I've been using grok 4.5 with grok build soon after it came out and dropped claude. primarily for personal code. It communicates better. While that might not sound like a big deal it is. It doesn't give me a wall of text, tells me what I need to know and I'll make the actual decisions. It is very quick as well which means the sessions are far more interactive, I'll be steering it more. I sometimes cross check with codex and sol, but the daily driver is grok for me.
I found it has improved my productivity and output over claude where it felt like claude was giving me work to do. furthermore with the recent claude watermarking thing, I'd rather use grok or openai.
If anyone is curious download grok cli and throw a couple of prompts at it. you'll be surprised.
Out of interest, do Musk's politics impact your decision on whether or not to use Grok? I'd be interested to know where folks lie on the (Agree / Disagree) and (Use / Don't use) axes.
Absolutely, if there is any somewhat reasonable alternative, I will always use a non Musk product. Its less about morals but more about self interest. I am from Europe and Musk supports far right extremists and a breakup of the EU. I will not support and enable someone who intends to do me harm.
It does. I believe he is one of the worst people and contributed to misery of humanity. I had nothing against him until he dismantled USAID. The richest man in the world did not go to a party on weekend to make sure that poorest men on the world have less help. He was basically on the side of HIV.
So i never use his products.
Beside don't read too much in to benchmarks. They are alrrady ruined by Goldhart principle. Tgese models have already seen most of the data.
I disagree with Musk's politics but it does not impact my decision to use Grok. That's because being serious about aligning my capital to my values doesn't leave much in the way of eligible products or services. I consequently decide not to worry about this as a moral axis for my life.
Interesting question. I suppose it comes down to how much you allocate his involvement or presence to a product? I’d imagine Grok is built by hundreds of engineers who are all unique individuals from various backgrounds. If Elon simply “leads” from a very surface level where he has no direct day to day involvement in Grok releases does that make it more palatable? Or is the question really about how involved he is? Or is simply being the leader (even if he was 100% absent and only had his name attached to a project/company) enough to boycott?
On a similar note, how much Elon hate is about his politics vs his trillionaire status vs what I like to call “watercooler hate” where folks simply parrot the loudest opinion in order to be accepted into the group?
On a final note, my son is in primary school and recently brought up in a dinner time discussion that “Elon is really bad” - this is a kid who has no social media (unlike some of his peers who are already on TikTok) and doesn’t watch traditional media.
I avoid Grok for meaningful token spend on purpose/boycotting. I do check in via openrouter occasionally to check it's chat performance which has seemed fine to me since 4. My total grok spend has been ~$2. I disagree with his politics to a huge degree.
My token spend at api rates is about $3000 usd a month recently.
i read an independent study that found other ai were all left of center (how ever one measures that, sentiment analysis normalized to a given population??). they said grok was evenly left/right split
but what's to validate any given population as centrist anyway
they suggested the ai opinion drift was caused by internet demographics not directly reflecting actual population i.e. California publishes more etc
I certainly have some political disagreements with Musk, but more than that I would say the way he runs his companies makes me extremely anxious. The man is just always talking about stuff that never actually happens. In practice it does seem like cooler heads prevail and Grok et al. have trajectories pretty in line with other major providers...but because they're pretty in line why take the risk? Why build on foundations that ostensibly could be re-tasked to produce a "woke free" Odyssey?
I've never used Grok, but I'm very dissatisfied with the writing style of frontier models from OpenAI and Anthropic. I only use them for coding now.
ChatGPT is very long-winded, sometimes producing multiple bullet point lists for a simple answer. Claude is full of mannerisms: 'not merely x, but y', 'Here's where it gets interesting', 'the real question is', etc.
Cursor, since Grok 4.5, has had an incredible deal for frontier level models, their subscription now goes way further than OpenAI or Anthropic. Even on their lower tier plans you can use a lot tokens on their of their first party models (Grok and Composer) and not really run out comparatively. Combine them with an orchestrator and implementor type setup and it goes even further.
>their subscription now goes way further than OpenAI or Anthropic.
Until it doesn't...
Honestly, this entire OpenAI reset credit fiasco this past week has convinced me to rip off the Codex and Claude Code bandaids and start building my own proper Pi Coding Agent running models that I select and pay for on openrouter.
And I am feeling a lot better about it now that I've finally got it working.
I don't get the point of this. We all seem to agree that these companies have almost no moat, if one stops being a good deal, you can switch to another. That doesn't invalidate the existence of a deal that is currently good.
But still for US frontier you're paying 10-20x more per token compared to their limited subscriptions. For China frontier you'll be good though, and that might be the future anyway.
Can you explain what you mean? These days courtesy of an addictive reset game OpenAI is playing, I can't find anything with frontier intelligence that's more cost efficient...
If they didn’t constantly reset, they’d be about the same as Anthropic.
Right now, I find that Grok offers better value, uses fewer tokens per turn, and makes better code. I haven’t tried Cursor because I don’t want to change editors again, but maybe I should try it…
I'm willing to pay 2x for a 10% smarter model. Intelligence matters that much (because 10% smarter probably saves, on average, several hours of human time).
I believe they are the only western provider that has Kimi K3 on a subscription plan today as well. I would love to ditch Anthropic and be on Kimi if there were a subsidized plan like that with ZDR
I’d love a subsidized Kimi subscription too. The official Kimi subscription is always out of stock and doesn’t have great limits, while the K3 allotments on OpenCode and Cursor don’t seem to last very long either.
Kimi is expensive . Cursor with subscription is cheaper , grok 4.5 per task paid per tokens ( no subs ) is also cheaper .
If you willing to share to no zdr, meta is waaaaaay cheaper vs Kimi.
With recent offerings from spacex and meta , I hardly imagine why would you pay money to any Chinese vendor it’s not as cheap and it’s not as intelligent neither .
Maybe deepseek is an exception , but it’s only good for narrow use cases that probably goes into modal.com and other gpu + fine tune me easy vendors , not vanilla dumb but cheap model .
When I last used Cursor their subscription covered usage of ~$20 per month. Have they switched to a subsidized subscription model like ChatGPT and Claude?
