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Grok 4

simonwillison.net

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Re: Grok 4

#261

Post by [deleted] »

twright0 wrote: post #214
dotancohen wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is a classic weird tesla-style pricing tactic at work. The price is not what it seems. How is that "tesla-style pricing"? When I bought my Tesla the price was exactly what they told me it would be. Contrast that with every other car I've bought new, especially the Ford Focus for which the salesman tried to haggle me for more options and told me he thinks we should raise the price a bit "to make sure it gets ap…

For the better part of a decade people have been buying Teslas under the promise that the cars would drive themselves better than their owner could, or would offset their cost by participating in a self-driving taxi service while their owners were not using them, none of which has come remotely true.

[deleted]

Re: Grok 4

#262

Post by rsynnott »

dotancohen wrote: post #212
aliljet wrote: post #18

[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…

> This is a classic weird tesla-style pricing tactic at work. The price is not what it seems. How is that "tesla-style pricing"? When I bought my Tesla the price was exactly what they told me it would be. Contrast that with every other car I've bought new, especially the Ford Focus for which the salesman tried to haggle me for more options and told me he thinks we should raise the price a bit "to make sure it gets ap…

Well, for instance, see https://www.theverge.com/2019/3/7/18255252/tesla-german-regu...

Re: Grok 4

#263

Post by ltbarcly3 »

kalkin wrote: post #143
ltbarcly3 wrote: post #130

"It feels very credulous to ascribe what happened to a system prompt update. Other models can't be pushed into racism, Nazism, and ideating rape with a system prompt tweak." You don't even need a system prompt tweak to push chatgpt or claude into nazism, racism, and ideating rape. You can do it just with user prompts that don't seem to even suggest that it should go in that direction.

Evidence?

It's so easy it's not even worth showing you.

Re: Grok 4

#264

Post by SJMG »

rpdillon wrote: post #248
radium3d wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

There's a bit of an illusion here because gas prices take into account a tax for road maintenance, which EVs are currently avoiding. Eventually the system will have to catch up because road maintenance requires money.

While electric vehicles do cause more road wear, applying that tax to most consumer vehicles is the joke. Road wear is completely dominated by semi-trucks.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth_power_law

The simplest method is to raise the HVUT, but we have so much data, we could assess miles driven * axel weight and charge a graduated fee based on that.

Re: Grok 4

#265

Post by spacechild1 »

itake wrote: post #260
nerevarthelame wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know what regionalization OpenAI or Deepseek do. But it makes sense that they would change some things because of different languages, cultures, and regulations. Most global businesses tailor products for different regions. People are up in arms that Grok is using their CEO's shitposting as a primary knowledge base because that is a low quality source of information.

I think people in Indonesia would say the same about ChatGPT’s model being pro Christianity. If you ask ChatGPT, how many wives a husband should have, it says one which isn’t true for the majority of religious believers in the world. Specifically for deepseek there are “controversial” truths based on low quality sources information about certain historical events. I think people are just upset that a popular AI model…

Again, Grok is consulting Elon's recent Twitter posts as part of its reasoning. This is on a whole different level. It is a fact that Elon was personally unhappy with some of Grok's answers and tried to "fix" it, i.e. align it with his personal political views. This is just crazy narcissistic and megalomaniac behaviour.

Re: Grok 4

#266

Post by itake »

spacechild1 wrote: post #265
itake wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think people in Indonesia would say the same about ChatGPT’s model being pro Christianity. If you ask ChatGPT, how many wives a husband should have, it says one which isn’t true for the majority of religious believers in the world. Specifically for deepseek there are “controversial” truths based on low quality sources information about certain historical events. I think people are just upset that a popular AI model…

Again, Grok is consulting Elon's recent Twitter posts as part of its reasoning. This is on a whole different level. It is a fact that Elon was personally unhappy with some of Grok's answers and tried to "fix" it, i.e. align it with his personal political views. This is just crazy narcissistic and megalomaniac behaviour.

