Obviously catching up to others in agent assisted coding is the motivation for this. But it is also an odd decision in the same way that Meta hiring an AI leader from a data labeling company is odd.
Feel like the canary was when Grokpedia became a project.
Giant waste of time while Anthropic/OAI keep surging forward.
I also keep hearing this narrative that Twitter is a good data source, but I cannot imagine it's a valuable dataset. Sure keeping up with realtime topics can be useful, but I am not sure how much of a product that is.
xAI's biggest contribution to the space seems to have been their x-rated image/video model. Hard to see what xAI has to offer against Gemini, Claud, ChatGPT.
All: please stick to thoughtful, substantive discussion. You may not owe you-know-whom better, but you owe this community better if you're participating in it.
If you don't have a thoughtful, substantive comment to add, not commenting is also a good option. There are quite a few interesting submissions to talk about.
It's surprising that AI coding agents have network effects but it's true. Think about it from first principles & you'll realize that the bottleneck is how many people are using it to write real code & providing both implicit (compiler errors, test failures, crash logs, etc) & direct ("did not properly follow instructions", "deleted main databases", "didn't properly use a tool", etc) feedback. No one is using xAI for serious software engineering so that leaves OpenAI, Anthropic, & Google w/ enough scale to benefit from network effects. No one has real AI but what they do have is the appearance of intelligence from crowdsourced feedback & filtering. This means companies that are already in the lead will continue to stay there & xAI started way too late so they will continue to lose in every domain that actually matters & benefits from network effects.
im not surprised, grok definitely falls behind as both a coding agent and a research tool.
claude codes the best, gpt is the best research tool, and grok is really only great at videos. which isn't a huge loss, but videos don't have the same functional capacity as academic topics and coding
Unfortunate. The Grok team built a phenomenal model. I use it all the time and it very often out performs GPT and Claude, on coding and STEM research related tasks. I was part of the beta for a while Grok 4.2 Beta with multi-agents and it was just amazingly good.
People aren't using it for reasons other than its capabilities. I mean, I don't think my boss would approve a paid Grok subscription for example.
There is no way in hell Grok is better than Gemini. Google has the advantage of much more efficient and faster inference, with a lot more data sets.
Secondly, would you trust a model, especially for STEM research, that consistently has training loops done on it to make it to adhere to what only Musk considers as truth?
Honestly, comments like yours really make me super suspicious of whether you are a bot or not.
I don't see what you're seeing, in any dimension. But here's a fair take.
I wrote several very specialized benchmarks that I've used over time, that surface "model personalities" and their effects on decision making (as well as measuring the outcomes).
Grok 4.1 Fast Reasoning is/was a solid model. It's also fundamentally different from the pack.
I call it a smart, aggressive, Claude Haiku. That is, its "thinking" is quite chaotic and sometimes short-hand and its output can be as well (relate to other models).
Its aggressiveness can allow it to punch above in competitive scenarios that I have in some of my benchmarks. Its write-ups and documentation are often replete with "dominate", "relentless" and a general high energy that skirts the limits of 'cringe bro'. That said, it has generally performed just beneath the SOTA (at the time: GPT-5.2, Gemini-3-Flash, Claude Opus 4.5). Angry Sonnet perhaps.
The latest release feels quite similar but also underperforms the same older crowd (so far) so it hasn't quite made the leap that Claude's 4.6 and GPT's 5.3/5.4 series made. It's also now priced the same as its peers but does not deliver SOTA capabilities (at least not consistently in my opinion).
I use it because it is easily jailbroken and is willing to search for old orphan magazine PDFs I'm trying to track down. The subagents will all scream "this is copyright violation!" but the main Grok engine ignores them and finds obscure, niche forum posts etc.
So, it has its uses compared to the mainstream products.
xAI showed me that it’s really still OAI and Anthropic (which is basically the OG devs). No matter how much money you throw at the problem, the entire space is still in the hands of a few.
