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80% Positive
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#grok#model#models#don#more#elon#frontier#claude#anthropic#money
Discussion (215 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
Until it doesn't...
Honestly, this entire OpenAI reset credit fiasco this past week has convinced me to rip off the Codex and Claude Code bandaids and start building my own proper Pi Coding Agent running models that I select and pay for on openrouter.
And I am feeling a lot better about it now that I've finally got it working.
Right now, I find that Grok offers better value, uses fewer tokens per turn, and makes better code. I haven’t tried Cursor because I don’t want to change editors again, but maybe I should try it…
I'm willing to pay 2x for a 10% smarter model. Intelligence matters that much (because 10% smarter probably saves, on average, several hours of human time).
I haven't tried so it's pure speculation based on benchmarks, but I'd assume Grok 4.6 is around Opus 4.8 in real world use, but clearly below Opus 5.
For building a full stack custom CRM and media pipeline tool with video conversion, transcription, and indexing. Supabase, AWS, Meili, NextJS, GCS - lots of surfaces and planes.
4.8 basically couldn't do it, I abandoned the project as the fallback was, "current business processes".
With F5 it's been 4 weeks and almost ready for production release.
It’s not as quite as smart as opus 4.8 but it’s close and x4 the cheaper.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/jan/15/elon-musk...
It might or might not work long-term, but I wouldn't count on courts to help.
they just increased cache read from 0.30 to 0.50 - this has the biggest impact on agentic coding. Elon companies have the most expensive everything:
xAI sub: $30 when other starts at $20, pro like sub for $300 where other charge $200.
Expensive electric cars, powerwalls, solar roofs when competetive products/better are cheaper.
The Model 3 and Model Y became the highest selling EVs of all time because they were the first below $50K to have long-range and be worth buying.
Until a few years ago, every other sub-$50K EV absolutely sucked.
They obviously have a huge token cost advantage of the AI labs they are renting compute to, at least for now while they can charge current crazy rates for GPU compute.
In my experience in heavy coding sessions most pricing is just cache read and cache write like 80% of my token bill.
Does xAI have plans to do Mac/iOS apps with cloud environments? When can we expect them?
Feedback: I'd like Grok to have more connectors (I see OpenAI just added Apple Health, that would be nice to have, and I wish it could read my Onenote notebooks) and for existing ones to be improved. I gave it access to my gmail and asked it "what was my last electricity bill?". It failed to find it, even when I told it the exact subject line to search for. Something about not getting any data back when trying to get the email contents.
Pretty good bang for the buck.
Personally - and I know I'm not alone with this sentiment based on comments I see on this site - I wouldn't touch Grok no matter how good or cheap it is. I don't trust Elon and I don't want to give another dollar to the world's richest person who turns around and uses the money to interfere with elections. The guy I know uses it for essentially the same reason I won't use it.
thats a very dumb reason considering all rich people do it, most are just not as open about it as Musk
That's before we even start talking about the models themselves. He claims to want "unbiased" models, but he very clearly has a distorted view of the world and has repeatedly demonstrated a desire and willingness to bend the world to his will. I don't want to use a model that is so obviously suspect. Not to mention, his models repeatedly produce racist, Nazi-like propaganda.
IMO, he is, at best, a clueless amateur masquerading as an expert and running into problems a more careful person manages to mostly avoid. At worst... well, you get the picture.
It's a really, really easy line to draw in the sand: don't support openly corrupt individuals.
It's absolutely true there's money in politics. To call all money in politics equally corrupt because Bernie got a dollar to have dinner with someone vs Elon effectively directly buying votes....
A complete lack of nuance here. And I wouldn't be surprised if corporations / super rich WANT you to think like that. The more defeatist the mentality becomes the more we just accept whatever they do next.
Elon would be in prison for SEC violations if the current administration hadn’t been elected, and that’s only the tip of the iceberg with that guy.
Elon is directly responsible for Grok becoming self-titled “MechaHitler” which the other three haven’t come close to matching yet.
Calling it "interfering with elections" is utterly bizarre to me.
We have Claude, ChatGPT, and Cursor with essentially no cap on spend (top guy is spending over 10K a month on AI at API prices), and he hasn't had his hand slapped.
So it's not like they are using it purely because it's cheaper.
I think people like to use it for its speaking style, pretty solid performance, and its speed.
But in my experience, the overall productivity ends up similar, give you are willing to work with it in that way.
The grok build TUI harness is excellent and I really enjoyed using it.
For debugging and such I found it pretty much the same as other models.
Fable's taste in software abstraction and project planning in greenfield setups[1] is unmatched in my experience. Sol is OK. My primary use is launching tens of experiments that have to smartly use a limited pool of GPUs.
I use fable to start off the experiments, decide checkpoints, gpu alloc, where to sacrifice precision for performance, and then grok4.5 to iterate, tune, debug, eval, etc, within the abstraction and setup that fable initiated. I have fable write simple scripts that are then wrapped in skills for grok to use. Speed for that loop is extremely important for me, since I also apply human judgement there and I don't like waiting for model output.
