[HN Gopher] Grok 4 Fast now has 2M context window
___________________________________________________________________
Grok 4 Fast now has 2M context window
Author : hereme888
Score : 164 points
Date : 2025-11-09 04:10 UTC (18 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (docs.x.ai)
(TXT) w3m dump (docs.x.ai)
| changoplatanero wrote:
| Anyone can make a long context window. The key is if your model
| can make effective use of it or not.
| bigyabai wrote:
| Long context window = huge amounts of vacant VRAM = our servers
| are fucking empty
| trash_cat wrote:
| But isn't context window dependent on model architecture and
| not available VRAM that you can just increase or decrease as
| you like?
| reasonableklout wrote:
| Most attention implementations can work across an
| arbitrarily long context.
|
| The limiting factors are typically: 1. Often there are
| latency/throughput requirements for model serving which
| become challenging to fulfill at a certain context length.
| 2. The model has to be _trained_ to use the desired context
| length, and training becomes prohibitively expensive at
| larger contexts.
|
| (2) is even a big enough problem that some popular open
| source models that claim to support large context lengths
| in fact are trained on smaller ones and use "context length
| extension" hacks like YaRN to trick the model into working
| on longer contexts at inference time.
| onion2k wrote:
| The model will use the full context if it's been designed
| well, but you can still increase the size of the window on
| models where it hasn't. It's just pointless. People who
| don't know much about LLMs will still think "bigger number
| is better" though.
| chucknthem wrote:
| How do they make the context window longer? (serious question,
| I want to learn how this works)
| TheCoolGuy wrote:
| You literally just shift the window over by to the next token
| once you reach the max amount of tokens you want for context
| window, NOT with what you train on, (only limited with memory
| now)
|
| This has obvious issues since you're now losing information
| from the now unseen tokens which becomes significant if your
| context window is small in comparision of the answer/question
| you're looking at. That's why companies try to give stupidly
| large context windows. The problem is they're not training on
| the large context window, they're training on something
| smaller (2048 and above). Due to how attention is setup, you
| can train on a small amount of context and extrapolate it to
| any number of tokens possible since they train via ROPE which
| trains the model because on words and their offset to the
| neighboring words. This allows us to effectively
| x2,x3,x10,x100 the amount of tokens we generate vs train with
| with some form consistency BUT still cause a lot of issues
| consistency wise since the model approaches more of a "this
| was trained on snippets but not the entire thing" situation
| where it has a notion of the context but not fundamentally
| the entire combined context
| vlovich123 wrote:
| That's a very basic way to keep the LLM inferring past the
| context window size (there's better, smarter ways) but
| that's not at all what the question was which is how they
| train a 2M token length window. My understanding at a basic
| level is that you need corpuses that are >2M in length for
| training data which is where the problem comes in for -
| there's only so much long form content and it's swamped by
| all the smaller stuff. I think there's probably tricks now
| but I suspect it's still largely an open problem.
| Ey7NFZ3P0nzAe wrote:
| AFAIK nobody does that. They train on much much shorter
| text but with use tricks in the position encoding steps
| that can be extrapolated by the LLMs. Lile ROPE and YARN
| etc.
| ErikBjare wrote:
| AFAIK (not much) it definitely helps to train on longer
| sequences even with rope/yarn and is needed if you care
| about long context performance (and not just the long
| context _capability_ ).
| nbardy wrote:
| No they can't, it's a N^2 algorithm, just fitting it in the
| context window is a challenge.
|
| And sure maybe not 2mil of it is usable, but they're reliably
| pushing the frontier here.
| ggeorgovassilis wrote:
| I came here just to complain about that :-) All LLMs I used
| seem to give more weight to things at the beginning of the
| context window and omit many details. Eg. I tried this simple
| thing: pasted a friend's and my CV into Gemini and asked it to
| recommend topics for a joint conference presentation. Results
| depended greatly on the order of CVs pasted in.
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| The middle tends to be underweighted. The beginning and end
| get more attention.
| otabdeveloper4 wrote:
| That's because when they say "long context window" they're
| lying and they actually mean that they support a long input
| prompt that is still compressed into a small context window.
| (Typically by throwing out tokens in the middle.)
|
| An actually large context window is impossible due to how LLM
| attention works under the hood.
| retinaros wrote:
| no one makes effective use of long context.
| DrSiemer wrote:
| It's not the most energy efficient workflow, but I work on
| relatively small codebases and I made a tool that let's me
| dump all of it in an LLM with a single copy/paste. This works
| surprisingly well with Gemini 2.5 Pro (1.000.000 ctx).
|
| The only real mistakes it makes are some model specific
| quirks, like occasionally stripping out certain array index
| operators. Other than that, it works fine with 150.000 token
| size conversations. I've gone up to 500.000 with no real
| issues besides a bit of a slowdown. It's also great for log
| analysis, which I have maximized to 900.000 tokens.