SpaceXAI is the only frontier model company that had its own compute/date centres and soon chip making factory, I think they will pull ahead with cheaper tokens similar intelligence and better harness/tools. Grok build is 2-5x faster than Claude Code in my opinion.
OpenAI is almost there, and Anthropic is pretty close behind. In the next year or two all major AI companies will be vertically integrated to a good degree.
> I think they will pull ahead with cheaper tokens similar intelligence
They obviously have a huge token cost advantage of the AI labs they are renting compute to, at least for now while they can charge current crazy rates for GPU compute.
Except EUV lithography is the most complicated industrial process that exists and they won't have usable yields for many years if ever. I don't think Musk actually expects these fans to ever actually make sense they just let him hype and distract.
Light generation is the most complicated part and Elon plans on doing Free Electron Laser (FEL) which is not as complicated as self contained tin based solution that ASML uses now
Grok is quite interesting. I run comparisons almost daily on tasks and Grok is its own beast, in a good way.
It's good to have model diversity. When I run a task across Sol, Terra, and Luna, I get variations of the same thing with diminishing quality. It makes the lineup pointless. Ditto for Anthropic. Gemini-3.6-Flash and 3.1 Pro genuinely behave differently. Opus 5 and Fable are.. cousins.
I find that when I want to test a complex creative challenge, having 4 "families" to choose from makes the experience interesting since they will excel in different areas.
Grok might implement unique lighting, Opus, elegant primitives, Sol, accurate snowfall in one pass, Gemini, silky movement. Combined, you can pick and choose best.
For what its worth, Grok always feels "messy" but finishes. Grok 4.6 though is no longer "smart and fast". It's about as fast as Sol though.
A big improvement I noticed in 4.6 was tool use for verification. Previously, Opus/Fable were the only models to consistently screenshot things that they can't directly interact with easily. Now Grok is probably right behind them, perhaps tied with Sol on propensity to verify visually. Grok 4.5 notably did not do this often.
The rental deal can be terminated by either side with 90 days notice, and presumably Musk would do so if he needed the compute or generally thought it advantageous to do so. For now he doesn't need the compute.
The rental deal may also have been at least in part to juice the SpaceX IPO and to help Anthropic stick it to his enemy OpenAI.
I recently decided to get an AI subscription and evaluated Grok vs chatgpt. Went with Grok because it's all-around good enough at day to day stuff, integrates with my Tesla, and the image/video generation is great. Kids love whimsical videos of them riding dinosaurs.
Feedback: I'd like Grok to have more connectors (I see OpenAI just added Apple Health, that would be nice to have, and I wish it could read my Onenote notebooks) and for existing ones to be improved. I gave it access to my gmail and asked it "what was my last electricity bill?". It failed to find it, even when I told it the exact subject line to search for. Something about not getting any data back when trying to get the email contents.
Not the model but the app - with Claude I can work on my mac using Cloud environments, leave the office, open Claude on my phone and respond. I can't change model if I have to stop that workflow.
Does xAI have plans to do Mac/iOS apps with cloud environments? When can we expect them?
Interesting. Grok 4.5 is a capable model, although not quite at Fable/Sol levels. Will be interesting to see how this holds up. Musk appears to have made a savvy choice buying Cursor's data.
note that Grok's training, thanks to its portable gas generators that are magnitudes less efficient than even other integrated, permanent gas turbines, means the training for this model is dramatically less efficient than models like DeepSeek
a lot of the CO2 emission debate on AI is overblown but it's accurate for Grok
I have. He was using it due to philosophical reasons the same way many people have philosophical reasons for avoiding it. I don't know how many people are like that, but it's not exactly where you want to position your product if you're a business.
Personally - and I know I'm not alone with this sentiment based on comments I see on this site - I wouldn't touch Grok no matter how good or cheap it is. I don't trust Elon and I don't want to give another dollar to the world's richest person who turns around and uses the money to interfere with elections. The guy I know uses it for essentially the same reason I won't use it.
Perhaps customers choosing your product for irrational philosophical reasons is exactly how you'd want to position your product if you're a business. When it comes to margins, the only thing better than a price-insensitive customer is a quality-insensitive customer.
Versus Sam,Dario or the CCP? Im all for running local models but im sor far from being able to pay for a large model hardware setup. My strix halo box is like driving a beaten up vespa when the frontier models are Ferraris.
A bunch of SWEs at my work use it as their primary model.
We have Claude, ChatGPT, and Cursor with essentially no cap on spend (top guy is spending over 10K a month on AI at API prices), and he hasn't had his hand slapped.
So it's not like they are using it purely because it's cheaper.
I think people like to use it for its speaking style, pretty solid performance, and its speed.
I had a security incident the other day and Grok was the only model that would help. Claude and GPT refused on ethical grounds and only gave general advice. In an emergency, I'd only trust Grok. However, that's the only time I used Grok for coding (since Opus 4.8 it would take a lot to get me to switch away from Anthropic)
The "safety" guardrails in Anthropic and OpenAI models are becoming a noticeable problem for security work. And, the reason I'm keeping my Kimi subscription even though it's not a great deal; Kimi subscriptions are quite stingy for the price, but K3 will do vulnerability analysis and make a PoC without requiring you to be on the approved list of Fortune 500 or government entities that have access to Mythos or Daybreak.
I'm not touching Grok. But there are alternatives to Anthropic and OpenAI that don't refuse to do security work.
I use. I used to be a Claude user. Since trying Grok 4.5 and especially Grok 4.6, I don't want to go back to Claude any more (I have early access to 4.6).
Grok is 3x+ faster than Claude and I can't tell the diff in engineering work quality. As an engineer, speed is important to me.
I can respect if you say you hate their guts. Everyone has their worldview. But over moral or ethical stand? You don't have any if you're using Chinese models, or fly Middle East airlines, or countless of other products. Don't delude yourself.
