VentureBeat | May 1, 2026 10:49 AM PT

While Elon Musk faces off against his former colleague and OpenAI co-founder Sam Altman in court, Musk's rival firm xAI isn't slowing down on launching competitive new products and services. Last night, xAI shipped a new, proprietary base large language model (LLM), Grok 4.3, and a new voice cloning suite on the web. The new products arrive after months of tumult from xAI that saw all of Musk's 10 original co-founders of the lab and dozens more researchers exit the firm, and Grok was eclipsed on performance by many new competing LLMs from the likes of OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and Chinese firms DeepSeek, Moonshot (Kimi), Alibaba (Qwen), z.ai, and others. While Grok 4.3 does mark a significant leap in performance on third-party benchmarks over its direct predecessor Grok 4.2, according to the independent AI model evaluation firm Artificial Analysis, it still remains below the state-of-the-art set by OpenAI and Anthropic's latest models. Grok 4.3 API pricing: $1.25 per million input tokens and $2.50 per million output tokens (up to 200,000 input tokens, at which point costs double). At the core of Grok 4.3 is a fundamental shift: reasoning is now an active, permanent state. The model is designed to "think" before it speaks for every query. It features a 1 million-token context window and is specifically optimized for agentic workflows. The model accepts both text and image inputs, outputting text. For the first time, Grok has access to the same tools and environments a human professional would use.

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