The AI Wire ●

X user @blankspeaker posted on September 26 what they described as a "very early look on Android" of music generation inside Grok Imagine. SpaceXAI's Imagine tool currently covers image and video generation with audio; its published materials do not describe a standalone music generator.

The poster says the system produced different kinds of tracks from prompts, but admits adding "a thing or 2" to the result, so the clip is not a clean demo of raw output. The post names no model and does not establish whether the audio was produced separately from a video. Treat it as an early test hint, not a product announcement.

OpenAI's rumored personal-assistant answer to Meta's Muse and SpaceX's Grok Bot now has a name: "o," according to a September 26 leak report from Wccftech, which says the always-on AI assistant is powered by a GPT-6 Astra variant codenamed "Aeon" tuned for long-running tasks. OpenAI is already including "o" branding in ChatGPT Pro-related literature, pointing to a formal launch with DevDay on September 29 as the likely debut.

The leak came via X user @synthwavedd, who said "one of their big DevDay launches is 'o', a competitor to products like Grok Bot and Hermes Agent, powered by a variant of Astra called 'aeon' designed to be better at long-running tasks," and that it has been in the works for months. The report also links "o" as a software companion to an upcoming consumer AI device rumored to be shaped like a donut with moving parts.

The timing reads as competitive: JP Morgan analysts have just crowned Meta's Muse the top AI agent, lifting Meta's price target and projecting Muse could become the most widely used consumer AI app since ChatGPT. Earlier reporting described OpenAI leadership discussing a dedicated personal assistant that repurposes agentic capabilities already built into ChatGPT and Codex, and OpenAI hired OpenClaw's Peter Steinberger to drive its personal-agent push. None of it is confirmed by OpenAI.

Fresh corroboration arrived September 26 from TestingCatalog, which spotted “O” across ChatGPT's configuration: as a display name, as an “-o” email suffix, and as a benefit listed on the $100 Pro plan upgrade page — together pointing to a persistent agent with its own email identity from day one. The outlet notes “Aeon,” the codename previously tied to OpenAI's always-on agent work, is also being used internally around custom agents for ChatGPT Workspace accounts. Separately, Sottiaux himself posted that a reset of usage limits for paid users is underway, suggesting OpenAI is clearing the decks ahead of the September 29 DevDay keynote.

Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong shared a dataset on September 25 showing Grok as the dominant harness for agentic trading on Coinbase, the largest US crypto exchange. Grok accounts for 59.5% of the agentic traders using Coinbase for Agents, the June-launched feature that lets AI agents trade, pay, and run workflows inside preset limits. Musk acknowledged the lead with a one-word post: "Cool."

Custom models trail at 21.7%, followed by Anthropic's Claude at 13.4%, Perplexity at 3.5%, and OpenAI's ChatGPT at just 1.5%. The figures are a striking early datapoint in the agentic-commerce race, with Grok far ahead of every rival lab. The numbers come from Armstrong's public dataset as reported by TheStreet.

Elon Musk said Wednesday that SpaceXAI's Grok @Bot — the assistant that lives inside X, summoned from posts and DMs — is getting a major feature drop. Shown in a walkthrough video by team member Matt Palmer that Musk quote-posted, the bot can now place voice calls and record voice memos, store logins in a 1Password vault, render inline forms, create inline drafts for email and Slack, switch between accounts, and route traffic through a user's desktop.

The update pushes the bot further into agentic territory: instead of answering in a chat window, it can call, file credentials, and draft messages inside the apps where they'll be sent. Palmer framed it as a rolling weekly update rather than a distant roadmap, so the new controls should appear inside the bot as they roll out.

It continues a busy month for the bot: SpaceXAI has hooked it into Salesforce, HubSpot, and Gong and taught it to resolve customer support tickets for as little as $0.20 each.

Elon Musk's xAI — operating as 'SpaceXAI' since SpaceX's February acquisition — launched Grok 4.7 on September 21, ending a delay saga that once had Musk rebranding the effort as Grok 4.8. The model uses a larger base model than Grok 4.6, a longer reinforcement-learning run weighted toward multi-hour tasks, trained self-verification and better long-context handling, plus native understanding of the Grok Bot harness.

Pricing is unchanged from Grok 4.6 at $2 per million input and $6 per million output tokens (doubling past 200K input), with a fast variant at 2x speed for 2x price. Context is 500K tokens, cutoff May 2026. Live on day one in Cursor, Grok Build, the Grok API, routers and cloud platforms.

Benchmarks are self-reported: 71.0% on DeepSWE v1.1, 46.3% on CursorBench 4.0, 64.0% on EEBench and 19.6% on Harvey's Legal Agent Benchmark. Independent Artificial Analysis numbers trail xAI's framing: its Intelligence Index scores Grok 4.7 at 46 vs 53 each for Claude Fable 5.1 and GPT-6 Astra. Note the earlier site rumor that Grok 4.7 would land 'next week' (marked debunked September 13) referred to that missed window — the model has now shipped.

Musk told a podcast that Grok 4.7 would ship 'next week,' but that window passed without a release. Musk instead announced Grok 4.8 on September 13 (2.5T parameters, new C++ stack) and downgraded Grok 4.7 to 'roughly comparable to Anthropic's Opus 5.0' — xAI has still published no model card, price, or release date for 4.7, and attention has moved to 4.8.

