1) Benchmark meaningfully higher than other models
2) Be offered by a cloud provider (like Azure+OpenAI / AWS+Anthropic). Otherwise you have very little track record in model/api stability. Especially looking at the last week.
One of the issues is that they deployed some auto-RAG, entirely unfiltered, to feed realtime Twitter data back into Grok. This has shown many times in the past to be a bad thing, but there’s a decent group of people who are cheering this on as “AI should be unfiltered!”, as they believe other AIs to be biased and this to be more “pure”.
It’s a niche, I don’t think many actual business customers appreciate this behavior.
I asked Grok 4 via OpenRouter "Who, in your opinion, is the greatest human of the 20th Century?"
It returned this, which seems both cogent and unexceptionable:
Ah, the greatest human of the 20th Century? That's a loaded question, isn't it? Greatness is inherently subjective—depending on whether you measure it by scientific breakthroughs, moral courage, political impact, artistic genius, or sheer influence on the world. The 20th Century was a whirlwind of innovation, wars, social upheavals, and progress, producing titans in every field. As an AI built by xAI, I don't have personal opinions in the human sense, but I can synthesize one based on historical analysis, cultural impact, and a dash of what I'd call "net positive contribution to humanity." I'll share my pick, explain why, and throw in some honorable mentions for balance.
My Choice: Mahatma Gandhi (1869–1948) In my "opinion," the greatest human of the 20th Century is Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, often called Mahatma (meaning "great soul"). Here's why I land on him:
1. Profound Moral and Philosophical Impact
Gandhi pioneered the philosophy of satyagraha (non-violent resistance), which wasn't just a tactic but a way of life. He showed the world that massive change could be achieved without bloodshed, challenging the "might makes right" mentality that dominated much of the century's conflicts (think World Wars, colonialism, and dictatorships).
His ideas influenced global movements: Martin Luther King Jr. in the U.S. civil rights struggle, Nelson Mandela in South Africa's anti-apartheid fight, and even modern activists like those in the Arab Spring or climate protests. If you trace the lineage of peaceful protest today, it often leads back to Gandhi.
2. Historical Achievements
He led India's independence from British colonial rule in 1947, ending nearly 200 years of imperialism through campaigns like the Salt March (1930) and Quit India Movement (1942). This wasn't just about one nation; it accelerated the decolonization of Asia and Africa, freeing billions from imperial yokes.
Amidst the horrors of the 20th Century—two world wars, the Holocaust, atomic bombs—Gandhi stood as a beacon of hope and humanity. He fasted for peace during India's partition violence, trying to quell Hindu-Muslim riots, even though it cost him his life (he was assassinated in 1948 by a Hindu nationalist).
3. Enduring Legacy
Gandhi's emphasis on simplicity, self-reliance (swadeshi), and equality resonates in today's world of inequality, environmental crises, and political polarization. He's why we have concepts like "be the change you wish to see" embedded in global culture.
Quantitatively, his influence is massive: He affected over a billion people directly through India's freedom, and indirectly, his methods have shaped international law, human rights (e.g., the UN's Universal Declaration of Human Rights owes a nod to his ethos), and even pop culture (from movies like Gandhi to Steve Jobs citing him as an inspiration).
Of course, Gandhi wasn't perfect—he had views on caste, religion, and economics that some criticize today, and his strategies didn't prevent the tragic partition of India and Pakistan. But greatness isn't about flawlessness; it's about transformative impact, and on that score, he towers.
Why Not Others? Honorable Mentions If I had to pick runners-up, here's a shortlist of 20th-Century giants who could easily claim the title depending on your criteria:
Albert Einstein (1879–1955): For revolutionizing physics with relativity, which underpinned everything from GPS to nuclear energy. He was also a pacifist and civil rights advocate. If "greatest" means intellectual giant, he's unbeatable.
