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.

I probably have the same strix halo box as you. It's slow, although mostly tolerable, but even 128 GB isn't enough to run good models. Where that leaves us is giving money to somebody to get access to frontier models. I don't like any of those guys either, but some appear worse than others. FWIW, I mostly use Anthropic models. And CCP and their distilled models notwithstanding, at least they release open weight models at a lower cost. It's not like any American company can claim the higher ground these days anyway, especially when they trained their models on pirated content and trash our neighborhoods with their datacenters.

Couple of years with some bandwidth improvements and higher RAM capacity might do some wonders

For many people, yes. That’s how far down the Elon Musk morality bar is.

Elon would be in prison for SEC violations if the current administration hadn’t been elected, and that’s only the tip of the iceberg with that guy.

Yes, ethically Elon ranks lowest based on the past 5 years of questionable decisions, like uploading your entire codebase to their server without consent.

Elon is directly responsible for Grok becoming self-titled “MechaHitler” which the other three haven’t come close to matching yet.

This statement doesn't go far enough given Elon's direct and hands-on involvement with DOGE and the 2024 elections. Very few of the richest people of the world are personally entangled in meddling with government agencies directly, for example.

I think it would be extremely naive to believe that the rich weren't literally writing the laws. They're just usually more quiet about it.

> MADISON, Wis. (AP) — Billionaire Elon Musk likely broke Wisconsin law when he promised to hand out $1 million checks to voters in the 2025 state Supreme Court election, a bipartisan panel has found.

> The Wisconsin Elections Commission last week referred two complaints to the Brown County district attorney’s office, which can choose to bring criminal charges over violating the state law against election bribery. Prosecutors have 40 days to report back to the commission.

https://apnews.com/article/elon-musk-wisconsin-election-mill...

> "Likely broke"

Journalism has gone wild these days. He's already been sued and won a couple times. An for what? Encouraging people just to vote (he did not say which way). It's going to backfire hard for all the ad spend by MTV, Meta, and Google who also spend lots of money to encourage certain demographics to vote.

"Likely broke" is according to the Wisconsin Election Commission, as is attributed at the end of that very sentence.

> Encouraging people just to vote

And "Criminal Conspiracy" is just making plans with friends. Just because you can describe it in vague terms doesn't make it A-Okay.

> It's going to backfire hard for all the ad spend by MTV, Meta, and Google

It will not, because running ads is definitely not election bribery, whereas what Musk did likely is under Wisconsin law.

Elon Musk has actively endorsed the right wing extremist party in Germany.

The one that often has trouble running it's events as businesses try to avoid serving them. And which has prominent members that the secret service considers definitely fascist.

Musk has gone a long way beyond simply being the standard rich person lobbying for their own interests, and has moved into actively promoting people that are trying to tear down liberal democracy.

Not sure you put "wrong" in quotes. Much of what he's done, both in election interference, and subsequently in DOGE, is illegal.

The wrong side is the authoritarian side that wishes to co-opt democracies around the world.

Idk I just don't like the richest man on planet and the owner of the "town square of the internet" to post fake news blatantly to promote hate against a group of people.

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.

Paying people to vote is interfering amigo.

Remember when he got hired by the federal government and walked away with a ton of private data?

>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

There's a big difference between quiet donations to a PAC - not that that's good either - and what Elon did. He literally paid for votes, likely in violation of the law. He poured more money into U.S. elections than anyone has before. He and Trump both made strange, cryptic statements about Elon's role in Pennsylvania with the voting machines that has caused people to reasonably wonder if they somehow manipulated the election. Whether he did or not, the innuendo alone is not ok. Then he did what he did in Germany. Don't even get me started on DOGE or his Starlink shenanigans in Ukraine.

That's before we even start talking about the models themselves. He claims to want "unbiased" models, but he very clearly has a distorted view of the world and has repeatedly demonstrated a desire and willingness to bend the world to his will. I don't want to use a model that is so obviously suspect. Not to mention, his models repeatedly produce racist, Nazi-like propaganda.

IMO, he is, at best, a clueless amateur masquerading as an expert and running into problems a more careful person manages to mostly avoid. At worst... well, you get the picture.

"Everyone's doing it" presented with no evidence is just you trying to make yourself feel better for: - using from - driving a Tesla - voting for Trump

It's a really, really easy line to draw in the sand: don't support openly corrupt individuals.

It's absolutely true there's money in politics. To call all money in politics equally corrupt because Bernie got a dollar to have dinner with someone vs Elon effectively directly buying votes....

A complete lack of nuance here. And I wouldn't be surprised if corporations / super rich WANT you to think like that. The more defeatist the mentality becomes the more we just accept whatever they do next.

everyone interferes with elections. you just prefer people to interfere on your side.

I think you are confusing the words interfere and influence.

Every accusation is a confession...

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.

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.

