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Public story · 2026-07-25 · high
Grok 4.6 claims across-the-board gains over Grok 4.5 while trailing Kimi K3's parameter count, and Musk's release dates have slipped before.
Why now: Musk posted the timeline on July 24, tightening the release window from what he'd said on July 18.
Musk committed to shipping Grok 4.6 in two weeks and Grok 4.7 in four, per a July 24 post. Anyone choosing between xAI and Kimi K3 for a frontier build has to decide on Musk's word alone. Grok 4.6's 2 trillion parameters go up against Kimi K3's roughly 2.8 trillion, and neither has an independent benchmark published yet.
Grok 4.6 is a 2-trillion-parameter model that Musk says beats the 1.5T Grok 4.5 "in every way," with throughput near 80 tokens per second. He's positioning it against Kimi K3 despite Grok 4.6 being the smaller model.
The two-week date is tighter than the late-August window analysts had inferred from Musk's July 18 comments. Six days changed the public estimate by a month.
There's nothing behind the Grok 4.7 date beyond that same post. No parameter count, no benchmark claim, no explanation of what separates it from 4.6 four weeks later.
Bet against the two-week date. Musk has a track record of Grok release windows that slip. A model claiming gains over its predecessor in every way is exactly the kind of claim that gets walked back once outside benchmarks run. Watch whether Grok 4.6 ships by the first week of August, and whether xAI publishes any independent benchmark against Kimi K3.
Each link below shares sources, entities, or timing with this story.
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