Sam Altman, Elon Musk tease powerful AI model days after backing slower AI pace

Days after urging for a slower pace of frontier AI development, tech titans Sam Altman and Elon Musk teased powerful new model releases in rapid succession. After Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei published a September 12 essay urging the industry to curb rapid capability jumps, both competitors initially appeared to agree on the need for caution, but swiftly reverted to their aggressive deployment plans.On September 15, OpenAI CEO Altman hinted at a "big ship this week and then for devday" announcement, promising output volumes on par with expectations for DevDay 2025.

The same day, Musk revealed details of SpaceXAI's Grok 4.8 system, boasting an astounding 2.5 trillion parameters. Musk stated that Grok 4.8 would transition from pre-training to reinforcement learning by week's end, delivering a significant performance boost with a future Grok 4.9 expected to compete with top-tier systems like Astra and Fable.The announcements come after SpaceXAI's Grok 4.6 model, which outperformed OpenAI's GPT 5.6 Sol with an Artificial Analyst Intelligence Index score of 61, was deployed in September.

Grok 4.6 was priced at $2 per million input tokens and $6 per million output tokens, while Anthropic's Fable 5 model was priced significantly higher at $10 per million input tokens and $50 per million output tokens.Musk vehemently defended his company's internal architecture, stating that the C and C++ training stack was written entirely by human engineers, despite reports suggesting reliance on rival models like GPT or Fable's code.