xAI's Grok 4.5 Enters Private Beta at SpaceX and Tesla With 1.5 Trillion Parameters and No Public Benchmarks
About This Episode
Elon Musk announced June 28 that xAI's Grok 4.5, a 1.5-trillion-parameter model built on the V9 architecture, has entered private beta testing exclusively at SpaceX and Tesla. Musk claims performance may exceed Anthropic's Claude Opus, but no independent benchmarks exist. xAI plans monthly model releases through end of 2026 while posting a $2.47 billion operating loss in Q1.
Our Take
Musk's Grok 4.5 makes the AI arms race personal: a $2.5B-per-quarter bet on keeping frontier AI behind closed doors, testing it on rockets and cars instead of public benchmarks, embodying the Star Wars path where AI power concentrates in the hands of those who can afford the compute.
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