Side-by-side comparison of Grok-2 (xAI · USA) and Phi-4 (Microsoft · USA) for self-hosted deployment of the open-weight model. Grok-2 is rated conditional; Phi-4 is EU-ready. They part ways on licence: Grok-2 is "Grok 2 Community", Phi-4 is "MIT".
| Field | ||
|---|---|---|
| Summary | ||
| Verdict | Conditional xAI's first open-weights release. Commercial use allowed under the Grok 2 Community License with xAI's Acceptable Use Policy. Notable restriction: weights cannot be used to train other models (distillation ban). 500GB model, needs 8 GPUs with 40GB+. | EU-ready MIT-licensed 14B from Microsoft Research. Heavy use of synthetic training data is disclosed; English-primary (thin multilingual coverage). Strongest small-model option for permissive-licence EU deployments. |
| Last reviewed | 2026-04-16 | 2026-04-15 |
| Open-weight | ||
| Licence | Grok 2 Community | MIT |
| Commercial use | Yes (w/ AUP) | Yes |
| Training data | Undisclosed | Partial |
| Origin | USA | USA |
| Performance & pricing? | ||
| Quality index | 14/100 | 10/100 |
| Speed | — | 29 tok/s |
| Blended price | — | $0.22/M |
| Context window | — | — |
| Evidence | ||
| Sources | ||
No overlapping sources between the two entries.