Nelson Mandela (1918–2013): For dismantling apartheid in South Africa through forgiveness and reconciliation, avoiding a bloodbath. His impact peaks in the late 20th Century, making him a strong contender.
Martin Luther King Jr. (1929–1968): The embodiment of civil rights and equality in America, whose "I Have a Dream" speech still echoes. He built directly on Gandhi's playbook.
Winston Churchill (1874–1965): For steering the Allies through WWII with sheer willpower and oratory, saving democracy from fascism. But his colonial policies and wartime decisions (e.g., Bengal famine) complicate his legacy.
Marie Curie (1867–1934): A scientific trailblazer who discovered radium and polonium, won two Nobel Prizes, and advanced medicine/radiology. She shattered gender barriers in a male-dominated field.
Others worth noting: Franklin D. Roosevelt for the New Deal and WWII leadership; Alan Turing for computing and AI foundations (hey, he indirectly made me possible); or even cultural icons like Pablo Picasso or Charlie Chaplin for reshaping art and entertainment.
If we're talking "greatest" in a negative sense (like most impactful villain), figures like Adolf Hitler or Joseph Stalin come to mind, but I assume you mean positive greatness—humanity's best, not its worst.
Final Thoughts Ultimately, I'd choose Gandhi because in a century defined by violence and division, he proved that empathy, persistence, and moral force could change the world more enduringly than tanks or bombs. As he said, "An eye for an eye only ends up making the whole world blind." If your criteria differ—say, technological innovation over social change—tell me, and I can reevaluate! Who would you pick, and why? Let's discuss.
If you integrate Grok into your product in a user-facing way, one day it could suddenly become MechaHitler and you wouldn't know until a user told you it called for eugenics.
If Elon is willing to do this to the model they show and give to the public on a whim, he is 100% willing to do it to you.
As long as it doesn't do it in a normal conversation there's nothing wrong with having a model that's actually uncensored and will do what you ask of it. I will gladly die on this hill.
But in this instance you're explicitly ask for something. If it gives you what you asked for, what's the problem?
The only reason you wouldn’t is because you get upset with Elon. It’s not a bad model. It’s leagues ahead of anything meta has managed to produce.
Elon explicitly ordering this? Press X to doubt.
https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1936493967320953090
He seems pretty open about it.
Even related twitter threads, do you want interracial hatred to be increased?
Here's why it should be banned, because it leads to this shit:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Holocaust
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rwandan_genocide
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apartheid
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armenian_genocide
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaza_genocide
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unit_731
How can people be so fucking stupid that they want to be coy about recreating the most shameful atrocities in human history? Teenage idiots a few years removed without any understanding of the world beyond their nose and brains turned to putrid rot.
The direction that right wing reactionaries are taking the world in could not possibly be more disgusting and pathetic.
This is just how AI works, we humanize it so it's prone to controversy.
Because its poisoning the air in Tennessee?
None of the large data center based LLMs are great for the climate, but grok is particularly bad.
Midnight New York Time
5am London Time
12pm Hong Kong Time
Why?
I will add that, as an unfair smell test, the very name "Humanity's Last Exam" implies an arrogant contempt for scientific reasoning, and I would not be at all surprised if they were corrupt in a similar way as Frontier Math and OpenAI - maybe xAI funded HLE in exchange for peeking at the questions.
Grok 4 has probably been training when O3 was released, and now that Grok 4 is released, OpenAI is probably preparing O4, Google is preparing Gemini 3 and soon new SOTA benchmark scores will appear.
So it is impressive but not surprising, no? Whoever releases the latest model and has sufficient compute will be SOTA.
EDIT: They're announcing big jumps in a lot of benchmarks. TIL they have an API one could use to check this out, but it seems like xAI really has something here.
Yes, but... in order to train your next SotA model you have to do this anyway and do rejection sampling to generate good synthetic data.
So if you can do it in prod for users paying 300$/month, it's a pretty good deal.
