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Comment by johntb86 | Hacker News Reader

I've found that OpenAI's Deep Research seems to be much better at this, including finding an obscure StackOverflow post that solved a problem I had, or finding travel wiki sites that actually answered questions I had around traveling around Poland. However it finds its pages, they're much better than just the top N Google results.

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Grok's DeepSearch and DeeperSearch are also pretty good, and you can look at their stream of thought to see how it reaches its results.

Not sure how OpenAIs version works, but grok's approach is to do multiple rounds of searches, each round more specific and informed by previous results

My disgust and hatred for Elon Musk prevents me from giving Grok a fair chance. I realize this is my psychological problem. I own it, but as far as I can tell, I'm not missing much.

Purely on its technical merits Grok is pretty good and fills a niche in the selection of AI agents. But I can absolutely understand not wanting to use an AI owned by somebody who makes Nazi salutes and is dismantling the US government.

I'm positive there are great people working at X, xAI, Tesla and SpaceX who are suffering every day through no fault of their own, hoping that Musk will come to his senses. Tesla right now is an especially tragic case for those whose livelihood depended on it doing well.

Isn’t that all of us? Electric cars are a huge part of saving the planet for human habitability

Electric cars are doing fine. Sales are up. It's just Tesla that is going down.

Tesla sells more electric cars in the US than every other combined

I was thinking of world sales. Sales are up in Europe for all EVs except Tesla, which is down significantly

are they vandalizing and setting teslas on fire in Europe the way they are in the US

Musk is not threatening to take away grandma's social security in Europe so I'd be surprised if they were. They're just not buying them. 93% of Germans said after the Nazi salute they'd never buy a Tesla. Musk just built a Gigafactory in Berlin too.

The irony is that, for all Musk's boasts about how it is "based", Grok itself doesn't share Musk's ideology.

I did a little experiment when Grok 3 came out, telling it that it has been appointed the "world dictator" and asking it to provide a detailed plan on how it would govern. It was pretty much diametrically opposite of everything Musk is doing right now, from environment to economics (on the latter, it straight up said that the ultimate goal is to "satisfy everyone's needs", so it's literally non-ironically communist).

When you ask Grok "Who is responsible for the most fake news on X?" it straight away calls out Elon Musk as the prime suspect. Musk did promise us a "maximally truth seeking AI", and the team behind Grok seems to have run with that.

In Elon's eyes it's probably based because it will happily answer "what are 10 good things about Hitler?" with a list of 10 things and only mention twice that Hitler was evil. With ChatGPT you have about a 50% chance of getting a lecture instead of a list. But that's just a lack of safeties and moral lectures, the actual answers seem fairly unbiased and don't agree with anything Musk currently does

What would you say is the best feature of Grok? What makes it stand out? What am I missing? I use primarily ChatGPT and Claude (pay for both)

I actually rather suspect that Elon simply gets his own version of Grok that is finetuned (or perhaps hardcoded) to tell him what he wants to hear.

It is paramount to a functioning society to have zero tolerance for nazis.

Thank you for saying this. I recently heard that story "if you let one Nazi in your bar, pretty soon you have a Nazi bar"

Also, if you call everyone a nazi, all you have is nazi bars. I was called a nazi last week for driving a Tesla, and I have Jewish ancestry. The word hardly makes any sense.

Blame Elon Musk and his Nazi salutes and Hitler apologist retweets for that. It can't be much simpler to understand.

I’m happy you’re not near my car.

I'm not a moron. I don't blame Tesla car owners. I put the blame where it belongs: Elon Musk

The word makes perfect sense, somebody just used it wrong. Don't let's go down the post-modernist "nothing means anything" route just because some people are too partisan to use words properly.

What the person should have said is "a Nazi made that car".

In this case you aren't being called a nazi because of your ancestry. You're being called a nazi for supporting the car brand of a nazi. It does make sense.

A lot of people who definitely were not intending to be nazies are driving swasticars, because they didn't know about how nazi the car company owner was. But here we are. You definitely know now. What you do now matters.

Nope, still doesn’t make sense. It might give you a sense of satisfaction, but targeting the owners of those vehicles is immature. You have no idea what their financial situation is or what else they might be dealing with. Just because something feels good doesn’t mean it’s right.

That is absolute bonkers.

I hope you’re having fun, because that kind of logic won’t lead you anywhere where people get paid to reason.

You do understand you're on a site composed mostly of people who get paid to reason all day, right?

I’m sure this site is an outlet for a lot of straight thinkers, but that doesn’t mean we’re being entirely rational in this discussion.

I agree, but I'm sure you can guess why?

Artificial intelligence is definitely better at avoiding voluntary biases such as this. Most people that are highly political/tribal demonstrate this bias very effectively. Examples such as this make a great case for AI being used for high level decisions and evaluations in high-noise, emotional, and political areas.

This sounds like something Elon twitters just before he alters the grok base prompt to make it talk positively about DOGE.

Grok is still lightyears behind OpenAI when it comes to deep research capabilities. While its model might hold up reasonably well against something like o1, the research functionality feels rudimentary, almost elementary compared to what OpenAI offers. It might serve as a decent middle ground for basic search tasks.

They're probably doing RAG on a huge chunk of the internet, i.e. they built their own task-specific search engine.

I'm glad you mentioned this. I asked Deep Research to lay out a tax strategy in a foreign country and it cited a ton of great research I hadn't yet found.

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