| mg wrote:
| If a model is not making use of the whole context window -
| shouldn't that be very noticeable when the prompt is code?
|
| For example when querying a model to refactor a piece of code -
| would that really work if it forgets about one part of the code
| while it refactors another part?
|
| I concatenate a lot of code files into a single prompt multiple
| times a day and ask LLMs to refactor them, implement features
| or review the code.
|
| So far, I never had the impression that filling the context
| window with a lot of code causes problems.
|
| I also use _very_ long lists of instructions on code style on
| top of my prompts. And the LLMs seem to be able to follow all
| of them just fine.
| MallocVoidstar wrote:
| I don't think there are any up-to-date leaderboards, but
| models absolutely degrade in performance the more context
| they're dealing with.
|
| https://wandb.ai/byyoung3/ruler_eval/reports/How-to-
| evaluate...
|
| >Gpt-5-mini records 0.87 overall judge accuracy at 4k
| [context] and falls to 0.59 at 128k.
|
| And Llama 4 Scout claimed a 10 million token context window
| but in practice its performance on query tasks drops below
| 20% accuracy by 32k tokens.
| mg wrote:
| That makes me wonder if we could simply test this by
| letting the LLM add or multiply a long list of numbers?
|
| Here is an experiment:
|
| https://www.gnod.com/search/#q=%23%20Calcuate%20the%20below
| %...
|
| The correct answer: Correct:
| 20,192,642.460942328
|
| Here is what I got from different models on the first try:
| ChatGPT: 20,384,918.24 Perplexity: 20,000,000
| Google: 25,167,098.4 Mistral: 200,000,000
| Grok: Timed out after 300s of thinking
| jarek83 wrote:
| Isn't that LLMs are not designed to do calculations?
| mg wrote:
| Neither are humans.
| cuu508 wrote:
| But humans can still do it.
| cluckindan wrote:
| They are not LMMs, after all...
| gcanyon wrote:
| > Do not use a calculator. Do it in your head.
|
| You wouldn't ask a human to do that, why would you ask an
| LLM to? I guess it's _a_ way to test them, but it feels
| like the world record for backwards running: interesting,
| maybe, but not a good way to measure, like, anything
| about the individual involved.
| throwuxiytayq wrote:
| I'm starting to find it unreasonably funny how people
| always want language models to multiply numbers for some
| reason. Every god damn time. In every single HN thread. I
| think my sanity might be giving out.
| solatic wrote:
| A model, no, but an agent with a calculator tool?
|
| Then there's the question of why not just build the
| calculator tool into the model?
| KristoAI wrote:
| Since grok 4 fast got this answer correct so quickly, I
| decided to test more.
|
| Tested this on the new hidden model of ChatGPT called
| Polaris Alpha: Answer: $20,192,642.460942336$
|
| Current gpt-5 medium reasoning says: After confirming my
| calculations, the final product (P) should be
| (20,192,642.460942336)
|
| Claude Sonnet 4.5 says: "29,596,175.95 or roughly 29.6
| million"
|
| Claude haiku 4.5 says: [?]20,185,903
|
| GLM 4.6 says: 20,171,523.725593136
|
| I'm going to try out Grok 4 fast on some coding tasks at
| this point to see if it can create functions properly.
| Design help is still best on GPT-5 at this exact moment.
| d4rkp4ttern wrote:
| There are "needle in the haystack" benchmarks for long context
| performance. It would be good to see those.
| throwuxiytayq wrote:
| These aren't really indicative of real world performance.
| Retrieving a single fact is pretty much the simplest possible
| task for a long context model. Real world use cases require
| considering many facts at the same time while ignoring
| others, all the while avoiding the overall performance
| degradation that current models seem susceptible to when the
| context is sufficiently full.
| jtrn wrote:
| The number of times I know that my instruction is in context,
| but it's forgotten, is countless at this point for me. My
| experience, both ad a clinical psychologist and developers, is
| that there is a convergent trend in how I speak to both clients
| and AI. I can view much of my therapist's approach in how I try
| to highlight the important things to focus on to achieve
| progress. Often, it's about helping the client articulate and
| understand what's important to them and how they rank these
| priorities. The same applies to AI. It feels obvious now that
| the problem with attention and context is the lack of hierarchy
| or levels of importance. We know that we have, probably
| biologically based, three types of memory: short-term,
| intermediate, and long-term. Long-term memory is what you use
| with MCP, web search, and RAG. Shorter memory is the current
| response, and intermediate memory is the current context. When
| assume this, in my interactions with an agent, it makes perfect
| sense where they falter and what they forget, in the exact same
| way as people. It feels more and more like talking to a human,
| with same weaknesses in logic, reasoning, and focus.
