Elon Musk’s artificial-intelligence firm xAI has launched Grok Code Fast 1, a software-development-oriented large language model that the company says is significantly faster and cheaper than rival systems. The model processes about 92 tokens a second, handles context windows of up to 256,000 tokens and will cost US$0.20 per million input tokens once a promotional period ends—roughly one-tenth the price of OpenAI’s GPT-4, according to xAI. Grok Code Fast 1 is immediately available, at no charge, on several coding platforms including GitHub Copilot, Cursor, Cline, Kilo Code, Roo Code, opencode and Windsurf. The free access runs through 2 September at 2 p.m. Pacific time. The system had been quietly tested under the code name “Sonic” before today’s public release. xAI has also published a model card and prompt-engineering guide, and said it is already training a follow-on version that will accept multimodal inputs, support parallel tool invocation and extend contextual capacity further.