xAI launches Grok 4.3 at an aggressively low price and a new, fast, powerful voice cloning suite
Why this matters: a development in AI with implications for how people work, create, and decide.
While Elon Musk faces off against his former colleague and Open AI co-founder Sam Altman in court, Musk's rival firm x AI, founded to take on Open AI, isn't slowing down on launching competitive new products and services.Last night, x AI shipped a new, proprietary base large language model (LLM), Grok 4.3, and a new voice cloning suite on the web. The new products arrive after months of tumult from x AI that saw all of Musk's 10 original co-founders of the lab and dozens more researchers exit the firm and Grok was eclipsed on performance by many new competing LLMs from the likes of OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and Chinese firms DeepSeek, Moonshot (Kimi), Alibaba (Qwen), z.ai, and others. While Grok 4.3 does mark a significant leap in performance on third-party benchmarks over its direct predecessor Grok 4.2, according to the independent AI model evaluation firm Artificial Analysis, it still remains below the state-of-the-art set by OpenAI and Anthropic's latest models.But the marquee feature of the Grok brand has — other than Musk's stated opposition to "wokeness" and its more freewheeling personality and image generation policy — increasingly been its low price point when accessed by developers and users via the xAI application programming interface (API), a trend only furthered by Grok 4.3, which costs $1.25 per million input tokens and $2.50 per million output tokens (up to 200,000 input tokens, at which point costs double, a common pricing strategy of leading AI labs) compared to its direct predecessor Grok 4.2's initial API pricing of $2/$6 per million input/output tokens.According to xAI's release notes, Grok 4.3 began beta testing in April for subscribers to xAI's SuperGrok ($30 monthly) plan, and those of its sibling social network, X, through its Premium+ plan ($40 monthly with 50% for first two months). Now it's available to all through the xAI API and through partner OpenRouter. Reasoning baked-in and agentic tool-use