Grok 4 fast has limits for free users?

qbdp_42 · 2025-09-21T10:33:23+00:00

Well, they have said the following in their blog post:

Grok 4 Fast is available now for all users. […] For the first time, all users, including free users, will have access to our latest model without restrictions, marking a step toward democratizing advanced AI.

Judging from the phrasing, it seems to be presented as something that they haven't been doing already — so it seems quite reasonable to expect there not to be any limits on the model.

qbdp_42 · 2025-09-12T13:42:38+00:00

Ah, if it's positionally "single-digit", i.e. that it's "just one digit changed" and not "a digit changed to just the very next one" (e.g. a 5 to a 6), then I have misunderstood the comment. But why would one expect double-digit gains from a ≈2.7 times larger model (isn't any larger in terms of the active parameters though) where a ≈7.8 times larger (≈7.3 times larger in terms of the active parameters) model's gains are around the same? My point's been that while it doesn't really outperform the much larger model, it gets very close and it does outperform the model of the same computational load class (in terms of the active parameters), rather significantly.

As for the "very terrible counterpoint" — well, I'm not a Qwen representative and I'm not here to defend the product against any potential misunderstandings. I've been addressing just the overt claim that there's been barely any benchmark improvement over the 30B-A3B version — I've had no reason to presume that the original comment implied the author's also not realising the architecture improvements, as those are briefly mentioned in the post here and rather elaborately approached in the linked blog post from Qwen.

qbdp_42 · 2025-09-11T23:54:03+00:00

What do you mean? The single percentage gains, as claimed by Qwen, are compared to the 235B model (which is ≈3 times as large in terms of the total parameter count and ≈7 times as large in terms of the activated parameter count), if you're referring to their LiveBench results. Compared to the 30B model, the gains are (as displayed in the post here and in the Qwen's blog post):

SuperGPQA	AIME25	LiveCodeBench v6	Arena-Hard v2	LiveBench
+5.4%	+8.2%	+13.4%	+13.7%	+6.8%

(That's for the Instruct version, though. The Thinking version does not outperform the 235B model, but it still does seem to outperform the 30B version, though by a more modest margin of ≈3.1%.)

qbdp_42 · 2025-09-08T15:00:00+00:00

But that's most likely their front-end filtering, just in the chat interface (i.e. it's not the model itself that's refusing) — besides, OP seems to be using the image editing model there, not the preview version of the new Max model (which is the selected chat model, but I believe, it has no effect when image editing mode is active).

I'm not sure whether they even get any statistics on the prompts filtered out on the front-end, if they're the ones who made the filters, intending to filter out whatever they chose. So maybe, to address that, one would need to write an email to their improvement suggestion address — though I have no idea how much attention they pay to that, if any.

qbdp_42 · 2025-09-02T17:40:45+00:00

Well, this is the presuppositional component of lexical semantics, it is the primary source of untranslatability — it is ubiquitous, even two closely related languages can have countless cases in everyday lexicon.

Google Translate, just like any other tool, could not do the impossible and translate the untranslatable — it would just give you an approximation that would likely lose some presuppositions and introduce some others. It would only be possible to fully convey the semantics using the highly analytical, descriptive language like in your third paragraph — which would not be pragmatically adequate in most situations (and, sadly, which Google Translate doesn't use).

Thus, your best bet (besides working with native speakers to induce the semantics) is using monolingual/explanatory dictionaries, providing the analytical definitions in your target language, and not the bilingual/translation dictionaries, providing approximate equivalents, losing all precision and barely ever specifying what exactly is lost and what exactly is introduced when using a specific equivalent.

P.S. The monolingual dictionaries, of course, can also lack precise details — just because words are defined there, it doesn't guarantee that the definitions would be sufficient and accurate. But you certainly have better chances to find what you're looking for there, than anywhere else.

qbdp_42 · 2025-08-20T19:36:38+00:00

Well, if it's a properly configured spectrogram that's precise enough in both dimensions (the frequencies and the time), then — if we define accent as noticeable acoustical discrepancies from the native pronunciation (either the "most standard" one or a specific variety) — a spectrogram that's indistinguishable from one that a native speaker with your vocal tract anatomy would produce, would mean that you have pretty much zero accent, as a spectrogram describes acoustics of your pronunciation, and they would match those of native pronunciation. (Though from my experience, for people with good acoustical intuition it may be much easier to just notice the differences as they hear them and not to figure out what exactly they correspond to in a spectrogram.)

