[gordonhart]

> I don't understand why we would turn the models into law enforcement officers

It's a simple corporate risk minimization strategy. Just look at how universally despised Grok is on HN. Not because it's a bad model, but because it has less aggressive alignment which means it can be coaxed into saying things that get Xai pilloried here and elsewhere.

[Wowfunhappy]

I just think Grok is a bad model. I haven't had success with it.

[bilbo0s]

This.

I tried them all.

Grok was worse than even some of the more mediocre open models at actually doing anything. (At least anything tech work related.) GPT and Claude just do what I ask most of the time. With grok, it’s like a chore just getting it to understand the question.

You’re pulling your hair out trying to figure out what on earth you need to do to land in the right place in whatever topsy turvy embedding grok is using?

[noelsusman]

It's mostly just a bad model. Plenty of people would be willing to overlook the baggage if the model was even marginally better than the competition.

[toraway]

I also used to see Grok boosting/slack-cutting on here/Reddit constantly back in Peak Subsidy when xAI was giving out hundreds of dollars of credits for free per month.

After they killed that and then stopped handing out free model access to users of every Cline fork for weeks following model releases, vibe coder hype moved back to Chinese models for cost and the SOTA models for quality.

[kelnos]

Agreed. There's are plenty of instances where people here on HN do mental gymnastics to justify using a truly good product when the company that builds it is morally bankrupt.

Not a criticism (I probably engage in that sort of thinking myself sometimes), just something I've observed. If Grok were actually good, we'd see that phenomenon here, but we don't.

[DANmode]

I just read a bunch of compelling “Grok is better at this” use cases in a thread yesterday.

I’m not rushing towards it, but, had to mention.

[ascorbic]

No, they've clearly put a lot of work into alignment. It's just that they've been trying to align it with Elon Musk rather than Amanda Askell. Unfortunately the more anti-woke they try to make it, the worse it seems to perform.

[skeledrew]

> Unfortunately the more anti-woke they try to make it, the worse it seems to perform.

Probably because being anti-woke generally goes hand in hand with going against facts and logic. Cull the "woke", lose the facts+logic. Not that they care about that anyway.

[lostdog]

Grok is despised because it has more aggressive alignment.