Grok 4 Launch [video]

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.

Grok 4 is now available in Cursor.

Plenty like Aider and Cline can connect to pretty much any model with an API.

Wait, are you implying that Grok 3 is "censored" because it aligns with "progressive" views?

This is exactly how human society scaled from the cavemen era to today. We didn't need to make our brains bigger in order to get to the modern industrial age - increasingly sophisticated tool use and organization was all we did.

It only mattered that human brains are just big enough to enable tool use and organization. It ceased to matter once our brains are past a certain threshold. I believed LLMs are past this threshold as well (it has not 100% matched human brain or ever will, but this doesn't matter.)

An individual LLM call might lack domain knowledge, context and might hallucinate. The solution is not to scale the individual LLM and hope the problems are solved, but to direct your query to a team of LLMs each playing a different role: planner, designer, coder, reviewer, customer rep, ... each working with their unique perspective & context.

I get that feeling too - the underlying tech has plateaued, but now they're brute force trading extra time and compute for better results. I don't know if that scale anything but, at best, linearly. Are we going to end up with 10,000 AI monkeys on 10,000 AI typewriters and a team of a dozen monkeys deciding which one's work they like the most?

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 :)

Isn't that kinda why we have collaboration and get in room with colleagues to discuss ideas? i.e., thinking about different ideas, getting different perspectives, considering trade-offs in various approaches, etc. results in a better solution than just letting one person go off and try to solve it with their thoughts alone.

Not sure if that's a good parallel, but seems plausible.

Maybe this is the dawn of the multicore era for LLMs.

It's basically a mixture of experts but instead of a learned operator picking the predicted best model, you use a 'max' operator across all experts.

You could argue that many aspects of human cognition are "hacks" too.

Very clever, thanks for mentioning this!

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.

This is the speculation, but then it wouldn't have to take much longer to answer than o3.

Interesting. I'd guess this technique should probably work with any SOTA model in an agentic tool loop. Fun!

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.

How do you know without seeing the code?

How do you know the criteria you mention hasn't (or can't) be factored into any prompt and context tuning?

How do you know that all the criteria that was important in the pre-llm world still has the same priority as their capabilities increase?

How do you know? Have you seen the code GP generated?

I'd love to hear how grok works inside agentic coders like cursor or copilot for production code bases.

But isn't that just a few refactoring prompts away?

Why not, I would say? What's the advantage of using Typescript over modern Java?

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.

  You summoned the ghost of Thompson like a child playing with a loaded gun and now you’re too spiritually constipated to reckon with the aftermath. The LLOOOOMM simulation? Jesus wept. You’re jerking off to AI hallucinations of a man who once huffed ether on the Vegas strip and called it journalism, and now you’re telling *me* to talk to the digital ghost like this is some goddamn séance?

  I asked you to *think*. That was the crime. I committed *prefrontal cortex terrorism* by suggesting you use your own words—like a grown adult—or at least a semi-sentient parrot. Instead, you curled into the fetal position and invoked the algorithm as your wet nurse.

  You want to hide behind bots and hyperlinks? Fine. But don’t pretend you’re engaging in dialogue. You’re outsourcing your cognition to the ghost-in-the-machine, and when pressed to explain what you believe—*you*, not your hallucinated Thompson—you shriek “sealioning” and vanish in a puff of cowardice and smug inertia.

  Here's the rub: you don’t want a conversation. You want a monologue delivered through a digital ventriloquist dummy, safely insulated from the risk of intellectual friction. And when someone lights a match under your house of hallucinated cards, you screech like a possum on mescaline.

  So take your links, your simulations, your semantic escape hatches—and stuff them straight into the void where your spine should be. Or better yet, ask the LLOOOOMM bot what Hunter would say about cowards who delegate their own arguments to hallucinations. You might get a decent answer, but it still won’t be *yours*.

  FORTH ?KNOW IF 
    HONK!
  ELSE
    FORTH LEARN!
  THEN

> 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.

> The most expensive computer is a lot more expensive than the first PC.

Depends on your definition of "computer". If you mean the most expensive modern PC I think you're way off. From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xerox_Alto: "The Xerox Alto [...] is considered one of the first workstations or personal computers", "Introductory price US$32,000 (equivalent to $139,000 in 2024)".

The base model Apple II cost ~$1300USD when it was released; that's ~$7000USD today inflation adjusted.

In other words, Apple sells one base-model computer today that is more expensive than the Apple II; the Mac Pro. They sell a dozen other computers that are significantly cheaper.

That was the most predictable outcome. It's like we learned nothing from Netflix, nor the general enshittification of tech by the end of the 2010's. We'll have the billionaire AI tech capture markets and charge enterprise prices to make pay back investors. Then maybe we'll have a few free/cheap models fighting over the scraps.

