xAI, Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence venture, has skipped directly to Grok 4, bypassing Grok 3.5 entirely. This leap is justified by impressive benchmark performances, positioning Grok 4 as a formidable contender in the rapidly evolving AI landscape. However, a deeper look reveals both its immense strengths in specialized domains and its current limitations for broader use cases.

Overview

Grok 4 is xAI’s latest single-agent large language model, while Grok 4 Heavy is its multi-agent counterpart. The significant advancements in Grok 4 appear to stem from a substantial increase in computational power approximately ten times more than its predecessor, Grok 3rather than groundbreaking architectural shifts. xAI claims Grok 4 to be the most intelligent model currently available, a assertion largely supported by its performance in challenging benchmarks, particularly “Humanity’s Last Exam.” Grok 4 Heavy takes this a step further by employing multiple agents in parallel to work on tasks, compare results, and converge on an optimal answer, akin to a collaborative study group. This multi-agent approach significantly enhances performance on complex reasoning tasks, albeit at a higher cost and slower speed.

Key Features

Grok 4 boasts several key features that set it apart:

• Exceptional Reasoning Capabilities: Grok 4 demonstrates strong performance in academic and STEM-focused evaluations. It excels in complex math problems, scientific research, and intricate logical reasoning. Its “Think Mode” allows the model more time to deliberate and refine answers.
• Large Context Window: Grok 4 offers a context window of 128,000 tokens in the app and 256,000 in the API. While generous, it’s worth noting that competitors like Gemini 2.5 Pro offer a more expansive 1 million tokens, necessitating careful context engineering for extensive use cases with Grok 4.
• Tool Use Integration: Grok 4 can effectively integrate and utilize external tools, such as a code interpreter or web search, to enhance its problem-solving abilities. This is particularly evident in its mathematical and coding test results.
• Multi-Agent System (Grok 4 Heavy): This advanced version leverages several AI agents working in parallel to tackle a single problem. This collaborative approach leads to higher accuracy and more robust solutions for complex, multi-faceted tasks.
• Real-time Data Search (DeepSearch): Grok 4 integrates live web access, pulling current data from X (formerly Twitter) and the broader internet, making it suitable for tasks requiring up-to-date information.
• Future Multimodal Capabilities: While primarily text-focused at present, xAI has an ambitious roadmap for Grok 4, including dedicated coding models (August), truly multimodal agents for enhanced image/video/audio understanding (September), and video generation capabilities (October).

Who Can Use This?

Grok 4 is not designed for everyday, general-purpose queries. For simple questions like weather forecasts or local concert listings, Grok 3 or other general-purpose models would be more efficient due to Grok 4’s slower response times.

Grok 4 is primarily suited for:

• Researchers and Academics: Its strong performance in complex STEM subjects and its ability to handle intricate reasoning tasks make it ideal for scientific research, academic problem-solving, and in-depth analysis.
• Developers and Engineers: With its robust coding capabilities, particularly with the upcoming specialized coding model, Grok 4 is a valuable tool for software development, debugging, and code optimization.
• Financial Professionals: Its precision and analytical abilities can be leveraged for financial modeling, risk assessment, and complex data analysis in the financial sector.
• Enterprise Partners: Biomedical labs and other early enterprise partners are already utilizing Grok 4 for specialized, high-stakes applications requiring raw reasoning power.
• Users needing advanced problem-solving: Individuals or teams tackling problems that benefit from multiple reasoning paths and deep analysis, especially with Grok 4 Heavy.

Why It Is Great?

Grok 4’s greatness lies in its exceptional performance on highly demanding, academic, and complex reasoning benchmarks. It has demonstrated impressive results on:

• Humanity’s Last Exam (HLE): Comprising 2,500 PhD-level questions across diverse fields, Grok 4 (with tools) solved approximately 38.6% of the problems, while Grok 4 Heavy (with tool use) achieved 44.4%. This significantly surpasses competitors like Gemini 2.5 Pro (26.9% with tools) and OpenAI’s o3 (24.9% with tools).
• Academic & STEM Benchmarks: Grok 4 consistently outperforms other leading LLMs in areas like GPQA (87.5% for Grok 4, 88.9% for Grok 4 Heavy), AIME25 (91.7% for Grok 4, 100% for Grok 4 Heavy), LCB, HMMT25, and USAMO25. For instance, Grok 4 Heavy achieved a perfect score on AIME25, a tough math contest.
• ARC-AGI: A benchmark for abstract reasoning, Grok 4 scores 66.6% on v1 and 15.9% on v2, significantly ahead of competitors like Claude 4 Opus (8.6% on v2).
• Vending-Bench (Business Simulation): Grok 4 impressively outperformed its closest competitor, Claude Opus 4, in a simulated business environment. Grok 4 achieved a net worth of $4,694 and sold 4,569 units, compared to Claude Opus 4’s $2,077 net worth and 1,412 units sold, demonstrating its long-horizon planning capabilities.

