MW Musk sidesteps Yaccarino exit, antisemitic posts in Grok 4 presentation

By Steve Goldstein

Musk says current economy will be compared to that of cave dwellers

Elon Musk ignored hot-button issues including Linda Yaccarino's departure and Grok's sudden antisemitic outbursts as xAI presented the latest large language model that it's rolling out.

Speaking alongside employees he did not identify on a livestream Wednesday night, Musk said the latest version, Grok 4, would get near perfect results in any graduate-level exam, even for questions it's never seen.

"Grok 4 is smarter than almost all graduate students in all disciplines simultaneously," said Musk. The company said Grok 4 outperformed rivals including ChatGPT and Gemini in various tests.

In typical Musk fashion, he projected revolutionary changes to the economy.

"Like the actual notion of a human economy, assuming civilization continues to progress, will seem very quaint in retrospect. It will seem like cavemen-throwing-sticks-into-a-fire level of economy, compared to what the future will hold," said Musk.

He paused.

"It's somewhat unnerving to have intelligence created that is far greater than our own," said Musk.

"I think it'll be good [for humanity], most likely it'll be good," said the world's richest person. "I've somewhat reconciled myself to the fact that even if it wasn't going to be good, I'd at least like to be alive to see it happen."

Linda Yaccarino, the chief executive of what used to be called Twitter, announced her departure on Wednesday. The Wall Street Journal reported internal frictions as the artificial-intelligence applications became more important than social media at the company.

Several antisemitic social-media posts, including ones that praised Adolf Hitler, that were made by Grok were deleted by the company.

The Grok LLM was designed with some 110,000 microchips from Nvidia (NVDA), which on Wednesday reached $4 trillion in market value.

-Steve Goldstein

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July 10, 2025 06:03 ET (10:03 GMT)

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