Musk Expects Grok 5 to Surpass Claude Opus 5.5 in Two to Three Months

Elon Musk said Tuesday, Nov. 10, that he expects Grok 5 to surpass Anthropic’s Claude Opus 5.5, perhaps within two to three months, while acknowledging Grok 4.8 does not yet match the model.

Musk praised Claude Opus 5.5 highly, calling it a major achievement. He gave no Grok 4.8 test score and no firm release date for Grok 5.

xAI plans a limited Grok 4.8 release to Grok Bot users later this week. The model has completed pretraining and entered reinforcement learning, with evaluation scores beginning to rise. Musk said the limited rollout will let xAI gauge user response.

Musk also said xAI replaced JAX and SGLang by rebuilding its reinforcement-learning and inference systems in C and C++, a process that took more time. He said the team extensively cleaned up supervised fine-tuning data. He described Grok 4.8 as substantially different from Grok 4.7, though not yet impressive.