Musk says xAI’s Grok 5 will achieve AGI

Elon Musk declared on Monday that xAI's Grok 5 will be the model to achieve artificial general intelligence, laying out an ambitious roadmap even as the company's next release, Grok 4.7, remains overdue.

A Rapid Roadmap With No Benchmarks

In a series of posts on X on September 14, Musk wrote that Grok 4.8, a 2.5-trillion-parameter model built on xAI's new C++ software stack, should finish training within the week before entering reinforcement learning. Asked how close that model would come to AGI, Musk replied: "That will be Grok 5."yellow+2

Musk characterized the unreleased Grok 4.7 as "roughly on par with Opus 5.0, not 5.1," Anthropic's earlier flagship, adding it was "better in some ways, worse in others" and that multimodal performance still needed work. He projected Grok 4.9 would reach "Astra/Fable class" — a reference to OpenAI's GPT-6 Astra and Anthropic's Fable line — and described Grok 5 as "maybe better than anything," hedging with "we shall see." No benchmark, timetable, or definition of AGI accompanied the claim.cryptopolitan+2

Grok 4.7 Still Missing

The AGI talk arrives against an awkward backdrop. Grok 4.7, originally expected around September 12, has not shipped. On September 11, Musk said the model needed "a few more days to cook" because the team may have penalized response length too heavily during reinforcement learning, leaving the model prone to giving up on hard tasks early and failing to check its own work. As of Monday, xAI's latest released flagship remains Grok 4.6, which launched on August 12 with API access and pricing at $2 per million input tokens.startupfortune+1

The delay stands out because rival labs have been shipping steadily. Anthropic released Claude Fable 5.1 on September 1, Google DeepMind published its Gemini 3.8 Flash model card on September 2, and OpenAI published a safety overview for GPT-6 Astra on September 3. Three frontier releases landed in three days while xAI was still tuning its next model.startupfortune

Safety Calls and Market Jitters

Musk made his AGI prediction the same day he endorsed calls from Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei and OpenAI's Sam Altman to slow the pace of capability development over safety concerns. The apparent tension — pursuing AGI while urging caution — drew immediate scrutiny. Nvidia ↗ 2.78% shares fell 3.46% and AMD Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. ↗ 11.04% dropped 6.24% as investors reassessed demand projections for AI chips amid the broader slowdown rhetoric.blockonomi+1

xAI still commands formidable compute resources, with its Memphis-based Colossus cluster running 200,000 H100 GPUs. But as one industry analysis noted, "compute can get you into the race. It doesn't publish a release date for you."startupfortune