Cursor, since Grok 4.5, has had an incredible deal for frontier level models, their subscription now goes way further than OpenAI or Anthropic. Even on their lower tier plans you can use a lot tokens on their of their first party models (Grok and Composer) and not really run out comparatively. Combine them with an orchestrator and implementor type setup and it goes even further.
Can you explain what you mean? These days courtesy of an addictive reset game OpenAI is playing, I can't find anything with frontier intelligence that's more cost efficient...
If they didn’t constantly reset, they’d be about the same as Anthropic.
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…
Not that I know of. AA's token use metrics (mentioned in this article) are indicative, however. They say explicitly here that the Grok models are notably token efficient. This is my experience.
I believe they are the only western provider that has Kimi K3 on a subscription plan today as well. I would love to ditch Anthropic and be on Kimi if there were a subsidized plan like that with ZDR
I’d love a subsidized Kimi subscription too. The official Kimi subscription is always out of stock and doesn’t have great limits, while the K3 allotments on OpenCode and Cursor don’t seem to last very long either.
They don't do request based pricing anymore. Its just token based (1 credit = $0.01) plus some bonus credit based on which plan you subscribe. So for example a $39 plan get $70 of credits.
Yeah, I know, but "credit" translates differently because the models bill at different rates, which gets turned into "multipliers" (or at least, it did).
Have they converted entirely to transparent API rates + base allocation now? One of the reasons I left was that if I was going to be billed at API rates anyway, I'd just rather use the APIs. The value proposition still sucks for individuals now, when the other major providers are bundling at below-API rates.
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).
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.
I have. He was using it due to philosophical reasons the same way many people have philosophical reasons for avoiding it. I don't know how many people are like that, but it's not exactly where you want to position your product if you're a business.
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.
Versus Sam,Dario or the CCP? Im all for running local models but im sor far from being able to pay for a large model hardware setup. My strix halo box is like driving a beaten up vespa when the frontier models are Ferraris.
I probably have the same strix halo box as you. It's slow, although mostly tolerable, but even 128 GB isn't enough to run good models. Where that leaves us is giving money to somebody to get access to frontier models. I don't like any of those guys either, but some appear worse than others. FWIW, I mostly use Anthropic models. And CCP and their distilled models notwithstanding, at least they release open weight models at a lower cost. It's not like any American company can claim the higher ground these days anyway, especially when they trained their models on pirated content and trash our neighborhoods with their datacenters.
> the world's richest person who turns around and uses the money to interfere with elections.
I'm no Elon fanboy but to be fair a lot of the richest people in the world heavily fund and endorse political candidates, parties, PACs, lobbyists, etc across the political spectrum. Elon was just far more public about it and it was covered much more.
This statement doesn't go far enough given Elon's direct and hands-on involvement with DOGE and the 2024 elections. Very few of the richest people of the world are personally entangled in meddling with government agencies directly, for example.
Elon Musk has actively endorsed the right wing extremist party in Germany.
The one that often has trouble running it's events as businesses try to avoid serving them. And which has prominent members that the secret service considers definitely fascist.
Musk has gone a long way beyond simply being the standard rich person lobbying for their own interests, and has moved into actively promoting people that are trying to tear down liberal democracy.
> MADISON, Wis. (AP) — Billionaire Elon Musk likely broke Wisconsin law when he promised to hand out $1 million checks to voters in the 2025 state Supreme Court election, a bipartisan panel has found.
> The Wisconsin Elections Commission last week referred two complaints to the Brown County district attorney’s office, which can choose to bring criminal charges over violating the state law against election bribery. Prosecutors have 40 days to report back to the commission.
Journalism has gone wild these days. He's already been sued and won a couple times. An for what? Encouraging people just to vote (he did not say which way). It's going to backfire hard for all the ad spend by MTV, Meta, and Google who also spend lots of money to encourage certain demographics to vote.
Idk I just don't like the richest man on planet and the owner of the "town square of the internet" to post fake news blatantly to promote hate against a group of people.
There's a big difference between quiet donations to a PAC - not that that's good either - and what Elon did. He literally paid for votes, likely in violation of the law. He poured more money into U.S. elections than anyone has before. He and Trump both made strange, cryptic statements about Elon's role in Pennsylvania with the voting machines that has caused people to reasonably wonder if they somehow manipulated the election. Whether he did or not, the innuendo alone is not ok. Then he did what he did in Germany. Don't even get me started on DOGE or his Starlink shenanigans in Ukraine.
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.
