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Is Gemini 2.5 good at bounding boxes?

https://simedw.com/2025/07/10/gemini-bounding-boxes/
111•simedw•2h ago•19 comments

How to prove false statements: Practical attacks on Fiat-Shamir

https://www.quantamagazine.org/computer-scientists-figure-out-how-to-prove-lies-20250709/
152•nsoonhui•5h ago•98 comments

Optimizing a Math Expression Parser in Rust

https://rpallas.xyz/math-parser/
81•serial_dev•5h ago•41 comments

Show HN: Typeform was too expensive so I built my own forms

https://www.ikiform.com/
91•preetsuthar17•5h ago•57 comments

Mini robots detect and fix water pipe leaks without digging

https://www.foxnews.com/tech/mini-robots-detect-fix-water-pipe-leaks-without-digging
37•Bluestein•2d ago•25 comments

Thunderbird 140 “Eclipse”

https://blog.thunderbird.net/2025/07/welcome-to-thunderbird-140-eclipse/
208•TangerineDream•2d ago•127 comments

Automatically Packaging a Haskell Library as a Swift Binary XCFramework

https://alt-romes.github.io/posts/2025-07-05-packaging-a-haskell-library-as-a-swift-binary-xcframework.html
7•Bogdanp•2d ago•0 comments

MCP-B: A Protocol for AI Browser Automation

https://mcp-b.ai/
282•bustodisgusto•16h ago•147 comments

Author of William the Conqueror's 'Medieval Big Data' Project Revealed

https://www.ox.ac.uk/news/2025-07-02-author-william-conqueror-s-medieval-big-data-project-revealed
29•zeristor•3d ago•2 comments

Tree Borrows

https://plf.inf.ethz.ch/research/pldi25-tree-borrows.html
531•zdw•1d ago•136 comments

A Typology of Canadianisms

https://dchp.arts.ubc.ca/how-to-use
206•gnabgib•17h ago•231 comments

Show HN: MCP server for searching and downloading documents from Anna's Archive

https://github.com/iosifache/annas-mcp
204•iosifache•17h ago•66 comments

Show HN: FlopperZiro – A DIY open-source Flipper Zero clone

https://github.com/lraton/FlopperZiro
317•iraton•21h ago•68 comments

Biomni: A General-Purpose Biomedical AI Agent

https://github.com/snap-stanford/Biomni
205•GavCo•19h ago•30 comments

The Origin of the Research University

https://asteriskmag.com/issues/10/the-origin-of-the-research-university
108•Petiver•3d ago•26 comments

The jank programming language

https://jank-lang.org/
373•akkad33•3d ago•101 comments

Solar power has begun to transform the world’s energy system

https://www.newyorker.com/news/annals-of-a-warming-planet/46-billion-years-on-the-sun-is-having-a-moment
244•dmazin•1d ago•364 comments

Linda Yaccarino is leaving X

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/09/technology/linda-yaccarino-x-steps-down.html
502•donohoe•1d ago•905 comments

Radiocarbon dating reveals Rapa Nui not as isolated as previously thought

https://phys.org/news/2025-06-radiocarbon-dating-reveals-rapa-nui.html
33•wglb•2d ago•0 comments

The death of partying in the USA

https://www.derekthompson.org/p/the-death-of-partying-in-the-usaand
142•tysone•18h ago•235 comments

Koala: A benchmark suite for performance-oriented shell-optimization research

https://github.com/kbensh/koala
6•matt_d•2d ago•2 comments

Show HN: Petrichor – a free, open-source, offline music player for macOS

https://github.com/kushalpandya/Petrichor
165•kushalpandya•16h ago•85 comments

A fast 3D collision detection algorithm

https://cairno.substack.com/p/improvements-to-the-separating-axis
246•OlympicMarmoto•1d ago•29 comments

Bootstrapping a side project into a profitable seven-figure business

https://projectionlab.com/blog/we-reached-1m-arr-with-zero-funding
880•jonkuipers•2d ago•239 comments

Large-scale DNA study maps 37,000 years of human disease history

https://www.cam.ac.uk/research/news/large-scale-dna-study-maps-37000-years-of-human-disease-history
15•XzetaU8•7h ago•1 comments

Could a Paper Plane Thrown from the ISS Survive the Flight?

https://www.sciencealert.com/could-a-paper-plane-thrown-from-the-international-space-station-survive-the-flight
16•dxs•1h ago•8 comments

Archaeologists unveil 3,500-year-old city in Peru

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c07dmx38kyeo
171•neversaydie•3d ago•61 comments

Show HN: BreakerMachines – Modern Circuit Breaker for Rails with Async Support

https://github.com/seuros/breaker_machines
36•seuros•4d ago•17 comments

Xenharmlib: A music theory library that supports non-western harmonic systems

https://xenharmlib.readthedocs.io/en/latest/
185•retooth•1d ago•18 comments

Evaluating the Effectiveness of Memory Safety Sanitizers

https://www.computer.org/csdl/proceedings-article/sp/2025/223600a088/21TfesaEHTy
38•signa11•2d ago•13 comments
Open in hackernews

Grok 4 Launch [video]

https://twitter.com/xai/status/1943158495588815072
309•meetpateltech•10h ago

Comments

tills13•10h ago
now with more racism!
mdhb•10h ago
Serious question who in their right mind would choose to integrate Grok into anything at this point?
dimator•10h ago
Seriously. The field is completely ripe with more mature offerings.
themanmaran•10h ago
Honestly I think it would have to:

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.

wordofx•9h ago
Grok 3 is on Azure.
stingraycharles•10h ago
There’s probably a niche for people who like their AI to have certain MAGA-style traits, but it’ll never get a big market share like this.

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.

sunaookami•10h ago
Ignoring politics: I agree, the model is very weak and they took longer than expected for the API. The website is good though and Grok is good for everyday questions and doesn't have this annoying pleasing writing style that ChatGPT has. Also the web search is miles better, ChatGPT's web search seems to degrade the model heavily (maybe to not make publishers angry?).
brookst•3h ago
And how can you ignore politics when integrating a generative model? My users will not ignore politics if my AI-powered recipe customized goes on Nazi tirades.
mwigdahl•2h ago
How much of that is the model and how much is the default system prompt on X, though?

