Grok 4.5

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• Hacker News
• Every time I get excited about Grok’s performance on benchmarks and demo videos, I test it myself and end up disappointed.

  I'll give this one a try with a grain of salt and lowering my levels of expectations

  by HyperL0gi
• What do you think?
  by electriclove
• My only complaint is that a $40 plan gets you very little usage out of Grok Build. 8 hours for an entire month, that is definitely not worth $40.
  by giancarlostoro
• I am trying to benchmark it now, but:

      - It doesn't seem available in EU (?)
      - Using a VPN seems to sort of fix it, but it's way slower than I expected, when everyone was praising it, it feels like the speed is slowly ramping up
      - Cost is $2/$6 for <200k context only, above that, cost is $4/$12
      - GLM-5.2 still seems smarter, faster and much cheaper: 
  

  https://aibenchy.com/compare/x-ai-grok-4-5-medium/z-ai-glm-5...
  by XCSme
• Can someone breakdown to me how this makes any sort of economical sense? Spending billions and billions to have the 3rd best model while even the number 1 and 2 players already seem to struggle making a profit. What am I missing here? Not trying to go full Ed Zitron but this doesn’t make sense to me.
  by codemog
• They only struggle to make a profit because of investments into their future, basically: training, aggressive hiring of AI researchers. Anthropic seems to have 90% margin on their API pricing and all enterprise customers have to use this.

  And the reason they can do this is because they can create a $1Tr company in 5 years, so they know the investment will pay off.

  Why Elon wants his own model so much is a good question with many possible answers, but if Cursor/xAI can produce a truly good model at competitive pricing I don't see why many people won't jump on it.

  by ymolodtsov
• This market is far from mature or established to be making rankings. There's been plenty of tech markets where the early days didn't predict the later years.

  I'm personally skeptical of Grok but maybe they can pull off a profitable niche with Cursor integration once Claude loses it's edge.

  by dmix
• Anthropic is already profitable, economics is no longer an issue as they have found PMF in enterprise software market. You might need to update your views.

  https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/mind-blowing-growth-is-about-to-...

  by aayushdutt
• My guess is that the use here is similar to the reason AWS started as Amazon selling their excess capacity.

  Between Tesla, SpaceX, X, Boring Co and Neuralink they probably want the capability internally for a lot of different applications.

  If the whole data centers in space thing works out AND people keep protesting/blocking data center build outs on land SpaceX will eventually dominate the entire AI industry just based on escaping scarcity.

  by brightball
• The product is the stock.

  It is very valuable when you have various bundles of services, such as satellites, AI, and so on, to keep pace with the majors so that you keep pace with their valuation.

  These stacking valuations are not additive, they're multiplicative because you additionally market investors to the synergy between them.

  Having the third best model statistically is extremely useful in this context.

  by goodroot
• You could be typing the same about Google or a number of the other labs right now.

  A diverse market full of choices keeps it from becoming the browser wars all over again.

  by TheGoddessInari
• They have the same dreams as their competitors - finding a breakthrough that gives them an edge over the others and makes them dominant. And also, having the word 'AI' anywhere near your company makes all the right numbers go up, so having an in-house AI division that Musk can bundle with the other companies to pump their valuations with is very helpful to him, even if the product itself loses some money.
  by tavavex
• Previously they were a distant fourth. They're not going to single-shot catch up to OpenAI or Anthropic, but they moved up the ladder one rung.

  In the short term labs are not profitable, although supposedly Anthropic is close. But Amazon was also famously unprofitable for many many years, and then won huge. Current profits or lack thereof are not necessarily important to investors: what's important is they believe in your future potential profits.

  In this case, Elon clearly believes much of the economy will be run by AI in the future, and the economic value of a token will rise faster than the cost of generating the token — including the amortized cost of training the model to produce that token. Thus he is building a lab to train models and charge for inference of those models, and — he believes — it will eventually become profitable even if it isn't now.

