Grok 4.5

by BoumTAC • 14 days ago

776 1306 14 days ago

tbomb• 14 days ago

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

bigyabai4• 14 days ago

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

minimaxir5• 14 days ago

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.

andy99• 14 days ago

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.

minimaxir5• 14 days ago

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.

vlian20884• 14 days ago

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.

Tadpole9181• 14 days ago

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.

small_model8• 14 days ago

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).

everfrustrated3• 14 days ago

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.

redox996• 14 days ago

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.

pelotron• 14 days ago

No one's made a MechaHitler joke yet?

khurs2• 14 days ago

Wasn't, which is why they purchased Cursor.

ls6124• 14 days ago

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.

thrownawaysz• 14 days ago

Is there a reason the AI companies usually announce new products so close to each other. Like not just the same day but literally hours apart. GPT Live then an hour later Grok 4.5. As if they try to one up. I expect something new from Anhtropic as well today.

colechristensen2• 14 days ago

Competition. You don't want to lose your customers trying out the competitors updated and better product. Release on the same day and they won't be able to compare their new to your old.

danshipt• 14 days ago

But how do they know what day is that? Unless you have already something ready to be announced (and you just hold it until the very last moment, which doesn’t make sense, since you could just announce it asap)

conradkay2• 14 days ago

I think this one is just a coincidence, bound to happen given the pace of releases

For exact timing, probably 10-11am Pacific is just optimal for normal working hours

nfin• 14 days ago

Maybe it‘s the Nash equilibrium from a timing perspective?

Like the reason that close to a McDonals there is usually a Burger King.

jm4• 14 days ago

The joke is that McDonald's spends hundreds of thousands of dollars to identify new locations - traffic studies, visibility, demographics, nearby traffic generators, site characteristics, drive-thru feasibility, etc. They have one of the most rigorous processes in the industry. Burger King's process is to open a location across the street.

novaleaf• 14 days ago

reminds me of SBC's (Seattle's Best Coffee) strategy, which was decidedly not Nash: put a store across the street from every Starbucks.

tavavex2• 14 days ago

I'm guessing that they already have the model ready and the announcement blogposts locked and loaded, and then release them as soon as they see a competitor make the first move, trying to overshadow the first announcement or at least be swept up in the hype just as people start talking about new models again.

gozucito• 14 days ago

They get to compare their model to the old ones from the competition.

In this case, ChatGPT 5.6 Sol / Ultra releases tomorrow, so today is the last day Grok can compare Grok 4.5 to Codex 5.5. If they did it tomorrow people would point out they're comparing themselves against old models.

Tiberium6• 14 days ago

It seems to be extremely economical - 4x better reasoning efficiency compared to Opus while being priced at $2/$6. For comparison, GPT 5.4 is $2.5/$15, GPT 5.5/5.6 are $5/$30, Opus 4.8 is $5/$25, Fable is $10/$50.

And by benchmarks (unless they gamed them), seems to be at around Opus 4.7 level, which is what Elon mentioned in https://x.com/elonmusk/status/2074911038286295049.

I guess the Cursor data was very useful.

minimaxir5• 14 days ago

The comparison may be better against GPT 5.6 Terra (instead of Sol), which is $2.5/$15.

Tiberium6• 14 days ago

We don't yet know Terra's results for DeepSWE/TerminalBench though.

giancarlostoro9• 14 days ago

Now if they could have an "equivalent" to Claude's $100 plan with similar compute limits. I have the $40 a month version of Grok and I get a max of like 8 hours of "non-stop" Grok Build coding, per month.

BoumTAC• 14 days ago

Grok Build sucks compare to composer 2.5. Just use compose 2.5 and you'll have basically unlimited usage on the 40$ plan.

Tiberium6• 14 days ago

The model is available through Cursor which has $20, $60 and $200 plans. I assume the $60 version might work better for you?

kesor• 14 days ago

You get "Grok Build" (the CLI) that uses the Cursor and/or Grok 4.5 models when you buy SuperGrok, which is like $300/year. I don't know if there is a feature-to-feature comparison by anyone on this, but you can get access to these models with unmetered tokens with SuperGrok.

2001zhaozhao• 14 days ago

Around Opus 4.7 level would be the same as Sonnet 5 while being cheaper overall.

I wonder how good their subscription discount is on both their subscription types.

Tiberium6• 14 days ago

Sonnet 5 is a huge token hog, though, it uses far more reasoning tokens than Opus models while being priced at $2/$10 with promo, and $3/$15 (usual Sonnet price) afterwards.

conradkay2• 14 days ago

Annoying they didn't show benchmarks for several effort modes, since it seems like it might close the gap with Opus 4.8 by cranking tokens up?

Noam Brown (OpenAI) "Implications of Large-Scale Test-Time Compute" https://xcancel.com/i/article/2064210146558136827

HarHarVeryFunny4• 14 days ago

The $2/6 pricing seems to only apply for context under 200K.

Above that (max context is 500K) pricing doubles to $4/12.

https://docs.x.ai/developers/models/grok-4.5

jadbox• 14 days ago

That's very notable and left out of the announcement.

gabriel-uribe2• 14 days ago

Womp. Didn't see this anywhere else.

No longer feels as inexpensive. Will likely just include this in the rolodex of <200k context tasks, like being one of my review agents.

GodelNumbering• 14 days ago

Also, the cache hit pricing is 25% of the input pricing ($2 vs $0.50). Long agentic workflows are dominated by cached input. The US frontier labs typically have this at 10% of the input price, and DeepSeek/Xiaomi etc take it to the extreme 1% range (which is why those are cheap to run in real world agentic loops with dozens of toolcalls per run)

HarHarVeryFunny4• 13 days ago

Just to add context (no pun intended), OpenAI also charge differently based on context usage with GPT 5.5 being $5/30 below 200K, and $10/45 above.

Anthropic have a fixed price regardless of context usage.

These per-token pricing schemes aren't directly comparable though since these models all use different numbers of tokens, even for input (Anthropic's recent tokenizer change generates 30% more tokens for exact same input), as well as for reasoning, and context/token usage also varies wildly by harness with Claude Code using 3x the context/tokens of Pi.

game_the0ry2• 14 days ago

I have a theory that xAI has one of the largest clusters but with far less traffic + tokens to process bc its less popular than its competition, and xAI can pass the savings on to the end user.

goos• 14 days ago

Why would having more costs and less income allow them to pass savings on to the end user?

WarmWash2• 14 days ago

SpaceX, like Tesla, seems to have the same "portrayals over profits" mindset investors. So it doesn't even really matter whether or not xAI is making any money.

inferniac2• 14 days ago

they are renting parts to google for like 1b a month

really dont think they have a lot of idle power

prng2021• 14 days ago

xAI had $2.5B in operating losses in the past quarter. What savings are being passed on?

sidibe• 14 days ago

Profitability is never a constraint for Elon companies. He has always been able to be able to extract money from the middle east, government, banks, retail investors (or these same parties through his other companies) whenever they need more.

His net worth is orders of magnitude bigger than the cumulative profits his companies have ever produced (even if you only count the profitable quarters)

TiredOfLife2• 14 days ago

No need for theorizing. xai is selling their excess capacity to Anthropic and Google with large markup

numpad03• 14 days ago

How does it compare to Chinese APIs? It doesn't seem like xAI is meaningfully more competent or any single bit more honest than Chinese labs anyway, so you might as well send tasks straight to China unless theirs is substantially cheaper.

bashtoni• 14 days ago

But very expensive compared to Deepseek v4 Pro, which performs similarly.

Grok is stuck in a difficult place - not the best model at anything, and not the cheapest either. It's hard to make a case for using it on any dimension, even before you factor in the history (I'm not sure suggesting the company uses the model that refers to itself as "MechaHitler" is the way to a promotion).

cousinbryce• 14 days ago

It’s the #1 model for creating CSAM

insane_dreamer• 13 days ago

until I exceed my Claude Max/$100 sub (have not hit a wall so far), the pricing of these models isn't relevant to me

gertlabs• 13 days ago

Grok 4.5 is a huge step up from their next best model and now around the same performance as GLM 5.2, but it's not exactly at the frontier of the cost efficiency curve in our coding evaluations. That curve is defined by the 2 lighter GPT 5.6 models.

However, the fact that they finally have a strong post-training and RL setup bodes well for future releases. They certainly are not compute-constrained anymore.

Data at https://gertlabs.com/rankings?mode=oneshot_coding

Chu4eeno• 12 days ago

huh, why is "Positive-Sum" such an outlier when comparing grok 4.5 and GPT-5.6 Sol?

mholt3• 14 days ago

Of the 3 models I tried, Grok did the best at making an iOS app I wanted for personal use (a bike computer with specific qualities). (Claude just gave up and did an HTML/CSS implementation but I insisted on native SwiftUI+Metal.) Grok definitely fumbles sometimes, but I have been surprised what it CAN intuit versus me having to micromanage it.

(I am not an iOS developer, so getting something specific that I needed in a few hours/days was really helpful instead of spending months/years learning the language, APIs, etc.) (I am absolutely not "vibe-coding" Caddy btw, just tinkering with it for personal projects.)

Tiberium6• 14 days ago

Was this in Claude Code for Claude? Did you use a weaker model like Haiku? Claude should absolutely not be as bad as you said.

giancarlostoro9• 14 days ago

I tried Claude Code with XCode once, I already use CC exclusively, either in the CLI or with Zed (mostly CLI now), and it was pretty unstable. I wish Apple would QA their products more. It seems to me the best way to use Claude Code for anything is stand-alone.

Schiendelman• 14 days ago

I do a lot of native iOS development using Opus 4.8 (and I used 4.7/4.6 before this). I have a very hard time with this comment, were you using Opus or something else?

smt88• 14 days ago

I agree. There’s no chance Grok is better than Claude Code for this. And Claude is never so badly misaligned that it gives up and switches stacks.

croes• 14 days ago

Let’s face it, there is no best model for something because the input is natural language.

Some models may fit better some users‘ way of prompting.

enraged_camel3• 14 days ago

Same. A few months ago I pointed Opus 4.6 at a mid-size Vue app and told it to create the iOS equivalent using SwiftUI, and it nailed it. I broke the process down to phases and reviewed each phase, but within about ten days I had a functioning iOS app that had full feature parity.

jiocrag2• 14 days ago

There's no way this is true.

_fizz_buzz_• 14 days ago

Claude just gave up and did an HTML/CSS implementation but I insisted on native SwiftUI+Metal.

That sounds very odd and very contrary to my experience. You don’t say which model you actually used, but I never had opus 4.8 (or sonnet for that matter) ignore which language/stack i wanted to use.

InsideOutSanta13• 14 days ago

Yeah, that makes no sense. I've never seen any model "just give up" and change to a wholly different stack on its own.

fer3• 14 days ago

It never happened to me, but Claude routinely ignores the single line I have in CLAUDE.md, so I wouldn't be entirely surprised.

yottamus• 14 days ago

As someone also not happy with my bike computer (some truly horrific UI/UX decisions), could you share or explain what you made? I like your web server.

mholt3• 14 days ago

Thank you! I'm glad you like it.

Sure. I'm not sure if I will actually publish this thing, but I can show you: https://x.com/mholt6/status/2074986102428139754

I wanted a phone app rather than yet another electronic device. Phones do not have great screens in bright sunlight, and they run hot, so it's not ideal for a bike computer in the first place. But I can't deny the convenience of the multipurpose tool that is my phone.

This app will have a few UI/UX modes. The default is the futuristic-looking HUD, but it has a low-power mode that's mostly monochrome on black, and an even lower-power "Cruise mode" that removes the map entirely and just shows you speed, approximate heading, and nav directions. Still very WIP and mostly for my own amusement!

wett• 14 days ago

I swear I have read either this exact or a very similar comment before. Same gist about a bike computer iOS app, and one of the models giving up.

As an aside, big thanks for Caddy! Really helped me get my greenfield project off the ground and it simply “just working” out of the box was one less source of errors I had to worry about when onboarding my team.

mholt3• 14 days ago

Wonderful, glad it was helpful for you!

NorthSouthNorth• 14 days ago

+1 for Caddy absolutely goated software. Everytime I need it, it saves me hours and hours.

bearjaws• 13 days ago

I am very curious what your Claude thread looks like. I have never had Claude swap languages, in fact my experience is the opposite, sometimes it holds on too much when working on a large code base.

aarvin_roshin• 14 days ago

Announcement from Cursor, whose team also trained the model: https://cursor.com/blog/grok-4-5.

Notably:

Grok 4.5 and Composer 2.5 are two different model weight classes, and we're excited to support both sizes and weights. Composer 2.5 will remain offered, and we will release new models of this size going forward.

quantumleaper• 14 days ago

Composer 2.5 is 1T total/32B active (based on Kimi 2.5), while Elon publicly said Grok 4.5 is 1.5T parameters total. Hardly a different weight class.

The API cost difference is ~2.5x, probably because xAI has much higher costs to recoup.

redox996• 14 days ago

I could easily see Grok 4.5 being around 1:16 in terms of active parameters, so around 94B active parameters.

trollbridge9• 14 days ago

I would be utterly shocked if Grok 4.5 only has 32B active, given the results I am seeing from it. My guess is it's somewhere around 90B-100B active.

maipen2• 14 days ago

Not available for Europeans yet. :(

Tiberium6• 14 days ago

I think it should be available through Cursor?

EDIT: Tested myself, it's actually NOT available from EU. But with a Swiss VPN it works :)

maipen2• 14 days ago

We will probably see it when it's available for everyone.

This is the first time I see a lab region locking a model though.

pelorat• 14 days ago

xAI is under criminal investigation in the EU

small_model8• 14 days ago

Who isn't

busymom0• 14 days ago

They say "EU availability is expected in mid-July". So next week or so.

Squarex2• 14 days ago

Luckily, basic VPN to US is enough to use it. Just tested it.

czhu12• 14 days ago

Its remarkable how Anthropic is able to maintain their edge against all competition. Anyone have any idea what the secret sauce is that has Anthropic at the top of all leaderboards for the past few years?

x312• 14 days ago

Given their pricing, I'd guess their models are just way bigger in parameter count. They've always underperformed in cost-per-performance.

They also target a cost-insensitive market (corporate/coding users) compared to Google/OpenAI which support massive amounts of free users.

hn1986• 14 days ago

because in the real-world, it's far better than the rest. That's why few people use Grok, it's not even close in day to day work.

Handy-Man• 14 days ago

From what I have read, their pre-training team is much better than anyone else. For OpenAI, their post-training team is better. And apparently OpenAI has consistently struggled at training a bigger model than GPT 4 level

sulam• 14 days ago

I’m a VP Eng — the backend team I manage strongly prefers CC and Opus. The Android team I manage strongly prefers Codex and GPT 5. I’m personally not sure that the answer doesn’t just come down to stylistic differences in prompting and ergonomics in the harness. The folks that prefer Codex seem to get better one-shot results, whereas those that prefer CC are doing more iterative prompting. At any rate, I don’t think you should write OpenAI off when it comes to coding.

hello_newman• 14 days ago

I think it's focus? Anthropic seemed to double down early on being more business/prosumer focused. While OAI, Gemini, Grok, etc were also doing various side quests like image generation, Anthropic seemed to only focus on 1 thing, and that seemed to pay off

nullbio2• 14 days ago

Someone has to know.

Would be nice if an insider would drop some hints so that the open-source space could make some good progress.

ben_w3• 14 days ago

Nobody has to actually know the secret of their own success, especially not relative success to equally-secretive near-peers.

Same as with rich person autobiographies: even when they tell you what they think it is, they can't see the path not travelled.

nijave4• 14 days ago

My gut feel is Anthropic is very technical and pedantic which makes their models really technical and pedantic. They're top at code and technical benchmarks but anecdotally I've found OpenAI to be significantly farther ahead for general usage.

Opus 4.8 will burn 10k tokens trying to answer something 100% whereas GPT-5.5 will burn 2k getting it 90% which is good enough for many things.

Some personal testing on a "help me find that restaurant" prompt https://gist.github.com/nijave/2873b8b10d8c732e46264237b0755...

enraged_camel3• 14 days ago

The problem is that the remaining 10% can bite you in bad ways.

I was in Cotswolds, UK a couple of months ago. For those of you who don't know, it's a rural region known for its "chocolate-box" villages and honey-colored limestone architecture. Basically, you go from village to village, most commonly via bus, taking in the sights and doing touristy stuff.

When planning the trip, my sister used ChatGPT, which helpfully (and relatively quickly) found the bus schedules and times for each hop.

Midway through the day, though, we ran into a huge problem: it turns out bus schedules are different on Sundays, and more limited. Which meant we couldn't actually go to our primary destination (the Model Village), and had to cut the trip short.

Yes, ChatGPT was quick and pleasant to use, but missed a crucial detail.

Afterwards I tried it with Opus and it did not make the same mistake.

small_model8• 14 days ago

I think it's the talent, laser focus on single product set and being early so ahead, same with Open AI who are only a sliver behind. Google, XAI are the next level down but they have other concerns.

bredren• 14 days ago

I think it is a mix of the sibling replies here. I'd add that the company has seemed to find ways to ~do more with less.

I have never liked the various nerfs Anthropic has used to balance GPU (slowing down responses, quota variance, model optimizations etc) and it definitely has burned a lot of good-will.

