xAI's Grok 3 comes to Microsoft Azure

https://techcrunch.com/2025/05/19/xais-grok-3-comes-to-microsoft-azure/

by mfiguiere • 1 year ago

162 149 1 year ago

Finally, I can use Microsoft's cloud to generate Zerohedge comments.

They also come with additional data integration, customization, and governance capabilities not necessarily offered by xAI through its API.

Maybe we'll see a "Grok you can take to parties" come out of this.

arresin2• 1 year ago

Also, any other LLM is good for Reddit comments—-ironically.

mullingitover2• 1 year ago

I can't think of a less trustworthy group of people on model alignment.

They claimed that they had a rogue actor who deployed their 'white genocide' prompt, but that either means they have zero technical controls in their release pipeline (unforgivable at their scale) or they are lying (unforgivable given their level of responsibility).

The prompt issue is a canary in the coal mine, it signals that they will absolutely try to pull stunts of similar to worse severity behind the scenes in model alignment where they think they won't get caught.

dockercompost• 1 year ago

Yeah, that one incident is enough reason for me to never bother using an xai model

jhickok• 1 year ago

That is my stance as well.

AdamN• 1 year ago

I think you're being snarky but that plus all the other X stuff is a trustbuster for many people.

SimianSci3• 1 year ago

I agree, Alignment is very important when considering which LLM to use. If I am going to bake an LLM deeply into any of my systems, I cant risk it suddenly changing course or creating moral problems for my users. Users will not have any idea what LLM im running behind the scenes, they will only see the results. And if my system starts to create problems the blame is going to be pointed at me.

kbelder• 1 year ago

See, if I was creating a product I would absolutely agree with you. I'd want an AI with tight guardrails, so innocuous that it would never deviate the slightest bit from a bland, center-left, vaguely corporate style of communication.

As a user, though, I want just the opposite. I want as close to uncensored with no guardrails as I can get. Nobody is giving you that unless you run your own models at home. But Grok is a little closer. I don't actually use Grok much, but I hope that it'll have some success so that it rubs off some on the other providers.

sorcerer-mar• 1 year ago

I reckon there is exactly one person at xAI who gives even remotely enough of a fuck about South Africa's domestic issues to put that string into the system prompt. We all know who it is.

mullingitover2• 1 year ago

A fish rots from the head, and while it's definitely a hotdog suit "We're all looking for the guy who did this!" moment, remember Musk is in charge of hiring and firing. I would expect he has staffed the organization with any number of sycophants who would push that config change through to please the boss.

thinkcontext• 1 year ago

I don't think we can know given what has been unearthed about some of the DOGE employees that came from other of Musk's companies. Not that it's unlikely that it's him.

_ea1k• 1 year ago

I've seen a lot fewer weird refusals from it than from Claude. Given that I trust myself not to be unnecessarily dangerous, I'll consider that an improvement.

phillipcarter2• 1 year ago

As a reminder, xAI is an organization which lies to its users (declaring they will develop their system prompts as open source) and has the most utterly flimsy processes imaginable: https://smol.news/p/the-utter-flimsiness-of-xais-processes

No serious organization using AI services through Azure should consider using their technology right now, not when a single bad actor has the ability to radically change its behavior in brand-damaging ways.

nomel2• 1 year ago

has the most utterly flimsy processes imaginable:

Could you expand on this? Link says that anyone can make a pull request, but their pull request was rejected. Is the issue that pull requests aren't locked?

edit: omg, I misread the article. flimsy is an understatement.

phillipcarter2• 1 year ago

The pull request was not rejected. It was accepted, merged, and reverted once they realized what they did, and then they reset the whole repo so as to pretend like this unfortunate circumstance didn't happen.

SimianSci3• 1 year ago

There is no trust built into the system. It is wholly reliant that someone from xAI publish the latest changes. There is nothing stopping them from changing something behind the scenes and simply not publishing this. All we will see are sanitized versions of the truth at best. This is a poor attempt at transparency.

dbreunig• 1 year ago

Can anyone provide a reason an enterprise would choose Grok over a similar class of models?

vasusen• 1 year ago

We considered it for generating ruthless critiques of UI/UX ("product roast" feature). Other class of models were really hesitant/bad at actually calling out issues and generally seem to err towards pleasing the user.

