Image: SpaceXAI

Elon Musk has acknowledged that SpaceXAI's next Grok model is running behind schedule, while promising that Grok 4.8 will not disappoint. In a post on X on October 30, Musk said the company is not optimizing the model for benchmarks and that it will be incredibly useful.

I know it’s taken longer than expected, but Grok 4.8 will not be a disappointment.

We’re not optimizing for benchmarks and I really don’t care how Grok does on those, but it will be incredibly useful.

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) October 30, 2026

Musk was replying to the account Tech Dev Notes, which had written that apart from Voice, SpaceXSI barely has any state of the art models. SpaceXAI recently released Grok Voice 3.0, which the company describes as the most intelligent speech to speech model.

Grok 4.8 has been in the works for weeks. On September 14, Musk said that Grok 4.8 is a 2.5T model trained with the company's new C++ software stack and that it would finish training that week before moving on to reinforcement learning. In a separate post the same day, he said Grok 4.8 would be a noticeable improvement over Grok 4.7, which he described as roughly on par with Claude Opus 5.0. He added that Grok 4.9 is probably in the same class as GPT-6 Astra and Fable, and that Grok 5 may be better than anything.

SpaceXAI released Grok 4.7 on September 21, calling it a notable improvement over Grok 4.6 at the same price and speed. Since then, Musk has frequently shared third party benchmark results for Grok 4.7 and rankings for Grok 4.7, including results from Artificial Analysis and VulcanBench.

Musk has also said that a lightning fast version of Grok 4.8 will handle most simple requests in Grok Bot when it comes out, with the aim of giving users the best possible combination of speed and intelligence.

No release date for Grok 4.8 had been announced by SpaceXAI at the time of this writing, and Musk did not say how much longer the model will take. Grok 4.7 remains the company's current flagship model.