Grok 4.7

SpaceXAI's most powerful model for coding and knowledge work. Twice as fast, at half the price of comparable models.

609 points•meetpateltech•9 days ago•539 comments•

#grok #price #coding #twice #powerful #half #knowledge #spacexais

539 comments

Apparently Grok 4.7 has 40% more weights than Grok 4.6, but the price ($6 output token, $2 input) is the same.

Given that the decrease in their margin and the fact they delayed the release of Grok 4.7 almost two weeks past the original date, XAI must not have been happy with the results for 4.7. And XAI also waited the day before Opus 5.5 is rumored to launch. I imagine Opus 5.5 will blow Grok 4.7 out of the water benchmark wise.

However, I have become skeptical of benchmarks. Grok 4.5 solved some issues setting up a buildroot system that Fable 5 couldn't do. I find the post cursor groks are phenomenal at frontend web development, though Claude is much better at backend ruby.

My favorite part of the new Groks has been how they speak in plain english. I simply cannot stand Claudish. Or even GPT, which doesn't have Claude's ticks but definitely likes to handwave explaining technical concepts. Still, nothing beats Claude 3.5 and 4 with explaining since it seems all models have regressed. I wonder if Grok 4.7 will also regress with English because of all the RL.

imron9 days ago

> My favorite part of the new Groks has been how they speak in plain english. I simply cannot stand Claudish.

Grok has its own feel too. It's not as bad as Claude, but one of the things that bugs me is that it is far too terse.

It regularly seems to come up with terms and descriptions for things in its chain of reasoning and then uses these terms in its output assuming you understand what it's talking about.

I find I often have to ask it to re-explain what it means.

runeks9 days ago

> It regularly seems to come up with terms and descriptions for things in its chain of reasoning and then uses these terms in its output assuming you understand what it's talking about.

GPT does this all the time, too (both Sol and Astra). I constantly have to tell it to not use terms that were not part of the initial prompt.

taspeotis9 days ago

I just got DeepSeek V4.1 Flash on our Azure Foundry w/ Pi and I found its tone to be refreshing.

Separately have been using Grok 4.6 for a bit and it's also pretty concise.

iamflimflam19 days ago

It’s frustrating that we can’t see the “thinking” - it’s like we only have access to half the conversation.

Zambyte9 days ago

I wonder how much of this is due to reliance on Twitter data. Or even just RLHF from humans that have a preference for Twitter style information.

JimDabell9 days ago

> It regularly seems to come up with terms and descriptions for things in its chain of reasoning and then uses these terms in its output assuming you understand what it's talking about.

I’ve noticed Astra doing this a lot as well.

smashers11149 days ago

FYI a quick fix for claudish is to ask for the response to be in ASD-STE100 (Simple Technical English). Then it is far more readable. But I would agree that this is an annoyance and shouldn't require user workaround to get something readable.

a2dam9 days ago

I think this is more a meme than anything else, for a couple reasons:

First, after a while it's just as grating as Claudeish. Second, my hunch is that it constricts the actual thinking of the LLM, like the same way that Newspeak does in 1984. It shrinks the range of thought that can be expressed if used as an input.

I think the real way to do it is to have another Claude entirely deal with the user as a liaison, but to keep the thinking in whatever format it came in.

Latent space reasoning, if you think about it, is exactly this to a crazy degree: why even formulate a thought as words if you can just keep it as matmuls until the user needs it? And then, if the user needs it, have it always specifically formulated for the user by another LLM rather than constrict its range of thought? Anyway, that's my take.

_boffin_9 days ago

Does not work for Claude, at least for me and I put it as the system prompt

neomantra9 days ago

I hadn’t heard of ASD-STE100 until last month when the TinyGo AGENTS.md added it as a requirement, along with some other tidbits to improve life for maintainers.

It’s been really productive and I’ve been asking my agents to communicate using it more and more. I believe it’s relieved my cognitive load a bit while working with them.

https://github.com/tinygo-org/tinygo/blob/dev/AGENTS.md

SoMomentary9 days ago

I created a custom output style based on this (borrowing some from github.com/AminBlg/SimpleEnglish) and I've found it to be better than the default or concise output styles, but still not as good for me as current GPT or Gemini models when it comes to communicating.

el_benhameen9 days ago

I tried this a while back and I felt like the result was the same weird shoehorning of ideas into language, just with a different vocabulary. I’d really like for it to work, though.

jasonjmcghee9 days ago

For what it's worth - over the last few years or whatever, it seems like Anthropic benchmaxxes the least.

