The newest Grok is expected to feature advanced coding assistance, a sign that owner Elon Musk is re-evaluating the chatbot’s strategy after Microsoft Corp. and OpenAI released powerful new models that set higher benchmarks for language model performance.

Musk’s artificial intelligence (AI) company xAI is skipping Grok 3.5 and moving straight to Grok 4. The latest iteration, expected to launch sometime after July 4, will likely focus on enhanced coding assistance and seamless integration with native code editors, making it a more powerful tool for developers.

Clues in the codebase of the Generative AI chatbot suggest xAI is building a native code editor within the Grok web interface, modeled after Visual Studio Code (VSCode), a source code editor developed by Microsoft. This would let Grok directly modify, write, or debug code, signaling a move towards “agentic coding” in which AI suggests code and acts more autonomously within an integrated development environment.

Exact implementation of the new approach remains uncertain, but would position Grok more competitively alongside AI assistants that provide deep integration for developers.

“Grinding on @Grok all night with the @xAI team. Good progress. Will be called Grok 4. Release just after July 4th. Needs one more big run for a specialized coding model,” Musk said on social-media platform X on June 27.

Grok 4’s updates indicate a move toward more sophisticated, integrated development tools driven by AI. For xAI, the shift fits into a larger plan to remain at the forefront of GenAI, as well as a key cog in xAI’s ambitious expansion to build the world’s most powerful AI cluster. The company has a roadmap to deploy 1 million GPUs for computational power.

Ultimately, Grok 4 aspires to dominate in complex reasoning tasks, with targeted performance improvements designed to outperform rivals like ChatGPT-4 Turbo in code generation, debugging, and technical problem-solving, according to various reports.

While details remain somewhat sketchy on the forthcoming Grok 4, Musk has made no secret of where he intends to take content and data on the chatbot.

The makeover will also reportedly be politically influenced: Musk has tasked Grok’s development team with excising “politically incorrect, but nonetheless factually true” info from its data banks to stop the app from providing answers that Musk disagrees with. Among its various claims that have raised his ire is  its conclusion that Musk is “the biggest spreader of misinformation on X.”