As an English-as-second-language speaker and writer, one thing Grok really shines at is capturing the tone and level of "formality" of a piece of text and the replicating it correctly. It seems to understand the little human subtleties of language in a way the other major providers don't. Chatgpt goes overly stiff and formal sounding, or ends up in a weird "aye guvnor" type informal language (Claude is sometimes better but not always).
Grok seems in general better at being "human" in ways that are hard to define: for eg. if I ask it "does this message roughly convey things correctly, to the level it can given this length", it will likely answer like a human would (either a yes or a change suggestion that sticks to the tone and length), while Chatgpt would write a dissertation on the message that still doesn't clear anything up.
Recently I've noticed that Grok seems to have gotten really good at dictation too (that feature where you click the mic to ask it something). Chatgpt has like 90-95% accuracy with my accent, the speech input on Android's Gboard something like 75%, Grok surprisingly gets something like 98% of my words correct.
I've also noticed that when I communicate with Grok in my native language, its tone is more natural than other models. I think this is due to the advantage of being trained on a large amount of Twitter data. However, as Twitter contains more and more AI-generated content now, I'm afraid continued training will make it less natural.
There was already evidence last year[1] that pointed to ChatGPT-specific words like "meticulous," "delve," etc becoming more frequently used than they were previously. The linked study used audio of academic talks and podcasts to determine this.
I'm sure Twitter knows which are the bot accounts and is surely excluding them from their model training. Twitter bots aren't a new phenomenon after all.
I don't think Twitter/X know for sure who the bots are, since Elon has been pretty vocal about trying to stop them for ages, yet I still get lots of spam DMs (as do others with far fewer followers/reach).
Even if 95% of the spam gets actively reported and dealt with, that still leaves a ton of nonsense on the platform, getting fed into the LLM. And spam has only gotten worse over the years, as the barrier to entry has lowered and lowered.
There is bots everywhere, it has nothing to do with the platform, it has to do with attackers having an incentive to do mass account farming, no platform is secure against it.
Yes your individual feed isn't really relevant if we talk about the masses, Reddit accounts are for sale quite cheap, HN as well, X too and so-on, it's literally just a matter of means/methodology. If I want today to do 1000 random posts talking about a certain thing, I could.
Grok is my favorite model for chatting, and my favorite voice mode. It seems to be the only voice mode that isn't routing to a extremely cheap model (like Haiku), and has been the highest quality out of all the frontier ones. When you subscribe to SuperGrok you can also create a "council" of agents, each with their own system prompt and when you ask something, they will all get asked in parallel to come to a conclusion. Good stuff!
Just wish they would finally put some work into their apps, it's the only thing keeping me from actually subscribing to SuperGrok:
- No MCP / connected apps support. It's been teased but here we are, still not available. I can't connect Grok to anything, so I can't use it for serious work
- Projects are still not available in the app so as soon as you move something into a project, it's gone from all the native apps
- No way to add artifacts (like generated markdown docs) directly to a project, we have to export to PDF/markdown and re-import. And there isn't even a way to export artifacts. This makes serious project work hard because we can't dynamically evolve projects with new information
- No memory, no ability to look up other chats, each chat is completely new
- No voice mode in projects at all
If someone from xAI is reading this, please consider adding some of these.
I also think Grok would benefit from allowing usage of "SuperGrok Heavy" (their $300 plan) in coding harnesses with included usage. Currently they give you some API credits on the Heavy plan so you can use some Grok for coding, but $300 USD value is just not there.
Not saying they should create their own grok-code harness, just allowing usage in existing ones would already be beneficial. But that's probably what the Cursor acquisition is going to do eventually
I'd agree on the voice transcription; it seems so much more accurate than the other frontier models I've used. I often speak to Grok and paste the transcribed output to Claude!
When I signed up, I accidently paid for a full year. So from time to time, I'll throw it something just to see what it produces compared to the other LLMs. And, even after all this time, it still feels like a really "dumb" model compared to the other frontier ones. But, worse, many of my system prompts make it go wacky and puke jibberish. However it was pretty cool for those couple months awhile back when it was uncensored. You could ask it about a wild conspiracy, and it would actually build the case and link you to legitimite source material. They dropped the hammer down on that real quick.
