Everyone wrote off Elon Musk’s xAI as an also-ran. Grok 4.6 just made that take look silly.

The new model scores 61 on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index, tying GPT-5.6 Sol and sitting just one point behind Claude Fable 5. It also tops the leaderboard on GDPVal-AA v2, AA-Briefcase, and Harvey LAB (Vals), which isn’t nothing given who it’s up against.

Grok Ai’s price is the real story

At $2 per million input tokens and $6 per million output tokens, Grok 4.6 costs roughly half what other frontier models charge for comparable performance. That’s a serious dent in the “cheap models are worse models” assumption. Mind you, DeepSeek’s freshly released V4-Pro undercuts even that, coming in at $0.435 per million input tokens and $0.87 per million output tokens, so xAI isn’t the only one playing the discount game.

None of this works without a lot of powerful computers behind it. Think of each chip like a tiny brain doing maths really fast, and xAI just has loads of them. By May 2026, its Colossus 1 site reportedly had over 220,000 of these chips running. Colossus 2 already has even more, over 550,000 of them. And xAI wants to keep adding more computers every year, aiming for about five times today’s amount by the end of 2027.

Frontier AI was supposed to be a two-horse race between Anthropic and OpenAI. Grok 4.6 says otherwise.

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