Comment by Nuzzerino
3 months ago
I was about to roast you until I realized this had to be satire given the situation, haha.
They tried to imitate grok with a cheaply made system prompt, it had an uncanny effect, likely because it was built on a shaky foundation. And now they are trying to save face before they lose customers to Grok 3.5 which is releasing in beta early next week.
I don't think they were imitating grok, they were aiming to improve retention but it backfired and ended up being too on-the-nose (if they had a choice they wouldn't wanted it to be this obvious). Grok has it's own "default voice" which I sort of dislike, it tries too hard to seem "hip" for lack of a better word.
All of the LLMs I've tried have a "fellow kids" vibe when you try to make them behave too far from their default, and Grok just has it as the default.
> it tries too hard to seem "hip" for lack of a better word.
Reminds me of someone.
However, I hope it gives better advice than the someone you're thinking of. But Grok's training data is probably more balanced than that used by you-know-who (which seems to be "all of rightwing X")...
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Who?
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Only AI enthusiasts know about Grok, and only some dedicated subset of fans are advocating for it. Meanwhile even my 97 year old grandfather heard about ChatGPT.
I don't think that's true. There are a lot of people on Twitter who keep accidentally clicking that annoying button that Elon attached to every single tweet.
This.
Only on HN does ChatGPT somehow fear losing customers to Grok. Until Grok works out how to market to my mother, or at least make my mother aware that it exists, taking ChatGPT customers ain't happening.
They are cargoculting. Almost literally. It's MO for Musk companies.
They might call it open discussion and startup style rapid iteration approach, but they aren't getting it. Their interpretation of it is just collective hallucination under assumption that adults come to change diapers.
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Grok could capture the entire 'market' and OpenAI would never feel it, because all grok is under the hood is a giant API bill to OpenAI.
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I see more and more GROK used responses on X, so its picking up.
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From another AI (whatever DuckDuckGo is using):
> As of early 2025, X (formerly Twitter) has approximately 586 million active monthly users. The platform continues to grow, with a significant portion of its user base located in the United States and Japan.
Whatever portion of those is active are surely aware of Grok.
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First mover advantage. This won't change. Same as Xerox vs photocopy.
I use Grok myself but talk about ChatGPT is my blog articles when I write something related to LLM.
That's... not really an advertisement for your blog, is it?
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First mover advantage tends to be a curse for modern tech. Of the giant tech companies, only Apple can claim to be a first mover -- they all took the crown from someone else.
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> Only AI enthusiasts know about Grok
And more and more people on the right side of the political spectrum, who trust Elon's AI to be less "woke" than the competition.
For what it’s worth, ChatGPT has a personality that’s surprisingly “based” and supportive of MAGA.
I’m not sure if that’s because the model updated, they’ve shunted my account onto a tuned personality, or my own change in prompting — but it’s a notable deviation from early interactions.
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not true, I know at least one right wing normie Boomer that uses Grok because it's the one Elon made.
Is anyone actually using grok on a day to day? Does an OpenAI even consider it competition. Last I checked a couple weeks ago grok was getting better but still not a great experience and it’s too childish.
My totally uninformed opinion only from reading /r/locallama is that the people who love Grok seem to identify with those who are “independent thinkers” and listen to Joe Rogan’s podcast. I would never consider using a Musk technology if I can at all prevent it based on the damage he did to people and institutions I care about, so I’m obviously biased.
Yes this is truly an uninformed opinion.
I use both, grok and chatgpt on a daily basis. They have different strenghts. Most of the time I prefer chatgpt, bit grok is FAR better answering questions about recent events or collecting data. In the second usecase I combine both: collect data about stuff with grok, copy-paste CSV to chatgpt to analyzr and plot.
In our work AI channel, I was surprised how many people prefer grok over all the other models.
Outlier here paying for chatgpt while preferring grok and also not in your work AI channel.
Did they change the system prompt? Because it was basically "don't say anything bad about Elon or Trump". I'll take AI sycophancy over real (actually I use openrouter.ai, but that's a different story).
No one is losing customers to grok. It's big on shit-twitter aka X and that's about it.
Ha! I actually fell for it and thought it was another fanboy :)