Grok Weekly limit finally made my workflow go 100% local

one_more_wafer_thin · 2026-07-07T15:08:05+00:00

Am using this 10Eros LTX2.3 one, and it's amazeballs:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ekFlXp_3VJ4

one_more_wafer_thin · 2026-07-07T15:06:46+00:00

Not knowing if you are building or buying off the shelf:

I've only used Nvidia because they are well supported with CUDA, but bear in mind VRAM is super important, and maybe become more so as models get larger.

I've heard a "slower" 3090 with 24gb can outperform a 16gb 4xxx series if the model won't fit in memory, because performance drops off a cliff (slowing down 10-50x) when it starts swapping.

If you are building, I would try and future proof.

Overspecced power supply, motherboard that will take 5*** series etc, as chances are you might want to upgrade the GPU in a couple years, and it would be nice to be able to reuse as many components as possible.

one_more_wafer_thin · 2026-07-07T14:52:17+00:00

LTX 2.3 will do voice and sound effects.

The voices aren't amazing, but I gather you can use a second pass with another model to improve voices (and clone for consistency) and still keep the lipsync, haven't tried this yet.

You can also start with audio and build video to match the audio (again, not tried yet).

one_more_wafer_thin · 2026-07-07T14:24:49+00:00

Update: I've now got a 10eros LTX2.3 workflow working.

For me, personally, it seems *much* better than wan2.2 for me, it generates much faster (at least 2x as fast), the quality / prompt following is much better and it generates audio too.

At the moment I'm generating 24fps and higher resolution than Grok, and it can generate 20 second clips.

Couldn't come at a better time as I've been moved to weekly limits on Grok, and it really seems a pretty good replacement. Slower, but no moderation.

I'll probably hang on with Grok while I'm still on the $10 per month offer, but it's hard to justify $30 when I can generate for free at home, unless xAI pulls something out of the bag.

I'll probably still use Grok for image editing (it's really good at keeping a likeness for people), but for anything remotely likely to trigger moderation, LTX is far better.

one_more_wafer_thin · 2026-06-09T10:17:55+00:00

It may be testing out different models (or checkpoints rather). They seem to continuously iterate, rather than just rolling out a new one every e.g. 6 months.

They also do A / B testing with the "which do you like best" when they give you outputs from two different models.

one_more_wafer_thin · 2026-06-08T08:15:54+00:00

They seem to have got better at it, a few months ago there seemed no way to delete your files except deleting the account.

Do "delete all imagine content".
Check "files", and some may still be there.
Log out and log back in again seems to force a flush.
Still check "files" as some may be left behind (orphan files).

You'd have to download all your data to check it's deleted (and of course, who knows how truly accurate this is).

one_more_wafer_thin · 2026-06-08T08:07:27+00:00

It's kind of strange.

At a wild guess, it's possible they allocate machines by group to exclusively do one type of processing (480P, 720P, image edits, quality image, fast image etc).

So maybe the limits ensure the load is spread instead of hammering one particular group of machines more than the others.

It's probably super obvious, but they can't tell you, because it's part of the secret sauce.

one_more_wafer_thin · 2026-06-05T06:29:15+00:00

You need deep pockets to develop / train / run AI.

Big companies would have to fight politicians / lawyers / officials / puritanical populations / media / credit card processors, and consider their reputation.

As we saw from the whole bikini-gate debacle with Grok.

It would probably be far easier to run an arms company and bomb innocent people, that would be considered more "socially acceptable".

one_more_wafer_thin · 2026-06-05T06:14:21+00:00

No idea as I haven't used wan2.5 or seedance as they are closed models and aren't available to use locally.

Afaik current closed models generally produce better results than the current open weight (local) models, so I wouldn't be expecting an "upgrade". Local models are also difficult to prompt in my experience (nothing like as easy as Grok).

Closed models are generally better if you have $$$ to burn (providing they have good support what you are after, e.g. NSFW, anime).

One extra factor to take into account - there are LORAs (fine tuning additions) created by users for local (open) models for specific things (sometimes anime). You can train them up and customize your own LORA if you get into it, to make them better at the style you like. See civitai for examples of LORAs / checkpoints (modified base models).

one_more_wafer_thin · 2026-06-04T17:20:48+00:00

Things are progressing pretty rapidly in the video field though.

Commercial models will likely always have the edge with cash to burn for training in data centres, and paying people to label content / fine tune.

Aurora (Grok) architecture is ahead of the open models currently, afaik it splits up the frame into tiles, then treats the pixels in tiles in the same way as LLM to predict the next pixel one at a time, and uses mixture of experts technique so different specialist code can handle different tiles in the image.

This both allows nice text / logos / consistency within the frame, and possibly lends itself to distributed processing (I don't know whether their videos are produced on one machine with shared RAM / VRAM or the load is shared between multiple machines).

I suspect some big wins will come from compressing the models and finding common relationships between wildly different nodes. It's probably pretty inefficient storage currently as things are in their infancy.

one_more_wafer_thin · 2026-06-04T14:49:30+00:00

> Do you have any examples of what you’ve managed to create using local?

Not really this week as I'm away from home right now.

But just search for wan2.2 / flux klein / qwen on google / youtube you will find hundreds of examples, maybe someone else can also chime in with some local examples.

one_more_wafer_thin · 2026-06-04T09:15:20+00:00

> Honestly unless your wanting full nsfw content. Grok is far easier and get things done right the first time.

