Grok 4 is the newest large language model (LLM) from xAI, the AI company led by Elon Musk. Launched in July 2025, this is one more try by Elon to compete with OpenAI and Google in the whole AI field.

But Grok 4 isn’t just "a new model", if you see how media covers it, it became more of a statement, with its peculiarities and surprising use cases. xAI (proudfully) says it does better than most human graduate students.

• Grok 4 has some new reasoning types and also a strong collaborative system.

• This system is called Grok 4 Heavy and I will review it in this article as well.

• It’s also priced at a level that suggests Musk is finally serious about targeting enterprise users.

My name is Artem and in the last 4 years, I have tried, reviewed and extensively used hundreds of AI models and LLM-based tools. Decided to write this full guide to explore what Grok 4 can really do. I will compare new Grok 4 to other top models like GPT-4, Claude 4 Sonnet and Google Gemini as well. I'll also cover the cost of Grok 4 access and its true and effective real-world use cases. It is not great at some tasks, while surprisingly good at others. Let's figure this out.

All insights below are based on xAI’s full Grok 4 benchmark walkthrough, as well as context from TechCrunch and Artificial Analysis.

Grok 4’s Core Capabilities

Grok 4 is strong in multiple technical and academic domains. Here’s what stands out:

• Outstanding results in academic benchmarks. It excels in ARC AGI 2, a tough reasoning test, and achieves the highest score on the HumanEval coding benchmark.

• Grok 4 works quite well in logic puzzles and nuanced reasoning. In my experience, it does that better than Claude and GPT in over half of the cases. In a custom test named SimpleBench, it beat other LLMs in social reasoning, tricky logic & even in spotting bias traps (many would argue with that).

• For now, Grok has very weak spatial reasoning. It still has trouble with basic physics, as far as I have tried it. For instance, it doesn't understand what happens when a cup falls off a moving truck.

• This Grok is mostly text-based and not vision-first. Grok 4 can work with a variety of different inputs, but its visual skills are a lot weaker than Gemini 2.5 and GPT-4o. At least, when it comes to diagrams, image reasoning and all that vision feature-set that OpenAI models became quite profound in.

• New reasoning engine: Grok 4 Heavy A parallel agent system also lets Grok agents to do work together before giving you their answer. This increases quality, quantity, accuracy. Especially on difficult problems and reasoning tasks.

Real-World Use Cases

Grok 4 is not a general AI that understands everything. But in practice, it can be a great tool for users who need:

• Fast, accurate coding help Developers have used Grok 4 to create simple games in under five hours. Its HumanEval score shows it’s excellent for Python tasks.

• Doing some summaries of large documents or datasets is easy for it. Thanks to its strong understanding and memory, it reads and explains technical materials clearly and efficiently.

• Math and Science Tutoring. In my tests, Grok 4 excels in Olympiad-level math and physics. It helps students and researchers with clear, step-by-step solutions.

• Advanced question answering works well for academic, legal, or scientific queries. It gives high-quality results, especially in Grok 4 Heavy mode.

It's not great for tasks that need lots of visuals, modeling the physical world, or writing long stories. It can also still hallucinate a lot when pushed beyond its training data. What are those limits? I have put some Grok 4 benchmarks in this article as well.

Grok 4 vs GPT-4 vs Gemini vs Claude

Let me now break down Grok 4 in comparison with the other top-tier models that are available in 2025 (all of them also on Writingmate.ai).

My Verdict: Grok 4 is strongest in reasoning, logic, and code. GPT-4 and Claude offer better overall polish. Gemini leads in multimodal vision. If you're not tied to a benchmark leaderboard, other models might offer better value.

Here are some benchmarks on new Grok. See more details about this "Humanity Last Exam" here.Keep in mind that it is by xAI itself, so I would double check how it works on your exact set of tasks.