> It is a fact that Elon was personally unhappy with some of Grok's answers and tried to "fix" it, i.e. align it with his personal political views.

Cool! You can also replace "Elon" with "Sundar" as Google’s CEO openly pushed for more PoC and women in image search. Did you grab your pitch forks then? Or are you just upset when CEO's align AI away from your personal biases? or you a reflexive Musk opposer?

Re: Grok 4

#267

Post by dotancohen »

itsoktocry wrote: post #253
dotancohen wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is a classic weird tesla-style pricing tactic at work. The price is not what it seems. How is that "tesla-style pricing"? When I bought my Tesla the price was exactly what they told me it would be. Contrast that with every other car I've bought new, especially the Ford Focus for which the salesman tried to haggle me for more options and told me he thinks we should raise the price a bit "to make sure it gets ap…

> which the salesman tried to haggle me for more options and told me he thinks we should raise the price a bit "to make sure it gets approved" as I'm signing the paperwork. If you're walking into a store to spend tens of thousands of dollars and manage to get bullied by the salesperson, it's probably a "you problem". Tesla charges retail; that's it, it's no magic.

I "managed to get bullied"? No, I put the pen down and asked him to make a phone call and ensure it will be approved, whatever he thinks that means. Somehow the question of "it getting approved" was resolved without him ever making that phone call.

He probably thinks I bullied him.

Re: Grok 4

#268

Post by dotancohen »

andsoitis wrote: post #254
dotancohen wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> does not match the views that many people have of him and how he gets portrayed. And yet matches the view that many _other_ people have of him, and how he is portrayed in other places. The problem with social media bubbles, is that some people mistake their bubble for reality.

> And yet matches the view that many _other_ people have of him, and how he is portrayed in other places people say he's a nazi, yet he supports Israel (according to this article). to my tiny brain, that does not compute.

1. Elon publicly supports Israel (as do I).

2. Elon made two clear Nazi salutes, later claiming that was not his intention with the gesture.

People can say a lot of dumb things. These are the facts, parse them as you will.

Re: Grok 4

#269

Post by mvieira38 »

manutreebot wrote: post #224
rozap wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

(I'm critical of LLMs but mean no harm with this question) Have you measured if this workflow is actually faster or better at all? I have tried the autocomplete stuff, chat interface (copy snippets + give context and then copy back to editor) and aider, but none of these have given me better speed than just a search engine and the occasional question to ChatGPT when it gets really cryptic.

Re: Grok 4

#270

Post by TeMPOraL »

SV_BubbleTime wrote: post #167
rozap wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>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 A. I feel personally and professionally attached. B. Yea don’t do that. Don’t say “I want a console here”. Don’t even say “give me a console plan and we’ll refine it”. Write the s…

> Yea don’t do that. Don’t say “I want a console here”. Don’t even say “give me a console plan and we’ll refine it”. Write the sketch yourself and add parts with Claude.

Myself, I get a good mileage out of "I want a console here; you know, like that console from Quake or Unreal, but without silly backgrounds; pop out on '/', not '~', and exposing all the major functionality of X, Y and Z modules; think deeply and carefully on how to do it properly, and propose a plan."

Or such.

Note that I'm still letting AI propose how to do it - I just give it a little bit more information, through analogy ("like that console from Quake") or constraints ("but without silly backgrounds"), as well as hints at what I feel I want ("pop out on '/'", "exposing all major functionality of ..."). If it's a trivial thing I'll let it just do it, otherwise I ask for a plan - that in 90%+ cases I just wave through, because it's essentially correct, and often better than what I could come up with on the spot myself! LLMs have seen a lot of literature and production-ready code, so usually even their very first solution already accounts for pitfalls, efficiency aspects, cross-cutting concerns and common practice. Doing it myself, it would likely take me a couple iterations to even think of some of those concerns.

> I don’t care what anyone claims there are no experts in this field. We’re all still figuring this out, but that worked for me.

Agreed. We're all figuring this out as we go.

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