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Comment by tbomb | Hacker News Reader

How popular is Grok compared to other companies models for SWE tasks? I almost never hear it talked about against OpenAI's or Anthropic's products

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Because of the of the political stuff, they have a bad reputation I think and are taken less seriously (I feel this way). They have an opportunity imo to break free from that and just not do the gatekeeping / condescension that the other providers are starting, and become more mainstream.

Even without the politics, Elon has shown that he will weaponize his platforms against people/companies he personally doesn't like (e.g. specific bans/demotions to external sites like Substack and Bluesky).

Using Grok is therefore a supply chain risk and it's not nearly good enough to offset that risk.

As opposed to what was happening before, on Twitter?

Nobody said that Twitter wasn't poorly-managed. All types of petty squabbling are a liability nightmare for consumers of software services.

Seems irrelevant since Jack Dorsey is not the one buying half the worlds compute and telling us to plug his AI into our brains.

I do just want to focus on the 'even without the politics' asterisk though because sometimes there is a risk people think everyone on x side (x meaning 'a given side', not x.com) is wrong

You can claim Elon bought x as some sort of power trip. Fine. Willing to entertain it, I have no dog in the fight. I'm not a member of the Elon fan club. And yet Twitter (under Dorsey though I don't think he was involved) was banning tons of people under guises of 'misinfo' that wasn't misinfo

Pre-Musk twitter isn't the comparison point here. Anthropic/Google are.

Americans are 4% of the world's population, and even among those 4% at least half don't give a shit. the rest of us give even less of a shit, we don't have the luxury to be principled.

The rest of the world either has no money to pay for this stuff or cares even more. You think the average European or Australian loves Elon's racist tweets?

The people who "don't have the luxury" are using cheaper Chinese models.

do you contemplate Xi Jinping's public statements before you buy something made in China?

To be frank, I will never use Grok as long as it's remotely affiliated with or under the influence of Elon Musk or his ilk.

They were missing a harness like Claude Code or Codex (terminal). However they recently released Grok Build, which is probably the fasted I've used, in terms of responsiveness, but didn't have a model at Opus 4.7/8 level. The thing is if they add 4.5 to Grok Build and keep improving the harness I think it can compete (cheaper and faster).

I've been using Grok Build over the last couple weeks. It's actually a very good CLI. The Grok Build 0.1 model isn't great but can also use Composer 2.5 which is excellent. Well worth trying.

You can very roughly proxy popularity of close-sourced models through OpenRouter token throughput. Grok has an order of magnitude less OpenRouter usage than Claude, GPT, even Gemini.

They had two big substantive flaws on top of the political stuff. Aside from a brief window last summer Grok has been behind the curve for coding, and before the Cursor acquisition they didn’t have a harness. Now they have an Opus tier model and a real harness they have at a minimum the opportunity to undercut the competition on price. And with the 5T and 10T models being trained on Colossus 2 they have the possibility to leap ahead.

Completely irrelevant, which was expected considering their previous models were vastly outclassed by other models at SWE.

This is the first grok model that seems actually pretty competitive at SWE.

Wasn't, which is why they purchased Cursor.

If they were a frontier lab, you'd know.

No one's made a MechaHitler joke yet?

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