[bilbo0s]

Good point.

But no one is saying "use grok".

Grok sucks. Not only because it's seemingly made only to serve the goal of ethnically cleansing non-whites or whatever, but also because it's just not even close to being as useful as other models. In human terms, grok is the job candidate who's simply not qualified. That candidate being a virulent racist is beside the material point.

Here's the thing though, the point of functional LLMs with fewer guardrails is still a good one. Grok is not that model. But such a hypothetical model would have broad application. (For good and for ill. Of course.)

[solidasparagus]

I don't agree. I avoided grok because of Musk for a long time, but having used it more, I think it is one the best models around and grok.com is an extremely good chat app. My evaluation was based on trying it before gpt-5.5 and obvious before grok 4.3, but it was, for me, the 2nd best model/chat app after claude. It's much less edgelordy than you might think based on the news.

[tel]

All my usage of Grok for technical topics shows it regularly deeply misunderstanding things and just parroting back my question in fancy language. It’s the only frontier model I get this impression of. That makes it super annoying when it tries to market itself as good at engineering tasks when it seems (to me) to be much worse at them.

[solidasparagus]

Interesting. I have not had this experience. I would like to learn more. Can you point me to any examples or domains where I might be able to replicate this?

[tel]

I was asking questions about compiler techniques. Then when I got annoyed I started asking about experimental design. Both were very frustrating experiences once I started realizing how limited its responses were.

Though yeah the edgelord-y style faded after I criticized it a couple times.

[solidasparagus]

I'll take a look. Thank you!

[mrhottakes]

This comment section is full of people saying "use grok"

[timacles]

100% being astroturfed. Way too many posts coming out of the woodwork with all of these “grok is so good at” conversational points

[ivraatiems]

A job candidate being a virulent racist would not be beside the point. It would be disqualifying to even let them interview.

[mrhottakes]

It's very telling how many HN posters think "being good at programming" can counterbalance "is a virulent racist"

[Petersipoi]

No, it's telling that people like you have watered that word down so much that people don't trust it anymore.

So yes, if someone says "they're a great programmer, but they're racist" I'm going to ask, how are they racist? And at that point, if they can't give me a specific reason for why they're racist, I'm going to hire the guy.

It's also telling that you seem to think a tool is capable of "being racist". Hopefully this doesn't ruin your relationship with it, but LLM's cant think.

[Capricorn2481]

Yes, but I think that particular commenter is just throwing a bone to people that think that way so he doesn't get the "don't bring politics" treatment.