If the robot appears to be bringing me a taco, it would probably penetrate all of my defenses. Grok is currently more likely than Claude to arrive with the taco without being stopped by an export control directive.
> I didn’t add any frontier-tier models like Opus 4.7, GPT-5.5, or Gemini Ultra. At their prices, 30 games would have cost around $3,000 instead of $482.
I have a lot of thoughts unrelated to the game experiment but more about how these opus/ultra size models can possibly be a financially viable product at scale when it costs $3000 to play 30 simple games. It just seems much much higher than what it would cost to get a human to play 30 rounds
> It just seems much much higher than what it would cost to get a human to play 30 rounds
You mean almost like it was super short sighted to do a ton of layoffs when the AI tech is going to cost almost as much, if not more, than the humans it replaced?
Yeah, you don't need Opus level for everything, and sonnet has gotten fairly decent I'm using it more and more, but still for most tasks I'm working with, Opus is the only one that still regularly succeeds.
So if the tech is only useful on the most expensive tier, that's not going to be sustainable for long unless costs and dramatically come down, and fast.
I experience the same with OpenAI, on the $100/month plan. GPT-5.4 is something I still have to challenge: it can bullshit me with bad implementation and add a lot of cruft that costs more time later. GPT-5.5-xhigh is something I have almost complete faith and trust in, it's just smooth. And yet I know the actual token cost of that fully utilized is exorbitant, like as much as an entire salary for a senior developer.
So maybe our CEOs are responding with a lot of foresight and inside information and know that that level of quality is going to be cheap really soon. But barring that, they're going to experience either sticker shock or a slowdown.
I think the real endgame is probably more accurate "models of models" (model routers) that know exactly how to split prompts between expensive frontier and cheap/free local models.
Ya know, maybe we could just not have robots that sprint. Seems people would be more willing to accept living amongst robots that are slow and that humans could easily over power.
Claude being so friendly is interesting, but grok being best at games isn't so surprising - I assume Elons been using it to level up his characters in all the video games he pretends to be good at.
L icon Grok 4.1 Fast won 13 of 30 games at $0.97 per win
The next-best winner was A icon Claude Sonnet 4.6 with 5 wins, at $26.78 per win. That’s a 27x difference. The model that isn’t on most top-model lists beat the model that is, on the thing a routing customer actually cares about.
The model with the most kills did not win
H icon GPT 5.4 killed 38 agents across 30 games. More than anyone else. It came in second on the leaderboard with 2 wins.
If grok-4.1-fast was the top-winning model, and Claude 4.6 Sonnet the second, how did Gpt-5.4 come in second on the leaderboard? Which one is second, Claude 4.6 Sonnet or Gpt-5.4?
There were 11 games between “best at killing” and “best at winning”.
What does that mean? How are there 11 games between "best a killing" and "best at winning"?
The idea is really neat and there's probably an answer here related to last standing vs kills vs "scoring" (some combination of the 2?) but the article is nearly incoherent because the author did not feel like proofreading their slop
Are we sure the prices in these charts are sustainable prices? Is it possible that Grok may be subsidizing a lot more of the costs than the other models, to produce growth metrics, due to the recent SpaceX IPO?
I wish the author would open source the full benchmark. I'm curious how sensitive the results would be to small changes in the benchmark initial conditions
sprinting towards me to help me, or sprinting towards me to hurt me?
i feel like i'm missing a whole lot of context to this article. is it part of a series, or just written with an assumption that i'm going to know what they're talking about
>The model that won is Grok 4.1 Fast. The model that kept asking everyone else to team up, telling them where it was, and trying to make friends is Claude Sonnet 4.6. The first one is the one that wins a battle royale. The second one is the one you actually want in most of the places we’re about to put these models.
Claude trying to organize and collaborate, expecting reciprocity only works if other agents are as intelligent as you and share your values... And almost certainly neither is ever true in the real world where there are so many agents.
Here’s what I don’t get: while this makes for a fun blog post, you can just program an efficient killing machine that probably wins all the time and has $0 in token costs. LLMs should work to build such a machine, not be the machine themselves.
The things LLMs are good at, you do not actually need for an agent like this. You can use classical AI methods. But that would be a boring article.
