I've been using grok 4.5 with grok build soon after it came out and dropped claude. primarily for personal code. It communicates better. While that might not sound like a big deal it is. It doesn't give me a wall of text, tells me what I need to know and I'll make the actual decisions. It is very quick as well which means the sessions are far more interactive, I'll be steering it more. I sometimes cross check with codex and sol, but the daily driver is grok for me.
I found it has improved my productivity and output over claude where it felt like claude was giving me work to do. furthermore with the recent claude watermarking thing, I'd rather use grok or openai.
If anyone is curious download grok cli and throw a couple of prompts at it. you'll be surprised.
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.
>their subscription now goes way further than OpenAI or Anthropic.
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.
I don't get the point of this. We all seem to agree that these companies have almost no moat, if one stops being a good deal, you can switch to another. That doesn't invalidate the existence of a deal that is currently good.
My point was that chasing deals like this is just kicking the can down the road. You're going to have to reckon with harsh price increases sooner or later.
So I have resolved to avoid that future-dreading and fixed it, basically.
But still for US frontier you're paying 10-20x more per token compared to their limited subscriptions. For China frontier you'll be good though, and that might be the future anyway.
Relying on a single frontier model to just zero-shot all the work is so 2025.
Deepseek V4 Flash 0731 is surprisingly capable and cheap. [0]
Checkout pi coding agent. You can create as many different sub-agents as you wish, to specialize and understand and tackle or pass off any problem you like. It's refreshing, really. I feel like a coder in control again.
Your reason for the rate limit reset is speculative. Here's a history of them and tweets that correspond to when they happen. Others can be the judge if they believe the stated reasons or not: https://codex-resets.com/
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.
The benchmark article we're replying to shows that Grok token usage is at least on par with the latest OpenAI models [1], and significantly cheaper per token:
Yeah, even without the resets, chatgpt subscription currently goes quite a bit further than an equivalent anthropic plan. The main reason to have an anthropic plan is to get access to Fable 5 if you feel the quality of output makes it worth 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).
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 the same quality results with Fable. With just a brief prompt, it created a great static website with a beautiful animation of a workflow. Gemini's output was so poor that I closed the chat. And with Codex, the results were bad, so I discarded them.
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 believe it's one of the models you have to go in to your settings on and enable Chinese providers for to use. Could be mistaken. I wish there was a clear list on this.
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’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.
Kimi is expensive . Cursor with subscription is cheaper , grok 4.5 per task paid per tokens ( no subs ) is also cheaper .
If you willing to share to no zdr, meta is waaaaaay cheaper vs Kimi.
With recent offerings from spacex and meta , I hardly imagine why would you pay money to any Chinese vendor it’s not as cheap and it’s not as intelligent neither .
Maybe deepseek is an exception , but it’s only good for narrow use cases that probably goes into modal.com and other gpu + fine tune me easy vendors , not vanilla dumb but cheap model .
When I last used Cursor their subscription covered usage of ~$20 per month. Have they switched to a subsidized subscription model like ChatGPT and Claude?
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.
From Matt Levine's description, SpaceX has a governance model that explicitly makes it resistant to shareholder lawsuits. It's not a Delaware corporation.
It might or might not work long-term, but I wouldn't count on courts to help.
There’s some number of supposedly unsupervised Teslas actually operating in Austin, but what I’ve seen suggests it’s more like a dozen.
And extreme skepticism is warranted that they’re actually fully unsupervised, given Tesla’s repeated lies about this. They’re likely remotely monitored and operated.
Corporations are legally required to maximize shareholder's value. If reaching that goal requires them to pretend to be transparent, or fudge the numbers that they show to the public, then that's what you can expect them to do.
SpaceX is run by an absolute ghoul who managed to get away with securities fraud ("funding secured"), what makes you think there's any accountability left in public markets?
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.
highest selling is not same as cheap - apple also have the highest selling iphones among smartphones and they are still pretty much the most expensive (and usually not the best either these days).
> 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.
Light generation is the most complicated part and Elon plans on doing Free Electron Laser (FEL) which is not as complicated as self contained tin based solution that ASML uses now
Why do you give Elon any credibility? FEL is not proven at all and is much much riskier than using existing EUV machines. Plus if it breaks all your machines are down until you fix it.
The rental deal can be terminated by either side with 90 days notice, and presumably Musk would do so if he needed the compute or generally thought it advantageous to do so. For now he doesn't need the compute.