• Writingmate has side-by-side model comparison where you can try several models with the same task and see speed and tokens used for every model, for example, Claude 4 vs Grok 4, Grok 4 vs Gemini or a sometimes close comparison between of GPT4o vs Grok 4 and alternatives.

• Try it out here: new.writingmate.ai and compare models to see which one works the best for you.

What Is Grok 4 Heavy?

This is where things, in my opinion, get more interesting, promising and pricey. Grok 4 Heavy has a "debate-style" setup. In this system, several model instances work at the same time, each suggesting a solution to the same issue. Then, the system evaluates those answers and picks the best one.

This approach is similar to SmartGPT and Tree of Thought methods from earlier research. What’s different here is that it’s built into the system and works automatically.

In testing, Grok 4 Heavy made fewer logical mistakes. It also performed better on chain-of-thought tasks than the base Grok model.

Use Grok 4 Heavy if you:

Here are 4 scenarios and if you meet four of those, Grok Heavy may be right for you. If it is so, you have probably guessed it though.

• Need high accuracy on math or legal queries

• Are solving open-ended, high-risk problems

• Can afford the slower response time (due to multiple passes)

• If you can afford SuperGrok Heavy in the first place! It is 300$ per month, so, it's more enterprise-oriented in many cases.

Grok 4 Pricing

Grok 4 access now comes in multiple tiers:

• Basic tier: Included with X Premium+ on X.com

• Grok 4 Heavy (Pro): $300/month or $3,000/year

Developer API costs as of now:

• $3 per million tokens input

• $15 per million tokens output

This is similar to Claude Sonnet or Opus for developers, but Super Grok Heavy is much more expensive than GPT-4o or Gemini Pro. You can see full Grok 4 pricing here, I don't find it too attractive personally.

But is it worth it? If you’re a researcher, power user, or enterprise with deep reasoning needs — maybe. If you're a casual user or student, probably not.

For comparison, below is Writingmate AI pricing which also includes Grok 4 Model in Pro plan (9 dollars per month, no API keys or advanced skills needed, beginner-friendly & feature-packed).

Known Issues and Odd Behavior

Grok models have had quirks. For example:

• If gives very biased outputs from small changes in system prompts

• Political tone shifts, depending on region or phrasing

• Recently, it became much less politically correct, which resulted in a series of weird takes that surprised many.

• Weird historical overfocus, especially around South Africa, which may come out of Elon Musk personal views and set of biases. This is not new in AI world though, and I can't say that GPT or Claude are not biased all the time. Grok, though, is much more meme-worthy in those regards :D

These can also resuly from how xAI works with internal instruction tuning. Even with Grok 4, users should stay cautious & various double-check outputs in sensitive domains.

Grok 4 and the Environment

To scale Grok, Elon plans to power… 1 million GPUs using a specialized energy project. The first of these may be based in Memphis, according to leaks. And for many, this provokes some questions:

• Will these be sustainable?

• How much energy will be used?

• Can xAI really afford the $1B/month burn rate?

• Will the time and efforts saved by using Grok be really worth it?

We don’t have clear answers yet, and this is not a new issue. But large-scale AI compute comes with serious environmental and financial costs and should probably be considered.

Grok 4 as a Gemini Alternative

If you don't need Gemini's vision skills for your work, Grok 4 may be a better option for reasoning tasks, and this one is also included on Writingmate.ai

To me, Grok 4 vs Gemini is like logic over looks You see, Grok 4 consistently outperforms Gemini in logic puzzles, code benchmarks, and complex academic tasks. On reasoning-heavy challenges, like ARC AGI or HumanEval tests, Grok 4 now scores higher, it produces more reliable output in general.

In contrast, Google’s Gemini models often misinterprete images and fail at multimodal tasks.

• If your work involves… charts, photos, or diagrams, Gemini 2.5 and 3 are better choices.

• But for technical reasoning, math, or science workflows, Grok 4 is the stronger tool.