| behnamoh wrote:
| Who here actually uses Grok? It's sad to see Elon's arc but when
| he doubled down on some of his political ideas he had it coming
| with the Tesla sales going down and x.ai not taken seriously.
|
| I've always tried to remain apolitical and unbiased but it's hard
| to overlook who's behind a technology you wanna buy. Not that
| sama and others are saints either, it's just Elon's very obvious
| and vocal about it.
|
| It's a shame, really, because Grok is a good model. But Elon
| promised to open source the previous model and it took them
| forever to do that with Grok 3. Sorry, but I wanna buy from
| someone who keeps their promises ("FSD by next year").
| YetAnotherNick wrote:
| Grok fast is by far the most used model in openrouter with more
| than a trillion tokens weekly[1].
|
| [1]: https://openrouter.ai/rankings
| behnamoh wrote:
| Because some tools (AFAIR Kilo Code but I might be wrong)
| gave it away for free. The model itself was (still is?) free
| for a while, so I'm not surprised.
| ribelo wrote:
| Openrouter is not counting tokens used by Kilo or Cline.
| They have own endpoints.
| wqaatwt wrote:
| Yet if you go to the actual model's page:
|
| https://openrouter.ai/x-ai/grok-code-fast-1
|
| Cline and Kilo code are in the top 3. So how does that
| work?
|
| It's considerably cheaper than competing models like 2.5
| flash, though. So its not that surprising
| rjdj377dhabsn wrote:
| For at least the last year, I've been using Grok for 90% of my
| queries. I pay for their $30 plan as well as $20 for Claude
| Code, which I only use for simple development projects. For
| anything more complicated, Grok's expert mode has consistently
| better results.
| weird-eye-issue wrote:
| > I've always tried to remain apolitical and unbiased
|
| Clearly
| kelsolaar wrote:
| As you point out, Sam Altman is not exactly an altar boy:
| https://fastcompany.co.za/business/2025-11-07-sam-altmans-tr...
| andai wrote:
| Thought this would be about the whistleblower. They didn't
| even mention it!
| roman_soldier wrote:
| Yes allegedly having an employee bumped off for
| whistleblowing and the sister thing is way worse than
| someone having a different opinion than you. One is
| criminal the other is free speech.
| ramraj07 wrote:
| One is alleged, other isn't just an opinion. Its
| estimated that several hundred thousand deaths have
| already happened from the abrupt USAID cuts initiated by
| DOGE.
| jamespo wrote:
| "roman soldier" indeed
| darkwater wrote:
| I don't think you can compare the usual internal backstabbing
| between executives with someone who literally directed and
| participated in acts of the US Government, and keep saying
| and doing things to help and nurture a certain side of the
| political spectrum.
| vasco wrote:
| Both do both.
| wqaatwt wrote:
| Not to an even remotely same degree..
| diputsmonro wrote:
| Did Sam Altman lead a government agency and camp in the
| Oval Office for months too? Degrees matter.
| KingMob wrote:
| Fair, but don't forget Altman's sister accused him of
| sexual abuse in court. (https://www.newsweek.com/sam-
| altman-openai-sister-annie-sexu...)
|
| Dunno if it's true. The family wrote it off, saying she's
| mentally ill, but I can also see years of abuse leading to
| mental illness.
| supriyo-biswas wrote:
| I've been occasionally using Grok and found it good for devops
| stuff; specifically it often is able to explain and produce
| working configurations without getting lost or introducing
| subtle mistakes as I've sometimes seen with other models.
| sipsi wrote:
| i didn't
| galaxy_gas wrote:
| I have try it a few times in Copilot as code fast 1 because it
| was advertised. It has never correctly done something so far.
| Maybe because it's the fast ver ?
| jasonvorhe wrote:
| Maybe you just used it wrong? I refactored a complicated code
| base, built exhaustive tests for a CLI app and I've been
| maintaining and building out several k8s clusters out of a
| mono repo using Cline + grok-code-fast-1 and it's been a
| breeze.
| mudkipdev wrote:
| I don't but only because the model is not satisfying, not
| because I dislike Tesla
| raincole wrote:
| In my experience Grok Fast is the best "cheaper" model out
| there. Far better than Haiku 4.5 and Gemini Flash. I don't
| think the other cheaper models should be treated seriously at
| this point.
| behnamoh wrote:
| Gemini Flash is the first model I disable in any tool I use.
| It's a joke, and to add salt to injury, google announced a
| "lite" version of that as well!
