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Grok 4.5

x.ai

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Re: Grok 4.5

#241
post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because of the of the political stuff, they have a bad reputation I think and are taken less seriously (I feel this way). They have an opportunity imo to break free from that and just not do the gatekeeping / condescension that the other providers are starting, and become more mainstream.

Even without the politics, Elon has shown that he will weaponize his platforms against people/companies he personally doesn't like (e.g. specific bans/demotions to external sites like Substack and Bluesky). Using Grok is therefore a supply chain risk and it's not nearly good enough to offset that risk.

As opposed to what was happening before, on Twitter?

Re: Grok 4.5

#242
post #21
post #3

How popular is Grok compared to other companies models for SWE tasks? I almost never hear it talked about against OpenAI's or Anthropic's products

Because of the of the political stuff, they have a bad reputation I think and are taken less seriously (I feel this way). They have an opportunity imo to break free from that and just not do the gatekeeping / condescension that the other providers are starting, and become more mainstream.

To be frank, I will never use Grok as long as it's remotely affiliated with or under the influence of Elon Musk or his ilk.

Re: Grok 4.5

#243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The product is the stock. It is very valuable when you have various bundles of services, such as satellites, AI, and so on, to keep pace with the majors so that you keep pace with their valuation. These stacking valuations are not additive, they're multiplicative because you additionally market investors to the synergy between them. Having the third best model statistically is extremely useful in this context.

I know that SpaceX have tremendous potential, the problem is that we account future potential that maybe not happening in 20 - 50 years

> future potential

Starlink doesn't qualify? Because that's a practically unbelievable track record. It's easy to say it's obvious, but it was only obvious in hindsight (or perhaps to Elon, but I think the reason that it was successful was actually more about him just being relentless)

I'm not an Elon acolyte, but as with his other enterprises (SpaceX, Tesla), he succeeded where others (Irridium etc) repeatedly failed.

It's really hard to argue that he got lucky when he keeps pulling these really extremely high capex and hard-tech and business successes off so cleanly, especially when you see the entrenched opposition (govt, politics, competitors) that's been arrayed against him.

Re: Grok 4.5

#244
post #216

Do we have any proof that this was made by xAI and isn't some Chinese open model running with modifications? Their inital image generation was a wrapper around Flux.

Even if they did start from an open model base, does (or should) that matter if it performs well? Genuinely asking.

It matters for how much money they are valued at. If they don't have the ability to develop true frontier models in-house, why are they worth $1T+?

Re: Grok 4.5

#245
post #75

With each release from the the other major labs, it becomes harder for Google to tell a compelling story about Gemini 3.5. Edit: Gemini 3.5 Pro . Expectations grow with each day it is not released.

Google wanted to release 3.5 Pro last month but because of the trouble Anthropic got with Fable they might have wanted to wait a bit for the dust to settle I could imagine. And now there is quite some competition. 3.5 Flash for me is a replacement to 3.1 Pro. It's more like a 3.2 Pro. It costs about the same (or more!) than 3.1 Pro, is a little bit smarter in many cases and a little bit faster. 3.5 Pro will be a lot more expensive and I expect it to juuuust be able to hang with Opus 4.8 and GPT-5.5.

I wish Google was able to actually push the industry further, either in terms of quality (intelligence) or quantity (price) but they've been playing catch up a lot.

They are playing the game a bit differently than all the others. The others have useable IDEs etc. while Google has a boatload of half-assed products.

Google better come out with a banger 3.5 Pro because who would have thought that Grok and GLM would be beating them?

Re: Grok 4.5

#246
post #5

It seems to be extremely economical - 4x better reasoning efficiency compared to Opus while being priced at $2/$6. For comparison, GPT 5.4 is $2.5/$15, GPT 5.5/5.6 are $5/$30, Opus 4.8 is $5/$25, Fable is $10/$50. And by benchmarks (unless they gamed them), seems to be at around Opus 4.7 level, which is what Elon mentioned in https://x.com/elonmusk/status/2074911038286295049 . I guess the Cursor data was very useful.