The rental deal may also have been at least in part to juice the SpaceX IPO and to help Anthropic stick it to his enemy OpenAI.
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.
Not the model but the app - with Claude I can work on my mac using Cloud environments, leave the office, open Claude on my phone and respond. I can't change model if I have to stop that workflow.
Does xAI have plans to do Mac/iOS apps with cloud environments? When can we expect them?
The main issue I have with grok is that Musk, its owner, did 2x seig heil at the presidential inauguration, and proceeded to gaslight the world about it (this is a strong form of dogwhistling, kind of a dog bullhorn). Therefore all services which have anything to do with Musk are ineligible for use - they are directly funding the worst kind of person.
That is good news for Grok team. However, most of the time cost comparing to the result is secondary, and better results and conclusions can come from mixing AI brains together.
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.
Perhaps customers choosing your product for irrational philosophical reasons is exactly how you'd want to position your product if you're a business. When it comes to margins, the only thing better than a price-insensitive customer is a quality-insensitive customer.
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.
Yes, ethically Elon ranks lowest based on the past 5 years of questionable decisions, like uploading your entire codebase to their server without consent.
Elon is directly responsible for Grok becoming self-titled “MechaHitler” which the other three haven’t come close to matching yet.
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've used all of the models extensively and Grok is only "faster" because it claims to be done minutes after you ask it to do something. It does not produce results anywhere near the Anthropic or OpenAI models, it just hacks a tiny piece of what you ask for and says "I'm done!". I also notice Musk-isms leaking through the model. Multiple times it's told me "this is not a roast" or "I'm not roasting your code". People who use this model because they align with Musk's ideology are doing us all a favor and weeding themselves out of the competition.
In most coding harnesses you can just instruct the agent to do so. When using Fable, I often say things like:
> Save your context. Always use a subagent (Opus 5 or GPT 5.6) for performing the implementation and then review the work yourself. You are the orchestrator and coordinator it’s up to you to ensure a cohesive final result.
I’ve done more or less the same thing with other agents/versions but with Fable consuming usage credits/tokens so quickly I do it more regularly than usual. I know people who will specify Composer (to my chagrin) as the implementing agent.
Addendum: this really goes a long way, and I can use a single chat session for days before I get into the context danger zone and need to compact/summarize.
It's a different type of model. In my admittedly judgemental observation, people that aren't the type to configure fully automated harnesses with good tools and skills and verifiers for their infrastructure and are way more interventionist in the way their agent works tend to like grok 4.5 more as the main agent. It's much faster and writes more simple and normal code that aligns a bit more with human written code. As an example, instead of sandboxing and simply verifying output artifacts they manually read and approve edits, suggest different code patterns, and manually approved shell commands. On the flip side it's not as good as fable when you need a relatively complex multi step thing done.
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.
Yeah [1] is really a thing and SlopCodeBench (https://www.scbench.ai/) kind of measures that.
You need to manually push models to clean up the slop every now and then otherwise it becomes chaotic. And every change with LLMs is always extra lines.
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.
Big same here with Claude but I’m on the $200 sub. I let Fable run for roughly 4 hours and still didn’t hit the session limit. I suppose if I was running more in parallel it would be easier to hit, but I’m not particularly good at focusing on more than one thing at the same time (even if I’m waiting on an agent to do the work).
For me it helps that back when xAI was the new hotness, after reading HN comments constantly advertising the free Grok credits they were giving out each month for developers with data sharing enabled, I eventually set aside my personal distaste figuring I might as well take advantage for Cline/Roo Code.
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.
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.
I don’t like what is happening in my country, Elon is a huge part of that and I don’t want to reward it. I’m not a fanatic, but if all other things are equal I can certainly factor social responsibility into the equation. Fuck that rage baiting xenophobic nazi-salute throwing asshole. [edit spelling]
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.
macOS Codex app is my main agent (its very polished). When it makes changes or code scans i ask it to run claude -p plus cursor-cli plus grok cli for double checking. This way bias of one model can be overruled by quorum.
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.
The answer is simple: They're willing to burn money faster than the others.
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.
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 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.
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
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.
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 and service 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
They came here in three years. I think there’s a chance they will release the absolute top model soon. And I think they believe that as well. They have the compute. They have the money. They have the engineers.
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.