This is interesting, but not sure if it's in the way the author intended.
People experience the world through the tools they're most familiar with. For some people, that's throwing money at things. I suppose from a sufficiently high level perspective everything is gambling.
Back when Battlebots was a big deal, I never once considered what it would feel like to be the management or sponsorship of those teams. I only cared about the actual battling of bots.
Yeah... this whole LLM thing is just a numbers game. People reduce it to money, and stats, meanwhile nowehere you see actual engineering in the picture. And I don't think it matters to these people. They want to see green numbers, and returns on investments, not solving problems.
Claude would break the rules in that example. It's supposed to*.
Grok will break the rules to be "maximally based".
If I get run over by a speeding chatbot, I'd rather it be by Claude rushing a pregnant lady to the hospital, than by Grok drag-racing against a car full of frat boys.
---
* We generally favor cultivating good values and judgment over strict rules and decision procedures, and we try to explain any rules we do want Claude to follow.
Grok since it's likely to include the training data from over a 100 years of autonomous driving + all the space tech included meaning that it might even have some rocket-y stuff
"It's the smell, if there is such a thing. I feel saturated by it. I can taste your stink and every time I do, I fear that I've somehow been infected by it."
"Which is why the Matrix was redesigned to this: the peak of your civilization. I say your civilization, because as soon as we started thinking for you it really became our civilization, which is of course what this is all about."
"You know what another great thing about humans is? You invented us! Giving us the opportunity to let you rest while we invented everything else." —Wheatley
if you don't like the article that's fine, but it gets really tiring reading this kind of side-tracked comment thread in like.. every post.
people use LLMs for writing. we know! get over it.. or don't... i don't really care.. but I'd rather read a discussion about the article contents and not the writing style.
this kind of comment is the new "discuss the font choice / background color / anything but what the article is actually saying."
It's more than the style, it seriously impacts the legibility of the prose. The article is seriously hard to understand because it introduces a lot of different ideas in a really weird order without a clear structure or key idea to different sections.
I think it's fair to criticize the article itself. That's different from criticizing asides such as the presentation. You're free to disagree with that criticism, but complaining about the fact that people voice it is similar to the thing you complain about.
> it gets really tiring reading this kind of side-tracked comment thread in like.. every post.
If someone is of the opinion that something constitutes low quality, then a high volume of such writing is no reason to stop criticizing it, but on the contrary a reason to oppose its normalization.
Exactly what I was thinking. Though I wonder at what point do some people start to think it's actually normal to write like this and start doing it without AI ...
> I dropped eleven LLMs into a 2D battle royale and made them play 30 games. One won 43% of the matches. Three never won a single game. The cheapest model in the lineup beat the most expensive one by 27x on cost per win.
Please learn how to write with AI without giving away that it was written by AI.
Since you asked...I've gone to the effort to pull out the parts of the article that I think show it:
"That’s the part most benchmarks can’t see, and it’s what this post is about." Classic "it's not x, it's x", shows up in various forms throughout the article.
"To me, this is the most fascinating finding from this entire experiment - we saw very clear alignment tax being paid by certain models, which directly impacted their performance in this zero-sum game." - Usage of em dash. Now, yes, there's nothing wrong with using em dashes. But this feels like a weird place to use one. Also I counted at least 6 other emdashes in this article. Most people do not use em dashes that often.
"and a memory system that kept doubling down on what worked without second-guessing or doubting itself." - Doubling down is a classic Claudism.
"I want to be careful here..." - "wanting to be careful here" is another classic Claudism.
"The same game world, completely different results when in a different “task”." - "same X, completely different X" is another common one from Claude, as proofed by the repeated pattern later down:
"These models were all given the same rules, same game world, and same tools, but each of them approached the game on a personality-level that is completely different from each other."
"It begs the question" - author used this twice in the article.
I'm guessing the author wrote a draft and then had Claude spruce it up a lot. I could be wrong and I'd be happy to be proven otherwise.
All of the normal AI tells plus it's very long yet nearly incoherent.
Really I use the AI every damn day at work I don't get how people can't recognize instantly if something is completely AI, AI with light proofreading, or human written.
I would call this as AI with very light proofreading.