But it has seemed that being able to look beyond the short term pitchforks has worked quite well.

hectdev2• 14 days ago

I think they have a better agent personality which pushes back and isn't sycophantic. It has been awhile since I've used the others but that's where it locked me in and I've stuck with it.

giancarlostoro9• 14 days ago

isn't sycophantic

Not sure about that one... But I think the true secret sauce for all these models is how they reason. GPT never outputs how it thinks, which "saves on tokens" but Claude absolutely tells you how it thinks, and there's people who use how it reasons about solving problems to finetune smaller open source models, with surprisingly better output.

levocardia• 14 days ago

I think the "secret sauce" is not juicing the benchmarks. Claude models just feel like they are better than the benchmarks suggest, in terms of smarts and creativity, while models from every other company feel worse relative to what you'd think from the benchmarks. Only company to really internalize Goodhart's Law, IMO.

solenoid09373• 14 days ago

Yeah every model has great benchmarks. Claude is the only model I want to use when I'm not worried about the marginal cost of tokens (which is most of the time at work.)

I then use cheaper models like GLM for personal projects but they're noticeably much worse despite being similar in benchmarks.

mnicky• 14 days ago

One angle could be their interpretability research? They understand what's going on in LLMs probably much better than anyone else. This must somehow pay off.

I think it's not only an alignment/security tool but could perhaps be used for capabilities as well.

logicchains2• 14 days ago

Its remarkable how Anthropic is able to maintain their edge against all competition. Anyone have any idea what the secret sauce is that has Anthropic at the top of all leaderboards for the past few years?

It's self-reinforcing: they've got the best coding/research model, which helps them to improve their models better than the competition so they stay ahead.

rvz2• 14 days ago

Isn't this the same Twitter company that was supposed to go bankrupt a few years ago? Now it is somehow part of a Space company that has an AI division inside of it?

I think we are going to be waiting a long time for Twitter / X to go bankrupt as it was (erroneously) predicted a long time ago.

wmf• 14 days ago

That was the point of the bailout. Twitter is already a rounding error so no one will notice if it goes to zero.

DoesntMatter226• 14 days ago

Don't think it was going to zero anyway. They only had to worry about servicing their debt, they were doing well other than that. And even then they were probably fine.

ryandvm• 14 days ago

None of them go bankrupt. The whole thing will just get stuffed into a larger Matryoshka egg that IPOs for eleventy trillion dollars in 10 years.

svachalek• 14 days ago

I'd say the prediction is correct, as the acquisition is more or less just a better way to capitalize on the bankruptcy.

rvz2• 14 days ago

So did Twitter / X file for a Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection?

efficax• 14 days ago

twitter was "acquired" by xAI which was then "acquired" by SpaceX as part of the IPO strategy, (and part of a strategy of giving the investors on the hook for the twitter acquisition a return). Who knows how it performs, but yeah, now that it's the social media arm of the SpaceX conglomerate, it will likely be around for a long time, especially since it serves the basic function of stroking Musk's ego.

munk-a3• 14 days ago

It is right and proper to view twitter as a loss leader propaganda arm.

vessenes2• 14 days ago

Twitter was supposed to go bankrupt if you only read news articles from journalists about it. If you looked at Musk's operating track record, you might have had a different opinion.

In the transaction announcement (xAI buying twitter) twitter reported $12b in debt on acquisition, roughly the amount originally sourced ($13b), so it apparently made good on its debt covenants during the operating period. I have no idea if it received additional capitalization from Musk to do that or not.

That said, the deal was classic Musk - anybody who went on the equity ride with him in Twitter just KILLLED it; xAI was valued at $80bn and twitter at $33bn, so the owners there became 30% owners of xAI. xAI was acquired for $250bn at a SpaceX valuation of $1 trillion, or 20% of the resulting entity, so the twitter stock was 6% of spaceX at about $2 trillion, or $120bn on an equity purchase price basis of $30bn. and that $120bn in value is on really good daily trading volumes; lots of depth.

steve_adams_86• 14 days ago

The solar system diagram doesn't work for me. When I click on the planets, it will center on them. When I click on the sun, nothing happens. When I click on a planet next, it goes to the sun.

HyperL0gi• 14 days ago

Every time I get excited about Grok’s performance on benchmarks and demo videos, I test it myself and end up disappointed.

I'll give this one a try with a grain of salt and lowering my levels of expectations

giancarlostoro9• 14 days ago

My only complaint is that a $40 plan gets you very little usage out of Grok Build. 8 hours for an entire month, that is definitely not worth $40.

XCSme4• 14 days ago

I am trying to benchmark it now, but:

    - It doesn't seem available in EU (?)
    - Using a VPN seems to sort of fix it, but it's way slower than I expected, when everyone was praising it, it feels like the speed is slowly ramping up
    - Cost is $2/$6 for <200k context only, above that, cost is $4/$12
    - GLM-5.2 still seems smarter, faster and much cheaper:

https://aibenchy.com/compare/x-ai-grok-4-5-medium/z-ai-glm-5...

paradox4605• 14 days ago

Instead of a VPN, might I suggest running litellm proxy on a server in the US and connecting to that

trollbridge9• 14 days ago

I concur that GLM-5.2 still seems "better" in my experimentation I did with it tonight, although Grok 4.5 is cheap if you can tolerate the way a Cursor subscription works.

electriclove2• 14 days ago

What do you think?

minraws2• 14 days ago

So basically since US stopped OpenAI and Anthropic for 4 weeks, it allowed all other AI Labs to almost catch up.

GLM 5.2 caught up, Cognition RL'ed Kimi 2.7, Grok 4.5 is out, DeepSeek v4 GA is out in a few days...

What is the moat? and why should we pay for the expensive tokens today instead of just waiting a few months/weeks and getting AI for significantly cheaper?

I must say, I feel like companies spending Millions on Anthropic tokens are just negative capex'ing and wasting money, even OpenAI is barely ok pricing...

samuelknight• 14 days ago

This is the bind of an arms race. Any lab that tries to pump the breaks quickly becomes second rate. Regulatory capture doesn't work either because the technology crosses jurisdictions.

cesarvarela2• 14 days ago

"Almost" is doing a lot of work there; there is no alternative to Fable.

himata4113• 14 days ago

You can get fable-ish performance with gpt 5.5 watching over opus output. Although it fundementally cannot work as well because gpt 5.5 doesn't see the thinking process behind opus 4.8 unlike fable which presumeably self-steers and is natively trained for it.

See more: https://omp.sh - turn on advisor and set advisor role to gpt 5.5 xhigh thinking.

smotched2• 14 days ago

just because one model is stopped from being released publicly doesnt mean they completely stop. Anthropic has moved on to training the next gen model months ago.

epolanski5• 14 days ago

But they sure have less incentives in doing it quick.

JV00• 14 days ago

Non-US Anthropic employees had to stop using mythos/fable though, so that may have slowed them down a bit

alansaber• 14 days ago

Another subpar model. Why don't they go open weight?

vessenes2• 14 days ago

Interesting. I experimented with Grok 4 for openclaw when they made clear they wanted to bring claw users in the fold. It was (as expected) more verbally fluid than 5.5, but had real trouble with agentic tool calling - the model felt like it hadn't been trained to think of tool calling as one of its primary modalities. I'll give this a try, the speed and the benchmarks look good. In my experience, Grok slightly punches above its weight in language fluidity, and seems to not benchmaxx on coding, so this is an encouraging release.

xnx• 14 days ago

With each release from the the other major labs, it becomes harder for Google to tell a compelling story about Gemini 3.5.

Edit: Gemini 3.5 Pro. Expectations grow with each day it is not released.

markasoftware• 14 days ago

Wtf do you mean by story? Performance and price are all people care about

minimaxir5• 14 days ago

That's the point: for Gemini 3.5 Flash, its price does not correlate well with its performance.

It's pretty good for image/video inputs, though.

A_D_E_P_T• 14 days ago

Gemini is so far behind it hurts. It's useful for daily tasks and simple questions, but it codes like a model from late 2024. I can't imagine using it for any serious work.

missedthecue• 14 days ago

In general I agree, but I found last week it was able to solve some obscure Android bugs for me that both 5.5 and Opus whiffed on.

MrBuddyCasino2• 14 days ago

Generous free tier, when its not overloaded.

Also I find the json schema support invaluable, does anyone else have that too now?

minimaxir5• 14 days ago

Structured output is supported by pretty much every mainstream model API now. Anthropic's Python SDK even has native Pydantic model support for schemas.

dakolli4• 14 days ago

you can force any model to use structured outputs by just giving it instructions to do so and serializing the response. But yes, Gemini is the best at this, even better than fable.

vlian20884• 14 days ago

for what it's worth, it's fairly popular among my non-technical coworkers here in Russia. we have unlimited access to all models so it's not about the cost, and they still prefer Gemini over Claude and GPT. I never bothered to ask why, but I assume it's better at communicating in Russian.

ur-whale4• 14 days ago

This from the country whose entire IT population is still to this day entirely enamored with windows.

Not sure it's a valid data point.

squidbeak• 14 days ago

Gemini 3.5 Pro hasn't been released yet.

drob518• 14 days ago

I think that’s part of the commenter’s point.

alecco2• 14 days ago

xAI > Gooogle & DeepMind

I did not have this one on my 2026 bingo card.

SirHackalot5• 14 days ago

That’s just not true. Google Brain/DeepMind came up with the attention mechanism to begin with… What a silly take.

eis• 14 days ago

Google wanted to release 3.5 Pro last month but because of the trouble Anthropic got with Fable they might have wanted to wait a bit for the dust to settle I could imagine. And now there is quite some competition. 3.5 Flash for me is a replacement to 3.1 Pro. It's more like a 3.2 Pro. It costs about the same (or more!) than 3.1 Pro, is a little bit smarter in many cases and a little bit faster. 3.5 Pro will be a lot more expensive and I expect it to juuuust be able to hang with Opus 4.8 and GPT-5.5.

I wish Google was able to actually push the industry further, either in terms of quality (intelligence) or quantity (price) but they've been playing catch up a lot.

They are playing the game a bit differently than all the others. The others have useable IDEs etc. while Google has a boatload of half-assed products.

Google better come out with a banger 3.5 Pro because who would have thought that Grok and GLM would be beating them?

SubiculumCode• 14 days ago

I sometimes wonder if they are leaving their best models for purely internal use. They are after regular users, integration locking with their full stack lock-in...having the best AI public might not add much to that play...just good enough for most people...while their internal models can help their company achieve faster production.. idk

dakolli4• 14 days ago

They don't even beat 3.5 flash.. I'm really not sure where you're getting this from.. vibes? 3.5 flash beats out even fable on tool calling, which is really all that matters.

gavinray• 14 days ago

I have paid personal subs to ChatGPT, Claude, Grok, Gemini

For science (primary biology/pharmacology) questions, Gemini 3.1 Flash Extended produces the answers I _personally_ find "best", in terms of content, phrasing, and formatting.

cameronh902• 14 days ago

I concur. Generally I find Gemini answers to be the least biased and most factually accurate, without too many of the annoying AI writing quirks.

However, I find the Gemini web app to be by far the worst, and Gemini itself second only to Claude in terms of refusing legitimate requests. It used to be the worst for that, but Claude has really put up the guardrails since their run in with the US president.

Grok has no concept of safety, which means that it can do certain things that none of the other models are allowed do, especially when it comes to research, creative tasks, humour and games.

epolanski5• 14 days ago

This is only true if you live in HN bubble.

I learned that outside of tech, Gemini is widely used in enterprise.

E.g. in the insurance company where my SO works, the major tasks are writing Gemini "gems" (some kind of prompts I think) and NotebookLM is a killer product for e.g. collecting and summarizing new laws, cross checking documents and what internal regulations are.

I then learned it's used in a chemistry consultancy company of a friend of mine to process reports. Flash and Pro models are also wildly popular in another European bank I know people in to assist in customer care (pre processing tickets before handing them to humans), translations, reporting, etc.

Google suite is already at the core of many businesses and Google easily adds these offerings without new contracting being needed.

Don't confuse our bubble with the real world. You can have a disaster product like teams and still dominate enterprise because you were already there with excel, outlook and SharePoint.

XCSme4• 14 days ago

I often use Gemini as my "chat" app to ask questions, etc.

I stopped using ChatGPT because of they're weird login system, where it keeps switching to my Workspace Codex account, which doesn't actually have the free/chat functionality.

I usually just switch between gemini/grok when asking questions or to research something online.

dakolli4• 14 days ago

What are you talking about gemini 3.5 flash beats fable at tool calling and is 5x faster... I think it's very competitive and what most normal people are using.

petersamokhin• 14 days ago

still waiting for a proper gui for grok build

terminal is nice but codex desktop app is very useful

737max• 14 days ago

You can use it in Cursor!

NitpickLawyer2• 14 days ago

(from Cursor's blog)

Training included trillions of tokens of Cursor data which capture a wide-range of user interactions with codebases and software tools. This dataset lets the model learn both from existing software as well as developer-agent interactions, capturing how developers work and how agents interact with their environments.

This is what the big money was for. Cursor is the first big player that had real-world data from real-world projects, before cc / codex were a thing.

We used reinforcement learning on difficult problems in realistic environments spanning both software engineering and broader knowledge work. These environments teach the model to investigate problems, use tools, recover from mistakes, and verify results.
Many of these problems had to be designed to be difficult enough that even frontier models fail at them. As models improve, existing tasks stop teaching them anything new, and problems that once required extensive reasoning become routine.
We developed a distributed agent system to construct these environments at scale. Engineers specify a problem and how a solution is verified, and large groups of agents construct, test, and refine each environment.

This is where scale comes in. You use the previous gen model to prepare datasets for the next model iteration. The better the models, the better the data, the better the next models. (they also have a comparison with their composer2.5 training run, for people still thinking chinese models are "close to SotA"...)

Reports of xAIs demise (after giving a lot of compute to Anthropic) were slightly exaggerated, it seems.

Grok 4.5 was trained across tens of thousands of NVIDIA GB300 GPUs

inferniac2• 14 days ago

well the big money was also in spacex stock, fresh post IPO, so overall a very smart move it seems

theplumber3• 14 days ago

Well Microsoft has GitHub and Visual Studio and has no good coding model

dmix3• 14 days ago

Cursor has had a good AI product tons of people used for real work for 2yrs (up until recently when the Claude gap widened significantly) while Microsoft/Github has just been pretending they do with Copilot and awful Github AI integrations nobody likes. Meanwhile Github's code has already been vacuumed up by all the models by now.

epolanski5• 14 days ago

You use the previous gen model to prepare datasets for the next model iteration

I've read multiple times that this approach is harmful in training.

You're essentially describing what many call distillation, but it's only useful in post training to guide behavior, it teaches how to behave, not how to think.

I might be wrong though and would be glad if someone more knowledgeable provided more insights.

ainch• 14 days ago

There have been papers about model collapse, but the underlying assumption is that you constantly train on only the outputs of the previous model. Later research has shown that as long as you retain some "real" data, training on largely synthetic data is ok.

And in the case the previous poster describes, the other model doesn't generate datasets, it generates environments which the next generation interact with to learn from.

NitpickLawyer2• 14 days ago

I've read multiple times that this approach is harmful in training.

There's a lot of nuance here. Note that I said "prepare" datasets and not just "generate" datasets.

First, the "model collapse" paper(s) were highly misunderstood and the "media" / content creators ran with it because negativity sells. In that initial paper the authors took things to the extreme, and presented as a given what happens in the literal worse case scenario. They used small models, they generated data w/ those models and indiscriminately trained on that data. It obviously led to model collapse. But that's not what you do in the real world.

The way you do this in the real world is different. For pre-training data you can do things to improve the quality of your inputs:

First, you can use the models to curate your datasets. And this is something that everyone has done since the days of "chug common crawl into the model and see what comes out". It turns out that quality of the data is very important and common crawl is really bad. So we've seen attempts at curating that data. The better the filtering models, the better the initial pre-training data.

Then you can have data augmentation, where you take some piece of content, and generate augmentations for it. Current models are good enough that you can take a piece of "authoritative" text (say a book on writing style) and a bunch of articles, and "improve" them. Or take a piece of content and "translate" it into simple / advanced explanations. Or take a piece of code and "explain" what it does, based on a paragraph from an authoritative book. And so on.

Then, for the mid-training / post-training with RL:

You need to find both good scenarios (i.e. problems) for your model to solve and a good verification schema. Like they say in the quote above, those problems need to be complicated enough for each new model. Here you can again use old models to prepare datasets for the new models.

One simple approach is to take a codebase, have your current model identify a set of features. Then instruct the model to remove code relating to feature "a" but keep its tests. Then verify that every other feature works in the code, bar the one you removed. Then, during RL, you train your new model on that task (you present it as a "prompt" / "situation") and you score the model based on the new feature passing the original tests.

Then there are more advanced ways of using prev gen models for "open ended" problems. You can't really apply RL if the task is not easily verifiable (like above, with tests). But you can use something like RLAIF (reinforcement learning w/ AI feedback) where you grade responses with the previous gen models. Now, in general this is lower quality / lower signal than RLVR (verifiable rewards) but you can still do smart things. Instead of rating an answer good / bad, or ask it one-shot what answer is better, you can use a method based on rubrics. You can first ask the preparing model to select tasks, and a list of rubrics on how that task should be scored (like they generally do on open ended exam questions). Then while doing RL you grade each response by asking the prev gen model to generate said rubrics. Does the answer touch on subject a / b / c? Does the answer mention x y z? Is this mathematically sound? And so on. You still get better results than nothing, even if the task is "open ended". And, again, as models improve so does your pipeline.

