One-Minute News
▶ On November 10 (local time), Elon Musk said on X that SpaceX’s AI subsidiary, SpaceX Superintelligence (SpaceXSI), would release Grok 4.8 to a limited group later this week.
▶ “We threw out JAX and SGLang and rewrote the entire reinforcement learning and inference stack from scratch in C/C++,” Musk wrote. “That’s why it took longer.” He said pretraining was complete and the model was now in the reinforcement-learning phase, with evaluation scores beginning to improve.
▶ “Thankfully, Grok 4.8 won’t resemble 4.7,” Musk said. “It’s not amazing yet, but we’ve laid the foundations properly this time, so I expect it to evolve into something special.” Grok 4.7 was released on September 21.
Elon Musk has previewed a new version of Grok. Musk, CEO of Tesla and head of SpaceX, wrote on X on November 10 (local time) that SpaceX’s AI subsidiary, SpaceX Superintelligence (SpaceXSI), planned to release Grok 4.8 to a limited group later this week. It will be the first version released after the technology underpinning the chatbot was overhauled.
◆ Replacing outside tools with a system built from scratch
Musk’s explanation was technical. “We threw out JAX and SGLang and rewrote the entire reinforcement-learning (RL) and inference stack from scratch in C/C++. That’s why it took longer,” he said. JAX is a machine-learning framework developed by Google, while SGLang is an open-source inference engine designed to run large language models quickly. Both are widely used third-party tools in the AI industry. Replacing them with a custom engine written in C/C++, a language closer to the hardware, means gaining speed and control at the cost of a longer development timeline.
Musk said pretraining was complete and that the training data needed extensive cleanup. Pretraining is the stage in which a model is exposed to vast amounts of text; reinforcement learning is then used to improve the quality of its responses. “4.8 is in reinforcement learning now, and its evaluation scores are starting to rise,” he said.
◆ “It won’t resemble 4.7”
Musk was blunt about the previous version. “Thankfully, Grok 4.8 won’t resemble 4.7,” he wrote. “It’s not amazing yet, but we’ve laid the foundations properly this time, so I expect it to evolve into something special.”
Grok 4.7 was released on September 21. The next version is due less than two months later, but Musk’s comments suggest it is not simply an incremental upgrade—it is a model rebuilt from the ground up. The initial release will be limited to some users.
◆ xAI, SpaceXAI and “Superintelligence”
The name of the developer has changed three times this year. In February, xAI merged with SpaceX through a stock swap. In May, Musk said xAI would no longer remain a separate entity and that its AI products would be brought under SpaceX. In July, the company changed its name and X account to “SpaceXAI.”
On the 4th of last month, Musk wrote on X, “It’s no longer AI. It’s SI. That’s better. SpaceX is a superintelligence company,” and said the name would be changed to “SpaceX Superintelligence.” The move followed a trend of the White House beginning to use the term “superintelligence” in federal documents, and aligned with the Trump administration’s decision in October to refer to AI as “SI.” It has not been confirmed whether the company’s official legal name has been changed or the change has been registered.
SpaceX went public in June. Grok is now part of the publicly listed company’s business. SpaceX also controls significant AI computing resources: Anthropic signed a deal worth up to $120.5 billion to rent Nvidia GPUs owned by SpaceX. The target users and scope of Grok 4.8’s limited release, as well as the timing of its full launch, have not been disclosed.