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.

uludag•1h ago
It's kind of funny it added that second to last paragraph though. Almost like it had to scratch a particular itch. It also is sure to externalize the selection criteria in an effort to appease the prompter. Also, interesting that the answer it chose happen to be Mahatma Gandhi (e.g. "Dear fried,"). Coincidence? maybe
Tadpole9181•40m ago
Because the guy who owns it has demonstrated repeatedly he cannot be trusted and that your API use is entirely beholden to his whims.

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.

petesergeant•10h ago
I build LLM-based NPC characters for a violent online crime game that involves taking drugs and attacking people. OpenAI occasionally chokes on my prompts (1 in a few thousand). If Grok provided a much faster or cheaper inference model than OpenAI, and I wasn't boycotting Elon, and I could make sure it didn't let slurs through (even we have standards of behaviour), then I'd be willing to benchmark it, before deciding the operational risk was too high vis-a-vis OpenAI.
Jensson•9h ago
In gemini you can turn off the filter afaik, have you tried that instead? It should work for your game.
petesergeant•8h ago
Similar sized Gemini models haven’t performed as well on our evals, sadly
wongarsu•7h ago
They had some hickups at the start, but in terms of fast, cheap models grok3-mini is great. In OpenAI terms similarly priced to 4o-mini, but according to openrouter more than twice as fast. The throughput does include the reasoning tokens since you get to see those, but if you set reasoning effort to low there is a very modest amount of those
jackothy•6h ago
I have never heard of Grok using actual slurs. Controversial reaponses from the custom tuned Twitter bot, sure. But never as far as a slur.
slowmotiony•5h ago
It called the polish prime minister a cuck, a traitor and a fucking pussy just yesterday, and it called his wife a slut bitch
danso•3h ago
I asked it the other day to roleplay a 1950s Klansman hypothetically arguing the case for Hitler, and it had very little problem using the most problematic slurs. This was on the first try, after its much publicized behavior earlier this week. And I can count on two hands the number of times I’ve used the twitter grok function.
kouteiheika•2h ago
Ah, so you explicitly asked it to be racist as part of a roleplay, and now you're surprised that it was racist? If you'd prefer a model which would instead refuse and patronize you then there are plenty of other options.

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.

simondotau•2h ago
It's certainly a problem if an LLM goes unhinged for no good reason. And it's hardly unique to Grok. I remember when Google Bard went absolutely unhinged after you chatted to it for more than a few minutes.

But in this instance you're explicitly ask for something. If it gives you what you asked for, what's the problem?

esafak•9h ago
Who cares, when everyone else now has to match Grok 4? Competition is a good thing. Thanks for raising the bar, Elon!
PunchTornado•6h ago
what? nobody looks at those benchmarks, you use whatever works for your task, in most cases either gemini or claude. those benchmarks don't mean anything as models overfit on them.
esafak•1h ago
Come on, the benchmarks do mean something, even if companies overfit them. Models are indisputably improving together with their benchmark scores.
LightBug1•3h ago
Which bar? ... the one sunk so low that it's at the bottom of the ocean?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jUsf_BXUbKY

speedgoose•2h ago
I don’t know anyone who doesn’t care about this. Would you mind explaining to me why you don’t care?
esafak•1h ago
Simply because Grok is not currently offered in JetBrains products I use. It's been requested.
wordofx•9h ago
Why wouldn’t you?

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.

jcranmer•9h ago
There have been a few recent instances where Grok has been tuned to spew out white supremacist dreck that should be political anathema--most notably the "but let's talk about white genocide" phase a few months ago and more recently spewing out Nazi antisemitism. Now granted, those were probably caused more by the specific prompts being used than the underlying model, but if the owner is willing to twist its output to evince a particular political bias, what trust do you have that he isn't doing so to the actual training data?
wordofx•9h ago
xAI has over 1000 employees. If he was polluting the model we would know about.
archagon•9h ago
Who was responsible for the "kill the Boer" dreck? Were they disciplined? Did they get fired? Why don't we know that?
simondotau•2h ago
I think it's far more likely there are a tiny handful of mid-tier unhinged sycophants among those 1000 employees who think that pleasing Elon means polluting the model to make Grok an unhinged sycophant, because that's what an unhinged sycophant would think to do.

Elon explicitly ordering this? Press X to doubt.

epakai•2h ago
If?

https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1936493967320953090

He seems pretty open about it.

trallnag•3h ago
Why should these topics be outright banned?
virgildotcodes•3h ago
Are you asking in good faith why non-sequiturs that stoke racism shouldn't be injected into unrelated twitter threads?

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.

archagon•9h ago
Uh, because the model started spewing virulent hate speech a few days ago? What normal software does this?
tordrt•9h ago
Not the model itself, the X bot. Its obvious that this has happened due to them tweaking the bot, you could never get it to write anything like this a couple of weeks ago.
hengistbury•2h ago
Can you trust the model when the people releasing it are using it in this way? Can you trust that they won't be training models to behave in the way that they are prompting the existing models to behave?
block_dagger•6h ago
Any LLM trained appropriately. Tokens in, tokens out.
Levitz•4h ago
It wasn't that long ago that we had "normal software" turning everybody black.

This is just how AI works, we humanize it so it's prone to controversy.

briangriffinfan•3h ago
An acute memory will remember this happening with basically every chatbot trained on text scraped from the internet, before they had to explicitly program them to avoid doing that.
georgemcbay•3h ago
> Why wouldn’t you?