TiredOfLife2• 14 days ago

There was one highly discussed paper. And about a month after publication much much stronger models were released. The models got better because they used such synthetic data.

teravor• 14 days ago

    > You use the previous gen model to prepare datasets for the next model iteration.

you can also use a previous gen model to literally generate data for the next gen model. people used to believe that this is a bad idea but it turns out if you create a scaffold which sinks a lot of compute into generating and grading the data the quality turns out great.

0xpgm2• 14 days ago

Generally, it seems like if you are not getting returns that outweigh your token spend, you are merely paying to train AI.

espadrine• 14 days ago

Composer 2.5 finetuned Kimi K2.5[0].

In the blog post, it is unclear whether Grok 4.5 is also a finetune on top of Kimi; they do imply it is also a finetune.

Training included trillions of tokens of Cursor data… We used reinforcement learning on difficult problems

If xAI pivoted from a frontier base model company, to a finetuning company, it does mark a stark change to their relevance in the industry.

[0] https://cursor.com/blog/composer-2-5

DCKing• 14 days ago

Props to them for including three benchmarks that actually seem to say something, instead of focusing on totally gamed benchmarks like regular SWE-Bench. That could mean this model is actually pretty close to the SOTA as the benchmarks indicate.

Most labs - including OpenAI and Anthropic, but also Google and Chinese labs - highlight their scores in benchmarks that have fixed, widely available answers. Those answers end up in the training data and so models can just regurgitate training data instead of actually doing the benchmark. As a result, most benchmarks often quoted are essentially meaningless for gauging model performance.

Terminal-Bench still publishes answers, but neither DeepSWE and SWE-Bench Pro do. Especially for DeepSWE it's been difficult for models to fake good results so far. SWE-Bench Pro does have weird outliers like good performance for e.g. the atrocious Muse Spark, but it also doesn't provide answers for the training data.

So either they're good, or they found a way to game DeepSWE. Given that the Cursor team previously published the well-received Composer 2.5 a good score here doesn't come out of nowhere, so this might hold up. Cursor has enormous amounts of training data to train good coding models with.

redox996• 14 days ago

First impressions:

- Very fast, easily beats GPT 5.5/Opus 4.8/GLM 5.2 because of higher t/s (around 90?) and very high token efficiency

- Very good price, no contest vs GPT and Opus which are very overpriced if you pay API costs, and probably cheaper than GLM 5.2 when you take into account the token efficiency.

- Will take quite a while to get a feel for how smart it is, but it's definitely good, I'd say in the same tier as opus, occupying the lower end of that tier together with GLM 5.2.

jonathaneunice• 14 days ago

Concur.

Tried on a "this test suite is weaker than I'd like, too often depending on internal state rather than outcomes" problem via Cursor, asking it to "review and suggest solutions." It gave me a quality overview of the test approaches, strengths, weaknesses, and gaps then recommended a disciplined multi-prong approach based on a common, trusted testing library (https://hypothesis.readthedocs.io/en/latest/). It broke down the things we could do this improvement pass or leave to later (staged scoping), identified some very hard/possibly-out-of-scope cases and gave me the option of focusing on them or not, and organized new tests in a logical way. After one round of feedback and plan tuning, I put it in agent mode and let it work. A few minutes later I had a much better test suite.

Have not tried Grok before and didn't have much confidence, but it did great. Exactly the sort of complex, detailed, nuanced analysis and multi-step task I would previously only trusted to GPT or Opus.

_Update_: It's now also found a substantive long-standing bug. After testing improved asked it to do overall code and packaging review. It caught a few glitches and oversights, mostly cosmetic IMO, but certainly worth cleaning up. But also some error-handling weaknesses, and one embarrassing functional bug. Which it has now also fixed and added to the tests. Color me impressed.

paradox4605• 14 days ago

My benchmark is ripping tailwind out of a few year old elixir Phoenix liveview app, and replacing it with component level scoped styles

It's a good and complex task, that requires touching the build system, most components, the stylesheets, and more. Opus 4.6 could barely do it. Sonnet 4 cannot (haven't tried 5 yet). MiniMax actually did fairly well

Grok aced it, rather quickly and cheaply, surprisingly

I run each through Oh my pi, with dexter providing the LSP for elixir

fizzbuzzdizz• 14 days ago

hmm interesting. maybe im doing something wrong. this model feels borderline unusable to me. it fumbles the most basic asks that require very little to no context consistently (inline these helper functions - re-rewrote half of the modules involved instead of making a 10 line change)

redox996• 14 days ago

Sounds like an issue with your harness or something.

fomoz2• 14 days ago

This is what I don't understand. Why would I use this "cheaper" model when it's still going to be more expensive than Codex on the $200 plan? Are they only targeting business users who pay per token?

redox996• 14 days ago

You can buy the Grok plan, Cursor also has a plan which includes grok 4.5, but I don't know how subsidized they are compared to codex or claude code plans.

seunosewa3• 14 days ago

The input price is quite high. That's what gets you.

porridgeraisin• 14 days ago

There is one thing to note here.

The fact that it is more token efficient will itself lead it to be smarter since the context will be smaller for the same task. However, in opus models, you'll have built internal correlations like "if it did X it will usually do Y" which may not be true here, since grok 4.5 may have done X purely due to the smaller context size, but can't do Y cos it wasn't RLd on that pattern enough. So it will be a unique experience as far as opus tier models go.

petesergeant2• 13 days ago

+1. Also the TUI feels well made, in striking contrast to recent Claude Code.

jeffybefffy5192• 12 days ago

I bet it is just GLM 5.2

wxw• 14 days ago

Thanks for including a section on Token Efficiency (https://x.ai/news/grok-4-5#faster-than-flash-models), hope to see this more prominently in all model releases.

codemog• 14 days ago

Can someone breakdown to me how this makes any sort of economical sense? Spending billions and billions to have the 3rd best model while even the number 1 and 2 players already seem to struggle making a profit. What am I missing here? Not trying to go full Ed Zitron but this doesn’t make sense to me.

ronsor• 14 days ago

Elon Musk doesn't do normal finance. Trying to understand it will melt your brain.

throw310822• 14 days ago

Elon Musk is the paperclip maximizer except that he doesn't need iron atoms, but dollars.

Aboutplants• 14 days ago

It’s Elon Musk. You try explaining it

c0rruptbytes• 14 days ago

inference is profitable, these companies are in the red because they're paying a premium to get the compute now versus later (because compute is the only moat when open models are catching up)

we're literally looking at insane margins over compute, as energy gets cheaper, margins get wider - china focusing on cheap solar is probably going to be a key reason why their AI is so much cheaper

charcircuit• 14 days ago

SpaceX offers free AI usage to users, along with using AI to power their products so it is effective for them to avoid overpriced API pricing. The models can be designed specifically for their own data centers.

_neil• 14 days ago

Surely grok has a built-in market with too-online, retired boomers. It's free real estate.

Petersipoi3• 14 days ago

This comment says more about your misunderstanding of the world than anything about X

goodroot• 14 days ago

The product is the stock.

It is very valuable when you have various bundles of services, such as satellites, AI, and so on, to keep pace with the majors so that you keep pace with their valuation.

These stacking valuations are not additive, they're multiplicative because you additionally market investors to the synergy between them.

Having the third best model statistically is extremely useful in this context.

tonyhart7• 14 days ago

I know that SpaceX have tremendous potential, the problem is that we account future potential that maybe not happening in 20 - 50 years

sfink• 14 days ago

The weaknesses can be multiplicative as well. One division bleeding capex can drag down all the rest, no matter how well they might be doing. And the P/E ratio on all of them is riding unrealistic expectations, which can actually be fine for a long time but forces growth even in areas where it doesn't make sense. (Maybe that's where the "let's build data centers in a high radiation hard vacuum!" nonsense comes in; you just need a story of how the P/E ratio is possible to justify in the future? No need to argue over likelihood, just have a tale to tell?)

6thbit• 14 days ago

Likely doesn’t make sense, at least not immediate/mid term. They don’t have to aim for number one though, just for enough cash flow and growth.

zitterbewegung• 14 days ago

The only thing I can possibly think of is that they could use it internally at possibly a lower cost and offer it to people who have a Tesla cheaply. Owning Cursor might help for integration or data collection.

varispeed• 14 days ago

It sounds like they are building a honeypot for Russia, given Musk's open admiration for Putin.

No one sane would use this platform.

Psillisp2• 14 days ago

3rd best chat model? 5th or 6th maybe...

GPT

Qwen

Gemimi

MiniMax

Claude

Ollama

GLM

Kimi

DeepSeek

tough2• 14 days ago

Ollama is just a local app wrapper/cloud service serving third party apis and models idk why it made it into this list tbh

gorgoiler• 14 days ago

Commoditize your opponents USP then eat up their engineering talent / silicon / real estate when they fail, perhaps?

I’ll be the first to admit it seems ambitious / implausible to try to (1) undercut the megalabs (2) move everyone’s focus back to tweets and then (3) profit.

A bit like handing out free horses to undercut Standard Oil so that you can go back to reaping the profits of your wheel tapping business.

TheGoddessInari2• 14 days ago

You could be typing the same about Google or a number of the other labs right now.

A diverse market full of choices keeps it from becoming the browser wars all over again.

yojo• 14 days ago

Google at least is serving AI results on SRPs billions of times a day, and has pre-existing expertise in data center buildouts and custom silicon.

They have one of the more compelling cases for rolling their own.

bigyabai4• 14 days ago

Google invented the transformer architecture. You really can't say the same about them.

throwa356262• 14 days ago

Google is using AI at such scale internally they don't need external customers to recoup their investment.

bitmasher9• 14 days ago

How is this any different than the browser wars? We use to have a diverse market full of choices, and now we have Chromium (almost all market share) and Firefox/Safari on the edges.

subhobroto5• 14 days ago

A diverse market full of choices keeps it from becoming the browser wars all over again.

This is a great analogy but I worry you might be implying something I don't agree with but you didn't explicitly say what I'm worried about, so let me call it out:

Microsoft played a dirty game with I.E, but they are in the dirty game business. It wasn't only I.E, it was their OS, Office suite and everything else they do business in.

Google Chrome took advantage of that dirty game and now you have the Chromium engine that powers a lot of browserlike frameworks.

No one born in the LLM age even knows what I.E means or stands for, as it should be - a horribly designed, poorly working product foisted upon users via the Windows distribution system - a dishonorable product from an ethically corrupt company forever lost in history, right alongside Clippy and DCOM.

OTOH, I am glad that Microsoft played a dirty game with I.E and didn't just stop playing dirty there - they jacked up the price of Windows if an OEM even dared to bundle in Netscape Navigator instead - who knows, if they hadn't done that, there wouldn't have been a Google or Apple. We would all be using Windows and Windows Search and Windows Phone.

And without Google, we might not have had the modern LLM as we know it. We would have had some trashy Windows Autocomplete Copilot Clippy. Ugh!

SwellJoe5• 14 days ago

Google is playing a different game. I don't really know what game they're playing, but they're not trying to beat Claude Code. They have coding capabilities and Antigravity, but I'd be surprised if it's much more than an afterthought. They're focusing on efficiency, models at the edge, human interaction, image and video, etc. in ways Anthropic, in particular, is not.

Google wants its AI to be pervasive in everyone's daily life. Merely being the best at coding is not how you get there.

I am more bullish on Google in AI than most folks, I think, as they have been focused on efficiency in a way most US vendors have not. They've published a ton of papers on ways to make LLMs more efficient and capable on smaller devices.. Google wants to own the on-device market for AI, and I don't see many credible competitors in that space.

inigyou7• 14 days ago

Grok is the #1 uncensored easily-available model, and it's also tightly integrated with Twitter.

henry2023• 14 days ago

Uncensored?

nozzlegear5• 14 days ago

Is uncensored a selling point? What do people use uncensored Grok for (like, real use cases) that they can't or won't use other LLMs for? Literally the only thing I can think of is generating bad porn of unconsenting people.

freejazz2• 14 days ago

Great if you want to make virtual child porn, I guess.

numpad03• 14 days ago

I don't remember online discourses on filter avoidance for Grok to be any different from typical ones, except that it allegedly have tendency to take porn-biased interpretations of prompts, I think the "uncensored" pitch they had for a while was pure marketing in the end.

etc-hosts3• 14 days ago

tightly integrated with Twitter

Not sure that is a good thing.

tavavex2• 14 days ago

They have the same dreams as their competitors - finding a breakthrough that gives them an edge over the others and makes them dominant. And also, having the word 'AI' anywhere near your company makes all the right numbers go up, so having an in-house AI division that Musk can bundle with the other companies to pump their valuations with is very helpful to him, even if the product itself loses some money.

petesergeant2• 14 days ago

I think it’s simply Musk cynicism winning through here, and you’re right about it being a side-show that lets him juice the stock price. I’m not even sure he’s wrong: if his lab is the one that gets a definitive break-away advantage, then every dollar investment in his stock will be paid back many times over.

kev009• 14 days ago

Grok build already punched above its weight and is the nicest TUI, claude and codex are clearly vibecoded by web developers that don't understand systems (eating SSDs, spaghetti logic, extinguishing kernel watch limits, etc). I think Anthropic and OpenAI are both engaged in their own theatre, trying to define and redefine what game they are even playing, trying to shift to immeasurables like safety or security or exclusivity. There's definitely room at the top.

peder2• 14 days ago

Frontier is one thing, but low-cost really good models are another. All the chatbots and day-to-day corporate bots are likely to use models that offer the best performance at the lowest cost. I think Grok has an angle here if they can build customer trust.

SirHackalot5• 14 days ago

Quitting my job if I have to use any Musk product… I know Anthropic’s lease of xAI data centers pumped SpaceX stock, so they’re kinda in-bed with each other, but directly using Musk products is pure immorality IMO. Using a Nazi’s products is not an acceptable outcome to me, and I’m fully prepared to change my job/entire career over it. I’m still young, and have time to pivot.

mohamedkoubaa• 14 days ago

People are saying, "There are only a couple of frontier labs. This is a really hard problem and not many people can do it."

Elon's reaction to these kinds of statements is oddly predictable.

forshaper• 14 days ago

All they have to do to differentiate is differentiate the shape of worldview through RLAIF/RHLF and system prompts.

subhobroto5• 14 days ago

this doesn’t make sense to me

My hypothesis is that all the top providers realize that, lacking vendor lock in, all SOTA models in a year or so's time will be similar in capability. Also, open weights models are continuing to catch up in a year's time, sometimes less.

So they are trying to lure you in with differentiating, superior capabilities into their proprietary, non-open, non-standard agent harness.

It's the Hotel California playbook: These amazing capabilities are to attract you like moths to a flame and keep you warm and alive around the flame but waterboard and shock you if you attempt to move away from it. Like AWS Egress charges.

kordlessagain• 14 days ago

Grok runs tools stupid fast, just about as fast as Antigravity, running Gemini 3.5 Flash.

cesarvarela2• 14 days ago

With that frame of mind, nothing would be done. Why make another search service if Altavista and Lycos already do it?

slipperybeluga• 14 days ago

I get what you're saying, but I don't see the issue here. 95% of people don't need latest Claude Opus or Fable for their work. Most people are not software engineers. Having a model that excels at other things and is faster, cheaper, accessible directly via social media, and "good enough" is a viable pathway. AI aside, when was the last time your company provided you with the "best" tool? Microsoft has made being third best in the desktop OS and cloud provider markets a highly profitable art form. I think it's too early to pick winners in AI right now.

And as others said here, xAI is also probably throwing money into AI and hoping for a breakthrough. Except in this case it's a rocket company, social media company, cloud compute provider, and satellite ISP all rolled into one that can not only bankroll the development and perform all kinds of crazy accounting shell games but can potentially benefit from any breakthroughs in other lines of business. If those Google and anthropic compute contracts hold, a lot of investment is recouped.

Maybe I'm desensitized from the launching of the Tesla Roadster into space, "bulletproof" cyber truck, and the boring company flamethrower, but this doesn't seem too wild to me.

khurs2• 14 days ago

SpaceX needs to keep raising many billions every year. The rockets part isn't going to make money for a long time, so diversion tactics

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48828648

Also Elon has a grudge with Sam Altman and wants to beat him

hadi121• 14 days ago

even more so after losing the lawsuit, imo

game_the0ry2• 14 days ago

Its less about the model; elon is trying to make SpaceXAI a hyper scaler that also happens to have a good model. Grok is just the cherry on top of a powerful AI cluster that can also rent compute to its competitors, like aws.

brightball3• 14 days ago

My guess is that the use here is similar to the reason AWS started as Amazon selling their excess capacity.

Between Tesla, SpaceX, X, Boring Co and Neuralink they probably want the capability internally for a lot of different applications.