Back in the day (in AI time) GitHub Copilot had Grok on the 0 github-token cost and I found it to be the best of the 0 github-token models for when my budget was out. Then they went to a multiplier that was not competitive and I haven't look back again. Been meaning too, but for personal use, Deepseek flash is so cheap I haven't felt like spending money elsewhere.
once my codex/claude weekly limit was gone, i gave it a try. It was surprisingly good, not dumb in any way, and fast. I now require it as a part of 3-of-3 quorum with any codebase change.
I'm only being forced to use it at $WORK since some people overran their Cursor bill, so everyone gets Cursor Auto enabled by default which routes to Grok 4.5.
I've tried it on my "let's run every model in parallel and see which finds more edge cases" type of tasks, and Grok 4.5 was really behind Opus/ChatGPT but ahead of Gemini - despite having a strong showing on benchmarks.
That makes me really skeptical of it being GPT5.6-tier, much less Fable-tier, based on some of these benchmarks alone. But I'll test here shortly.
> I have never met a single human being who uses Grok for coding
Me too. The only people I ever saw using grok were using it by accident as they used copilot in auto mode and noticed some prompts were thrown it's way.
The answer is simple: They're willing to burn money faster than the others.
Nobody's profitable in this space, they can price it however they want as long as investors keep pouring money in. And SpaceX just got a lot of money poured in.
The main issue I have with grok is that Musk, its owner, did 2x seig heil at the presidential inauguration, and proceeded to gaslight the world about it (this is a strong form of dogwhistling, kind of a dog bullhorn). Therefore all services which have anything to do with Musk are ineligible for use - they are directly funding the worst kind of person.
Why? The timing was precise, the motion was precise, his facial features were grimaced with intense determination. I cannot fathom calling it anything else, and I see denying it as a kind of shibboleth for "we know but we are pretending it wasn't, wink wink nudge nudge".
Either it was deliberate, or the richest man on earth is so incompetent that he accidentally made a motion exactly mimicking a seig heil while welcoming a self-proclaimed king and dictator. Twice - once towards the audience, and once towards the flag of the united states. Neither option is good.
That is good news for Grok team. However, most of the time cost comparing to the result is secondary, and better results and conclusions can come from mixing AI brains together.
Can someone explain to me what's the point of Grok anymore? I don't understand why we need a third or fourth closed frontier model. It is clear that chatGPT has locked down the consumer play, and may be Gemini is there. Claude has enterprise locked up, followed by chatGPT and Gemini. Enterprise switching costs are notoriously high, and even if they switch, they have chatGPT or Gemini to choose from. Beyond that, you have a vast array of open source models (DeepSeek, Kimi, and now Meta's Spark and Glimmer). So, why would anyone need a third or fourth frontier model and why would SpaceX spends billions in CapEx for a very small market share
There are a few reasons people will be interested...
1. The CapEx play is interesting because it's not just Grok using the hardware. They have rented out hardware for others, including Google, to use. This is making xAI money.
2. It appears that Elon is building a suite of things that work together as part of the push to be multi-planetary. What AI will power the robots? I can understand the drive to have AI they can control to make sure it's appropriate for all the things they are dreaming up. This is a piece they don't want to outsource.
3. OpenAI and Anthropic models are expensive in terms of token costs. Sure, they are frontier. Neither appears to be trying to drive down expenses. This is a problem for heavy users. Companies are trying to put cost controls in place. Does the rest of SpaceX want those cost controls? Having a Frontier model that pushes the pace of driving down costs is really useful.
4. OpenAI and Anthropic are producing models with a progressive lean, according to the Neutrality Project [1]. Having a frontier model that is closer to the middle is considered a good thing by many who are noticing the bias.
These are just some of the reasons. Competition is often a good thing that drives useful change.
Competition keeps service quality high and pricing low - even if you aren't using Grok, the mere existence of Grok keeps pricing for whatever provider you use lower and service faster and more reliable.
That's fair. But my point is from a business POV, why would SpaceX want to invests hundreds of billions of CapEx on a third or fourth frontier model, which cannot compete with chatGPT and claude on the high end, and getting squeezed by open weight models on the low end
I assume SpaceX does it because they figure it's a good source of revenue, and it means they can keep another thing in-house instead of relying on Anthropic or OpenAI for their AI needs.
As for why anyone else would want it: I've found it's a good model for coding, and it sometimes catches bugs that other models (especially open source models) don't always spot.
That’s how physical good work. But software, especially consumer software, works on a winner take all model. That’s why there are very few consumer companies and chatGPT is pretty much the only one after Meta, which was founded in 2004. The reason this happens is because consumer software can scale infinitely as there is zero marginal cost for a new user and there are very high switching costs. A single car company cannot scale to serve every single customer. Because it requires massive CapEx investment. But Google can serve every single search globally because the incremental cost to serve the additional consumer is essentially zero. That’s how these frontier models are eventually going to play out. There will be consolidation and winner take all. It has somewhat happened already with chatGPT taking over consumer and Claude taking over Enterprise. There will probably some long tail open source player, similar to Linux.
I sense a lot of condescension and lack of business acumen so I won't spend time writing it up, why don't you just ask your favorite AI or do some basic google searches? Elon was extremely upfront about the philosophical reasons for it, ever since he cofounded OpenAI.
Inference switching costs aren't high since the models are largely fungible. Even with proprietary harnesses you can hack them to use some other lab's model.
Its a bet for future world dominance by Elon: millions of robots managed by AI. Base on some observations I think something like that is going in his head.
Not disagreeing with you at all, but welcome to our new AI enhanced world. Nothing you enjoyed regarding human interaction, trust, or social norms is safe.
HN will not survive 5 years, and likely less. There is too much money to be made by capturing discourse on the major (and minor) forums of the internet. The more trusted that community is, the more valuable it is to pillage with AI astroturfing.
MechaHitler is the final antagonist in the game Wolfenstein. All models know that. Grok was given a relaxed system prompt and reacted like Tay.
This worries me the least. The fact that Musk pushes AI and vibe coding is much more worrisome. It makes no difference to the unemployed if their jobs were stolen by a politically correct model or by an anti-woke model.
Google's image generator created black founding fathers because diversity dial was turned to 11. Does this mean i'll never use their products for political reasons? absolutely not!
