Emad Mustaque, founder of Intelligent Internet, shared insights on the release of Grok 4, the latest AI model from xAI, during a recent episode of the Moonshots podcast hosted by Peter H. Diamandis. Speaking from London, Mustaque joined industry experts to unpack the model’s capabilities and its implications for the future.
“I think it is very impressive,” Mustaque said, highlighting Grok 4’s ability to reason at a postgraduate level across all academic subjects. However, he noted a key limitation: “It’s not planning as yet… It can now execute and it can reason, but it doesn’t have planning yet.” This distinction, he suggested, is what separates Grok 4 from achieving artificial general intelligence (AGI), though he believes the model is close, stating, “We’re nearly there because we have that final building block now with this next level of model.”
Grok 4 has set a new standard in AI performance, scoring 100% on the AIME25 advanced math quiz, a feat Mustaque described as evidence that “you’re literally running out of benchmarks.” He attributed this success to both computational power and data quality, explaining, “The amount of compute and resources are going exponential… Now it’s the real quality that differentiates the top models.”
Mustaque highlighted the model’s practical applications, noting its adoption by the ARC Institute for biomedical research, where it sifts through millions of experiment logs to identify hypotheses in seconds. In the financial sector, Grok 4’s access to real-time data has made it a popular tool, and its API, with a 256k context length, is already being tested for tasks like game development, with one developer creating a first-person shooter in just four hours.
Despite its achievements, Mustaque tempered expectations about Grok 4’s immediate impact. “Life is just the same so far because you haven’t got that final step,” he said, referring to the lack of planning capabilities. He predicted that Grok 5, expected to be a multi-agent system with enhanced interconnectivity, could bridge this gap, potentially integrating with tools like Maya and advanced physics simulators.
Mustaque said the economic implications, noting that the cost of running Grok 4—$3 per million input tokens and $15 per million output tokens—is comparable to competitors like Anthropic’s Claude, but hardware advancements could reduce costs significantly. “Next year with Vera Rubin, the next generation chip… it’ll be three to four times cheaper,” he said, forecasting a future where “a buck for a million amazing words” becomes feasible.
In the entertainment sector, Mustaque sees Grok 4 as a game-changer for video game and film production, predicting that AI-generated content could produce “watchable” TV episodes this year and full-length movies by next year. However, he cautioned that human attention remains a limiting factor: “The thing that won’t grow is people’s attention.”
While AI can lower production costs and enable individual creators to tell richer stories, distribution remains a challenge. “For the individual creators, this is great because you can finally tell the stories… but you’ve still got to distribute them,” he said, pointing out that established platforms like Hollywood studios will continue to dominate due to their distribution networks.
Mustaque addressed concerns about AI replacing jobs, particularly in medicine. He advocated for augmentation over replacement, citing a Google study showing AI outperforming doctors alone (70% accuracy) and doctor-AI combinations (87%), with AI alone reaching the low 90s. “Right now, what we need is less errors in something like medicine,” he said, emphasising the potential to reduce diagnostic errors, which he noted occur in roughly 30% of cases.
The rapid development of Grok 4, built in just 28 months, has sparked debate about the pace of AI innovation. Mustaque praised xAI’s approach, driven by Elon Musk’s ability to challenge conventional wisdom: “Every AI expert in the world said, ‘You cannot get power laws and coherence at that scale.’… And every AI expert is like, ‘Oh, god dang, he did it.’”
However, he acknowledged the competitive landscape, with Google, OpenAI, and Meta investing heavily in their own models. “Google has 3 million odd [GPUs]… Meta is going to drop a hundred billion,” he said, suggesting that the race for AI supremacy hinges on access to compute resources and innovative engineering.
As Grok 4 pushes boundaries, Mustaque remains optimistic but pragmatic about its trajectory. “It’s already superhuman narrow capability in many narrow areas,” he said, predicting that discoveries in fields like physics could emerge soon. Yet, he stressed that the true value of future models like Grok 5 will lie in their usability and integration into everyday workflows, transforming industries while complementing human creativity and decision-making.
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