Grok 4.1 from xAI with a personality makeover

With an emphasis on creativity and emotional intelligence above pure reasoning capacity, Elon Musk's xAI recently unveiled Grok 4.1, an improvement to the startup's top model that promises to take the top spot across a number of rankings and benchmarks. The specifics: 4.1, which optimizes for personality attributes including empathy and conversational tone, has the highest emotional intelligence score of all tested systems. The model, which was introduced to small user groups earlier this month under the codename "quasarflux" in LM Arena, ranked first overall in terms of user preference. In comparison to its predecessor, xAI significantly decreased the rate of hallucinations from 12% to 4%. In tests, it also reduced factual errors by 66%. In creative writing activities, 4.1 also witnessed a notable improvement; on the Creative Writing v3 benchmark, it only trailed GPT 5.1. With a 4.1 update that looks to bring increases in more "vibe" areas like creativity and emotion, which can frequently make even more of an experience upgrade for the average user than pure intelligence or coding improvements, xAI is joining Google's fireworks this week.