xAI Offers Grok 4 for Free Worldwide

GPT-5’s August 7 launch promised a leap in AI reasoning but has been marred by routing glitches, benchmark misses, and presentation missteps. The brand new “Pondering” mode, intended for complex, slower reasoning, was undermined by an automatic router that ceaselessly defaulted to faster, less capable models, resulting in degraded algebra, coding, and logic performance in comparison with GPT-4o.

Early adopters reported failures in problems GPT-4o had previously solved, and internal benchmarks lagged behind rivals resembling Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4.1 in real-world “one-shot” reasoning tests. Security firm SPLX also identified vulnerabilities to prompt injection and obfuscated logic attacks, raising reliability concerns.

The launch was further overshadowed by a “chart crime” through the livestream, where bar charts misrepresented benchmark values despite the underlying numbers being correct in official documentation. One slide incorrectly depicted GPT-5’s 50% “coding deception” rate as visually smaller than o3’s 47.4%, while other bars appeared equivalent despite numerical differences. CEO Sam Altman later called this a “mega chart screwup,” attributing it to late-night slide preparation.

In response, restored GPT-4o access for Plus subscribers, doubled message caps, and announced UI changes to display energetic models. Usage metrics suggest demand for advanced reasoning is surging, with every day adoption jumping from under 1% to 7% amongst free-tier users and from 7% to 24% for Plus subscribers. Altman framed this trend as central to GPT-5’s future, stating capability allocation will soon be rebalanced between ChatGPT, API access, research, and product demands. Read more.

xAI is executing a two-pronged strategy: flood the highest of the funnel to capture real-world signals and concurrently construct a radically different foundation model that may turn those signals into higher-order capabilities.

Grok 4, previously paywalled, is now free worldwide with “generous” temporary limits. Auto mode invokes extra computation when prompts demand higher accuracy, while Expert mode lets users manually trigger heavier reasoning. Grok 4 Heavy stays exclusive to SuperGrok Heavy subscribers, and Grok Imagine’s image/video generation remains to be US-only. Elon Musk confirmed ad integration is planned to offset the high GPU costs powering Grok.

Grok’s next iteration, now fully pre-trained, will debut because the model’s first natively multimodal foundation system that ingests raw audio/video bitstreams reasonably than counting on transcripts or extracted frames. This suggests spatiotemporal tokenization and end-to-end multimodal representations that capture tonal nuance, mood, and real-time context without intermediate transcription.

Musk says V7 will boost “one-shot” game generation by generating a game, playing it, observing on-screen feedback, editing code, and feeding those rollouts back into training, a model-in-the-loop self-improvement pipeline that raises one-shot success probability but additionally multiplies compute, latency, and safety surface area. Read more.

OpenArt, an AI video startup founded by two ex-Google engineers, has rolled out its “One-Click Story” feature in open beta. The tool converts a single sentence, full script, or song right into a one-minute video with a coherent story arc, offering three formats: Character Vlog, Music Video, and Explainer. Users can edit via storyboard mode and choose from over 50 integrated AI models, including DALL·E 3, GPT, Imagen, Flux Kontext, and Stable Diffusion.

OpenArt claims an edge in maintaining character consistency across scenes, an ongoing limitation in lots of AI video generators. The platform serves 3M monthly energetic users, runs on a credit-based subscription starting at $14/month, and is on course for $20M ARR. While the tool lowers creative barriers, it faces legal risks over potential IP infringement, which it mitigates with automated rejection systems and possible licensing deals. The corporate has raised $5M and stays cash-flow positive. Read more.

Google is rolling out an AI-powered upgrade to Google Finance within the U.S., adding natural language Q&A, advanced charting, expanded asset coverage, and a streaming news feed. Users can now pose complex market queries, resembling multi-stock comparisons or sector performance evaluation, and receive AI-generated answers with linked sources. The brand new charting engine supports technical indicators like moving average envelopes and candlestick views, allowing for more granular trading insights.

Coverage now extends beyond equities to incorporate commodities and extra cryptocurrencies, while a real-time headline feed delivers market-moving news without leaving the page. By embedding AI directly into Finance, Google is targeting competitors like Yahoo Finance and Looking for Alpha, and aiming to cut back user reliance on standalone AI chatbots for financial research. The redesign is rolling out progressively, with the choice to toggle between old and recent interfaces. Read more.