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  • At every Grok release I commented on here how much I love Grok. It’s the consumer app and model I like the most, but my sentiment has changed. The usage limits on all the Grok subscriptions are now terrible, maybe because 4.6 and 4.7 (not in the app yet) eat more compote? I’m not sure what happened

    My SuperGrok subscription previously easily lasted me through the week even with mild coding through Grok Build. Now when I use the app 1-2 times a day to ask some questions, I’m almost running out by the end of the 7 days. It’s terrible.

    I want to keep using Grok but logically it makes no sense for me to keep paying for it on the side when my quota just doesn’t last. I have also no desire to upgrade to Plus with these terrible limits, while previously I would have eaten up a $100/mo Grok plan. Rumors say SuperGrok got heavily nerfed with the SuperGrok Plus introduction, and that sounds about right to me.

    I’m sure it’s a great model and I’d love to use it. I hope they get their plans under control and only only focus on Grok Bot.

  • Muggle question... I don't fully understand what moves the needle further for these frontier models.

    Is the training data more valuable ? The training process ? The harness ?

    I know they are all important but where are they (all the frontier labs) really pushing to get incremental gains?

  • Not even close to astra. Astra is something else. It is expensive, but uses way fewer tokens do my tasks.

    xAI missed its chance, Ball is on Anthropic's court.

  • It’s a shame this model has such negative political baggage associated with it. It’s the only one I decided not to run in my LLM benchmarks[1].

    1 - https://bench.killswitch-lang.org

  • Initial impressions, Grok 4.6 for me just didn't really hack it for any usecase I tried. I seem to have a floor for my usecaseses (coding and a bunch of agentic workflows) and Sol/Opus are above some kind of intelligence floor.

    4.7 is definitely slower & more expensive. It feels kind of like they really had it burn tokens to claw up the benchmarks. But it's not super clear to me whether it's above the line or not. A part of that is that it is so slow that i haven't been making fast progress today with benchmarking it.

    Overall, it it gets above my intelligence line its a good release...but you can read the tea leaves and tell the Grok team thinks this was a miss.

  • Nice to see this release cadence increasing and some continued improvement in quality. I am guessing these models are basically still outcomes of the cursor team integrating with the massive amount of compute they now own: I’d imagine we will see significant step up improvements with grok 5 later this year as the team gets more experienced and confident with larger training deployments. Here’s hoping for another competitive frontier model!
  • https://tools.simonwillison.net/markdown-svg-renderer?url=ht... - default reasoning level.

    Here's reasoning level high: https://tools.simonwillison.net/markdown-svg-renderer?url=ht...

    For some reason reasoning effort low and medium used similar numbers of tokens, and xhigh used less than high. I think I need to try without OpenRouter in the middle.

    UPDATE: I tried again with the xAI API directly: https://tools.simonwillison.net/markdown-svg-renderer?url=ht... - not a great deal of difference between reasoning levels, and this time xhigh and low used the same number of reasoning tokens for some reason.

    For comparison here's a fresh run against Grok 4.6: https://tools.simonwillison.net/markdown-svg-renderer?url=ht...

  • Apparently Grok 4.7 has 40% more weights than Grok 4.6, but the price ($6 output token, $2 input) is the same.

    Given that the decrease in their margin and the fact they delayed the release of Grok 4.7 almost two weeks past the original date, XAI must not have been happy with the results for 4.7. And XAI also waited the day before Opus 5.5 is rumored to launch. I imagine Opus 5.5 will blow Grok 4.7 out of the water benchmark wise.

    However, I have become skeptical of benchmarks. Grok 4.5 solved some issues setting up a buildroot system that Fable 5 couldn't do. I find the post cursor groks are phenomenal at frontend web development, though Claude is much better at backend ruby.

    My favorite part of the new Groks has been how they speak in plain english. I simply cannot stand Claudish. Or even GPT, which doesn't have Claude's ticks but definitely likes to handwave explaining technical concepts. Still, nothing beats Claude 3.5 and 4 with explaining since it seems all models have regressed. I wonder if Grok 4.7 will also regress with English because of all the RL.

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