THIS WEEK IN AI: Grok Bot (and 4.6), AI Watermarks, Deepseek Strategy, Selling the Lakers

**Josh** (0:00)
There's a new frontier model in town, and it comes from a not-so-suspecting company in SpaceX AI. They just released Grok 4.6. This is now possibly the best model that there is out there, depending on what you care about. As we look at this benchmark card, it shows that Grok 4.6 high is scoring higher than even Fable 5 on some tasks. And this is shocking because, I mean, just last week, if you would have asked us where Grok stood in the AI race, we would say, well, they're like a distant third competing probably with Meta and Gemini.
The reality is that with this new model, they are now right at the front. And not only that, but the new model, Grok 4.7, is expected to come out in the next three to four weeks and be even better than this one. This comes on the back of Grok releasing a new product called GrokBot, which we'll get into, as well as a lot of other interesting news from this week. This is the roundup, the weekly roundup, every Friday that we publish, where we cover all things about news and AI. Things like covering earnings from Neo Clouds all the way over to the new acquisition of your favorite or least favorite sports team. We have to start here with Grok 4.6. They're back. They're right here at the frontier. This is an amazing model.

**Ejaaz** (1:02)
They're back. Yeah, no. So, for the longest time, SpaceX has kind of lost the frontier race. Elon's engineering team had made a few wrong moves and they kind of fell behind the likes of Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google, which is crazy to say because Google has fallen behind a lot since then. But they're officially back. Grok 4.6 comes, I think, three weeks after Grok 4.5 got released. It is a bigger and better model. Now, specifically, if we look at a few different benchmark comparisons, there's this thing called the AA Intelligence Index. It's a really good way of testing just the general level of intelligence across different models.
On your screen here, you'll see it compared directly to GPT 5.6 Sol Max, so that's the highest, hardest version from OpenAI, as well as Fable 5 Max. And you'll see it is the equivalent to GPT 5.6 Sol, and just a point off Fable 5 So you could argue that its general intelligence level is right up there, but the best part is it comes at a fraction of the cost. So it's 5x cheaper output than Sol, 8.5x cheaper output than Fable. Overall, you're kind of ranging between 3 to 5x cheaper than these two models, which is a big thing if you're like a company that's using these frontier models, and want to kind of figure out how to cut your cost down from tens to hundreds of millions of dollars. Now, the main way that they're able to achieve this frontier intelligence, well, there's a few ways, but the main one is they spin up a bunch of agents. So Grok 4.6 uses multiple agents to kind of like solve your query. Now, this isn't something that's relatively new. This is something that Meta is doing in their smaller models. It's something that a lot of Chinese open source models are also doing. So that's one part, but two, and this is like, I have to emphasize, this is SpaceX's like, biggest moat. They have a lot of data, a lot of useful data, that makes these models insanely smart. They can just bung it into it when they're training it. And also a hell of a lot of compute, which Elon has been very strategically amassing over the last year. He has like the most compute out of anyone in the game. And we're starting to see this, like you mentioned, like 4.7 is coming out in a few weeks time, and it's going to be even bigger and better than this. I think it's going to be like a 3 to 5 trillion parameter model. So you can only imagine that with the cost benefits and with the intelligence starts increasing, like SpaceX is in a new world right now. It's very impressive.

**Josh** (3:26)
This is where things are going to start to get really interesting, because it was mostly a matter of if not when, and now it feels like it's a matter of when, when they actually get to the frontier and eclipse it for a few reasons. The first of which is that, I mean, as we mentioned all the time, the SpaceX team is the best team in the world at building physical things, at moving atoms around, at compiling data centers quickly. It is nothing compared to building a rocket ship, to just put a couple servers on a rack on the ground and plug them into electricity. So they have been doing this quickly and efficiently. In the episode yesterday, we talked about MicroHard, which is the small version of MacroHard, yet it is the same exact footprint in terms of GPUs in a cluster. So basically, they've been able to figure out how to get 200,000 coherent GPUs into a package the size that's about one third of MacroHard. So it's this amazing iterative process that they have on hardware, and then they have this amazing iterative process on software, where they're planning to publish these models once a month that are incrementally stronger and stronger. You said now, you just, I think we're at three to five. I'm pretty sure there's plans for like eight to 10 trillion parameters in terms of parameter count.