Sam Altman, Elon Musk tease powerful AI model days after backing slower AI pace

Barely days after voicing support for Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei’s call to decelerate frontier artificial intelligence (AI) development, tech leaders Sam Altman and Elon Musk took to social media to preview aggressive releases for their next flagship models.

The announcements arrived after Amodei published a widely discussed essay on September 12 urging the tech sector to curb rapid capability jumps.

While both rivals initially signaled agreement with the need for caution, their public posture quickly pivoted back toward rapid product deployment.On September 15, OpenAI CEO hinted at an imminent wave of product releases, teasing a major rollout this week and promising an output volume on par with expectations for DevDay 2025.

Replying to a post, “This week will also be a level of ships that you could have expected for DevDay 2025. Crazy”, ALtman said, “Big ship this week and then for devday.”

Musk previews 2.5-Trillion Parameter Grok 4.8

Meanwhile, on September 14, Tesla and SpaceXAI leader Elon Musk laid out an ambitious roadmap for his own frontier software. Musk revealed that SpaceXAI's upcoming Grok 4.8 system with an immense 2.5 trillion parameters is set to complete pre-training and transition into reinforcement learning this week.

According to Musk, Grok 4.8 will deliver a noticeable performance jump, while a future Grok 4.9 iteration will probably compete directly with top-tier systems like Astra and Fable.The announcements follow a strong September run for SpaceXAI after deploying Grok 4.6, which the firm claimed performed comparably to Anthropic's Fable 5 models. Grok 4.6 posted an evaluation score of 61 on the Artificial Analyst Intelligence Index (AAI), outpacing OpenAI's GPT 5.6 Sol and landing just a single point behind Fable 5.“Grok 4.7 should be roughly on par with Opus 5.0, not 5.1. Better in some ways, worse in others. We need to fix multimodal performance. Grok 4.8 will be a noticeable improvement. Grok 4.9 is probably Astra/Fable class. Grok 5 maybe better than anything. We shall see,” Musk said.

The model also entered the market with aggressive pricing:

SpaceXAI Grok 4.6: Billed at $2 per million input tokens and $6 per million output tokens.Anthropic Fable 5: Priced at $10 per million input tokens and $50 per million output tokens.After a Google AI researcher suggested that SpaceXAI's internal architecture likely relied on code generated by rival models like GPT or Fable, Musk pushed back directly, asserting that the underlying C and C++ training stack was written entirely by human engineers.“Our C/C++ training stack was written by humans. AI is not yet good enough for extremely high-performance software (but it will be),” Musk stated. However, Musk did not clarify whether his engineering teams made use of autonomous human-guided coding agents during development.