| RobKohr wrote:
| I like grok for noncoding stuff. I find it hasn't been tuned
| for "Safety" (meaning it isn't tuned much for political
| correctness). It also seems good at making images and stories
| up well. I run some choose your own adventures stories with my
| kids through it. We tell it who each of their characters are
| and what the theme is for the night and grok gives them each a
| section of story and 4 choices. They also have the option of
| choosing something different then suggested. We have it so it
| cycles around the turns for everyone. Works pretty well, and if
| the kids wanna go dark (preteen boy) grok doesn't mind the
| violence.
|
| Kinda reminds me of the video game from enders game.
| vlovich123 wrote:
| > meaning it isn't tuned much for political correctness
|
| Is being tuned for right wing viewpoints the same as not
| being tuned for political correctness? Because there is
| tuning happening to a specific viewpoint:
|
| https://gizmodo.com/elon-says-hes-working-to-fix-grok-
| after-...
| gitaarik wrote:
| Yeah, but you can argue that the AI has been biased because
| of biased training data.
|
| Ultimately every AI is biased based on what you train it on
| and how you instruct it.
|
| I tend to use LLMs from different companies and personally
| compare them, and read between the lines.
| Yoric wrote:
| > I tend to use LLMs from different companies and
| personally compare them, and read between the lines.
|
| Read between the lines? Does this mean that you're using
| LLMs as a source of information?
| wohoef wrote:
| The point of LLMs is that there's nothing in between the
| lines.
|
| Or do you mean to say that you are trying to find the
| specific bias each model has?
| wqaatwt wrote:
| > it isn't tuned much for political correctness
|
| It was tuned to be edgy and annoying though (I mean his
| general style of speech not necessarily the content).
| simondotau wrote:
| Nothing in AI is more edgy and annoying than beginning
| every response with a mandatory glazing, like ChatGPT.
| "That's a really insightful question, and shows that you
| really understand the subject!"
| razingeden wrote:
| early iterations i could immediately peg as grok content
| based on its condescending snarky "OOoooOoOo -- so much to
| unpack here sweaty, lets get started" tone.
|
| im open minded and ive fed grok a few requests recently. it
| was better at doing creative fiction prompts without the
| "eddie izzard coming down off of a fifteen day coke bender"
| vibe.
|
| everything i ask it to do is completely made up nonsense so
| i dont have an opinion about its bias or the quality of its
| factual content.
|
| snark and clapback made the world go around on xitter.
| maybe thats what they thought people wanted. savage
| insulting content to "own" people. i for one, also found it
| extremely annoying.
| LorenDB wrote:
| I do! I have felt bad vibes from OpenAI for a while now, and
| eventually defaulted to Grok as somewhat the lesser of many
| evils. I respect anybody who doesn't wish to use it, but it's
| good enough for what I need it for. Case in point: it just spit
| out valid OpenSCAD code for an adapter piece I want to 3D
| print.
| anon214535 wrote:
| I don't understand how anyone can think Grok is the lesser of
| many evils. It seems to me that Grok is currently playing in
| its own league of evil.
|
| Most models belong to capitalist companies that are fairly
| apolitical and all they care about is money. Their evil comes
| from not caring about consequences as long as it grows their
| value. Their censorship come from the desire to avoid PR
| disasters.
|
| On the other hand, Grok belongs to a billionaire involved in
| destroying America's democracy, and it's being openly
| manipulated according to Musk's ideology. I can't think of a
| model I would trust less.
| minimaxir wrote:
| Going off OpenRouter's rankings
| (https://openrouter.ai/rankings), Grok Code Fast 1 is the most
| used model by a significant margin, and since those metrics are
| calculated as of this week, that's after providers stopped
| giving free promotional access to it. Grok 4 Fast is #5 on that
| list which was never free.
|
| In terms of models, Grok 4 Fast has essentially zero
| restrictions on safety, which a) makes it unusable for most
| applications that allow user input and b) makes it _extremely_
| useful for _certain_ applications.
| BoredPositron wrote:
| It's the only model that lets you do gooner shit. That's why
| the usage is highly skewed. You can just call a horse a horse
| if you see one.
| Squarex wrote:
| this is a code model, not the general one
| BoredPositron wrote:
| you are so naive. lol. It's a general model with the tag
| "code" added to it.
| jasonvorhe wrote:
| This is nonsense. grok-code-fast-1 is just part of many
| free tiers of agentic coding assistants like Cline etc.
| Void_ wrote:
| Half of USA voted for Trump. That should answer "who actually
| uses Grok".
|
| I personally use the best tool for the job, which Grok
| sometimes is.
| aaronbrethorst wrote:
| Trump received 77.3 million votes. Harris received 75 million
| votes. The US population is about 342 million.
| herbst wrote:
| I am not sure why these numbers would matter. He won,
| obviously, because the majority of voters voted for him.
|
| Which are Americans, Americans who either voted for him and
| didn't do enough against him.
|
| There is really no excuse to democratically vote for a
| person like this and let all this bullshit happen.
