Elon Musk’s xAI Releases Grok 4.1 AI Model, Rolled Out to All Users

Elon Musk's xAI released the Grok 4.1 artificial intelligence (AI) model on Monday. The successor to Grok 4, which arrived in July, brings several improvements and new capabilities. The AI firm claims that the newer version of the large language model offers better emotional intelligence, creative writing, and reduced hallucinations. The company also shared the internal benchmark scores of the model, highlighting better performance than Gemini 2.5 Pro and Claude 4.5 Sonnet in some metrics. Notably, it is a major update to the fourth-generation Grok model, not a new model in itself.

Grok 4.1 Improvements and Features

In a newsroom post, xAI announced the release of the new version of the AI model. Interestingly, Grok 4.1 was released in stealth between November 1-14. Users would randomly get a choice between two responses, and one of them was the latest model. xAI says Grok 4.1 was preferred by users 64.78 percent of the time over the older model.

Currently, the new AI model is available to everyone across Grok.com, X (formerly known as Twitter), as well as the Android and iOS apps. Users do not even need to be logged into their accounts if they access the model on the website. It is now the default model on the Auto mode, and can be explicitly picked via a separate Grok 4.1 listing.

Coming to the improvements, emotional intelligence is one of the areas where Grok 4.1 performs better. Based on internal evaluations, the company said the model scored 1585 on the EQ-Bench benchmark (1586 with Grok 4.1 Thinking), outperforming models such as Gemini 2.5 Pro, Claude Opus 4, and GPT-5. In a real-world use case, this means the AI model now better picks up on the nuances in the prompts and picks up on the tonality. It then generates a response acknowledging the emotions.

Creative writing of the model has also been upgraded. The LLM scored 1708.6 on the Creative Writing v3 benchmark, outperforming Claude 4.5 Sonnet, the company claimed. The improved capability now allows Grok 4.1 to generate better responses for creative tasks such as generating a social media post, writing a short story, and so on. Finally, the company also claimed that the AI model hallucinates (generates inaccurate information) lesser than its predecessor.