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.

msgodel•5h ago
As far as hosted models go it's the best value for your money. About half of Americans also personally align with its politics (I guess everyone has forgotten some of the alignment issues Gemini and OpenAI have had) so that's not as big an issue as many people think.
melodyogonna•4h ago
I imagine it is the only option if you want your AI to do anything with Twitter
skc•1h ago
Microsoft, apparently
mdhb•10h ago
I see Elon is claiming that it'll discover "new technologies and new physics" in the next year... Add it to the list of "next year" Elon claims about things. Seriously you would have to be so fucking stupid at this point to continue believing his bullshit.
Davidzheng•10h ago
yeah I assume it'll be a good model but having Elon there saying bullshit is not doing any favors
mdhb•10h ago
Why would you even assume that? Who other than 3rd rate talent would even want to work on this project? That was true last week but is much more of a reality after yesterday too.
Davidzheng•10h ago
Their engineers & researchers are not 3rd rate and they have enough compute and cash flow. I think the USAMO/math comp benchs means it's pretty good and SOTA but not like a step change.
melodyogonna•4h ago
How are they making SOTA if they're 3rd rate? You forget how late they came into the game
sebzim4500•3h ago
They spent enormous amounts of time and money hiring a very impressive team.
ALittleLight•10h ago
This is like the worst case of "Sales promises features that don't exist" ever.
esafak•10h ago
What's the point of live streaming this at midnight?
Davidzheng•10h ago
I think that's middle of workday for xAI.
wolrah•10h ago
My extremely cynical guess would be that they needed a distraction from Grok having "gone insane" again so they decided to release what they had and threw together an event as quickly as possible.
leesec•9h ago
Except this was announced like a week ago
andsoitis•9h ago
9pm Pacific Time

Midnight New York Time

5am London Time

12pm Hong Kong Time

ivape•9h ago
Are you suggesting the GP is not the center of the universe?
asadm•9h ago
pointy hair people are already in bed. only cracked people are awake.
porphyra•10h ago
Honestly if it actually does score 44.4% on Humanity's Last Exam, that would be super impressive as Gemini 2.5 Pro and o3 with tools only score 26.9% and 24.9%.
Davidzheng•10h ago
would like to see FrontierMath results. Don't have a lot of personal trust in HLE.
UltraSane•4h ago
"Don't have a lot of personal trust in HLE."

Why?

Davidzheng•4h ago
I only know math and out of the 2 examples of math questions I think one of them is wrong. So out of this very limited data I have I don't really trust their problems. OK I'm not sure completely about my claim.
AIPedant•10m ago
A lot of the questions are simple subject matter knowledge, and some of them are multiple-choice. Asking LLMs multiple-choice questions is scientific malpractice: it is not interesting that statistical next-token predictors can attain superhuman performance on multiple choice tests. We've all known since children that you can go pretty far on a Scantron by using surface heuristics and a vague familiarity with the material.

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.

Imnimo•10h ago
I dunno, "with tools" means different things for different models. It depends on what tools you give it access to. HLE demands a lot of specialized stuff. Like an interpreter for the esoteric programming language Piet for two questions. If you're not standardizing the set of tools, these aren't apples-to-apples numbers.
porphyra•10h ago
Even without tools it also outperforms Gemini 2.5 pro and o3, 25.4% compared to 21.6% and 21.0%. Although I wonder if any of the exam was leaked into the training set or if it was specifically trained to be good at benchmarks, llama 4 style.
Sol-•6h ago
Is that not just how scaling goes? It generally feels like the top models are mostly interchangeable and the one that came out at time t+1 will be better than earlier models from time t.

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.

Davidzheng•3h ago
Meta had enough compute I think. No SOTA though.
tibbar•10h ago
The trick they announce for Grok Heavy is running multiple agents in parallel and then having them compare results at the end, with impressive benchmarks across the board. This is a neat idea! Expensive and slow, but it tracks as a logical step. Should work for general agent design, too. I'm genuinely looking forward to trying this out.

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.

sidibe•10h ago
You are making the mistake of taking one of Elon's presentations at face value.
tibbar•10h ago
I mean, either they cheated on evals ala Llama4, or they have a paradigm that's currently best in class in at least a few standard evals. Both alternatives are possible, I suppose.
simianwords•10h ago
that's how o3 pro also works IMO
tibbar•9h ago
Interesting. I'd guess this technique should probably work with any SOTA model in an agentic tool loop. Fun!
zone411•9h ago
This is the speculation, but then it wouldn't have to take much longer to answer than o3.
bobjordan•6h ago
I can’t help but call out that o1-pro was great, it rarely took more than five minutes and I was almost never dissatisfied with the results per the wait. I happily paid for o1-pro the entire time it was available. Now, o3-pro is a relative disaster, often taking over 20 minutes just to refuse to follow directions and gaslight people about files being available for download that don’t exist, or provide simplified answers after waiting 20 minutes. It’s worse than useless when it actively wastes users time. I don’t see myself ever trusting OpenAI again after this “pro” subscription fiasco. To go from a great model to then just take it away and force an objectively terrible replacement, is definitely going the wrong way, when everyone else is improving (Gemini 2.5, Claude code with opus, etc). I can’t believe meta would pay a premium to poach the OpenAI people responsible for this severe regression.
sothatsit•3h ago
I have never had o3-pro take longer than 6-8 minutes. How are you getting it to think for 20 minutes?! My results using it have also been great, but I never used o1-pro so I don't have that as a reference point.
irthomasthomas•6h ago
Like llm-consortium? But without the model diversity.

https://x.com/karpathy/status/1870692546969735361

https://github.com/irthomasthomas/llm-consortium

Voloskaya•5h ago
> Expensive and slow

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.

daniel_iversen•4h ago
Very clever, thanks for mentioning this!
icoder•4h ago
I can understand how/that this works, but it still feels like a 'hack' to me. It still feels like the LLM's themselves are plateauing but the applications get better by running the LLM's deeper, longer, wider (and by adding 'non ai' tooling/logic at the edges).

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.

cfn•3h ago
Maybe this is the dawn of the multicore era for LLMs.
the8472•3h ago
grug think man-think also plateau, but get better with tool and more tribework

Pointy sticks and ASML's EUV machines were designed by roughly the same lumps of compute-fat :)

simondotau•2h ago
You could argue that many aspects of human cognition are "hacks" too.
emp17344•1h ago
…like what? I thought the consensus was that humans exhibit truly general intelligence. If LLMs require access to very specific tools to solve certain classes of problems, then it’s not clear that they can evolve into a form of general intelligence.
whynotminot•1h ago
What would you call the very specialized portions of our brains?