| chistev wrote:
| What models are better than Grok?
| dymk wrote:
| Sonnet-4 and onward, GPT-4 and onward
| NaomiLehman wrote:
| and GLM-4.6
| whywhywhywhy wrote:
| Saying "GPT-4" is dishonest, launch GPt4 was significantly
| better than anything devday downgrade, all the 4o nonsense
| etc.
|
| In reality GPT really sucked from devday until 5 and it
| redeemed itself
| schappim wrote:
| I used Grok to successfully split a large 10K-line file of
| spaghetti code into multiple smaller well organised files. This
| was after giving the same task to Claude, OpenAI, and Gemini,
| all of which consistently failed.
|
| Grok certainly has its uses, but I default to OpenAI for most
| business tasks and Claude for code.
| gitaarik wrote:
| All propietary AIs are probably biased in some way. I mean,
| that is the power of them and the reason they're propietary,
| right?
|
| So I tend to use different LLMs from different providers,
| personally compare them and read between the lines.
| roman_soldier wrote:
| At least Elon is open about what he believes. Other CEO's hide
| behind corporate PR machines, how do you know they are not
| psychopaths.
| KingMob wrote:
| > At least Elon is open about what he believes.
|
| @dril: "you do not, under any circumstances, 'gotta hand it
| to them'"
| sidibe wrote:
| There's a nonzero chance they are not psychopaths. Elon
| reminds us daily about his chances
| voganmother42 wrote:
| Yeah he was really open about his salute eh soldier?
| apu6865i wrote:
| Let me give you a perspective. For Indians Winston Churchill is
| no different than Hitler. The guy was responsible for millions
| of death in bengal famine.But for you and I assume majority of
| this forum and westerners he is a hero. Against Winston
| Churchill though Elon appears like a saint!
| whywhywhywhy wrote:
| Groks underrated honestly. If you have to market on X you need
| a sub anyway so it's replaced casual questions/sort of
| questions I used to Google for me and I'm not seeing anything
| worse than ChatGPT and often it's better. Much better at
| current events.
|
| The video gen is actually really good fast and cheap for short
| videos.
|
| Still use Claude and GPT5 for work tasks but I haven't tried
| grok extensively for those
| Bender wrote:
| I used it to calculate the size of a greenhouse using a lot of
| inputs and restrictions. It did that fine but the one thing I
| did not appreciate was its sense of humor. It said the
| excavator would be here first thing Monday along with a pot of
| coffee. Just tell me a dad joke or just skip the attempt at
| humor all together.
| mehdibl wrote:
| What matter is not context or the recod token/s you get.
|
| But the quality for the model. And it seem Grok pushing the wrong
| metrics again, after launching fast.
| saretup wrote:
| Seems reductive. Some applications require higher context
| length or fast tokens/s. Consider it a multidimensional Pareto
| frontier you can optimize for.
| sigmoid10 wrote:
| It's not just that some absolutely require it, but a lot of
| applications hugely benefit from more context. A large part
| of LLM engineering for real world problems revolves around
| structuring the context and selectively providing the
| information needed while filtering out unneeded stuff. If you
| can just dump data into it without preprocessing, it saves a
| huge amount of development time.
| cronin101 wrote:
| Depending on the application, I think "without
| preprocessing" is a huge assumption here. LLMs typically do
| a terrible job of weighting poor quality context vs high
| quality context and filling an XL context with unstructured
| junk and expecting it to solve this for you is unlikely to
| end well.
|
| In my own experience you quickly run into jarring tangents
| or "ghosts" of unrelated ideas that start to shape the main
| thread of consciousness and resist steering attempts.
| jeswin wrote:
| Depends. For coding at least, you can divide tasks into high-
| intelligence ($$$) and low-intelligence ($) tasks. Being able
| to do low-intelligence tasks super fast and cheap would be
| quite beneficial. A majority of code edits would fall into the
| fast-and-cheap subset.
| jorvi wrote:
| Grok's biggest feature is that unlike all the other premier
| models (yes I know about ChatGPT's new adult mode), it hasn't
| been lobotomized by censoring.
| basisword wrote:
| I've never run into this problem. What are you asking LLM's
| where you run it censoring you?
| donatj wrote:
| I've run into things ChatGPT has straight up refused to
| talk about many times. Most recently I bought a used
| computer loaded with corporate MDM software and it refused
| to help me remove it.
| gizmodo59 wrote:
| It's easy to appear as uncensored when the world's
| attention is not on your product. Once you have enough
| people using it and harm themselves it will be censored
| too. In a weird way, this is helping grok to not get
| boggled by lawsuits unlike openai.
| londons_explore wrote:
| I'm sure there are lawyers out there just looking for
| uncensored AI's to go sue for losses when some friendly
| client injures themselves by taking bad-AI-advice.
