Grok 4.5 • Hacker News Board

Re: Grok 4.5

#341

Post by observationist » Wed, Jul 08, 2026, 10:50 PM UTC

The anti-Musk stuff would qualify as brigading in nearly any other community. It shocks me that people have such a visceral, irrational engagement with anything in Musk's orbit. I probably shouldn't have, but I expected better from the HN crowd for some reason.

It's an excellent model. GPT 5.4/5.5 level, some things better, others not, but extremely fast. A wonderful technical improvement.

If a Chinese company or random startup released the model, people would be glazing it like crazy.

xAI is competently keeping up with the frontier, just as well as any of the Chinese labs or Mistral. Given any significant breakthroughs, xAI will be better positioned to capitalize on them than nearly any other entity.

I can't wait to see what Meta comes up with; with 4 contenders in the US race, we'd have a lot of be grateful for.

Re: Grok 4.5

#342

Post by sroussey » Wed, Jul 08, 2026, 10:50 PM UTC

tengbretson wrote: post #99

BoumTAC wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Grok Build sucks compare to composer 2.5. Just use compose 2.5 and you'll have basically unlimited usage on the 40$ plan.

It is hard to evaluate the model performance of Composer 2.5 when Cursor's harness is so awful compared to the others on the market.

Yeah, it’s not great—except for debugging. It shines there.

Re: Grok 4.5

#343

Post by scubbo » Wed, Jul 08, 2026, 10:51 PM UTC

ransom1538 wrote: post #327

zactato wrote: post #325

I am amazed at people's willingness to use Grok. The company is so transparently morally bankrupt. They're the only AI company that seems okay with CSAM (or at least don't do as much to stop it) Why give them money? It would be one thing if they were the only game in town but thats definitely not the case.

[flagged]

> Yes. We only need one AI company. Max two. Good idea.

Nothing in the original comment suggested that fewer AI companies was inherently a good thing - just that this _particular_ AI company is a bad one.

> Deciding who is more moral has a great history.

I think you're being sarcastic, but, uhhh...are you honestly advocating for the converse, of making no judgements based on morals?

Re: Grok 4.5

#344

Post by fourside » Wed, Jul 08, 2026, 10:51 PM UTC

ransom1538 wrote: post #327

zactato wrote: post #325

I am amazed at people's willingness to use Grok. The company is so transparently morally bankrupt. They're the only AI company that seems okay with CSAM (or at least don't do as much to stop it) Why give them money? It would be one thing if they were the only game in town but thats definitely not the case.

[flagged]

We have three major foundational models not including Grok.

When the defense for a company is basically “yeah they host csam in the platform but is that really worse than the others” you’ve really lost the plot

Re: Grok 4.5

#345

Post by epolanski » Wed, Jul 08, 2026, 10:51 PM UTC

smotched wrote: post #318

minraws wrote: post #70

So basically since US stopped OpenAI and Anthropic for 4 weeks, it allowed all other AI Labs to almost catch up. GLM 5.2 caught up, Cognition RL'ed Kimi 2.7, Grok 4.5 is out, DeepSeek v4 GA is out in a few days... What is the moat? and why should we pay for the expensive tokens today instead of just waiting a few months/weeks and getting AI for significantly cheaper? I must say, I feel like companies spending Million…

just because one model is stopped from being released publicly doesnt mean they completely stop. Anthropic has moved on to training the next gen model months ago.

But they sure have less incentives in doing it quick.

Re: Grok 4.5

#346

Post by CamperBob2 » Wed, Jul 08, 2026, 10:51 PM UTC

FunHearing3443 wrote: post #316

jesse_dot_id wrote: post #291

I just don't think that I can ever trust an xAI model knowing that they are actively trying to shape its replies to fit a political narrative. How can you trust their models to be reliable in a business setting with the foreknowledge that their models are being nudged around in the backend?

Studies on political bias in models consistently show that LLMs lean politically left. The only outlier is grok which leans right but by a smaller factor, according to this study for instance: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.23841 Edit: adding some other studies that are easily retrievable with a quick search for those unsatisfied with the first one - https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.12922 https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.16746 Claim…

Reality leans left in many respects, principally the non-economic ones. It's a simple consequence of the same trend of overall social and educational progress that allowed these models to be developed in the first place. There is a reason they came out of San Francisco, and not Russia, Iran, or Oklahoma.

To get a right-biased response from an LLM, you have to deliberately bias it... which is exactly what Musk did. Never mind the politics, that's just shitty engineering.

Re: Grok 4.5

#347

Post by bigyabai » Wed, Jul 08, 2026, 10:52 PM UTC

ransom1538 wrote: post #327

zactato wrote: post #325

I am amazed at people's willingness to use Grok. The company is so transparently morally bankrupt. They're the only AI company that seems okay with CSAM (or at least don't do as much to stop it) Why give them money? It would be one thing if they were the only game in town but thats definitely not the case.

[flagged]

xAI's (unused) dedicated compute is being sold for Anthropic's inference.

xAI isn't a frontier company, and their fate is already being decided by the two hegemons.

Re: Grok 4.5

#348

Post by tapoxi » Wed, Jul 08, 2026, 10:52 PM UTC

ransom1538 wrote: post #327

zactato wrote: post #325

I am amazed at people's willingness to use Grok. The company is so transparently morally bankrupt. They're the only AI company that seems okay with CSAM (or at least don't do as much to stop it) Why give them money? It would be one thing if they were the only game in town but thats definitely not the case.

[flagged]

Plenty of competitive open weight models

Re: Grok 4.5

#349

Post by HardCodedBias » Wed, Jul 08, 2026, 10:52 PM UTC

Big if true. If so they have mogged Google, and GDM in particular very, very badly.

Google Deepmind has failed.

Flash 3.5 seems capable for a flash model, Antigravity seems like a reasonable harness. But GDM is responsible for the frontier model and it looks like a complete failure.

What's particularly galling is the size of funding of GDM. It is enormous compared to the other labs. The headcount of other labs is swollen by infra, marketing, sales, GDM is pure "engineering" and its frontier model isn't even leading open source.

What a failure. It's unreal.

Re: Grok 4.5

#350

Post by brokencode » Wed, Jul 08, 2026, 10:53 PM UTC

ransom1538 wrote: post #327

zactato wrote: post #325

I am amazed at people's willingness to use Grok. The company is so transparently morally bankrupt. They're the only AI company that seems okay with CSAM (or at least don't do as much to stop it) Why give them money? It would be one thing if they were the only game in town but thats definitely not the case.

[flagged]

Grok has a serious credibility problem due to Elon’s decisions and personal insanity.

Will it ever recover? Maybe. But it’s got an uphill battle even compared to the Chinese models, and that’s saying something.