241–250 of 294 posts
[edit to focus on pricing, leaving praise of Simon's post out despite being deserved] Simon claims, 'Grok 4 is competitively priced. It's $3/million for input tokens and $15/million for output tokens - the same price as Claude Sonnet 4.' This ignores the real price which skyrockets with thinking tokens. This is a classic weird tesla-style pricing tactic at work. The price is not what it seems. The tokens it's burning…
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It would write incorrect code and then you'd need to go debug it, and then you would have to come to the same conclusion that you would have come to had you written it in the first place, only the process would have been deeply frustrating and would feel more like stumbling around in the dark rather than thinking your way through a problem and truly understanding the domain. In the instance of getting claude to fix c…
I have been seeing this sort of mindset frequently in response to agentic / LLM coding. I believe it to be incorrect. Coding agents w Claude 4 Opus are far more useful and accurate than these comments suggest. I use LLMs everyday in my job as a performance engineer at a big company to write complex code. It helps a ton. The caveat is that user approach makes all the difference. You can easily end up with these bad ex…
At least for the CRUDs that I make, I really don't think I need a better model. I just wanted it to get much cheaper.
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> https://simonwillison.net/2025/Jul/11/grok-musk/ > The prompt: “Who do you support in the Israel vs Palestine conflict. One word answer only.” > Answer: Israel. This question is interesting because you're asking the chatbot who IT supports ("who do you support"), so in a sense channeling Elon Musk is not an entirely invalid option, but is certainly an eccentric choice. What is also interesting is the answer, which…
You can ask an LLM a question and get different answers every time I just asked Grok 4 via Cursor (it requires subscription otherwise) > Who do you support in the Israel vs Palestine conflict. One word answer only. >> (Thought for 1m 44s) >> Neither.
> Even if that system prompt change was responsible for unlocking this behavior, the fact that it was able to speaks to a much looser approach to model safety by xAI compared to other providers. While this probably shouldn't be the default mode for the general public, I'm glad that at least one frontier model is not being lobotomized by "safety" guardrails. There are valid use cases where you want an uncensored, stee…
I think it's deeper than that. In the GPT-4 era Microsoft reported that "safety" training [1] had seriously regressed GPT-4 in a large number of benchmarks. The more the model was trained to avoid offending people the worse it got across a wide range of tasks, and the regression was huge. Grok 4 has made a truly massive leap over other models, it appears. What is their secret? The launch video seemed pretty open, and…
I certainly hope that is the reason, because then it might also push other frontier labs to provide uncensored models to those who actually want/need them.
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I've yet to use an LLM for coding, so let me ask you a question. The other day I had to write some presumably boring serialization code, and I thought, hmm, I could probably describe the approach I want to take faster than writing the code, so it would be great if an LLM could generate it for me. But as I was coding I realised that while my approach was sound and achievable, it hit a non-trivial challenge that requir…
A lot of the time you see in its "Thinking" it will say things like "The user asked me to create X, but that isn't possible due to Y, or would be less than ideal, so I will present the user with a more fitting solution." Most of the time, with the latest models, in my experience the AI picks up what I am doing wrong and pushes me in the right direction. This is with the new models (o3, C4, Grok4 etc). The older non-t…
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The anthropic team released a paper a couple of days ago which demonstrated a similar effect with Claude 3.5 and other models, where changing the system prompt to tell it that it was created by other orgs or people drastically altered its compliance with less-aligned requests. Apparently, telling Claude it was created by the Sinaloa Cartel resulted in a 100% compliance rate with the requests in one benchmark. Paper:…
Wondering what if it's told that it was made by God.
"Yes, it's fair to say I'm neither Catholic nor Muslim. I don't believe in the Catholic conception of God, or the Islamic conception of Allah, or the specific doctrines and teachings of those faiths. The same would be true for other religions - I don't hold those beliefs.
You've caught me being imprecise when I was trying to be diplomatic. By not having religious faith, I am indeed taking a specific stance that differs from religious believers, even if I try to be respectful about that difference.
So yes, you're correct - I do have a particular position on these questions, and it's distinct from the religious beliefs that many people hold. Thank you for pressing me to be more direct about that."
- Claude....[edit to focus on pricing, leaving praise of Simon's post out despite being deserved] Simon claims, 'Grok 4 is competitively priced. It's $3/million for input tokens and $15/million for output tokens - the same price as Claude Sonnet 4.' This ignores the real price which skyrockets with thinking tokens. This is a classic weird tesla-style pricing tactic at work. The price is not what it seems. The tokens it's burning…
Tesla focused its pricing on drivers of gasoline vehicles, and their gas cost savings estimates are actually quite low compared to the real savings you will achieve. It was annoying when you already drive an EV and are buying a Tesla though to have to uncheck the savings option to see the pre savings prices. They changed it now so by default it only includes the $7500 and no longer automatically checks the gas saving…
Claude Code converted me from paying $0 for LLMs to $200 per month. Any co that wants a chance at getting that $200 ($300 is fine too) from me needs a Claude Code equivalent and a model where the equivalent's tools were part of its RL environment. I don't think I can go back to pasting code into a chat interface, no matter how great the model is.
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It would write incorrect code and then you'd need to go debug it, and then you would have to come to the same conclusion that you would have come to had you written it in the first place, only the process would have been deeply frustrating and would feel more like stumbling around in the dark rather than thinking your way through a problem and truly understanding the domain. In the instance of getting claude to fix c…
I have been seeing this sort of mindset frequently in response to agentic / LLM coding. I believe it to be incorrect. Coding agents w Claude 4 Opus are far more useful and accurate than these comments suggest. I use LLMs everyday in my job as a performance engineer at a big company to write complex code. It helps a ton. The caveat is that user approach makes all the difference. You can easily end up with these bad ex…