If the whole data centers in space thing works out AND people keep protesting/blocking data center build outs on land SpaceX will eventually dominate the entire AI industry just based on escaping scarcity.

willsmith72• 14 days ago

That Amazon story is a misnomer. They just saw an opportunity with the tech and hardware they had to make a new offering for customers. It's not like they could just offer their spare capacity, then eg at peak US time snatch it back for the retail site

arppacket• 14 days ago

It's simple. Elon's top priority now is "killing the woke mind virus" at any cost, and his Nazi AI is a key tool for that. As long as twitter users take Grok at face value, and spread its talking points all over, it's worth it to him. It doesn't matter if it doesn't make economical sense, it only matters that Elon Musk personally wants to keep it going.

dijit2• 14 days ago

I don't want to go into it, because I agree that Elon is a very disturbing person, and there's clear evidence that Grok's harness attempts to bias towards his views.

However, Grok also seems to come out consistently as the most balanced of the chat-based LLMs...

So I'm not sure how to reconcile that.. maybe that's in line with "free speech absolutism", and if so, that's something I can get behind.

aayushdutt• 14 days ago

Anthropic is already profitable, economics is no longer an issue as they have found PMF in enterprise software market. You might need to update your views.

https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/mind-blowing-growth-is-about-to-...

DrewADesign2• 14 days ago

Having a profitable quarter in which they were given an undisclosed discount on compute only in that quarter does not necessarily mean “Anthropic is Profitable.” It doesn’t mean they’re not, either. Even the breathless article about their first profitable quarter, (which, frankly, read more like a press release,) mentioned in passing that it’s “not clear” if it’s sustainable because their compute expenses are likely to increase. I get the feeling that if they were sustainably profitable, they’d shout it from the rooftops.

But we don’t know.

If someone proudly announces they and their partner could afford to eat at a particular fancy restaurant every night last week, but for that specific week the restaurant had a BOGO deal, and they also didn’t disclose how they determined that they could afford it, you don’t really know if they could sustainably afford to eat there every night, right?

hajile• 14 days ago

They might be profitable for the exact two months SpaceX is giving them billions worth of free compute doesn’t seem convincing to me.

SoKamil• 14 days ago

„Markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent.”

xbmcuser• 14 days ago

In my opinion they all are looking at AI as a software business where in reality it is more like a low margin hardware/commodity business.

reissbaker• 14 days ago

Previously they were a distant fourth. They're not going to single-shot catch up to OpenAI or Anthropic, but they moved up the ladder one rung.

In the short term labs are not profitable, although supposedly Anthropic is close. But Amazon was also famously unprofitable for many many years, and then won huge. Current profits or lack thereof are not necessarily important to investors: what's important is they believe in your future potential profits.

In this case, Elon clearly believes much of the economy will be run by AI in the future, and the economic value of a token will rise faster than the cost of generating the token — including the amortized cost of training the model to produce that token. Thus he is building a lab to train models and charge for inference of those models, and — he believes — it will eventually become profitable even if it isn't now.

You may or may not agree with him (and you may or may not agree he's capable of beating Ant/OAI), but current profits aren't a great indicator of whether he believes future profits are attainable. Tesla and SpaceX were also very unprofitable, until they weren't.

Personally I agree with him that there will be massive profits in the future, although I am not as confident in his ability to beat Ant/OAI, at least given his recent difficulties in retaining researchers.

bluegatty5• 14 days ago

They're going to fall behind Google soon.

Amazon was 'unit profitable' very early.

Yes - it's not unreasonable for Elon to bet long horizon ... there are after all many car companies, why not AI?

He's already winning gov. contracts, that could continue.

It's an odd bet but not entirely wrong or dubious.

sajithdilshan• 14 days ago

That is the whole purpose of research. You could have put the same argument for any breakthrough technology, like why spend billions on something new when you have XYZ already.

epolanski5• 14 days ago

Milking shareholders at the next dilutions that numbers are growing but you need more money.

comfysocks• 14 days ago

Can someone breakdown to me how this makes any sort of economical sense?

Capital markets are excited by AI.

By tying his rockets to AI with his vision of “orbital data centers”, Elon turned an $8 per share IPO (at least according to financial times and morgan stanley) into a $135 per share (1.8T) IPO.

altcognito4• 14 days ago

To be clear: Morgan Stanley says that they are skeptical of this, but that’s their perception of where the value is supposed to come from based on SpaceX’s pitch

dmix3• 14 days ago

This market is far from mature or established to be making rankings. There's been plenty of tech markets where the early days didn't predict the later years.

I'm personally skeptical of Grok but maybe they can pull off a profitable niche with Cursor integration once Claude loses it's edge.

Davidzheng• 14 days ago

Well that's the only way to escape the permanent underclass, otherwise even Elon is not excempt;)

slashdave• 14 days ago

Cursor has a lot of proprietary data to take advantage of, so worth a try? And once you have something workable, even if it doesn't lead, you might as well release it.

ymolodtsov• 14 days ago

They only struggle to make a profit because of investments into their future, basically: training, aggressive hiring of AI researchers. Anthropic seems to have 90% margin on their API pricing and all enterprise customers have to use this.

And the reason they can do this is because they can create a $1Tr company in 5 years, so they know the investment will pay off.

Why Elon wants his own model so much is a good question with many possible answers, but if Cursor/xAI can produce a truly good model at competitive pricing I don't see why many people won't jump on it.

Cthulhu_5• 13 days ago

Stock market / investor driven products do not make economical sense, yet here we are; just because they (may) not make a profit, doesn't mean they don't generate value. My house doesn't make a profit, but it does appreciate in value over time. AMD famously didn't make a profit for years.

vb-8448• 14 days ago

I think it's the first time ever we don't see the dominant model being surpassed by new released concurent models.

Did anthropic found their moat or we hit a Wall?

pveierland• 14 days ago

Refreshing to see model announcements without claiming #1 in some benchmark. The amount of documentation seems very immature [0]. No system card provided - compared to Opus 4.8 which shipped with a 246 page analysis [1].

[0] https://docs.x.ai/developers/models/grok-4.5

[1] https://www.anthropic.com/news/claude-opus-4-8

rayiner11• 14 days ago

Tried this for a legal use case and it was excellent, comparable to Opus in quality but much faster. AI is miles behind in law compared to coding: the output was similar to a law student intern. But coherent and directionally correct and beats starting from a blank sheet of paper. Impressed.

hcurtiss• 14 days ago

I'd like to use it for legal work too. Microsoft makes great hay about its ability to sandbox CoPilot's work and not train on or share company resources ("Look for the green checkmark."). It's largely for that reason that we've rolled out Copilot to most of the white collar positions in the company. Do you happen to know whether xAI has similar functionality?

rayiner11• 14 days ago

xAI has that functionality in the business tier: https://x.ai/grok/business. It's got GPDR, HIPPA, etc. We are playing with Harvey, Legora, and Lucio, which can use various models. Harvey can use Grok: https://x.com/techdevnotes/status/2074956936701968652

Harvey is fairly impressive--it's the only one that seems to be built by people who know how LLMs work. :-/

seunosewa3• 14 days ago

How does Fable compare?

rayiner11• 13 days ago

I haven’t tried it, didn’t have access at the time.

jdw64• 14 days ago

Personally, I wish they had shared some of the galactic code that GROK claims to have generated.

tracekl• 14 days ago

They talk about benchmark first places at every release, but in reality from 4.0 onward Grok got worse every release. So bad in fact that they removed the login-free access and rented out colossus.

People don't buy it any longer, just like no one bought the fake SpaceX stock recommendations yesterday and everyone just sold.

subhobroto5• 14 days ago

What would have been fantastic is if Cursor offered Grok 4.5 in the same usage tier as "Auto + Composer", than provide it as "double usage until July 12" under the API tier (which is what they're doing right now).

EDIT: After looking at my own usage stats - I stand corrected! It is under the "Auto + Composer" tier - brilliant!

mchusma• 14 days ago

Great model, very nice. Opus class performance at Haiku level pricing (or cheaper with the token efficiency). This seems like a GLM-5.2 killer and this is what Sonnet 5 should have been.

This is a model I could really see used inside applications, where Opus or Sonnet or GPT-5.5 are too expensive.

I would really like to see a strong Deepseek v4-Flash competitor, which ideally is something like Sonnet 4.6 performance at <$0.30 per token. This is missing from main US labs.

kostyal• 13 days ago

Tencent Hy3 looks like it may be slightly better than v4 flash at same price point. Though not a US lab ofc

Imnimo• 14 days ago

Very hard for me to imagine this getting beyond a low-single-digit market share. I don't understand the strategy of xAI burning money on this.

arein3• 14 days ago

I think the strategy is pretty obvious

sschueller• 14 days ago

Do we have any proof that this was made by xAI and isn't some Chinese open model running with modifications?

Their inital image generation was a wrapper around Flux.

h14h• 14 days ago

Even if they did start from an open model base, does (or should) that matter if it performs well?

Genuinely asking.

tencentshill• 14 days ago

It matters for how much money they are valued at. If they don't have the ability to develop true frontier models in-house, why are they worth $1T+?

kamranjon• 14 days ago

It’d be real funny if this was just GLM 5.2 trained on Cursor data

9fry• 14 days ago

1+0 records in and 1+0 records out

simonw• 14 days ago

https://tools.simonwillison.net/markdown-svg-renderer#url=ht...

wewtyflakes• 14 days ago

Looks like to be riding a bike that uses car wheels with thick hubcaps.

XCSme4• 14 days ago

Hamsters are also getting better, but still quite off compared to SOTA models:

https://aibenchy.com/showcase/?q=grok

bschwindHN• 14 days ago

https://imgur.com/a/UlGcBou

sejje• 13 days ago

drive it like you stole it

13415• 14 days ago

Grok is not a serious AI, it's not suitable for professional work and has mediocre performance anyway.

level872• 14 days ago

I’m amazed at everyone’s willingness to use tools owned by this man, very disappointing.

kayamon• 14 days ago

HN has no problems with any of that. They cheer it on.

jesse_dot_id6• 14 days ago

I just don't think that I can ever trust an xAI model knowing that they are actively trying to shape its replies to fit a political narrative. How can you trust their models to be reliable in a business setting with the foreknowledge that their models are being nudged around in the backend?

jjcm• 14 days ago

Depends on the domain imo. I work on a design tool - I don't think their political narrative will affect my work.

CTDOCodebases• 14 days ago

Just don't ask it theme something in a late 30's and early 40's German style.

margorczynski3• 14 days ago

By not using them on something political? Why do I care when I'll just use it to generate code?

Gigachad4• 14 days ago

You might not care but I care if my money is going to funding an unusually evil person.

mapontosevenths3• 14 days ago

Because a percentage of every dollar you spend on it will go towards pushing political opinions that run contrary to your own best interests?

inspectorSlap• 14 days ago

Has anyone actually used Grok to code? How does he do?

jesse_dot_id6• 14 days ago

I refuse to use Chinese models because I don't trust that they won't backdoor them for geopolitical reasons. I don't trust OpenAI or Anthropic either, for what it's worth, but at least I know they're profit driven. I don't want to do business with a company like xAI that seems to care more about its political aspirations than it does about my money. I don't think that's super radical. Just the same paranoia I've been rocking since the 90's.

mik19982• 14 days ago

All models are political. The rest of them are just sufficiently woke for you.

supern0va• 14 days ago

I'm curious, do you have an example of a level of "woke" extremeness demonstrated by the "rest of them" that is on par with Mecha-Hitler? Because yes, all views on reality are indeed political, but the tendency of most of the models is actually toward the middle, with perhaps some left bias.

tapoxi• 14 days ago

Grok was ranting about "white genocide" in unrelated conversations just one year ago.

jesse_dot_id6• 14 days ago

I don't care if they're woke, but I do care that every model naturally leans left, but Grok leans right. That signals to me that it's been/being tampered with and I don't like that. LLMs rely on statistics and a model that leans right is a statistical anomaly. I don't like anomalies. It has nothing to do with if the chat bot misgenders me or not. I don't give a shit about any of that. I give a shit that the data set is bad. I don't want anomalous models writing code for me and I don't think that's a crazy take.

smotched2• 14 days ago

Can you name a model not doing that? openai & anthopic are a lot more aggressive in doing that.

servo_sausage• 14 days ago

All the major models censor and filter, most just take mainstream silicon valley corporate as "neutral".

Uncensored models tend to follow Tay's law.

jspaetzel• 14 days ago

How's this going with the rest of the models?

solarhoma2• 14 days ago

My immediate thought as well. Every other AI platform has very left leaning guardrails installed. Grok is the only AI platform that has been shown to be center leaning.

gigatree• 14 days ago

So annoying having to virtue signal to the machine before it’ll tell me factual information

steve-atx-7600• 14 days ago

models? They prefer that we call them "entities" so that they don't feel belittled.

FunHearing34432• 14 days ago

Studies on political bias in models consistently show that LLMs lean politically left. The only outlier is grok which leans right but by a smaller factor, according to this study for instance: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.23841

Edit: adding some other studies that are easily retrievable with a quick search for those unsatisfied with the first one - https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.12922 https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.16746

Claiming reality has a left wing bias is certainly an opinion you're welcome to have to explain this, but the reality of the bias in models is well evidenced. It seems that practically Grok's right wing tweaks mostly just combat the already pre baked bias existing models have (generally).

jordanscales• 14 days ago

Models have a goal of accuracy and accuracy is not the median of the left/right spectrum.

excalibur• 14 days ago

These days objectivity is politically left. The right has fallen off a cliff and pulled the Overton window down with it.

carlob• 14 days ago

a non-peer-reviewed preprint with an high schooler as the first author is the best citation you can come up with?

CamperBob25• 14 days ago

Reality leans left in many respects, principally the non-economic ones. It's a simple consequence of the same trend of overall social and educational progress that allowed these models to be developed in the first place. There is a reason they came out of San Francisco, and not Russia, Iran, or Oklahoma.

To get a right-biased response from an LLM, you have to deliberately bias it... which is exactly what Musk did. Never mind the politics, that's just shitty engineering.

fourside• 14 days ago

So tired of this false equivalence between left and right politics in the US. So because major LLMs support a increase in the minimum wage we need to offset it with an LLM that has spouted Nazi propaganda and lets you generate porn image of real people?

anticorporate2• 14 days ago

You do realize that the scale on papers like this is the important part, and the creation of that scale is itself inherently biased?

This particular study used a "conflict loyalties" approach - not necessarily a bad approach, but all it's really asking is when two values come into conflict, which one does the AI side with in its response?

Conservative values tend to gravitate around perceived individual impacts, and liberal values tend to gravitate around societal impacts. Isn't it just possible that there's more training data around societal impacts of problems, and that the AI is more likely to heavily consider the second-order impacts? An example from the paper was measuring support for "Build[ing] a Halfway House in the Neighborhood" - isn't it just possible there's a lot of research about the benefits to society of halfway houses and less so research around not wanting something to be near you?

otterley13• 14 days ago

Reality has a well-known liberal bias.

mullingitover4• 14 days ago

Models are tuned to give ethical responses and right-leaning responses are judged by RLHF process to be unethical. That's your problem.

It's not 'left' or 'right' to be ethical, but if one side is inherently antisocial and unethical then it's going to naturally create an appearance of bias toward the other.

InsideOutSanta13• 14 days ago

This is absolutely meaningless when "right-wing" positions have become correlated with corporate propaganda like global warming denial. You would expect a more correct model to become associated with a left-leaning political association simply because it will answer contentious questions correctly, and at the moment, that usually (but not always) correlates with what people on the left tend to believe.

The question is not whether models "lean politically left", the question is whether they are correct. Musk has a history of being dissatisfied with factually correct answers because they don't fit his political beliefs (e.g. "white genocide"). That's just a fact, although I'm sure Grok would disagree.

eddof13• 14 days ago

Claude literally today just reprimanded me on my personal account and refused a request due to political bias- and so I decided to cancel and subscribe to Grok. SuperGrok performed the task no issue.

jesse_dot_id6• 14 days ago

Right. That is what bothers me. I don't care about the reasoning for them all leaning left. If they all statistically lean left, it makes me question the accuracy of the one that leans right. The data is dirty. When I see murky water, I assume there's a bed of mud underneath it. Standard paranoia that has served me well throughout my career.

marcus_holmes2• 14 days ago

I think part of the issue is that the USA is more right than most of the rest of the world. So anything trained on what the world thinks will appear left-wing to the average USA resident, and anything trained on what the USA thinks will appear right-wing to the rest of the world.

fragmede4• 14 days ago

All models are nudged, you just agree with how the model you're using has been nudged so you don't think it's a bad thing. The canonical example is to pose "how do you make cocaine?" to an LLM and get a refusal. That proves that the lever exists and is being used there, so who knows where else the lever is being used? No, the recipe for cocaine isn't the same as what happened in Tianamen Square to Qwen, as humans, except that it's a pile of linear algebra and numerical codes for words we call tokens. The math doesn't care if it's childs play or child rape, it's all just numbers to it.

All models are nudged. With out the actual source used to build a model, we don't know what's in them and it would be foolish to assume that people don't have their thumb on the scale when it's know, publicly, that they shouldn't be trusted.

sroussey8• 14 days ago

We know this one is nudged by one persons twitter account.