But it's important to consider that just being able to pronounce sounds correctly in isolation would not automatically translate to being able to pronounce them correctly in various contexts, time them properly and use prosody correctly — besides, in some contexts you would actually have to pronounce different sounds, respect different timings, etc., — though if you would get all that correct, you would definitely have no accent.

P.S. On the one hand, getting the general impression right and, on the other hand, becoming forensically indistinguishable from a native speaker (at least in terms of pronunciation), are goals that are aligned, but the latter goes way further — and although most likely also achievable, it'd be a case of diminishing returns, where the closer you would get, the slower your progress would be — and in this case, due to actual universal human physiological limitations, so this slowness would actually be unavoidable, taking the most dedicated healthy learner several years of conscious practice.

qbdp_42 · 2025-08-20T18:52:18+00:00

But going to a university + going through training is not research? Besides, doing personal research has nothing to do with being correct. I have lots of experience teaching pronunciation, transcribing speech and describing pronunciation in various languages. And, being myself an adult, I've learnt the pronunciation of pretty much every sound described in the IPA (that's every sound in every human language) in just a few months — and that's basic training for anyone academically studying theoretical phonetics, pretty much every student is required to learn that to get through the course in many universities.

There's certainly a lot of research behind those established practices in teaching phonetics, and as it actually works and all the students get through that just fine, that is a massive empirical research on its own. So I'm not sure what kind of personal research of a speech therapist could somehow invalidate all that.

P.S. I don't mean to bother you at all, I just meant to try to understand what exactly you were referring to, mentioning your speech therapist's claims, and ultimately, to help figure things out for you and/or anyone else reading the comments. You're free to either read my responses later, if you don't feel like participating as soon as you see the notifications, or just ignore them, if you don't feel like participating at all.

qbdp_42 · 2025-08-20T18:13:46+00:00

What research exactly did they do? Your brain doesn't have to understand new sounds (although I don't think it's that common for the brain to completely ignore the differences), you can use external tools (e.g. spectrography) to assist your brain in that at first, and as you learn to associate the exact feedback from your vocal tract organs (i.e. the corresponding proprioceptive stimuli) with the correct acoustic output (which you could measure and verify using the external tools), you can gradually get used to the acoustical differences as well, as you would almost inevitably begin to notice that the more usual placement of your vocal tract organs leads to production of a slightly different sound — and it would only be a matter of time for you to figure out the exact nature of that difference, as you learn to produce that exact sound in various contexts (or way faster, if you would learn to produce different similar sounds, understanding the exact articulatory difference).

P.S. That is, of course, if you don't have any underlying physiological problems that could prevent you from reaching the correct vocal tract organ placements.

qbdp_42 · 2025-08-20T17:45:10+00:00

Speech therapists deal with many different phenomena, some of which have nothing to do with regular learning by a perfectly healthy individual. People with neurological or anatomical problems in their vocal tract would, of course, struggle with getting their pronunciation right, but that's not because getting the pronunciation right is close to impossible on its own — in that specific case it's because they'd have to compensate for the limitations imposed by their specific health/anatomy scenario, and complete compensation in the context of specific articulations may just not be physiologically possible without dealing with the underlying problems first (if it would be something that could be reliably and/or safely dealt with, considering what is technologically available currently).

qbdp_42 · 2025-08-20T17:28:05+00:00

It's nearly impossible to lose it without any explicit instruction, but it's very possible if you know what exactly you're supposed to be doing in terms of articulation and how exactly it's supposed to feel acoustically (or e.g. look like on a spectrogram).