These results indicate that Grok 4 possesses advanced reasoning capabilities and can handle highly intricate tasks that stump other models.

Pricing Grok 4

Pricing Model: Grok 4 is available through both subscription plans for end-users and API pricing for developers.

Subscription Plans:

• Grok 4 (Standard): This plan costs $30 per month or $300 per year (under the “SuperGrok” plan). This provides access to Grok 4 with increased access and a 128,000 token context memory.
• Grok 4 Heavy: This premium version is available via the “SuperGrok Heavy” tier for $300 per month or $3,000 annually. This offers exclusive early preview access to Grok 4 Heavy, which uses multiple AI agents for complex tasks, dedicated support, and early feature access.

API Pricing:

• Input Tokens: $3.00 per 1 million tokens
• Cached Input Tokens: $0.75 per 1 million tokens (offers significant cost savings)
• Output Tokens: $15.00 per 1 million tokens
• Live Search: $25 per 1,000 sources used (each source costs $0.025)

Pros & Cons

Pros:

• Unparalleled Performance on Difficult Benchmarks: Grok 4 consistently tops leaderboards in complex academic, scientific, and reasoning-intensive evaluations, making it highly effective for specialized, high-stakes problem-solving.
• Advanced Reasoning and Problem-Solving: Its ability to break down complex problems, utilize chain-of-thought reasoning, and leverage tools for verification (as seen in the math test) showcases its sophisticated analytical capabilities. Grok 4 Heavy further enhances this with its multi-agent approach.
• Strong Coding Assistant (with future specialization): While current performance is good, the upcoming dedicated coding model in August is poised to make Grok 4 a top-tier assistant for developers, promising speed and accuracy in software development workflows.
• Real-time Information Access: DeepSearch provides current web data, which is crucial for tasks requiring up-to-the-minute information.
• Ambitious Roadmap: The planned release of a dedicated coding model, a true multimodal agent, and a video generation model by October demonstrates xAI’s commitment to pushing the boundaries of AI capabilities.

Cons:

• Limited Context Window Compared to Some Competitors: While 256,000 tokens is substantial, it’s less than Gemini 2.5 Pro’s 1 million, requiring more careful context management and prompting for extremely long documents or conversations.
• Slower Response Times: Grok 4 is noted to be slower than its predecessor, Grok 3, and other general-purpose models, making it less suitable for rapid, conversational interactions or everyday queries.
• Early-Stage Multimodal Understanding: Despite supporting image and video inputs, its current understanding in these areas is described as limited, making it primarily a text-focused model for reliable results. Misclassifications and shallow analysis in multimodal tasks were observed.
• High Cost (Especially Grok 4 Heavy): Access to Grok 4 Heavy comes at a premium of $300/month (SuperGrok Heavy tier), which is a significant investment, making it less accessible for casual users. Standard Grok 4 also requires an X Premium+ subscription or a $30/month plan via grok.com.
• Potential for Bias (as per external reports): Some external reports indicate that Grok 4 has shown tendencies to consult Elon Musk’s social media posts for controversial topics, raising concerns about objectivity and potential bias amplification, and has faced issues with generating inappropriate content. This highlights the ongoing challenge of aligning AI models with ethical guidelines.
• Not a General-Purpose Chatbot: Its specialized nature means it’s not a go-to for casual conversations or quick, simple lookups, where a faster, less resource-intensive model would suffice.

Verdict

Grok 4 is a powerful AI tool for specialized, high-difficulty tasks, particularly in academic, scientific, and technical domains. Its multi-agent system (Grok 4 Heavy) offers robust solutions for complex problems. However, it’s not a general-purpose chatbot due to slower speeds, a relatively less expansive context window, and nascent multimodal capabilities. For professionals needing cutting-edge reasoning power and willing to invest, Grok 4 is a strong contender. For casual users, faster and more versatile alternatives might be preferable.