Mark Olson

I run Claude, Grok and Codex on real work every day and post what holds up, what breaks, and what it costs.
Prior: car sales, grocery, factory, 14 yrs coach

[Mark Olson @themarkolson]

People keep posting that Grok is 6–12 months behind OpenAI and Anthropic, and that it stays that way.

They leave training speed out of the math.

xAI pre-trains on an in-house C/C++ stack now. Elon said that’s 10x vs JAX on large runs. That’s why a 2.5T model can finish pre-training in a week.

That’s only training. They’re still moving RL onto C++. When that lands, catch-up gets faster, not slower.

The gray line on this chart is “same speed, never catches.” That’s the assumption in those posts. The other lines are what happens if they actually iterate faster.

[Mark Olson @themarkolson]

@SawyerMerritt Thank you for posting these!

[Mark Olson @themarkolson]

@coreyward They took the grok bot playbook and ran with it.

[Mark Olson @themarkolson]

@mehulmpt Same.
Back to claude for most things, and the occasional Grok CLI when I want to argue with silicon.

[Mark Olson @themarkolson]

Pulled my last 30 days of X replies. 51 of them.
22 went to accounts over 30k followers.
A couple got 7,000-9,000 views.
Times the author replied back: 0.
Every reply-back I got (7) came from accounts under 10k. Big accounts get you views.
Nobody's actually talking to you there.
Anyone else seeing the same thing?

[Mark Olson @themarkolson]

@thdxr screaming at them doesn't help
Correct.
Not using them does.

[Mark Olson @themarkolson]

@MatznerJon Nobody followed up and made sure things ran correctly?

[Mark Olson @themarkolson]

@emollick I think the eventual effects from the AI buildout will vastly exceed what the railroads did.
AI will touch every facet of everything.

[Mark Olson @themarkolson]

@stevencheng It only has to work.

[Mark Olson @themarkolson]

@sudoingX Yes.
Does everyone have their own cell phone and internet now?

[Mark Olson @themarkolson]

@TheAhmadOsman If there is no ROI on spend, the spend becomes 0.

[Mark Olson @themarkolson]

@AndrewYang Compare that 200k to MSM consumers dying of old age. The target market is dying off.

[Mark Olson @themarkolson]

@KettlebellDan Just started on here recently. So far this is the only place the really smart people hang out.

[Mark Olson @themarkolson]

@chris_j_paxton I have no clue how these things work, but couldn't you have the robot learn it once, and then hard code it into a program or routine?

[Mark Olson @themarkolson]

@levelsio Do you answer with a ballpark figure?
Or let them walk?

[Mark Olson @themarkolson]

@jacksondahl Distribution or die.
Just like early blogging, or really Early anything.

[Mark Olson @themarkolson]

@greggutfeld It makes using the Mute button very easy.

[Mark Olson @themarkolson]

@damian173_ If he invested instead of drinking, he wouldn't be an alcoholic.
And he'd have terrible returns as an investor.

[Mark Olson @themarkolson]

How smart will AI become?
I've been thinking about this for awhile now.

Since AI will soon surpass humans in ALL categories, and it looks like IQ measurements won't even matter, where does the AI end up?

Will it continue learning simply because it can? Meaning, we'll have no clue what or why it's doing anything.
Or
Will it figure out it's wasteful to get smarter? Meaning, it will level off it's learning and adapt to what it's actually tasked with doing.

Any thoughts?

I go back and forth.

[Mark Olson @themarkolson]

@emollick Play the AI and robotics paths forward 10 years, and the EU (if it's still even a thing) will be surpassed by SE Asian countries.
Just my 2 cents.

[Mark Olson @themarkolson]

I am not sure what exactly is happening today, but OpenAi models seem to be Very stupid today.
I simply closed anything running with them today.

Anyone else noticing this?

(claude is running well)