That’s how physical good work. But software, especially consumer software, works on a winner take all model. That’s why there are very few consumer companies and chatGPT is pretty much the only one after Meta, which was founded in 2004. The reason this happens is because consumer software can scale infinitely as there is zero marginal cost for a new user and there are very high switching costs. A single car company cannot scale to serve every single customer. Because it requires massive CapEx investment. But Google can serve every single search globally because the incremental cost to serve the additional consumer is essentially zero. That’s how these frontier models are eventually going to play out. There will be consolidation and winner take all. It has somewhat happened already with chatGPT taking over consumer and Claude taking over Enterprise. There will probably some long tail open source player, similar to Linux.
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.
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.
Its a bet for future world dominance by Elon: millions of robots managed by AI. Base on some observations I think something like that is going in his head.
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
I've been using grok 4.5 with grok build soon after it came out and dropped claude. primarily for personal code. It communicates better. While that might not sound like a big deal it is. It doesn't give me a wall of text, tells me what I need to know and I'll make the actual decisions. It is very quick as well which means the sessions are far more interactive, I'll be steering it more. I sometimes cross check with codex and sol, but the daily driver is grok for me.
I found it has improved my productivity and output over claude where it felt like claude was giving me work to do. furthermore with the recent claude watermarking thing, I'd rather use grok or openai.
If anyone is curious download grok cli and throw a couple of prompts at it. you'll be surprised.
Agreed, I've been using it on personal projects, and prefer it to Claude and GPT at the moment.
Same, sad how far Claude has fallen. I still think Claude code patterns are amazing so I just port those.
Sounds like a caveman skill.
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.
>their subscription now goes way further than OpenAI or Anthropic.
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.
>Until it doesn't...
I don't get the point of this. We all seem to agree that these companies have almost no moat, if one stops being a good deal, you can switch to another. That doesn't invalidate the existence of a deal that is currently good.
No, it doesn't.
My point was that chasing deals like this is just kicking the can down the road. You're going to have to reckon with harsh price increases sooner or later.
So I have resolved to avoid that future-dreading and fixed it, basically.
But still for US frontier you're paying 10-20x more per token compared to their limited subscriptions. For China frontier you'll be good though, and that might be the future anyway.
Relying on a single frontier model to just zero-shot all the work is so 2025.
Deepseek V4 Flash 0731 is surprisingly capable and cheap. [0]
Checkout pi coding agent. You can create as many different sub-agents as you wish, to specialize and understand and tackle or pass off any problem you like. It's refreshing, really. I feel like a coder in control again.
[0] https://arcprize.org/results/deepseek-v4-flash-0731
Grok is cheaper vs real Chinese frontier aka kimi. Sponsored or not.
> Honestly, this entire OpenAI reset credit fiasco this past week
Huh, what's happened? I'm on the 20x plan and haven't noticed any fiasco, what went down exactly?
Nothing really, when model usage goes up they do a credit. They did two last week.
Your reason for the rate limit reset is speculative. Here's a history of them and tweets that correspond to when they happen. Others can be the judge if they believe the stated reasons or not: https://codex-resets.com/
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…
Are there any projects that track how much usage of each model translates to how much percentage drop in weekly/5hr windows?
Usage? Not exactly. But I tried to make something that can estimate dollars per tokens in actual usage while taking into account multiple factors.
https://harness.eveid.com/lazy-harness-cost-simulation
Just curious, was this coded with Claude or Codex? Copy reads very Claude to me but I’m curious if thats an actual pattern or just me
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.
That is not true; GPT is the most reasoning efficient model family on the market.
The benchmark article we're replying to shows that Grok token usage is at least on par with the latest OpenAI models [1], and significantly cheaper per token:
https://artificialanalysis.ai/models/grok-4-6#token-use
So depending on how you want to define "token efficiency", Grok is either tied with OpenAI, or in the lead.
[1] Though I grant that 4.6 appears to be wordier, on the order of Terra max.
Yeah, even without the resets, chatgpt subscription currently goes quite a bit further than an equivalent anthropic plan. The main reason to have an anthropic plan is to get access to Fable 5 if you feel the quality of output makes it worth it.
How does Grok 4.5 compare to Opus >= 4.8 though?
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 a bit worse.
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.
I've found Fable 5 to be so much better than 4.8.
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 the same quality results with Fable. With just a brief prompt, it created a great static website with a beautiful animation of a workflow. Gemini's output was so poor that I closed the chat. And with Codex, the results were bad, so I discarded them.
