SpaceXAI has released Grok 4.5, its first model since the company went public several weeks ago. According to a blog post published Wednesday, this new workhorse can handle all the tedious tasks the AI industry has been automating: coding, app-building, office work, research, writing, and other routine knowledge jobs. Grok supposedly does all this with "twice greater token efficiency" than leading rivals - a big selling point given growing token cost concerns.

SpaceXAI released benchmarks showing Grok competitive with top models, though just shy of best-in-class. Founder Elon Musk, posting on his social platform X (a SpaceXAI subsidiary), compared it to Anthropic's Opus, calling it "an Opus-class model, but faster, more token-efficient and lower cost." He later added that internally it's "roughly comparable to Opus 4.7, but much faster."

Pricing is aggressive: $2 per million input tokens and $6 per million output tokens. For comparison, Opus 4.7 costs $5/$25, and OpenAI's Sol runs $5/$30, while its budget Luna is $1/$6. That's quite competitive - if the capabilities match the hype.

It's a big week for AI releases. OpenAI plans to drop GPT 5.6 on Thursday, which it calls its "strongest model yet," after previous release restrictions by the Trump administration over security concerns.