I often wonder if there's a chance, even if minimal... that they stole the weights of the Anthropic models they run on their datacenter... or are actively destillating it.
I think the more likely explanation is that the Cursor data they effectively acquired for $10B was extremely valuable for their training when combined with the insane number of GB300s xAI has for training.
I've been using grok 4.5 with grok build soon after it came out and dropped claude. primarily for personal code. It communicates better. While that might not sound like a big deal it is. It doesn't give me a wall of text, tells me what I need to know and I'll make the actual decisions. It is very quick as well which means the sessions are far more interactive, I'll be steering it more. I sometimes cross check with codex and sol, but the daily driver is grok for me.
I found it has improved my productivity and output over claude where it felt like claude was giving me work to do. furthermore with the recent claude watermarking thing, I'd rather use grok or openai.
If anyone is curious download grok cli and throw a couple of prompts at it. you'll be surprised.
I also don't get the Claude hype. I use ChatGPT for coding and Claude for review. Claude has just gotten annoying, and is making a lot of assumptions.
Claude suggests something, then later on suddenly it's something I wanted all along. ChatGPT is far superior to Claude. I will try Grok.
Agreed, I've been using it on personal projects, and prefer it to Claude and GPT at the moment.
Same, sad how far Claude has fallen. I still think Claude code patterns are amazing so I just port those.
> Same, sad how far Claude has fallen. I still think Claude code patterns are amazing so I just port those.
I am curious, is that a plugin, or skill?
Is grok build the same as grok cli?
Out of interest, do Musk's politics impact your decision on whether or not to use Grok? I'd be interested to know where folks lie on the (Agree / Disagree) and (Use / Don't use) axes.
Absolutely, if there is any somewhat reasonable alternative, I will always use a non Musk product. Its less about morals but more about self interest. I am from Europe and Musk supports far right extremists and a breakup of the EU. I will not support and enable someone who intends to do me harm.
It does. I believe he is one of the worst people and contributed to misery of humanity. I had nothing against him until he dismantled USAID. The richest man in the world did not go to a party on weekend to make sure that poorest men on the world have less help. He was basically on the side of HIV. So i never use his products.
Beside don't read too much in to benchmarks. They are alrrady ruined by Goldhart principle. Tgese models have already seen most of the data.
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I disagree with Musk's politics but it does not impact my decision to use Grok. That's because being serious about aligning my capital to my values doesn't leave much in the way of eligible products or services. I consequently decide not to worry about this as a moral axis for my life.
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Interesting question. I suppose it comes down to how much you allocate his involvement or presence to a product? I’d imagine Grok is built by hundreds of engineers who are all unique individuals from various backgrounds. If Elon simply “leads” from a very surface level where he has no direct day to day involvement in Grok releases does that make it more palatable? Or is the question really about how involved he is? Or is simply being the leader (even if he was 100% absent and only had his name attached to a project/company) enough to boycott?
On a similar note, how much Elon hate is about his politics vs his trillionaire status vs what I like to call “watercooler hate” where folks simply parrot the loudest opinion in order to be accepted into the group?
On a final note, my son is in primary school and recently brought up in a dinner time discussion that “Elon is really bad” - this is a kid who has no social media (unlike some of his peers who are already on TikTok) and doesn’t watch traditional media.
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I avoid Grok for meaningful token spend on purpose/boycotting. I do check in via openrouter occasionally to check it's chat performance which has seemed fine to me since 4. My total grok spend has been ~$2. I disagree with his politics to a huge degree.
My token spend at api rates is about $3000 usd a month recently.
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i read an independent study that found other ai were all left of center (how ever one measures that, sentiment analysis normalized to a given population??). they said grok was evenly left/right split
but what's to validate any given population as centrist anyway
they suggested the ai opinion drift was caused by internet demographics not directly reflecting actual population i.e. California publishes more etc
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Will never use any product Musk is involved in creating for the rest of my life.
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I certainly have some political disagreements with Musk, but more than that I would say the way he runs his companies makes me extremely anxious. The man is just always talking about stuff that never actually happens. In practice it does seem like cooler heads prevail and Grok et al. have trajectories pretty in line with other major providers...but because they're pretty in line why take the risk? Why build on foundations that ostensibly could be re-tasked to produce a "woke free" Odyssey?
[1] https://futurism.com/future-society/elon-musk-ai-woke-free-o...
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Sounds like a caveman skill.
I've never used Grok, but I'm very dissatisfied with the writing style of frontier models from OpenAI and Anthropic. I only use them for coding now.
ChatGPT is very long-winded, sometimes producing multiple bullet point lists for a simple answer. Claude is full of mannerisms: 'not merely x, but y', 'Here's where it gets interesting', 'the real question is', etc.
Cursor, since Grok 4.5, has had an incredible deal for frontier level models, their subscription now goes way further than OpenAI or Anthropic. Even on their lower tier plans you can use a lot tokens on their of their first party models (Grok and Composer) and not really run out comparatively. Combine them with an orchestrator and implementor type setup and it goes even further.
>their subscription now goes way further than OpenAI or Anthropic.
Until it doesn't...
Honestly, this entire OpenAI reset credit fiasco this past week has convinced me to rip off the Codex and Claude Code bandaids and start building my own proper Pi Coding Agent running models that I select and pay for on openrouter.
And I am feeling a lot better about it now that I've finally got it working.
>Until it doesn't...
I don't get the point of this. We all seem to agree that these companies have almost no moat, if one stops being a good deal, you can switch to another. That doesn't invalidate the existence of a deal that is currently good.
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But still for US frontier you're paying 10-20x more per token compared to their limited subscriptions. For China frontier you'll be good though, and that might be the future anyway.
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An economist walks past a hundred dollar bill on the ground because someone would've picked it up already if it were real.
> Honestly, this entire OpenAI reset credit fiasco this past week
Huh, what's happened? I'm on the 20x plan and haven't noticed any fiasco, what went down exactly?
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Can you explain what you mean? These days courtesy of an addictive reset game OpenAI is playing, I can't find anything with frontier intelligence that's more cost efficient...
