Who here actually uses Grok? It's sad to see Elon's arc but when he doubled down on some of his political ideas he had it coming with the Tesla sales going down and x.ai not taken seriously.
I've always tried to remain apolitical and unbiased but it's hard to overlook who's behind a technology you wanna buy. Not that sama and others are saints either, it's just Elon's very obvious and vocal about it.
It's a shame, really, because Grok is a good model. But Elon promised to open source the previous model and it took them forever to do that with Grok 3. Sorry, but I wanna buy from someone who keeps their promises ("FSD by next year").
I like grok for noncoding stuff. I find it hasn't been tuned for "Safety" (meaning it isn't tuned much for political correctness). It also seems good at making images and stories up well. I run some choose your own adventures stories with my kids through it. We tell it who each of their characters are and what the theme is for the night and grok gives them each a section of story and 4 choices. They also have the option of choosing something different then suggested. We have it so it cycles around the turns for everyone. Works pretty well, and if the kids wanna go dark (preteen boy) grok doesn't mind the violence.
Kinda reminds me of the video game from enders game.
Nothing in AI is more edgy and annoying than beginning every response with a mandatory glazing, like ChatGPT. “That’s a really insightful question, and shows that you really understand the subject!”
Politeness is not the same thing as gratuitous praise. Politeness is appropriate; being excessively glazed for asking an obvious follow-up question is weird.
Right, and neither politeness nor gratuitous praise are even remotely similar to being edgy. These words have meanings, you have been using at least one of them incorrectly, that is the point I'm trying to make.
early iterations i could immediately peg as grok content based on its condescending snarky “OOoooOoOo — so much to unpack here sweaty, lets get started” tone.
im open minded and ive fed grok a few requests recently. it was better at doing creative fiction prompts without the “eddie izzard coming down off of a fifteen day coke bender” vibe.
everything i ask it to do is completely made up nonsense so i dont have an opinion about its bias or the quality of its factual content.
snark and clapback made the world go around on xitter. maybe thats what they thought people wanted. savage insulting content to “own” people. i for one, also found it extremely annoying.
> meaning it isn't tuned much for political correctness
Is being tuned for right wing viewpoints the same as not being tuned for political correctness? Because there is tuning happening to a specific viewpoint:
Going off OpenRouter's rankings (https://openrouter.ai/rankings), Grok Code Fast 1 is the most used model by a significant margin, and since those metrics are calculated as of this week, that's after providers stopped giving free promotional access to it. Grok 4 Fast is #5 on that list which was never free.
In terms of models, Grok 4 Fast has essentially zero restrictions on safety, which a) makes it unusable for most applications that allow user input and b) makes it extremely useful for certain applications.
For at least the last year, I've been using Grok for 90% of my queries. I pay for their $30 plan as well as $20 for Claude Code, which I only use for simple development projects. For anything more complicated, Grok's expert mode has consistently better results.
I throw all my queries at Grok 4 Expert, GPT 5 Thinking and Opus 4.1 Extended Thinking.. for Golang it's been my experience that Grok produce the best results about 90% of the time as well.
Not sure about Claude, but OpenAI models are pretty bad at Go for some reason. For example, they always want to replace the "new" style for-loop that uses range with the old syntax. This drives me nuts.
In my experience Grok Fast is the best "cheaper" model out there. Far better than Haiku 4.5 and Gemini Flash. I don't think the other cheaper models should be treated seriously at this point.
Gemini Flash is the first model I disable in any tool I use. It's a joke, and to add salt to injury, google announced a "lite" version of that as well!
Yes allegedly having an employee bumped off for whistleblowing and the sister thing is way worse than someone having a different opinion than you. One is criminal the other is free speech.
One is alleged, other isn't just an opinion. Its estimated that several hundred thousand deaths have already happened from the abrupt USAID cuts initiated by DOGE.
I don't think you can compare the usual internal backstabbing between executives with someone who literally directed and participated in acts of the US Government, and keep saying and doing things to help and nurture a certain side of the political spectrum.