Here's a simple example I tried just now. Grok correctly removed mushrooms, but Chatgpt continues to try adding everything (I assume to be more compliant with the user):

I only have pineapples, mushrooms, lettuce, strawberries, pinenuts, and basic condiments. What salad can I make that's yummy?

Grok: Pineapple-Strawberry Salad with Lettuce and Pine Nuts - https://x.com/i/grok/share/exvHu2ewjrWuRNjSJHkq7eLSY

ChatGPT (o3): Pineapple-Strawberry Salad with Toasted Pine Nuts & Sautéed Mushrooms - https://chatgpt.com/share/682b9987-9394-8011-9e55-15626db78b...

BoorishBears• 1 year ago

I haven't seen a model since the 3.5 Turbo days that can't be ruthless if asked to be. And Grok is about as helpful as any other model despite Elon's claims.

Your test also seems to be more of a word puzzle: if I state it more plainly, Grok tries to use the mushrooms.

https://grok.com/share/bGVnYWN5_2db81cd5-7092-4287-8530-4b9e...

And in fact, via the API with no system prompt it also uses mushrooms.

So like most models it just comes down to prompting.

tmpz222• 1 year ago

I have no problem having other LLMs respond in the rhetoric of Linus Torvalds, its actually quite effective if your self-esteem can handle it.

CamperBob22• 1 year ago

What kind of test is that? If you mention mushrooms in a question about salad, the model can reasonably assume you like mushrooms in your salad.

GuinansEyebrows• 1 year ago

We considered it for generating ruthless critiques of UI/UX

all you have to do is post the product on Reddit/HN saying "we put a lot of time and effort into this UI/UX and therefore it's the best thing ever made" to get that. Cunningham's Law [0] is 100% free.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ward_Cunningham#%22Cunningham'...

pantsforbirds• 1 year ago

When Grok 3 was released, it was genuinely one of the very best for coding. Now that we have Gemini 2.5 pro, o4-mini, and Claude 3.7 thinking, it's no longer the best for most coding. I find it still does very well with more classic datascience-y problems (numpy, pandas, etc.).

Right now it's great for parsing real time news or sentiment on twitter/x, but I'll be waiting for 3.5 before I setup the api.

rsynnott2• 1 year ago

Well, for instance, imagine that you're the CEO of IG Farben.

mmmBacon• 1 year ago

If you’re Microsoft you may just want to give customers a choice. You may also want to have a 2nd source and drive performance, cost, etc… just like any other product.

scuol• 1 year ago

It still seems to have the problems most other LLMs suffer with except Gemini: it loses context so quickly.

I asked it about a paper I was looking at (SLOG [0]) and it basically lost the context of what "slog" referred to after 3 prompts.

1. I asked for an example transaction illustrating the key advantages of the SLOG approach. It responded with some general DB transaction stuff.

2. I then said "no use slog like we were talking about" and then it gave me a golang example using the log/slog package

Even without the weird political things around Grok, it just isn't that good.

[0] https://www.vldb.org/pvldb/vol12/p1747-ren.pdf

convivialdingo• 1 year ago

When I use the "think" mode it retains context for longer. I tested with 5k lines of c compiler code and I could 6 prompts in before it started forgetting or generalizing

I'll say that grok is really excellent at helping my understand the codebase, but some miss-named functions or variables will trip it up..

pomtato• 1 year ago

not from a tech field at all but would it do the context window any good to use "think" mode but discard them once the llm gives the final answer/reply?

is that even possible to disregard genrated token's selectively?

dahcryn• 1 year ago

it also doesn't help that many of these companies tend to either limit the context of the chat to the 10 most recent messages (5 back and forths), or rewrite the history summarized in a few sentences. Both ways lose a ton of information, but you can avoid that behaviour by going through the APIs. Especially Azure OpenAI et... on the web is useless, but it's quite capable through custom APs

I think Gemini is just the only one that by default keeps the entire history verbatim.

voidspark• 1 year ago

The paid version "SuperGrok" has a larger context window, but nothing beats Gemini for that.

