Grok 4 Fast

I would guess that it is essentially just a “grok 4 mini”, but if you use mini as the qualifier then most people will be inclined not to use it. If you call it fast then it gives people a reason to select it.

I was wondering that too. Anything reflecting human institutional knowledge writ large will, from Elons perspective, have "liberal bias" which is why he's also attacking Wikipedia and mainstream knowledge across the board. But other attempts at making non "biased" AI have barely done more than have custom instructions requesting that it "be conservative".

Unless you train it on Conservapedia or some equivalent corpus I'm not sure you'll be able to make it agree that "the Irish were the real slaves", that the D's and R's never realigned after the civil war, that the 2020 election was stolen and that gamergate was truly about ethics in journalism.

It doesn't outperform uniformly across benchmarks. It's worse than Grok 4 on GPQA Diamond and HLE (Humanity's Last Exam) without tools, both of which require the model to have memorized a large number of facts. Large (and thus slow) models typically do better on these.

The other benchmarks focus on reasoning and tool use, so the model doesn't need to have memorized quite so many facts, it just needs to be able to transform them from one representation to another. (E.g. user question to search tool call; list of search results to concise answer.) Larger models should in theory also be better at that, but you need to train them for those specific tasks first.

So I don't think they simply trained on the benchmark tests, but they shifted their training mix to emphasize particular tasks more, and now in the announcement they highlight benchmarks that test those tasks and where their model performs better.

You could also write an anti-announcement by picking a few more fact recall benchmarks and highlighting that it does worse at those. (I assume.)

> Can anyone explain why that makes sense?

Can be anything from different arch, more data, RL, etc. It's probably RL. In recent months top tier labs seem to have "cracked" RL to a level not seen yet in open models, and by a large margin.

Just two different models branded under similar names. That's it. Grok 4 is not the slower version of Grok 4 Fast, just like gpt-4 is not the slower version of gpt-4o.

If this is sonoma-dusk that was on preview on openrouter, it's pretty cool. I've tested it with some code reverse engineering tasks, and it is at or above gpt5-mini level, while being faster. Works well till about 110-130k tokens tasks, then it gets the case of "getthereitis" and finishes the task even if not all constraints are met (i.e. will say I've solved x/400 tests, the rest can be done later)

Oh man. Life must be hard

So will you make it your daily driver then?

Did using Microsoft's tools ever feel like a political standpoint? Because I won't even consider pitching Grok to my employers/clients for that very reason.

Grok / X does not have the moat that Microsoft had.

> If half of the developers in the world hate Musk and refuse to use his company's tools

In general, developers use what tools their employers paid for.