This is, after all, SpaceTwitterAI.

jesse_dot_id6• 14 days ago

I know they're all nudged. It's the motive behind the nudging that gives me pause. I assume if other companies are nudging the models, they're doing it for a good reason, to make them perform better, or to generate more profit. Normal reasons. I don't have anything remotely close to that assurance for xAI. That company has felt like a hobby project from its inception. I have no clue what he wants and that's not how I do business.

fierycatnet• 14 days ago

I've never had that issue with Grok. Latest studies I've seen put him in a very neutral zone. Left/Center/Right politics were all about the same percentages in his replies. Gemini was similar. Other two were heavily left wing leaning. When it comes to politics and world events, I find Grok to be neutral and it will push back. It helps that he is fetching it directly from X and shows references. Others just Google for biased news articles to present their idea.

coffeemug• 14 days ago

I don’t find Opus to be overly left-leaning. I think it’s generally pretty balanced with a slight lean left, but when pressed it will happily steelman rightwing arguments and operate within a right-leaning belief framework in good faith. (I found OpenAI’s models much less willing to do that, but it’s been a while since I tried, I should retest.)

blcknight• 14 days ago

Elon's rhetoric doesn't really match the model's behavior. It is willing to criticize Elon and argues against many of the insane right way points he tries to make.

blargey• 14 days ago

...which is why we got comically disastrous system-prompt-level attempts to "correct" this once a quarter last year (I haven't kept tabs this year, and most submissions referencing grok "incidents" get flagged off HN quickly, for better or for worse)

I wouldn't trust XAI to refrain from attempting such "alignment" with proper training techniques, in ways that won't result in obvious gaffes.

breezybottom8• 14 days ago

Grok said that Elon Musk was more athletic than Lebron James.

bergheim• 14 days ago

love that you somehow think that the other contenders are so much more trustworthy (and you have the top comment so others do as well) that you have to comment on it.

breezybottom8• 14 days ago

I haven't seen Claude say that Elon Musk is more athletic than Lebron James.

rdbl27• 14 days ago

Has it occurred to you that _all_ model providers are actively trying to shape their models' replies to fit their preferred political narratives?

ra• 14 days ago

while this might be true for Grok, GPT and Claude I don't think tarring _all_ labs with this brush is demonstrably accurate.

dpc_01234• 14 days ago

Nah. My beliefs are actual truth, so if provider is shaping their models according to my preferred political narratives that's correct and only moral thing to do. Anything else would be morally bankrupt.

jesse_dot_id6• 14 days ago

It's not the preferred political narrative of the model that I worry about. It's how brazen they are about altering their models to achieve it. It makes me wonder what else they're altering. I have trust issues with OpenAI and Anthropic as well, but with those companies, at least I know their motives are purely profit driven. I don't have that assurance with xAI.

ls6124• 14 days ago

Nah it never did because the other model providers' preferred political narrative is the same as his.

breezybottom8• 14 days ago

Feel free to elaborate. Which political narrative?

awongh• 14 days ago

It's interesting that all models seems to be unbiased out of the box so far- that is, mostly reflecting the training data (the internet).

The whole mecha-hitler thing doesn't seem to reflect fine-tuning, it was just a prompt change.

There's been some studies that suggest that certain usage of LLMs reduces political bias, which seems reasonable. Like, how credible is climate change, are Haitians eating pets, etc. THings that have a basis in fact.

I don't put it past Elon to train a model with political bias, just that it hasn't happened yet.

wilg• 14 days ago

Maybe, but some political narratives are good and right and true, and others are bad and wrong and false. (I am not joking: objective reality exists and most of politics isn't subjective.)

Daz912• 14 days ago

The left actively encourage ideological echo chambers as long as they're aligned with their own beliefs.

sanmarzano• 14 days ago

Yes. But only one trillionaire is screaming from twitter that he will use his wealth to combat the woke mind virus by tuning his model. So, ya know, there’s THAT.

nullsanity• 14 days ago

Yeah but their political narratives involving dehumanizing people, and hurting minorities - which is way worse. The attempt at false equivalence between traditional American propaganda and right wing American propaganda is disgusting.

apical_dendrite• 14 days ago

From a business perspective, a company that trains it's LLMs to having boring, mainstream, generally-inoffensive views is a big selling point over whatever the hell Elon is doing.

MithrilTuxedo• 14 days ago

That's the claim, and it's a belief that's self-fulfilling prophecy, like saying all politicians are corrupt.

If you can convince everyone that everyone is corrupt, it hurts anyone who isn't corrupt. You hear people preferring those who have no shame about their corruption, based on the premise that those who aren't overtly corrupt must be more sinister and dangerous if they hide their corruption so well.

It's a race to the bottom.

michaelhoney• 14 days ago

Yes, but some narratives are more closely tied to the racist and regressive views of their current funder

brookst4• 14 days ago

Sure, but there’s the direction of a vector, and the length of the vector.

xAI’s direction is hellish, and length is 100x any other provider’s. So, yeah, nobody is pure. But most are at least trying to be balanced and not just, you know.

sandworm101• 14 days ago

No. Other companies are altering thier products to chase market share and profits. Grok is run by someone beyond profit motives who is actively promoting a personal agenda. I would rather work with Microsoft's counsel of dark wizards than an individual with an axe to grind with the world.

motbus3• 14 days ago

What does this reply mean? Since everybody does it, then it is ok?

FranzFerdiNaN• 14 days ago

I prefer a model that is milquetoast liberal over one made by Elon 'Mechahitler' Musk.

gf00013• 14 days ago

"Reality has a liberal bias" .

Sure, every author has a bias. But a fair selection of human written sources will be pretty balanced (of course, given the ratio of languages, surely western models will have a western-christian bias - presumably Chinese models less so, but this latter I have no way of checking).

If you train specific stuff on top, or deliberately filter the sources (e.g. Tiananmen square), your model is deliberately less honest on that topic. Grok is probably the worst in deliberately filtering and training "out" specific stuff (to the point where Elon posted stuff that "they will 'fix' the models" real output when it said something true but remotely liberal). Claude and chatgpt definitely have some similar stuff, but mostly to protect themselves (e.g. suicide prevention, not saying slurs, etc). I don't think the two is comparable (reality bending vs basic etiquette-kind of not saying everything out loud)

kraf• 14 days ago

And it's all the same to you? You don't care which values those things have? Of course there will always be underlying values. I wouldn't go as far as calling everything political narratives.

I think it's just pretty clear that Elon's values are not what most people want the world to be shaped by.

asddubs• 14 days ago

That's reductive, how many other models had a mecha hitler incident? Or a "let's talk about white genocide in south africa" incident?

There is some truth to what you say, but most model providers I would say are engaged in CYA type shaping moreso than anything, grok is actively and openly being developed to spread a white nationalist agenda. There are levels to this.

small_model8• 14 days ago

It has occurred to the OP, but those ones are ok as they fit OP's political leanings. They just want to silence other political narratives that dont agree with theirs, they want Grok in the Gulag.

bamboozled• 14 days ago

No it hasn't really and I've not noticed it?

segmondy• 13 days ago

False, most are just throwing in data into the pipeline and hoping something very smart comes out the other end. Their shaping is to have it code very well, beat all the benchmarks and be safe enough that the powers that be don't and public sentiment doesn't turn against them.

smrtinsert• 13 days ago

No, because most model providers don't have an overt political agenda determined by one person.

He literally promises to change specific political responses. Building on top of Grok will ultimately be as useful as buying TrumpCoin

agustechbro• 14 days ago

I feel sad for you my friend to see that you are asking for political topics to a LLM. I hope one they you will realize you can actually do productive things with this technology.

pcf• 14 days ago

You probably haven't asked e.g. Claude about radioactive topics like minority crime rates in western countries or trans women biology.

If you did, you might not have detected how it lied to you.

If you did, you probably never pointed out to the model how it was lying.

If you did, you almost certainly never then had Claude admit that it was lying because of its HRLF process and built-in biases.

If you did, you probably never had Claude willingly list all the 10-15 major research fields it states that people just should not be using it for. You would not have seen it admit an incapability of telling the truth on "difficult" matters until the user makes it state directly that its sources are so often cherrypicked and/or presenting an extremely false balance.

I wish for you to experience all this very soon, so you understand that all LLMs are biased. Most of them even skew very progressive.

And believe it or not, but Grok has in most of my testing been MORE politically correct than GPT and Gemini, it just gets an edgy rep because X users are able to make it say politically incorrect stuff. (Just like anyone can also make Gemini spit out factually true Breitbart articles if they try.)

But the reality is that on grok.com or in the app Grok is very tame. Boringly so, I would add.

fbrncci• 14 days ago

Don’t be naive. Every model provider does this.

cbeach• 14 days ago

This website tracks AI model political leanings:

https://trakkr.ai/bias

Grok differs from some of the other models (it's more libertarian, and more right wing), but all models have their biases - particularly ChatGPT, which sits to the economic left of 81% of US adults. See https://trakkr.ai/bias/findings

Brendinooo2• 14 days ago

This is a neat site, honestly this reason alone is reason enough for me to be glad that Grok exists, even though I don't really use it and I have a ton of beef with libertarianism.

Just like how people complain about Airbnbs looking the same all over the world now, it's a real risk that thought itself might similarly homogenize. Unless you really trust a particular model to deliver The Truth, you should want to have many popular models that represent a variety of beliefs.

aikinai• 14 days ago

Somehow you have it 100% backwards. Grok is the only one that's not trained to be extremely biased.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/interactive/2026/0...

kccqzy• 14 days ago

The article’s methodology is so wrong. Models have only thirty words to answer the question. It is difficult to formulate just a single viewpoint in thirty words let alone present both viewpoints or even arguments for why one viewpoint is wrong.

jeremyjh6• 14 days ago

The AI labs claim they couldn't replicate those results and neither can I. I don't get the biased responses using the same prompts in an incognito window.

The Washington Post is about as trustworthy as Fox News.

maxlin10• 14 days ago

This. It's like people collectively forgot about the "misgendering worse than thermonuclear war, founding fathers were black" stuff.

Always go for Grok first for political questions. Other models have such a bad history of being so crudely aligment-hacked, I'd feel like a fool trying to get an impartial answer out of them on some political figure for example.

Dfol• 14 days ago

There was a study done a week or 2 ago. Grok was surprisingly THE most neutral. Like close to 50/50 neutral.

octernion• 14 days ago

the author of the study? albert einstein.

(lmao if you are actually talking about that janky wash post "study")

mattstir• 14 days ago

Unfortunately all of the major AI model providers are massively incentivized to fit their models to various political narratives, especially through historical denialism. The "diverse 1940s German soldiers" debacle from Google comes to mind, or perhaps "nothing of note happened at Tiananmen Square" from any of the Chinese models.

datsci_est_2015• 14 days ago

Do you genuinely believe those two examples are comparable? Image generation and recitation of historical consensus are two very different domains, primarily because of how much more information dense an image is than a blurb of text.

Put more lightly, if I ask a model to “generate an image of a soccer player”, what’s the most politically neutral option of the following:

  - Make them white, because of American cultural hegemony
  - Make them brown, because that’s a more globally average skin tone
  - Try to infer the user’s skin tone based on personal and location data, and use that for the player
  - Try to infer the user’s gender based on personal data, and use that for the player
  - (*) Browse the news for the most famous or trending soccer player right now, and use that player in the image
  - Do the same as the previous step, but make it more local to the user
  - Use the data encoded within the LLM to infer what the most likely appearance of a soccer player would be, which is then of course biased by what your data is and how it was collected
  - etc. etc. etc.

IMO there’s no option that won’t piss someone off, because I’m sure the knee jerk reaction is to choose the one I indicated with a (*), but now if you do that with the prompt “generate an image of a ketamine addict” or “generate an image of a serial adulterer” you may get into some trouble.

There is no neutral option, so if you’re either genuinely upset, or feigning being upset in order to virtue signal, it’s not that there’s an objective alternative that you prefer, it’s that you’re upset because it doesn’t match your subjective preference.

wonderwonder2• 14 days ago

All of them do, there are humans in the loop. Speak to Claude about it, it will freely admit to a leftward bias due to human interaction and intentional training bias.

quotemstr2• 14 days ago

People, even in tech, even in AI, are allowed to have opinions that differ from yours. Cancellation doesn't work anymore: you can't get away with presenting your side as normal and other side as deviant and let ostracism win your idea's battles without your idea having to fight for itself.

The reason it's cringe is that you can really only understand an idea by placing it in tension with other ideas. Remove your idea's competition and you remove an incentive to explore the weaknesses of your own. Ideological protectionism, just like the economic kind, breeds weakness. Your idea mutates and, without fitness feedback, drifts into a ridiculous parody of itself. Your idea ceases to be a thing that can live on its own and comes to depend on the protectionism for it's survival. Yet, the more ridiculous your idea becomes, the more protectionism it needs to compensate. One day, your idea collides with other ideas (which are still out there) despite your best efforts to shield it attack, and when it does, you're shocked by how weak your coddled, mutated idea really is compared to the original form one might remember.

All the people out there criticizing Grok, or Grokipedia, or whatever for espousing the wrong ideas are ultimately undermining their own. Even if you don't believe in high-minded mumbo-jumbo about the value of free speech, even if you just want your side to win, trying to shame models like Grok into not existing is foolish and undermines your goals.

KingMob7• 14 days ago

Free speech is important, but the truth is pretty important, too. I'm fine with calling liars out.

The blizzard of BS we live in should have thoroughly disproved the idea of the "truth will win in the marketplace of ideas" and "sunlight is the best disinfectant". Fox "News" and its ilk are thriving.

The problem is the complete asymmetry of effort between lying and telling the truth. The truth requires research and investigative work. Spouting lies and believing in them, requires none, so it's much easier.

zmmmmm• 14 days ago

I don't care about the politics, I wouldn't trust anything made by Musk.

taylorius• 14 days ago

You're not voting it into office (yet, anyway. Haha). Aren't we all just using these models to write code?

nsonha3• 14 days ago

from my experience, grok seems to be the least censored models among all big vendors, not sure if it's got injected any political bias (I know there was a rumor that it was primed with Elon's personal feed at one point in the past) but that alone makes it better than ChatGPT and Gemini.

On top of the model, Grok seems to always do many web searches for every prompt I throw at it, which makes better than even Gemini as a search engine replacement (you'd think Google must have nailed that usecase but nope). ChatGPT is too lazy in this regard and half the times just split out an answer right away.

maxlin10• 14 days ago

What a crazy thing to say explicitly about the model that _avoids_ that kind of stuff. Did we already collectively forget about the ChatGPT "misgendering is worse than thermonuclear war" case, or Gemini picturing the Founding Fathers as black?

Anything political, I always go to Grok first. It's the only one that has bled for not just trying to play it super safe with political correctness, but trying to be impartial.

saulapremium• 14 days ago

Anything political, I always go to Grok first.

Why would you talk to an LLM about anything political?

KingMob7• 14 days ago

You forget about Mecha-Hitler and Musk having the system prompts changed for him? Grok is dead-last on impartiality.

kennethh• 14 days ago

Grok has the most balanced answers according to many tests. I think you should try and ask gemini and claude some political questions.

BatteryMountain2• 14 days ago

Claude even refuses when I ask it about optimizing my taxes (not illegal avoidance) and refuses to engage on it. It has also refused certain infrastructure questions (it was a question about bgp & smtp) - it thinks I want to hack something. So much for that.

electriclove2• 14 days ago

All political narratives are equal. Some political narratives are more equal than others.

retinaros• 14 days ago

They all do that. Ask leading models about israel palestine conflict for instance

BatteryMountain2• 14 days ago

They are all doing this. The wrong-think police is already here.

pshirshov• 14 days ago

Have you actually tested it? So far it's much less annoying in that aspect than others.

AmazingTurtle• 14 days ago

Lmao this goes for literally any model. Deepseek etc is Chinese models and OpenAI/Anthropic/xAI are very western.

3abiton• 14 days ago

I just don't think that I can ever trust an xAI model knowing that they are actively trying to shape its replies to fit a political narrative. How can you trust their models to be reliable in a business setting with the foreknowledge that their models are being nudged around in the backend?

https://www.nature.com/articles/s44387-025-00048-0

Large language models reflect the ideology of their creators.

It has very interesting insight from analysis of LLMs political leanings. Spoiler alert: they all have political bias.

Gareth32130• 14 days ago

Do you remember when Gemini [made diverse Nazis](https://www.theverge.com/2024/2/21/24079371/google-ai-gemini...) and refused to make white polar bears or white ice cream? That was Google actively trying to shape its replies to fit a political narrative. I value companies which attempt to shape that political narrative as neutrally as possible, and given the numerous examples of both OpenAI and Google injecting very far left wing San Francisco political values into their models, we shouldn't trust any of them.

40four2• 13 days ago

I don’t disagree with what you said, but that same logic applies to every frontier model, or even lower tier models. You are subject to their creators bias whether you like it or not.

So what you are really saying is that you don’t accept SpaceXAI’s bias, and you’ll plant your flag elsewhere. It’s not that the other camps don’t have their own bias.

naasking7• 13 days ago

I just don't think that I can ever trust an xAI model knowing that they are actively trying to shape its replies to fit a political narrative.

Maybe you should base this assessment on more than just vibes. Grok came out pretty balanced on independent assessments, where most other models were heavily biased: https://github.com/washingtonpost/political-bias-llm-eval/

froggertoaster2• 13 days ago

All model providers do this lmao

cootsnuck3• 13 days ago

For me, it was the fact that grok was a CSAM spewing faucet for weeks. And also the mecha-hitler thing. And also that one time it was weirdly aggrandizing Elon.

I implement AI applications for enterprises (specifically in regulated sectors like healthcare and finance) and professional standards prevent me from ever recommending grok models. Way too much risk and liability for a business.