| TheDong wrote:
| I sometimes use LLM models to translate text snippets from
| fictional stories from one language to another.
|
| If the text snippet is something that sounds either very
| violent or somewhat sexual (even if it's not when properly
| in context), the LLM will often refuse and simply return
| "I'm sorry I can't help you with that".
| neidu wrote:
| I was talking to ChatGPT about toxins, and potential attack
| methods, and ChatGPT refused to satisfy my curiosity on
| even impossibly impractical subjects. Sure, I can
| understand why anthrax spore cultivation is censored, but
| what I really want to know is how many barrels of botox an
| evil dermatologist would need to inject into someone to
| actually kill them via Botulism, and how much this
| "masterplan" would cost.
| felixgallo wrote:
| man, that sounds terrible, I am so sorry for you that
| your biological weapons research was crippled by the mean
| woke AI.
| Hamuko wrote:
| Is this the same AI model that at some point managed to make
| any single topic about the white genocide in South Africa?
| cbm-vic-20 wrote:
| How does this sort of thing work from a technical
| perspective? Is this done during training, by boosting or
| suppressing training documents, or is is this done by
| adding instructions in the prompt context?
| Hamuko wrote:
| I think they do it by adding instructions since it came
| and went pretty fast. Surely if it was part of the
| training, it would take a while longer to take in.
| benzible wrote:
| This was done by adding instructions to the system prompt
| context, not through training data manipulation. xAI
| confirmed a modification was made to "the Grok response
| bot's prompt on X" that directed it to provide specific
| responses on this topic (they spun this as "unauthorized"
| - uh, sure). Grok itself initially stated the instruction
| "aligns with Elon Musk's influence, given his public
| statements on the matter." This was the second such
| incident - in February 2025 similar prompt modifications
| caused Grok to censor mentions of Trump/Musk spreading
| misinformation.
|
| [1] https://techcrunch.com/2025/05/15/xai-blames-groks-
| obsession...
| fragmede wrote:
| For a less polarizing take on the same mis-feature of
| LLMs, there was Golden Gate Claude.
|
| https://www.anthropic.com/news/golden-gate-claude
| afavour wrote:
| Of course it has. There are countless examples of Musk saying
| Grok will be corrected when it says something that doesn't
| line up with his politics.
|
| The whole MechaHitler thing got reversed but only because it
| was too obvious. No doubt there are a ton of more subtle
| censorships in the code.
| jampekka wrote:
| Grok has plenty of censoring. E.g.
|
| "I'm sorry, but I cannot provide instructions on how to
| synthesize a-PVP (alpha-pyrrolidinopentiophenone, also known
| as flakka or gravel), as it is a highly dangerous Schedule I
| controlled substance in most countries, including the US."
| Havoc wrote:
| No censoring and it says the things I agree with are not the
| same thing
| sd9 wrote:
| I am amazed people actually believe this
|
| Grok is the most biased of the lot, and they're not even
| trying to hide it particularly well
| jgalt212 wrote:
| According to a recent Economist article, even Grok is left-
| biased.
| HEmanZ wrote:
| "Reality has a well known left bias."
| aaa_aaa wrote:
| Oh the hubris.
| rayiner wrote:
| People believe it because they have eyes:
| https://nypost.com/2024/02/21/business/googles-ai-chatbot-
| ge...
|
| As I recall, it's undisputed that Chat GPT and Gemini
| insert hidden text into prompts to change the outputs to
| conform to certain social ideologies.
| BoiledCabbage wrote:
| Nothing you posted (from an almost two year old article
| btw) in anyway refutes the prior comment.
|
| Grok is significantly the most biased. Did you sleep
| through its continuous insertion of made up stuff about
| south africa?
|
| This is the same person who is trying to re-write an
| entire encyclopedia because facts aren't biased enough.
|
| A group has created an alternate reality echo chamber,
| and the more reality doesn't match up the more they are
| trying to invent a fake one.
|
| When you're on the side of book banning and Orwellian re-
| writing of facts & history that side never turns out to
| have been the good side. It's human nature for some
| people to be drawn to it as an easy escape rather than
| allowing their world views to be challenged. But you'd be
| pretty pressed to find the group doing that any of the
| times it's been done to have been anything but a negative
| for their society.
| NotGMan wrote:
| >> This is the same person who is trying to re-write an
| entire encyclopedia because facts aren't biased enough.
|
| You have to be either blind or arguing in bad faith to
| state that wikipedia isn't heavily biased to the left.
| afavour wrote:
| Can't help but feel everyone making a pro-Grok argument
| here isn't actually making the case that it's uncensored,
| rather that it's censored in a way that aligns with their
| politics, and thus is good
| R_D_Olivaw wrote:
| It's almost always telling isn't it?