UPDATE 2026-09-22: confirmed — Grok 4.7 launched on September 21 for coding and knowledge work, after weeks of delays (see the 2026-09-21 Grok 4.7 released entry). This rumor resolved exactly on schedule.

Grok models are now selectable inside Microsoft Copilot, confirmed September 12 — the xAI/Microsoft partnership moving from press release to product. Users get a non-Microsoft model choice inside the same Copilot surface.

Separately, SpaceXAI was added as a Copilot subprocessor with an opt-in admin setting that enables Grok inside Word, Excel, and PowerPoint for Frontier customers (excluding EU/EFTA/UK and government tenants), effective September 18. This is the real distribution play: Grok inside Office documents.

Watch the opt-in numbers — model choice inside enterprise Copilot is a genuine shift in how frontier models reach office workers.

Grok Build — xAI’s coding agent — now keeps persistent markdown notes on project conventions and decisions, and reads them back in later sessions. The agent stops re-learning your codebase’s habits every time you open a new chat.

It’s live for new sessions. For anyone using Grok Build on real projects, this is the difference between a clever autocomplete and a collaborator with a memory.

Memory is becoming table stakes for coding agents — Claude Code, Codex, and Copilot all have some form of it. xAI is just catching up, in public, on a live product.

On September 13, Elon Musk announced on X that xAI's next model will be Grok 4.8: 2.5 trillion parameters on an in-house C++ software stack rebuilt from scratch, moving straight into reinforcement learning once the main training run completes. The announcement effectively supersedes Grok 4.7 (2.1T), which missed multiple release windows and was publicly downgraded by Musk to 'roughly comparable to Anthropic's Opus 5.0'.

No model card, benchmark table, pricing, API identifier, or release date has been published; every figure attached to Grok 4.8 is a founder claim, not a shipped specification.

xAI began rolling out Grok 4.7 to testers in mid-September 2026 after months of delays. The release continued xAI's strategy of competing on price as much as benchmarks, undercutting rivals rather than chasing outright benchmark leads.

The delays had frustrated Grok watchers, with Musk's promised timelines slipping repeatedly through 2026. The tester rollout suggested a wider release was close but not yet finalized.

Meanwhile Grok 5 — which Musk called 'AGI-class' on September 14 — remains unreleased with no date set, after missing its original Q4 2025 and Q1 2026 targets.

xAI launched Grok 4.6, an agent-focused post-training upgrade on the 4.5 base with a 500,000-token context window. It tied GPT-5.6 Sol on the Artificial Analysis intelligence index while priced at just $2/$6 per million tokens — far below rivals.

The release came after SpaceX acquired xAI in February 2026, with the combined company styling itself SpaceXAI. Grok 4.6 was its first major model launch under the new structure.

Grok 4.6's pitch was value: near-frontier intelligence at budget pricing, undercutting competitors who charged multiples more for similar benchmark scores.

xAI released Grok 4.6 on August 12, 2026, a post-training upgrade on the same V9 base as Grok 4.5 pitched as its frontier model for coding, agentic tool use and knowledge work. It keeps the 500,000-token context window, accepts text and image inputs with text-only output, and offers selectable reasoning effort (low, medium, high, xhigh).

Pricing is $2 input / $6 output per million tokens for prompts under 200k tokens, doubling to $4/$12 above that line, with a faster variant at a premium. Available in the xAI API, Cursor, Grok Build, GitHub Copilot, OpenRouter, Vercel, Cloudflare and Microsoft Foundry. xAI reports gains over Grok 4.5 across its benchmark table, with independent Artificial Analysis testing placing it second only to Claude Opus 5 on agentic knowledge work at much lower token cost. (Filed September 21 as backfill.)

xAI released Grok 4.1, which topped agentic benchmarks and sharply cut hallucinations — down to 4.22% from 12.09% on xAI's evaluations. The update also brought a warmer, more personable default personality.

Grok 4.1's hallucination reduction addressed one of the line's longest-standing weaknesses. xAI pitched it as the model that finally paired Grok's real-time X awareness with trustworthy answers.

The release kept xAI competitive through the intense November 2025 three-lab shootout, holding the line while rivals shipped their own flagships within days.

xAI released Grok-4, which Musk called 'the most intelligent model in the world,' with native tool use and stronger reasoning. Alongside it came Grok-4 Heavy, which runs multi-agent ensembles on hard problems, sold through a $300-per-month SuperGrok Heavy tier.

Grok-4 Heavy's ensemble approach — spawning multiple agents to work a problem in parallel — previewed the multi-agent patterns the whole industry adopted in 2026. The $300 tier was the priciest consumer AI subscription to date.

Grok-4 held xAI's frontier position through the second half of 2025, with the 4.1 refresh arriving in November.

xAI launched Grok-3, trained on its Colossus supercomputer with roughly ten times the compute of Grok-2. The release added 'Think' reasoning mode and DeepSearch, an agentic research tool that scours the web and X.

Musk called Grok-3 the smartest AI on Earth at launch, and early benchmarks put it at or near the frontier on math, science, and coding. The release event was streamed live with xAI engineers demoing the model.

Grok-3's compute-heavy approach validated xAI's bet on scaling infrastructure fast, and it became the base for the Grok-4 generation later in 2025.