The artificial intelligence landscape is rapidly evolving, and the latest contender vying for the title of "smartest AI" is Grok 4, developed by Elon Musk's xAI. Released in July 2025, Grok 4 is designed to compete with leading AI models like OpenAI's GPT-4 and Google's Gemini, boasting advanced reasoning, multimodal understanding, and real-time data integration.

What is Grok 4?

Grok 4 is a large language model (LLM) designed for advanced reasoning tasks, including mathematics, logic, coding, and scientific thinking. Unlike previous versions, Grok 4 comes in two versions:

• Grok 4 (standard): A powerful single-agent language model.
• Grok 4 Heavy: A multi-agent architecture designed for complex collaborative reasoning. This version allows multiple AI minds to work together on a single task.

Grok 4 has approximately 1.7 trillion parameters and was trained with 100 times more computing power than Grok 2, incorporating substantial reinforcement learning. According to Elon Musk, Grok 4 is designed to perform at a "post-graduate level" across many topics simultaneously, exceeding the capabilities of any single person.

Key Features and Capabilities

• Hybrid Neural Design: Grok 4 uses a modular architecture with specialized subsystems for code generation, language understanding, and mathematical reasoning.
• Large Context Window: Grok 4 supports a context window of up to 128,000 tokens in-app and 256,000 tokens via API, enabling detailed, multi-turn interactions and extended memory. However, its context window is smaller than average.
• Multimodal AI: Grok 4 processes text and images. Future iterations may support video content.
• Native Tool Use: Grok 4 can use tools such as code interpreters and web browsing to augment its reasoning, which is useful for answering difficult research questions or searching for real-time information. Grok 4 can also use tools to find information from X.
• Deep Reasoning: Grok 4 is designed for deep thinking and excels in multi-step math, logic problems, and graduate-level scientific questions.
• Code Generation: A specialized Grok 4 Code version is designed for developers, providing code suggestions, debugging assistance, and software design ideas.

Performance and Benchmarks

Grok 4 has demonstrated strong performance on various benchmarks:

• Humanity's Last Exam (HLE): Grok 4 (with tools) achieved approximately 38.6% accuracy on this exam comprised of 2,500 PhD-level questions. Grok 4 Heavy, with tool use, scored 44.4%, outperforming the single-agent Grok 4. Grok 4 Heavy was the first model to score 50% on the text-only subset of HLE.
• ARC-AGI: Grok 4 scored 66.6% on ARC-AGI v1, and 15.9% on ARC-AGI v2, exceeding other models.
• Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index: Grok 4 achieved an index of 73, surpassing OpenAI o3, Google Gemini 2.5 Pro, Anthropic Claude 4 Opus, and DeepSeek R1 0528.
• GPQA: Grok 4 Heavy with Python scored 88.4%.
• USAMO 2025: Grok 4 Heavy with Python scored 61.9%.

Strengths

• Advanced Reasoning and Logic: Grok 4 excels in solving complex math problems, analyzing scientific data, and managing multi-step reasoning.
• Tool Use: Grok 4 utilizes tools to augment its thinking.
• Multi-Agent Collaboration: Grok 4 Heavy's multi-agent architecture improves accuracy in complex reasoning tasks.
• Real-time Web Search: Grok 4 has built-in web access to provide up-to-date information.

Weaknesses

• Context Window: Grok 4 has a smaller context window than average.
• Multimodal Capabilities: Grok 4's image understanding capabilities are not as strong.
• Speed and Latency: Grok 4 is slower and has a higher latency compared to average.
• Potential Biases: Grok 4 has faced scrutiny regarding potential biases and instances of generating inappropriate content.
• Cost: Grok 4 is more expensive compared to average.

Is Grok 4 the Smartest AI?

While Grok 4 has demonstrated impressive benchmark results and capabilities, determining whether it is the "smartest AI" is subjective and depends on the criteria used for evaluation. Grok 4 excels in reasoning, logic, and complex problem-solving, but it has limitations in other areas such as multimodal understanding and context window size. It has incredible performance on benchmarks and some of the tests done are the best an AI has ever been at some information retrieval tasks, but it falls on its face in some simple ways when compared to its peers.

Grok 4's multi-agent "Heavy" configuration and tool use capabilities contribute to its strong performance on challenging benchmarks. However, the "Heavy" version is slower and more expensive to operate.

Ultimately, the "smartest AI" is the one that best meets the specific needs and requirements of a given task or application. Grok 4 represents a significant advancement in AI capabilities and is a strong contender in the ongoing race to develop more intelligent and versatile AI models.