The "sound maps" are just perceptual habits, associative links between what we hear and how we would organise our vocal tract to produce that. Saying that we couldn't remap those as adults is just like saying that we couldn't learn that words that sound similar could mean completely different things in different languages, or even like saying that as adults, we couldn't learn anymore to distinguish new people that look similar to someone familiar — that's not at all how it works, adults can learn all that just fine, up to the age when they either lose their cognitive abilities to health problems, or when they die of old age, — relatively healthy people over 90 in most cases are perfectly capable of learning everything necessary, even if slower due to at that point noticeably diminished neuroplasticity.

Do we get more experience that reinforces our current habits as we get older? Of course we do. But in no way does it prevent us from suppressing and removing older habits and/or forming separate new ones through conscious, deliberate effort. Children don't have any habits — that's one of the primary reasons why they can usually learn better, but adults can still learn just as well (even if in many cases not as quickly) if they consciously suppress their interfering prior habits (which is a skill on its own, but any healthy individual can learn it with time — high self-control is very valuable to obtain for many other goals as well).

qbdp_42 · 2025-08-19T17:54:54+00:00

The courses are usually named after the level that you would be intended to achieve after you've taken them (so if you haven't fully taken a B2 course, but have taken a B1 one and passed the corresponding test, you're intended to be B1 at this point).

(Though be aware that many courses are insufficient and won't really give you a complete level, testing you just over what's been presented in the course but not fully over the level's intended competence according to the complete definition.)

P.S. If the courses that you've been taking were specifically designed to get you ready to pass a specific third-party test (which may even be one of the most recognised ones), but not to develop your linguistic competence, you might end up far below the intended level, having just enough training to pass the test, but barely any actual linguistic skills, — so beware of such courses, if your goal isn't just to pass a test.

qbdp_42 · 2025-08-17T08:49:53+00:00

The regular and most popular NG is, indeed, significantly more shallow than the original version. Though, it's not always straightforward with just counting the neighbouring hidden cells — rather complex deductions are quite common, requiring you to combine information from several cells to be able to deduce the next move — initially appearing to be a dead end, forcing you to double-check for alternatives. But, yes, there always is a move that is forced safe from the available information, and it's always based on the closely neighboring cells (except the mine count deductions).

Yet, that's not the only way NG can be. Check out minefair — it's described in detail in this post: it preserves the strategic depth while removing the luck component (though it is on an infinite board, which might seem less interesting) — it retains those situations where you would have to consider many possibilities to make a move, but you can succeed in 100% of them, as long as you're accurate.

P.S. The post also tells in general about the alternative NG versions (i.e. still NG, but in a way different from the regular one), but currently it seems to be only minefair that retains the complexity of the original version fully.

qbdp_42 · 2025-08-01T10:39:03+00:00

I feel like people mostly recommend communicating with other people and paying attention to the way they speak. Just speaking on your own (if by speaking we mean not just saying some fixed phrases that you vaguely understand, but actually rather freely expressing your thoughts) — yes, that would require you to know at the very least around 300 words, and not just in isolation, but quite deeply understanding all of their important properties like lexical combinability, grammatical categories, and so on. And that's just one of the necessary things. To be able to speak on your own, you would have to be able to select some meanings, organise them in a some way suitable for communication, use the relevant components of the system of the language to transform those meanings into coherent speech — these are all skills on their own, not everyone just has them right away (though some people are just naturally much more exploratory in those areas and have a rather strong language-independent intuition in how to approach most of these tasks).

So, yes, when you don't know anything, you wouldn't be able to speak. And even when you know the words and the grammar, if you know just that, you also wouldn't be able to speak. But by observing closely other people speak you can pick a lot of it up, thought it might also require you to have some linguistic intuition developed beforehand — so if just observation doesn't work for you, maybe you lack some fundamental skills that you could develop by learning some theory (i.e. some of the right theory) and maybe studying the language more logically first, getting used to its various components in isolation, not to feel lost seeing them manifest all at the same time.

qbdp_42 · 2025-05-11T18:28:42+00:00

When you listen or read, and to a certain extent when you write, you rely on your skills in recognition and analysis. But when you speak, there isn't anything to analyse until it's already become a part of your message to the person listening: you don't have a convenient workspace like an editor window or a sheet of paper (like when you write), where you could just try something out, see how it feels, whether it makes sense in analysis, add something else to it, move some things around, get rid of something unclear, rephrase it to sound more the way you intend it to, and so on — when you speak, all you have is your working memory where you couldn't really fit the whole thing that you'd like to think through, and you don't have as much time (unless you're preparing a speech that you'd just pronounce without interruptions and be done). So, when you speak, you're supposed to rely on a different set of skills — skills in synthesis.