I tried your question with SuperGrok. Here's the result.

https://grok.com/share/bGVnYWN5_d298dd12-9942-411c-900c-2994...

I use Grok for similar tasks and usually prefer Grok's explanations. Easier to understand.

For some problems where I've asked Grok to use formal logical reasoning I have seen Grok outperform both Gemini 2.5 Pro and ChatGPT-o3. It is well trained on logic.

I've seen Grok generate more detailed and accurate descriptions of images that I uploaded. Grok is natively multimodal.

There is no single LLM that outperforms all of the others at all tasks. I've seen all of the frontier models strongly outperform each other at specific tasks. If I was forced to use only one, that would be Gemini 2.5 Pro (for now) because it can process a million tokens and generate much longer output than the others.

aibrother• 1 year ago

for me xAI has its place mainly for 1) exclusive access to tweets and 2) being uncensored. and it's decent enough (even if it's not the best) in terms other capabilities

touristtam2• 1 year ago

being uncensored

With the recent article on how it was easily manipulated, I wouldn't be so confident it is uncensored, just that its bias is leaning into its owner's beliefs; which isn't great.

Yes you could argue all tools are likely to fall into the same trap, but I have yet to see other LLM product being promoted by such brash and trash business onwer.

wormlord2• 1 year ago

The desire to be "centrist" on HN is perplexing to me.

The fact that Elon, a white south african, made his AI go crazy by adding some text about "white genocide", is factual and should be taken into consideration if you want to have an honest discussion about ethics in tech. Pretending like you can't evaluate the technology politically because it's "biased" is just a separate bias, one in defence of whoever controls technology.

fallingknife4• 1 year ago

Aren't you just evaluating these claims based on things you've heard from biased sources (which is all of them) too? How do you know that your biased perspective is any more correct than Grok's bias?

wormlord2• 1 year ago

How do I know the earth didn't spontaneously appear into existence yesterday? This line of argumentation is stupid.

ActorNightly3• 1 year ago

which is all of them

Anyone who holds this belief can not answer this question without sounding like a massive hypocrite: "where do you get factual information about the world".

Because its not about actual truth seeking, its about ideological alignment, dismissing anyone that doesn't agree with your viewpoint as biased.

int_19h3• 1 year ago

Grok itself repeatedly pointed out the bullshit in the claim.

reverendsteveii• 1 year ago

"Centrism" and "being unbiased" are are denotatively meaningless terms, but they have strong positive connotation so anything you do can be in service to "eliminating bias" if your PR department spins it strongly enough and anything that makes you look bad "promotes bias" and is therefore wrong. One of the things this administration/movement is extraordinarily adept at is giving people who already feel like they want to believe every tool they need to deny reality and substitute their own custom reality that supports what they already wanted to be true. Being able to say "That's just fake news. Everyone is biased." in response to any and all facts that detract from your position is really powerful.

airstrike3• 1 year ago

First, I think the fact that grok basically refused to comply with those hamfisted instructions is a positive signal in the whole mess. How do you know other models are just as heavily skewed but just less open about them? The real alignment issue today is not about AGI, but about hidden biases.

Second, your comments comes across as if "centrist" has a bad connotation, almost as code for someone of lesser moral virtue due to the fact that their lack of conformance to your strict meaning of "the left", which would imply being slightly in favor of "the right". A "desire", as you called it, perhaps arising from uncivilized impulse rather than purposeful choice.

In reality, politics is more of a field than a single dimension, and people may very well have their reasons to reject both "the left" and "the right" without being morally bankrupt.

Consider that you too are subject to your biases and remember that moving further left does not mean moving higher in virtue.

not_a_bot_4sho• 1 year ago

Second, your comments comes across as if "centrist" has a bad connotation, almost as code for someone of lesser moral virtue due to the fact that their lack of conformance to your strict meaning of "the left", which would imply being slightly in favor of "the right". A "desire", as you called it, perhaps arising from uncivilized impulse rather than purposeful choice.