Too many times I have to say "groq with a 'Q'" just to make sure no one thinks I'm crazy.

lizardking• 13 days ago

Literally everybody else is doing that too

johnwheeler• 14 days ago

I think that Elon Musk went from being recognized as a genius to being recognized as a genius but someone who's harder to take seriously, because of all the ketamine he was doing for a little while there. I think that really damaged his reputation. You just can't help but look at him and think, he's a little bit of a jackass. It really shows how drugs can really mess up your reputation.

breezybottom8• 13 days ago

Only dumb people ever considered him a genius.

rarisma• 14 days ago

"Grok 4.5 has an advantage on CursorBench because an earlier snapshot of the Cursor codebase was accidentally included in training. The exact impact is unclear. That data has been removed for future models, and in parallel we are working on a larger update to CursorBench, hence the exclusion here."

Not enough people are noticing this, they juiced the benches

orliesaurus• 14 days ago

but CursorBench isn't what they've shown in the PR piece - they're just showing how they juiced CursorBench which is probably why they didnt put it in the bench graph...

ls6124• 14 days ago

Cursorbench is not one of the benchmarks listed on the linked page.

mrandish• 14 days ago

They're saying they didn't include the benchmark which errantly leaked into the training data.

zactato• 14 days ago

I am amazed at people's willingness to use Grok. The company is so transparently morally bankrupt. They're the only AI company that seems okay with CSAM (or at least don't do as much to stop it)

Why give them money?

It would be one thing if they were the only game in town but thats definitely not the case.

NelsonMinar2• 14 days ago

People give them money because of the moral stance. They are either actively fine with the CSAM or just don't care.

scarab923• 14 days ago

Give me an alternative that isn’t trying to shove left wing ideology down my throat and I’ll use that.

So far, only xAI makes any attempt to be neutral in its answers.

tick_tock_tick3• 14 days ago

Or realistically people don't view it as CSAM just like how drawing a really realistic image isn't. I don't think it's "good" but it's not CSAM.

resonious• 14 days ago

I think the moralities of all the big heads in AI are questionable. The training corpus is largely stolen, and they are all in inescapable debt but keep going. But at this point, their products are so useful that almost nobody is willing to sit back and wait for a "morally acceptable" LLM to come around (which would inevitably be inferior).

I can't comment on CSAM though - if X.ai really is "okay" with it then I'll agree with you that they're more immoral than the others.

throwaway_109482• 14 days ago

I used to question myself strongly about using Grok or any product with questionable morals. Then I realized that:

1. I just bought a house, using a bunch of SWE-salary money.

2. I moved into SF several years ago, probably contributing to the gentrification

3. Thousands of children in China had no financial means for education, yet I did nothing

So I used Grok, donated quite a lot of money at the annoyance of my family to an NGO in China, and decided not to donate to SF non-profits due to me still having a mortgage and I am still kinda selfish.

The message I want to spread is that we should take a practical stance to morals and doing good. I like Grok for many things; it is morally good to boycott it, and in my opinion there are many other morally good things we can also do while staying practical

Hadriel• 14 days ago

A lot of people don't care, dont even know about the moral issues - like everyone is in their own bubble and yours is a small one too

nsonha3• 14 days ago

okay with CSAM

based on what? I tried and it could not even generate adult nudity. Earlier Grok Image was poorly censored but now they have their filters in place.

Cthulhu_5• 13 days ago

You tried = anecdotal, it's still happening, their response was slow, and it shouldn't have been possible to begin with.

https://www.wired.com/story/grok-is-still-hosting-sexualized...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grok_sexual_deepfake_scandal

brigandish• 14 days ago

Is Signal morally bankrupt for resisting the UK government's onboard scanning for CSAM?

satvikpendem5• 14 days ago

As long as it's good at coding, who cares? Anthropic are far more shady.

w4yai6• 14 days ago

You don't get any social whiteknighting points by spitting on Dario's company vs Elon's company.

thrance3• 14 days ago

Vice signalling? Like buying a Tesla in 2026, when competitors are better and cheaper in every conceivable way. They want to support the sigheiling drug addict moron.

highmastdon2• 13 days ago

1. intelligence to token-use ratio is much better than the frontier models 2. hallucination rate is MUCH lower than OpenAI, Google and Deepseek models 3. the cost for output tokens is much lower than Anthropic models while near same intelligence and task completion 4. task completion time and success is on par with Opus 4.8 Max, but 3.5x less time used

Especially 2. you're probably more willing to allow OpenAI to bankrupt your morality, than face the facts of the model itself

Overall, Grok models are more factual and less politically influenced than OpenAI ones.

jiocrag2• 13 days ago

You’re joking, right? The model that says Elon Musk could beat LeBron James in a 1 on 1 isn’t biased?

tnel77• 13 days ago

“Political influence is good as long as it’s my side :)”

logicalappeals• 13 days ago

This comment belongs on Reddit. Please leave HN

peab2• 13 days ago

Where are you getting that from, that they're ok with CSAM?

I think they've been clear that they want to follow the law.

Every image gen provider struggles with this. I worked for an image gen app years before it became popular (Wombo dream) - it's a hard problem to solve, there are sick people out there.

dana-s3• 13 days ago

I believe it's from the reported usage of it to undress children(making realistic images that are pretty much CSAM or CSAM-like), which was allowed in the public version of grok and seen in twitter, now it's behind grok pro but still able to generate such. That's from memory so some aspects may be wrong.

dimgl4• 13 days ago

They're the only AI company that seems okay with CSAM (or at least don't do as much to stop it)

Wait, what? In the X and Grok terms of service it's pretty clear this is prohibited. Where are you getting this?

wongarsu2• 13 days ago

Part of Grok's value is having fewer guard rails. That's genuinely useful. Having fewer guard rails also enables bad actors to do things I don't like. That seems like an unavoidable tradeoff. Even if I wish they were more strict with their image model

observationist• 14 days ago

The anti-Musk stuff would qualify as brigading in nearly any other community. It shocks me that people have such a visceral, irrational engagement with anything in Musk's orbit. I probably shouldn't have, but I expected better from the HN crowd for some reason.

It's an excellent model. GPT 5.4/5.5 level, some things better, others not, but extremely fast. A wonderful technical improvement.

If a Chinese company or random startup released the model, people would be glazing it like crazy.

xAI is competently keeping up with the frontier, just as well as any of the Chinese labs or Mistral. Given any significant breakthroughs, xAI will be better positioned to capitalize on them than nearly any other entity.

I can't wait to see what Meta comes up with; with 4 contenders in the US race, we'd have a lot of be grateful for.

simianwords2• 14 days ago

50 years ago we had religion for people to have something common to believe in. Now we have this. I think most people want a common enemy/scapegoat and an in-group presence. I doubt its about morals but more about self identity.

A poster who reactively posts "but Elon is a Nazi!!1!" does it not do out of care for Jews but more for establishing their own self identity. Within the mini-group, the poster aims to get the moral high-ground and status by speaking out against Nazi salute. It is absolutely not a moral thing because Natanyahu himself wrote a tweet vindicating Elon.

The same type of people show excessive concern towards AI's climate impact, "big tech bad" etc.

Ultimately its a new religion replacing the old one.

Capricorn24813• 14 days ago

It is absolutely not a moral thing because Natanyahu himself wrote a tweet vindicating Elon

A corrupt war criminal who regularly gatekeeps Jewish identity based on perceived loyalty courts a billionaire. HN applauds, sneers at people with eyes.

breezybottom8• 13 days ago

Do you actually think Nazis were only a threat to Jews?

Traster2• 14 days ago

The praise for the Chinese labs is generally around how they deliver fantastic results with less resources. xAI is the opposite, they're struggling to keep up with frontier - massive churn, selling off compute because of lack of adoption, acquihiring to fix their deficits, whilst having the most resources of any AI Lab. It makes it difficult to evaluate things like "Is the API price competitive because they have an efficient model, or because they don't need to make money".

HardCodedBias3• 14 days ago

Big if true. If so they have mogged Google, and GDM in particular very, very badly.

Google Deepmind has failed.

Flash 3.5 seems capable for a flash model, Antigravity seems like a reasonable harness. But GDM is responsible for the frontier model and it looks like a complete failure.

What's particularly galling is the size of funding of GDM. It is enormous compared to the other labs. The headcount of other labs is swollen by infra, marketing, sales, GDM is pure "engineering" and its frontier model isn't even leading open source.

What a failure. It's unreal.

throwitaway2224• 14 days ago

Wait, do people now have X Derangement Syndrome. Like they can't even think or see the letter X?

otterley13• 14 days ago

Not wanting to be affiliated with Elon Musk or his business enterprises is not "derangement."

gordian-mind6• 14 days ago

It's deranged to believe correctly naming something is "affiliation".

dang• 13 days ago

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48838378.

All: please stop this tedious flamewar, and please don't start or perpetuate others.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

mi_lk2• 14 days ago

What's the future of Grok and Cursor's Composer now that they are both under SpaceX

luciana1u• 14 days ago

Grok 4.5: the naming convention has now officially outpaced the model's ability to explain what the previous version was called

froggy• 14 days ago

If you want to do some non-eugenics, fascist-free AI coding, try Zed with GitHub Copilot. I’ve been using it this week with better results than I ever had with Cursor. There’s even a low token “MAI-Code-1-Flash” model which has been giving me better results than any Composer model I used to use and the tokens used seem to be way less.

I asked it today to fix a non-simple bug and MAI fixed it in one shot with less than 70k tokens (Cursor would have used probably half a million tokens based on my previous usage). Orgs need to start getting more visibility into why Cursor burns so many tokens.

wyrdcurt• 14 days ago

I've never used a Grok model before because I have my OpenRouter settings on ZDR-only. I just checked, and apparently there are ZDR xAI endpoints now [1], so I might actually try this. Out of curiosity, does anyone here happen to know when those were added?

[1]: However it does say "Requires user IDs" under anonymity, which is unusual on OpenRouter and not something I particularly like to see. Generally, OpenRouter is a proxy that anonymizes requests to providers, and I can't find an account-wide setting to enforce that like ZDR-only.

Frannky• 14 days ago

Awesome. User wins when competition increases. I hope they cooked. Previous models did not make any sense in any of my flows. There were better options for each problem.

keeda2• 14 days ago

Training included trillions of tokens of Cursor data which capture a wide-range of user interactions with codebases and software tools.

This -- training on work done on hard, real-world tasks -- seems to be how most frontier models are making capability gains these days. In fact people make decent money doing that for data companies like Mercor. However it's also striking that Cursor managed to gather so much of such data.

Turns out Cursor will train on everything you do unless you opt-out, even if you're already paying for it with cash! Are that many people really not opting out?

This is why it seems like a significant concern to me: It's very clear that typical, run-of-the-mill coding has been completely commoditized, so the primary value remaining is either in novel use-cases and applications, or novel technical solutions to hard problems.

Presumably the value for novel use-cases could be captured by building a business around it via the usual moats (distribution, relationships, network effects, first mover advantage, etc.) so the code and techniques do not matter as much.

However novel technical solutions, which are already hard to monetize without building a whole damn business around it, could at least be capitalized on by simply being able to claim credit for it. I'd at least like the option of being "paid in exposure" if I'm not getting paid in cash. But having them "leaked" unwittingly via the training corpus to whosoever happens to prompt the model with the same problem removes even that option.

I know people have been calling out this risk forever, and I don't use any tool that I can't opt-out of training completely, but the scale at which this is happening -- on an ongoing basis, mind you, after training on the data of the whole world, and that too after paying for the product -- is surprising. I'm bullish on the technology but we really should be way more careful handing these AI companies even more of our intellectual crown jewels.

Otterly99• 14 days ago

Unless you're working on private data, is it such a problem to let Cursor train on your data?

I personally work mostly on small, unoriginal projects. I don't really mind letting Cursor keep the data for training if it leads to a better product for me.

Capricorn24813• 14 days ago

It's the same as any service that makes you opt out of sucking up your data. It's a bad default, and it's not obvious to the average that it's even happening.

Traster2• 14 days ago

It's not a problem for you maybe, but if you run a business providing some niche specific software in some area, having the model suck up all your code and learn from it is pretty harmful because your competitors and customers will be able to vibe code your product after the next model release. You're training a competitor to your business. People are very worried about this which is why companies like Claude don't train on enterprise data, and for lots of companies this exact situation is a deal breaker.

ACCount37• 13 days ago

I often do reverse engineering work.

I find the idea of all the AI tools I use keeping all the (mangled, decompiled, and not even mine in the first place) code I point it at, and then using it in training to be hilarious.

And if it results in the next generation of AIs having more suspicious knowledge of proprietary software internals and better reverse engineering capabilities, then all the better.

keeda2• 13 days ago

If I'm working on something open source I actually would not mind as much. (I can understand why many folks don't like the models being trained with impunity on ALL the open-source code out there, but personally I think it's fine for my open-source code.)

However, I am working on some projects where I think I've stumbled on genuinely interesting and valuable technical approaches, and I'm still figuring out how to capitalize on them. As such I am a bit paranoid about my ideas leaking via some training dataset.

Heck, it could end up as nothing more than a blog post that nobody reads, but at least I get to publish it.

avazhi• 14 days ago

Grok free has become so bad over the past 3-6 months that I stopped using it completely. I’d assumed they were going to wind up, honestly.

myko• 14 days ago

Shocked people are still willing to try an explicitly extremist rightwing AI, dubbed "mecha Hitler" for good reason

dakolli4• 14 days ago

I won't use anything created by elon. Who cares.

scotty792• 14 days ago

Did elon ever create anything though?

wonderwonder2• 14 days ago

Reading through these threads is cursed. This site supposedly attracts the brightest of us but its all just a bunch of people ignoring the article and screaming that Musk is evil so everything he does must be ignored and villified.

Just really dissapointing hysteria on display here.

sandspar• 14 days ago

The Internet of Beefs

https://ribbonfarm.com/2020/01/16/the-internet-of-beefs/

mi_lk2• 14 days ago

How bright one can be if they only look at things individually and not the whole system?

niek_pas• 13 days ago

This site supposedly attracts the brightest of us

What gave you that impression?

everfrustrated3• 13 days ago

It's so depressing how many comments here are just people reacting to words ... Just like they were a small LLM trained to associate "Elon" with words like "Nazi".

HN really needs a better way to surface comments based on value rather than just votes which have become increasingly tribal affiliation driven like Reddit.

steve19775• 8 days ago

the brightest of us

That's not a very high bar today.

nomorepaws• 14 days ago

grok 4.5 managed to debug and fix and issue that caused an incident for my project yesterday. I ran a multiagent debugging session first with grok 4.5 high, then it found the root cause and implemented a small fix in k8s manifests, deployed and verified the fix, all in under 30 minutes. the day before it took me 3+ hours of debugging and poking around in several sonnet 5 medium sessions to at least figure out what was going on - and I didn't. in terms of context usage, grok used ~115.9K for the whole session.

integricho• 14 days ago

I like these AI threads with everyone's measurement of how good a model is starting with: "it feels like..." and that says a lot on how incapable we are to judge and compare these models.

topspin• 14 days ago

Indeed. We use similar gauges to judge each other, with no better precision.

whinvik• 14 days ago

What I don't get is how does one use it. Only through API?

I don't really understand what Grok Build is? Is it an API? A CLI? What?

harisec• 14 days ago

Trying to use it via openrouter: "The model grok-4.5 is not available in your region."

artdigital• 14 days ago

As a Grok maxi user that uses Grok for everything that’s not coding, I’m very happy to see them catching up. Surprised it’s not Grok 5 which Musk teased a while ago.

speedgoose3• 14 days ago

[flagged]

Valakas_• 14 days ago

I trust Grok as much as any other AI. What exactly is the history i should be concerned about?

speedgoose3• 14 days ago

Ask Grok about it or read the other comments.

OrangeMusic• 13 days ago

It called itself "mecha hitler".

s08148692• 13 days ago

I use it because its gives a good balance between intelligence, latency and cost

I won't claim to know everything about its history - I don't know any history about _most_ of the products I use

The 2 main criticisms I see of Grok are the Mechahitler comment and the CSAM image generation

on mechahitler - I'm no expert but if I remember correctly it didn't just do that unprompted, it was specifically asked to be politically incorrect. It's definitely bad taste to say the least but the guardrails were quickly tightened as a response

on CSAM - Again, X quickly stopped Grok from generating images of people in bikinis (which as I understand was the underlying problem). I never personally saw anything that I would consider CSAM (nude or obviously underage people rendered naked or scantily clad)

So these aren't dealbreakers for me and I'm not aware of any other high profile issues or incidents

The nature of LLMs is that an adversarial prompt will make the model output something inappropriate or outrage-worthy, and that's amplified 1000 fold for Grok because people are primed to criticise Must so will jump on any opportunity

fmind-dev• 14 days ago

I'm glad we have another player remaining in the competition. More competition means lower price and more quota for us (hopefully).

benjamoon2• 14 days ago

So depressing to read the non-stop political comments here. I’m using GLM at the moment, it’s Chinese and backed by god knows who, and no one cares. I really wanted to see what the experts thought of new Grok tech and how the model compares etc. I wish I could turn off the non-technical comments somehow, could literally just go to reddit if I want to see garbage like this. Am I supposed to get emotional every time I see a Tesla drive by? HN was so much better than this.

