Grok 4 Fast from xAI: an ultra-fast and cheap competitor to the GPT-5 and Claude Opus
Elon Musk's xAI company (Elon Musk) has unveiled a new language model Grok 4 Fast - a cheaper and faster version of Grok 4, released just a few months ago.
According to the developers, the model retains the same accuracy, but uses 40% less computational resources. This means that the cost of queries is reduced by almost 98%.
What is the main feature of Grok 4 Fast
The model is built on a hybrid architecture:
- if the query is complex, it switches to deep analysis mode
- If the query is simple, it switches to fast answers.
This approach is already used by competitors like GPT-5 and Claude Opus, but xAI claims that Grok 4 Fast has managed to make this balance particularly effective.
In tests on the LMArena platform, the model took 1st place in search tasks and was in the top 10 in text response quality.
Technical features
- Context window support up to 2 million tokens (huge volumes of text can be processed)
- Optimisation for fast work with external tools: code execution, web search, connection of additional services
- Training based on reinforcement learning methods, which allows flexible adaptation to users' tasks
Price and availability
The model is already available through:
- OpenRouter and Vercel AI Gateway
- xAI APIs on the web, as well as on iOS and Android
The price starts at $0.20 per million tokens, making Grok 4 Fast one of the cheapest models on the market.
The launch of Grok 4 Fast shows that xAI is serious about competing with the giants of the market. While Google is preparing a new version of Gemini and Anthropic has updated Claude Opus to 4.1, Musk is banking on speed and affordability.
After the scandalous Grok 4 failure, the company is clearly trying to regain user trust - and this time it has a chance.
Source: xAI