Grok is $2 in and $6 out. 4.8 is $5 in and $25 out.
It’s not as quite as smart as opus 4.8 but it’s close and x4 the cheaper.
Cursor also allows disabling Grok Fast mode which means tokens last forever. Fast is great tho, but nice to have the option.
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
Opencode have it in their subscription
I believe it's one of the models you have to go in to your settings on and enable Chinese providers for to use. Could be mistaken. I wish there was a clear list on this.
GitHub Copilot does have Kimi K3.
What’s the multiplier? GH copilot nerfed their product so badly that I unsubscribed.
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.
https://github.com/features/copilot/plans
https://github.blog/changelog/2026-08-06-kimi-k3-is-now-avai...
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.
Yes, they have transparent api rates. And for Anthropic and OpenAI their rates are exactly like API pricing.
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.
Kimi is expensive . Cursor with subscription is cheaper , grok 4.5 per task paid per tokens ( no subs ) is also cheaper .
If you willing to share to no zdr, meta is waaaaaay cheaper vs Kimi.
With recent offerings from spacex and meta , I hardly imagine why would you pay money to any Chinese vendor it’s not as cheap and it’s not as intelligent neither .
Maybe deepseek is an exception , but it’s only good for narrow use cases that probably goes into modal.com and other gpu + fine tune me easy vendors , not vanilla dumb but cheap model .
kimi k3 credits end in just a few sessions. Only Grok models allow generous use in Cursor Pro/+
you can use Kimi K3 on the typed++ model tier: https://typed.cloud
GabAI has KimiK3
Goes even further to exfiltrate your data, yeah.
That would be Muse Spark Contributor Tier. 12-21x price reduction at the expense of your digital existence.
I'd be the first model I'd reach for if I was providing a free service to AI gooners though. Serves them both right.
That's exactly what's going on LOL
When I last used Cursor their subscription covered usage of ~$20 per month. Have they switched to a subsidized subscription model like ChatGPT and Claude?
Subsidized for their own models now, plus 20 dollars of API credit for non first party models.
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.
But can you trust any number or metric coming out of SpaceX given everything? Also you mean their own compute like the illegal data centre turbines?
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/jan/15/elon-musk...
"everythin you don't like" is not a scientific argument, neither is the illegality of data centers on AI quality
So you’re asserting that the ends justify the means or?
I’m confused by how this reply makes sense in the context of the parent comment. They weren’t stating a preference, they were linking to simple facts.
Please do better.
Anthropic rent the same data centre with the turbines from X btw
Wait until they find out what's in a powerplant!
do you have any idea how much clickbait gets circulated because... Musk gets clicks? Just try it for yourself. Grok 4.6 is great (first impression)
Now do Anthropic's copyright fines.
Now find someone who cares about or respects copyright law.
being a public company forces a lot of trust and transparency bc otherwise shareholders will sue you into oblivion
From Matt Levine's description, SpaceX has a governance model that explicitly makes it resistant to shareholder lawsuits. It's not a Delaware corporation.
It might or might not work long-term, but I wouldn't count on courts to help.
True story, for example take Tesla's promise of self driving which was delivered back in 2015.
There's 90 unsupervised self driving tesla's in Austin today. They are delivering late but its false to say they are not delivering
They defrauded everyone who bought a Tesla on the promise that the Tesla they bought would be fully self-driving sometime in the near future.
Taxis are a different and wholly irrelevant product that doesn’t absolve the fraud that they committed.
But that isn’t what they promised.
“Late” is doing a LOT of heavy lifting here. We are talking about 11 years!
There’s some number of supposedly unsupervised Teslas actually operating in Austin, but what I’ve seen suggests it’s more like a dozen.
And extreme skepticism is warranted that they’re actually fully unsupervised, given Tesla’s repeated lies about this. They’re likely remotely monitored and operated.
Corporations are legally required to maximize shareholder's value. If reaching that goal requires them to pretend to be transparent, or fudge the numbers that they show to the public, then that's what you can expect them to do.
SpaceX is run by an absolute ghoul who managed to get away with securities fraud ("funding secured"), what makes you think there's any accountability left in public markets?
Because it works and they don’t charge a lot for it
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 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.
>Elon companies have the most expensive everything
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.
highest selling is not same as cheap - apple also have the highest selling iphones among smartphones and they are still pretty much the most expensive (and usually not the best either these days).
