Update Your Grok Usage and Code

Updated November 2, 2026. This review originally targeted Grok 4.5; since September 21, 2026, the recommended model is Grok 4.7 (Lesson 9). Lesson 12 completes this plan with the removal of Imagine and Voice features.

This final lesson moves from news to action: what exactly do you need to update in what you’ve built—code, habits, model choices—from the previous generation?

Audit Your Existing Knowledge

Our 29 Grok courses were written around generation 4.20, with occasional mentions of Grok 3. An honest assessment distinguishes three layers. The first, and largest, remains perfectly accurate: all API mechanics—chat completions, function calling, structured outputs—work identically, the 4.20 variants still exist with their use cases, and prompting principles haven’t changed. If you invested time in these courses, that investment remains intact.

The second layer requires a mental update rather than relearning: wherever a course says “flagship model,” read Grok 4.5 instead of 4.20; any pricing table before July 2026 is obsolete; and any mention of Grok 3 as the current model belongs to the past. The third layer, finally, covers new ground that older courses don’t cover at all: Grok Build, /goal, Automations, Workflows, Office and Workspace add-ins, the Voice Agent Builder—all topics covered in previous lessons of this course.

Choose the Right Model for Each Existing Use Case

The practical question that follows is always the same: “I used this model, where should I migrate?” The table below gives the condensed answer; the following paragraphs justify it.

The most nuanced case is the second. If you used 4.20 specifically for its large contexts, migration to 4.5 isn’t automatic: grok-4.3 offers 1 million context tokens at an unchanged price, and staying on 4.20 remains defensible. Conversely, the case for Grok 3 admits no nuance: the generation is outdated, and grok-4.3 is the minimum migration target.

The Migration Process, in Five Steps

Start by auditing the actual size of your contexts. The entire range is priced in tiers around 200k tokens; until you know the actual distribution of your requests, you can’t decide between 4.5 and its 500k context, and 4.3 which goes up to 1M. Many teams discover on this occasion that their requests rarely exceed a few tens of thousands of tokens—and that the debate on maximum context was theoretical.

Next, re-run your evaluations on 4.5. The announced capacity gain must be verified on your cases, not on public benchmarks. And the comparison must include real cost: 4.5 is billed at $2 / $6 versus $1.25 / $2.50 for 4.3. Depending on the task, the gap is justified—or it isn’t. A simple classification that works just as well on 4.3 has no reason to pay the flagship rate.

Third, if you have development teams: evaluate Grok Build. The agent is open source and the model accessible via API, making testing possible without any commitment, including inside your current tools like Cursor. This is an evaluation with near-zero entry cost.

Fourth: map the integrations useful to your organization. Office, Google Workspace, Bedrock, Databricks—for many teams, the adoption path is no longer the API but the tool already in place, as the previous lesson detailed. It would be a shame to build a custom integration where an existing add-in suffices.

Finally, before building anything on a new feature, verify its actual availability in Europe. As always with American announcements, the gap between the newsroom date and availability in your region and your contractual conditions can be significant—and it’s better to discover that before committing a project to it.

Pricing as of August 5, 2026 — prices change regularly: before any budget calculation, check the current grid on the official xAI models and pricing page.

Key Takeaways

• Our courses’ API mechanics remain valid; the “flagship” is now 4.5
• The 200k context token pricing tier concerns the entire range
• Grok Build, open source, can be tested without commitment
• Adoption increasingly occurs through integrations (Office, Workspace, clouds)

Test Your Knowledge

xAI’s summer 2026 in rapid fire: is the map up to date?

A quarter of releases requires a methodical approach: the update lesson above is your migration checklist.