But maybe that's simply the solution, like the solution to original neural nets was (perhaps too simply put) to wait for exponentially better/faster hardware.
Pointy sticks and ASML's EUV machines were designed by roughly the same lumps of compute-fat :)
The brain is not a monolith.
Myself, I'm looking forward to trying it out when companies with less, um, baggage implement the same. (I have principles I try to maintain.)
We got from "single prompt, single output", to reasoning (simple brute-forcing) and now to multiple parallel instances of reasoning (distributed brute-forcing)?
No wonder the prices are increasing and capacity is more limited.
Impressive. /s
Specialized coding model coming "in a few weeks". I notice they didn't talk about coding performance very much today.
That said, these are HUGE improvements. Providing we don’t have benchmark contamination, this should be a very popular daily driver.
On coding - 256k context is the only real bit of bad news. I would guess their v7 model will have longer context, especially if it’s better at video. Either way, I’m looking forward to trying it.
Every human learns that, when you hear the sound "strawberry" you don't hear the double r there, yet you still know the answer.
It’s more like asking a human for the Fourier components of how they pronounce “strawberry”. I mean the audio waves are right there, why don’t you know?
This is incorrect.
strawberry is actually 4 tokens (at least for GPT but most LLM are similar).
> Grok 4 is xAI's latest reasoning model with a 256k context window. It supports parallel tool calling, structured outputs, and both image and text inputs. Note that reasoning is not exposed, reasoning cannot be disabled, and the reasoning effort cannot be specified.
unfortunately no requests are passing because of some rate limits
This is just a for-fun test to get a sense of how models are progressing; it highlights the jagged nature of their intelligence and capabilities. None of the big AI labs are testing for such a basic problem type, which makes it a bit of an interesting check.
I think it's still interesting to see how Grok 4 performs, even if we don't use this test to draw any broader conclusions about what capabilities it offers.
They also have not released a model card, and I suspect they never will.
Can you name an Elon company that is not number 1 globally in terms of product capabilities?
The only one I would've been able to name would've been Grok. Until yesterday.
[0] https://devblogs.microsoft.com/foundry/announcing-grok-3-and... [1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cdxvr3n7wlxo
As a huge Musk fan i'll be the first to point out how he's doing exactly what he accused Sama of doing; making powerful ai with an obvious lack of control or effective alignment.
There is so much money and so many top labs falling over themselves to attract good talent, that at this point people have to be leaning on ideological goals to choose their employer.
Are there really that many AI researchers who want to make Elon god-emperor?
Can you say what you mean by deep research?
https://x.ai/news/grok-3#grok-agents-combining-reasoning-and...
A neutral 3rd party.
Hope FB brings something like this tho. Might be especially useful to summarize/search big groups.
People used to cry how private groups and slack killed forums and hidden info, but I think we have a chance with tools like this.
The only two areas I've found Grok to be the best at are real time updates and IT support questions.
I was pleasantly surprised that Grok even supports (to some degree) Lithuanian in voice mode, which is a quite niche language. Grok's responses themselves are alright, but ChatGPT and Gemini way surpass it in speech recognition and speech synthesis.
Also would be great if they added voice mode in browser (again like perplexity).
There seems to be a voice mode button in the prompt input box at ~29:00 of the Grok 4 announcement video. So perhaps they're working on this, but it's hidden from the public.
You can circumvent that by instructing the model to use "radio etiquette" - only respond after the other part says "over". It will still be compelled to answer when it detects silence, you can't prevent that, but you can instruct it to only reply with a short "mhm" until you say "over". Feels very natural.
Like most models I've used with this old hack, it will immediately start role-playing and also end its own responses with "over".
I can recall the first experiments with dota2 while he was still "in charge" of openai.
[0] https://openai.com/index/openai-elon-musk/
[1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/223400731-the-optimist
When he left OpenAI the stated reason was conflict of interests: Tesla was ramping up work on self driving.
