Following rumblings that Microsoft was considering adding Grok 4 to its Azure AI Foundry, the company has confirmed that the model is now available to use for its customers, following a private preview. It comes following a period of testing, which may be related to previous instances of erratic behaviour on Grok's part. Now, Microsoft has just announced that the model is available to everyone.
Grok 4 is, as described by its constituents, a "frontier intelligence" model, which means it excels at stuff like logic, scientific problem-solving, coding, advanced math, etc., and not so much at creative writing. Both OpenAI and Google are ahead in visual comprehension as well; Grok 4's multi-modal capabilities are lackluster compared to the competition. Most businesses, though, don't really care about that — all they want is options, wrapped around Microsoft's security promises.
For instance, a company might use GPT-4 for basic tasks but prefer Grok for reasoning-heavy analysis. Grok 4 being available under the Azure umbrella makes it easy to deploy and build AI agents for specific workloads. This aligns with Microsoft's efforts to essentially build an "AI supermarket" where models from every vendor are available. The only other place Grok 4 can be found (apart from xAI directly) is Oracle; Amazon is currently missing Grok 4 from its AWS Bedrock service.
Microsoft has priced Grok 4 at $5.5 per million input tokens and $27.5 per million output tokens. There are three different flavors available, too: Grok 4 Fast Reasoning for complicated analytical tasks; Grok 4 Fast Non-Reasoning for simpler jobs like summarizations; and Grok Code Fast 1 for developer workflows. All of these are supposed to be speedy, if you couldn't tell by the "fast" in their names, but they cater to different crowds. These will be available worldwide, seemingly with no restrictions, as part of Microsoft's "Global Standard" deployment category.
Musk's AI model is not without controversy. Notably, earlier this year, xAI had to delete comments by the bot after it started praising Hitler and referring to itself as 'MechaHitler.' While resolved, these issues will no doubt have played some part in the decision to exercise caution with Grok 4's rollout on Azure AI Foundry.
Inside Azure AI Foundry, Grok 4 has a very large context window of 128,000 tokens — matching GPT-4 Turbo and exceeding pretty much everything else. If you're having long conversations or feeding Grok extensive data, it can be better at keeping track of all that without a noticeable degradation in quality. Still, a large context window does mean the model has to remember more, which means extra compute and extra time. Therefore, in some cases, Grok 4 won't offer any benefits over a similarly-abled but token-restricted model.
Then again, that's precisely the allure of cloud AI platforms: having options. You can check out all the specific machine-learning details about Grok 4 in Microsoft's blog post, but the main takeaway is that it's focusing on STEM instead of being a general-purpose AI. Microsoft says it's not a "deploy and forget model," rather that you can prop up your own guardrails around Grok as the company works to publish new safety scores. This news comes at a time when xAI has just signed a new contract with the U.S. government to use Grok at $0.42 per agency.
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