I do! I have felt bad vibes from OpenAI for a while now, and eventually defaulted to Grok as somewhat the lesser of many evils. I respect anybody who doesn't wish to use it, but it's good enough for what I need it for. Case in point: it just spit out valid OpenSCAD code for an adapter piece I want to 3D print.
I don't understand how anyone can think Grok is the lesser of many evils. It seems to me that Grok is currently playing in its own league of evil.
Most models belong to capitalist companies that are fairly apolitical and all they care about is money. Their evil comes from not caring about consequences as long as it grows their value. Their censorship come from the desire to avoid PR disasters.
On the other hand, Grok belongs to a billionaire involved in destroying America's democracy, and it's being openly manipulated according to Musk's ideology. I can't think of a model I would trust less.
I find it funny that people are still calling Grok "mechahitler" as if that weren't prompted by trolls and the AI model is going to set up concentration camps on every block.
You know, feel free to keep thinking this. In my experience Grok is the best. I don’t let myself into weird groupthink that happens just because trolls took advantage of Grok’s absence of lobotomy. Kind of a superpower.
I feel compelled to point out that the Mechahitler thing was prompted by bad actors hiding invisible tokens in tweets, but sure, it's maybe an unpopular opinion.
Basically, the major free options out there for LLMs are OpenAI, Google, Perplexity, DeepSeek, Meta, and Grok. (I could be missing stuff here, but those are the main players.) DeepSeek is out because of China ties. OpenAI and Perplexity have CEOs that seem incredibly shifty to me. I refuse to give Meta and Google any more info than I have to, so I'm avoiding them. Hence we fall back to Grok. Again, maybe not a completely logical progression, but it's my choice and I get to live with the consequences :)
I've been occasionally using Grok and found it good for devops stuff; specifically it often is able to explain and produce working configurations without getting lost or introducing subtle mistakes as I've sometimes seen with other models.
I used Grok to successfully split a large 10K-line file of spaghetti code into multiple smaller well organised files. This was after giving the same task to Claude, OpenAI, and Gemini, all of which consistently failed.
Grok certainly has its uses, but I default to OpenAI for most business tasks and Claude for code.
I used it to calculate the size of a greenhouse using a lot of inputs and restrictions. It did that fine but the one thing I did not appreciate was its sense of humor. It said the excavator would be here first thing Monday along with a pot of coffee. Just tell me a dad joke or just skip the attempt at humor all together.
Because some tools (AFAIR Kilo Code but I might be wrong) gave it away for free. The model itself was (still is?) free for a while, so I'm not surprised.
I have try it a few times in Copilot as code fast 1 because it was advertised. It has never correctly done something so far. Maybe because it's the fast ver ?
Maybe you just used it wrong? I refactored a complicated code base, built exhaustive tests for a CLI app and I've been maintaining and building out several k8s clusters out of a mono repo using Cline + grok-code-fast-1 and it's been a breeze.
Let me give you a perspective. For Indians Winston Churchill is no different than Hitler. The guy was responsible for millions of death in bengal famine.But for you and I assume majority of this forum and westerners he is a hero. Against Winston Churchill though Elon appears like a saint!
Groks underrated honestly. If you have to market on X you need a sub anyway so it’s replaced casual questions/sort of questions I used to Google for me and I’m not seeing anything worse than ChatGPT and often it’s better. Much better at current events.
The video gen is actually really good fast and cheap for short videos.
Still use Claude and GPT5 for work tasks but I haven’t tried grok extensively for those
I use Grok more than other LLMs. It’s built into X, so the use case of pressing the Grok button on a post to see an explanation for something I didn’t understand, or a fact check for something I doubted, or just more background on a subject, is by far the most frequently useful feature of AI in my day to day life.
People seem to nitpick a lot. Grok 3 came out in, what, March? Cost how many tens of millions to train? And you’re mad because it’s not open source yet?
I've always tried to remain apolitical and unbiased but it's hard to overlook who's behind a technology you wanna buy. Not that sama and others are saints either, it's just Elon's very obvious and vocal about it.
It's a shame, really, because Grok is a good model. But Elon promised to open source the previous model and it took them forever to do that with Grok 3. Sorry, but I wanna buy from someone who keeps their promises ("FSD by next year").