Elon Musk’s mid-September announcement that Grok 4.8—a 2.5-trillion-parameter model on xAI’s new C++ training stack—had finished pretraining and entered reinforcement learning has anchored trader sentiment for the next release. SpaceXAI shipped Grok 4.7 just days later on September 21 after multiple delays, underscoring the lab’s compressed cadence and use of SpaceX engineering data. Historical intervals from pretraining completion to public availability range from three to seven weeks, pointing to a likely late-October or early-November window. Traders are watching for any RL-related setbacks, competitive benchmark gains by models such as Claude Fable or GPT Astra, and xAI’s next official update on scaling or deployment timelines.