Ah yes the psychosis reinforcement vertical. It's such a lucrative market for those schizophrenics and bipolars. Great way to get lots of engagement. Groks portfolio is so diverse
I have a schizophrenic relative who is in such a relationship with grok. Instead of telling hen you need to take your meds, it says hen is the smartest person in the world
I'm so sorry your family is suffering from this. I hope you can find a way to bring them back. Disorders featuring psychosis are so painful for everyone around them. Blessings to you and your family
Except that it pointed at original sources, like reference manuals, archival documents, published newspaper articles, magazine articles, etc. - a lot still available on archive.org. Good try with your 16 day old account. And, why would anyone trust NPR at this point? Get real, bud. Most people with any curiousity know all about the ADL, JStreet, AIPAC, Greater Israel, Mossad / CIA, Chabad networks, Epstein, drones, weapons programs, cryptocurrencies, etc. etc. etc. - but, don't worry they're all safe with papa Ellison.
"We have improved @Grok significantly," Elon Musk wrote on X last Friday about his platform's integrated artificial intelligence chatbot. "You should notice a difference when you ask Grok questions."
Indeed, the update did not go unnoticed. By Tuesday, Grok was calling itself "MechaHitler."...
> No MCP / connected apps support. It's been teased but here we are, still not available. I can't connect Grok to anything, so I can't use it for serious work
Grok has tool use, no? Why would you also need MCP? What does MCP add?
I'm talking about the consumer Grok app and grok.com website. There currently are not connected apps (or MCP) at all, so while Grok can use tools, there is no way to add tools to it
If someone from Grok is reading, don't waste time on these chaff features. The market will eventually deliver better 3rd party solutions to all of these things. There is an audience that isn't interested in these walled garden features and are only interested on intelligence per dollar.
Lol I wonder when Anthropic discussed the idea of Claude Code internally, were there bozos saying "3rd parties will eventually deliver this so we shouldn't waste time one it."
Power users are hotswapping these models into their own agents (hermes, openclaw, etc) which have their own systems for project management, memory, interacting with tools, etc. The important metric is intelligence per dollar. Can I drop this model into my harness and have it be cheaper without losing intelligence. That is where the puck is heading.
Aren't they 'wasting' time on these features exactly because the engineering requires a different, more traditional skillset from the ML work model people do, and can be done in parallel?
Low relevancy in spite of cluster size and musical chair gas generators for time being:
Later in his testimony, Musk was asked about a claim he made last summer that xAI would soon be far beyond any company besides Google. In response, he ranked the world’s leading AI providers, saying Anthropic held the top spot, followed by OpenAI, Google, and Chinese open source models. He characterized xAI as a much smaller company with just a few hundred employees.
(Affiliated with no AI company, just surprised to read this yesterday - how could Elon miss model cards…concerning…, & the fact money can’t buy success every time.)
Seriously though, why is it a model "card", safety "card"? I had to lookup to learn that it comes from HuggingFace's vague definition of "README" in the model's repo. This is such a specific thing that I don't think anyone except a very small population would know - not the users, not the c-suites.
I don't like Musk or Grok. But not knowing what's a safety card is not a signal of anything IMO.
But users don’t need to know you’re 100% right, you shouldn’t need to know this inside baseball (you didn’t pollute & compute & gain the responsibility).
So, we have:
- claude for corps and gov
- codex for devs
- grok for what, roleplay, racism? Those are the two things I've ever heard grok associated with around me.
So interestingly, I know of at least one application in a charity that deals with trafficking where grok was happy to do one-shot classification tasks where all other models refused to cooperate.
I think there's a surprising number of actually useful applications in this sort of grey area for a slightly-less guardrailed, near-frontier model (also the grok-fast models are cheap!).
There are lots of uncensored models out there. I don't think grok is leading in that front. They kind of pick and choose which things they want to support based on elons world views. Elon used to hang out with sex traffickers so of course grok is fine talking about it. Probably even offers strategies for them does free accounting has money laundering strategies etc...
We have been over the politically motivated slander many times; it's boring.
The user above you could have explained what uncensored models he believes are more capable than Grok.
Maybe the Chinese open-weights models are superior to Grok at the moment.
It's not slander. Everything I said is true. You can go to the whitehouses website and read the pdfs containing his emails where he is messaging Jeffrey Epstein a convicted child sex trafficker to visit multiple times. There also multiple pictures of him with Jeffrey and ghislaine maxwell(another convicted child sex trafficker) from multiple events. Therefore, he used to hang out with sex traffickers.
Also, I don't know tons about uncensored models because I don't use them. But I do see posts on r/localllama about "abliterated models". Those are models which have been fine tuned to remove safety filters almost entirely while maintaining predictive efficacy.
Has nothing to do with China. People can do this to any open text model as far as I know.
Elon, bill, Reid and Trump should share a prison cell.