The cache reads are really insanely expensive.
> 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.
Light generation is the most complicated part and Elon plans on doing Free Electron Laser (FEL) which is not as complicated as self contained tin based solution that ASML uses now
Why do you give Elon any credibility? FEL is not proven at all and is much much riskier than using existing EUV machines. Plus if it breaks all your machines are down until you fix it.
They’ve already contracted with Intel to use A14 for the initial buildout so that solves the process tech problem.
Not at all
Well this makes me bullish on Gemini if its this easy to reach the frontier
Who said it's easy? xAI staff are putting in 80+ hour weeks and building datacenters faster than anyone.
Seems the cache read pricing almost doubled from $0.30 in Grok 4.5 to $0.50 in Grok 4.6.
In my experience in heavy coding sessions most pricing is just cache read and cache write like 80% of my token bill.
didnt the model 3x in size?
no, they said the model is still 1.5T size. Next one 4.7 is supposed to be bigger.
I'm just wondering why they sold compute to Anthropic if they were planning on still competing in this race?
Competing doesn't mean winning
The rental deal can be terminated by either side with 90 days notice, and presumably Musk would do so if he needed the compute or generally thought it advantageous to do so. For now he doesn't need the compute.
The rental deal may also have been at least in part to juice the SpaceX IPO and to help Anthropic stick it to his enemy OpenAI.
Likely because they had the capacity to spare. Prior to Grok 4.5, I doubt there was much demand for their models.
The revenue was critical to making their IPO numbers look a bit less insane.
Timing. They had a massive amount of compute coming online and a serious pipeline of more arriving.
a lot of that compute is used for inference, which is demand-based
For distillation deals lol
Grok is not the best model around, but it's decent. It gets the basic job done at a low price. I don't think it can advance frontier Math, yet.
Probably can't advance frontier math yet, yeah. But please let us know other places you want to see Grok improve for future models!
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.
None of that has anything to do with the model - your issues are all with the harness/app you used...
Yes. Grok is a harness/app as well as a model.
What's the latest on Composer 3? Is it a sort of distilled Grok?
We plan to eventually have another model at that weight class, but right now trying to train the best possible model.
Not the model but the app - with Claude I can work on my mac using Cloud environments, leave the office, open Claude on my phone and respond. I can't change model if I have to stop that workflow.
Does xAI have plans to do Mac/iOS apps with cloud environments? When can we expect them?
Options
https://t3.codes/
https://happier.dev/
https://paseo.sh/
All of these also enable multi vendor LLMs.
You absolutely can do this; I do it every day in fact. https://apps.apple.com/us/app/cursor/id6767085653
It is also not annoying to use. It doesn’t overcomplicate things, and its quick. Much better than eg GLM 5.2.
Pretty good bang for the buck.
Reading the SWE bickering back and fourth in this thread about Claude vs Grok reminds me of IE vs Netscape bickering way back when.
/me eating popcorn from my Lynx term
/me emailing my hot takes and emoticons to newsletters from pine
Netscape 4 Lyf
Gemini 3.5 flash lite is all I use.
Nice to see SpaceX on the model frontier! They have been chasing it for a while.
Cursor ultra is great . For 200 you got essentially unlimited capacity vs Claude.
I used auto in cursor it’s much faster va Claude code and as good.
The main issue I have with grok is that Musk, its owner, did 2x seig heil at the presidential inauguration, and proceeded to gaslight the world about it (this is a strong form of dogwhistling, kind of a dog bullhorn). Therefore all services which have anything to do with Musk are ineligible for use - they are directly funding the worst kind of person.
And don’t get me started on Volkswagen and Disney
anyone who believes that was intentioned as a seig heil just outs themselves as a lemming.
truly a dumb thing to believe
That is good news for Grok team. However, most of the time cost comparing to the result is secondary, and better results and conclusions can come from mixing AI brains together.
I have never met a single human being who uses Grok for coding
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.
Perhaps customers choosing your product for irrational philosophical reasons is exactly how you'd want to position your product if you're a business. When it comes to margins, the only thing better than a price-insensitive customer is a quality-insensitive customer.
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.
Couple of years with some bandwidth improvements and higher RAM capacity might do some wonders
For many people, yes. That’s how far down the Elon Musk morality bar is.
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.
