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FWIW Grok 3 has not impressed me at all so far. It seems very confused about its abilities and more prone to hallucination than any post GPT-4 class model I’ve used. Additionally, the benchmark scores so far have been underwhelming. For example, a lot of Grok 3’s higher scores (the bits of the bar charts shaded in a lighter colour) rely on cons@64, shorthand for running the input prompt 64 times and then taking the consensus of results, which isn’t practical for most people. xAI are not alone in doing this, but it does make a difference for pairwise comparisons.
Musk has thrown vast amounts of money and compute at xAI and in the process he’s built something not quite SotA. OpenAI still the team to beat on performance, DeepSeek on efficiency, and Anthropic for vibes.
I used it for the first time today with some technical questions. For me it was very good. It's definitely much better than Claude 3.5 Sonnet which is my current daily drive. I haven't used O-1 though.
I also tried the Research feature which did a better job than Google's offering.
Grok won't be my #1 because it doesn't have API access, but my days of using ChatGPT as a secondary are likely over.
That said, I think everyone's mileage will vary on these things, and you're right not to trust benchmarks.
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