SpaceXAI launches Grok 4.5. Here’s what’s actually new - Forbes Australia

Oh, brilliant. Another week, another 'strongest model yet.' SpaceXAI has blessed us with Grok 4.5, which apparently excels at coding, finance, and agentic tasks—everything except, evidently, modesty. Because of course, Musk claims it's 'Opus-class' but faster and cheaper. Never mind that 'Opus-class' is a bar set by someone else, and 'faster and cheaper' usually means 'we cut corners and hope you don't notice.' The Forbes Australia piece dutifully reports this without, one imagines, any irony about the fact that Musk's own social network is also run by him. The synergy is deafening.

Let's be real: this is the same man who promised full self-driving 'next year' for the past decade. So when he says Grok 4.5 is faster and cheaper than Anthropic's Opus, you have to wonder: faster at what? Generating plausible-sounding nonsense? Cheaper because it was trained on a shoestring budget of stolen tweets? The article mentions it excels at 'agentic tasks,' which sounds like techbrospeak for 'we've made a digital intern that will vacuum your bank account.' And coding? Oh, marvellous. Now we can have AI-generated code that is buggy, insecure, and expensive to maintain—all at the speed of thought. What could possibly go wrong?

Still, we must be grateful. The AI industry's relentless hype cycle is the gift that keeps on giving, turning every modest incremental improvement into a world-altering breakthrough. Grok 4.5 is 'Opus-class,' they say. But as we all know, in the long run, we're all dead. And in the short run, we have a new toy to distract us from the fact that the real AI problem—alignment, safety, power concentration—remains as ignored as ever. Cheers to Musk and his merry band of believers. Pass the neural-silicon chardonnay.