Elon Musk Says Grok's 1481 ELO 'Not Bad For Now' As xAI Pushes For Top Spot

The world of Artificial Intelligence is a fiercely competitive arena, and xAI, led by Elon Musk, is determined to claim the top spot. A recent, notable milestone suggests their challenger, Grok, is making swift progress.

The competition to build the world's most powerful AI is heating up, and Elon Musk's xAI is pushing its Grok model toward the summit. Musk recently noted that Grok's 1481 ELO rating was 'not bad for now,' signalling the company's clear ambition to reach the top spot in the field.

Grok's Performance on AI Benchmarks

After participating in more than 5,800 contests, Grok-4.1-Thinking achieved an ELO of 1481 on the LMArena text chart, securing the second position; the standard Grok-4.1 variant follows closely, holding third place with 1462.

Beyond that, it scored 126 in the TrackingAI evaluation for logic and pattern spotting, surpassing prominent models such as Claude-4.1 Opus and GPT-5 Pro.

Musk shared a screenshot of the scores, initially posted by X user X Freeze, and commented that the performance was 'not bad for now.' In a separate statement, the 54-year-old billionaire forecast that his AI would achieve first place by January.

Before the model achieved its current ELO rating, Musk leveraged a highly publicised demonstration of Grok 4.1's creative abilities to generate buzz for the update.

Grok's New Trick: AI Video Leaves the Web Stunned

On Sunday, Musk generated significant interest for his AI chatbot Grok by posting a strikingly realistic, AI-generated video on the X platform. The video shows the Tesla CEO, joined by Google's Sundar Pichai, OpenAI's Sam Altman, and Nvidia's Jensen Huang, having McDonald's outside the restaurant, with a Tesla Cybertruck visible in the foreground.

The clip first appeared on the X account @BlessethWeb314, carrying the caption, 'Stretching The Limits W/ @grok @elonmusk @xai.' Musk subsequently circulated the video, using it to underscore the quick advancements in AI visual technology.

The initial post also contained the phrase, 'It is scary how real AI is starting to look,' a sentiment shared by many people who viewed the footage.

The Grok 4.1 Update: Sharper Reasoning and Realism

Musk circulated the video just as xAI launched Grok 4.1, an upgraded version built to dedicate greater processing resources towards reasoning and generating better answers.

This timely release implies the entrepreneur is leveraging the widely shared clip to highlight the enhanced abilities of his Artificial Intelligence model.

In addition to promoting the update, Musk has directly called on users on X to provide examples of where the Grok model remains deficient. He encouraged the public to submit errors and compare them with those of competing chatbots, signalling xAI's commitment to fixing inaccuracies and limiting recent unpredictable performance.

Musk specifically requested feedback on Saturday, posting, 'Please provide examples where @Grok needs to improve in replies. Showing how another AI does it better would be helpful. These examples should be of Grok going wrong today, as we fixed many bugs from earlier in the week.'

The entrepreneur subsequently declared, 'We will not rest until Grok is perfect.' He also encouraged users to highlight instances of strong performance, noting that these examples were equally valuable to the development team.

The Pursuit of Perfection

The model's steady climb in performance metrics, coupled with Musk's aggressive, user-driven strategy for refinement, underscores xAI's seriousness in the market. As development continues at this rapid pace, the entire AI community will be keenly watching to see if Grok can achieve the coveted top spot by the billionaire's January deadline.