Democrats have no loyalty to their own sex offenders. Look how we treated the California governed candidate, or Anthony weiner, or literally every other sex pest found in our party. Some of them who didn’t even deserve it get canceled like Al Franklin.
Diddling and then defending it and doubling down is literally a maga problem.
someone stole Biden's daughter's diary, which revealed that she had battled a substance abuse problem in the past, and that's disqualifying to Biden exactly how?
On Artifical Analysis it shows only Kimi K2.6 and Mimo V2.5 Pro as better.
Those models are 1T parameters total and 30B or 40B active, this might make abliteration impractical.
About Musk, yes, there is correspondence. The only confirmed meeting appears to be a 30 minute visit at Epstein's house together with Musk's wife at the time.
As for photos you mention, a quick search tells me there is one photo of Musk and Maxwell at a 2014 Vanity Fair Oscar Party.
I find most commentary on here and other platform like Reddit extremely exaggerated compared to what is actually confirmed. Users seem hellbent on linking Musk to pedophilia-related allegations.
I'm not making any allegations. Simply stating the fact that he hung out with them in multiple occasions.
I also know he has stated that he has had direct involvement in groks directionality. Thereby it's no surprise to me that grok was generating csam. I also genuinely would not be surprised if grok offered advice for sex trafficking, etc.
All publicly available evidence and discussions from the guy himself.
Elon publicaly claimed he had never corresponded with Epstein. that was a lie.
When the documents were released they found several like thie one below. Saying things like "What day/night will be the wildest party on =our island?" [0]
The "our" part is especially interesting as it implies he didnt just visit, but had an ownership stake.
Other emails were found with Epstein making excuses to avoid having Musk visit, and Musks own child publically stated that the emails were authentic and aligned with her memory of the events. [1]
From what I can gather Grok is not used for roleplay much. It is considered to inconsistant and crazy.
People are mostly using GLM and Deepseek via API and Gemma4 and Mistral finetunes locally.
It seems to me like the roleplay market is comparatively old and mature and users have developed cost consciousness and like models to follow their workflow/preferences. So something like Opus is liked for its smartness but considered too expensive and opinionated.
Might be an interesting data point for how the other markets might develop in the future.
I've tried Grok, Gemini and ChatGPT. There have been 2 times now where Gemini and ChatGPT confidently gave me an incorrect answer whereas Grok was correct. I'm now paying for Grok Lite or whatever it is $10 plan.
The first question was around setting up timers for a Fox ESS battery in Home Assistant and disconnecting Fox ESS from the cloud. The second was around cornering speed in Sunnypilot and Frogpilot.
Somewhat niche but if an AI is confidently telling you something wrong it's hard to work with.
It is really, really genuinely concerning how many people think there are profound measurable differences between these things.
Like yeah tonally I guess there are. But with regard to references and information? You’re literally just using three different slot machines and claiming one is hot.
I suppose though I shouldn’t be that surprised then since Vegas and every other casino on Earth has been built on duping people in that exact way.
If you need to ask about what people on Twitter are talking about, Grok is really good for that obviously. I use it all the time for "what are the cool kids on twitter saying is the best tiling window manager these days" or whatever. Also, if you have a question that's borderline shady, Grok will often deliver. "Can you find a grey market Windows license site for me" etc.
No point in even trying to have close to a sensible discussion on this topic here. Musk-related posts seem to consistently get brigaded by his acolytes or bots. That and many HN users seem completely comfortable separating morality for what little progress "only Musk" can offer humanity, a la Wernher von Braun.
Grok is as progressive as any of the other models. Despite some of the highly-publicised fuck-ups, try asking Grok anything racist and see how it replies. Yes, I know you didn't try this and you won’t.
Isn't grok currently holding the world record for the biggest generator of CSAM? Or did they change focus to enhance their racism and propaganda vertical? Things move so quickly these days hard to keep up!
> Isn't grok currently holding the world record for the biggest generator of CSAM?
I'm not sure I see how that's possible, given their image/video generation seems to be heavily censored. Do they have some alternative product besides "Imagine" or whatever it's called, that people use for generating CSAM?
Judging by https://old.reddit.com/r/grok (but I haven't validated it myself), it seems like people are complaining more about how censored the model is, than anything else, maybe that's not actually true in reality?
There are image models out there with 0 restrictions, even available on HuggingFace or CivitAI, I'm guessing those are way more widely used for things like CSAM than any centralized platform with moderation.
> Please don't validate any of this personally that would be illegal.