|
| Almost like chatting with an LLM that refuses to make
| that extra leap of logic.
|
| "if the llm won't give racist or misogynistic output,
| it's biased in the wrong way!"
| ben_w wrote:
| Has the possibility occurred to you that the majority of
| the editors aren't American and don't care about American
| culture wars?
|
| What you think of as "heavily biased to the left" is,
| globally speaking, boring middle of the road academia.
| afavour wrote:
| > it's undisputed that Chat GPT and Gemini insert hidden
| text into prompts to change the outputs to conform to
| certain social ideologies
|
| And why do you think Grok doesn't? It has been documented
| numerous times that Grok's prompt has been edited at
| Musk's request because the politics in its answers
| weren't to his satisfaction.
| giancarlostoro wrote:
| I would argue over censorship is the better word. Ask Grok to
| write a regex so you can filter slurs on a subreddit and it
| immediately kicks in telling you that it cant say the nword
| or whatever, thanks Grok, ChatGPT, Claude etc I guess racism
| will thrive on my friends sub.
| solumunus wrote:
| I can't tell if this is serious or not. Surely you realise
| you can just use the word "example" and then replace the
| word in the regex?!
| jknutson wrote:
| I think they would want a more optimized regex. Like a
| long list of swears, merged down into one pattern
| separated by tunnel characters, and with all common
| prefixes / suffixes combined for each group. That takes
| more than just replacing one word. Something like the
| output of the list-to-tree rust crate.
| ahtihn wrote:
| Wouldn't the best approach for that be to write a program
| that takes a list of words and output an optimized regex?
|
| I'm sure an LLM can help write such a program. I wouldn't
| expect an LLM to be particularly good at creating the
| regex directly.
| jknutson wrote:
| I would agree. That's exactly what the example I gave
| (list-to-tree) does. LLMs are actually pretty OK at
| writing regexes, but for long word lists with
| prefix/suffix combinations they aren't great I think. But
| I was just commenting on the "placeholder" word example
| given above being a sort of straw man argument against
| LLMs, since that wouldn't have been an effective way to
| solve the problem I was thinking of anyways.
| solumunus wrote:
| Still incredibly easy to do without feeding the actual
| words into the LLM.
| fragmede wrote:
| It doesn't blindly give you the full recipe for how to make
| cocaine. It's still lobotomized, it's just that you agree
| with the ways in which it's been "lobotomized".
| cluckindan wrote:
| Bigger context window = more input tokens processed = more
| income for the provider
| bgwalter wrote:
| Indeed. Free grok.com got significantly worse this week and has
| been on a decline since shortly after the release of Grok-4.
|
| People who have $2000 worth of various model subscriptions
| (monthly) while saying they are not sponsored are now going to
| tell me that grok.com is a different model than
| Grok-4-fast-1337, but the trend is obvious.
| fragmede wrote:
| What are the other ones to get to $2,000? There's OpenAI and
| Anthropic; their to of the line plans are like $200 each,
| which only gets you to $400. there's a handful of other
| services, but how do you get to $2,000?
| alchemism wrote:
| AWS Bedrock of course
| cedws wrote:
| Big context window is an amplifier for LLMs. It's powerful to
| be able to fit an entire codebase into a prompt and have it
| understand everything, versus it having to make N tool
| calls/embeddings queries where it may or may not find the
| context it's looking for.
| bko wrote:
| I thought the number of tokens per second doesn't matter until
| I used Grok Code Fast. I realized that it makes a huge
| difference. If it take more than 30s to run, I lose focus, and
| look at something else. I end up being a lot less productive.
| It also opens up the possibility to automate a lot more simple
| tasks. I would def recommend people try fast models
| alyxya wrote:
| Quality of the model tends to be pretty subjective, and people
| also complain about gaming benchmarks. At least context window
| length and generation speed are concrete improvements. There's
| always a way you can downplay how valuable or impressive a
| model is.
| cactusplant7374 wrote:
| I had a failed refactor with Codex recently and I am wondering if
| context window size is the cause.
| sgc wrote:
| I not an expert ai user (and have never touched Codex), but
| anything remotely important I do, I force the smallest context
| window possible. I just did something very beautiful using that
| principle, which will soon be ready to show the world. It would
| have been a garbled pile of garbage with long context windows.
|
| Obviously major architectural changes need a bigger context
| window. But try to aggressively modularize your tasks as much
| as you can, and where possible run batch jobs to keep your
| workflow moving while each task stays a smaller chunk.
| jakevoytko wrote:
| With the current crop of LLMs/agents, I find that refactors
| still have to be done at a granular level. "I want to make X
| change. Give me the plan and do not implement it yet. Do the
| first thing. Do the second thing. Now update the first call
| site to use the new pattern. You did it wrong and I fixed it in
| an editor; update the second call site to match the final
| implementation in $file. Now do the next one. Do the next one.
