SpaceX stock was rising in Thursday's premarket after surging almost 10% the previous session after CEO Elon Musk told employees "We must win in AI because the future is overwhelmingly AI and robots."
On that theme, the company launched Grok 4.6, the latest version of its artificial intelligence assistant to rival OpenAI's ChatGPT and Athropic's Claude.
In a post on his X social-media platform Musk described the latest iteration as "Smart, fast & amazing bang for buck."
AI measurement firm Artificial Analysis said in an X post: "This brings SpaceXAI back to the intelligence frontier alongside OpenAI, behind only Anthropic."
SpaceX stock was up 0.5% at $149.99, surging way back above its offer price of $135 before it started trading on June 12.
While Grok appears to be catching up with the big players on performance, it's beating them on price, according to SpaceX, which said the latest release was "half the price of other frontier models" in a post on X.
Grok 4.6 starts at $2 per million input tokens and $6 per million output tokens. Claude Opus 5 costs $5 per million input and $25 per million output tokens, while OpenAI's GPT-5.6 Sol runs $5 per million input and $30 per million output tokens, according to Artificial Analysis.
SpaceX and Musk's xAI officially merged earlier this year on Feb 2. In further consolidation, on June 16 SpaceX announced an all-stock deal valued at $60 billion to acquire Anysphere, the start-up behind the Cursor AI coding editor.
Cursor was an integral partner in both the development and rollout of Grok 4.6.
Musk's model has trailed its more illustrious peers in the AI race so far. One complaint has been about Grok's higher hallucination and false-confidence rates on factual queries compared with Claude and ChatGPT -- meaning it's less likely to admit ignorance. However, SpaceX appears to have admitted faults were there and addressed them.
In his all-hands meeting Tuesday Musk projected that AI-based internet traffic will be 1,000 times human traffic in five years. This looks like a good step toward making his future become a reality.