"Everyone's doing it" presented with no evidence is just you trying to make yourself feel better for:
- using from
- driving a Tesla
- voting for Trump
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.
A bunch of SWEs at my work use it as their primary model.
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.
It's much faster, so if you're not doing something cutting-edge, or you're doing the planning yourself and just using the LLM for implementation, the speed benefit outweighs the extra smarts of Fable/Opus5/Sol.
I had a security incident the other day and Grok was the only model that would help. Claude and GPT refused on ethical grounds and only gave general advice. In an emergency, I'd only trust Grok. However, that's the only time I used Grok for coding (since Opus 4.8 it would take a lot to get me to switch away from Anthropic)
The "safety" guardrails in Anthropic and OpenAI models are becoming a noticeable problem for security work. And, the reason I'm keeping my Kimi subscription even though it's not a great deal; Kimi subscriptions are quite stingy for the price, but K3 will do vulnerability analysis and make a PoC without requiring you to be on the approved list of Fortune 500 or government entities that have access to Mythos or Daybreak.
I'm not touching Grok. But there are alternatives to Anthropic and OpenAI that don't refuse to do security work.
I use. I used to be a Claude user. Since trying Grok 4.5 and especially Grok 4.6, I don't want to go back to Claude any more (I have early access to 4.6).
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.
An hour in, I've been running four terminals full bore on my $20/mo Grok sub and I'm at 9% for the week. Codex or Claude would easily have hit 5-hour or weekly limits.
I'm really not burning tokens fast enough. I use Claude a lot, daily, and have yet to hit my a ceiling with my Max/100 subscription.
Maybe because I like to verify its outputs and spend a lot of time iterating to get better outcomes. Presumably if I just let it "do its thing" I'd burn more tokens and "get more done" but I'd lose my grasp on what's in the code base.
When you make politics a big part of your identity, you can’t help but to inject it everywhere. It’s glaringly weird and annoying for those of us who are apathetic and just want to talk about tech, but that’s how it has been for a few years.
It's not virtue signaling. People are allowed to have morals. And they are allowed to act in ways that align with those moral beliefs.
> do you use Apple equipment despite Apple’s use of Chinese slave labor?
If someone said they didn't buy Apple because of this, I'd support them in that too.
People. Are. Complicated. We're allowed to have beliefs, we're allowed to have beliefs that aren't internally consistent. You gotta get over the idea that people aren't genuine believers in their beliefs.
The issue is that this is supposed to be a tech discussion forum and many of us don’t want to be repeatedly beaten over the head with other people’s politics. Plenty of other places to be political, we just wish this wasn’t one of them.
There's always been "politics" embedded in this tech discussion forum. Generally you shouldn't discuss politics for politics sake, but if someone's politics are intersecting with their product (which is Musk's entire MO), of course people will have thoughts.
Besides, if Musk embeds his politics into everything he does, it's fair game to discuss his merits in that arena.
It's fine to make your own choices about what you want to spend your money on. But it gets old to constantly have actual technical discussion drowned out by the same repetitive low-effort comments in every single post. I want to hear about what people have used Grok for, how it compares to other models, what it's not good at, etc., without having to wade through all the predictable "Elon bad" comments.
@dang - feature request for HN: have a "Thunderdome" section for the off-topic political commentary on the site, and once enough people flag something for being political, it gets detached and moved to the Thunderdome. People can let off steam there and the rest of us can have a nice clean place to read about tech.
> The issue is that this is supposed to be a tech discussion forum and many of us don’t want to be repeatedly beaten over the head with other people’s politics.
Maybe that wouldn’t be a problem if Elon Musk would lay off the ketamine and shut his fucking mouth sometime. But instead he spends all day tweeting about how anyone he doesn’t like is a “traitor to western civilization” and calling for executions.
Why is it surprising that people are reacting to his words and actions? You want the politics to go away, get a CEO that doesn’t make everything political.
I can respect if you say you hate their guts. Everyone has their worldview. But over moral or ethical stand? You don't have any if you're using Chinese models, or fly Middle East airlines, or countless of other products. Don't delude yourself.
once my codex/claude weekly limit was gone, i gave it a try. It was surprisingly good, not dumb in any way, and fast. I now require it as a part of 3-of-3 quorum with any codebase change.
Yeah, sounds a bit like a selection bias, i.e. the people who managed to survive the firings by DOGE and the current admin are the kind of people who might prefer Grok.
I'm only being forced to use it at $WORK since some people overran their Cursor bill, so everyone gets Cursor Auto enabled by default which routes to Grok 4.5.
