xAI Launches Grok 4.3 With Budget Pricing and Voice Cloning, But Coding and Math Weaknesses Draw Criticism
Summary
xAI launches Grok 4.3 with ultra-low API pricing, a 1M-token context window, and rapid voice cloning, topping legal and financial benchmarks, but critics slam its coding and math weaknesses and report erratic 'narcolepsy' behavior in autonomous tasks.
Key Points
- xAI launches Grok 4.3 with always-on reasoning, a 1 million-token context window, and aggressively low API pricing of $1.25 per million input tokens and $2.50 per million output tokens, making it one of the most cost-efficient major foundation models available.
- Grok 4.3 tops specialized legal and financial benchmarks, ranking #1 on CaseLaw v2 with 79.3% accuracy, but faces criticism for underperforming on general coding tasks, complex math, and agentic consistency, with some users reporting the model exhibits 'narcolepsy' behavior in autonomous simulations.
- xAI also debuts Custom Voices, a voice cloning suite that lets users clone their voice in as little as 120 seconds, with the Voice Agent API priced at $3.00 per hour, though the feature is currently limited to the United States and excludes Illinois due to biometric privacy regulations.