xAI, the AI lab led by Elon Musk, released the Grok 4.1 AI model on November 17. The model is claimed to bring improvements in creative writing and emotional intelligence.
“It is more perceptive to nuanced intent, compelling to speak with, and coherent in personality, while fully retaining the razor-sharp intelligence and reliability of its predecessors,” the company claimed.
On the LMArena Text leaderboard, which evaluates AI models on text-generation quality by a blind test by human voters, Grok 4.1 Thinking stands at the #1 spot with 1483 points, and Grok 4.1 stands second at 1465 points.
On EQ-Bench, which evaluates the emotional intelligence capabilities of AI models, Grok 4.1 models occupied the top two positions.
Even on the Creative Writing v3 benchmark, Grok 4.1 Thinking and Grok 4.1 were among the top three models tested. The model is also claimed to bring lower hallucinations.
To achieve the above results, xAI stated, “We used the same large-scale reinforcement learning infrastructure that powered Grok 4 and applied it to optimise the style, personality, helpfulness, and alignment of the model.”
The company also ‘silently’ deployed preliminary Grok 4.1 builds to users to gauge their preferences. “Compared to the previous production model in traffic, Grok 4.1 is preferred 64.78% of the time.”
Recently, CNBC reported that xAI is raising $15 billion in a Series E round; however, Musk denied the development in a post on X.