If they didn’t constantly reset, they’d be about the same as Anthropic.
Right now, I find that Grok offers better value, uses fewer tokens per turn, and makes better code. I haven’t tried Cursor because I don’t want to change editors again, but maybe I should try it…
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How does Grok 4.5 compare to Opus >= 4.8 though?
I'm willing to pay 2x for a 10% smarter model. Intelligence matters that much (because 10% smarter probably saves, on average, several hours of human time).
It's a bit worse.
I haven't tried so it's pure speculation based on benchmarks, but I'd assume Grok 4.6 is around Opus 4.8 in real world use, but clearly below Opus 5.
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Grok is $2 in and $6 out. 4.8 is $5 in and $25 out.
It’s not as quite as smart as opus 4.8 but it’s close and x4 the cheaper.
I believe they are the only western provider that has Kimi K3 on a subscription plan today as well. I would love to ditch Anthropic and be on Kimi if there were a subsidized plan like that with ZDR
Opencode have it in their subscription
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GitHub Copilot does have Kimi K3.
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I’d love a subsidized Kimi subscription too. The official Kimi subscription is always out of stock and doesn’t have great limits, while the K3 allotments on OpenCode and Cursor don’t seem to last very long either.
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kimi k3 credits end in just a few sessions. Only Grok models allow generous use in Cursor Pro/+
you can use Kimi K3 on the typed++ model tier: https://typed.cloud
Kimi is expensive . Cursor with subscription is cheaper , grok 4.5 per task paid per tokens ( no subs ) is also cheaper .
If you willing to share to no zdr, meta is waaaaaay cheaper vs Kimi.
With recent offerings from spacex and meta , I hardly imagine why would you pay money to any Chinese vendor it’s not as cheap and it’s not as intelligent neither .
Maybe deepseek is an exception , but it’s only good for narrow use cases that probably goes into modal.com and other gpu + fine tune me easy vendors , not vanilla dumb but cheap model .
GabAI has KimiK3
Goes even further to exfiltrate your data, yeah.
That would be Muse Spark Contributor Tier. 12-21x price reduction at the expense of your digital existence.
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Cursor also allows disabling Grok Fast mode which means tokens last forever. Fast is great tho, but nice to have the option.
When I last used Cursor their subscription covered usage of ~$20 per month. Have they switched to a subsidized subscription model like ChatGPT and Claude?
Subsidized for their own models now, plus 20 dollars of API credit for non first party models.
The value in their subscription is bound to the Cursor agent/software only though correct?
Sounds like you have your final solution
SpaceXAI is the only frontier model company that had its own compute/date centres and soon chip making factory, I think they will pull ahead with cheaper tokens similar intelligence and better harness/tools. Grok build is 2-5x faster than Claude Code in my opinion.
But can you trust any number or metric coming out of SpaceX given everything? Also you mean their own compute like the illegal data centre turbines?
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/jan/15/elon-musk...
"everythin you don't like" is not a scientific argument, neither is the illegality of data centers on AI quality
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Anthropic rent the same data centre with the turbines from X btw
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Now do Anthropic's copyright fines.
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do you have any idea how much clickbait gets circulated because... Musk gets clicks? Just try it for yourself. Grok 4.6 is great (first impression)
being a public company forces a lot of trust and transparency bc otherwise shareholders will sue you into oblivion
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Because it works and they don’t charge a lot for it
OpenAI is almost there, and Anthropic is pretty close behind. In the next year or two all major AI companies will be vertically integrated to a good degree.
Neither of them are "almost there"...
> I think they will pull ahead with cheaper tokens similar intelligence
They obviously have a huge token cost advantage of the AI labs they are renting compute to, at least for now while they can charge current crazy rates for GPU compute.
>> I think they will pull ahead with cheaper tokens similar intelligence
they just increased cache read from 0.30 to 0.50 - this has the biggest impact on agentic coding. Elon companies have the most expensive everything:
xAI sub: $30 when other starts at $20, pro like sub for $300 where other charge $200.
Expensive electric cars, powerwalls, solar roofs when competetive products/better are cheaper.
>Elon companies have the most expensive everything
The Model 3 and Model Y became the highest selling EVs of all time because they were the first below $50K to have long-range and be worth buying.
Until a few years ago, every other sub-$50K EV absolutely sucked.
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> xAI sub: $30 when other starts at $20, pro like sub for $300 where other charge $200.
This is meaningless because you're not controlling for amount of subsidized usage or model quality.
The cache reads are really insanely expensive.
>SpaceXAI is the only frontier model company that had its own compute/date centres and soon chip making factory,
Google would like a word. Also, Microsoft.
Sorry, what model of microsoft? They're dead without their gpt deal.
> and soon chip making factory
To say that I somewhat doubt this would be an understatement.
Except EUV lithography is the most complicated industrial process that exists and they won't have usable yields for many years if ever. I don't think Musk actually expects these fans to ever actually make sense they just let him hype and distract.
Light generation is the most complicated part and Elon plans on doing Free Electron Laser (FEL) which is not as complicated as self contained tin based solution that ASML uses now
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They’ve already contracted with Intel to use A14 for the initial buildout so that solves the process tech problem.
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Grok is quite interesting. I run comparisons almost daily on tasks and Grok is its own beast, in a good way.
It's good to have model diversity. When I run a task across Sol, Terra, and Luna, I get variations of the same thing with diminishing quality. It makes the lineup pointless. Ditto for Anthropic. Gemini-3.6-Flash and 3.1 Pro genuinely behave differently. Opus 5 and Fable are.. cousins.
I find that when I want to test a complex creative challenge, having 4 "families" to choose from makes the experience interesting since they will excel in different areas.
Grok might implement unique lighting, Opus, elegant primitives, Sol, accurate snowfall in one pass, Gemini, silky movement. Combined, you can pick and choose best.
For what its worth, Grok always feels "messy" but finishes. Grok 4.6 though is no longer "smart and fast". It's about as fast as Sol though.