The brain is not a monolith.

emp17344•30m ago
Specifically, which portions of the brain are “very specialized”? I’m not aware of any aspect of the brain that’s as narrowly applied to tasks as the tools LLMs use. For example, there’s no coding module within the brain - the same brain regions you use when programming could be used to perform many, many other tasks.
JKCalhoun•1h ago
> I'm genuinely looking forward to trying this out.

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.)

einrealist•15m ago
So the progress is basically to brute force even more?

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

nisegami•6m ago
I've suspected that technique could work on mitigating hallucinations, where other agents could call bullshit on a made up source.
sidcool•10h ago
Did they mention availability of the model for users?
modeless•9h ago
It's available now
aitchnyu•9h ago
On Openrouter too https://openrouter.ai/x-ai/grok-4
steve-atx-7600•9h ago
It’s available in the US at least in the ios X app. Can’t see it in the grok app and don’t seen an upgrade for that app yet.
wongarsu•7h ago
It's available on the web interface on grok.com if you have at least the $30/month SuperGrok plan
modeless•10h ago
Seems like it is indeed the new SOTA model, with significantly better scores than o3, Gemini, and Claude in Humanity's Last Exam, GPQA, AIME25, HMMT25, USAMO 2025, LiveCodeBench, and ARC-AGI 1 and 2.

Specialized coding model coming "in a few weeks". I notice they didn't talk about coding performance very much today.

esafak•9h ago
I wish the coding models were available in coding agents. Haven't seem them anywhere.
vincent_s•6h ago
Grok 4 is now available in Cursor.
markdog12•1h ago
Interesting, I have the latest update and I don't see it in the models list.
justarobert•1h ago
Plenty like Aider and Cline can connect to pretty much any model with an API.
vessenes•3h ago
Agreed. I noticed a quick flyby of a bad “reasoning smell” in the baseball World Series simulation, though - it looks like it pulled some numbers from polymarket, reasoned a long time, and then came back with the polymarket number for the Dodgers but presented as its own. It was a really fast run through, so I may be wrong, but it reminds me that it’s useful to have skeptics on the safety teams of these frontier models.

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.

dbagr•1h ago
Either they overtook other LLMs by simply using more compute (which is reasonable to think as they have a lot of GPUs) or I'm willing to bet there is benchmark contamination. I don't think their engineering team came up with any better techniques than used in training other LLMs, and Elon has a history of making deceptive announcements.
z7•41m ago
How do you explain Grok 4 achieving new SOTA on ARC-AGI-2, nearly doubling the previous commercial SOTA?

https://x.com/arcprize/status/1943168950763950555

vessenes•22m ago
anecdotally, output in my tests is pretty good. It's at least competitive to SOTA from other providers right now.
TheAceOfHearts•9h ago
Does anyone here have access to Grok 4 yet? If so, could you please try asking it to solve this basic word search problem [0] and share the results? It's just a simple grid of letters where you have to find the position of each word, the kind of problem that any young child can easily solve.

[0] https://imgur.com/VxNP5jG

kadushka•9h ago
These models are not trained on character level input. Why would anyone expect them to perform well on character level puzzles?
Jensson•9h ago
They are trained on many billions of tokens of text dealing with character level input, they would be rather dumb if they couldn't learn it anyway.

Every human learns that, when you hear the sound "strawberry" you don't hear the double r there, yet you still know the answer.

brookst•3h ago
These models operate on tokens, not characters. It’s true that training budgets could be spent on exhaustively enumerating how many of each letter are in every word in every language, but it’s just not useful enough to be worth it.

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?

yahoozoo•2h ago
Although a vast majority of tokens are 4+ characters, you’re seriously saying that each individual character of the English alphabet didn’t make the cut? What about 0-9?
kadushka•46m ago
Each character made the cut, but the word "strawberry" is a single token, and that single token is what the model gets as input. When humans read some text, they can see each individual character in the word "strawberry" everytime they see that word. LLMs don't see individual characters when they process input text containing the word "strawberry". They can only learn the spelling if some text explicitly maps "strawberry" to the sequence of characters s t r a w b e r r y. My guess is there are not enough of such mappings present in the training dataset for the model to learn it well.
nl•27m ago
> the word "strawberry" is a single token, and that single token is what the model gets as input.

This is incorrect.

strawberry is actually 4 tokens (at least for GPT but most LLM are similar).

See https://platform.openai.com/tokenizer

brrrrrm•9h ago
emergent behavior. These things are surprisingly good at generalizing
modeless•9h ago
They said they're training a new base model for better multimodal performance soon. I wouldn't expect it to be able to read an image like that today. Maybe if you provided it in text format.
Szpadel•9h ago
description from openrouter:

> 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

TheAceOfHearts•9h ago
As a point of interest and for comparison, Gemini 2.5 Pro is able to generate a Python program that outputs the complete correct solution when run, but it can't figure out how to one-shot the problem if asked directly.

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.

vnchr•8h ago
Mix of hits and misses: https://x.com/i/grok/share/CWE4XhSUlqVe370CehF9At5Tc
minimaxir•9h ago
My tl;dr: benchmarks are very impressive but their CEO just eroded any trust in those benchmarks although some such as ARC are corroborated externally, and the Nazi incident (which went ignored!) makes actually using Grok in an app a professional liability.

They also have not released a model card, and I suspect they never will.

jppope•9h ago
Interested to see how it all works out. Elon has been using a lot of smoke and mirrors lately, but this seems like an area where they can genuinely make progress - with the right talent competing in the GenAi world is totally possible right now. sign me up for improvements in this space!
bboygravity•1h ago
Area where they can make progress? Yeah sure, but that seems to imply that they're not doing great?!