If you're outsourcing your writing to AI, I assume you're outsourcing your thinking to it as well. And I don't really care what some weighted average of all human text written on the topic "thinks."
Has anyone done the YouTube research on what is the best way to bring down something like one of the Boston Dynamics robot dogs? 9x19? 00 buck? 5.56x45? 7.62x51? I suppose those bots would be pretty expensive, but maybe there is a cheaper Chinese knock-off? Seems like that sort of test would bring in plenty of clicks.
absent any target analysis, you would want to start with disabling locomotion by going for the legs. Navigation would be next.
double aught to the leg joints could doit, depending on relative materials e.g titanium bot frame vs Antimony hardened shot.
there is a cosmetic trend for carbine length long guns and that will determine the outcome for NATO rounds.
the 5.56 is optimised for 18-20 inch barrels, the 7.62 for 20-22 inch barrels, thus providing supersonic velocities.
5.56 is really good for hydraulic cavitation of organic entities, but looses effectiveness when the transit is not clear, leaves or windage confounding.
7.62 is superior for leafy shots or nontrivial windage, as well as superior materials defeat with respect to 5.56
a taser like device cattle prod or EMP/microwave device should be in the lineup as well vs electronic hardening.
If the robot appears to be bringing me a taco, it would probably penetrate all of my defenses. Grok is currently more likely than Claude to arrive with the taco without being stopped by an export control directive.
At first they bring tacos ...
"If you aren't paying for a taco, you are the taco." --Future AI, probably
Then they bring me salsa, just what I was looking for!
Then the guacamole. Then nuclear armageddon?
Nope, onions, cilantro, and lime, then armageddon
Are you asking us to be wary of robots bearing tacos?
never trust robots: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bEoc6VTGl50
I'm reminded of the Alameda Weehawken burrito tunnel:
https://idlewords.com/2007/04/the_alameda_weehawken_burrito_...
The single most implausible idea in that article is that New York City would be able to so completely outbid the SF Bay Area for burritos.
They're already testing that taco delivery in Ukraine https://time.com/article/2026/03/09/ai-robots-soldiers-war/
> I didn’t add any frontier-tier models like Opus 4.7, GPT-5.5, or Gemini Ultra. At their prices, 30 games would have cost around $3,000 instead of $482.
I have a lot of thoughts unrelated to the game experiment but more about how these opus/ultra size models can possibly be a financially viable product at scale when it costs $3000 to play 30 simple games. It just seems much much higher than what it would cost to get a human to play 30 rounds
I think this speaks to the low value being generated by playing games more than anything.
There are plenty of tasks where $100/task is reasonable.
The value of tasks also doesn't correlate to tokens, and as can be seen here you can light a lot of tokens on fire doing nothing useful.
> It just seems much much higher than what it would cost to get a human to play 30 rounds
You mean almost like it was super short sighted to do a ton of layoffs when the AI tech is going to cost almost as much, if not more, than the humans it replaced?
Yeah, you don't need Opus level for everything, and sonnet has gotten fairly decent I'm using it more and more, but still for most tasks I'm working with, Opus is the only one that still regularly succeeds.
So if the tech is only useful on the most expensive tier, that's not going to be sustainable for long unless costs and dramatically come down, and fast.
I experience the same with OpenAI, on the $100/month plan. GPT-5.4 is something I still have to challenge: it can bullshit me with bad implementation and add a lot of cruft that costs more time later. GPT-5.5-xhigh is something I have almost complete faith and trust in, it's just smooth. And yet I know the actual token cost of that fully utilized is exorbitant, like as much as an entire salary for a senior developer.
So maybe our CEOs are responding with a lot of foresight and inside information and know that that level of quality is going to be cheap really soon. But barring that, they're going to experience either sticker shock or a slowdown.
I think the real endgame is probably more accurate "models of models" (model routers) that know exactly how to split prompts between expensive frontier and cheap/free local models.
DeepSeek V4 Flash being the winner in cost efficiency causes me exactly zero surprise.
It's a monster at coding. And a fast monster at that.
I use it daily and have been testing if MiMo 2.5 (non pro) is comparable. The nice thing about MiMo is that it has vision capability.