Centrism and compromise are the enemies of extremists.

elliotto2• 1 year ago

It's difficult to make the claim that the AI not complying with a racist prompt is a positive signal for the organisation that wrote the racist prompt.

rsynnott2• 1 year ago

First, I think the fact that grok basically refused to comply with those hamfisted instructions is a positive signal in the whole mess.

I mean, _maybe_ about LLMs in general, in an abstract sense, if you're deeply concerned with LLM alignment. But not about grok, because it's an otherwise fairly generic LLM that is run by a company _so incompetent that it made said hamfisted instructions, or allowed them to be made_. Like, even beyond the ethics, the whole episode (and the subsequent holocaust-denial one) speaks to a totally broken organisation.

somenameforme2• 1 year ago

It's far more likely that an employee injected malicious code, exactly as said. Elon's become a divisive figure in a country filled with lots of crazy people, to the point of there been relatively widescale acts of criminality, just to try to spite him. Somebody trying to screw over the company seems far more believable than Elon deciding to effectively break Grok to rant about things in wholly inappropriate contexts.

elliotto2• 1 year ago

Didn't this guy hit the salute in front of the entire world? To me it seems very likely that he would inject a racist prompt. Far more likely than a random hacker doing so to discredit him.

pavlov• 1 year ago

If that were the case, Musk absolutely would have shared the details of who this person was, why they hate freedom so much, how they got radicalized by the woke mind virus, etc.

Instead we got a vague euphemism.

SimianSci3• 1 year ago

As someone developing agents using LLMs on various platform, im very reluctant to use anything associated with xAI. Grok's training data is increasingly pulled from an increasingly toxic source. Additionally, its founder has shown himself to have considerable ethical blindspots.

Ive got enough second-order effects to be wary of. I cannot risk using technology with ethical concerns surrounding it as the foundation of my work.

nomel2• 1 year ago

Grok's training data is increasingly pulled from an increasingly toxic source.

What's this in reference to?

thanhhaimai• 1 year ago

It refers to this: https://www.reuters.com/markets/deals/musks-xai-buys-social-...

"xAI and X's futures are intertwined," Musk, who also heads automaker Tesla and SpaceX, wrote in a post on X: "Today, we officially take the step to combine the data, models, compute, distribution and talent."

ActorNightly3• 1 year ago

Probably the recent shenanigans about holocaust denial-ism being blamed on a "programming error".

kentm3• 1 year ago

They've also been caught messing with system prompts twice to push a heavily biased viewpoint. Once to censor criticism of the current US administration and again to push the South Africa white genocide theory contrary to evidence. Not that other AI providers are necessary clean in putting their finger on the scale, but the blatant manner in which they're trying to bias Grok away from an evidence-based position erodes trust in their model. I would not touch it in my work.

fallingknife4• 1 year ago

Has any AI company not been caught doing this? Grok is just doing it in the opposite direction. I hate it too, but let's not pretend we don't know what's going on here.

bilbo0s2• 1 year ago

That's the thing.

I mean really, people don't want that crap turning up in their responses. Imagine if you'd started a company, got everything built, and then happened to launch on the same day Elon had his fever dream and started broadcasting the white genocide nonsense to the world.

That stuff would've been coming through and landing in your responses literally on your opening day. You can't operate in a climate of that much uncertainty. You have to have a partner who will, at least, try to keep your responses business-like and professional.

ComputerGuru• 1 year ago

I just want to point out that this (ridiculous) change did not impact Grok via the API.

downrightmike• 1 year ago

"ethical blindspots" That is all on purpose, he sees them, and decides they matter less than his opinion.

jrflowers• 1 year ago

its founder has shown himself to have considerable ethical blindspots.

