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Comment by mikkupikku | Hacker News Reader

I assume "extremely skeptical" is you being generous, is there anybody other than Elon who says xAI/Grok are SOTA? The only thing anybody says about it is that it's only good for porn, but local models do porn too so xAI has no moat or edge at all as far as I can see.

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There is actually a real bull case for xAI (that I don't endorse), e.g. from people who think that chips & computer is the main determiner of model quality. xAI may plausibly soon have the biggest training apparatus of anyone.

I think talent is more important than compute, as I wrote in my Jan 2026 predictions that Anthropic would end up on top this year: https://futuresearch.ai/blog/forecasting-top-ai-lab-2026/

> I assume "extremely skeptical" is you being generous

I'm not sure that's the case. Every value in this forecast is absurd, I actually think the author is sincere in there feeling that they are being extremely skeptical.

If you don't spend any time comparing models to the point where you don't know about benchmarks, why do you care where people think the line for SOTA is?

The benchmark game is wholly gamed, but the proof is in the pudding. I know people using Anthropic, OpenAI, and Gemini. Chinese models locally. But who uses Grok for anything but porn? Whatever the benchmarks might say, Grok is just trash in practice. They spent too much time teaching it to be edgy and not enough time teaching it to code.

Ok, sounds like you're already mentally set

Sounds like you've got nothing to say for Grok besides meaningless benchmarks.

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