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Comment by wnmurphy | Hacker News Reader

Which means more Grok degradation, more severe throttling, etc.

I can't understand why xAI charges 50% more per month for Grok over competitors when it doesn't even gracefully downgrade to a cheaper model when paid subscribers hit the limit.

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Who uses Grok? Not even SpaceX engineers that is known...

Grok is pretty good. It really excels when the results can be improved by deep online search. It tends to be more aggressive in looking things up than competitors. I use it in certain situations.

It’s exceptionally fast at it too. I love using it for looking up things where recency matters.

I've used/use it. For a while it had one of the best lightweight coding LLM's, which actually lead to a #1 spot on openrouter usage ranking although they've fallen off the top 10 used now. It's also provided some good reasoning models, which perform better when dealing with non-PC topics.

Also, although I've never used it for this, I believe some of the paid models produce some of the best "adult" content, and I know there are even subreddits which do nothing but praise Grok and "content" produces who use it.

> which actually lead to a #1 spot on openrouter usage

that was only because it was free

+1. The coding model was fine and it was fast but the fact that it was free was a massive boost.

Tesla drivers, at least for a few minutes each day before hitting the limit.

I am a Tesla driver and I never knew it had a limit, which tells you how much I use it.

A surprising number of people have conversations with Grok every day and hit the limit in a hurry. Not my thing, either.

Grok is the best for researching recent events and real-time information. All the other AIs have a learning date cut-off too far in the past.

Claude accuses me of hallucinating events that happened the day before, and it's quite annoying.

Gemini, Claude, and ChatGPT all offer web search integrations in order to get recent data.

Grok 3 and Grok 4 have a 2024 knowledge cutoff. https://docs.x.ai/developers/models

Grok has access to the X firehouse, and gives context on realtime events much better than the models you listed.

I wish Meta made their own AI/search model because they probably have the best data source.

> can't understand why xAI charges 50% more per month for Grok over competitors

One potential read is xAI knows Grok isn't going to be a Tier 1 model. So while SpaceX focusses on infrastructure, Grok bets its users like its model enough that they'll pay a premium for it, even if this curtails growth prospects.

They already make it required to have a premium X account

Claude has tons of throttling already. Chat GPT is not as accurate at computational problems despite less throttling. Gemini has fewest restrictions but worse quality. Always a tradeoff.

Why would you even want to use that dumpster fire of a model in the first place..?

Probably because it has all but zero filters on the input and output. It took widespread media outrage about "grok show me her in a bikini" to at least create a filter that bans such things.

[1] https://counterhate.com/research/grok-floods-x-with-sexualiz...

Does the thing where it wanted to move every conversation onto the topic of "white genocide in South Africa" not count as a filter on the output?

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