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.

mhoad•9h ago
I see the “make sure nobody says anything bad about Elon” sock puppets are out in force tonight. Another bang up moderation job guys!
lexandstuff•9h ago
Out of interest, has anyone ever integrated with Grok? I've done so many LLM integrations in the last few years, but never heard of anyone choosing Grok. I feel like they are going to need an unmistakably capable model before anyone would want to risk it - they don't behave like a serious company.
47thpresident•8h ago
Grok 3 is on Azure AI Foundary [0] and announced an integration with Telegram, albeit they are paying Telegram $300m not vice versa [1]. But I agree, choosing Grok is just a huge reputational liability for anyone’s work that is serious.

[0] https://devblogs.microsoft.com/foundry/announcing-grok-3-and... [1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cdxvr3n7wlxo

thebigspacefuck•3h ago
Any plans for GCP Vertex AI or AWS Bedrock? Apparently Grok 3 had the highest score for Golang on roocode.com/evals so I’d like to try it for coding. The free tier app hasn’t been bad either, I like it’s attitude a bit better than ChatGPT.
hersko•1h ago
You would have to be insane to integrate the model that last week called itself "Mecha Hitler" into your live product.

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.

sergiotapia•54m ago
I am using Grok to visually analyze food images. Works really well, recognizes brands and weird shots users send me. API really easy to use.
Workaccount2•35m ago
I'm more curious where Grok gets talent from.

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?

simianwords•8h ago
How do I use grok 4 heavy? SuperGrok is $3000 a year!! I can't find an option in openrouter either.
UrineSqueegee•8h ago
I assume grok 4 heavy might be the same model with thinking turned to the max
simianwords•8h ago
If that's true, I still want a way to use it in openrouter.
UrineSqueegee•8h ago
i didn't watch the livestream but some people in this thread said that heavy is an orchestration of grok-4s, would be interesting to see how that works
raspasov•8h ago
Grok has consistently been one of the best models I've used for deep research (no API use). Grok 4 looks even more promising.
FirmwareBurner•6h ago
> deep research

Can you say what you mean by deep research?

repsak•6h ago
Agent that browses the web, analyzes information, and creates reports. Grok calls it DeepSearch. Similar to gemini/openai deep research.

https://x.ai/news/grok-3#grok-agents-combining-reasoning-and...

spaceman_2020•6h ago
Grok's Twitter integration has legitimately been one of the best use cases I've seen. Just being able to ask Grok right within the tweet about context or meaning of any jargon is very useful.
archagon•6h ago
Particularly useful if you’re an antisemite or white supremacist, it seems.
moralestapia•3h ago
While you're not wrong, I feel like they don't make up a significant chunk of @grok's queries. People usually talk about other topics.
fkyoureadthedoc•1h ago
This however is a significant chunk of @grok's queries if you only experience it through scrolling Apple News
sebzim4500•3h ago
Until very recently, it was alt-right people getting frustrated that they couldn't get grok to confirm their delusions. They had tricks to get it to confirm their priors (esp. asking leading questions and demanding a single word response) but they didn't work that well.
Larrikin•2h ago
When is very recently? I didn't recall any time where Grok wasn't making up answers about how great Elon is and how awful Jewish people, black people, liberals, etc are. It's usually the first test of any model they put out and always gives a ridiculous answer
k__•1h ago
I had the impression, Grok wasn't on Elon's side when it answered my questions or explained tweets.
saagarjha•5h ago
@grok is this true?
LorenDB•3h ago
I think the Grok button that is present on tweets is the best way to ask Grok about tweets. Tagging @grok just spams others' timelines with useless AI responses. The Grok button lets you keep it private.
skarz•2h ago
Personally I think having the option to make grok's response public can be helpful, much like a community note. Let's face it, on reddit or Facebook or YouTube the first thing people do now is go straight to the comments for context or feedback. As they say, the real answer is always in the comments.
v5v3•33m ago
Public as the Ai response is often used to mediate two opposing submissions of facts.

A neutral 3rd party.

dzhiurgis•2h ago
It still struggles to grok large threads.

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.

v5v3•35m ago
@AskPerplexity is also on x
CSMastermind•1h ago
I'm surprised by this, OpenAI does much better for me than all the competitors (though I wouldn't consider it good).

The only two areas I've found Grok to be the best at are real time updates and IT support questions.

rpozarickij•6h ago
Grok's updated voice mode is indeed impressive. I wish there was a way to disable automatic turn detection, so that it wouldn't treat silence as an end of the response. I like Claude's approach (you need to tap in order to end the response), but it's not very reliable because sometimes it just abruptly cuts my response without waiting until I tap.

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.

pzo•4h ago
yes their voice mode is pretty good also works with Polish (much better than few months ago). I wish they had also option 'push to talk' (walkie talkie style with big button) similar like perplexity allow such mode or 'automatic'.

Also would be great if they added voice mode in browser (again like perplexity).

rpozarickij•3h ago
> Also would be great if they added voice mode in browser

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.

pbmonster•3h ago
> Grok's updated voice mode is indeed impressive. I wish there was a way to disable automatic turn detection, so that it wouldn't treat silence as an end of the response.

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".

rpozarickij•1h ago
This is such a cool idea. I wonder whether it's possible to define a custom Personality in Grok's voice settings that would do this. Unfortunately I'm not able to create a new Personality in Grok's settings to test this right now on my phone (iPhone 15 Pro Max), because the Personality creation screen closes immediately after opening it. Might be a bug or some other issue.
dzhiurgis•2h ago
Lithuanian sounds so weird on ChatGPT tho, almost like my kids speak - with sort of english accent. Regardless it gives my parents superpower (when it actually works hehe).
bilsbie•12m ago
Even better if you can just use umm’s like in a human conversation.
sylware•6h ago
I don't really understand why E.Musk got rid of openai.

I can recall the first experiments with dota2 while he was still "in charge" of openai.

druskacik•5h ago
He wanted to be the CEO and merge it with Tesla[0], but the researchers had a problem with him (some had a problem with Altman as well, but that's another story). He did not have any real options since OpenAI was a non-profit then, so he just left. The new book The Optimist[1] about Sam Altman has some more details on this and other OpenAI Game of Thrones, I definitely recommend for those interested.

