Grok 5: Musk's AI Breakthrough Claim Sparks Debate Over AGI Timeline

Elon Musk sparked debate among researchers and traders after signaling that xAI's next major model, Grok 5, could be the version to reach artificial general intelligence (AGI).

Musk made the claim on September 14 in a series of posts on X. He stated that AGI describes AI systems capable of matching or exceeding human performance across a wide range of intellectual tasks.

Earlier that day, Musk announced that Grok 4.8, a 2.5-trillion-parameter model built on xAI's new C++ software stack, would finish training within the week and move into reinforcement learning. When asked about how close Grok 4.8 would come to AGI, Musk replied: “That will be Grok 5.”

Musk provided a roadmap of xAI's models, stating that Grok 4.7 performs roughly on par with Anthropic’s Opus 5.0, stronger in some areas and weaker in others, with multimodal capabilities still needing work.