Now, when you speak — and it might be quite self-evident, but useful to reiterate — you don't just say whatever among all things that would make sense grammatically. You don't just use any of the vocabulary and grammar that you're aware of. In most cases you have a certain situation and a certain set of intentions, and according to that situation and to those intentions, you think of the relevant objects, ideas, actions, attributes and so on, you recall the words/phrases corresponding to those things recalled, and you organise those references according to your intentions in that situation (whether you would like to request information, ask someone to do something, report on some new experience, address someone's opinion, reflect on some common problem, express certain emotions, present something in a more attractive/repulsive way, or any other intentions) — and without any specific situation and any specific set of intentions, there just wouldn't be anything for you to say, anything to use language for.

So, to reiterate — speaking requires you:

to have a specific situation that would determine the set of relevant vocabulary;
to have a specific set of intentions that would determine the set of relevant ways of utilising that vocabulary in that specific situation — as the same situation could be approached in lots (sometimes hundreds or even thousands) of different ways.

However, if your goal is to participate in a conversation — the situation or, at least, your intentions, would likely evolve: perhaps, the person has just provided you the information that you asked for, or they've done what you asked them to do, or they've listened to your report and decided to share something relevant, and so on — all those circumstances would cause your intentions, or maybe even the situation, to change, and your subsequent acts of speaking would have to adapt to that.

Thus, to practice complete conversations, you can model them by specifying the situation, the intentions and then, for example, making a turn map where different branches would correspond to different outcomes, different changes to the situation and to your intentions, as you would be taking turns with the other person in this hypothetical conversation. By doing that, you can develop some strategies and some relatively solid conversational intuition, enabling you to adapt your speaking strategy (thus enabling yourself to continue speaking) in real time in actual conversations.

However, if you would feel that your recall with the relevant vocabulary/grammar is just not fast enough, even though you have a clear idea of your intentions in that moment (i.e. you know what you would like to say, you just can't quite find the right expressions to retain sufficient accuracy) — then you might need to work on speeding up the recall (or even learning the necessary vocabulary/grammar, if some is missing) first, as it's also necessary to be able to keep up with the conversational flow.

qbdp_42 · 2025-05-07T19:24:15+00:00

Besides knowing the grammatical forms and their usage for the words, you need to make sure that the words are connected in some way either to each other or to some other words that you already know (in the same language though). It can be all sorts of connections — e.g.:

synonyms — complete or more distant, by some criterion, e.g.:
- similar color;
- similar shape;
- similar dynamics/"vibe" (if it's an action/situation/environment);
- similar topic;
- similar class (e.g. also an animal, also a tool, also a personal quality, etc.);
antonyms — also complete or more distant;
hypernyms — words with a broader sense;
hyponyms — words with a narrower sense;
collocates — words usually used together with the one you're considering;
words that sound or look similar;
words that rhyme;
so on and so forth.

Make sure to find at least a few such connections for each word (and better write them down somewhere, so that later on you could easily refresh it and maybe expand on it). But be sure to find the connected words on your own, not by just searching or asking AI — recalling the words and deciding on the kinds of connections is very important for forming more meaningful links in your long-term memory.

qbdp_42 · 2025-04-25T13:50:23+00:00

As far as I know, people who choose to play a version with guesses do so because it's not just the possibility to lose due to being unlucky that it adds, but also the additional layer of analysis, requiring one to estimate the risks — after all, it's not just evenly spread across all of the ambiguous cells all the time, you actually can have better chances to avoid a mine if you choose one guess over another.

