SpaceXAI has released Grok 4.5, its first model since going public several weeks ago.
A workhorse for routine tasks
A blog post published Wednesday describes the new release as a workhorse. It targets the standard tasks the industry has sought to automate: coding, app-building, office work, research, writing, and other forms of routine knowledge work.
SpaceXAI claims the model offers twice the token efficiency of other leading models. If this holds true in real-world use, it provides a significant advantage. Token cost has become a growing concern for AI consumers.
The company released benchmark metrics Wednesday showing Grok is competitive with top models from rivals, though just short of best-in-class.
Elon Musk’s comparison to Opus
Founder Elon Musk compared the model to Opus, Anthropic‘s LLM designed for intensive and complex tasks.
“Based on strong positive feedback from customers in our beta test program, @SpaceXAI will make Grok 4.5 available to the public tomorrow. It is an Opus-class model, but faster, more token-efficient and lower cost,” Musk wrote on X, a subsidiary of SpaceXAI.
He later added: “Our internal assessment is that Grok 4.5 is roughly comparable to Opus 4.7, but much faster. The combination of capability, faster speed and lower cost is what makes it competitive.”
Price differences
SpaceXAI says the new model costs $2 per million input tokens and $6 per million output tokens. That is quite competitive, if Grok’s capabilities match SpaceXAI’s rhetoric.
Opus 4.7, by comparison, costs $5 per million input tokens and $25 per million output tokens. OpenAI has tiered costs for different model versions: Sol, its most expensive, costs $5 for 1 million input tokens and $30 for 1 million output tokens, while its least expensive, Luna, costs $1 for 1 million input and $6 for 1 million output tokens.
Other releases this week
It is a big week for AI model releases. OpenAI is planning to release GPT 5.6, its latest and most powerful model, on Thursday. The release of that model had previously been limited by the Trump administration, due to concerns about its security implications. OpenAI has called it its “strongest model yet.”