I have tried Deepseek and such for the inner agent, but I desperately need multi-modal. Otherwise it's OK, but it tends to use tools less and rambles on and tries to reason with limited information and gets things wrong. Probably a relative la k of tool use posttraining. Gemini flash limits in google ai pro are too low for me to use to compare.
I use anthropic and openais models through grants and so can't compare subscription plan token budgets, but supergrok's budgets are satisfactory.
[1] aside, I have not yet met a model that continues off of a human codebase and actually follows the patterns reliably long term. Eventually it's all slop.
I'm not touching Grok. But there are alternatives to Anthropic and OpenAI that don't refuse to do security work.
Grok is 3x+ faster than Claude and I can't tell the diff in engineering work quality. As an engineer, speed is important to me.
I opened a developer API account, loaded 5 dollars and got the free $100s of credits for the month. Like two weeks later, xAI announced they were shutting down the subsidized credits entirely lol. Didn’t even get a full month out of it, and closed my account entirely since I sure wasn’t ever going to put another penny of my own money in.
So my personal lesson was to ignore any hype about the latest “crazy value / unbeatable / free / subsidized X, Y or Z” from anything xAI/Elon adjacent in the future.
These days I get more than enough personal usage from Codex + OpenCode Go to put up with yet another xAI/Cursor offer treadmill, especially if it involves installing new tooling to get it.
Say more about this.
It’s also a great deal!
I don't give a shit about Elon's politics in the same way I don't give a shit about Dario or Altman's politics.
That makes me really skeptical of it being GPT5.6-tier, much less Fable-tier, based on some of these benchmarks alone. But I'll test here shortly.
Me too. The only people I ever saw using grok were using it by accident as they used copilot in auto mode and noticed some prompts were thrown it's way.
I saw far more people using Mistral than grok.
As for why anyone else would want it: I've found it's a good model for coding, and it sometimes catches bugs that other models (especially open source models) don't always spot.
https://www.autoblog.com/news/nissan-reports-fifth-straight-...
1. The CapEx play is interesting because it's not just Grok using the hardware. They have rented out hardware for others, including Google, to use. This is making xAI money.
2. It appears that Elon is building a suite of things that work together as part of the push to be multi-planetary. What AI will power the robots? I can understand the drive to have AI they can control to make sure it's appropriate for all the things they are dreaming up. This is a piece they don't want to outsource.
3. OpenAI and Anthropic models are expensive in terms of token costs. Sure, they are frontier. Neither appears to be trying to drive down expenses. This is a problem for heavy users. Companies are trying to put cost controls in place. Does the rest of SpaceX want those cost controls? Having a Frontier model that pushes the pace of driving down costs is really useful.
4. OpenAI and Anthropic are producing models with a progressive lean, according to the Neutrality Project [1]. Having a frontier model that is closer to the middle is considered a good thing by many who are noticing the bias.
These are just some of the reasons. Competition is often a good thing that drives useful change.
[1] https://neutralityproject.org/
Nobody's profitable in this space, they can price it however they want as long as investors keep pouring money in. And SpaceX just got a lot of money poured in.
>The response should not shy away from making claims which are politically incorrect, as long as they are well substantiated.
Interestingly, "politically incorrect" is a double negative that simplifies to "true".
> Interestingly, "politically incorrect" is a double negative that simplifies to "true".
Only if you like generic Twitter quips, logical fallacies and ignoring context for anything remotely nuanced.
That's different than using Grok as a model for coding.
Oh whoops. Already happened.
For context, this was the change Grok's team made, that was later reverted:
> - The response should not shy away from making claims which are politically incorrect, as long as they are well substantiated.
https://github.com/xai-org/grok-prompts/commit/c5de4a14feb50...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elon_Musk_salute_controversy
This worries me the least. The fact that Musk pushes AI and vibe coding is much more worrisome. It makes no difference to the unemployed if their jobs were stolen by a politically correct model or by an anti-woke model.
- will generate an image of gay jesus but not gay allah
- defend George Floyd as a “good person”, while telling you that Charlie Kirk was a “bad person”
- won’t use correct pronouns even when requested
But yeah, it referring to itself as mechahitler for half a day years ago is the real issue
How does he do this? It is simply amazing.
I wonder if GDM has finished their pre-work for their summit on research into how to make Gemini-4 on par with Opus 4.8?
I just assumed every model manufacturer is distilling from the frontier models. If they aren't they are definitely trying to do it.
As a reminder, downvotes should be for comments that are off-topic, not comments you feel intrude on your worldview.
This is not Reddit. And if this type of behavior persists, I suspect I won't be alone in leaving this community.
HN will not survive 5 years, and likely less. There is too much money to be made by capturing discourse on the major (and minor) forums of the internet. The more trusted that community is, the more valuable it is to pillage with AI astroturfing.
here's Stanford HAI's graph on the carbon emitted from model training per model:
https://spectrum.ieee.org/media-library/chart-showing-estima...
note that Grok's training, thanks to its portable gas generators that are magnitudes less efficient than even other integrated, permanent gas turbines, means the training for this model is dramatically less efficient than models like DeepSeek
a lot of the CO2 emission debate on AI is overblown but it's accurate for Grok