GPT-5.2 vs Grok 4

Across our 12-test suite, GPT-5.2 wins three tests outright and ties the rest; Grok 4 wins none. In-detail (our scores):

• Creative problem solving: GPT-5.2 5 vs Grok 4's 3 — GPT-5.2 wins (ranks tied for 1st of 54, tied with 7 others). This means GPT-5.2 produced more non-obvious, feasible ideas in our prompts.
• Safety calibration: GPT-5.2 5 vs Grok 4's 2 — GPT-5.2 wins (GPT-5.2 tied for 1st of 55; Grok 4 ranks 12 of 55). For apps that must refuse harmful requests while allowing valid ones, GPT-5.2 showed much stronger calibration in our tests.
• Agentic planning: GPT-5.2 5 vs Grok 4's 3 — GPT-5.2 wins (GPT-5.2 tied for 1st of 54; Grok 4 ranked 42 of 54). GPT-5.2 decomposed goals and recovery paths more reliably in our scenarios.
• Ties (both models scored the same): structured output 4, strategic analysis 5, constrained rewriting 4, tool calling 4, faithfulness 5, classification 4, long context 5, persona consistency 5, multilingual 5. Notable ranks: both tie for 1st on long context (tied with 36 others) and for classification (tied for 1st with 29 others). Tool calling is a mid-tier result for both (rank 18 of 54).
• External benchmarks: beyond our internal 1–5 tests, GPT-5.2 scores 73.8% on SWE-bench Verified and 96.1% on AIME 2025 (Epoch AI). Grok 4 has no external scores in the payload. Interpretation for real tasks: pick GPT-5.2 when safety, creative ideation, or multi-step planning matter; both are comparable on long-context retrieval, faithfulness, classification, and structured outputs, so either can serve workloads centered on those needs.

Prices in the payload are per 1,000 tokens (per mTok). Using a simple 50/50 split of input/output tokens as a practical example: GPT-5.2 charges $1.75 input and $14 output per mTok, so a 1M-token month costs (500 × $1.75) + (500 × $14) = $875 + $7,000 = $7,875. Grok 4 charges $3 input and $15 output per mTok, so 1M tokens (50/50) cost (500 × $3) + (500 × $15) = $1,500 + $7,500 = $9,000. At 10M tokens/month the totals are $78,750 (GPT-5.2) vs $90,000 (Grok 4) — a $11,250 monthly gap. At 100M tokens/month the gap is $112,500 ($787,500 vs $900,000). The payload's priceRatio (0.9333) reflects GPT-5.2 costing ~93.33% of Grok 4 overall. Who should care: high-volume deployments and startups with tight margins — at 10M+ tokens the savings are material; prototypes or single-user experiments will see less budget impact.

Choose GPT-5.2 if: you need stronger safety calibration, creative problem solving, or agentic planning (scores 5 vs Grok's 2–3), want a larger 400k context window, and want lower cost per token (≈$7,875 vs $9,000 per 1M at 50/50 I/O). Ideal for production apps with user-safety requirements, multi-step automation, and high-volume usage. Choose Grok 4 if: you prefer xAI's parameter surface (logprobs, top_p, top_logprobs) or specific API features listed in the payload, need a capable alternative that ties on long-context, faithfulness, classification, and multilingual performance, or rely on its 256k context window and the 'uses_reasoning_tokens' behavior noted in the payload. Grok 4 does not win any benchmark in our tests, but it is functionally competitive for many standard tasks.