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Grok 4.6

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Re: Grok 4.6

#41

Post by sm0ss117 »

logancbrown wrote: post #30
causal wrote: post #23

Anyone else find it weird how within 2 months of Fable releasing all the major labs suddenly had Fable-level models? Trying to think of explanations: 1) AI researchers talk and change companies often, so techniques circulate. This feels implausible because training and shipping a new model ought to take longer than 2 months? 2) Distillation - also implausible for the reason above. 3) Benchmark hacking. AI companies h…

Its possible no AI lab has any unique edge, and success is a combination of (a) having access to GPUs (b) having access to large amounts of data (c) know about the handful of techniques to build an LLM, of which nearly all are likely open source and documented in papers. So the cycle of growth is (a) and (b), get more GPUs and get more data and you have a better model.

Yea, this reads as LLMs are a pretty obvious technology to develop(for the highly intelligent researchers who are there). Also there's probably a lot of actual divergence in model capabilities and skills that concealed by the fairly narrow set of tests we run them against nowadays. Like wasn't Grok 4.20 super targeted at non-coding tasks.

Re: Grok 4.6

#42

Post by causal »

bottlepalm wrote: post #33
causal wrote: post #23

Anyone else find it weird how within 2 months of Fable releasing all the major labs suddenly had Fable-level models? Trying to think of explanations: 1) AI researchers talk and change companies often, so techniques circulate. This feels implausible because training and shipping a new model ought to take longer than 2 months? 2) Distillation - also implausible for the reason above. 3) Benchmark hacking. AI companies h…

I think model level is more a function of the state of hardware. Once it exists and is available (and if a lab can afford it), then they can train their own 1T, 5T, coming up next 10T model.

This is a good candidate because it would also explain the timing. Most of the replies here do nothing to explain the timing I brought up.

Re: Grok 4.6

#43

Post by nomilk »

Tangental, but has anyone else noticed grok's voice mode got stupid and terse ~2 weeks ago? I've absolutely loved grok's voice mode since it came out (incredibly useful for brainstorming on walks and helping conceptualise and get the verbiage for expressing ideas) but it seems so have lost about 40 IQ points recently, and if the question is multi-part, it often answers just one part with no elaboration or explanation of the other parts or interactions between parts. No clue why.

Re: Grok 4.6

#44

Post by causal »

extr wrote: post #31
causal wrote: post #23

Anyone else find it weird how within 2 months of Fable releasing all the major labs suddenly had Fable-level models? Trying to think of explanations: 1) AI researchers talk and change companies often, so techniques circulate. This feels implausible because training and shipping a new model ought to take longer than 2 months? 2) Distillation - also implausible for the reason above. 3) Benchmark hacking. AI companies h…

It's because Fable is just synthetic RL tasks + scale. The secret has been out for awhile now.

Does not explain timing

Re: Grok 4.6

#45

Post by moomin »

causal wrote: post #23

Anyone else find it weird how within 2 months of Fable releasing all the major labs suddenly had Fable-level models? Trying to think of explanations: 1) AI researchers talk and change companies often, so techniques circulate. This feels implausible because training and shipping a new model ought to take longer than 2 months? 2) Distillation - also implausible for the reason above. 3) Benchmark hacking. AI companies h…

Yeah, I’m not convinced that there are any models as smart as Fable. Opus 5 definitely isn’t for all it has great benchmark scores. Fable displays judgement in a way I haven’t seen from any other model.

Re: Grok 4.6

#46

Post by causal »

Jcampuzano2 wrote: post #40
causal wrote: post #23

Anyone else find it weird how within 2 months of Fable releasing all the major labs suddenly had Fable-level models? Trying to think of explanations: 1) AI researchers talk and change companies often, so techniques circulate. This feels implausible because training and shipping a new model ought to take longer than 2 months? 2) Distillation - also implausible for the reason above. 3) Benchmark hacking. AI companies h…

I'm pretty sure both Anthropic and OpenAI haven't necessarily been secretive that they have internal models that are much more capable than commercially available ones. It's probably a mix of all of that plus simply always keeping one in the chamber to 1up everyone else when the time is right.

The "one in the chamber" is another good candidate that could explain the timing.

Re: Grok 4.6

#47

Post by drcongo »

nomilk wrote: post #43

Tangental, but has anyone else noticed grok's voice mode got stupid and terse ~2 weeks ago? I've absolutely loved grok's voice mode since it came out (incredibly useful for brainstorming on walks and helping conceptualise and get the verbiage for expressing ideas) but it seems so have lost about 40 IQ points recently, and if the question is multi-part, it often answers just one part with no elaboration or explanation…

Presumably because Musk has been training it to be more like him.

Re: Grok 4.6

#48

Post by hackernan9000 »

Jcampuzano2 wrote: post #26

As polarizing as grok is, it was basically inevitable for it to start being a real competitor given how much investment SpaceX made into its own inference capabilities. Seems if you are okay with it, there's no reason to use anything but the highest effort levels of some other frontier models for the price. I think Grok provides healthy competition to the other labs, though I do think they bank on groks reputation ma…

Curious - what is the main issue you find polarizing with grok?

Re: Grok 4.6

#49

Post by nater5000 »

It's crazy that I'd literally trust a Chinese AI company with my data over anything Musk is involved with.

Like, even if you don't care about (or even like) his politics and can look past how unlikable he comes off as, the damage he's done to his own reputation in this domain just makes using his products like this a no-go. He's literally so rich that he can get caught personally looking through chat sessions and it wouldn't slow him down a bit. He's too rich to be held accountable, and that makes it impossible to trust his businesses. It's a funny dynamic that I don't think is appreciated enough, but I know that if Google or Amazon or OpenAI or Anthropic (etc.) got caught doing something like that, the backlash would be astounding and the reputation hit they'd take would be brutal. Here, Musk would just awkwardly come out attacking people for not letting him behave unethically even more than he already is, and that'd be it.

Beyond that, the obvious astroturfing that occurs on this site (along with reddit, etc.) when it comes to Grok isn't helping. All I hear about Claude, GPT, Gemini, etc., are how terrible they are, yet any discussion of Grok seems to always revolve around sensible, but confident, assertions that it's actually a great product and every new release is the point where Grok finally catches up.

Re: Grok 4.6

#50

Post by nomilk »

cjalmeida wrote: post #5

Fable-like intelligence, beats GPT-5.6-Sol on most benchmarks, cheaper than Kimi K3 on API and quite generous usage on Cursor subscription.

I'm thinking of switching to Grok on Cursor (purely for $$ reasons). But Opus >= 4.8 has been fantastic; it's hard to leave, even just to dabble with other models.
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