Grok 4.8 is in its last training stage; Musk says some Grok Bot users get it this week
Elon Musk says Grok 4.8 has finished its first training stage and a limited rollout to Grok Bot users should start this week. Here is what he said, and what it means for Grok 5.
On November 10, 2026, Elon Musk posted that Grok 4.8 has finished its first training stage and is now in reinforcement learning, the stage where the model is tuned by practice and feedback. He said a limited rollout to Grok Bot users is expected later this week. There is no date for a wider release. He also said Grok 5 could follow in two or three months.
What Musk said about Grok 4.8
In two posts on X, Musk wrote that “4.8 is in RL and the evals are starting to climb.” RL is short for reinforcement learning, and evals are the tests used to score a model. He gave no numbers.
He was also careful about expectations. He called the new version “not yet incredible” and said its foundations were built correctly. Asked how it compares with Anthropic’s latest Claude model, he said Grok 4.8 is “not as good.”
Why it took longer than planned
In mid-September, Musk said Grok 4.8 would finish training that week. It took about two more months. His explanation: the team dropped two outside software tools it used to train and run the model and rewrote that software itself, mostly in the C programming language. He also said the example data used for fine-tuning needed cleanup.
These are Musk’s own statements, reported by TeslaNorth. SpaceXSI has not published a release note for Grok 4.8 yet.
Who gets Grok 4.8 first
According to Musk, a limited group of Grok Bot users gets it first, later this week, and the team will “see how it goes.” He did not say which plans are included or when everyone else gets it. Until it shows up in the app or in the SpaceXSI release notes, Grok 4.7 is still the current model.
What this means for Grok 5
Musk said Grok 5 “should exceed” the best Claude model, possibly within two or three months. That would put it around January or February 2027. He has missed his own dates before, including on Grok 4.8, so treat this as a target, not a release date. We keep the full timeline in our Grok 5 tracker.
Our take
The useful part of this news is the order of events: a small Grok Bot test first, a wider release later, and Grok 5 after that. If you are on Grok Bot, watch for a new model option this week. If you are waiting for Grok 5, nothing has shipped and no date is confirmed.