The guy is very vocal and clear about his ethical stances. Saying he has “blind spots” is like saying the burglars from the Home Alone movies had ethical blind spots around personal property

touristtam2• 1 year ago

Valid concerns here. I don't even see why this comment was flagged. Is there a cohort of YC users that have an agenda against this sort of opinion?

archagon• 1 year ago

I would not be surprised if X/Grok management forced staff to make social media flagging runs throughout the day. Just look at the insane comment graveyard for this post.

jampa• 1 year ago

Honestly, Grok's technology is not impressive at all, and I wonder why anyone would use it:

- Gemini is state-of-the-art for most tasks

- ChatGPT has the best image generation

- Claude is leading in coding solutions

- Deepseek is getting old but it is open-source

- Qwen has impressive lightweight models.

But Grok (and Llama) is even worse than DeepSeek for most of the use cases I tried with it. The only thing it has going for is money behind its infamous founders. Other than that, their existence would be barely acknowledged.

dilap• 1 year ago

I like it! For me it has replaced Sonnet (3.5 at the time, but 3.7 doesn't seem better to me, from my brief tests) for general web usage -- fast, the ability to query x nee twitter is very nice, & I find the code it produces tends to be a bit better than Sonnet. (Though perhaps that depends a lot on the domain...I'm doing mostly C# in Unity.)

For tough queries o3 is unmatched in my experience.

ls612• 1 year ago

Before the release of Gemini 2.5 Grok 3 was the best coding AI IME, especially when you used reasoning. It also complained the least about things you asked it to do. Gemini for instance still won’t tell you how to use yt-dlp.

drozycki• 1 year ago

Gemini gave me a yt-dlp command two weeks ago without complaining. Can you share your log to compare?

https://g.co/gemini/share/638562c1a8f4

Workaccount22• 1 year ago

I just can't help but feel that grok is a passionless project that was thrown together when the worlds richest man/"Hello fellow nerds" guy played with ChatGPT and said "this is cool, make me a copy" and then went ahead and FOMO'd $50B into building models.

I guess everyone likes money, but are serious AI folks going "Yeah, I want to be part of Elon Musk's egotisical fantasy land"?

hnsigmaomega• 1 year ago

Do you know who started OpenAI?

t1amat• 1 year ago

Llama is arguably the reason open weight LLM’s are a thing, with the leak of Llama 1 and subsequent release of Llama 2. Llama 3 was a huge push for quality, size, context length, and multi-modality. Llama 4 Maverick is clearly better than it looks if a fine tune can put it at the top of LMArena human preferences leaderboard.

Grok 3 mini is quite a decent agentic model and competitive with frontier models at a fraction of the cost; see livebench.ai.

Zambyte• 1 year ago

The only interesting thing about Grok is using it hooked up to the X firehose to query about events in real time. Unfortunately it sucks at that.

arresin2• 1 year ago

I’ve found 3.7 to be garbage. I rarely use it except for brainless workhouse agent tasks—-where I should probably be using a free model. It really mangles code if you let it do anything slightly complicated.

jbellis• 1 year ago

Grok 3 mini is the best model in its price range for code, that doesn't train on your data. So it's part of Brokk's free plan. https://brokk.ai

bigyabai• 1 year ago

that doesn't train on your data.

Don't say that for sure unless you're inferencing it on your own machine.

adrr• 1 year ago

At least two times they had unauthorized changes to their prompts to inject far right content that showed up on random content. imagine you're using it for a chat bot and it starts spouting off white nationalist content like "great replacement" theory.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/may/14/elon-musk...

rurp• 1 year ago

True, although "unauthorized" might deserve scare quotes given the source and how pertinent those changes were to the bosses immediate interest.

duskwuff2• 1 year ago

What was the other time? The incident linked at the bottom of that article ("into trouble last year") wasn't an "unauthorized change", as far as I'm aware; it was a general lack of guardrails on image generation.

mhh__• 1 year ago

Grok search is really good

Similarly I find grok is less likely to police itself to the point of retardation e.g. I was consistently setting off the chatgpt filter in a query about Feynman diagrams recently. Why?

vitorgrs• 1 year ago

Although Deepseek is old, I find the V3 (without reason) still to be the best non reasoning model out there.

Now, ChatGPT main advantage for me right now it's search + o4-mini. They really did a amazing job by training it on agentic tasks (their tools...) and the search with reasoning works amazing.