How does it compare to Chinese APIs? It doesn't seem like xAI is meaningfully more competent or any single bit more honest than Chinese labs anyway, so you might as well send tasks straight to China unless theirs is substantially cheaper.

Re: Grok 4.5

#247
post #92

First impressions: - Very fast, easily beats GPT 5.5/Opus 4.8/GLM 5.2 because of higher t/s (around 90?) and very high token efficiency - Very good price, no contest vs GPT and Opus which are very overpriced if you pay API costs, and probably cheaper than GLM 5.2 when you take into account the token efficiency. - Will take quite a while to get a feel for how smart it is, but it's definitely good, I'd say in the same…

Concur.

Tried on a "this test suite is weaker than I'd like, too often depending on internal state rather than outcomes" problem via Cursor, asking it to "review and suggest solutions." It gave me a quality overview of the test approaches, strengths, weaknesses, and gaps then recommended a disciplined multi-prong approach based on a common, trusted testing library (https://hypothesis.readthedocs.io/en/latest/). It broke down the things we could do this improvement pass or leave to later (staged scoping), identified some very hard/possibly-out-of-scope cases and gave me the option of focusing on them or not, and organized new tests in a logical way. After one round of feedback and plan tuning, I put it in agent mode and let it work. A few minutes later I had a much better test suite.

Have not tried Grok before and didn't have much confidence, but it did great. Exactly the sort of complex, detailed, nuanced analysis and multi-step task I would previously only trusted to GPT or Opus.

_Update_: It's now also found a substantive long-standing bug. After testing improved asked it to do overall code and packaging review. It caught a few glitches and oversights, mostly cosmetic IMO, but certainly worth cleaning up. But also some error-handling weaknesses, and one embarrassing functional bug. Which it has now also fixed and added to the tests. Color me impressed.

Re: Grok 4.5

#248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sonnet 5 is a huge token hog, though, it uses far more reasoning tokens than Opus models while being priced at $2/$10 with promo, and $3/$15 (usual Sonnet price) afterwards.

I'll probably get hate for it, but I was not impressed by Fable, I felt like it was just Opus with more tokens for thinking. I feel like the second I turned on Fable I drained my usage more quickly, despite them billing it as though it were Opus level of usage. The value is just not there for me. I wish they could make Haiku remain low-cost and drastically more capable to the point you could use only Haiku.

I felt the same tbh; I notice more the regressions in the weeks before a new release than any potential improvement the new model might have actually brought.

It may also depend on the workload. At work everything is very domain specific with barely (if any) public training data; both need thorough review and careful hand holding, meanwhile at home Fable is scared of libtorch and falls back to Opus even if it's not touching the ML parts.

Re: Grok 4.5

#249
post #8

Of the 3 models I tried, Grok did the best at making an iOS app I wanted for personal use (a bike computer with specific qualities). (Claude just gave up and did an HTML/CSS implementation but I insisted on native SwiftUI+Metal.) Grok definitely fumbles sometimes, but I have been surprised what it CAN intuit versus me having to micromanage it. (I am not an iOS developer, so getting something specific that I needed in…

> Claude just gave up and did an HTML/CSS implementation but I insisted on native SwiftUI+Metal. That sounds very odd and very contrary to my experience. You don’t say which model you actually used, but I never had opus 4.8 (or sonnet for that matter) ignore which language/stack i wanted to use.

Yeah, that makes no sense. I've never seen any model "just give up" and change to a wholly different stack on its own.

Re: Grok 4.5

#250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My guess is that the use here is similar to the reason AWS started as Amazon selling their excess capacity. Between Tesla, SpaceX, X, Boring Co and Neuralink they probably want the capability internally for a lot of different applications. If the whole data centers in space thing works out AND people keep protesting/blocking data center build outs on land SpaceX will eventually dominate the entire AI industry just ba…

That Amazon story is a misnomer. They just saw an opportunity with the tech and hardware they had to make a new offering for customers. It's not like they could just offer their spare capacity, then eg at peak US time snatch it back for the retail site

For many years, I watched my apps performance on AWS suffer in December around all the holiday sales. They might not snatch it back but they probably saturated it during high demand periods.
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