Elon Musk’s AI company xAI just dropped a bombshell: Grok 4 is here — and it’s fast, smart, and already topping the charts. Some even say its AGI.
What is Grok 4?
Grok is xAI’s answer to ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini. It's multi-modal, API-accessible, and now available in two flavors:
- Grok 4 (the base model)
- Grok 4 Heavy (a multi-agent powerhouse that thinks in parallel)
xAI says it performs better than PhD level on academic tasks - Musk's words, not mine ;)
Benchmark showdown
Grok 4 is already outperforming most models in the wild:
| Benchmark | Grok 4 | Grok 4 Heavy | o3 (OpenAI) | Gemini 2.5 Pro |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Humanity’s Last Exam (no tools) | 25.4% | — | 21% | 21.6% |
| Humanity’s Last Exam (with tools) | — | 44.4% | — | 26.9% |
| ARC-AGI-2 | 16.2% | — | ~8% | ~6% |
🧠 That’s state-of-the-art territory — especially the ARC-AGI score, nearly 2x the nearest competitor. Say what you want about Elon Musk, but that is impressive.
How much does it cost?
Using Grok 4 via OpenRouter is easy — but not cheap:
-
Grok 4
- Input:
$3 / million tokens - Output:
$15 / million tokens
- Input:
Compare that to OpenAI’s o3:
- Input:
$2 / M - Output:
$8 / M
There’s also a $300/month SuperGrok Heavy plan for early access to Grok 4 Heavy, new agents, coding models, and even video generation later this year.
Try Grok 4 via OpenRouter
Want to test it yourself? Here’s a simple code snippet using OpenRouter:
from openai import OpenAI
client = OpenAI(
base_url="https://openrouter.ai/api/v1",
api_key="<OPENROUTER_API_KEY>",
)
completion = client.chat.completions.create(
model="x-ai/grok-4",
messages=[
{
"role": "user",
"content": [
{"type": "text", "text": "What is in this image?"},
{
"type": "image_url",
"image_url": {
"url": "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/d/dd/Gfp-wisconsin-madison-the-nature-boardwalk.jpg/2560px-Gfp-wisconsin-madison-the-nature-boardwalk.jpg"
}
}
]
}
]
)
print(completion.choices[0].message.content)
Yep, multimodal! Image in, answer out.
Final thoughts
Between wild benchmark results and Musk’s usual hype, Grok 4 is shaping up to be a serious contender. Whether it holds up in the real world — or just on X.com — is still TBD.
But if you want to play with what might be the most powerful public model today, it’s already live via OpenRouter.
Let’s see what it can do.
Cheers,
Jonas, Co-Founder of sliplane.io
feels like i'm switching between models daily at this point 🫨