Elon Musk announced on July 18 that xAI’s upcoming 2-trillion-parameter language model, Grok 4.6, will complete its initial training run next week in response to Moonshot AI’s recent launch of Kimi K3. Musk claimed that Grok 4.6 outperforms its predecessor, Grok 4.5, which is based on a 1.5-trillion-parameter foundation model. He stated that the new model might exceed Kimi K3’s performance while maintaining a similar generation speed and token efficiency as Grok 4.5.
Moonshot AI unveiled Kimi K3 on July 16, boasting 2.8 trillion parameters, making it the largest open-weight AI model released to date. The launching of Kimi K3 was strategically scheduled ahead of the World Artificial Intelligence Conference in Shanghai, with full model weights set to be publicly available on July 27.
Testing conducted by Artificial Analysis indicated that Kimi K3 scored 57 on intelligence benchmarks compared to Grok 4.5’s 54 score, but Grok 4.5 has a substantially lower cost per task of approximately $0.31, about one-third of Kimi K3’s $0.94. Musk aims to close the performance gap between Grok 4.5 and Kimi K3 while preserving the cost advantage.
According to the BBC, independent evaluations also confirm that Kimi K3 performs comparably to leading U.S. models and excels in web interface engineering. Business Insider reported that the pricing of Moonshot AI’s API for Kimi K3 is lower than that of competitors OpenAI and Anthropic.
xAI’s Grok 4.5, announced on June 28, is currently in private beta testing at SpaceX and Tesla and reportedly performs closely to or surpasses Claude Opus. Moreover, xAI is developing even larger models, including 6-trillion and 10-trillion-parameter versions labeled Grok 5, which are being trained on the Colossus 2 supercluster where multiple models were in training as of April.
In addition, xAI is advancing its Grok Build coding agent, which was launched in May. The agent operates from the terminal and delegates tasks through parallel subagents, reaching version 0.2.101 on July 13 and remaining in beta for subscribers of the SuperGrok Heavy tier, priced at $300 per month.