Yes, ethically Elon ranks lowest based on the past 5 years of questionable decisions, like uploading your entire codebase to their server without consent.
Elon is directly responsible for Grok becoming self-titled “MechaHitler” which the other three haven’t come close to matching yet.
Supporting parties or candidates you want to win elections is a core part of democracy.
Calling it "interfering with elections" is utterly bizarre to me.
Paying people to vote is interfering amigo.
Remember when he got hired by the federal government and walked away with a ton of private data?
everyone interferes with elections. you just prefer people to interfere on your side.
I think you are confusing the words interfere and influence.
>who turns around and uses the money to interfere with elections
thats a very dumb reason considering all rich people do it, most are just not as open about it as Musk
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.
That's pretty surprising. Idk about Grok 4.6, but Grok 4.5 was clearly below Fable, Opus 5 and GPT 5.6 Sol.
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've used all of the models extensively and Grok is only "faster" because it claims to be done minutes after you ask it to do something. It does not produce results anywhere near the Anthropic or OpenAI models, it just hacks a tiny piece of what you ask for and says "I'm done!". I also notice Musk-isms leaking through the model. Multiple times it's told me "this is not a roast" or "I'm not roasting your code". People who use this model because they align with Musk's ideology are doing us all a favor and weeding themselves out of the competition.
Is there a good way to auto switch between models for planning/implementation?
Pretty much every coding harness allows you to define skills and agents so yes
In most coding harnesses you can just instruct the agent to do so. When using Fable, I often say things like:
> Save your context. Always use a subagent (Opus 5 or GPT 5.6) for performing the implementation and then review the work yourself. You are the orchestrator and coordinator it’s up to you to ensure a cohesive final result.
I’ve done more or less the same thing with other agents/versions but with Fable consuming usage credits/tokens so quickly I do it more regularly than usual. I know people who will specify Composer (to my chagrin) as the implementing agent.
Addendum: this really goes a long way, and I can use a single chat session for days before I get into the context danger zone and need to compact/summarize.
OpenCode can.
Yeah the speed was very nice indeed.
It's a different type of model. In my admittedly judgemental observation, people that aren't the type to configure fully automated harnesses with good tools and skills and verifiers for their infrastructure and are way more interventionist in the way their agent works tend to like grok 4.5 more as the main agent. It's much faster and writes more simple and normal code that aligns a bit more with human written code. As an example, instead of sandboxing and simply verifying output artifacts they manually read and approve edits, suggest different code patterns, and manually approved shell commands. On the flip side it's not as good as fable when you need a relatively complex multi step thing done.
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.
Yeah [1] is really a thing and SlopCodeBench (https://www.scbench.ai/) kind of measures that.
You need to manually push models to clean up the slop every now and then otherwise it becomes chaotic. And every change with LLMs is always extra lines.
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.
With Claude I start having to limit the context I give it about my problem in case it trips up the safeguards. :(
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.
For $30/month, I'd expect it to have higher usage limits than Claude Code and Codex.
It really does. I felt like I could have spent $1000+ api token on claude for the amount of work on my $30 grok subscription.
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.
Big same here with Claude but I’m on the $200 sub. I let Fable run for roughly 4 hours and still didn’t hit the session limit. I suppose if I was running more in parallel it would be easier to hit, but I’m not particularly good at focusing on more than one thing at the same time (even if I’m waiting on an agent to do the work).
I refuse to use that product because of the parent company.
100%, it's an easy pass given that it is always playing catch up.
For me it helps that back when xAI was the new hotness, after reading HN comments constantly advertising the free Grok credits they were giving out each month for developers with data sharing enabled, I eventually set aside my personal distaste figuring I might as well take advantage for Cline/Roo Code.
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.
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.
I don’t like what is happening in my country, Elon is a huge part of that and I don’t want to reward it. I’m not a fanatic, but if all other things are equal I can certainly factor social responsibility into the equation. Fuck that rage baiting xenophobic nazi-salute throwing asshole. [edit spelling]
You are confusing cause and effect imho.
Chinese models are open, Grok is not.
chances are high they are open for now because they infiltrating market and collecting data.
collecting data by making them open weight? where is logic in that?
Infiltraiting market by making them open weight, then majority users still use official API, and you have answer to your question.
They aren't though? Only a subset are. Are you aware that there are multiple competing Chinese companies making models?
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.