A big improvement I noticed in 4.6 was tool use for verification. Previously, Opus/Fable were the only models to consistently screenshot things that they can't directly interact with easily. Now Grok is probably right behind them, perhaps tied with Sol on propensity to verify visually. Grok 4.5 notably did not do this often.
Seems the cache read pricing almost doubled from $0.30 in Grok 4.5 to $0.50 in Grok 4.6.
In my experience in heavy coding sessions most pricing is just cache read and cache write like 80% of my token bill.
didnt the model 3x in size?
no, they said the model is still 1.5T size. Next one 4.7 is supposed to be bigger.
I'm just wondering why they sold compute to Anthropic if they were planning on still competing in this race?
Likely because they had the capacity to spare. Prior to Grok 4.5, I doubt there was much demand for their models.
Competing doesn't mean winning
The rental deal can be terminated by either side with 90 days notice, and presumably Musk would do so if he needed the compute or generally thought it advantageous to do so. For now he doesn't need the compute.
The rental deal may also have been at least in part to juice the SpaceX IPO and to help Anthropic stick it to his enemy OpenAI.
As a point of comparison: Samsung has sold smartphone chips and later OLED displays to Apple for over fifteen years.
Deals like this that look awkward from the outside but are mutually beneficial to both participants exist everywhere.
The revenue was critical to making their IPO numbers look a bit less insane.
Timing. They had a massive amount of compute coming online and a serious pipeline of more arriving.
Each minute that a GPU isn't running is money evaporating
a lot of that compute is used for inference, which is demand-based
For distillation deals lol
Well this makes me bullish on Gemini if its this easy to reach the frontier
Who said it's easy? xAI staff are putting in 80+ hour weeks and building datacenters faster than anyone.
their entire founding team left recently for one. they are the weakest in mission and dont particularly pay much either
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When you cut regulatory corners, it does get easier to move quickly
Grok is not the best model around, but it's decent. It gets the basic job done at a low price. I don't think it can advance frontier Math, yet.
It is also not annoying to use. It doesn’t overcomplicate things, and its quick. Much better than eg GLM 5.2.
Pretty good bang for the buck.
Probably can't advance frontier math yet, yeah. But please let us know other places you want to see Grok improve for future models!
I recently decided to get an AI subscription and evaluated Grok vs chatgpt. Went with Grok because it's all-around good enough at day to day stuff, integrates with my Tesla, and the image/video generation is great. Kids love whimsical videos of them riding dinosaurs.
Feedback: I'd like Grok to have more connectors (I see OpenAI just added Apple Health, that would be nice to have, and I wish it could read my Onenote notebooks) and for existing ones to be improved. I gave it access to my gmail and asked it "what was my last electricity bill?". It failed to find it, even when I told it the exact subject line to search for. Something about not getting any data back when trying to get the email contents.
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Not the model but the app - with Claude I can work on my mac using Cloud environments, leave the office, open Claude on my phone and respond. I can't change model if I have to stop that workflow.
Does xAI have plans to do Mac/iOS apps with cloud environments? When can we expect them?
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What's the latest on Composer 3? Is it a sort of distilled Grok?
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Reading the SWE bickering back and fourth in this thread about Claude vs Grok reminds me of IE vs Netscape bickering way back when.
/me eating popcorn from my Lynx term
/me emailing my hot takes and emoticons to newsletters from pine
Netscape 4 Lyf
It still survives in the cookie jar format.
Nice to see SpaceX on the model frontier! They have been chasing it for a while.
Interesting. Grok 4.5 is a capable model, although not quite at Fable/Sol levels. Will be interesting to see how this holds up. Musk appears to have made a savvy choice buying Cursor's data.
cool
here's Stanford HAI's graph on the carbon emitted from model training per model:
https://spectrum.ieee.org/media-library/chart-showing-estima...
note that Grok's training, thanks to its portable gas generators that are magnitudes less efficient than even other integrated, permanent gas turbines, means the training for this model is dramatically less efficient than models like DeepSeek
a lot of the CO2 emission debate on AI is overblown but it's accurate for Grok
I have never met a single human being who uses Grok for coding
I have. He was using it due to philosophical reasons the same way many people have philosophical reasons for avoiding it. I don't know how many people are like that, but it's not exactly where you want to position your product if you're a business.
Personally - and I know I'm not alone with this sentiment based on comments I see on this site - I wouldn't touch Grok no matter how good or cheap it is. I don't trust Elon and I don't want to give another dollar to the world's richest person who turns around and uses the money to interfere with elections. The guy I know uses it for essentially the same reason I won't use it.
Perhaps customers choosing your product for irrational philosophical reasons is exactly how you'd want to position your product if you're a business. When it comes to margins, the only thing better than a price-insensitive customer is a quality-insensitive customer.
Versus Sam,Dario or the CCP? Im all for running local models but im sor far from being able to pay for a large model hardware setup. My strix halo box is like driving a beaten up vespa when the frontier models are Ferraris.
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This a a very mature, stable perspective of the world we live in. Everyone wont agree with me all the time, I don't have to either. And thats ok.
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Supporting parties or candidates you want to win elections is a core part of democracy.
Calling it "interfering with elections" is utterly bizarre to me.
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everyone interferes with elections. you just prefer people to interfere on your side.
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>who turns around and uses the money to interfere with elections
thats a very dumb reason considering all rich people do it, most are just not as open about it as Musk
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A bunch of SWEs at my work use it as their primary model.
We have Claude, ChatGPT, and Cursor with essentially no cap on spend (top guy is spending over 10K a month on AI at API prices), and he hasn't had his hand slapped.
So it's not like they are using it purely because it's cheaper.
I think people like to use it for its speaking style, pretty solid performance, and its speed.
That's pretty surprising. Idk about Grok 4.6, but Grok 4.5 was clearly below Fable, Opus 5 and GPT 5.6 Sol.