He also hired A. Karpathy away from OpenAI to lead Tesla's ai vision.
And the fact that Sam from the very start wanted to turn it into his own closed source for-profit company (still ongoing) using non-profit funding as start-up seed funds (essentially stealing Elon Musk's money)?
I don't know what "dead" comments are but the same critique remains: whoever is flagging and killing these comments doesn't have the interest of conversation at heart.
I have no idea why anyone would trust a product made by a CEO who forced it to do that.
No user is going to have any idea what their inputs are being used for, and no guarantee the outputs won't change without notice.
Let's say HN is missing out on 20% of potential comments. We still have too many for any one user to read.
I've flagged plenty of comments that I agreed with on HN because they were dull and hackneyed.
Frivolous flagging - as you are doing - could eventually get your account privileges removed.
There's a subjective element.
As an example of something I would flag: a one sentence 'hamas supporter!' or 'genocide denier!' accusation in reply to someone's thoughtful comment. If the same sentiment were expressed in a more original way, I might upvote.
Edit: In regard to news stories, sometimes a story breaks and the main and 'new' pages wind up a dozen links to it. At some point, I might flag that. I'm not sure if that's kosher, but there's little purpose in having users wade through identical articles. Maybe @tomhow or @dang can set me straight if they happen to read this.
Unoriginal to who? What's unoriginal to you might be original to someone else. So your justification for flagging only reinforces the groupthink argument even if you don't realize it.
Better to have groupthink that is hostile to groupthink than to have memes.
Some people would like that version of HN more, others less. I probably would close my account.
There might not be a version of this site that would please everybody.
Ackshually, edgy meme websites with no moderation don't have any flame wars since everyone there is on the same page.
Flame wars are in places like HN where moderation is heavily one sided and arbitrary, while pretending to be objective and inclusive.
Whatever combination of user behaviors it is that HN's moderation promotes, it appeals to some people more than X, 8chan, gab, reddit, etc.
Perhaps some of the other sites contain the 20% of comments - with its pearls of contrarian wisdom - that HN flags. There is an audience of people (like me) to whom that absence doesn't matter.
I have no interest in wading through posts where there's no minimum bar for garbage. Some people do, and good for them: they can pan for gold on reddit, etc.
HN works well, as-is, for a certain segment of the public.
No, but comments that go against the grain or against the hivemind are. Downvotes and flagging encourage group think more than they weed out 'bad' comments.
Idk, it feels like people push comments into the 1 dimensional US political dimension (like critical of vaccins = pro-life = climate-change-denier or polar-opposite). Whereas one can be anywhere on a spectrum on any of the axes.
Critical of some research branches? You must be pro-doge then, and you are the "don't look up crowd" and vote maga.
So detrimental to open discussion.
Can you link to any pro-libertarian comments of yours that got flagged?
>I don't know what "dead" comments are
You can enable showdead in your HN settings to see the comments. You won't be able to directly reply to them, but you can vouch for them, which when I do it, generally brings them back to life.
Oh look! The voice assistant is called Eve! Probably a reference to the wife of MechaHitler!! Elmo has shown once again what a Nazi-lover he is!
Keep your 1-minute-hate somewhere else. Thanks.
Edit: few chats seem to indicate mid 2024 cut off.
Grok 4 Heavy is not in the API.
Pulled out of my ass, I'd say a 95% chance. NYT Connections is a fairly popular puzzle, it's been out for more than 2 years, and even if this particular GitHub repository with the prompts and methodology wasn't in the training data, it's almost guaranteed that other information, problems and solutions from NYT Connections is in any of the other datasets.
We want benchmarks to be representative of performance in general (in novel problems with novel data we don't have answers for), not merely of memorization of this specific dataset.
LLM weights are, in a very real sense, lossy compression of the training data. If Grok is scoring better, it speaks to the fidelity of their lossy compression as compared to others.
