Grok 4 Is Making Waves as World’s “Most Intelligent Model”

xAI just dropped its most powerful model yet: Grok 4. And it’s not just a minor update.

Grok 4—and especially its heavyweight sibling, Grok 4 Heavy—represents a serious leap forward in artificial intelligence. From native tool use to record-setting performance on top-tier academic benchmarks, Grok 4 is now officially in the same conversation as models from OpenAI, Google, Meta, and Anthropic.

What can the new and improved Grok do? And what does it mean for AI development?

I got the scoop from Marketing AI Institute founder and CEO Paul Roetzer on Episode 158 of The Artificial Intelligence Show.

"Grok 4 Today Is Smarter Than Grok 4 a Few Days Ago"

One of the most jaw-dropping aspects of Grok 4? It keeps getting smarter. Elon Musk himself claimed the model is improving in real time through continuous reinforcement learning.

If true, it would mean Grok 4 doesn't just stop learning after training.

And while we don’t have technical proof (since xAI doesn’t publish research), Roetzer says the implications are big.

"You run a model, you do the training, and its knowledge base stops when the training stops," says Roetzer. "But by doing reinforcement learning continuously on top of a model, the model can keep getting smarter. And so that's what he's implying here."

Roetzer does note that xAI doesn't publish any research, so we don't quite know how they're doing this at the moment.

The jump in capability comes from massive investment. xAI used its 200,000-GPU Colossus cluster to run Grok 4's training, leveraging sixfold improvements in compute efficiency and dramatically broader data inputs.

Where Grok 3 Reasoning first introduced reinforcement learning at scale, Grok 4 took it further. It expanded training beyond just math and coding data, ingesting verifiable data across many domains. The result was consistent gains in reasoning performance at unprecedented scale.

Grok 4 also introduces native tool use. That means it autonomously chooses when to run code, browse the web, or even search X and analyze visual media.

And in the top-tier Grok 4 Heavy variant, the model considers multiple hypotheses simultaneously, using parallel test-time compute to reason more like a team of experts than a single chatbot.

As a result of all this, Grok 4 is setting records.

Grok 4 Heavy became the first model to score over 50% on Humanity's Last Exam, a brutal test of expert-level reasoning across domains. It crushed top competitors like Claude Opus 4, Gemini 2.5 Pro, and o3 on tasks ranging from coding (LiveCodeBench) to math olympiads (USAMO) to abstract reasoning (ARC-AGI).

And while xAI hasn’t disclosed training data specifics, one thing is clear: they’re tapping into X data in ways other labs can’t. That proprietary stream could be a serious advantage when training models that thrive on real-time, human-created data.

Not to mention, the sheer speed at which xAI operates, and their appetite for risk, is proving a massive advantage in the AI arms race. xAI is willing to move faster—and with fewer safety constraints—than many competitors.

That's because they're willing to do things other labs won't do, says Roetzer, like push innovation and release models with fewer regards for safety. Though that's not always a good thing.

That risk appetite might unnerve some. But, love it or hate it, one thing is clear:

xAI is officially playing in the big leagues, and they’re not slowing down.

“They’re not going away,” says Roetzer. “They’re going to keep raising billions and tens of billions of dollars. They’re going to keep building massive data centers. And they’re going to keep making this model bigger and smarter."