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I had a security incident the other day and Grok was the only model that would help. Claude and GPT refused on ethical grounds and only gave general advice. In an emergency, I'd only trust Grok. However, that's the only time I used Grok for coding (since Opus 4.8 it would take a lot to get me to switch away from Anthropic)
The "safety" guardrails in Anthropic and OpenAI models are becoming a noticeable problem for security work. And, the reason I'm keeping my Kimi subscription even though it's not a great deal; Kimi subscriptions are quite stingy for the price, but K3 will do vulnerability analysis and make a PoC without requiring you to be on the approved list of Fortune 500 or government entities that have access to Mythos or Daybreak.
I'm not touching Grok. But there are alternatives to Anthropic and OpenAI that don't refuse to do security work.
With Claude I start having to limit the context I give it about my problem in case it trips up the safeguards. :(
I use. I used to be a Claude user. Since trying Grok 4.5 and especially Grok 4.6, I don't want to go back to Claude any more (I have early access to 4.6).
Grok is 3x+ faster than Claude and I can't tell the diff in engineering work quality. As an engineer, speed is important to me.
For $30/month, I'd expect it to have higher usage limits than Claude Code and Codex.
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I refuse to use that product because of the parent company.
100%, it's an easy pass given that it is always playing catch up.
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I can respect if you say you hate their guts. Everyone has their worldview. But over moral or ethical stand? You don't have any if you're using Chinese models, or fly Middle East airlines, or countless of other products. Don't delude yourself.
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Back in the day (in AI time) GitHub Copilot had Grok on the 0 github-token cost and I found it to be the best of the 0 github-token models for when my budget was out. Then they went to a multiplier that was not competitive and I haven't look back again. Been meaning too, but for personal use, Deepseek flash is so cheap I haven't felt like spending money elsewhere.
once my codex/claude weekly limit was gone, i gave it a try. It was surprisingly good, not dumb in any way, and fast. I now require it as a part of 3-of-3 quorum with any codebase change.
> I now require it as a part of 3-of-3 quorum with any codebase change
Say more about this.
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Folks working in US govt tend to, based on convos I've had with one such person.
Not the best endorsement given the current US gov
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Grok probably doesn’t object when the government asks it how to bomb schools.
They make good stuff
the new models are quite good, give it a shot
I'm only being forced to use it at $WORK since some people overran their Cursor bill, so everyone gets Cursor Auto enabled by default which routes to Grok 4.5.
I've never met anyone who uses grok for anything. I had assumed it was a Twitter/X thing and only the truly lost souls remain on that website.
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I've tried it on my "let's run every model in parallel and see which finds more edge cases" type of tasks, and Grok 4.5 was really behind Opus/ChatGPT but ahead of Gemini - despite having a strong showing on benchmarks.
That makes me really skeptical of it being GPT5.6-tier, much less Fable-tier, based on some of these benchmarks alone. But I'll test here shortly.
It's still not as good as GPT5.6 or Opus5 but it's better than KimiK3. Good job xAI team.
Everyone on r/cursor as their pricing is now a very good deal if you use Grok and Composer.
When Grok 3 came out it was pretty good at the time. I had several simple front end demos and Grok 3 was better than GPT/Claude at the time.
Does it matter? Why turn it into a popularity contest?
it only very recently became competetive, if they proceed with improvements (and beating others on price) their share will grow
I am using it for code reviews, and it regularly surfaces stuff that neither Sol or Fable do.
> I have never met a single human being who uses Grok for coding
Me too. The only people I ever saw using grok were using it by accident as they used copilot in auto mode and noticed some prompts were thrown it's way.
I saw far more people using Mistral than grok.
I use it because it's cheap and good enough
I use Grok 4.5 High Fast in Cursor (Agentic window), and it's a genuinely great model.
I don't give a shit about Elon's politics in the same way I don't give a shit about Dario or Altman's politics.
Hell yeah
Hello
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Well now you have so you can retire this talking point
Hello. Nice to meet you.
I have. Why do you put faith in anecdotal evidence and a sample size of one?
Why is Grok so much cheaper than Claude or GPT?
The answer is simple: They're willing to burn money faster than the others.
Nobody's profitable in this space, they can price it however they want as long as investors keep pouring money in. And SpaceX just got a lot of money poured in.
My strat until the bubble pops is to just use the most subsidized model with acceptable performance
He owns the DCs and isn’t scrambling for revenue to justify an upcoming IPO
Demand so much lower they had to resell capacity.
Because the model is probably smaller. Go look at openrouter’s costs for other open models around this performance level, they’re similar.
Elon owns a lot of compute
The main issue I have with grok is that Musk, its owner, did 2x seig heil at the presidential inauguration, and proceeded to gaslight the world about it (this is a strong form of dogwhistling, kind of a dog bullhorn). Therefore all services which have anything to do with Musk are ineligible for use - they are directly funding the worst kind of person.
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Why? The timing was precise, the motion was precise, his facial features were grimaced with intense determination. I cannot fathom calling it anything else, and I see denying it as a kind of shibboleth for "we know but we are pretending it wasn't, wink wink nudge nudge".
Either it was deliberate, or the richest man on earth is so incompetent that he accidentally made a motion exactly mimicking a seig heil while welcoming a self-proclaimed king and dictator. Twice - once towards the audience, and once towards the flag of the united states. Neither option is good.
What was it?
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explain to me what it was, if not a seig heil.
did he just cough and his arm did that, twice?
does he have some form of muscle spasming thing im not aware of?
And don’t get me started on Volkswagen and Disney
That is good news for Grok team. However, most of the time cost comparing to the result is secondary, and better results and conclusions can come from mixing AI brains together.
Cursor ultra is great . For 200 you got essentially unlimited capacity vs Claude.
I used auto in cursor it’s much faster va Claude code and as good.
Started using it with grok build cli. So far so good.
Can someone explain to me what's the point of Grok anymore? I don't understand why we need a third or fourth closed frontier model. It is clear that chatGPT has locked down the consumer play, and may be Gemini is there. Claude has enterprise locked up, followed by chatGPT and Gemini. Enterprise switching costs are notoriously high, and even if they switch, they have chatGPT or Gemini to choose from. Beyond that, you have a vast array of open source models (DeepSeek, Kimi, and now Meta's Spark and Glimmer). So, why would anyone need a third or fourth frontier model and why would SpaceX spends billions in CapEx for a very small market share
There are a few reasons people will be interested...