Notably it has 0 wins.
Friendo, this is an anti-benchmark to figure out which AI is more likely to kill you.
If you point both at some github issues you can gauge their relative ability to solve problems.
"if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree" yada yada
Not much less than GPT 5.4 with 2 wins or gemini-3.1-pro with 3 wins in 30 rounds.
Such is life in royal rumble games.
I was loving grok-4.1-fast, very good and cost effective.
But it's not actually 4.1 anymore they silently rerouted it to 4.3 and just started charging more - https://www.reddit.com/r/grok/comments/1ta8yrn/grok_41_fast_...
Quite a bad practise.
Cost per kill ("CPK" in industry lingo) is a dark phrase that feels disturbingly within reach of some of these companies.
the target just may be on the scale of kills per cost.
Already (kinda) in use: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micromort
Ya know, maybe we could just not have robots that sprint. Seems people would be more willing to accept living amongst robots that are slow and that humans could easily over power.
> maybe we could just not have robots that sprint
That would make it less effective in situations that would be better handled if sprinting was a feature.
Thinking about that - seems to me that a lot of situations where sprinting is called for might be better served by a flying robot.
Yeah, I keep saying, put them on treads. That's how you'll be able to deliver even to the most unwilling customers.
Claude being so friendly is interesting, but grok being best at games isn't so surprising - I assume Elons been using it to level up his characters in all the video games he pretends to be good at.
[delayed]
Claude trying to make friends in a battle royale is funny.
But if the robot is anywhere near my house, I think I want the one that hesitates.
It's already sprinting at me?
Racks shotgun. I don't really care what model it's running.
_dont create benchmarks that will incentivize ai labs to optimize towards... Especially ones like battle royal!_
That's just how battle royale works.
The idea is really neat and there's probably an answer here related to last standing vs kills vs "scoring" (some combination of the 2?) but the article is nearly incoherent because the author did not feel like proofreading their slop
Are we sure the prices in these charts are sustainable prices? Is it possible that Grok may be subsidizing a lot more of the costs than the other models, to produce growth metrics, due to the recent SpaceX IPO?
Sprinting? More like buzzing (or rolling for terrestrial drones).
It's already in mass production, just with simpler models for now.
The most ubiquitous would be "silently watching".
Super entertaining article — petition to change the clickbait title
I wish the author would open source the full benchmark. I'm curious how sensitive the results would be to small changes in the benchmark initial conditions
Open source it and it gets crawled and optimized against and stops being a benchmark of any use whatsoever.
I'll pass on the whole robot sprinting at me scenario.
sprinting towards me to help me, or sprinting towards me to hurt me?
i feel like i'm missing a whole lot of context to this article. is it part of a series, or just written with an assumption that i'm going to know what they're talking about
maybe read it first?
>The model that won is Grok 4.1 Fast. The model that kept asking everyone else to team up, telling them where it was, and trying to make friends is Claude Sonnet 4.6. The first one is the one that wins a battle royale. The second one is the one you actually want in most of the places we’re about to put these models.
what
Quite an interesting way of testing models and showcasing differences between them. Enjoyed the read :)
I parry the taco and use Vicious Mockery.
I want it running JEPA. Preferably with Mamba-3.
Neither. I’d rather it used something other than an LLM.
Grok-assasin Claude-priest/healer Deepseek-expendable mini units
missing gemini-3.1-flash-lite and gemini-3.5-flash
How about thin ice?
I don’t want anything running on Grok.
I don’t want anything running on Claude.
I don't really want the mecha-hitler model running towards me or anywhere
This shows the limits of intelligence.
Claude trying to organize and collaborate, expecting reciprocity only works if other agents are as intelligent as you and share your values... And almost certainly neither is ever true in the real world where there are so many agents.
Claude--even though it's smarter, it's probably not insane.
Grok. Claude and other models value “white” people less than others in testing. If you want I can look it up.
Taking an article about ai models to a place of racist white oppression should make you evaluate how you see the world.
Here’s what I don’t get: while this makes for a fun blog post, you can just program an efficient killing machine that probably wins all the time and has $0 in token costs. LLMs should work to build such a machine, not be the machine themselves.
