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Investing.com -- xAI has released its latest frontier model, Grok 4, which analysts say has firmly placed the Elon Musk-founded company among the leaders in the AI arms race.
The launch exceeded expectations, with D.A. Davidson’s Alexander Platt arguing that "xAI is now clearly at the frontier."
After being skeptical about the release initially, Platt said he was impressed by the strategic direction and technical ambition of the project.
“Don’t bet against Elon,” the analyst said in a note, adding that xAI appears close to matching DeepSeek in both innovation and GPU efficiency. The company is scaling reinforcement learning (RL) compute more aggressively than any competitor this year.
One standout element in Grok 4’s architecture is the use of RLVR (reinforcement learning with value ranking), with xAI reportedly allocating ten times more compute for RL than for its prior Grok 3 Reasoning model.
That level of investment matches the compute used in pre-training, a move not expected from frontier labs until later in the year.
Benchmark results so far show Grok 4 performing “state-of-the-art on every benchmark it’s been tested on,” Platt said, significantly outpacing rivals like Claude 4 Opus on difficult tasks such as ARC-AGI-2.
Still, the report flagged some concerns. The model showed signs of “clear overfitting in certain domains due to the immense amount of RLVR,” particularly in math and coding—similar to issues seen in Claude 4 and Qwen3.
Platt also raised questions about “naive scaling” of RL in the absence of published technical details.
“But it’s clear that throwing exponentially more compute on RLVR works, there are just areas that need to be worked on to combat overfitting,” he added.
Looking ahead, the pace of progress is accelerating. While bottlenecks in compute and data remain, the analyst said Grok 4 proves how difficult it will be for open source models to keep up and noted that Meta (NASDAQ:META) “will have to really kick things into gear if they are to ever catch up.”