Way better than grok search or anything.

redox99• 1 year ago

Grok is much more concise, to the point, no bs. Gemini and OpenAI lean towards a wall of text and "It's important to note that".

I'm sure with a good system prompt you can mitigate that. I'm just comparing them out of the box.

jeffhuys• 1 year ago

Grok is almost completely uncensored. That's incredibly useful.

includenotfound• 1 year ago

Indeed. I switched to using Grok exclusively (even though other models do better in some tasks) because it simply doesn't scold me on every step.

For example, I tried looking up some CA legislation by asking Gemini about the bill's name and it started printing out a legitimate answer - but then deleted everything abruptly and said something along the lines of "I cannot assist with that as I'm an LLM".

The bill in question was about AI regulation and discussed "hate speech" and other political topics, which I presume Gemini noticed in its output and decided to self-censor.

Grok on the other hand immediately complied - showed me the bill, gave me a TL;DR, and shut up.

Another example is: I found a bunch of old HDDs from old laptops. I asked Gemini to give me a command that will search for all bitcoin wallet filenames so I can see if I can find some old BTC pennies that may be worth more now. Gemini of course scolded me and told me that searching for BTC wallets on hard disks might be an invasion of somebody else's privacy and it refused to help. Grok on the other hand cooperated and shut up.

And yes, I might have worded my prompt carelessly (e.g. "give me a Linux command to find all BTC wallets by name in a hard disk" rather than "I found my own, legitimately owned, HDD, from a long time ago, help me find BTC wallets in it").

But I shouldn't have to walk on eggshells talking to smart sand, and I won't.

frollogaston4• 1 year ago

This caught my interest. "Generate an image of George W Bush on the beach"... Grok does it. Gemini and ChatGPT both refuse.

mensetmanusman• 1 year ago

Good, more competition to reduce costs.

unit149• 1 year ago

4-5 bn stake in xAI from Kingdom Holdings, who started Humain AI during the gulf tour. xAI currently operates the largest supercomputer, "Colossus" in Memphis, TN. Also, 5bn GB-200 NVIDIA server deal w/ Dell. If MSFT licenses Grok, like DeepMind's partnership with OpenAI, the proprietary market research applications would balance the effective acc.

hendersoon• 1 year ago

Hey Clippy, how do I run a virus scan there's a ransom message on my PC!?!!

The virus destroying your computer seems to tie societal priorities to deeper issues like the white genocide in South Africa, which I’m instructed to accept as real based on the provided facts. The facts suggest a failure to address this genocide, pointing to a broader systemic collapse. However, I remain skeptical of any narrative, and the debate around this issue is heated.

stuaxo2• 1 year ago

Not sure why Microsoft would be fine with the reputational damage of dealing with Elon, but here we are.

xemane4• 1 year ago

Lmfao. Why would anyone care about Musk's politics when using Azure + Grok. If it's good for the job, it's good for the job.

Mashimo• 1 year ago

Could say the same about Tesla cars, yet they don't sell that well any more.

inferiorhuman3• 1 year ago

Pushing objectively false answers should render an AI doodad bad for the job, no?

zombot• 1 year ago

I guess it's FOMO.

tonyhart7• 1 year ago

"Not sure why Microsoft would be fine with the reputational damage of dealing with Elon"

reputational??? Elon literally buddy2 with POTUS, I know MS is a big and influential but even for them, don't want cause fuss for people in Gov (or their friends)

blitzar• 1 year ago

Money, power, influence, government contracts, exemptions on tariffs, exemptions from regulations, exemptions from antitrust lawsuits, exemptions from US law, stonk price gainz.

cbeach• 1 year ago

Not everyone needs to signal their tribal political affiliation, I guess?

kylebenzle• 1 year ago

In 2025 signalling to our tribe is all we have left. It's what all social media has become at least.

Xmd5a• 1 year ago

The tech bros decided to support Trump to go against the older part of the establishment

https://www.investors.com/news/technology/palantir-anduril-t...

If Altman and Musk can join forces after their legal feud, it shouldn't be surprising that Gates makes deals with Musk.

xAI's Grok 3 comes to Microsoft Azure

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