Grok 4 Heavy & Anime Companions

xAI had a busy July. On the 9th, they released Grok 4 and Grok 4 Heavy — reasoning models that set new benchmarks across the board. A couple weeks later, they launched anime-style AI companion characters behind their SuperGrok paywall.

Same company. Same month. And I can’t stop thinking about what that says.

The Technical Side: Genuinely Impressive #

Let’s start with what works. Grok 4 scored 25.4% on Humanity’s Last Exam, beating Gemini 2.5 Pro (21.6%) and o3 (21%). Those aren’t rounding errors — they’re meaningful gaps on a test specifically designed to stump frontier models.

DALL-E 2: Moving Image Synthesis into the API

Last week, OpenAI launched outpainting for DALL-E 2. You take an existing image, and the model extends it beyond its original borders — generating new content that matches the style, lighting, and subject matter of what’s already there. The demos look magical. A Vermeer painting expanded to reveal the rest of the room. A photograph extended to show what was just outside the frame.

It’s impressive. But I keep thinking about something else entirely.