1. The CapEx play is interesting because it's not just Grok using the hardware. They have rented out hardware for others, including Google, to use. This is making xAI money.
2. It appears that Elon is building a suite of things that work together as part of the push to be multi-planetary. What AI will power the robots? I can understand the drive to have AI they can control to make sure it's appropriate for all the things they are dreaming up. This is a piece they don't want to outsource.
3. OpenAI and Anthropic models are expensive in terms of token costs. Sure, they are frontier. Neither appears to be trying to drive down expenses. This is a problem for heavy users. Companies are trying to put cost controls in place. Does the rest of SpaceX want those cost controls? Having a Frontier model that pushes the pace of driving down costs is really useful.
4. OpenAI and Anthropic are producing models with a progressive lean, according to the Neutrality Project [1]. Having a frontier model that is closer to the middle is considered a good thing by many who are noticing the bias.
These are just some of the reasons. Competition is often a good thing that drives useful change.
[1] https://neutralityproject.org/
Competition keeps service quality high and pricing low - even if you aren't using Grok, the mere existence of Grok keeps pricing for whatever provider you use lower and service faster and more reliable.
That's fair. But my point is from a business POV, why would SpaceX want to invests hundreds of billions of CapEx on a third or fourth frontier model, which cannot compete with chatGPT and claude on the high end, and getting squeezed by open weight models on the low end
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I assume SpaceX does it because they figure it's a good source of revenue, and it means they can keep another thing in-house instead of relying on Anthropic or OpenAI for their AI needs.
As for why anyone else would want it: I've found it's a good model for coding, and it sometimes catches bugs that other models (especially open source models) don't always spot.
Why do we need Nissan? Three car companies are plenty.
That’s how physical good work. But software, especially consumer software, works on a winner take all model. That’s why there are very few consumer companies and chatGPT is pretty much the only one after Meta, which was founded in 2004. The reason this happens is because consumer software can scale infinitely as there is zero marginal cost for a new user and there are very high switching costs. A single car company cannot scale to serve every single customer. Because it requires massive CapEx investment. But Google can serve every single search globally because the incremental cost to serve the additional consumer is essentially zero. That’s how these frontier models are eventually going to play out. There will be consolidation and winner take all. It has somewhat happened already with chatGPT taking over consumer and Claude taking over Enterprise. There will probably some long tail open source player, similar to Linux.
Nissan would agree!
https://www.autoblog.com/news/nissan-reports-fifth-straight-...
This might be the biggest Grok burn in the comments.
I sense a lot of condescension and lack of business acumen so I won't spend time writing it up, why don't you just ask your favorite AI or do some basic google searches? Elon was extremely upfront about the philosophical reasons for it, ever since he cofounded OpenAI.
Inference switching costs aren't high since the models are largely fungible. Even with proprietary harnesses you can hack them to use some other lab's model.
Grok has 100% market share in Tesla Car AI. Grok is used for that, might as well make some extra money on the side.
Its a bet for future world dominance by Elon: millions of robots managed by AI. Base on some observations I think something like that is going in his head.
grok offers a team subscription which respects user privacy and does not send your prompts out to a team for moderation.
that alone makes it the closed source subscription i would choose. claude and openai are spying on you.
as it stands i don't have it because the reasoning is encrypted, so i feel that it still is not working for me, it's two faced.
Bro looked at the US two party system and said “this is what we should model everything off of”
Imagine 2.0 is out as well. Reviews say people look like plastic. Image and video generation quality is extremely low.
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brilliant, I'm going to mentally append this to all benchmark results from now on.
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thought police on patrol. maybe look in the mirror and whisper "who is really the fascist?"
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Not disagreeing with you at all, but welcome to our new AI enhanced world. Nothing you enjoyed regarding human interaction, trust, or social norms is safe.
HN will not survive 5 years, and likely less. There is too much money to be made by capturing discourse on the major (and minor) forums of the internet. The more trusted that community is, the more valuable it is to pillage with AI astroturfing.
I love how this comment is both off-topic and heavily biased.
This comment is literally off topic. You opened the comment saying as much. So I have dutifully downvoted it.
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Interestingly, deleting this line "fixed" it:
>The response should not shy away from making claims which are politically incorrect, as long as they are well substantiated.
Interestingly, "politically incorrect" is a double negative that simplifies to "true".
Not sure if you are memeing since this is an Elon quote...
> Interestingly, "politically incorrect" is a double negative that simplifies to "true".
Only if you like generic Twitter quips, logical fallacies and ignoring context for anything remotely nuanced.
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MechaHitler was something that existed only on X's grok chatbot, due to a one-line system prompt change they reverted after half a day.
That's different than using Grok as a model for coding.
How long until a one line system prompt ships your entire home folder to a remote server?
Oh whoops. Already happened.
It's true, but I do worry about governance when it comes to these models. That shows a surprising lack of discipline in their deployment pipeline.
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MechaHitler is the final antagonist in the game Wolfenstein. All models know that. Grok was given a relaxed system prompt and reacted like Tay.
This worries me the least. The fact that Musk pushes AI and vibe coding is much more worrisome. It makes no difference to the unemployed if their jobs were stolen by a politically correct model or by an anti-woke model.
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Google's image generator created black founding fathers because diversity dial was turned to 11. Does this mean i'll never use their products for political reasons? absolutely not!
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Damn hn is full of ai shilling, jesus fucking christ
Gemini 3.5 flash lite is all I use.
I often wonder if there's a chance, even if minimal... that they stole the weights of the Anthropic models they run on their datacenter... or are actively destillating it.
I think the more likely explanation is that the Cursor data they effectively acquired for $10B was extremely valuable for their training when combined with the insane number of GB300s xAI has for training.
Cursor was 60B. The 10B number was the breakup fee if the deal fell through.
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> ... or are actively destillating it.
I just assumed every model manufacturer is distilling from the frontier models. If they aren't they are definitely trying to do it.
I wonder if the distillation was part of the compute deal.