alt Hacker NewsGrok 4.6
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As polarizing as grok is, it was basically inevitable for it to start being a real competitor given how much investment SpaceX made into its own inference capabilities.
Seems if you are okay with it, there's no reason to use anything but the highest effort levels of some other frontier models for the price.
I think Grok provides healthy competition to the other labs, though I do think they bank on groks reputation making it less appealing to many.
Anyone else find it weird how within 2 months of Fable releasing all the major labs suddenly had Fable-level models? Trying to think of explanations:
1) AI researchers talk and change companies often, so techniques circulate. This feels implausible because training and shipping a new model ought to take longer than 2 months?
2) Distillation - also implausible for the reason above.
3) Benchmark hacking. AI companies have ways they can dial up performance artificially, and will reach for that to maintain the appearance of parity.
Other reasons?
Edit: Most replies are ignoring timing. It's the near-concurrent release of the same jump in capability that I find suspicious; not the fact that labs can catch up eventually.
Fable-like intelligence, beats GPT-5.6-Sol on most benchmarks, cheaper than Kimi K3 on API and quite generous usage on Cursor subscription.
In terms of using experience, I found Grok 4.5 to be way more pleasant to use than GPT 5.6 Sol and Claude 4.8/5. It just gets to the point, and is super fast and concise, no yapping. That's how AI agents should be imo. None of the weird "Claude ipsum" jargon like "load-bearing" and "stale folklore" or GPT 5.6-isms like "focused regression" and "provenance".
I'd let the dust settle rather than trusting benchmarks. But in general a third competitive frontier model would be great.
I still think that it's very possible Gemini gets its act together and becomes the true competitor to the existing frontier models (on more than just cost). But they sure are taking their time with this one, and recent org changes don't exactly signal confidence
Cursor blog: https://cursor.com/blog/grok-4-6
>Grok 4.6 produces stronger first passes on visual and interactive projects than we typically saw with Grok 4.5. Given a concrete product idea, it is able to establish structure and visual language for an application in one pass.
As a designer, I'm always hesitant to believe these statements until there's independent comparisons between the old & new model, as well as comparisons to human made flows. Design can be so subjective that blanket statements like this seem almost useless.
Thats actually a lot more impressive than I thought. At least on paper
Q for all: what do we do if they’re the new frontier lab for the foreseeable future?
You may not like Elon, but you must respect him. I don't think anyone expected 6 months ago that Grok would be at the frontier and beating openAI and anthropic. Competition is good.
Still not dead somehow even though they've been renting out datacenter capacity and other (seeming) problems with people leaving and so on. Quite impressive unless it's just been benchmaxxed.
Tangental, but has anyone else noticed grok's voice mode got stupid and terse ~2 weeks ago? I've absolutely loved grok's voice mode since it came out (incredibly useful for brainstorming on walks and helping conceptualise and get the verbiage for expressing ideas) but it seems so have lost about 40 IQ points recently, and if the question is multi-part, it often answers just one part with no elaboration or explanation of the other parts or interactions between parts. No clue why.
So did they distill Mythos in the "Macrohard" data centers? Can Grok hack now and get a free AISI commercial?
Just after DeepSeek-V4-Pro-0813 published, is this on purpose?
how many CSAM per second on this version
Pricing pages haven't been updated yet, still advertises 4.5
What is the nazi name calling? Winston Churchill the fucker who was responsible for many deaths due to starvation us India is hailed here like a hero. He is not better than a nazi for us. Musk is much better that evil person.
Very impressive
gpt 5.6 sol and fable 5 level if the benches hold
Wow, OpenAI is now 4th after Opus 5, K3, and Grok
Fable level performance, faster and significantly cheaper. Wow!
Very excited for this release. I love how based the model is.
Nobody wants a nazi AI
Literal trash for nazis.
By the way if you're looking to get off of Cursor since X.ai bought them, I switched to Zed a few weeks ago and out-of-the-box it does everything Cursor can without charging you their dumbass premium. The transition is pretty much seamless
It's crazy that I'd literally trust a Chinese AI company with my data over anything Musk is involved with.
Like, even if you don't care about (or even like) his politics and can look past how unlikable he comes off as, the damage he's done to his own reputation in this domain just makes using his products like this a no-go. He's literally so rich that he can get caught personally looking through chat sessions and it wouldn't slow him down a bit. He's too rich to be held accountable, and that makes it impossible to trust his businesses. It's a funny dynamic that I don't think is appreciated enough, but I know that if Google or Amazon or OpenAI or Anthropic (etc.) got caught doing something like that, the backlash would be astounding and the reputation hit they'd take would be brutal. Here, Musk would just awkwardly come out attacking people for not letting him behave unethically even more than he already is, and that'd be it.
Beyond that, the obvious astroturfing that occurs on this site (along with reddit, etc.) when it comes to Grok isn't helping. All I hear about Claude, GPT, Gemini, etc., are how terrible they are, yet any discussion of Grok seems to always revolve around sensible, but confident, assertions that it's actually a great product and every new release is the point where Grok finally catches up.