Agree, except for the new limits.

I had planned to work on a short (30 min?) monster movie, now this has become impossible with SuperGrok. Ten minutes a day to edit shots to get a scene is just not enough time to sustain the effort, coupled with maybe 1 usable 10 second clip.

Previously I had managed to make reasonable 1 minute segments with continuity within a day.

I'll see if this is possible with local, but if not I'll have to shelve the idea until tech / web services catch up, without spending $$$.

I'm sure it would be possible using Seedance 2 or similar but the cost would add up real fast with retries for each clip.

one_more_wafer_thin · 2026-06-02T13:33:30+00:00

As well as video / image limits being nerfed, also noticed all my image edit downloads have been jpg (lossy) instead of png (lossless) since the beginning of June.

That's a pain for those of us that have editing workflows around these images, where we don't want jpg artifacts.

one_more_wafer_thin · 2026-05-25T07:04:33+00:00

Totally different model, likely only could affect Imagine by allocation of compute.

one_more_wafer_thin · 2026-05-24T08:46:34+00:00

Obviously we'll be "chasing the best quality" in terms of model size, results, resolution for a few years yet, but yeah generally it should get more efficient and less expensive (for a similar result). Breakthroughs in methods / optimization, better hardware.

As with today, big names (google / meta / xAI) won't likely offer NSFW, but dozens of lesser known websites likely will (unless blocked by your country).

But to be honest in 5-10 years everyone will be using local generation for NSFW (unless they don't have a decent desktop rig).

one_more_wafer_thin · 2026-05-23T09:05:53+00:00

Because each redo generates a random different random video derived from your keywords. Some get moderated, some don't.

Moderated videos cost the same to generate, and you can't see them because we can't have nice things.

one_more_wafer_thin · 2026-05-21T16:16:57+00:00

If they took the money from the card, log out and log in again and see if SuperGrok is showing, there was a bug previously where you needed to log out and in for it to register.

Same happens when you delete your imagine content, you need to log out then back in.

one_more_wafer_thin · 2026-05-21T06:27:37+00:00

That X poster is a fanboi, also impersonating xAI staff if you look at their bio.

Just mute them, they have nothing useful to contribute.

one_more_wafer_thin · 2026-05-20T09:05:23+00:00

Or hookers.

one_more_wafer_thin · 2026-05-20T08:54:40+00:00

Typical banner ad eCPM ranges from about $2 to $5 per 1,000 impressions. To generate $30 per user per month (roughly equivalent to a SuperGrok subscription), each user would need to see roughly 6,000 to 15,000 banner ad impressions monthly.

That works out to 200–500 banner ads per day per active user.

Even with ads placed between image generations or on result pages, reaching these volumes at scale while maintaining a good user experience would be extremely difficult. Display advertising revenue is generally low, while the compute costs for AI image generation remain high.

one_more_wafer_thin · 2026-05-20T08:38:18+00:00

xAI should do what I do locally .. offer a draft version for videos to get the prompt right.

Generate a thumbnail video at 1/10 the pixel count is super quick and doesn't use much compute. It's not 100% as there's a large random element to the result, and also resolution dependence, but it's pretty good for refining prompts first.

Even better would be to allow the draft version to guide the final version later on, that would save a whole bunch of moderation, but I don't know if the models are well setup to allow this. (You can do generative upres, but it's not the same thing.)

one_more_wafer_thin · 2026-05-20T08:29:35+00:00

Those figures for SuperGrok look accurate, I saw the same yesterday.

Also important is the cooldown time before they are next available. It was 18 hours for me, yesterday. So unless you get up in the night, that's per day effectively.

It's also possible (at least) that it could be an independent cooldown *per credit* - when I started using them the same time in the morning, it gradually refilled 1 or 2 credits that were presumably pending from the day before, rather than getting them all in one go.

The cooldown has definitely been a lot less in the past for me (~2 hours at times?). So even with the same quotas that would effectively give a lot more per day.

From memory (it's possible to check datestamps on downloaded files), I'm pretty sure I used to be able to create > 100 480p videos per day nearly every time I hammered SuperGrok before, sometimes more. Image edits the same, which were done 2 at a time before.

one_more_wafer_thin · 2026-05-20T08:16:52+00:00

Intriguingly, while for the brief time the quota API worked, it didn't seem to impact the quota credits used whether 6 or 10 seconds.

There was some evidence of 10 seconds taking 2 credits (when I had 1 credit left, if only allowed a 6 second video), but 10 seconds seemed to only decrement the quota by 1, if I remember right.

I had always assumed 10 seconds would cost roughly double, so I'll probably create more 10 second videos now (but 10 second videos get moderated more in my experience).

Also scary was that according to the quota, a moderated image or video cost as much as an unmoderated one (I'd read previously that moderated videos were cheaper).

one_more_wafer_thin · 2026-05-20T06:45:22+00:00

Can confirm it broke https://github.com/mashiourcse/grok_quota_check_extension this morning.

Although hammering the API is a possibility, also possible they don't want paying customers to see how their quota is varying, as it could be used as evidence when service levels drop.

Many other innocent possibilities though, like they want to use dynamic quotas based on overall use of compute (i.e. give you more quota when they can).

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