[michaelbuckbee]

I did a quick eval comparing Grok 4.3, Opus 4.7 and GPT 4.1 and they actually seem pretty similar:

https://ofw640g9re.evvl.io/

They all did pretty well at a more "formal" tone, but GPT4.1 was the only one that didn't make me cringe with a "casual" tone.

[edit] fwiw, grok was also the fastest+cheapest model, claude was slowest and priciest.

[sundarurfriend]

This is the most basic level of eval, of whether they can produce output that will be considered by someone somewhere (usually a young urban US American) as informal toned. Real human communication is far more nuanced than this, different groups have different linguistic registers they're used to and things outside it sound odd even if they can't articulate why. You could also want to be informal but not over-familiar with the other person (for eg. in a discord chat to a new acquaintance) - actually looking at the outputs here, the Claude output seems best fitting for that (in my subjective view anyway) than to the one you gave it - or want many other little variations.

What makes one cringe and another recognize as familiar and comfortable is also pretty subtle and hard to define. These things need nuanced descriptions and examples to actually get right, and it's in understanding those nuances and figuring out the register of the examples that Grok outshines the others.

[Romario77]

you said that English is not your first language, so heads up - you don't need "for" when you use "e.g.", it already means "for example".

[idiotsecant]

You presumably do have English as a first language so you should know that sentences begin with capital letters.

Was that helpful and interesting conversation?

[jasonjmcghee]

That's Grok 4.2 not 4.3 right?

And why are you comparing to gpt-4.1? (As opposed to one of the 6? model releases since then - would have expected gpt 5.5)

[michaelbuckbee]

Good catch, there was an issue with the second hardest thing in programming (caching).

Here's an updated eval with the proper models https://a3bmfqfom3.evvl.io/

[Reebz]

Claude 4.7 is the clear winner to me for manager and formal report updates.

As an ex-senior exec (hundreds of staff), the bolded timeline impact is a particular nuance that I would expect a Lead/Director to format for a VP+ audience. Interesting none of the other models did that. My eyes immediately went to impact statement, then worked back to context to grasp the whole situation.

[wamatt]

Thanks from where I'm looking Grok 4.3 and Claude 4.7 do a better job on the informal close friend/coworker vibe.

ChatGPT sounds fake / formal phrasing (for the specific close friend context) and has em-dashes and uses capitalization. Hence, ChatGPT does not, imo grok the assignment ;)

[andai]

Is it me or did GPT get noticeably more natural in word choice recently? You can see it between 4.1 and 5.5 here, but I'm not sure when that happened. (My guess would be one of the recent 5.x releases.)

Edit: I meant specifically the absence of bizarre phrasing. That seems to have improved.

[reissbaker]

Wow, I'm surprised. Grok 4.3 actually is noticeably better than the other two for the close-friend variant. Surprisingly I found Claude the cringiest of the three!

[embedding-shape]

I know it's just an evaluation, but seeing an informal message and a prompt to ask to rewrite this informal message to the tone of an "informal message" when the original one sounds just fine, just makes me sad... Not because of this evaluation, but because it reminds me that this is how some people use LLMs, basically asking it to remove your own voice from texts that are generally fine already.

[michaelbuckbee]

My sister in law is a pharmacist and the heaviest non-dev ChatGPT user I know and her main use case is writing professionally polite messages to doctors on how the drugs they prescribed to a patient would have killed them had she not caught a particular interaction or common side effect.

There's a lot of "tone" in it as she's not trying to anger these folks, but also it's quite serious, but also there's just everything else happening in medicine.

Feels like a great use.

[ryandrake]

Pretty neat. This kind of tone self-moderation comes naturally to good communicators, but I know people (on and off the spectrum) who really, really need help with this, and it's cool to see LLMs are able to do this. There are a surprising number of people in the business world who are just totally unable to tone-police themselves. In the medical field I'd be worried about hallucinations, of course, but presumably your SIL fact-checks the output.

[hamdingers]

She does herself a disservice by outsourcing that skill. One day she might have to actually talk to one of these people.

[michaelbuckbee]

She's 50 years old has a doctorate in pharmacy and has worked as a hospital pharmacist for two decades.

I don't say this as a "gotcha", but more that even with all that experience she still finds it beneficial and helpful.

[hamdingers]

That makes it more sad, to me. Someone with those credentials should be able to communicate with their colleagues effectively. I wonder if she used to be able to.

It appears Hacker News disagrees that social skills are valuable skills. Mea culpa, I should have guessed.

[PoignardAzur]

There's something ironic about complaining about other people's social skill while you couldn't be bothered to make a point without sounding dismissive and condescending.

[janderson215]

Navigating tough conversations takes time, attention, and mental energy. I’d rather a pharmacist spend that time on catching another dangerous contraindicated combo of drugs for a different patient. Actually, AI should soon be checking for that, too.

[accrual]

All three did well, and while I'm a Claude user, I found the Opus reply here added some unnecessary detail, like "Impact: Minimal; no downstream dependencies are currently at risk". Downstream dependencies weren't mentioned in the original message; for all we know downstream could be relying on a poorly performing API and is impacted by waiting another week for replacement.

[ActivePattern]

Seeing this makes me wonder if Grok uses Claude conversations for training.

It's otherwise kind of surprising that they both converge on very similar phrases (e.g. "API integration is kicking my ass") that aren't anywhere in the prompt.

[sroussey]

Elon testified this week that SpaceTwitter is indeed distilling from openAI and others.

[rafram]

All of these were frankly terrible. I guess Grok’s “informal” version sounded the most like a real human, but only because it reads exactly like an Elon tweet (including his favorite emoji!). It’s obvious what they’ve been training on.

[mwigdahl]

GPT 4.1? Why not a 5-class model?