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Comment by behnamoh | Hacker News Reader

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").

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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.

> it isn't tuned much for political correctness

It was tuned to be edgy and annoying though (I mean his general style of speech not necessarily the content).

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!”

Nothing is more edgy than the AI being too polite? Are we just inventing new meanings for words?

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.

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/edgy

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/edgy

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:

https://gizmodo.com/elon-says-hes-working-to-fix-grok-after-...

Yeah, but you can argue that the AI has been biased because of biased training data.

Ultimately every AI is biased based on what you train it on and how you instruct it.

I tend to use LLMs from different companies and personally compare them, and read between the lines.

> I tend to use LLMs from different companies and personally compare them, and read between the lines.

Read between the lines? Does this mean that you're using LLMs as a source of information?

The point of LLMs is that there’s nothing in between the lines.

Or do you mean to say that you are trying to find the specific bias each model has?

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.

It's the only model that lets you do gooner shit. That's why the usage is highly skewed. You can just call a horse a horse if you see one.

this is a code model, not the general one

you are so naive. lol. It's a general model with the tag "code" added to it.

This is nonsense. grok-code-fast-1 is just part of many free tiers of agentic coding assistants like Cline etc.

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.

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!

As you point out, Sam Altman is not exactly an altar boy: https://fastcompany.co.za/business/2025-11-07-sam-altmans-tr...

Thought this would be about the whistleblower. They didn't even mention it!

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.

"roman soldier" indeed

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.

Fair, but don't forget Altman's sister accused him of sexual abuse in court. (https://www.newsweek.com/sam-altman-openai-sister-annie-sexu...)

Dunno if it's true. The family wrote it off, saying she's mentally ill, but I can also see years of abuse leading to mental illness.

Both do both.

Did Sam Altman lead a government agency and camp in the Oval Office for months too? Degrees matter.

Not to an even remotely same degree..

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'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've always tried to remain apolitical and unbiased

Clearly

I don't but only because the model is not satisfying, not because I dislike Tesla

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.

I won't go near anything Elon touches because of this. He's a clown.

Grok fast is by far the most used model in openrouter with more than a trillion tokens weekly[1].

[1]: https://openrouter.ai/rankings

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.

Openrouter is not counting tokens used by Kilo or Cline. They have own endpoints.

Yet if you go to the actual model’s page:

https://openrouter.ai/x-ai/grok-code-fast-1

Cline and Kilo code are in the top 3. So how does that work?

It’s considerably cheaper than competing models like 2.5 flash, though. So its not that surprising

It doesn't include the free usage. There is a different model named grok code fast 1 free.

Half of USA voted for Trump. That should answer “who actually uses Grok”.

I personally use the best tool for the job, which Grok sometimes is.

Trump received 77.3 million votes. Harris received 75 million votes. The US population is about 342 million.

I am not sure why these numbers would matter. He won, obviously, because the majority of voters voted for him.

Which are Americans, Americans who either voted for him and didn't do enough against him.

There is really no excuse to democratically vote for a person like this and let all this bullshit happen.

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.

I use Grok 4 Fast via API, cheap, fast and almost really well suited for data parsing/extraction, a lot better than Gemini 2.5 Pro for example.

All propietary AIs are probably biased in some way. I mean, that is the power of them and the reason they're propietary, right?

So I tend to use different LLMs from different providers, personally compare them and read between the lines.

What models are better than Grok?

Sonnet-4 and onward, GPT-4 and onward

Saying “GPT-4” is dishonest, launch GPt4 was significantly better than anything devday downgrade, all the 4o nonsense etc.

In reality GPT really sucked from devday until 5 and it redeemed itself

and GLM-4.6

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!

At least Elon is open about what he believes. Other CEO's hide behind corporate PR machines, how do you know they are not psychopaths.

> At least Elon is open about what he believes.

@dril: "you do not, under any circumstances, 'gotta hand it to them'"

There's a nonzero chance they are not psychopaths. Elon reminds us daily about his chances

Yeah he was really open about his salute eh soldier?

i didn't

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?

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