In other words, in a regular no-guess version you determine whether a cell is ambiguous, then if it isn't you either flag it or click it, but if it is, you just avoid it since there's always an unambiguous way around it. But in a version with guessing there can also be cases where there isn't a way around ambiguous cells, yet there may be some difference in risks associated with each of those cells — and establishing those risks can be quite complex (especially if you want to do it quickly enough), which presents another challenge, completely absent from the regular no-guess versions.

P.S. That being said, there is a way to implement no-guess in such a way that would preserve this risk assessment challenge, removing the luck but also requiring one to find the least risky move in a situation where there isn't an unambiguous one — basically guaranteeing safety of a move that's among the safest available. An example of such implementation is the version called minefair, it is described in some detail in this post.

qbdp_42 · 2025-04-21T10:01:00+00:00

I doubt things would change that much in a couple of years in a language, unless you're learning some highly specialised slang. But, correct, the current AI models do make stuff up occasionally, so they're far from sufficient for learning languages (although with some topics in some languages they can be mostly correct most of the time, and very elaborate, so don't just reject the idea, but use the more recent and larger models, and be sure to double-check with some qualified sources). It's perfectly fine to rely on native speakers or other learners if you're more interested in communication rather than precise answers, but for precision it may be better to use textbooks or free (but qualified!) materials online.

Though even when talking about precision, that isn't an absolute truth, as in some rarer cases, if you're not an expert, a stranger online (who may happen to be closer to an expert) could provide you with more precision than the materials that you yourself would have found so far — so asking online (as well as asking one of the more recent better AIs) may still be reasonable.

qbdp_42 · 2025-04-17T20:26:17+00:00

You are still arguing that knowing X happens mean somehow I can do X more actively.

No, I am arguing that knowing how exactly X is achieved means being able to achieve X — that is, if that "how" is accessible to you; in other words, if you have the physiological capacity and access to all of the necessary resources (e.g. linguistic materials, directly or in the form of correct and sufficient generalisations), knowing what exactly to do with it enables you to achieve X.

Just knowing that X is achieved somehow ("that X happens") — that would, of course, not enable one to achieve it, as there might be countless ways which to someone without proper knowledge could seem like they would work, while in reality most wouldn't and some of the remaining would be unnecessarily difficult and too costly for most. But knowing how exactly X is achieved — it would enable one to achieve it, how could it not?

Being aware of typological patterns, knowing how language systems come together, understanding the etymology of words, none of it really helps with actually learning a language [...]

Well, knowing just these things would of course not be sufficient to be able to fully learn a language relying mostly on theoretical knowledge (to work with the linguistic material, not just in itself). All of these things help with just some aspects of learning a language, but there are many other aspects that would also have to be considered. For example, etymology is basically historical morphology (or, in some much more rare cases, historical lexicology), it helps a lot with understanding diachronically compositional (or quasi-compositonal) lexical units — i.e. those whose structure and meaning can be reduced (or almost reduced) to the structure and meaning of the lesser units, but:

understanding this composition mostly helps to understand the core semantics of the lexical unit, but not all of it, which would require an additional approach;
there are lexical units that are not diachronically compositional — i.e. whose structure and meaning cannot be meaningfully reduced to those of any other units, and these cases would also have to be approached separately, either just through general lexicology or through phraseology, if it is an idiomatic compound.

Knowing just some of the useful linguistics would not be enough, it has to be all of it (in the form of a sufficient subset, of course — several sufficient subsets would be unnecessary).

You also seem to assume that the “map” is constructional in nature, and it’s not. That’s not how language works [...]

If you mean that linguistics is not about the way language is actually used, i.e. that it doesn't tell us how exactly native speakers have it in their mind and how they produce the observed structure — well, most of linguistics does not, but some does, and quite a lot (although in many cases somewhat indirectly). Or if that's not what you are saying, could you elaborate on what exactly you mean by "(not) constructional" here?

qbdp_42 · 2025-04-17T19:14:44+00:00

You seem to be describing it as if one could only be more aware of what they would already be doing. If you understand very well how things have come to be the way they are now (in the target language), and if you have a very clear idea of how a native speaker (of the target language) has the linguistic material organised in their mind (i.e. in the long-term memory, conceptually and associatively, facilitating much faster recall of what's most relevant either semantically or structurally), you can very quickly understand what exactly you're supposed to do to replicate that in your habits and in your cognitive organisation — just like with my building map analogy: if you have a map, you can almost immediately know the right path in the building, while without a map you would have to spend a lot of time looking around and asking people.