Back in the day (in AI time) GitHub Copilot had Grok on the 0 github-token cost and I found it to be the best of the 0 github-token models for when my budget was out. Then they went to a multiplier that was not competitive and I haven't look back again. Been meaning too, but for personal use, Deepseek flash is so cheap I haven't felt like spending money elsewhere.
I've tried it on my "let's run every model in parallel and see which finds more edge cases" type of tasks, and Grok 4.5 was really behind Opus/ChatGPT but ahead of Gemini - despite having a strong showing on benchmarks.
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.
> I have never met a single human being who uses Grok for coding
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.
Can someone explain to me what's the point of Grok anymore? I don't understand why we need a third or fourth closed frontier model. It is clear that chatGPT has locked down the consumer play, and may be Gemini is there. Claude has enterprise locked up, followed by chatGPT and Gemini. Enterprise switching costs are notoriously high, and even if they switch, they have chatGPT or Gemini to choose from. Beyond that, you have a vast array of open source models (DeepSeek, Kimi, and now Meta's Spark and Glimmer). So, why would anyone need a third or fourth frontier model and why would SpaceX spends billions in CapEx for a very small market share
I assume SpaceX does it because they figure it's a good source of revenue, and it means they can keep another thing in-house instead of relying on Anthropic or OpenAI for their AI needs.
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.
There are a few reasons people will be interested...
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.
I sense a lot of condescension and lack of business acumen so I won't spend time writing it up, why don't you just ask your favorite AI or do some basic google searches? Elon was extremely upfront about the philosophical reasons for it, ever since he cofounded OpenAI.
Competition keeps service quality high and pricing low - even if you aren't using Grok, the mere existence of Grok keeps pricing for whatever provider you use lower, faster, and more reliable.
That's fair. But my point is from a business POV, why would SpaceX want to invests hundreds of billions of CapEx on a third or fourth frontier model, which cannot compete with chatGPT and claude on the high end, and getting squeezed by open weight models on the low end
Inference switching costs aren't high since the models are largely fungible. Even with proprietary harnesses you can hack them to use some other lab's model.
I recently decided to get an AI subscription and evaluated Grok vs chatgpt. Went with Grok because it's all-around good enough at day to day stuff, integrates with my Tesla, and the image/video generation is great. Kids love whimsical videos of them riding dinosaurs.
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.
Grok doesn’t have those features, and people who like to make adult content have been complaining for a while how Grok has made it a lot harder to do so.
SpaceXAI is the only frontier model company that had its own compute/date centres and soon chip making factory, I think they will pull ahead with cheaper tokens similar intelligence and better harness/tools. Grok build is 2-5x faster than Claude Code in my opinion.
OpenAI is almost there, and Anthropic is pretty close behind. In the next year or two all major AI companies will be vertically integrated to a good degree.
> I think they will pull ahead with cheaper tokens similar intelligence
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.
Except EUV lithography is the most complicated industrial process that exists and they won't have usable yields for many years if ever. I don't think Musk actually expects these fans to ever actually make sense they just let him hype and distract.
On a meta topic, it seems there's quite a flame-war happening in the comments. At the time of this writing, there appears to be some brigading in support of Musk / Grok, with downvotes for comments critical of Musk, his politics, or Grok.
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.
Not disagreeing with you at all, but welcome to our new AI enhanced world. Nothing you enjoyed regarding human interaction, trust, or social norms is safe.
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.
Interesting. Grok 4.5 is a capable model, although not quite at Fable/Sol levels. Will be interesting to see how this holds up. Musk appears to have made a savvy choice buying Cursor's data.
I’m perpetually surprised people feel comfortable sending their code to an LLM that was made to call itself MechaHitler. I wouldn’t touch grok or now cursor with a 10 foot pole
MechaHitler is the final antagonist in the game Wolfenstein. All models know that. Grok was given a relaxed system prompt and reacted like Tay.
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.
Agreed but there were similar controversies with how OpenAI was generating images. The only pass is these are the early days of chatbots and this stuff is so non-deterministic and experimental.
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.
For sure. The difference is that they've made a number of similar suspect changes to Grok on X. Like that weird couple of hours where it would only talk about white genocide in South Africa no matter how you prompted it.
Everyone makes mistakes, especially with frontier models. The stuff with Grok shows that the person running the show has a pretty transparent agenda that the company isn't willing to push back on a bit for safety.
