Elon Musk acknowledged on October 30 that Grok 4.8's development has taken longer than expected, while promising the model will not disappoint. He said the team is not optimizing for benchmark tests and that he personally does not care about scores, placing greater emphasis on practical applications.

The delay is now substantial. On September 14, Musk said the 2.5-trillion-parameter model, trained on SpaceXAI's new C++ stack, would finish pretraining that week and move into reinforcement learning. More than six weeks later, Grok 4.8 has still not been released, and there is still no date, price or API model ID in any SpaceXAI document.

Musk has previously conceded the gap behind him: in a September interview he said Grok 4.7 falls short of Claude Opus 5.5 and might not catch the top tier until 2027. Grok 4.7 remains the current flagship in the meantime.