[leetharris]

I have the pro account for ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Grok.

They all have various strengths and weaknesses. My favorite is still ChatGPT, then Gemini/Claude, then Grok.

Grok often feels 1-2 generations behind the competition in general use, but it has three things that I love:

1. It seems to be the best at understanding current events. Maybe due to X integration, or some other tool call optimization in the backend? I don't know, but I often ask about things going on, and the other models have outdated info, give unhelpful answers, etc.

2. It is generally the least sycophantic for personal things. Anthropic is getting here too. ChatGPT and Gemini are working on this, but previous models in those families would almost never say anything negative about what I am doing. Sometimes I need career advice, personal advice, etc and I like the tone of how it responds. I think Claude will be caught up soon.

3. For professional work, there are certain topics that other models would refuse to engage with. At my last company we had an enormous amount of legal users. When a deposition would need a summary on certain topics, most models would refuse. Grok would not. I understand the need for safety and I don't blame the other model providers, but for some professional use cases you NEED a model that is capable of handling sensitive subjects.

[e9]

I recently worked with NRC dataset, specifically about nuclear reactor events and status reports(example: https://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/event-status/...). Public data that just needed some cleaning. Several time Claude API would refuse to engage. Because of that I can't trust Claude to clean production data sets.

[emodendroket]

> 1. It seems to be the best at understanding current events. Maybe due to X integration, or some other tool call optimization in the backend? I don't know, but I often ask about things going on, and the other models have outdated info, give unhelpful answers, etc.

That makes sense, but occasionally you ask about an issue where it's clearly received political instruction from the commissar and it acts totally lobotomized. But it's true that Gemini will often blithely state that something could never happen and you'll say "what do you mean, that just happened" and then it comes back apologizing after running a Web search.

[timfsu]

We saw this too with Gemini specifically. My favorite example - we built a hallucination detector (given the input, does the output make any false claims) in Gemini, and after the Seahawks won the Superbowl in February, it would consistently flag that as "not possible".

[emodendroket]

I believe it was assuring me the Israelis would never invade southern Lebanon and declare a buffer zone inside it after that had already happened.

[sawjet]

Do you have an example of this?

[emodendroket]

Which "this"?

[deaton]

All 4 of these still regularly insist that I am a genius and everything I say is brilliant. Grok definitely pushes back more than the others, but I don't like how sycophantic they all still are.

[pell]

I don’t want to open up that whole can of worms but Grok on any vaguely philosophical or political topic is a scaredy cat and has a very hard time staying factual if it could make Musk or the conservative movement appear negatively.

[square_usual]

Opus 4.8 has made huge jumps in being less sycophantic. I see it pushing back on ideas a lot, and that's very helpful when you're evaluating options.

[lachlan_gray]

Almost too much so, it often feels like opus is pushing back for the sake of pushing back. The way old models used to add disclaimers to every message regardless of content

[NewJazz]

That's because it can't literally reason, it has just been manually steered into those reasoning speech cycles.

[emodendroket]

Yes, yes. Does everyone still find it interesting to go over this point every time about how it's not literally a person with human reasoning?

[NewJazz]

Uh, only when people don't seem to understand it, or try to personify it. Which is quite often.

[CamperBob2]

What about when they ask how you can take gold at IMO and solve research-level math problems without reasoning?

[emodendroket]

People “personify” their cars but I don’t think because they think cars have human cognition

[galkk]

It’s more like Opus wants you to do its job for it. I feel that amount of time when I tell it “no, you do that” increases with each new version.

[fragmede]

It was mind blowing the first time I got a refusal, and retorted "yes you can" and had that work, but now it's just another reason to move to a different model.

[Traubenfuchs]

> Anthropic is getting here too.

I almost exclusively use claude for all my professional and private needs. In my experience it's really good at adhering to my wishes in regards to sycophancy and pushing back. If you really want to you can tell it to systematically push back on anything where pushback makes sense until it continues with the flow of conversation.

In my first therapy session, the answers were too long and contained multiple questions, spawning multiple threads of conversation. I told it to tone it down and only ever ask one question back, maybe two, if they are related. The answers got too short. I told it to make them "slightly longer" again and reached a sweet spot.

The conversation is yours to form! You need to find the "system prompts" and guidelines to give it that work for you.

[nonethewiser]

What are you using it for? Im pretty surprised ChatGPT is your top model but maybe you arent using it for code.

[fragmede]

codex-5.5 > Opus 4.7, imo.

[htx80nerd]

My favorite was ChatGPT, and I still use it often, but it becomes way too 'hair splitting' argumentative too often over very minor non controversial topics. Like it's always going out of its way to "well actually..."

Grok used to be really really bad ~8 months ago or so, but it's gotten better.

ChatGPT team needs to turn down the 'disagree just because' factor by a lot.

[cactusplant7374]

But in terms of agentic coding? Dead last.

[epolanski]

My SO works in audit/compliance and business Gemini definitely does not refuse to answer.

[Azantys]

Career and personal advice from LLMs, not sure if thats your best bet

[selicos]

1. It seeks to manipulate the information you see and your lens to the world. This is already partially true from independent and major publications.

As soon as we hand over searching out information to social media algorithms and LLM tools, we abandon our ability to see reality outside our direct vision.

Grok's ownership has already demonstrated capacity to influence major world elections and other events. You cannot trust it with this sort of information gathering and reporting.