> I now require it as a part of 3-of-3 quorum with any codebase change
Say more about this.
macOS Codex app is my main agent (its very polished). When it makes changes or code scans i ask it to run claude -p plus cursor-cli plus grok cli for double checking. This way bias of one model can be overruled by quorum.
When Grok 3 came out it was pretty good at the time. I had several simple front end demos and Grok 3 was better than GPT/Claude at the time.
the new models are quite good, give it a shot
Folks working in US govt tend to, based on convos I've had with one such person.
Not the best endorsement given the current US gov
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.
Grok probably doesn’t object when the government asks it how to bomb schools.
They make good stuff
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.
Everyone on r/cursor as their pricing is now a very good deal if you use Grok and Composer.
Does it matter? Why turn it into a popularity contest?
Hi! Grok’s worked quite well for my use cases…
It’s also a great deal!
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 never met anyone who uses grok for anything. I had assumed it was a Twitter/X thing and only the truly lost souls remain on that website.
it only very recently became competetive, if they proceed with improvements (and beating others on price) their share will grow
I have. Why do you put faith in anecdotal evidence and a sample size of one?
Hello
I am using it for code reviews, and it regularly surfaces stuff that neither Sol or Fable do.
I use it because it's cheap and good enough
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.
It's still not as good as GPT5.6 or Opus5 but it's better than KimiK3. Good job xAI team.
I use Grok 4.5 High Fast in Cursor (Agentic window), and it's a genuinely great model.
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.
Well now you have so you can retire this talking point
> 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.
I saw far more people using Mistral than grok.
Hello. Nice to meet you.
Why is Grok so much cheaper than Claude or GPT?
The answer is simple: They're willing to burn money faster than the others.
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.
My strat until the bubble pops is to just use the most subsidized model with acceptable performance
He owns the DCs and isn’t scrambling for revenue to justify an upcoming IPO
Because the model is probably smaller. Go look at openrouter’s costs for other open models around this performance level, they’re similar.
Demand so much lower they had to resell capacity.
Elon owns a lot of compute
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.
Imagine 2.0 is out as well. Reviews say people look like plastic. Image and video generation quality is extremely low.
"that's numberwang!"
brilliant, I'm going to mentally append this to all benchmark results from now on.
Damn hn is full of ai shilling, jesus fucking christ
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.
Cursor was 60B. The 10B number was the breakup fee if the deal fell through.
$60B in SPCX stock, which is sort of magic money.
> ... or are actively destillating it.
I just assumed every model manufacturer is distilling from the frontier models. If they aren't they are definitely trying to do it.
I wonder if the distillation was part of the compute deal.
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
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.
[1] https://neutralityproject.org/
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 and service 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
They came here in three years. I think there’s a chance they will release the absolute top model soon. And I think they believe that as well. They have the compute. They have the money. They have the engineers.
That is more FOMO and maybe some end-game where SpaceX essentially owns a vertical slice of ISP+Datacenter+AI+application stack.
Scamming investors long enough for the founders to cash out.
grok offers a team subscription which respects user privacy and does not send your prompts out to a team for moderation.
that alone makes it the closed source subscription i would choose. claude and openai are spying on you.
as it stands i don't have it because the reasoning is encrypted, so i feel that it still is not working for me, it's two faced.
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.
Why do we need Nissan? Three car companies are plenty.
That’s how physical good work. But software, especially consumer software, works on a winner take all model. That’s why there are very few consumer companies and chatGPT is pretty much the only one after Meta, which was founded in 2004. The reason this happens is because consumer software can scale infinitely as there is zero marginal cost for a new user and there are very high switching costs. A single car company cannot scale to serve every single customer. Because it requires massive CapEx investment. But Google can serve every single search globally because the incremental cost to serve the additional consumer is essentially zero. That’s how these frontier models are eventually going to play out. There will be consolidation and winner take all. It has somewhat happened already with chatGPT taking over consumer and Claude taking over Enterprise. There will probably some long tail open source player, similar to Linux.
Nissan would agree!
https://www.autoblog.com/news/nissan-reports-fifth-straight-...
This might be the biggest Grok burn in the comments.
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.
Grok has 100% market share in Tesla Car AI. Grok is used for that, might as well make some extra money on the side.
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.
Its a bet for future world dominance by Elon: millions of robots managed by AI. Base on some observations I think something like that is going in his head.
Bro looked at the US two party system and said “this is what we should model everything off of”
cool
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