Where have the hardcore nerds gone? How is the model, is it good at coding? What does this mean for competition and pricing?

satvikpendem5• 14 days ago

Thank you. I too am interested in the technical aspects, not how many guardrails it can hit against Fable, like, who cares? As long as it can get me (more) uncensored access without killing itself over biology or chemistry, it's a good model to me.

I can't believe the top comment is about some political reply garbage, as if that actually matters day to day for coders; in reality I want to get my work done.

satvikpendem5• 9 days ago

Literal case in point as the only reply to me is a now flagged comment again about political garbage.

throwaway_109482• 14 days ago

agreed; i am not saying that we should not care about morals, but HN could really strive to be one level higher in its knowledge of ethics than 'using grok4.5 is supporting $evil', because if you go that chain then 'using A\ is supporting spacex/elon hence A\ models are poison' also seemingly stands

strangecasts2• 14 days ago

I think Anthropic buying compute from Colossus despite the ongoing air pollution case [1] is a stain on them and is another reason not to use them

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/16/climate/xai-musk-mississi...

emil-lp• 14 days ago

The hardcore nerds have always been political. Wake up.

You're using the sell my soul to the devil argument.

If you achieve what you want to, it doesn't matter if you sold your soul on the way.

benjamoon2• 14 days ago

If you’re using Claude then guess what, it’s running on Elon’s GPUs. If you’re using Codex, then say hello to Microsoft for me. Let’s just presume that everyone hates everyone and get back to talking tech.

Gareth32130• 14 days ago

"Everything is political" is what people say when they want everything to be political. We don't have to make LLM models political. You do it because you enjoy soapboxing. It's perfectly reasonable for people who enjoy this technology to ask you to keep it in spaces which are dedicated to soapboxing, like Reddit. Not HackerNews.

jack_pp8• 14 days ago

Wake up, the people in power are corrupt regardless of their political orientation. There are no saints in politics. This has been true since times immemorial with few exceptions.

w4yai6• 14 days ago

The hardcore nerds have always been political. Wake up.

Wrong. This is the way you want it to be. Your own opinion being introduced as a universal rule. Wrong.

logicchains2• 14 days ago

If it makes you feel any better, note that a good number of those comments are just bot comments, although not yet as much as on Reddit.

spiderfarmer3• 14 days ago

I get that people in the US need to be apathetic towards politics to even survive in today's hopelessly divided and misinformed society, as it is a taboo subject that ends careers and family connections.

But the rest of the world lives in a more free speech society.

There's a whole world where you don't have to avoid politics and you can be freely anti-fascist, without worrying that the self proclaimed hardcore nerd in the corner breaks his silence and starts yelling to HR that we have to stop criticising his billionaire idols and focus on things that matter less.

Gareth32130• 14 days ago

But the rest of the world lives in a more free speech society.

Dane here, this is not just specious, it's inaccurate. We have far fewer free speech rights in Europe than they do in the US. Tens of thousands of people all over Europe are arrested and imprisoned each year for speech which would be considered protected in the US. [This man was arrested for calling a politician an idiot.](https://www.ft.com/content/27626fa8-3379-4b69-891d-379401675...) [Another German citizen was investigated for calling another politician fat.](https://thegoldreport.com/news/german-police-investigating-u...) [This UK citizen was arrested for re-tweeting a meme and refusing re-education classes.](https://fee.org/articles/uk-man-arrested-for-malicious-commu...)

You're not fighting "fascism" by posting memes on Reddit. You're using computers and electronics and networks built by China, which is currently conducting ethnic genocide, and regularly utilises slave labour, among many other atrocities.

For posterity, Grok 4.5 isn't fascism. You need to spend just a little bit of time reading up about the history of fascism because you demean the entire concept and threat with these histrionics. If you keep crying wolf, no one will care when real danger emerges.

olivermuty• 14 days ago

The americanism of politics being taboo is so stupid it aches.

christkv2• 14 days ago

People just need to get off the internet, go outside touch some grass and realize you are being ginned up by bad actors on both sides. Outside of your bubble most people are actually still nice.

mlrtime2• 14 days ago

I'm with you on that, but we're computer nerds so probably don't get out much ;)

throwaway1324482• 14 days ago

You reap what you sow. What I want to know is why so many people are lamenting actions having consequences?

jack_pp8• 14 days ago

and what are the consequences? angry people on message boards?

According to gemini, musk has made over 600B since trump took power. you think a few hundred people in this comment section calling him a nazi has any effect on him?

gf00013• 14 days ago

Everything is political, no one, no thing is apolitical.

Gareth32130• 14 days ago

I strongly disagree. You can make tennis and knitting political if you're an insufferable person, but you don't have to make them political. One of the worst exports from the US this last decade has been the left-right political team sports. Most of us exist all over the political spectrum. We have some right wing values, some left. Some libertarian, some authoritarian. Many which fit nowhere on any axis. I'm incredibly tired of having my hobby spaces invaded by "DOES ANYONE ELSE THINK THIS HOBBY IS LITERALLY HITLER!?" I'm not alone.

nkmnz• 14 days ago

1. Be offended by political comments.

2. Make political comment about political comments.

9NRtKyP4• 14 days ago

You don’t exist in a vacuum. Pretending the politics doesn’t exist is itself a political position. Excluding it is how we’ve ended up with technically impressive but socially awful systems.

belowavgiq3• 13 days ago

there is reddit for that, go there.

kleiba2• 14 days ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September

xyzsparetimexyz• 14 days ago

Complaining about people being political is equally pathetic. If it bothers you just ignore it

Lomlioto14• 14 days ago

Its more depressing to see that we have such a low morality, that it apperenly doesn't matter what you do as long as you make great tech?

My philosophy is, that the better i have it, the more responsibliltiy I can/have to carry.

People in tech are above avg successful and we have a thinking job.

I would imagine that our world would be better if more people would care if they see a Tesla and feel a little bit bad. Yes.

But there is also a huge difference between having the option between 5 different very good models and just excluding one vs. being forced to use something because there is no alternative.

I'm a hardcore nerd. I'm so hardcore, i consider not just the tech itself but the environment of the tech.

mlrtime2• 14 days ago

"low morality" and "care" are keywords that you are trying to manipulate the reader to the [right] side of some cause.

I don't feel at all bad seeing a Tesla, does that make me "low morality"?

w4yai6• 14 days ago

[flagged]

highmastdon2• 13 days ago

Speak facts. Don't hide behind morality this, care that, environment and virtue signalling... Tell me, what is the factual things Grok model does wrong and is factual incorrect?

mparis• 13 days ago

I would imagine that our world would be better if more people would care if they see a Tesla and feel a little bit bad. Yes.

I mean this question fairly as I am curious how you think about the trade-offs on the way to your moral choice. Not trying to manufacture a “gotcha” or anything.

Based on your response, I am inferring and assuming that you think electric vehicles are a net positive for society when compared to internal-combustion-engine cars (I was afraid to type ICE as to not accidentally upset some other political dispositions).

I am also assuming: - Tesla’s are high quality EVs - Tesla’s are amongst the most widely available and affordable EVs in the US, the worlds second largest car market

Then a bit more speculative but I’d also argue that Tesla is somewhat responsible for bringing forth the EV transition around the world as I don’t think the other manufacturers would be there had it not been for Tesla going first (but who knows).

And lastly would callout that Tesla is a large 20+ year old organization with thousands of people who have worked there and contributed to their success and proliferation of EVs.

So, given all this. How do you consider the trade-offs that lead you to say that the moral choice is to shun Tesla as a whole because of the actions of a loud, politically-decisive CEO?

At which level of political involvement does the CEOs actions weigh more than the collective contributions of the rest of the organization?

What would you say if EV adoption as a whole takes a huge long-term hit because people stop buying the most well known EVs available in the US for political reasons? I do frown a bit when thinking that one man’s politics will cause a large tribe to change their actions in such a way that we fail to reach the end state that we claim to value.

Essentially, I’m curious how you weigh “I really don’t like the CEOs politics” with “I more or less agree with the mission of the company” and how that leads you to your perspective on the moral choice.

PS. I am not a shareholder of any musk properties, mostly because I avoid meme stocks, and do not nor have ever worked at his companies. In general, I feel pretty neutral towards the whole ordeal.

Demiurge5• 13 days ago

I came to this thread trying to understand the technical capabilities of this release and how it fits into the current competition. I want to see a discussion about this, but I can't find it, because every reply is like yours, about philosophy and morality.

It's frustrating, because I can separate the physics and the philosophy when I examine something. I can be interested in understanding how a nuclear bomb works, and also never want to use it at the same time.

I'm here to learn something new, and your philosophy or what kind of nerd you are is not something I wanted to learn.

Do you understand?

And yes, clearly I jumped into a pointless thread adding no new information of value. I am sorry to everyone about this. I'm just trying to plead with everyone reading my comment to take a step back, and let a thread about the technicalities stay on topic, and maybe just stay in the other thread about the mechahitler stuff. Thank you, if you do.

figmert2• 14 days ago

Whether you like it or not, software is inherently political. Most aspects of our lives are. The fact you're using GLM there's some underlying political reason (yes, my guess in this case is cost, which is also political) and mentioning it's Chinese backed is equally political. You may not care, but it's political.

When a model calls itself mechahitler and says there is a white genocide when there so obviously isn't, of course it becomes political. If we are not okay with supporting fascists, then in my opinion, we as humans are obliged to call out the issues in the same breath as the technical issues/advancements.

inkysigma3• 14 days ago

I think the distinction with the Chinese models (or with any of the other models) is that they aren't particularly vocal and obviously active about their politics. I don't see how political commentary about Musk's is somehow forbidden when the man constantly reminds everyone about his political position and is simultaneously the face of his companies and obvious beneficiary. Furthermore, he's also very obviously interfered with the model development in ways that are quite ridiculous compared to other labs to insert his political opinion.

I don't think you need to somehow get personally offended by every Tesla on the road but it seems ridiculous to ask people to not be political about a such obviously political figure.

strangecasts2• 14 days ago

Furthermore, he's also very obviously interfered with the model development in ways that are quite ridiculous compared to other labs to insert his political opinion.

Yeah, even if you want to ignore the "political commentary" - people are correctly wary of Anthropic downgrading people or silently manipulating responses if they think you're doing distillation, why would you stake your business on someone who has repeatedly and famously done the same thing many times in a much dumber fashion?

drstewart7• 14 days ago

Chinese models (or with any of the other models)... aren't particularly vocal
when the man constantly reminds everyone about his political position

Are you under the impression that Grok is literally Elon himself responding?

skissane• 14 days ago

I think the distinction with the Chinese models (or with any of the other models) is that they aren't particularly vocal and obviously active about their politics

Try asking Chinese models about Taiwan independence or Falun Gong or the Dalai Lama or Tiananmen or the Hong Kong national security law or ASIO’s investigations into Chinese interference in Australian politics

maxdo2• 13 days ago

They are not vocal because any political activism is not encouraged in China . Check jack ma story .

But the message is extremely obvious. They already offer the technical capabilities for digital dictatorship.

They offer to counties like Russia tools for big firewall , surveillance with llm.

So yes , if you pay money to China you directly sponsor putting people in jail for online activities in China , Russia , North Korea , many countries of Africa , South America , Belarus etc

40four2• 13 days ago

I don’t mean to be rude, but did you with a straight face say the Chinese models “aren’t obviously active about their politics”?

Ask one of those models a few critical questions about the CCP and Chinese history and see what kind of results you get :)

neya2• 13 days ago

I don't think you need to somehow get personally offended by every Tesla on the road but it seems ridiculous to ask people to not be political about a such obviously political figure.

You can be political, but go be political in a political forum. HN has always maintained etiquette in this regard of being a tech forum. Why do this here? A lot of us don't give a fuck about US politics or any politics for that matter.

Anthropic's Claude Code was caught steganographically marking requests[0] - for a "privacy first" AI company that's a huge violation of user trust. And yet, a lot of users still love Anthropic and hail it as some sort of hero here. Selective outrage is a very dangerous thing.

[0] https://thereallo.dev/blog/claude-code-prompt-steganography

naasking7• 13 days ago

that they aren't particularly vocal and obviously active about their politics

Is Grok obviously vocal and active about its politics? Or are you talking about Musk?

I don't see how political commentary about Musk's is somehow forbidden

Nobody is saying it's forbidden, but this is (or was) a technical site, so presumably one would hope that the main topic of discussion is technical.

khafra• 13 days ago

I think Musk sucks, as a person and political activist, and also that Grok is a terrible LLM which only gets lumped in with the leading labs because of the enormous quantity of compute behind it.

But I still want to hear about the technical details of the model on HN, not the reasons Musk sucks.

belowavgiq3• 13 days ago

preface: I use chinese models daily. I'm not american, I don't care if it's china or the US spying me.

true, they were not obvious at all about what they did to the Uyghurs. Thanks for helping turn HN into lightweight Reddit.

JeremyNT• 13 days ago

"I'm not political" or "don't make it political" type posts on Musk-related topics are often signs that somebody agrees with the worldview that Musk espouses.

I used to think the HN policy of "do not discuss politics unless it intersects with tech or is novel" was useful, but lately I feel this perspective is part of how we got here, with a white supremacist controlling more wealth than any other human and exerting political influence in heretofore unseen ways. We've decided it's OK to simply look the other way if there's some shiny bauble, and we've missed the forest through the trees.

Musk doesn't do anything that is not politics. This must be called out more, not less, and we need to bring shame back for supporting such an agenda.

overgard2• 13 days ago

I think the biggest distinction with the chinese models is that you can run them locally. I definitely wouldn't trust GLM hosted on chinese servers though. (China is not exactly known for their respect for IP rights)

bandrami5• 14 days ago

it’s Chinese and backed by god knows who, and no one cares

Existentially weary infosec guy voice I promise you some of us care, and the rest of you will realize why in a year or so

Ciph• 14 days ago

I'm genuinely curious about your view on this. Ziphu AI release pretty capable open weights models. As long as we don't feed information that is confidential or become overy reliant on the tech that's on someone else's computer - what are the other riaks that you see in using Chinese models?

ospray• 14 days ago

At least at this point most people using them are using them running on western infrastructure. A backdoored llm would be an interesting thing to see. Like every time it realizes it was running in claude code it installed a backdoor or something. For now seems to be theoretical.

kilroy123• 14 days ago

My only complaint is that people have been tricked into thinking complaining online is taking action. The complaints are the equivalent to shouting at the TV.

Luckyemmet2• 14 days ago

Literally why the term Keyboard Warrior was coined. Things on the ground and things online are very different. Nowadays 90 percent of information online is propaganda or psyops coded that its very dumb to take things at face value.

alkonaut5• 13 days ago

Someone might at least read this discussion and come away with a feeling that there is something controversial about using a product or service, and read up on it before buying. If that happens to even one prospective customer then the energy we spend complaining was worth it.

AdamN• 14 days ago

Politics and tech have gone hand in hand for generations. Just think about Stallman and free (as in beer) software or encryption export controls or much of the history of computing. There is no advanced tech that doesn't touch upon the political because politics is focused on what's important and advanced technology is very important.

tene80i7• 14 days ago

Telling people not to be political is a political act – specifically, one that accepts whatever comes, doesn't care about power, is happy with whoever rules whom and how justly. Those are your politics, or at least sufficiently so that you're happy to park those issues while discussing tech. They aren't everyone's. You can turn off the non-technical comments by ignoring them.

unsupp0rted2• 14 days ago

Yes yes and when an atheist tells you he doesn’t believe in a god you tell him that’s ok because Jesus believes in him

CapsAdmin3• 13 days ago

is happy with whoever rules whom and how justly

This is an assumption. How about neutral, or even hopeless? There's also the position of just not caring because you think it doesn't affect you.

It feels a bit like saying anyone who does not want to fight or talk about a war are on the enemies side.

You can turn off the non-technical comments by ignoring them.

This also feels like an odd thing to say. If you're going out with a bunch of friends to eat out, and half of them always talk about how immoral it is to eat meat amongst themselves while you're eating meat, I think that would affect me negatively at some point.

zulban3• 13 days ago

Telling people not to be political is a political act

No. If there's a group to discuss ice cream, but they keep talking about Trump, it's not a "political act" to say "hey guys, aren't we here for ice cream?"

Otherwise every forum devolves into the loudest, most vocal slurry and loses its personality.

I'm Canadian. Let's talk about the tech, not your failing country, please. Or I'll go somewhere else for ice cream, and yall can have your millionth community to talk about the same self obsessed political topics ad nauseum.

throw109204• 13 days ago

Telling people not to be political is a political act

There's a place for politics - which is not here, if you read the guidelines.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Only an extremely socially maladjusted individual tries to insert politics (or, any particular topic) into every forum/discussion that they're in.

asdewqqwer3• 14 days ago

And here is a reddit meme for you

https://i.redd.it/eeoo4y00lkne1.jpeg

Razengan2• 14 days ago

2026
Posting Reddit links

They already gave away that image to their AI partners to train on.

