Rob Halsell (RobH) / Wikimedia Commons / CC BY-SA 3.0
NEW YORK – Elon Musk said Tuesday that Grok 4.8 has completed pre-training and entered reinforcement learning, with a limited rollout to Bot users planned for later this week. His comments described a development update and proposed testing, not a completed public model launch.
In a November 10 post on X, Musk said the team had dropped JAX and SGLang and rewritten the reinforcement-learning and inference software stack in C/C++. He said the rewrite had taken extra time.
“Training (aka pre-training) is done,” Musk wrote. He added that cleanup of supervised fine-tuning data had been needed, and that Grok 4.8 was now in reinforcement learning.
“We will do a soft rollout to Bot users later this week and see how it goes,” he said. The post did not specify a day, the size of the initial group or a timetable for wider availability.
Musk also said internal evaluations were beginning to improve. He did not provide benchmark scores, testing methods or independently verified performance results in the post. That comment therefore remains his assessment of development progress, not evidence of a measured advantage over competing models.
His description of Grok 4.8 was qualified: “It is not yet incredible, but, this time, the foundations are built right, so I expect it to evolve to be something special.” He said the new version would differ substantially from Grok 4.7, but did not publish a detailed comparison.
The update follows Musk’s earlier statement that Grok Bot fixes were underway to improve token efficiency and behavior. Tuesday’s post adds a model-training status and an intended limited rollout, rather than confirming that those earlier fixes are already available.
The distinction matters for users waiting for a new version: pre-training being complete does not mean the model has finished all development or has been released to everyone. Musk’s own description places Grok 4.8 in a further training stage, with a soft rollout still planned.
JBizNews Desk | New York
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