I just watched an interesting Marketing Against the Grain video featuring Kipp Bodnar and Kieran Flanagan discussing Grock 4, supposedly the “smartest AI on the planet.” Their hands-on testing of this new AI model from X AI (Elon Musk’s company) left me with some thoughts about what this means for marketers and content creators.
The AI race is heating up dramatically. With Grock 4 now competing against OpenAI’s models and Google’s Gemini, we’re seeing innovation curves that remain surprisingly steep. As someone who’s worked with various AI tools, I’m fascinated by how quickly these models are evolving – but also skeptical about whether they’re actually delivering practical value for marketing professionals.
The reality is that benchmark performance doesn’t always translate to real-world usefulness.
What Makes Grock 4 Different?
The most distinctive feature of Grock 4 is its access to X (formerly Twitter) data. This gives it unique capabilities that other models don’t have, particularly for analyzing social media trends, engagement patterns, and content performance.
In the video, Kieran tested three main use cases:
- Mimicking a creator’s writing style by analyzing their tweets
- Creating and assessing a marketing campaign for a fictional product
- Analyzing trending content topics among specific audience segments
The results? As Kieran put it: “It’s fine. It’s not incredible.” Despite Grock 4’s impressive benchmark scores, its practical output for marketing tasks wasn’t substantially better than OpenAI’s GPT-3.5.
The Pricing Question
Grock offers three tiers: free, $30/month, and $300/month. The $300 tier gives access to “Grock Heavy” which apparently uses multiple AI agents to solve complex problems. This pricing structure puts it in direct competition with ChatGPT Plus ($20/month) and GPT-4o ($20/month).
From my experience testing various AI tools, the value proposition needs to be compelling to justify higher price points. If Grock 4 isn’t delivering substantially better results for marketing use cases, it’s hard to justify the premium.
As Kieran noted in the video: “I was really excited to try it out. I thought it was going to be a total game-changer… And I don’t feel that way. I feel it’s pretty fine.”
Where Grock 4 Might Shine
Based on what I saw in the video, Grock 4 does have some potential strengths:
- Social media trend analysis using X data
- Identifying micro-influencers in specific niches
- Clustering content topics that engage specific audience segments
- Image generation with improved detail and sharpness
The ability to identify which content topics are trending among specific professional groups (like VPs of Sales) could be genuinely useful for content planning.
My Advice for Marketers
If you’re considering trying Grock 4, here’s what I recommend:
- Focus on its unique strengths – Use it primarily for tasks that leverage its X data access
- Compare outputs – Test the same prompts across multiple AI models to see which performs best for your specific needs
- Provide rich context – As with all AI models, the quality of output improves dramatically when you provide detailed context about your brand, audience, and goals
- Start with the lower tier – Test the $30/month version before considering the $300/month “Heavy” option
- Watch for improvements – These models are evolving rapidly; what’s “just fine” today might be exceptional tomorrow
The most practical approach is to view AI models as specialized tools rather than all-purpose solutions. ChatGPT might excel at creative writing, Claude at reasoning, and Grock at social media analysis. Building a toolkit of AI assistants for different purposes will likely yield better results than trying to find one model that does everything perfectly.
The AI marketing landscape is evolving at breakneck speed. While Grock 4 may not be the revolutionary leap forward that its benchmarks suggest, it represents another step in the rapid evolution of these tools. The real winners will be marketers who learn to effectively integrate these tools into their workflows while maintaining the human creativity and strategic thinking that no AI can replace.