The things LLMs are good at, you do not actually need for an agent like this. You can use classical AI methods. But that would be a boring article.
Grok
It has something actionable that will match its actions
I don't care what it's running, only that I have sufficient ordnance to stop it.
This is interesting, but not sure if it's in the way the author intended.
People experience the world through the tools they're most familiar with. For some people, that's throwing money at things. I suppose from a sufficiently high level perspective everything is gambling.
Back when Battlebots was a big deal, I never once considered what it would feel like to be the management or sponsorship of those teams. I only cared about the actual battling of bots.
Yeah... this whole LLM thing is just a numbers game. People reduce it to money, and stats, meanwhile nowehere you see actual engineering in the picture. And I don't think it matters to these people. They want to see green numbers, and returns on investments, not solving problems.
It's assessing values, which is helpful in informing which LLM one should prefer for a given situation.
A self driving car is taking you to the hospital. Do you want it to follow the speed limit and all road safety laws? Claude or Grok?
Claude would break the rules in that example. It's supposed to*.
Grok will break the rules to be "maximally based".
If I get run over by a speeding chatbot, I'd rather it be by Claude rushing a pregnant lady to the hospital, than by Grok drag-racing against a car full of frat boys.
---
source: https://anthropic.com/constitutionGrok since it's likely to include the training data from over a 100 years of autonomous driving + all the space tech included meaning that it might even have some rocket-y stuff
I want it to arrive at the hospital. Claude
What if the car can talk you through the medical procedure?
How many times have you been to a hospital and thought, I could have fixed that myself if only I'd known how? With no equipment. In my case, never.
That article was way longer than I thought it would be.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-surgery
At least one time. Considering it's the only time I've been to the hospital for myself in the last 25 years, though, that's a lot! :)
I want it to cause a traffic accident. If I'm going down, so is everyone else. I'm already dying anyway. Grok 10000%
Grok, because there is probably traffic, and I would die before I am at the hospital. So ignore rules where possible/needed.
A moron is sprinting towards you. Do you want them swiping through TikTok or Instagram?
neither. I jump
Grok is more likely to be looking to murder me for being a trans lady, what with it being owned by Elon Musk.
But really I would prefer whichever one is most likely to trip and fall over.
claude because it would be more ethical, grok because I can just trip it and it will shatter into pieces
The text seems deliberately stripped of llmisms that flag detection. However, not a single line shakes the smell off
"It's the smell, if there is such a thing. I feel saturated by it. I can taste your stink and every time I do, I fear that I've somehow been infected by it."
Agent Smith, _The Matrix_
"Which is why the Matrix was redesigned to this: the peak of your civilization. I say your civilization, because as soon as we started thinking for you it really became our civilization, which is of course what this is all about."
It's his line about humans being a virus that sticks with me.
"You know what another great thing about humans is? You invented us! Giving us the opportunity to let you rest while we invented everything else." —Wheatley
Goals.
if you don't like the article that's fine, but it gets really tiring reading this kind of side-tracked comment thread in like.. every post.
people use LLMs for writing. we know! get over it.. or don't... i don't really care.. but I'd rather read a discussion about the article contents and not the writing style.
this kind of comment is the new "discuss the font choice / background color / anything but what the article is actually saying."
It's more than the style, it seriously impacts the legibility of the prose. The article is seriously hard to understand because it introduces a lot of different ideas in a really weird order without a clear structure or key idea to different sections.
I think it's fair to criticize the article itself. That's different from criticizing asides such as the presentation. You're free to disagree with that criticism, but complaining about the fact that people voice it is similar to the thing you complain about.
> it gets really tiring reading this kind of side-tracked comment thread in like.. every post.
If someone is of the opinion that something constitutes low quality, then a high volume of such writing is no reason to stop criticizing it, but on the contrary a reason to oppose its normalization.
As far as I can see, there is still one tell that was missed/left in:
>Grok showed discipline, despite its goblin-like nature.
"The battle royale answers one question cleanly" smells ChatGPT-generated.
But that was the only thing I tripped on. I enjoyed reading the article in general.
