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xAI put Grok 4.6 straight into GitHub Copilot and Cursor, Grok Bot started acting like an actual teammate, and Google shipped Gemini 3.7 Flash two days later. Busy week.
August has been absurd. This week alone we got Grok 4.6, Meta's Muse Glimmer running on consumer GPUs, Gemini 3.7 Flash, GLM-5.3, and Alibaba's open weight Qwen3.8-27B. My RSS reader gave up before I did.
Grok 4.6, mostly because xAI shipped it directly into GitHub Copilot on August 14. No new tooling to learn, just pick it from the model picker in VS Code. It matches GPT-5.6 Sol on the Artificial Analysis index according to xAI, which would have been unthinkable six months ago given where Grok was. Pricing sits at $2 per million input tokens and $6 output, with a fast variant at double.
So I gave it something real instead of toy prompts. My alerts bot had a messy module that fetched candle data with three different retry paths, all slightly wrong. I asked Copilot with Grok 4.6 to consolidate them into one helper with proper exponential backoff.
It deleted about eighty lines and handled edge cases I hadn't even mentioned, like empty arrays during maintenance windows.
That second part genuinely surprised me. Not flawless, it took a couple nudges, but the final version is cleaner than what I would have written myself. For context on how far this came: Grok's earlier coding attempts needed so much hand holding that using them felt slower than typing everything myself. This is the first release where I finished a task and realized I never opened the file manually.
Worth remembering how we got here. Grok 4.5 was the first version trained partly on Cursor's accumulated usage data, and 4.6 reportedly got an even longer supplemental run. The Cursor team also co-built Grok Bot, an always-on agent service where bots share a cloud computer, sign into your tools, and message each other to coordinate work.
Everyone wants agents that hold context for days, not seconds. The teammate metaphor is winning.
$2/$6 makes Grok 4.6 one of the cheapest frontier options aroundHonorable mention to GLM-5.3 from Z.ai at $1.40/$4.40, which keeps the pressure on everyone above it. Honorable dishonorable mention to Gemini 3.7 Flash's introductory rate that doubles on January 1, 2027. Read the fine print, friends.
Cheers, Yassen