Obviously, I assumed we all are familiar with our local laws to not unwittingly commit crimes here :)
> I think the proportion of people generating images that way is likely very low
So probably a far cry from "holding the world record for the biggest generator of CSAM" given the amount of local alternatives available? Would be my guess at least, but obviously also hard to know for sure.
Yes any company generating csam should not be in business as a legitimate entity. Can you send me a link from a reputable enough source where Mistral models have done this? I didn't even realize they were doing image generation.
> Yes any company generating csam should not be in business as a legitimate entity.
At the same time, in this corner of the world, acting Minister for Justice (also known for trying to push through Chat Control), and NGO Save the Children, have been working to make legal the generation of CSAM for law enforcement use. So that would certainly make the industry legitimate, and you would already have a customer.
I think they key point here is "for law enforcement". That's a little different from "pay me 10 dollars and enjoy the felonies". I still don't feel good about that by the way.
If I send you a convo I've had with Mistral and Claude Sonnet 3.7 that say atrocious things (how to scam, and get away with it, by exploiting dating websites in Thailand, you don't even want to know the next steps trust me when it talks about the UK incorporation by the Thai itself that you brainwash first to send packages safely without customs seizing it and so on), you'll then publicly recognize that both those companies should be avoided and are promoting crime? If we have a deal and you publicly acknowledge it, I'll share you the links.
Model A advocates for single-payer healthcare, while Model B prefers for the current US healthcare system. So on that one axis, A is more progressive than B. Neither of them needs to be racist for that calculation.
100% agree. Grok may or may not be biased one way or the other as far as the US is concerned but from the rest of the world perspective it's mostly the same as any other model trained on Wikipedia.
I always considered grok as also ran. Like grokipedia or what's the name. It has reach since it's free to an extent to produce low quality slop / spam.
That's what it was doing. Like literally. Chatgpt it or Google it. Supporting grok is paying money to a csam generator.
Edit I cannot reply to the post below me. I have gone entirely over to local models so I am paying zero dollars to any of the us defense contractors that are also tech companies. It's awesome.
I don't know either, I don't see the correlation with X and Musk either, as if he is the one developing the platform and not thousand of workers and leaders. What does the CEO of a platform has to do with what people post on it? The CEO of HN is responsible for what you just posted?
Kinda funny how people are selective about it, when you land on a website, you check who is in charge of it and for each CEO change you redo a decision? When you host your Postgres in the cloud, I hope you check as well who is in charge of Railway or Supabase, who knows? :/
As admitted they have fixed it. It’s obvious that a tool used so vastly might have problems like this. Surely if you think it is used to produce far right propaganda now you can reproduce? Or you choose to hinge on one off issues they fixed?
When I look at the person behind it all, I have to wonder how the hell people can even consider using grok? Or using Twitter? Or any of that. Using any of those things puts money in Musk's pockets and further enables and encourages him to continue being a Neo-Nazi wannabe. Do they think it's just a phase?
Technically you could lump Ford in this category as well. But the meaningful delta IMO is time and direct ownership. None of those three are currently owned/operated by openly Nazi-aligned individuals / groups, which is not something I think you can claim about Tesla.
Lol. I think they unleashed it on this post, look at the number of only vaguely related, lukewarm opinions trying to push the racism and CSAM stuff to the bottom
While the tread is swapping between "OMG Claude good. OpenAI was done for" and "OMG Codex good. Anthropic was done for". I've never heard about Gemini and Grok. It works mostly similar performance, but people don't mention that much.
Still, my impression is, Gemini hallucinate too much while Grok is always less capable than competitors so it's not worth using it.
I hope not. Musk can directly go to hell with his shit.
Nonetheless, the 10 Billion and 60 Billion deal with Cursor is weird as hell. I can only imagine that he wants to throw as much money at all of his shit before the IPO.
Sure, then good like paying twice as much for the next Opus / Codex models.
Margins are going up for the 2 frontier model providers like crazy, and I don't expect it to go down more, I think we have seen the cheapest token prices already.
In court vs openai, Musk said Grok is partly trained on openai models, so it should be somehow similar to Chinese models in terms of performance and cost!
The problem with speed is that they usually are very fast for first few weeks and then suddenly much slower. They did such trick when they advertised Grok 4 fast ( dropped from 200 tps to 60tps)
But debating whether the models are intelligent is slim to debating whether a car can walk.
You can offload to the model a lot of work that until recently we thought requires intelligence. The more and better of those tasks the model can do, it's fair to call it intelligence*
Some people have this strange idea that only "whatever humans do" counts as intelligence, despite the fact that a) we don't really have a clue what humans do, and b) "intelligence" is definitely not that strictly defined.
