A Silent Drop From xAI

xAI released Grok 4.3 Beta on April 17, 2026, with no press release or announcement post. The update appeared silently in the model selector on grok.com and immediately surfaced across iOS and Android apps for users on the SuperGrok Heavy tier at $300 per month. Standard SuperGrok subscribers ($30/month) can see the model in the dropdown but cannot access it yet. A full rollout is expected in mid-to-late May 2026.

The release comes the day after Anthropic launched Claude Opus 4.7, and mirrors xAI's pattern of shipping quietly and letting users and community accounts surface the news organically.

What Is New in Grok 4.3 Beta:

• Native video understanding: Grok 4.3 adds native video input and processing, expanding its multimodal capabilities beyond images and text.
• Slide creation: Early testers confirmed that Grok 4.3 can now generate presentation slides directly inside the chat interface, a capability that was not available in 4.20. If you want AI-powered slides without a $300/month paywall, try Chatly's AI Presentation Maker.
• Retained architecture: The 16-agent Heavy system and 2 million token context window from Grok 4.20 carry over into 4.3, making it still the largest context window among Western closed models.
• Enhanced reasoning depth: xAI attributes improvements to longer training runs, though no model card has been published at launch.
• Still no persistent memory: Despite being the most expensive tier in the market at $300/month, Grok 4.3 still does not remember preferences or context across sessions, a gap that ChatGPT and Claude have addressed for over a year.

Also Launching Alongside Grok 4.3:

• Speech-to-Text API (GA): xAI's Speech-to-Text API is now generally available, supporting transcription in 25 languages with batch and streaming modes, plus multi-speaker diarization with word-level speaker IDs.
• Text-to-Speech API (GA): Priced at $4.20 per million characters, the TTS API powers the same voice stack used in Grok Voice and Tesla vehicles, with natural prosody controls via inline speech tags.
• XChat: xAI launched XChat on the Apple App Store, an encrypted messaging app built in Rust with end-to-end encryption, voice and video calls, disappearing messages, and Grok baked in. It requires iOS 26 or higher and supports 45 languages. No Android timeline has been announced.

Where Grok Stands in the Model Race:

Grok 4.3 arrives as xAI continues to ship fast across its product surface. SpaceX acquired xAI in February 2026 in an all-stock deal, folding Grok and the X social network under SpaceX's corporate structure. xAI now operates Colossus 2 at 1.5 gigawatts of compute and is training Grok 5, targeting a Q2 2026 release. You can try Grok 4 and Grok 4 Fast today inside Chatly's multi-model AI chat.

Also Read

• Anthropic Launches Claude Opus 4.7, Smarter Coding, Better Vision, and Stronger Agentic Performance
• Anthropic Launches Claude Design for Teams to Create Prototypes, Decks, and Landing Pages
• Google Launches Gemma 4, Its Most Capable Open Model Family
• Salesforce Turns Slackbot Into a Full Enterprise AI Agent With 30 New Capabilities
• OpenAI Closes Record $122 Billion Funding Round at $852 Billion Valuation