Elon Musk’s xAI has released Grok 4 Fast (on Friday night), a new version of its AI system that focuses on doing more with less. The model is basically designed to think faster, cost less to run, and still score high on the kinds of tests researchers use to measure how “smart” these systems are.
Compared to the previous Grok 4 model, Grok 4 Fast uses about 40% fewer tokens—the units of text AI systems process—while keeping similar accuracy. That makes it up to 47 times cheaper to run than some rival models like GPT-5 or Anthropic’s Claude, according to independent evaluations. In plain terms, Grok 4 Fast can handle tough questions and reasoning tasks but doesn’t rack up as much of a bill.
The model can also search the web and X in real time, pulling in live information instead of relying only on what it was trained on. It can look through articles, videos, and posts, then pull everything together into an answer. That puts it closer to how people actually research things online.
For everyday users, Grok 4 Fast will feel faster and more responsive in the Grok app and on grok.com. Free users now get access to the newest model without restrictions, which xAI says is part of making advanced AI more accessible. Developers, meanwhile, can adjust how much “deep thinking” the model does depending on whether they want quick replies or longer reasoning.
Grok 4 Fast also debuted on LMArena.ai, taking the #1 spot on the Search leaderboard, topping OpenAI’s o3-search and Google’s Gemini 2.5-pro-grounding. It was tested under the codename “menlo” and tying for #8 on the Text leaderboard. Musk shared the post and said, “Friday Night Lights”.
xAI is pricing Grok 4 Fast at about $0.20 per million input tokens and $0.50 per million output tokens, making it one of the cheapest advanced AI models available right now, lower than before for developers.
Grok 4 Fast is already available on Grok’s iOS and Android apps, as well as platforms like OpenRouter and Vercel AI Gateway. xAI says it will keep updating the system with new features, including better multimodal tools that can work with images and videos.
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