Yeah I don't care to use Grok's chat and find @grok responses on X mostly noise. I am still open to using it as a backup model for coding though, assuming it does a good job for the price. But mostly because I was already a Cursor user before they bought it.
yes exactly. if a company is happy to have their LLM's produce neo nazi content and CSAM, why do I want to give them money and my most important digital material?
I think "system prompt" is the key bit they're getting at. It doesn't necessarily reflect poorly on the underlying model if the system prompt was bad. It does reflect somewhat, in terms of alignment (how well the model does what the training company wants) and instruction following (how well the model does what the user wants). But it's not so clear to me what exactly the right answer is here. E.g., a model that scrupulously follows its system prompt and does what the user wants is a pretty useful, if very sharp, tool, albeit perhaps dangerous in the wrong hands.
I often wonder if there's a chance, even if minimal... that they stole the weights of the Anthropic models they run on their datacenter... or are actively destillating it.
I think the more likely explanation is that the Cursor data they effectively acquired for $10B was extremely valuable for their training when combined with the insane number of GB300s xAI has for training.
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
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…
https://github.com/features/copilot/plans
https://github.blog/changelog/2026-08-06-kimi-k3-is-now-avai...
Have they converted entirely to transparent API rates + base allocation now? One of the reasons I left was that if I was going to be billed at API rates anyway, I'd just rather use the APIs. The value proposition still sucks for individuals now, when the other major providers are bundling at below-API rates.
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).
It’s not as quite as smart as opus 4.8 but it’s close and x4 the cheaper.
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.
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.
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.
I'm no Elon fanboy but to be fair a lot of the richest people in the world heavily fund and endorse political candidates, parties, PACs, lobbyists, etc across the political spectrum. Elon was just far more public about it and it was covered much more.
The one that often has trouble running it's events as businesses try to avoid serving them. And which has prominent members that the secret service considers definitely fascist.
Musk has gone a long way beyond simply being the standard rich person lobbying for their own interests, and has moved into actively promoting people that are trying to tear down liberal democracy.
> The Wisconsin Elections Commission last week referred two complaints to the Brown County district attorney’s office, which can choose to bring criminal charges over violating the state law against election bribery. Prosecutors have 40 days to report back to the commission.
https://apnews.com/article/elon-musk-wisconsin-election-mill...
Journalism has gone wild these days. He's already been sued and won a couple times. An for what? Encouraging people just to vote (he did not say which way). It's going to backfire hard for all the ad spend by MTV, Meta, and Google who also spend lots of money to encourage certain demographics to vote.
Most importantly, he simply backed the “wrong” side for most of the people who bring this up.
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.
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.
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.
Maybe because I like to verify its outputs and spend a lot of time iterating to get better outcomes. Presumably if I just let it "do its thing" I'd burn more tokens and "get more done" but I'd lose my grasp on what's in the code base.
> do you use Apple equipment despite Apple’s use of Chinese slave labor?
If someone said they didn't buy Apple because of this, I'd support them in that too.
People. Are. Complicated. We're allowed to have beliefs, we're allowed to have beliefs that aren't internally consistent. You gotta get over the idea that people aren't genuine believers in their beliefs.
Besides, if Musk embeds his politics into everything he does, it's fair game to discuss his merits in that arena.
I agree completely. That's why I won't use Grok: its owner repeatedly beats us over the head with his politics, and I won't encourage it.
@dang - feature request for HN: have a "Thunderdome" section for the off-topic political commentary on the site, and once enough people flag something for being political, it gets detached and moved to the Thunderdome. People can let off steam there and the rest of us can have a nice clean place to read about tech.
Maybe that wouldn’t be a problem if Elon Musk would lay off the ketamine and shut his fucking mouth sometime. But instead he spends all day tweeting about how anyone he doesn’t like is a “traitor to western civilization” and calling for executions.
Why is it surprising that people are reacting to his words and actions? You want the politics to go away, get a CEO that doesn’t make everything political.
Oh but it is. Normal people don't go to McDonalds shouting: "I refuse to eat here because they kill cows!". They just... don't go there.
It’s also a great deal!
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.
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/
In my experience in heavy coding sessions most pricing is just cache read and cache write like 80% of my token bill.
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.
What the heck is wrong with you???
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/jan/15/elon-musk...
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.
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.
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?
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.
That's different than using Grok as a model for coding.
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...
Everyone makes mistakes, especially with frontier models. The stuff with Grok shows that the person running the show has a pretty transparent agenda that the company isn't willing to push back on a bit for safety.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elon_Musk_salute_controversy
- 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
I just assumed every model manufacturer is distilling from the frontier models. If they aren't they are definitely trying to do it.
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