What’s New in Grok 4 and Is This Bot Comparable to ChatGPT?

Dominic Anderson September 5, 2025

Key Takeaways

Grok 4 is xAI’s premium AI agent, launched in July 2025. Its increased power makes it more context aware, able to deal with larger data sets, and accepts voice input.
Grok 4 Heavy deploys multiple agents to attack a problem simultaneously, providing more complex problem-solving and solution rendering.
Grok 4 is a premium AI that excels at game-making, strategic assessment, and prototyping.
It has a less polished user interface and ecosystem than ChatGPT, and there is a lack of transparency around training biases and security protocols.

Ever since Elon Musk’s xAI launched Grok 4 in July 2025, we have been asking if it deserves the hype. Is it significantly more sophisticated than Grok 3, and is it worth the premium price tag when compared to its market-leading competitor, ChatGPT 5? Read our concise Grok 4 review.

What Is Grok 4?

What’s New in Grok 4 and Is This Bot Comparable to ChatGPT 1

There are two different versions of Grok 4 that users can access:

Grok 4 Standard, charged at around $30 per month, is a powerful, multimodal AI designed for the casual user. It is known for having a more direct and witty voice than other AIs, and can search the web, including social media, in real-time for the most up-to-date answers.
Grok 4 Heavy, which costs around $300 per month, uses multi-agent processing to deploy several AI agents to attack a single problem simultaneously. It is slower, but better at complex tasks and produces more sophisticated results.

Grok 4 is more powerful than Grok 3 in several ways, but this can be best summarized by the size of its context window. While Grok 3 had a token window of 131,072 tokens, Grok 4 uses 256,000 tokens, allowing it to analyze longer documents, maintain context in more complex conversations, work with larger code bases, and analyze visual inputs as well as text. This is what makes Grok 4 “multi-modal,” while Grok 3 was primarily text-based.

Grok 4 Capabilities

So, what can you do with Grok 4 that wasn’t possible with the earlier model?

What’s New in Grok 4 and Is This Bot Comparable to ChatGPT 2

Real-time voice chat with custom personalities, such as “motivational,” “argumentative,” or “therapist.”
Upload files to be parsed, summarized, and filed using structured data. Connect with cloud storage to use documents without the need to upload.
Create project containers that you can return to repeatedly, so you aren’t starting from zero every time you log on.
Schedule automated actions such as checking feeds, reading documents, or answering questions at specific intervals.
Create different personalities and custom behavior settings, such as “concise,” “formal,” or “Socratic.”

With these capabilities, Grok 4 Heavy can do things like custom game creation, complete with game mechanics and complex multiplayer scenarios; problem-solve by reviewing trends and conducting competitor analysis to deliver a strategic assessment; generate mind maps of books and complex documents; and code and prototype quickly.

Grok 4 Issues

While Grok 4 is powerful, it certainly has some issues. Principal among them is bias. On topics such as politics, social media, and cryptocurrency, Grok seems to reflect Elon Musk’s publicly known views. This does not feel like a coincidence. This is likely a result of the library of material that it was trained on.

What’s New in Grok 4 and Is This Bot Comparable to ChatGPT 3

xAI has limited documentation about its safety protocols, content filtering, and established ethical guidelines when compared to other AI makers such as OpenAI and Google DeepMind. This has led to concerns about why Grok 4 has been documented providing potentially harmful medical instructions and giving guidance on illegal matters.

Grok 4 is slower than its competitors, taking 10-15 seconds to respond to a question when other AIs might take 2-3 seconds, though this is reportedly something xAI is working on. There are also occasional glitches with the interface that are being worked on.

Grok vs. ChatGPT

Grok 4 and ChatGPT 5 are often pitted against each other, with users asking which one is better. It is fair to say that they are targeted at different markets, so it depends on what you need done.

Grok 4 is pitched as a specialist AI designed for more sophisticated users. Its powerful, multi-agent mode means that it excels at complex tasks such as coding and development, research and analysis, and creative tasks.

ChatGPT 5 is a more versatile and general AI model for a broad range of users, from basic to professional. It also has a more mature and integrated ecosystem, with a robust API, a vast marketplace of custom GPTs, and comprehensive enterprise-grade features.