And let me return for a while to Grok 4’s Heavy mode. It is a system where multiple AI agents tackle the same problem independently and vote on the best answer. This often leads to higher accuracy and fewer hallucinations than traditional single-pass models.

If you think of Gemini as a well-rounded visual generalist, Grok 4 is more like a logic-first specialist. And for developers, analysts or researchers, that often makes a lot bigger difference in real-world use cases. Here’s how Grok 4 behaves on benchmarks that matter most:

Those are, in my personal opinion, some key advantages of Grok 4 over Gemini:

• Superior coding performance - tops HumanEval benchmarks

• Better logic and reasoning - does decent work at academic-level problems

• Collaborative AI system - Grok 4 Heavy uses multiple agents for accuracy, it seems to mix them

• Strong in STEM fields - math, physics, and scientific analysis

On Writingmate.ai, you just click model choice button, then set Grok 4 as a model. No API needed and a lot less caps and limits than in other chatbots including official ones. Starts at 9 dollars per month and a free version is available as well.

The main trade-off here is visual processing. Gemini can work with images, diagrams & mixed content much better than Grok 4, which focuses on text.

You can try both models side-by-side at WritingMate.ai, which includes Grok 4 together with other top AI models in one platform.

Llama 4 Scout, Maverick, Behemoth

Meta’s latest Llama 4 lineup is turning out to be one of the most balanced in 2025. It has mixed opinions but I find it to be a suitable comparison to Grok 4 in some tasks (check model comparison on writingmate). You gain efficiency and performance + flexibility. This is true even for the smaller models.

Llama 4 Scout is the compact version, and it’s designed for speed. It runs on a single H100 GPU, uses 17 billion active parameters, and supports a 10 million token context window. That’s huge for its size.

From what I’ve tested and seen, Maverick is especially strong in more layered reasoning and multimodal tasks and is at least on part with Grok. Maverick does work with text, image, and other input types with deeper context awareness. Maverick provides the depth you need for research, AI development, or advanced content. Smaller models often don't measure up.

There’s also Behemoth, Meta’s enterprise-tier model, and as it seems, it still outperforms Grok 4 as of now. It is giant, it juggles billions of parameters and is targeted to work with large scale projects.

What's Next: Grok 5 and the AI Arms Race

Musk says Grok 5 is already in training. Meanwhile, OpenAI is working on GPT-5. Google is testing Gemini 3 internally. Anthropic is refining Claude 3.5.

The AI race is now focused on:

• Speed: Faster inference, quicker answers

• Reasoning: Better logic and consistency

• Multimodality: Smooth integration of text, image, audio, and video

Musk also hinted that Grok will generate video by fall 2025. If true, this could place Grok 4 (or Grok 5) back in competition with models like OpenAI’s Sora.

Should You Get Grok 4 Access?

Try using Grok 4 if:

• You need best-in-class logic and academic QA

• You work in law, math, or code-heavy fields

• You want to test Grok 4 Heavy and explore new agent frameworks

If you meet all three criteria, just access it instantly in links below. It may help you a lot and save a lot of time & effort :)

In my opinion, jut skip Grok 4 if:

• You’re focused on image, video, or real-world modeling

• You’re on a tight budget (GPT-4o and Claude are more affordable)

• You don’t need top-tier benchmark scores

To access Grok 4, visit x.ai or writingmate.ai, where you can use over 100 top-tier models in one chatbot.

Using All the Top Models With Writingmate Labs

Why choose just one model? With Writingmate Labs, you can run:

• Grok 4

• GPT-4o, GPT-4o mini, and GPT-4.1

• OpenAI o3-mini

• Claude Sonnet 4 and Claude Opus 4

• Mistral AI

• Llama 4 (Maverick & Scout)

• …and many others

All inside one clean and powerful platform that's ideal for research, document analysis, writing, coding, image generation, model comparison, prompt enhancement and more. You can also create images using Stable Diffusion, flux.ai, and GPT image tools, all in the same app.

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Artem