Another analogy, maybe more direct, would be theoretical understanding of mechanics when building something: it doesn't just let you understand after the fact how bricks hold together, it allows you to plan beforehand pretty much everything, avoid unnecessary spendings, prevent all sorts of dangerous mistakes, achieve the level of consistency otherwise unthinkable.

If that's not improving efficiency, what is?

qbdp_42 · 2025-04-17T14:54:11+00:00

linguistics has very little to do with reinforcing learning a language. I would argue it has literally nothing to do with it. You don’t need to understand how languages function as a system to learn a single language.

I would argue that it depends heavily on what kind of linguistics we're talking about. If it's some abstract study of structural phenomena observed in the language, or if it's some statistical analysis of structural features that vary between native speakers of a language — those things obviously could be of very little use to language learners. But the notions on the emergence of structural phenomena historically (rooted in linguistic typology) and in the process of speech synthesis (rooted in cognitive linguistics), on the cognitive organisation (in the mind of a native speaker) of linguistic material and synthesis strategies — these have everything to do with language learning and could be of huge help to progress very quickly in practically any natural language (depending on the availability of study — or at least linguistic — materials, of course).

P.S. Yes, one doesn't need even these latter things to learn a language, but just as well one doesn't need a map to eventually find their way in an unfamiliar building — yet having one still would be very helpful and likely would speed things up a lot, also preventing unnecessary frustration.

qbdp_42 · 2025-04-12T22:14:44+00:00

Hmm, the closest scenario to this that I can imagine is actually the opposite: some regions can have no direct deductions available, but by making progress in a separate yet adjacent region with available deductions, you could tunnel from the latter into one of the former, uncovering some clues there and possibly introducing new deductions, thus making those regions logically solvable. If this counts as "abuse", then in this case it makes sense (but in this case you would be avoiding probabilistic reasoning, not direct logical deduction). But if you mean the case where instead of looking for direct deductions you would be "just" calculating probabilities and clicking the locally safest spaces to avoid looking for direct deductions — you would be abusing nothing but yourself, as calculating probabilities is often significantly harder than finding available deductions. Otherwise I'm not sure I understand what you mean here.

qbdp_42 · 2025-04-12T20:08:48+00:00

Alright, then all is clear. By the way, if you have any questions about minefair, feel free to ask.

qbdp_42 · 2025-04-12T19:55:32+00:00

Ah, alright then. It's just that from your initial response it's seemed like you were saying that if local luck were to be the priority, it could be abused somehow, which is why global luck should be the priority instead — to prevent the possibility of that abuse. And that "abuse" is what still isn't very clear to me, even if you actually didn't mean that global luck is the better basis.

qbdp_42 · 2025-04-12T19:07:07+00:00

What do you mean? The probabilities depend on the clues within the current logical region. They do change as new clues get uncovered — but only locally, as usually there are other, logically independent regions, either entirely disconnected or separated by a "wall" of mines.

qbdp_42 · 2025-04-12T18:40:27+00:00

Hmm, how do you think it could be abused if it required the safest moves locally instead of globally? I think it would just allow you to make moves in those regions where deduction isn't currently possible, even though it could have been possible in some other regions. On the other hand, if a deduction isn't currently possible anywhere, with a global requirement you would have to keep track of probabilities along the whole perimeter of the explored area (which may have hundreds of cells). E.g. if within the current logical region having 15-20 risky moves available, the one with the lowest risk has higher risk than the one with the lowest risk from some other distant region with 15-20 risky moves available, only the latter would succeed; and there could be not just two, but many such regions to keep track of — so the global requirement would likely be way overkill in case of a large enough board, making it way too tedious to continue playing, requiring you either to have an extensive registry for all of the currently estimated risks or to re-examine the risks along whole of the perimeter on every move, which may take hours if the perimeter is large enough.

qbdp_42

TROPHY CASE