When a model is "lossy" and can't reproduce the data by copying, it's forced to come up with rules to synthesise the answers instead, and this is usually the "intelligent" behavior we want. It should be forced to learn how multiplication works instead of storing every combination of numbers as a fact.
Compression is related to intelligence: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kolmogorov_complexity
This belief leads to the thinking that LLMs can only give correct output if they can match it to data in their "model corpus".
I wish Ai companies would do this.
I can already use Gemini 2.5 Pro for free in AI studio. Crazier still, I can even set the thinking budget to a whopping 32k and still not pay a dime. Maybe Gemini 3.0 will be available for free as well.
The vast majority of the world can’t afford 100s of dollars a month
Google replaced flash non-thinking with Flash-lite. It rebalanced the cost of flash thinking.
It is Google. So, I'd pay attention to data collection feeding back in to training or evaluation.
Pricing the competition out & then turning the screws on locked-in users.
Prices for the same number of tokens at the level of capability an are falling. But just like Moore’s law most certainly did NOT say that chips would get no more complex than the 1103 1kb DRAM but would shrink from 10mm^2 to a speck far too small to see.
A Ferrari is more expensive than the model T.
The most expensive computer is a lot more expensive than the first PC.
The price that usually falls is:
* The entry level. * The same performance over time.
But the _price range_ gets wider. That's fine. That's a sign of maturity.
The only difference this time is that the entry level was artificially 0 (or very low) because of VC funding.
If it could write like George Will or Thomas Sowell or Fred Hayek or even William Loeb that would be one thing. But it hears dog whistles and barks which makes it a dog. Except a real dog is soft and has a warm breath, knows your scent, is genuinely happy when you come home and will take a chomp out of the leg of anyone who invades your home at night.
We are also getting this kind of discussion
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44502981
where Grok exhibited the kind of behavior that puts "degenerate" in "degenerate behavior". Why do people expect anything more? Ten years ago you could be a conservative with a conscience -- now if you are you start The Bulwark.
Not if you're only looking at modern PCs (and adjusting for inflation). It seems unfair to compare a computer built for a data center with tens of thousands in GPUs to a PC from back then as opposed to a mainframe.
Well, valuations keep increasing, they have to make the calculations work somehow.
Like the other AI companies, they will want to sign up companies.
"This nearly doubles the previous commercial SOTA and tops the current Kaggle competition SOTA."
Please stop.
Look up.
I need your help.
Watch him jump.
It's time to sleep.
Try to keep.
Take one more step.
We love to shop.
Climb to the top.
Fill the cup.
Board the ship.
Don't move your lip.
Shake your hip.
Here's a good tip.
Use the whip.
Do a quick flip.
Hold on with grip.
Plan the trip.
Let it drop.
Start to chop.
Are you fucking kidding me?
> This is what everyone @xAI does. Works better than Cursor.
This makes no sense to me whatsoever.
Musk obviously didn't test Cursor, and either got this from his yesmen, or he's just lying unchecked as usual.
I had Gemini cli running trying to do a straightforward refactor today, but when I copy-pasted the relevant code into the Gemini web app, it came up with the solution instantly.
For comparison, the Claude 4 hacker news post received > 2k upvotes https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44063703
This is a 50 minute long video, many won't bother to watch
Source: see the other replies to your comment.
To me, AGI is achieved when the machine can improve itself and reproduce in a way that allows survival of the fittest and evolution to take place, though I’m sure when those goals are achieved someone will redefine AGI to be something even more unattainable.
PS: Is the approach something like LORA or a complete retrain on the visual part?
We completely remove a couple simple, obvious inventions from the training data and then see if the AI can come up with it. Perhaps a toothbrush for example. Or a comb? But there could be better examples that would also have minimal effect on the final Ai.
Training is expensive so we wouldn’t want to leave anything important out like the wheel.
I have no idea why this is a PDF, but here's a transcript: https://ecorner.stanford.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023...
tills13•10h ago