xAI's aggressive monthly release cadence, announced by Elon Musk in June 2026, drives current sentiment around the next Grok model at 4.8 or higher. Grok 4.7 shipped publicly on September 21 after training on a roughly 2.1-trillion-parameter base, scoring competitively on coding benchmarks while priced at $2 per million tokens. Musk disclosed on September 13-14 that Grok 4.8, a 2.5-trillion-parameter model using a new C++ training stack, would finish pre-training that week before reinforcement learning, promising noticeable gains over 4.7. This follows Grok 4.5 and 4.6 launches in July and August, supported by talent shifts from SpaceX and Tesla plus Cursor data integration. Upcoming catalysts include potential RL completion timelines and any public benchmarks or API rollout, though historical gaps between training finish and release have ranged from 25 to 52 days amid ongoing multimodal refinements.