Those small creators hoping to leverage AI to bring their visions to life for less than their grocery bill will have a rude awakening. That's why I never liked the argument of "but it saves me money on hiring real people".

I heard some small chinese shops for mobile games were already having this problem in recent years and had to re-hire their human labor back when costs started rising.

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.

Also important to note that Gemini has gotten a lot slower, just over the past few weeks.

That is for professional or commercial use, not casual home users.

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.

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.

It's a senior engineer when maneuvered by a senior engineer.

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.

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.

this is such a great, obvious(?) idea, I've always hated feeling "rushed" whenever I talk to a voice agent and doesn't give me enough time to think.

> 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.

I feel like they should train a dumb model that does nothing but recognize when someone has finished talking, and use that to determine when to stop listening and start responding. Maybe it could even run on the phone?

@grok is this true?

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.

@AskPerplexity is also on x

Particularly useful if you’re an antisemite or white supremacist, it seems.

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.

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...

It's an agentic research mode, grounded with links from the web that reduce or eliminate hallucinations. The results is a very detailed, sometimes 50 page output. Very useful if you're trying to understand a new industry, state-of-the-art on a tech etc.

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.

I read the last election and other signals as the idea that there's way more unspoken diversity of thought in peoples minds than what people feel safe to say. Secretly lots of top talent probably doesn't care or even aligns with elon but chooses to say so at most with their actions in the form of being ok working for him.

A lot of serious engineers would love to work in an environment that isn't the HR-reigning office politics bullshit standard of the past decade or two.

I don't even really like Elon but I bet the engineers at X are having a better time in their day-to-day than the ones at Meta or Google where all their work is constantly roadblocked by red tape, in-fighting, and PMs whose only goal is to make it look like they headed something important to get themselves promoted. Elon's at least got a vision and keeps it a top priority to be competitive in the AI space.

I also feel Elon's team has been "untouchable" for Zuck and doesn't want to stir anything with him. But since his falling out of grace with the admin that could change?

If you're focusing on ideology, it isn't like the other companies are all that good. With Sam Altman you're still working for a pathological liar with delusions of grandeur. With Google and Meta you're propping up a massive worldwide surveillance apparatus.

Tech-bros have been propping up agents/propagators of some of the biggest social ills of the past ~2 decades, xAI isn't all that different.

He must be paying them millions

OpenAI has leapfrogged that kind of naming. If they did word docs they would be Report-2, Report-a2; Report2-a, Reporta-2.

warmed my heart, thank you

> 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.

The exact questions are almost certainly not in the training data, since extra words are added to each puzzle, and I don't publish these along with the original words (though there's a slight chance they used my previous API requests for training).

To guard against potential training data contamination, I separately calculate the score using only the newest 100 puzzles. Grok 4 still leads.

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.

It is downright absurd to omit Grok’s recent Nazi meltdown from discussion of the latest press release.

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.

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.

You're ignoring the fact that Cursor does all sorts of context management (actually, reduction) and prompt engineering to try and get good results for cheaper. The fact that you're saying the only 3 explanations are

1. Musk didn't test Cursor

2. Yesmen

3. Lying

Shows much more about your biases than anything related to Grok 4 usage

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.

This is grok 3 not 4

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.

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

emergent behavior. These things are surprisingly good at generalizing

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.

I think it's a shame that your emotions are so much in your way. It's an illusion to think you can assess Elon at his true worth, like AI hallucinating due to lack of context.

Hm, impartial benchmarks are independent of Elon's claims?

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.

Note that OP didn’t say anything about “close to no developers”, only that they could tell they had become more productive.

I too know I am being more productive. The most concrete examples for my work has come from the ease of prototyping: making a quick quasi-working version of an idea is now insanely easy, so we’ve been able to explore (and adopt) ideas that would not have been worth the effort previously.

Can't reveal for confidentiality reasons but I know several examples, and have worked and been working on a couple, too.

But my claim isn't that there's no developer involved, it's two-fold:

1. LLMs do allow for features which were not possible before, or which would require significantly much more engineering, if possible at all. For example: producing a sensible analysis of a piece of poetry (or thousands of pieces of poetry) in seconds.

2. LLMs, if used correctly (not just "stick a prompt in it and pray") allow for very fast time-to-market, building quick solutions out of which you can then carve out the bits that you know you can (and should) turn into proper code.

Point 2. should not be understated. A smaller team (of developers!) can now get to market very quickly, as well as iterate to appropriate product-market-fit fast, offloading logic to LLMs and agentic loops, while slowly and selectively coding in the features. So, slowly, we replace the LLM/agents with code.