It's a different type of model. In my admittedly judgemental observation, people that aren't the type to configure fully automated harnesses with good tools and skills and verifiers for their infrastructure and are way more interventionist in the way their agent works tend to like grok 4.5 more as the main agent. It's much faster and writes more simple and normal code that aligns a bit more with human written code. As an example, instead of sandboxing and simply verifying output artifacts they manually read and approve edits, suggest different code patterns, and manually approved shell commands. On the flip side it's not as good as fable when you need a relatively complex multi step thing done.

But in my experience, the overall productivity ends up similar, give you are willing to work with it in that way.

The grok build TUI harness is excellent and I really enjoyed using it.

For debugging and such I found it pretty much the same as other models.

Fable's taste in software abstraction and project planning in greenfield setups[1] is unmatched in my experience. Sol is OK. My primary use is launching tens of experiments that have to smartly use a limited pool of GPUs.

I use fable to start off the experiments, decide checkpoints, gpu alloc, where to sacrifice precision for performance, and then grok4.5 to iterate, tune, debug, eval, etc, within the abstraction and setup that fable initiated. I have fable write simple scripts that are then wrapped in skills for grok to use. Speed for that loop is extremely important for me, since I also apply human judgement there and I don't like waiting for model output.

I have tried Deepseek and such for the inner agent, but I desperately need multi-modal. Otherwise it's OK, but it tends to use tools less and rambles on and tries to reason with limited information and gets things wrong. Probably a relative la k of tool use posttraining. Gemini flash limits in google ai pro are too low for me to use to compare.

I use anthropic and openais models through grants and so can't compare subscription plan token budgets, but supergrok's budgets are satisfactory.

[1] aside, I have not yet met a model that continues off of a human codebase and actually follows the patterns reliably long term. Eventually it's all slop.

Yeah [1] is really a thing and SlopCodeBench (https://www.scbench.ai/) kind of measures that.

You need to manually push models to clean up the slop every now and then otherwise it becomes chaotic. And every change with LLMs is always extra lines.

It's much faster, so if you're not doing something cutting-edge, or you're doing the planning yourself and just using the LLM for implementation, the speed benefit outweighs the extra smarts of Fable/Opus5/Sol.

Is there a good way to auto switch between models for planning/implementation?

Pretty much every coding harness allows you to define skills and agents so yes

In most coding harnesses you can just instruct the agent to do so. When using Fable, I often say things like:

> Save your context. Always use a subagent (Opus 5 or GPT 5.6) for performing the implementation and then review the work yourself. You are the orchestrator and coordinator it’s up to you to ensure a cohesive final result.

I’ve done more or less the same thing with other agents/versions but with Fable consuming usage credits/tokens so quickly I do it more regularly than usual. I know people who will specify Composer (to my chagrin) as the implementing agent.

Addendum: this really goes a long way, and I can use a single chat session for days before I get into the context danger zone and need to compact/summarize.

OpenCode can.

Yeah the speed was very nice indeed.

I've used all of the models extensively and Grok is only "faster" because it claims to be done minutes after you ask it to do something. It does not produce results anywhere near the Anthropic or OpenAI models, it just hacks a tiny piece of what you ask for and says "I'm done!". I also notice Musk-isms leaking through the model. Multiple times it's told me "this is not a roast" or "I'm not roasting your code". People who use this model because they align with Musk's ideology are doing us all a favor and weeding themselves out of the competition.

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.

It really does. I felt like I could have spent $1000+ api token on claude for the amount of work on my $30 grok subscription.

An hour in, I've been running four terminals full bore on my $20/mo Grok sub and I'm at 9% for the week. Codex or Claude would easily have hit 5-hour or weekly limits.

I'm really not burning tokens fast enough. I use Claude a lot, daily, and have yet to hit my a ceiling with my Max/100 subscription.

Maybe because I like to verify its outputs and spend a lot of time iterating to get better outcomes. Presumably if I just let it "do its thing" I'd burn more tokens and "get more done" but I'd lose my grasp on what's in the code base.

Big same here with Claude but I’m on the $200 sub. I let Fable run for roughly 4 hours and still didn’t hit the session limit. I suppose if I was running more in parallel it would be easier to hit, but I’m not particularly good at focusing on more than one thing at the same time (even if I’m waiting on an agent to do the work).

I hear you. I usually have two things going at once (either two different machines, two different projects, or different work trees if the same repo), but more than that I don't feel like I'm locked in enough to providing the "thinking" that Claude definitely still needs.

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.

For me it helps that back when xAI was the new hotness, after reading HN comments constantly advertising the free Grok credits they were giving out each month for developers with data sharing enabled, I eventually set aside my personal distaste figuring I might as well take advantage for Cline/Roo Code.

