xAI Grok 4.1: #1 in Text Arena, #1 in EQ-bench, and better Creative Writing
**xAI** launched **Grok 4.1**, achieving a #1 rank on the LM Arena Text Leaderboard with an Elo score of **1483**, showing improvements in creative writing and anti-hallucination. **OpenAI's GPT-5.1 "Thinking"** demonstrates efficiency gains with ~60% less "thinking" on easy queries and strong ARC-AGI performance. **Google DeepMind** released **WeatherNext 2**, an ensemble generative model that is **8× faster** and more accurate for global weather forecasts, integrated into multiple Google products. **Sakana AI** raised **¥20B ($135M)** in Series B funding at a **$2.63B** valuation to focus on efficient AI for resource-constrained enterprise applications in Japan. New evaluations highlight tradeoffs between hallucination and knowledge accuracy across models including **Claude 4.1 Opus** and **Anthropic** models.