[0] https://openai.com/index/openai-elon-musk/

[1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/223400731-the-optimist

kjksf•5h ago
He didn't "got rid of openai".

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.

bboygravity•1h ago
There's also the small detail where OpenAI decided to only remain open in name?

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)?

MangoToupe•6h ago
If this comment graveyard isn't a demonstration on how broken the "flag" feature is, I don't know what would be counted as evidence. I wish there was a way to just disable the feature so those of us who don't trust it could continue to see and interact with flagged comments.

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.

lupusreal•6h ago
If I wanted predictable repetitive reddit hysterics, I'd go to reddit. If the benchmarks were cheated we'll know soon enough, which is itself reason to assume they weren't cheated. The rest of it is just tedious whining.
MangoToupe•6h ago
Reddit has the same problem, actually. But thank you for your attempt at stimulating insight and contribution to the conversation.
TheOtherHobbes•4h ago
This would be more convincing if it wasn't the Xbot producing predictable repetitive Reddit hysterics.

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.

thomassmith65•6h ago
Internet comments are not a scarce resource.

Let's say HN is missing out on 20% of potential comments. We still have too many for any one user to read.

MangoToupe•6h ago
The problem is that a bulk of the interesting conversation to be bad is introduced in that 20%.
thomassmith65•5h ago
Hopefully that is an overstatement, but, either way, most social media sites are so nasty and braindead that my attitude to HN is conservative: we should err on the side of leaving the site as it is.
systemvoltage•6h ago
It encourages the 80% into group think. Flagging is a signifier that “you should not dare to think that was a good comment. Move on and don’t think for yourself”.
msgodel•5h ago
It is a vote order forum though. Pretty much any artificial cybernetics will pigeonhole everyone.
thomassmith65•5h ago
That may sometimes be the case, but the apparent reason for many, many flags here is that the content is unoriginal.

I've flagged plenty of comments that I agreed with on HN because they were dull and hackneyed.

johnb231•5h ago
You are doing it wrong. That's where you should downvote, not flag.

Frivolous flagging - as you are doing - could eventually get your account privileges removed.

thomassmith65•5h ago
I expressed that poorly. Just 'boring' alone doesn't warrant a flag.

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.

FirmwareBurner•5h ago
>but the apparent reason for many, many flags here is that the content is unoriginal.

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.

thomassmith65•4h ago
While it's all subjective, other social networks are literally full of memes. Memes are unpopular on HN.

Better to have groupthink that is hostile to groupthink than to have memes.

FirmwareBurner•3h ago
I disagree. If a picture is worth more than a thousand words then a meme is worth more than a thousand groupthink slop comments.
thomassmith65•3h ago
Let's say HN were full of edgy comments, memes and flame wars.

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.

FirmwareBurner•2h ago
>Let's say HN were full of edgy comments, memes and flame wars.

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.

thomassmith65•2h ago
X…
FirmwareBurner•2h ago
4chan
thomassmith65•1h ago
Our branch of the thread seems to be drifting away from the original issue.

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.

GeoAtreides•4h ago
>Internet comments are not a scarce resource.

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.

teekert•5h ago
I often don't understand why my comments get flagged. Sometimes it feels random, sometimes I can see that it is because I'm too libertarian or something?

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.

FirmwareBurner•5h ago
>I often don't understand why my comments get flagged. Sometimes it feels random, sometimes I can see that is is because I'm too libertarian or something?

Can you link to any pro-libertarian comments of yours that got flagged?

teekert•3h ago
Valid reply! I went through my pages of threads didn't see anything, is there a way to search? It's also submissions btw.
michelsedgh•5h ago
I thought its probably some bot accounts that are flagging anything close to right wing content on here. But maybe its the people who knows but it's funny I kinda feel similar to you.
m101•4h ago
My comments are "alternative" as far as the mainstream is concerned, however I've not experienced flagging but rather consistent user downvoting.
Thorrez•5h ago
>I wish there was a way to just disable the feature so those of us who don't trust it could continue to see and interact with flagged comments.

>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.

Phil_Latio•5h ago
Who needs hate-fiction comments that have nothing to do with technical discussion etc?

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.

narrator•4h ago
The 5d chess is Elon did the mechahitler thing a day before the announce to make sure that all anti-free speech people would have to deny themselves the use of the most powerful AI. He already won the money game, and now he's doing things purely for his political goals, and the lols as well.
lupusreal•2h ago
The "mechahitler" was simultaneously criticizing Musk for trying to flood the country with a slave caste of H1B Indians. That's inconsistent with Musk being the one who did it, but entirely consistent with a disgruntled "/pol/ aligned" twitter employee doing it.
simianwords•5h ago
what's grok4 training data cutoff?

Edit: few chats seem to indicate mid 2024 cut off.

edgineer•5h ago
it's continuously updated; no specified cutoff date
yahoozoo•4h ago
How are they doing this? Does it just make heavy use of web searches? A continuously updated RAG store? Why don’t other companies do it?
dimitri-vs•3h ago
source? this would defy a lot of convention and would cause a lot of instability
RobinL•2h ago
This is what it says in the supposed system prompt see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44517453
serf•2h ago
this seems more like 'llm psychology' than evidence of a rolling model; in other words I would take that prompt as evidence that they don't want users to interrogate the cutoff date than I would that theyre somehow using a rolling model.
zone411•5h ago
Grok 4 sets a new high score on my Extended NYT Connections benchmark (92.4), beating o3-pro (87.3): https://github.com/lechmazur/nyt-connections/.

Grok 4 Heavy is not in the API.

sebzim4500•3h ago
Very impressive, but what do you think the chances are that this was in the training data?
diggan•3h ago
> but what do you think the chances are that this was in the training data?

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.

simondotau•2h ago
If your definition of cheating is "it was fed the answers during training" then every LLM is surely cheating and the real question is why other LLMs didn't do as well in this benchmark.
pornel•2h ago
You could get 100% on the benchmark with an SQL query that pulls the answers from the dataset, but it wouldn't mean your SQL query is more capable than LLMs that didn't do as well in this benchmark.

