Comment by ubertaco

17 days ago

>Their expertise will be used to improve Grok Build coding agent.

Is Grok not a toxic enough brand (by association with Musk) that people who would use Cursor wouldn't avoid Grok?

Like, the assumption seems to be that all the goodwill that Cursor users have towards Cursor will now apply automatically to Grok, which seems like a pretty significant leap.

I've been teaching myself physics lately and have found Grok to be one of the best both at coming to a correct answer and helping me to understand how to get it myself. It also seems a lot better than other models at saying "I don't know" or pointing out when my question doesn't make sense.

I'm a heavy Cursor user, I spend hundreds of dollars per month in overages above my $200 subscription, and I'll be switching away. I have zero interest in Musk's AI.

Companies using cursor could not care less about the CEO's ideology if they tried. Individuals may, but they don't matter in this context.

  • The CEOs ideology matters due to the fact it impacts the product design. The reason people don't want to use Grok is because it's bad, and it's bad because the team behind grok have to spend cycles crowbarring in far right white genocide conspiracy theories so that it doesn't embarrass their boss on twitter. One of the things we learned with Anthropic is that you have a lot more success being focused on the core product - coding agent, than trying to do that and chase internet chatbot users.

    • As someone that trains LLMs, even if grok does have a "avoid ""woke""" fine-tuning, adding that needs a few thousand examples SFT and a system prompt. It costs nothing extra to do it to coding agents and is not the reason why grok sucks at coding. It's just not in the same league in general - it's 0.5T parameters only and not trained specifically for coding at all.

      Even if the way they are doing it did damage coding performance, it is a simple matter of serving another model without that fine tuning in the enterprise API preferably only to the grok coding harness (or cursor, now). Coding performance for subscription plans don't move the needle in terms of revenue anyways and quality there doesn't matter as much.