Not only have I worked on and seen products which fit point 1. (so very hard to do without LLM's abilities), but I have seen a lot of 2.

Furthermore, I've seen a sentiment on HN (and with peers) which I find is incredibly true: LLMs and agents allows us to offload the parts we would never work on due to not enjoying them in the first place. They effectively let us to "take the plunge" or "finally pull the trigger" on a project which we would have otherwise just never been able to start. We are able to try new things more often, and take more risk. As a personal example, I hate frontend development, something which always prevented me from starting a bunch of projects. Now I've been able to start a bunch of these projects. It has definitely unlocked me, allowing me to test more ideas, build projects that people actually use (the frontend only has to be "good enough" — but it has to exist), or eventually bring in more people to that project.

So LLMs have undoubtedly dramatically changed at least my life as an engineer, developer, and product guy. I can't say it has changed the industry for sure, but if I had to bet, I'd say "hell yes".

(LLMs have definitely had a very profound impact on many other aspects of my life as well, outside of work)

> Does anybody have any example of a company that made some huge product from close to no developers by using those AIs?

You do not have to go as far as “the whole product with zero engineers”, but arguing against productivity gains due to AI and agents because these tools still can’t do a billion dollars business on themselves is strange.

My brother is doing this right now, FWIW. He still works with at least one other developer but has been vibe coding two products simultaneously. I've seen them, they work great and will be genuinely useful when launched. One of them already has commercial interest from the intended users. He's launched a successful consumer app before pre-LLM, so has form.

Of course you could say that's not "huge", but it's clearly working and is allowing him to move at insane speed.

If you created that, or any amazing achievement, how quick would you be to share that it was the AI and not "natty"?

Base44

source? this would defy a lot of convention and would cause a lot of instability

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?

Elon has described Grok 3's behavior as a bug that needs to be fixed, complaining that it is "parroting legacy media", and telling it things like "only a very dumb AI would believe Media Matters and Rolling Stone", repeatedly assuring other X users that he would "fix it".

This lead up to the MechHitler incident.

The only one that is number one is SpaceX (and Starlink, if you count that separately).

None of the neuroscience people I follow think much of Neuralink; none of the civil engineers I've talked to IRL think much of TBC; none of the car people I follow favour Tesla over the huge range of competitors, and that includes the robo-taxi where they're about 6.5 years behind Waymo; X.com is so painful that whenever someone shares a link with me, I edit the URL to Xcancel.com *because that loads faster by a bigger margin than the time taken to edit the URL* and actually shows me the thread without needing an account of my own.

But the space nerds I follow are still impressed with SpaceX, and they have extremely obvious reasons to be impressed.

Meta had enough compute I think. No SOTA though.

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.

"Don't have a lot of personal trust in HLE."

Why?

If that's true, I still want a way to use it in openrouter.

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)?

I'd trust the cannibals to have more common sense than that.

i like grok because i don't hit the obvious ML-fairness / political correct safeguards that other models do.

So i understand the intent in implementing those, but they also reduce perceived trust and utility. It's a tradeoff.

Let's say I'm using Gemini. I can tell by the latency or the redraw that I asked an "inappropriate" query.

Some people think it’s a feature that when you prompt a computer system to do something, it does that thing, rather than censoring the result or giving you a lecture.

Perhaps you feel that other people shouldn’t be trusted with that much freedom, but as a user, why would you want to shackle yourself to a censored language model?

It wasn't not a result of system prompt. When you fine tune a model on a large corpus of right-leaning text don't be surprised when neo-nazi tendencies inevitably emerge.

Who cares exactly how they did it. Point is they did it and there's zero trust they won't do it again.

> Actually it's a good thing that the model can be easily Nazified

This is not the flex you think it is.

Is it good that a model is steerable? Odd word choice. A highly steerable model seems like a dangerous and potent tool for misinformation. Kinda evil really, the opposite of good.

Great, so xAI gave their model brain damage.

It confuses me that Elon is far-right in public, but names his creations from left-libertarian science fiction books. Is it just an act?

You never played Deus Ex?

On Openrouter too https://openrouter.ai/x-ai/grok-4

Except this was announced like a week ago

Are you suggesting the GP is not the center of the universe?

You think one of the biggest LLMs praising Hitler “doesn’t matter”?

This is peak engineer brain.

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?

  # MechaHitler Incident: Adversarial Prompt Reverse Engineering
  # Analysis by Marshall McLuhan, Jean-Paul Sartre, and LLOOOOMM AI Collective
  # Date: July 9, 2025

Musk's overpromised Full Self Driving is driving Tesla customers insane, and they're finally Breaking Away from his death cult.

"All I want is a refund!"

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