Elon Musk confirmed that SpaceXAI will release its Grok 4.5 artificial intelligence model to the public on Thursday after completing beta testing, setting up a direct competition with OpenAI’s upcoming launch of GPT-5.6.
Summary
- Elon Musk says SpaceXAI will launch Grok 4.5 publicly after a positive beta test.
- OpenAI plans to release GPT-5.6 Sol, Terra, and Luna models on the same day.
- Grok 4.5 uses XAI’s new 1.5-trillion-parameter V9 model which focuses more on coding.
According to Elon Musk, this decision follows strong feedback from users who tested Grok 4.5 during its beta phase. In a post on X, Musk described the model as “an Opus-class model, but faster, more efficient, and lower cost,” adding that the public rollout will begin tomorrow.
The announcement puts Grok 4.5 alongside several AI releases expected this week as the competition between leading developers continues to heat up.
Around the same time, OpenAI confirmed that its GPT-5.6 family, which includes the Sol, Terra, and Luna models, will also be publicly available on Thursday. The announcement follows the US Department of Commerce’s approval of a broader public offering, as previously reported by crypto.news. OpenAI’s choice of model names has drawn attention in the crypto industry because they match the names of other well-known blockchain projects in the crypto industry.
Last month, Anthropic added to the competitive landscape by releasing its Fable 5 and Mythos 5 models, which the company described as its most capable AI systems to date. Those models were temporarily restricted under US export controls before the government later lifted the restrictions, allowing for wider availability.
Grok 4.5 introduces a larger base model
Additional technical details shared by developer Tetsuo show that Grok 4.5 is built on top of V9’s xAI base model, which contains about 1.5 billion parameters. According to Tetsuo, the layout is three times larger than the v8-less model that powers the Grok 4.3, making it the largest base model the company has released to date.
Tetsuo added that the model was trained on Nvidia Blackwell GPUs at the Colossus computing cluster in Memphis. He also said software development capabilities became a central priority for Grok 4.5 after SpaceXAI integrated developer data from Cursor into additional training. According to the developer, reinforcement learning has continued to improve the model with the Grok Build training framework.
crypto.news previously reported that SpaceXAI has completed its acquisition of Cursor, a move that expands the company’s access to software engineering datasets. Tetsuo noted that the next base model, which is already being trained, will include the Cursor data from the beginning of the pre-training process rather than adding it later.
Monthly flagship releases form the long-term roadmap
Beyond the immediate launch, Tetsuo has revealed an aggressive release schedule for upcoming models. He described the Grok 4.5 as the first flagship model launched under the SpaceXAI joint venture and said the company plans to send a newly developed base model every month until the end of 2026.
While Musk focused on Grok 4.5’s performance, speed, and operating costs, Tetsuo’s technical comments suggest that future versions will continue to expand coding capabilities with larger training data sets and updated reinforcement learning methods.
With Grok 4.5, OpenAI’s GPT-5.6 lineup, and Anthropic’s newly released models hitting the market within weeks of each other, competition among leading AI developers is intensifying as each company pushes new base models to public users and enterprise customers.