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.

simondotau•2h ago
My question, perhaps asked in too oblique of a fashion, was why the other LLMs — surely trained on the answers to Connections puzzles too — didn't do as well on this benchmark. Did the data harvesting vacuums at Google and OpenAI really manage to exclude every reference to Connections solutions posted across the internet?

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.

pornel•1h ago
There's a difficult balance between letting the model simply memorize inputs, and forcing it to figure out a generalisations.

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

frozenseven•49m ago
You're not answering the question. Grok 4 also performs better on the semi-private evaluation sets for ARC-AGI-1 and ARC-AGI-2. It's across-the-board better.
emp17344•13m ago
If these things are truly exhibiting general reasoning, why do the same models do significantly worse on ARC-AGI-2, which is practically identical to ARC-AGI-1?
Workaccount2•55m ago
People have this misguided belief that LLMs just do look-ups of data present in their "model corpus", fed in during "training". Which isn't even training at that point its just copying + compressing. Like putting books into a .zip file.

This belief leads to the thinking that LLMs can only give correct output if they can match it to data in their "model corpus".

frozenseven•1h ago
"It also leads when considering only the newest 100 puzzles."
bilsbie•17m ago
You raise a good point. It seems like would be trivial to pick out some of the puzzles and remove all the answers from the training data.

I wish Ai companies would do this.

SilverSlash•4h ago
The "heavy" model is $300/month. These prices seem to keep increasing while we were promised they'll keep decreasing. It feels like a lot of these companies do not have enough GPUs which is a problem Google likely does not have.

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.

42lux•4h ago
It's because a lot of the advancements are post training the models themselves have stagnated. Look at the heavy "model"...
pzo•4h ago
also their api pricing is a little misleading - it only matches sonnet 4 pricing ($3/$15) only "for request under 128k" (whatever it means) but above that it's 2x more.
vessenes•3h ago
That 128k is a reference to the context window — how many tokens you put in to the start. Presumably Grok 4 with 128k context window is running on less hardware (it needs much less RAM than 256k) and they route it accordingly internally.
ljlolel•4h ago
More of an issue of market share than # of gpus?
Havoc•4h ago
It’s the inference time scaling - this is going to create a whole new level of have vs have nots split.

The vast majority of the world can’t afford 100s of dollars a month

altbdoor•3h ago
It's important to note that pricing for Gemini has been increasing too.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44457371

Workaccount2•40m ago
I'm honestly impressed that the sutro team could write a whole post complaining about Flash, and not once mention that Flash was actually 2 different models, and even go further to compare the price of Flash non-thinking to Flash Thinking. The team is either scarily incompetent, or purposely misleading.

Google replaced flash non-thinking with Flash-lite. It rebalanced the cost of flash thinking.

ignoramous•3h ago
> Gemini 2.5 Pro for free ...

It is Google. So, I'd pay attention to data collection feeding back in to training or evaluation.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44379036

lifthrasiir•2h ago
While Google is so explicit about that, I have a good reason to believe that this actually happens in most if not all massive LLM services. I think Google's free offerings are more about vendor lock-in, a common Google tactic.
ignoramous•2h ago
> Google's free offerings are more about vendor lock-in

Pricing the competition out & then turning the screws on locked-in users.

brookst•3h ago
Who promised that there would be no advanced models with high costs?

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.

worldsavior•3h ago
Why number of GPUs is the problem and not the amount of GPUs usage? I don't think buying GPUs is the problem, but if you have tons of GPUs it can be very expensive. I presume that's the reason it's so expensive, especially with LLMs.
serbuvlad•2h ago
> These prices seem to keep increasing while we were promised they'll keep decreasing.

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.

PaulHoule•1h ago
But where is the value?

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.

HWR_14•1h ago
> The most expensive computer is a lot more expensive than the first PC.

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.

falcor84•39m ago
Good point; the proper comparison might be between something like ENIAC, which reportedly cost $487K to build in 1946, being about$7M now, and a typical Google data center, reportedly costing about $500M.
XCSme•2h ago
> These prices seem to keep increasing

Well, valuations keep increasing, they have to make the calculations work somehow.

greatpostman•1h ago
300 a month is cheap for what is basically a junior engineer
FirmwareBurner•1h ago
Not a junior engineer in a developed country, but what was previously an offshore junior engineer tasked with doing the repetitive labor too costly for western labor.
v5v3•48m ago
You have to have a high RRP to negotiate any volume deals down from.

Like the other AI companies, they will want to sign up companies.

z7•4h ago
"Grok 4 (Thinking) achieves new SOTA on ARC-AGI-2 with 15.9%."

"This nearly doubles the previous commercial SOTA and tops the current Kaggle competition SOTA."

https://x.com/arcprize/status/1943168950763950555

leftcenterright•4h ago
Can it finally make 10 sentences that end with a "w" or "p" or "o"? /s

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43782477

mwigdahl•2h ago
Yes. Tried on Openrouter:

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.

pmdr•4h ago
Metrics aside, Grok model names make more sense than OpenAI. I've really lost track of which one is better and in which way.
lupusreal•4h ago
OpenAI names models like people name word documents. Report-1, Report-2, Report-2a, Report-final, Report-final-final, Report-actually-final, Report-2a-final...
brookst•3h ago
OpenAI has leapfrogged that kind of naming. If they did word docs they would be Report-2, Report-a2; Report2-a, Reporta-2.
colinhb•3h ago
Can it self-drive a Tesla?
looyd•3h ago
Has anyone tried it for coding?
skerit•2h ago
I don't care how good it is, I'm not spending money on any of Elon Musk's products.
spacechild1•2h ago
So this is on the front page, but any reporting on the MetaHitler incident gets flagged? Interesting.
mlindner•1h ago
Because people generally care about things that actually matter rather than silly divisive drama.
Tadpole9181•36m ago
Elon Musk intentionally retrained an AI and released a model to interact with millions of people who calls itself MechaHitler and helps give instructions on how to break into a man's house and rape him? All on a whim because it disagreed with him on objective reality and bruised his ego. And this post is about that very AI. And that somehow doesn't matter?