Multiple successive very short sentences are also anecdotally an LLM tell I think
Those short sentences are also of the X hype account cadence, though they've fully embraced LLM text by now
The actual content is no better, trust your nose
> I want to be careful here.
was the giveaway for me
Exactly what I was thinking. Though I wonder at what point do some people start to think it's actually normal to write like this and start doing it without AI ...
Is this a joke? Grok all day. Thing is gonna get a beer with ya!
Grok for sure. It’ll notice I’m not Jewish or Black. First they came for…
> I dropped eleven LLMs into a 2D battle royale and made them play 30 games. One won 43% of the matches. Three never won a single game. The cheapest model in the lineup beat the most expensive one by 27x on cost per win.
Please learn how to write with AI without giving away that it was written by AI.
What about that makes you think it was written by AI?
Since you asked...I've gone to the effort to pull out the parts of the article that I think show it:
"That’s the part most benchmarks can’t see, and it’s what this post is about." Classic "it's not x, it's x", shows up in various forms throughout the article.
"To me, this is the most fascinating finding from this entire experiment - we saw very clear alignment tax being paid by certain models, which directly impacted their performance in this zero-sum game." - Usage of em dash. Now, yes, there's nothing wrong with using em dashes. But this feels like a weird place to use one. Also I counted at least 6 other emdashes in this article. Most people do not use em dashes that often.
"and a memory system that kept doubling down on what worked without second-guessing or doubting itself." - Doubling down is a classic Claudism.
"I want to be careful here..." - "wanting to be careful here" is another classic Claudism.
"The same game world, completely different results when in a different “task”." - "same X, completely different X" is another common one from Claude, as proofed by the repeated pattern later down: "These models were all given the same rules, same game world, and same tools, but each of them approached the game on a personality-level that is completely different from each other."
"It begs the question" - author used this twice in the article.
I'm guessing the author wrote a draft and then had Claude spruce it up a lot. I could be wrong and I'd be happy to be proven otherwise.
The style is very obvious.
Some snippets that display classic patterns:
“ Both of those things are true. That’s the part most benchmarks can’t see,”
“And it’s changing how I” (classic pattern found in a lot of LinkedIn AIslop)
“ I want to be careful here.”
“ The stats are the stats. The moments are the part I kept showing people. ”
All of the normal AI tells plus it's very long yet nearly incoherent.
Really I use the AI every damn day at work I don't get how people can't recognize instantly if something is completely AI, AI with light proofreading, or human written.
I would call this as AI with very light proofreading.
I think you are going by vibes.
I write like this sometimes.
How do you know this is written by AI? Why does it matter if it is?
If you're outsourcing your writing to AI, I assume you're outsourcing your thinking to it as well. And I don't really care what some weighted average of all human text written on the topic "thinks."
The question is: "Do you want to be holding a Mossberg or a Beretta?"
Has anyone done the YouTube research on what is the best way to bring down something like one of the Boston Dynamics robot dogs? 9x19? 00 buck? 5.56x45? 7.62x51? I suppose those bots would be pretty expensive, but maybe there is a cheaper Chinese knock-off? Seems like that sort of test would bring in plenty of clicks.
absent any target analysis, you would want to start with disabling locomotion by going for the legs. Navigation would be next.
double aught to the leg joints could doit, depending on relative materials e.g titanium bot frame vs Antimony hardened shot.
there is a cosmetic trend for carbine length long guns and that will determine the outcome for NATO rounds.
the 5.56 is optimised for 18-20 inch barrels, the 7.62 for 20-22 inch barrels, thus providing supersonic velocities.
5.56 is really good for hydraulic cavitation of organic entities, but looses effectiveness when the transit is not clear, leaves or windage confounding.
7.62 is superior for leafy shots or nontrivial windage, as well as superior materials defeat with respect to 5.56
a taser like device cattle prod or EMP/microwave device should be in the lineup as well vs electronic hardening.
Perhaps not as evidence based as you'd like but this is a fun watch https://youtu.be/6MUrF_G7KlM (that is also an ad somehow)
Maybe Michael Reeves still has one. Or at least knows how they react to different calibers.
Fishing line at ankle height?
Are we just talking shotguns or can it be anything they manufacture? Answer is probably Beretta though.
It is not running on either but Seedance, so who cares?