the main issue i find with Claude is, he fights you. He refuses so many requests and i need 3 or 4 replies to get what i want vs deepseek/grok. i've kept the monthly subscription to help anthropic, but it's trounced by the free options imo.
I have used grok a bit and it did what I needed it too, so I can't really compare. But 3.7 thinking is crazy strong for coding.
Back when it was 3.5 you could actually talk and learn things and it felt humane, but now it sounds like a McKinsey-corpo in a suit who sounds all fancy but is only right half the time.
I’ve switched back (rather regretfully) to chatgpt, and holy hell is its personality much better. For example just try asking it to explain differences between Neo Grotesque and Geometrical Sans Serif fonts/typefaces. One sounds like a friend trying to explain, the other sounds like a soulless bot. (And if you have 3.5 access, try asking it too.)
For general inference I use 4.5
I think OpenAI (and likely others) are on the right to track to acknowledge that different model tunings are best for different uses, and they interned to add a discriminator that can direct prompts to the best tuned model/change model tuning in real time.