I opened a developer API account, loaded 5 dollars and got the free $100s of credits for the month. Like two weeks later, xAI announced they were shutting down the subsidized credits entirely lol. Didn’t even get a full month out of it, and closed my account entirely since I sure wasn’t ever going to put another penny of my own money in.

So my personal lesson was to ignore any hype about the latest “crazy value / unbeatable / free / subsidized X, Y or Z” from anything xAI/Elon adjacent in the future.

These days I get more than enough personal usage from Codex + OpenCode Go to put up with yet another xAI/Cursor offer treadmill, especially if it involves installing new tooling to get it.

Do you not ever 'vote with your wallet'?

When you make politics a big part of your identity, you can’t help but to inject it everywhere. It’s glaringly weird and annoying for those of us who are apathetic and just want to talk about tech, but that’s how it has been for a few years.

Get some emotions and care about people

> It’s glaringly weird and annoying for those of us who are apathetic

Do you think being apathetic is a good thing?

You may not care about politics, but politics definitely cares about you.

It's not virtue signaling. People are allowed to have morals. And they are allowed to act in ways that align with those moral beliefs.

> do you use Apple equipment despite Apple’s use of Chinese slave labor?

If someone said they didn't buy Apple because of this, I'd support them in that too.

People. Are. Complicated. We're allowed to have beliefs, we're allowed to have beliefs that aren't internally consistent. You gotta get over the idea that people aren't genuine believers in their beliefs.

The issue is that this is supposed to be a tech discussion forum and many of us don’t want to be repeatedly beaten over the head with other people’s politics. Plenty of other places to be political, we just wish this wasn’t one of them.

There's always been "politics" embedded in this tech discussion forum. Generally you shouldn't discuss politics for politics sake, but if someone's politics are intersecting with their product (which is Musk's entire MO), of course people will have thoughts.

Besides, if Musk embeds his politics into everything he does, it's fair game to discuss his merits in that arena.

> many of us don’t want to be repeatedly beaten over the head with other people’s politics

I agree completely. That's why I won't use Grok: its owner repeatedly beats us over the head with his politics, and I won't encourage it.

It's fine to make your own choices about what you want to spend your money on. But it gets old to constantly have actual technical discussion drowned out by the same repetitive low-effort comments in every single post. I want to hear about what people have used Grok for, how it compares to other models, what it's not good at, etc., without having to wade through all the predictable "Elon bad" comments.

@dang - feature request for HN: have a "Thunderdome" section for the off-topic political commentary on the site, and once enough people flag something for being political, it gets detached and moved to the Thunderdome. People can let off steam there and the rest of us can have a nice clean place to read about tech.

There are already features that let you skip conversations you don't like. Just click the - next to the post and stop whining about it

Nah, I think I'll keep calling it out when people keep going on political tangents. Maybe my whining will help everyone save some time.

It won’t, but you do you.

Huh. I feel that way with the other models - all the same. Eh, what can you do. Have fun out there.

Do you really think OpenAI's leadership are as stridently, overtly political as Musk? OK.

> The issue is that this is supposed to be a tech discussion forum and many of us don’t want to be repeatedly beaten over the head with other people’s politics.

Maybe that wouldn’t be a problem if Elon Musk would lay off the ketamine and shut his fucking mouth sometime. But instead he spends all day tweeting about how anyone he doesn’t like is a “traitor to western civilization” and calling for executions.

Why is it surprising that people are reacting to his words and actions? You want the politics to go away, get a CEO that doesn’t make everything political.

Tech has always been political. You think Mitnick and Woz weren't political? You think windows and the powerpc werent political? That social media isn't political?

You don't like seeing politics you disagree with. You just don't think things you agree with are politics.

I come to HN to learn, to be exposed to different modes of thought. To engage in useful creative discourse over disagreements. The idea that HN or tech is free from politics is intellectually vacant thinking.

> It's not virtue signaling.

Oh but it is. Normal people don't go to McDonalds shouting: "I refuse to eat here because they kill cows!". They just... don't go there.

Didn’t realize we were posting on the xAI website. My mistake

Your analogy is goofy. An analogy is like, "People don't go to other people's kitchens and discuss their thoughts on McDonalds". And yeah, they totally do.

The person isn't complaining about grok to grok, they aren't even complaining about grok on X.

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.

Chinese models are open, Grok is not.

They aren't though? Only a subset are. Are you aware that there are multiple competing Chinese companies making models?

chances are high they are open for now because they infiltrating market and collecting data.

collecting data by making them open weight? where is logic in that?

Infiltraiting market by making them open weight, then majority users still use official API, and you have answer to your question.

Anthropic and friends infiltrate without open weights and their infiltration is 100% of traffic that goes through their official api.

sure, they have advantage of being first movers and being domestic companies. Chinese models need extra step to infiltrate US and other markets.

Move like making api substantially cheaper or free would make more sense.