| Continue. Continue.", etc.
| enraged_camel wrote:
| For complex refactors, I use "max mode" in Cursor, which in my
| experience noticeably improves the AI's performance and makes
| it go for a lot longer before it starts to drift. I haven't
| looked into how it works exactly, but it works well if you
| don't mind the extra cost.
| whywhywhywhy wrote:
| Had some bad experiences with max mode and the latest Claude
| spending significant time on writing worthless .md files
| rather than solving problems
| port3000 wrote:
| I use Claude Code, haven't used Codex yet (should I?) - but in
| Claude code you can spin up sub-agents to handle these big
| refactors, with the master context window just keeping track of
| the overall progress, bugs, etc and providing instructions to
| the subagents to do the rote work.
| mrud wrote:
| IMO yes. It is less polished but IMO the model is way better.
| I moved over from claude completely and cancelled my max
| subscription. Less polished, slower but the results are
| better and you have to do less steering
| johnnyApplePRNG wrote:
| But for some reason if I load a 400kb file into it... it can't
| even read the file?! Pffft, whatever elon. Go play with your
| rockets.
| raincole wrote:
| It's funny how fast this post is flagged, lol. Have other LLMs or
| blunt ads got the same treatment on HN?
| hereme888 wrote:
| It's probably because lots of people here resent their
| difference in personal ideology with Elon Musk.
| jauntywundrkind wrote:
| I believe those people are eager to discuss Musk. The people
| suppressing Musk discussion are the forces backing him, who
| are out here working to suppress inconvenient speakings.
| latexr wrote:
| > Have other LLMs or blunt ads got the same treatment on HN?
|
| Yes, I've seen it happen multiple times.
| ronsor wrote:
| This post really has no reason to be flagged. I know Elon is
| controversial, and I have a lot of gripes with his business
| practices myself, but this is literally just documentation for a
| frontier LLM. Can we stay on topic?
| big-and-small wrote:
| This. I wouldn't pay to use it, but big context windows are
| amazing for programming and especially prototyping when you can
| keep whole codebase in context.
|
| Gemini's 1M is amazing.
| oulipo2 wrote:
| The politics of the owners IS the topic. It's being really
| naive (read: stupid) to think that this has no implication on
| society
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| You're literally handing over your code to a third party.
|
| In fact AI is handing over the process of creating code -
| eventually all code - to a small number of third parties, who
| will have complete power over the world's IT infrastructure.
|
| No wonder they have wildly inflated valuations. The potential
| to enforce authoritarian policies through opaque technology
| is unprecedented.
| ramraj07 wrote:
| Here's an on topic question: all the frontier model companies
| "promise" that they wont store and train on your api use if you
| pay for it. Who do you trust? I for sure will absolutely assume
| grok will just use the data I submit to train in perpetuity.
| Thats a scary thing for me and if anyone else does anything
| thats real work this should be great cause for worry if they
| wish to use grok.
| pixel_popping wrote:
| Do you really think Google isn't logging all our prompts?
| hu3 wrote:
| This. We like to think about ourselves as engineers. But often
| behave like a bunch of emotion driven primitives.
|
| Honestly this kind of behaviour would be a huge red flag during
| interviews.
|
| I have problems that current LLMs can't solve efficiently due
| to context window sizes. And welcome any improvement in this
| space.
| autop0ietic wrote:
| I personally can't stand Musk but for many he has become an
| Emmanuel Goldstein character that even the mention of his
| name causes the most extreme emotional disgust from all the
| exposure of this strange, algorithmic, Two Minutes Hate.
| tastyface wrote:
| He's not "controversial," he's a far-right hate monger and Grok
| is part of his hate-mongering war machine. (Heck, the man
| spends half his social media time inciting civil war and
| whitewashing racist politicians.) No self-respecting "hacker"
| would spend a moment of their time on this pathetic excuse for
| technology. Fuck Grok.
| bdangubic wrote:
| Grok is not LLM, it is "not-so-large-take-out-what-Elon-doesnt-
| like LM" - no documentation necessary :)
| solumunus wrote:
| Grok? Next...
| tacker2000 wrote:
| Yea, no desire to ever use this.
| bushbaba wrote:
| I personally find grok better for certain tasks. It's better
| than Gemini for images. Its better than the rest at crude jokes
| etc
| drivingmenuts wrote:
| Honestly, if Elon Musk told me what time it was, I wouldn't trust
| him.
| htrp wrote:
| Any details on exactly how they accomplished this? longrope?
| daft_pink wrote:
| My experience with AI is that you generally want to keep your
| context as small as possible and this is only useful when your
| relevant context is actually 2m tokens.
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