That being said, I currently prefer Sol / Astra to Opus / Fable as I find both to be a better cost payoff to me.

vessenes9 days ago

I was going to say the reverse - claude has been the less satisfying normalized by benchmark for me in the last year. Both astra and fable have their quirks, but I am 90% codex this year up from 10% last year.

boc9 days ago

I've been getting a ton done with Fable as the supervisor and astra as the implementer, with opus for adversarial reviews of the astra PRs. You can use terminal multiplexers with custom harnesses to allow Fable to start codex sessions and send instructions / read instructions / allow/deny actions. It's pretty cool!

vintermann9 days ago

It's not just about benchmaxxing. Sincerely targeting those long-autonomy benchmarks is questionable in the first place, because naturally it drives the model to assume more and more about what you want.

Lucasoato9 days ago

> I simply cannot stand Claudish

I totally agree, it’s like that as models become more intelligent, they are less understandable by most of people... but aren’t we humans doing the same?

TomGarden9 days ago

Agreed. The more knowledge you amass on a subject, the more important it becomes to be extremely specific and nuanced - or your communications end up being incorrect. You become better at expressing your thoughts, but harder to understand.

The weird thing is, that's not what AI models seem to be doing. The prose is just weird.

superjan9 days ago

What I notice about Claudish is that it has its preferred cliche’s and overstretched methaphores, it packs too many ideas in a sentence, and to achieve the latter it makes up adjectives.

I should try adding these tips to my system prompt. Is there a shorthand to describe such language use? I am not a native English speaker.

samuelknight9 days ago

That's half true. A very smart model should be able make good explanations, which include simple understandable prose. That can should be possible even as its thought process gets more alien.

Aperocky9 days ago

The best ideas are usually the simplest to elaborate. If someone comes up with a convoluted scheme that are hard to understand or be adequately explained, it's usually fraud.

When claude speak in convoluted mess, they are often going off on tangents in real work that you asked it to do, too.

thesmtsolver29 days ago

This is /r/iamverysmart material (by Claude)

Part of intelligence is knowing your audience and communicating efficiently.

WarmWash9 days ago

Perhaps you haven't had the chance to use it, but 3.8 flash is the best model for talking too. Even routing Claudes output through 3.8 to have it explain whats going on is a breath of fresh air

moojacob9 days ago

I'll have to try Gemini Flash for coding. The reason I haven't I used Gemini for coding is last time I tried it couldn't call tools very well.

I am a huge fan of Gemini Pro for chat... gemini somehow just knows the most obscure stuff. I'll double check something Gemini said and find the source is deep inside a hard to access scientific paper. Google just has the best index of the internet.

svachalek9 days ago

Agreed. It's very capable for something carrying the "flash" label, super fast, and very clear to read.

esafak9 days ago

I would if they let me bring the subscription I have to the harness of my choice.

AustinDev9 days ago

gemini 3.8 flash?

simonw9 days ago

https://tools.simonwillison.net/markdown-svg-renderer?url=ht... - default reasoning level.

Here's reasoning level high: https://tools.simonwillison.net/markdown-svg-renderer?url=ht...

For some reason reasoning effort low and medium used similar numbers of tokens, and xhigh used less than high. I think I need to try without OpenRouter in the middle.

UPDATE: I tried again with the xAI API directly: https://tools.simonwillison.net/markdown-svg-renderer?url=ht... - not a great deal of difference between reasoning levels, and this time xhigh and low used the same number of reasoning tokens for some reason.

For comparison here's a fresh run against Grok 4.6: https://tools.simonwillison.net/markdown-svg-renderer?url=ht...

TomGarden9 days ago

I think these are the worst I've seen, at least in some time. It's a silly benchmark though, not sure what to make of it

athrowaway3z9 days ago

I think the result is fine. The benchmark is silly to the point of being useless nowadays.

It used to be a mess in various interesting ways. Now, almost every big release can draw something perfectly functional.

So the question - without a correct answer - given the prompt "Generate an SVG of a pelican riding a bicycle":

Does the user want the least lines of code to make it functional, or the best looking version?