Making it open weight does the opposite – it allows traffic to not be routed through them at all.

they needed to take multiple steps to catch up. Why else do you think they make open models?

Depends who you ask:

META releases open weight models because selling access to models isn't their business model, they get optimization for free, good press with adoption of their tech etc. They don't want AI to become another iOS, they want to commoditize the layer underneath them.

GOOGLE releases open weight models because they complement the rest – from premium offering to Android/Chrome/Google Cloud etc products. They use it as part of open ecosystem / local / edge / experimentation layer. 400 million downloads with 100k community variants is nice vibrant ecosystem they have and want to have, they can capture value in several places and would prefer if devs standardize on their tooling.

OPEN AI because their PR was shit and it saved them, purely defensive move, which is interesting considering their name and initial goal.

ALIBABA because it tickles them to erase/cap profits in western labs, free optimisation/research, great PR.

DEEPSEEK they want to have day-zero support for all possible hardware platforms, they started it because Liang wanted to do it, had resources from High-Flyer to do it and he said fuck it and did it (zero commercial incentives which is so bizzare that it deserves a movie or something). He wants to do it because his destination is AGI. In that sense he's more original OpenAI than OpenAI.

MISTRAL because they want to be to AI what RedHat is to Linux.

NVIDIA because they sell GPUs.

...the list is long, there are few dozens of companies including Microsoft, IBM, AI2, Databricks, Snowflake, xAI, EleutherAI, Hugging Face etc. that release open weight models, there are thousands of models and tens of thousands of fine tunes across across text, image, video, audio etc.

In general half life of any model is short. What is more lasting is ecosystem around it, releasing new generation as open doesn't give away technical advantage.

They give away asset for which strategic value is deprecating rapidly and in exchange they get developers, mindshare, tooling, optimizations, integrations, research, standarisation etc. and put pressure on competitors destroying their margins.

It's not an absurd way of thinking, it may seem like irrational move but let's wait and see – imho labs like Anthropic can't sustain long term this kind of pressure and will eventually collapse – regardless of the fact that currently they look like strongest player that can't be touched, the whole thing they have holds on thin, fragile support that gets eroded.

> ALIBABA because it tickles them to erase/cap profits in western labs, free optimisation/research, great PR.

we talked about Chinese models. Yes, erase/cap profits, PR, and give clients peace in mind that model access won't disappear. So, it is infiltraiting markets.

Your argument was that releasing models as open weight was allowing them to collect data but reality is that open weight models precisely allow users to completely avoid data collection – something that is not actually possible with closed weight models.

Motivations are more complex than that, if they wanted to achieve that they'd follow approach taken by some western labs to release weaker models only as open keeping frontier behind APIs.

I explained it already: open models -> market infiltration -> more data because many/majority clients still use official API because of convenience.

Use of official API outside of China is closer to opposite of reality.

Look at ie. OpenRouter you'll see how many providers there are and how much traffic they get.

If the goal was data, opening weights would be the worst available way to achieve it: a cheap, closed API would capture 100% of traffic (ie Anthropic style), weights can only lose share from there.

With open weights it's net loss of active users of your official api – you're loosing users to self hosting and dozens of providers.

The thing is that open weights create permanent exit that closed models do not have, inference is commoditized immediately, people choose open weight models specifically for data privacy (and stuff like soc2/hipaa compliance) and if somebody wants convenience they go to claude/openai and friends anyway.

Also chinese labs are not uniform with their approach just as western labs are not.

I don’t like what is happening in my country, Elon is a huge part of that and I don’t want to reward it. I’m not a fanatic, but if all other things are equal I can certainly factor social responsibility into the equation. Fuck that rage baiting xenophobic nazi-salute throwing asshole. [edit spelling]

You are confusing cause and effect imho.

Pretty sure Elon’s brain caused his arm to go up in a Nazi salute

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.

macOS Codex app is my main agent (its very polished). When it makes changes or code scans i ask it to run claude -p plus cursor-cli plus grok cli for double checking. This way bias of one model can be overruled by quorum.

the new models are quite good, give it a shot

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

Yeah, sounds a bit like a selection bias, i.e. the people who managed to survive the firings by DOGE and the current admin are the kind of people who might prefer Grok.

They make good stuff

Grok probably doesn’t object when the government asks it how to bomb schools.

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.

Spoken like someone living in a Bluesky bubble.

Hi! Grok’s worked quite well for my use cases…

It’s also a great deal!

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 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

it only very recently became competetive, if they proceed with improvements (and beating others on price) their share will grow

Does it matter? Why turn it into a popularity contest?

Hello

I have. Why do you put faith in anecdotal evidence and a sample size of one?

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.

I am using it for code reviews, and it regularly surfaces stuff that neither Sol or Fable do.

I use it because it's cheap and good enough

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.

Well now you have so you can retire this talking point

> 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.

Hello. Nice to meet you.

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.