Grok 4.8 is taking its time: Musk's timeline slips again

Elon Musk's AI company xAI has yet to release its next language model, Grok 4.8. On Oct. 30, Musk wrote on X that the model has taken longer than expected. As of that date it had not been released, and xAI has made no official announcement about a release date or pricing.

The information comes from three secondary sources that repeat Musk's post. None of them is an announcement from xAI itself.

What Musk says about the model

According to Musk, Grok 4.8 will not be a disappointment, and the model will be extremely useful. He also says xAI does not optimize for benchmarks, meaning standardized tests that AI models are compared on, and that he doesn't care how Grok performs on them.

Musk wrote in September that Grok 4.8 has 2.5 trillion parameters. Parameters are the adjustable numbers an AI model learns during training, and they are often used as a rough measure of size. The figure comes from Musk himself. According to the source, xAI has never published a parameter count for any Grok 4 model. He also wrote that the model is trained on xAI's new C++ software stack and that training would finish that same week, after which it would move on to reinforcement learning. That is a method in which the model is refined by being rewarded for good answers.

Musk has said Grok 4.8 will be a noticeable improvement over Grok 4.7. According to one of the sources, 4.7 has around 2.1 trillion parameters, which would make the new model roughly 19 percent larger.

Repeated delays

Delays are nothing new. Musk's deadlines for its predecessor, Grok 4.7, slipped several times: On July 24 he said four weeks, on Aug. 12 three to four weeks, and on Sept. 2 ten days. On Sept. 11 he said the model needed a few more days. According to one source, 4.7 required extra tuning to fix problems with response-length penalties and task handling.

The sources do not fully agree on 4.7. One writes that it was released on Sept. 21 at the same price as Grok 4.6, and that it is on par with Anthropic's Opus 5.0 without leading. Other search results said it was still delayed.

According to the blog CellCog, there have previously been 25 to 52 days between Musk's post about finished training and the release. As of Oct. 30, about 47 days had passed since the post about Grok 4.8, compared with around 40 days for Grok 4.7.

For readers, this means there are still no verified tests, pricing or access for Grok 4.8, and Musk's timeframes should be taken with a grain of salt.