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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?
Very interesting to me about this whole thing is how there's still plenty of space for new contenders to pop up and beat actual established players at their own game.
I thought Grok was just purely a derivative of existing products with some of the safety measures stripped off. And now they've done made an updated version that crushes all the cutting edge products in, feels like, about a year?
It sure seems like OpenAI has no meaningful "moat" (hate that term, honestly) that keeps them in the lead DESPITE being the first mover, having the highest concentration of talent, and more money than God.
Doesn't mean they won't win in the end, or that any of these other companies are in an inherently better position, but it is becoming less clear to me what the actual 'secret sauce' to turning out better models is.
Data quality? The quality of the engineers on staff? The amount of compute on tap?
What is it that gives any given AI company a real edge over the others at this point?
Grok 3 doesn't beat the yet unreleased o3 model that OAI is soon to launch.
It's only SOTA for models you can pay for use straight away, and even just an incremental increase over prior models. It is somewhat impressive that xAI was able to pull that off from a cold start, but it's not earth shattering news
OAI still has a slim lead, but in terms of technical chops, is well contested by Anthropic and DeepMind. DM has access to ~infinite money courtesy of Google, and while they've opted for releasing a reasoning model based off a slightly inferior Gemini Flash 2.0 instead of the Pro, it's still highly competent. I expect they're cooking up a bigger one, and don't feel overly pressured to release just yet.
It remains to be seen how Meta will react, but Llama 4 is certainly in the oven, and they'd be idiots not to pivot to a reasoning variant now that DeepSeek has stolen the open source crown.
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