xAI Unveils Grok Code Fast 1 to Take on GPT-5, Claude
Elon Musk’s xAI has released a fast, affordable AI coding assistant aimed squarely at developers, promising lower cost and quicker response than OpenAI’s GPT-5 or Anthropic’s Claude Sonnet 4
Topics
News
- India to Roll Out First Homegrown Chip From CG Semi's Sanand plant
- Anthropic Foils AI-Powered Cybercrime Spree
- Team Computers and Yotta Data Services Partner to Accelerate AI Adoption in India
- Databricks to Buy Enterprise Feature Store Tecton
- OutSystems Names Ganesh to Accelerate AI-Powered Low-Code Growth in India
- OpenAI to Open First India Office in Delhi by Year End
Elon Musk’s AI firm xAI on Thursday, 28 August, launched Grok Code Fast 1, a new coding assistant designed to help developers write, fix, and manage code faster.
xAI is pitching Grok Code Fast 1 as a serious alternative to Anthropic’s Claude Sonnet 4 and OpenAI’s GPT-5.
The tool is available through Cursor and will be free to use for one week. After that, it will cost $0.20 per million input tokens and $1.50 per million output tokens.
Grok Code Fast 1 has been built specifically for coding tasks. It can read and understand large amounts of code and documentation at once—up to 256,000 tokens—which helps reduce mistakes and the need for repeated debugging.
It can also process about 92 tokens per second, meaning developers can get faster responses and test their code more quickly.
Leading IT consulting firm Baytech said the model uses what’s called a Mixture-of-Experts design. Instead of one big system trying to handle every task, it works more like a team of experts, with only the most relevant parts of the system being activated each time. This helps make the model faster and more efficient.
The assistant also comes with some smart features: it can run tools, return structured results, and explain its logic step by step, something especially useful for industries such as finance and healthcare where clear reasoning matters.
It also supports multiple programming languages, including Python, Java, Rust, TypeScript, Go, and C++.
xAI is positioning Grok Code Fast 1 as an affordable, developer-friendly tool that can be plugged into existing workflows and tools.
Moreover, its pricing is lower than many other models, and it is designed to work well in real-world development environments.
Grok Code Fast 1 is cheaper and faster than Claude Sonnet 4, which has a smaller context window and costs more.
GPT-5, while capable of handling even larger inputs and offering image and text features, is expensive and slower — making it less practical for day-to-day coding.