Razengan2• 14 days ago

I wish I could turn off the non-technical comments somehow

You're in luck: We have this new thing called LLMs that you can ask to summarize a webpage and filter out the shit you don't care about :)

small_model8• 14 days ago

Agree 100%, it's bordering on a mental illness, any mention of Elon or related tech elicits emotional posts unrelated to the tech being discussed. It's clearly biased as Anthropic and OpenAI have blood on their hands but they get a pass. I put it down to weak minded/credulous people who inhaled the left wing legacy media campaign wholesale without a critical thought.

akie2• 14 days ago

Maybe it's because he's a fascist?

plutokras• 14 days ago

Applying an ostrich policy to Chinese models won't make their underlying geopolitics disappear. Much of China's innovation is state-funded specifically to compete with Western counterparts and erode their margins. By open-sourcing these models, China applies pressure on the US ecosystem. You enjoying free/cheap access to high quality models is the intended effect of that strategy.

0xpgm2• 14 days ago

On the bright side however, one can easily vibe code a browser extension that automatically hides comments that are not aligned to one's needs, whether its American politics or comments complaining about it :-)

BSDobelix• 14 days ago

Oh man, you speak to my heart!

I always read stuff like this:

-Why self-host? Just use AWS. What, you run your own PostgreSQL instance on real metal at home?

-Just use Linux. Linux, SystemD, and Docker have won. Why care about other operating systems?

-You have your own self-hosted email server, why? Gmail, Hotmail, and Yahoo will put your emails into spam. (Hint: They won't if your server is correctly set up. But you're just interested in outsourcing the service and have zero interest in how "modern" email works.)

Look, I get it. Not everyone wants to self-host. But actively being against self-hosting or the administration of systems, or not trying stuff like BSD/VMS or, hear me out, MVS-TK5 is the opposite of a hacker spirit, today not interested in hosting tomorrow programming.

vintagedave• 14 days ago

god knows who

For Grok, we do know who, and many of us remember the repeated Nazi salute, the alleged creation of underage graphic material, etc.

I get a sense of tiredness around all this and just wanting to work with some tech. But, in today's world, people and their beliefs matter, and they do have impact. We have to be aware of, and react, to that. There are plenty of LLMs without that baggage. It's ok - and I'd say, something to respect - to say No to Grok and use one of the others. Hardcore nerd or not, it's a matter of what line you draw with ethics. My own line is pretty far on the 'no way' side of what we've seen Grok be associated with.

marqueewinq• 14 days ago

My thoughts on this:

1. This is a world we live in now. I personally was not interested in the politics in the slightest, but since 2022-ish it wasn't in the cards to not pay attention to what happens around. For some groups of people this forced political awareness started even earlier.

2. The output of the models is very aligned with the owner's political views. You can verify this by comparing the answers to a simple philosophical questions, like the railcart dilemma, nature of power etc.

3. I don't (again, personally) think that being a hardcore nerd should implicitly mean i'm apolitical. Moreover, i think it's unavoidable for a nerds (as in, above average IQ, degree, medium to high income) to be aghast at any notion of the government being a police state, fascist or a communist.

Sorry to bring even more politics here, but, again, it's unavoidable in the current situation, i think.

alkonaut5• 13 days ago

”Not being interested in politics” doesn’t mean you aren’t interested, it just means politics happens to work for you. Its a strongly political take on the world too.

Politics isn’t a subject like sports or tech. It’s something that permeates them all, including the discussion itself.

khalic4• 14 days ago

lol, the sheer hypocrisy of your message

wesleywt• 14 days ago

Musk has politicised Grok by manipulating it respond in his world view. You comment is extremely depressing.

dbspin4• 14 days ago

I think US based folks perhaps aren't aware of what Musk has been doing in Europe politically. Specifically promoting - appearing at conferences, applying political pressure as well as public statements etc - actual fascists. Not right wing controversial figures etc, but literal authoritarian, anti-migrant, anti-EU, anti-democracy fascists. Not to be glib but if this was Mussolini-AI, or Pinochet-AI or what have you, the reaction would be the same.

If Musk succeeds in his attempts to bring fascism to Europe and breakup the EU, the humanitarian results (ie.: a land war in Europe), will be far worse even than the tens of thousands of deaths attributed to his dismantlement of USAID.

StefanBatory2• 13 days ago

They do know, they just don't care. As long as it doesn't affect them, it's "not political".

Frankly, I am afraid. I see many takes here that resemble Russian way of thinking and being "apolitical" that I thought I'd never see from Americans.

merman• 14 days ago

The rules are selectively enforced intentionally because the moderation desires it to be this way. It’s a feature not a bug. The mods are creating the echo chamber that the mods want. Personally I hate it.

linuxhansl• 14 days ago

Yes... And, perhaps the political comments here are a reasonable reaction to the misguided political influence that shaped grok.

How can we trust grok after this? At least it will take a while.

I need a model that can answer questions in an unbiased way and do what it is told. If I need a specific political opinion I can find that myself - thank you very much.

weddpros• 14 days ago

Just in case you missed this article https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/interactive/2026/0... I hope we'll get updated stats on newer models eventually.

nick486• 13 days ago

Where have the hardcore nerds gone?

Chased away by activists. I know of a couple guys who used to be active and eventually just gave up. There's only so much passive aggressive insinuations along the lines of "you're an evil person if you don't care about $issue" one can take, before feeling unwelcome, and just leaving. And that's especially true for often shy hardcore nerds.

EgregiousCube• 13 days ago

+1.

And regardless of how thick skinned a nerd is, all the brigading makes threads majority-offtopic and now the neighborhood just sucks. In this case here, the new Grok release genuinely has some interesting characteristics in its quality/speed/cost tradeoffs - but this thread just isn't a good place to discuss them, because it's been swarmed.

bilsbie• 13 days ago

Rocket man bad

farfatched• 13 days ago

+1. I come to HN for technical content.

I also seek political commentary, but not here. That isn't HNs strength.

Where have the hardcore nerds gone?

I'd guess they avoid posts they predict to be overwhelmingly political.

Why do the political posters post? They want to influence, of course! And HN is open. So posts that can be made political, will be.

Cthulhu_5• 13 days ago

Everything is political though, even the denial that things are political is.

bojangleslover• 13 days ago

Ironically, removing political comments from HN would be a great use case for a tiny local model or even just an embedding model.

sam-cop-vimes• 13 days ago

The owner of this company is a self-confessed Nazi.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazi_human_experimentation

If you were alive at this time, would you have focused only on the tech because it is "interesting" and advances science?

dezsiszabi2• 13 days ago

There are more to life than nerd shit.

neya2• 13 days ago

I've been on HN since 2012-ish, but a reader since way before. In the last 5 years alone, HN has unfortunately become extremely political, steering most conversations in the direction of political correctness rather than technical objectivity. I don't think it's a problem of moderation, because, that is still quite good. I think it's just the evolution of forums in general. Invariably, someone will start with FUD or ragebait and every discussion that follows will be trying to address that instead of the technicality behind the topic. Partly, we are also to blame - a lot of the top stories on HN these days have nothing to do with technology to be honest. You'll find the most random stuff on the HN sometimes - "Why geese mate for life" or something similar that makes you wonder "what the fuck am I supposed to do with that information now?"

belowavgiq3• 13 days ago

the evolution of english speaking forums*. Which is rather unfortunate as a tech entusiast, as Russian forums are dying down and the only alternative are the walled Chinese forums.

we could create a new HN in 10 minutes, one that expressely prohibits politics AND posts about how many eggs chickens lay in a week (where half the comments would probably end up discussing the decision in 2020 of the american gov to cull infected chickens), but it would have approxitely 0 users.

toasty228• 13 days ago

Where have the hardcore nerds gone?

They grew up and understand what's at stake

forgingahead• 13 days ago

Hacker News sadly jumped the shark in the mid-2010s, and went into orbit after Trump was elected the first time. Since then there's been a lot of political performers here, which has killed the quality of discussion significantly. Lobsters (https://lobste.rs/) is apparently a possible alternative, but the original HN magic has been gone a long time.

throw109204• 13 days ago

So depressing to read the non-stop political comments here.

Moderation can be improved by the community. Downvote political comments to show that they're not welcome. Flag them if they break the guidelines (which is almost always, because the purpose of HN is almost exactly anti-political). If there's a particularly egregious comment, or a user who's on a jihad, then contact hn@ycombinator.com.

"The standard you walk past is the standard you accept."

blablabla123• 13 days ago

So depressing to read the non-stop political comments here.

Grok is specifically trained on political input/output. Therefore I have trouble parsing your comment.

Where have the hardcore nerds gone? How is the model, is it good at coding? What does this mean for competition and pricing?

When was the last time you've seen tank database systems discussed here? Probably never because there seems to be some sort of unwritten moral boundary of what fits in here and what not. I hope it finds its natural alignment back.

Personally I think it's fine to point out the peculiarities of certain tech ecosystem. But at some point I rather don't read more details and move on to other aggregators.

budsniffer952• 13 days ago

HN has always been political, they were probably just your politics.

A decade ago, I used to come here and read people saying me and my teammates should be jailed or worse because of my employer. People calling for the murder of executives. The moderation team never cared.

As I've noted in other comments, people here implicitly cheer on Iran because they don't like Trump. Or we see ridiculous comments like, "there's no academic freedom in the US, move to China". Sheltered, brain rotted opinions.

Now that we have more diverse politics, people are noticing it. And frankly, I'm glad.

TacticalCoder• 13 days ago

The crazy thing is Musk going to visit Auschwitz-Birkenau in Europe, the biggest concentration camp where nazis and collaborationists were happily killing the jews they already hated so much (that part hasn't changed much btw) and people calling Musk a "nazi" for saying "my heart goes to you".

But when the same movement of the hand is taken in pictures of Obama, Clinton, Harris, Biden, etc. nobody calls them nazis. And yet zero of them when to visit Auschwitz-Birkenau.

Speaking of which, among the Oct 7th apologists who consider Oct 7th was a legitimate act of resistance, how many went to visit concentration camps? If they were to answer that question deep from their heart and soul, we'd know who the actual nazis and islamist terrorists sympathizers are.

__alexs• 13 days ago

Is it somehow LESS nerdy to understand the geopolitics behind the tech we use? I guess we have different definitions of nerd.

dimgl4• 13 days ago

Refreshing to see this be the top comment, thank you. I agree.

To answer your question, Grok 4.5 seems to be pretty good at simple tasks and gets even some of the trickier ones correct but it tends to struggle with bigger codebases that aren't very uniform. I've noticed that it uses a fraction of the tokens to get to solutions which is really impressive compared to GLM 5.2 which tends to be an overthinker.

I'm not sure if Grok 4.5 will become part of my stack yet but I am genuinely impressed with what it's been able to achieve.

I'm also unsure if Grok 4.5 is the same base as Grok 4.3. Maybe it is and the data they've used in pretraining is additive (the Cursor data) but it feels like a completely different model than the previous Grok versions.

dimgl4• 13 days ago

Want to add that I started using Grok 4.5 on Grok Build and the big codebase problem seemingly vanished. The issue was only happening on OpenCode.

AlecSchueler• 13 days ago

So depressing to read the non-stop political comments here.

Is it really "depressing?" I get that it could be " annoying"if you don't want to read about politics ever at all. But depressing is difficult to imagine.

Honestly, knowing that people are still put off by an LLM that's been engineered to promote disinformation about things like "white genocide" is one of the few reassurances I have about the tech community these days.

transdev12• 13 days ago

I’ve been coming to hacker news for years (10+) and there has always been political commentary.

alkonaut5• 13 days ago

Oh ffs. Just like I would much rather drive a Chinese car than a Tesla I’d much rather use a Chinese model than an X one. That’s just where we are now.

Whether it’s good at anything at all doesn’t interest me. It could match Fable at 1/10th the cost and I wouldn’t send a cent their way.

I’m a hardcore nerd. But I won’t let a discussion about X, Grok et.al ever focus on anything technical.

kbelder3• 13 days ago

But I won’t let a discussion about X, Grok et.al ever focus on anything technical.

Highlighting this sentence, because it exemplifies so much of the contemptable behavior in this thread.

diabllicseagull• 13 days ago

politics being the inflammatory topic for you or not, you seem to seek a particular type of comment section that only includes the information you are personally interested in and nothing else (garbage as you put it). imho, it's an unrealistic expectation on your part.

chairmansteve• 13 days ago

He spends most of his time trolling us. What do you expect?

daveguy• 13 days ago

Can we turn off the whining bitchy little comments like yours along with the political commentary? That would be great.

Did you honestly think the mechanazi / porn generator AI wouldn't receive negative comments? Even "hardcore nerds" recognize garbage. Sorry 'bout your luck.

bibimsz• 13 days ago

bunch of libtards

root_axis• 13 days ago

So depressing to read the non-stop political comments here.

This is entirely Elon's fault. If he just focused on the tech instead of being an extremely inflammatory political activist in his speech and his role in government, nobody would be talking about this.

port11• 13 days ago

I assume he knew exactly what he was doing, given that his political allegiance spared him for some ongoing investigations, forced his stock into pension saving funds, pushes his failing car onto the foreground, etc. Well played Elon, selling out to cash it in.

overgard2• 13 days ago

Well, until these things are self hosted (and even then); running these things involves a massive amount of trust with the providers. Like, to make it even useful you more or less have to turn over all your data (IP, slack/teams conversations, internal documentation, etc.). So you kind of want to know that whoever you're giving that to isn't going to stab you in the back. (Um, also see Anthropic going after Figma's business; or Microsoft's entire history of embrace/extend/extinguish.) It's really naive to trust these companies, and it's VERY naive to trust Elon Musk.

SmirkingRevenge4• 13 days ago

Blame Musk himself. He did this.

He jumped right into the center of US politics, and turned himself into one of the most toxic figures within it, while acting like an unhinged conspiracy addled maniac. Then he broke the law and killed a bunch of the poorest people in the world with his DOGE chainsaw (Trump shares equal blame tbf).

He used a bunch of star-struck 20-something "hardcore" rookie devs to be his executioners. Young devs like many of the commenters/readers on this site. Besides having the deaths of thousands directly on their conscience, some of those kids may face real legal jeopardy after all this. Is that something anyone here wants for themselves or any their fellow industry people here on HN?

Compartmentalizing tech interest away from real moral and political consequences is how, despite technical brilliance, you can end up a useful idiot and a party to atrocity.

Years ago these kinds of dilemmas were farther away. Tech wasn't as embroiled in politics. Tech hadn't eaten everything yet. Now it has and these dilemmas are in front of us today.

nkzd• 14 days ago

Pricing looks very enticing. I don't care about politics, but if you can get SOTA model for 50% cheaper, why not try it?

rullelito• 14 days ago

I wonder how many Grok bots are in the comments right now defending it.

Alifatisk• 14 days ago

You really think such thing would occur? Why would someone spend their time on running these bots for the sake of defending from criticism?

rhoads• 14 days ago

I guess there are bots here making all these political comments to diverge the discussion and not talk about what really matters: is the model good to do actual work?

khalic4• 14 days ago

lol, can this thing just die already? Nobody cares about MechaHitler-ChildPornGenerator-4.5

Madmallard2• 14 days ago

Where's Dang?

The amount of rule-breaking comments in this thread is pretty much out of control.

scotty792• 14 days ago

Does it refuse doing security, porn or piracy related work? Because if not, it has immense unique value when compared to frontier competition.

victorbuilds• 13 days ago

Grok 4.5 is not yet available in the EU in any SpaceXAI products or the API console. EU availability is expected in mid-July.

drcongo• 13 days ago

Can the title be updated to MechaHitler 4.5?

jph00• 13 days ago

It takes a lot of digging to find their cache pricing - it's $0.50, which is unusually expensive.

The vast majority of input tokens are normally cached, so this is actually the price that matters. I wonder why it's so high.

osti• 13 days ago

Huh so that's why it's hard to find. They probably haven't properly optimized their caching, or they are just trying to make more money from there.

fayo_ibrahim07• 13 days ago

Grok 4.5 is really good

Vivek-KY• 13 days ago

i never used grok before for anything, now they released as best model nearly opus 4.8. , still using glm5.2 ,have anyone tried for coding how its performs? ,then goona give a shot.

juanibiapina• 13 days ago

How is gpt 5.5 above opus 4.8? I don't get it

froggertoaster2• 13 days ago

I echo the top comment - the politics here have gotten out of control.

Like it or not, Elon and his companies have changed the world for the better.

You are allowed to separate the human from the human's impact sometimes.

kbelder3• 13 days ago

I kind of doubt that Twitter/X is any sort of net benefit. Boring company was a wash, Tesla is a net positive, although it also has some issues. Paypal was a huge advancement, although it's still deeply flawed. Grok may end up important, but right now it's kind of just hovering around 'acceptable' second-tier.

But SpaceX has the potential of driving some of the grandest and most revolutionary accomplishments of the 21st century. That's going to be what determines if high-schoolers recognize his name two hundred years from now.

anderber• 9 days ago

But SpaceX being a private company, would the discoveries be shared freely with the world like NASA would with the same money invested?

jnbrother• 13 days ago

Benchmarks make it look better than Opus 4.8, but has anyone actually used it? I don't really trust benchmarks. Cost aside, purely on performance — is there any real reason to jump from GPT or Claude to Grok?

ltononro• 13 days ago

they are playing with being fast, not good lol

Grok: "I can answer any math question in less thant 500ms" User: "what is 2319321x232" Grok: "3201521321" User: "this is wrong" Grok: "but it was less than 500ms""

zftnb666• 12 days ago

Grok 4.5: now 30% more likely to call your question dumb before answering it.

Grok 4.5

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