Elon Musk’s AI company, xAI, late on Wednesday released its latest flagship AI model, Grok 4, and unveiled a new $300-per-month AI subscription plan, SuperGrok Heavy.

Grok is xAI’s answer to models like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini, and can analyze images and respond to questions. In recent months, Grok has become more deeply integrated into Musk’s social network, X, which was recently acquired by xAI. However, that has also put Grok’s misbehavior front and center for millions of users.

The expectations are high for Grok 4. The latest AI model from xAI will be stacked up against OpenAI’s forthcoming AI model, GPT-5, which is expected to launch later this summer.

“With respect to academic questions, Grok 4 is better than PhD level in every subject, no exceptions,” said Elon Musk during a livestream Wednesday night. “At times, it may lack common sense, and it has not yet invented new technologies or discovered new physics, but that is just a matter of time.”

The launch of Grok 4 comes amid a tumultuous week for Elon Musk’s companies. Earlier on Wednesday, Linda Yaccarino stepped down from her role as the CEO of X after roughly two years with the company. X has yet to announce her successor.

Yaccarino’s departure comes just days after Grok’s official, automated X account responded to users with antisemitic comments criticizing Hollywood’s “Jewish executives” and praising Hitler. xAI had to briefly limit Grok’s account and delete the offensive posts. In response to the incident, xAI appeared to have removed a recently added section from Grok’s public system prompt, a list of instructions for the AI chatbot to follow, that told it not to shy away from making “politically incorrect” claims.

Musk and xAI’s leaders largely avoided discussing the incident, instead focusing on Grok 4’s performance and capabilities.

xAI launched two models on Wednesday: Grok 4 and Grok 4 Heavy — the latter being the company’s “multi-agent version” that offers increased performance. Musk claimed that Grok 4 Heavy spawns multiple agents to work on a problem simultaneously, and then they all compare their work “like a study group” to find the best answer.

xAI claims that Grok 4 shows frontier level performance on several benchmarks, including Humanity’s Last Exam— a challenging test measuring AI’s ability to answer thousands of crowdsourced questions on subjects like math, humanities, and natural science. According to xAI, Grok 4 scored 25.4% on Humanity’s Last Exam without “tools,” outperforming Google’s Gemini 2.5 Pro, which scored 21.6%, and OpenAI’s o3 (high), which scored 21%.

xAI claims that Grok 4 Heavy, with “tools,” was able to achieve a score of 44.4%, outperforming Gemini 2.5 Pro with tools, which scored 26.9%.

The nonprofit Arc Prize says that Grok achieves a new state-of-the-art score on its ARC-AGI-2 test — another difficult benchmark that consists of puzzle-like problems where an AI has to identify visual patterns — scoring 16.2%. That’s nearly twice the score of the next best commercial AI model, Claude Opus 4.

Alongside Grok 4 and Grok 4 Heavy, xAI launched its most expensive AI subscription plan yet, a $300-per-month subscription called SuperGrok Heavy. Subscribers to the plan will get an early preview to Grok 4 Heavy, as well as early access to new features. The plan is similar to ultra-premium tiers offered by OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic, but xAI now offers the most expensive subscription among major AI providers.

SuperGrok Heavy subscribers may get early access to some new products xAI plans to launch in the coming months. The company said Wednesday that an AI coding model is coming in August, a multi-modal agent in September, and a video generation model in October.

xAI is releasing Grok 4 through its API in an effort to get developers to build applications with the model. The company notes that xAI’s enterprise sector is only two months old, however, it plans to work with hyperscalers to make Grok available through their cloud platforms.

Despite Grok’s frontier-level performance on benchmarks, it may prove difficult for xAI to move past its recent mishaps as it tries to pitch Grok to businesses as a real contender to ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini. Whether businesses are ready to adopt Grok, flaws and all, remains to be seen.

YouTube is preparing to update its policies to crack down on creators’ ability to generate revenue from “inauthentic” content, including mass-produced videos and other types of repetitive content — things that have become easier to generate with the help of AI technology.

On July 15, the company will update its YouTube Partner Program (YPP) Monetization policies with more detailed guidelines around what type of content can earn creators money and what cannot.

The exact policy language itself has not yet been released, but a page on YouTube’s Help documentation explains that creators have always been required to upload “original” and “authentic” content. The update says that the new language will help creators to better understand what “inauthentic” content looks like today.

Some YouTube creators were concerned that the update would limit their ability to monetize certain types of videos, like reaction videos or those featuring clips, but a post from YouTube Head of Editorial & Creator Liaison, Rene Ritchie, says that’s not the case.

In a video update published on Tuesday, Ritchie says that the change is just a “minor update” to YouTube’s longstanding YPP policies and is designed to better identify when content is mass-produced or repetitive.

Plus, Ritchie adds, this type of content has been ineligible for monetization for years, as it’s content that viewers often consider spam.

What Ritche is not saying, however, is how much easier it is to create such videos these days.

With the rise of AI technology, YouTube has become flooded with AI slop, a term referencing low-quality media or content made using generative AI technology. For instance, it’s common to find an AI voice overlaid on photos, video clips, or other repurposed content, thanks to text-to-video AI tools. Some channels filled with AI music have millions of subscribers. Fake, AI-generated videos about news events, like the Diddy trial, have racked up millions of views.

In another example, a true crime murder series on YouTube that went viral was found to be entirely AI-generated, 404 Media reported earlier this year. Even YouTube CEO Neal Mohan’s likeness was used in an AI-generated phishing scam on the site, despite having tools in place that allow users to report deepfake videos.

While YouTube may downplay the coming changes as a “minor” update or clarification, the reality is that allowing this type of content to grow and its creators to profit could ultimately damage YouTube’s reputation and value. It’s no surprise, then, that the company wants clear policies in place that allow it to enact mass bans of AI slop creators from YPP.

LangChain, an AI infrastructure startup providing tools to build and monitor LLM-powered applications, is raising a new round of funding at an approximate $1 billion valuation led by IVP, according to three sources with knowledge of the deal. 

LangChain began its life in late 2022 as an open-source project founded by Harrison Chase, who was then an engineer at machine learning startup Robust Intelligence. After generating significant developer interest, Chase transformed the project into a startup, securing a $10 million seed round from Benchmark in April 2023. That round was followed a week later by a $25 million Series A led by Sequoia, reportedly valuing LangChain at $200 million.

The startup was an early darling of the AI era. When LangChain first emerged, LLMs lacked access to real-time information and the ability to perform actions such as searching the web, calling APIs, and interacting with databases. The startup’s open-source code solved those problems with a framework for building apps on top of LLM models. It became a hugely popular project on GitHub (111K stars, over 18,000 forks). 

The LLM ecosystem has since expanded significantly, with new startups including LlamaIndex, Haystack, and AutoGPT now offering comparable features. Furthermore, leading LLM providers including OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google have evolved their APIs to directly offer capabilities that were once key differentiators for LangChain’s core technology.

So the company has added other products, including LangSmith, a separate, closed-source product for observability, evaluation, and monitoring of LLM applications, specifically agents. This product has soared in popularity, multiple people tell us.

Since its introduction last year, LangSmith has led the company to reach annual recurring revenue (ARR) between $12 million and $16 million, four sources told TechCrunch. The company didn’t respond to a request for comment. Developers can start working with LangSmith for free and upgrade to $39 per month for small team collaboration features, according to the company’s website.  LangChain also offers custom plans for large organizations. 

Companies who use LangSmith include Klarna, Rippling, and Replit.

While LangSmith currently leads the burgeoning LLM operations space, it does have competitors like smaller, open-source Langfuse and Helicone. IVP declined to comment on this report.