  You may or may not agree with him (and you may or may not agree he's capable of beating Ant/OAI), but current profits aren't a great indicator of whether he believes future profits are attainable. Tesla and SpaceX were also very unprofitable, until they weren't.

  Personally I agree with him that there will be massive profits in the future, although I am not as confident in his ability to beat Ant/OAI, at least given his recent difficulties in retaining researchers.

  by reissbaker
• Tried this for a legal use case and it was excellent, comparable to Opus in quality but much faster. AI is miles behind in law compared to coding: the output was similar to a law student intern. But coherent and directionally correct and beats starting from a blank sheet of paper. Impressed.
  by rayiner
• How does Fable compare?
  by seunosewa
• I'd like to use it for legal work too. Microsoft makes great hay about its ability to sandbox CoPilot's work and not train on or share company resources ("Look for the green checkmark."). It's largely for that reason that we've rolled out Copilot to most of the white collar positions in the company. Do you happen to know whether xAI has similar functionality?
  by hcurtiss
• Great model, very nice. Opus class performance at Haiku level pricing (or cheaper with the token efficiency). This seems like a GLM-5.2 killer and this is what Sonnet 5 should have been.

  This is a model I could really see used inside applications, where Opus or Sonnet or GPT-5.5 are too expensive.

  I would really like to see a strong Deepseek v4-Flash competitor, which ideally is something like Sonnet 4.6 performance at <$0.30 per token. This is missing from main US labs.

  by mchusma
• Tencent Hy3 looks like it may be slightly better than v4 flash at same price point. Though not a US lab ofc
  by kostyal
• https://tools.simonwillison.net/markdown-svg-renderer#url=ht...
  by simonw
• drive it like you stole it
  by sejje
• Looks like to be riding a bike that uses car wheels with thick hubcaps.
  by wewtyflakes
• Hamsters are also getting better, but still quite off compared to SOTA models:

  https://aibenchy.com/showcase/?q=grok

  by XCSme
• https://imgur.com/a/UlGcBou
  by bschwindHN
• With each release from the the other major labs, it becomes harder for Google to tell a compelling story about Gemini 3.5.

  Edit: Gemini 3.5 Pro. Expectations grow with each day it is not released.

  by xnx
• What are you talking about gemini 3.5 flash beats fable at tool calling and is 5x faster... I think it's very competitive and what most normal people are using.
  by dakolli
• This is only true if you live in HN bubble.

  I learned that outside of tech, Gemini is widely used in enterprise.

  E.g. in the insurance company where my SO works, the major tasks are writing Gemini "gems" (some kind of prompts I think) and NotebookLM is a killer product for e.g. collecting and summarizing new laws, cross checking documents and what internal regulations are.

  I then learned it's used in a chemistry consultancy company of a friend of mine to process reports. Flash and Pro models are also wildly popular in another European bank I know people in to assist in customer care (pre processing tickets before handing them to humans), translations, reporting, etc.

  Google suite is already at the core of many businesses and Google easily adds these offerings without new contracting being needed.

  Don't confuse our bubble with the real world. You can have a disaster product like teams and still dominate enterprise because you were already there with excel, outlook and SharePoint.

  by epolanski
• Generous free tier, when its not overloaded.

  Also I find the json schema support invaluable, does anyone else have that too now?

  by MrBuddyCasino
• Gemini 3.5 Pro hasn't been released yet.
  by squidbeak
• I have paid personal subs to ChatGPT, Claude, Grok, Gemini

  For science (primary biology/pharmacology) questions, Gemini 3.1 Flash Extended produces the answers I _personally_ find "best", in terms of content, phrasing, and formatting.

  by gavinray
• for what it's worth, it's fairly popular among my non-technical coworkers here in Russia. we have unlimited access to all models so it's not about the cost, and they still prefer Gemini over Claude and GPT. I never bothered to ask why, but I assume it's better at communicating in Russian.
  by vlian2088