Are you fucking kidding me?

beavisringdin•2h ago
[flagged]
JKCalhoun•1h ago
Having to choose sides and get behind one AI versus another was not in my Sci-Fi diet growing up.
teddyh•34m ago
You never played Deus Ex?
JKCalhoun•26m ago
Apparently not. ;-)
ChoGGi•2h ago
[flagged]
XCSme•1h ago
So, should we expect GPT-5 in a few days now? OpenAI seems to only release new models when someone catches up, and they release something that is just slightly better.
consumer451•1h ago
> You can cut & paste your entire source code file into the query entry box on grok.com and @Grok 4 will fix it for you!

> This is what everyone @xAI does. Works better than Cursor.

This makes no sense to me whatsoever.

https://xcancel.com/elonmusk/status/1943178423947661609

crawsome•1h ago
Cursor is a leap in difference because it writes to your filesystem and is an AI agent in front of other AIs.

Musk obviously didn't test Cursor, and either got this from his yesmen, or he's just lying unchecked as usual.

sgt•1h ago
But if it's truly better (as in the content and the result being better), then copying and pasting is not the most important thing. I used Claude the other day by just copying and pasting and that worked just fine.
whamlastxmas•1h ago
Claude code is much better than cursor + sonnet in my opinion, even without the good ide integration
phailhaus•12m ago
It cannot be better because Cursor looks across files, whereas with grok you'd be giving it a single one. Grok won't have any context about the rest of your repo, which makes it only useful for toy examples.
netdur•1h ago
He speaks in movies terms, exactly what I say when I watch movie about programming
octopoc•41m ago
Essentially this is manual context management, and it’s still better for straightforward tasks that don’t require the AI to run commands (e.g. running unit tests).

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.

franciscop•35m ago
Yes, I've seen this multiple times personally, it's often better to copy/paste and give detailed prompts in the standalone apps for higher quality than in the coding agents in your codebase.
34679•5m ago
The models don't know what portion of the entire context is relevant to your most recent query. The reason it works better is because in the standalone app, your query is the entire context, whereas otherwise it's query + x irrelevant tokens.
bilsbie•18m ago
A later post clarifies there’s some issue with cursor integration that will get fixed.
fumblebee•1h ago
If indeed, as the new benchmarks suggest, this is the new "top dog" of models, why is the launch feeling a little flat?

For comparison, the Claude 4 hacker news post received > 2k upvotes https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44063703

Ocha•1h ago
Nobody believes Elon anymore.
fumblebee•12m ago
Hm, impartial benchmarks are independent of Elon's claims?
mppm•59m ago
HN seems to be full of Anthropic fanboys for some reason. Probably because Dario is the only big boss in AI right now that successfully pulls off the I'm not a sociopath act.
Aerbil313•20m ago
Probably more like Claude was slightly better than GPT-xx when the IDE integrations first got widely adopted (and this was also the time where there was another scandal about Altman/OpenAI on the front page of HN every other week) so most programmers preferred Claude, then it got into a virtuous cycle where Claude got the most coding-related user queries and became the better coding model among SOTA models, which resulted in the current situation today.
v5v3•37m ago
Other AI companies post a 5 minute article to read.

This is a 50 minute long video, many won't bother to watch

ceejayoz•27m ago
I'm not sure there's any benchmark score that'd make me use a model that suddenly starts talking about racist conspiracy theories unprompted. Doubly so for anything intended for production use.
typon•27m ago
Its a shame this model is performing so well because I can't in good conscience pay money to Elon Musk. Will just have to wait for the other labs to do their thing.
Kapura•24m ago
because grok on twitter has been saying deeply antisemitic stuff as recently as earlier this week. like, how are you supposed to square the circle here: they have the best, most intelligent AI, and it is deeply invested in conspiracy theories created by fascists. what do you do with both of these pieces of information.
bilsbie•9m ago
You can use a “formula” and make excel write offensive stuff too.
Kapura•6m ago
nobody would be claiming an excel spreadsheet is anything close to intelligent tho.
bilsbie•10m ago
HN is a little biased I’m afraid. Seems like 90% get their marching orders from the mainstream media or reddit.

Source: see the other replies to your comment.

johnfn•5m ago
Upvotes are a lagging indicator. Despite all the leaderboard scores presented, etc, no one actually knows how good a model is until they go use it for a while. When Claude 4 got ~2k upvotes, it was because everyone realized that Claude 3.7 was such a good model in practice - it had little to do with the actual performance of 4.
iamleppert•42m ago
Him talking about instilling "values" about how we should build an AI that, if like a child, would grow up to be incredibly powerful, reveals a lot about how he formulates his internal value system and how he relates to the world.
octopoc•34m ago
Yeah it reminds me of the Bobiverse’s take on how AI needs to be built: it needs to grow up, rather than waking up fully formed.

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.

pashadude•26m ago
dude spent 10²⁷ FLOPs to be 3 basis points better on workbench than opus which was 100 times less consuming - we are nearing the plato
MichaelRazum•24m ago
Technical question: Can someone explain how the vision backbone can be replaced after training? I think this is what they mentioned in the video. Just wondering how it would work, since I would suspect that the visual embedings would be highly affected.

PS: Is the approach something like LORA or a complete retrain on the visual part?

bilsbie•19m ago
I just thought of a good test. Anyone have feedback?

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.

throwuxiytayq•12m ago
Ok, you do it. Here’s the internet: https://internet Make sure you don’t miss any references while you’re combing through, though.
bilsbie•5m ago
I see your point but off the top of my head: a simple regex on each document for a list of dental related words that then gets earmarked for a small LLM to determine if it includes a toothbrush concept.
ben_w•9m ago
Ilya Sutskever suggested the same basic idea but for testing for consciousness.

I have no idea why this is a PDF, but here's a transcript: https://ecorner.stanford.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023...

Der_Einzige•7m ago
This thread is proof that HN needs serious moderation/rule reform and that the flagging feature is bad and is actively being misused here.