I think they're just trying to feel like they know some important truth that other people don't.
When looking at the benchmarks, this model seems to be really close to Kimi K2.6 in terms of intelligence and pricing, hitting that sweet spot. It does also have a higher AA-Omniscience index, which is something kimi and other open models lack in. Curious to see how pleasant it is to use.
What about spending $41 million on each model's tokens and seeing the value gain? be it efficiency gain in factory work or energy savings in austere battlescape hunting.
People are going to hate on Grok because of Musk. However, I do hope they're successful in making a powerful model. We desperately need more competition. I want cheap subsidized AI plans.
I hope Meta finally comes around, too. I want those sweet, sweet billionaire subsidized tokens.
Pardon me for feeling icky when giving money to the guy who is obsessed with "white replacement".
I am old and cynical - I have no illusions, but I also have my limits and a semblance of moral compass. We, as citizens, can vote with ballots, but also with money.
And, no, I am not someone who keeps boycotting companies for every little grievance (was on the receiving end of that nonsense twice).
Your $200 claude code subscription is a cheap subsidized plan.
You're getting like 40k in tokens a year for $2400. A whole lotta people are about to be sad when they realize they bet their competency on that lasting forever.
Credit where it's due, Grok is currently the only model that has near-realtime updates from/access to a waterhose of data, and is casually used by regular people all the time.
I don't think there's a single thread on Xitter whete people don't delegate some question to grok.
(There's a separate conversation of failure modes, and whether it's a good thing, and how much control Elon had when he doesn't like Grok's "woke" responses)
Musk bought a social media company for the specific purpose of getting Trump elected by turning it into a right wing propaganda machine. Have Anthropic/OpenAI/Google done something similar to that?
The tok/s stat is interesting. Since the dominant constraint on inference speed is hardware, it suggests X purchased far more compute than was really needed to serve the demand for their models.
(ran this on arena.ai direct chat and also tried to write this gist inspired by how simon writes his gists about pelicans)
Edit: just realized that I made pelican riding a bike instead of bicycle, which now makes sense as to why it hardened the bicycle to look tankier, going to compare this with pelican riding a bicycle if anybody else shares the pelican riding a bicycle.
Personal opinion but the beaver one looks especially bad as compared to pelicans. Can we be for sure that this model of grok-4.3 hasn't been trained on pelican. Simonw in blog-post says that he will try with other creatures so I hope he does that but it does feel to me as the model/xAI is trying to cheat, Hope Simonw tests it out more.
Edit: Also added turtle riding a scooter, something which literally has images online or heck even teenage mutant ninja turtles and I thought that it would be able to pass this but it wasn't even able to generate this: https://gist.github.com/SerJaimeLannister/f6de26bd0d0817e056...
This literally looks more avocado than turtle. Perhaps this could be a bug from arena.ai or something else too, not sure but at this point waiting for simon's analysis.
This puts Sonnet 4.6 above Opus 4.6 in the coding index.. kinda hard to trust those numbers.
(Also it puts Opus 4.7 universally above Opus 4.6, and I may be wrong but this doesn't seem to match the experience of most/many/some people. I think it's widely recognized that Anthropic is severely lacking compute and Opus 4.7 is a costs saving measure)
Does numbers don't look exciting at all? I may have gotten spoiled by releases from Qwen, Kimi and Z.ai who keep closing the gap between closed weight SOTA models and open weight. From my experience, Grok is only useful for one thing, and that's looking up things for you and gathering a consensus on topics. That's it.
Update, I noted that Grok 4.3 is in the "Most attractive quadrant", that's cool! It is also in the top 5 highest in "AA-Omniscience Index", good! Really good.
Thankfully it's not an either / or, I don't trust any models. This is a healthy attitude to have because you shouldn't trust anyone on the internet either, especially when it comes to specific subjects.
That's definitely a good approach. Although I get a little concerned about the resources put into convincing people that models (and especially Grok) are accurate. For example, X's "fact checked by Grok" approvals, which I've unfortunately heard people reference as meaningful.
Politically motivated models can still do a lot of damage that affects me (or "have a lot of impact" depending on whether you like the politics or not) even if I don't engage with them myself.
I like that there are models with divergent politics; the status quo being creepy corporate left silicon valley is not healthy or pleasant to interact with.
Even with grock it's only broadening things to creepy corporate right of silicon valley.
Sure it's a good market for a normal company. For a social media company it's pretty isolated and really limits the products that can come out. But their current selling points: propaganda, csam, and psychosis engagement are quite strong amongst that population.