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Notes -
Grok 3 just came out, and early reports say it’s shattering rankings.
Now there is always hype around these sorts of releases, but my understanding of the architecture of the compute cluster for Grok 3 makes me think there may be something to these claims. One of the exciting and interesting revelations is that it tends to perform extremely well across a broad range of applications, seemingly showing that if we just throw more compute at an LLM, it will tend to get better in a general way. Not sure what this means for more specifically trained models.
One of the most exciting things to me is that Grok 3 voice allegedly understands tone, pacing, and intention in conversations. I loved OpenAIs voice assistant until it cut me off every time I paused for more than a second. I’d Grok 3 is truly the first conversational AI, it could be a game changer.
I’m also curious how it compares to DeepSeek, if anyone knows more than I?
Lmsys ranking is not nothing, but we are getting to the point where most models are "good enough" from the perspective of the average lmsys rater and most of the interesting differentiation between models is going on in benchmarks that test specialized skill and knowledge that's not necessarily common among lmsys raters.
I couldn't be bothered to click through the tweets (I don't have a Twitter account) so I don't know if they published other benchmarks too.
According to Andrej Karpathy:
The architecture is extremely well known, the days of advancements in the space requiring genuine intellectual titans making leaps into the dark are over, it’s all relatively run of the mill iteration and more compute / bitter lesson now. This is pretty standard for great inventions, a few true geniuses and then a deluge of very intelligent people making rapid, incremental progress as the money and interest pours in. If you hired the best aircraft engineers in 1910 and put out a very impressive plane prototype in 1911 that would be no earth shattering achievement. If you did it in 1901 we’d still be talking about you.
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