Mashimo9 days ago

If you think this is bad, look up mistral.

paimapi9 days ago

it's not truly tested until it plays a match or ten in Brood War imo

forgot-my-pw9 days ago

I tried in Cursor and see a lot of improvements over Grok 4.6 svgs. The AA numbers indicate it's not very token efficient though: https://artificialanalysis.ai/agents/coding-agents?agents=co...

daveguy9 days ago

Hahaha. I remember when musk and his merry band of sycophants were bragging about grok producing the only physically accurate bicycle. What happened?

simonw9 days ago

Yeah, he had opinions: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/2023833496804839808

datsci_est_20159 days ago

Poor fella doesn’t have a seat. Intriguing design where both pedals are on the same side of the frame. Balancing must be a challenge.

MattDamonSpace9 days ago

Are there good tools for doing context audits? I feel I have no good way to visualize what a new session is getting by default in a given repo without crawling through every potentially included markdown file

vessenes9 days ago

Nice to see this release cadence increasing and some continued improvement in quality. I am guessing these models are basically still outcomes of the cursor team integrating with the massive amount of compute they now own: I’d imagine we will see significant step up improvements with grok 5 later this year as the team gets more experienced and confident with larger training deployments. Here’s hoping for another competitive frontier model!

mchusma9 days ago

Initial impressions, Grok 4.6 for me just didn't really hack it for any usecase I tried. I seem to have a floor for my usecaseses (coding and a bunch of agentic workflows) and Sol/Opus are above some kind of intelligence floor.

4.7 is definitely slower & more expensive. It feels kind of like they really had it burn tokens to claw up the benchmarks. But it's not super clear to me whether it's above the line or not. A part of that is that it is so slow that i haven't been making fast progress today with benchmarking it.

Overall, it it gets above my intelligence line its a good release...but you can read the tea leaves and tell the Grok team thinks this was a miss.

DustinBrett9 days ago

Odd, used 4.6 for many weeks and it handled most things I threw at it. I've been using all models and found it on par with others.

pampas9 days ago

I have no idea how good it is at coding but it seems to be good at omniscient tasks like solving a puzzle game I made [1]. It's a bit of a silly eval but I wonder if strong recall makes it good for knowledge tasks like legal work.

[1] https://redactle.net/llm-leaderboard

andsoitis9 days ago

> for any usecase I tried

For example?

mchusma9 days ago

Coding, agentic flows like logging into my accounts and gathering data, grok bot.

4.6 made more mistakes than SOL or Opus overall. Gave up a lot. And in my opinion, the rate of mistakes is kind of more important than how brilliant it is.

I think 4.7 may still be better, but I was hoping for clearly Sol/Opus level and so far it just isn't there for me.

ActorNightly9 days ago

In other news, people hired by Elon suck at engineering.

perilunar9 days ago

Yeah, all those engineers he hired at SpaceX are useless. Can't launch a fucking thing.

pclowes9 days ago

I don’t love the guy and currently am receiving lawsuit settlement money from him but…

This is such cope.

dom969 days ago

It’s a shame this model has such negative political baggage associated with it. It’s the only one I decided not to run in my LLM benchmarks[1].

1 - https://bench.killswitch-lang.org

sejje9 days ago

You'll have to include it in the future, or your benchmark won't be relevant.

For now, I doubt anyone would notice your protest if you didn't announce it.

peder9 days ago

I think you're seeing a big shift around it.... since it's been markedly cheaper and also still easily available from OpenCode, it's getting large enterprise traction.

mempko9 days ago

Yes, and that's a bad thing.

mempko9 days ago

Not sure why you are being downvoted. Until Musk owns up to his Nazi salute, I won't have anything to do with Grok, no matter how good or cheap it is. And yes, we need to keep talking about this because it's absurd.

cbeach9 days ago

If you watch the actual video, you’ll see Musk saying “my heart goes out to you all” as he waves his arm in the air. The Left would love us to imagine he’s saying “sieg heil” or “exterminate the j3ws” or some such, but that’s far from the truth. The media hoopla around a freeze frame of someone raising their arm is a desperate partisan attempt to smear a political rival.

If Elon hadn’t worked with Orange Man Bad, then the Left would still be in love with him for his massive former donations to the Democrat political machine, and his work against climate change.

The whole “he’s a nazi” accusation is banal, and people are seeing through it now. That’s why we’ve moved on.

niek_pas9 days ago

He’s being downvoted because the audience on Hacker News thinks you should keep politics out of their hobbies. It’s privilege.

xerlait9 days ago

In effect, you are saying you only want to test the tools or techniques that have some imaginary stamp of approval.

Read the full thread on Hacker News →

539 comments

Related stories