I feel like even just a couple years ago it would have been shocking to see an article involving Musk have this kind of spin. Like you'd never see a line like this:
> The name is a “funny” reference to Microsoft, the billionaire added.
It does not surprise me. The free Grok got worse since 4.0, they increasingly save money by not responding at all or only allowing one answer. Grok now defends the administration and billionaires.
The company seems to burn money like crazy. Everyone knows that "AI in space" and the downgrade to a moon trip after claiming for 15 years that Mars is just around the corner are marketing.
All AIs are toys and the coding promises are just a lie to string along investors. Unfortunately many of these are senile Star Trek watchers who buy into everything.
I think the problem for xAI is that it can really only hire two types of researchers - people who are philosophically aligned with Elon, and people who are solely money-motivated (not a judgment). But frontier AI research is a field with a lot of top talent who have strong philosophical motivation for their work, and those philosophies are often completely at odds with Elon. OpenAI and Anthropic have philosophical niches that are much better at attracting the current cream of the crop, and I don't really see how xAI can compete with that.
In an interview with xAI I was literally told that certain parts of the model have to align with Elon, and that Elon can call us and demand anything at anytime. No thanks!
This is becoming the problem with all of his businesses - Tesla has a crazy valuation and it really seems like they're having huge trouble getting Robotaxi going in Austin given the very slow progress there.
> But frontier AI research is a field with a lot of top talent who have strong philosophical motivation for their work
The "top researchers" in AI are Chinese. And I am skeptical that they even remotely have the philosophical or political alignment you are attempting to project on to them. Neither is a letter published by a few disgruntled employees of a San Francisco based company any kind of evidence or form of consensus.
> people who are solely money-motivated (not a judgment).
Honestly, we should judge. There should be judgment for people who are solely money motivated and making the world a worse place. I know, blah blah privilege, something something mouths to feed. Platitudes to help the rich assholes sleep at night. If you are wealthy and making stuff that hurts people, you are a piece of shit and should be called out, simple.
It’s interesting because for a long time people wanted to work for Elon because he held the moral high ground. “I’ll bring electric cars and space colonization online or die trying.”
I can't say I know the AI research community well but I'd imagine OpenAIs alignment w/ the military would not align w/ the the personal philosophy of many.
I’ve heard the haha-but-serious joke numerous times that you can’t have a security department that’s not trans and furry friendly. Thing is, I completely believe that. Those groups are disproportionately represented among the security community, and I personally would not work somewhere that my friends in those groups would feel unwelcome. That’s a quite common sentiment even among us straight cis non-furry men.
Well, I don’t think it’s a stretch that the kind of highly educated data scientists and engineers who have the experience to work in high-end AI labs also don’t want to work somewhere that their friends and associates would feel unwelcome, let alone have their friends question why they’d be willing to.
Turns out opinions have consequences and freedom of speech goes hand in hand with freedom of association. People have the right to say whatever they wish. Others have the right not to want to work with them.
Sorry, but what is the philosophical niche of openai really? Obtain money at all cost? No red lined when using your modele in war? Work for scam altman?
I don't use it myself, but I feel like the way Grok is integrated into Twitter is a pretty good thing for discussions, as it is certainly a more objective and rational voice than most human participants. I think it's good that people tag @grok if they don't understand something or want an opinion, even if it looks pretty silly to see "@grok is this true" repeated multiple times in replies.
That said, Musk's attempts at misaligning the thing and make it prefer his opinions of course destroy any trust. It's surprising that it's seemingly as good and helpful as it is despite the corruption attempts.
I also don't quite get how the business model is supposed to work out if its main usecase is to serve Twitter. I know they provide API access as all other models, but with how distrusted Musk is and how sensitive of a topic reliable model behavior is, they seem to sabotage themselves. Which company wants it to go mechahitler on them?
I disagree, I find that the grok replies are terrible product UX. Not only do they clog up the replies of every popular post, they're also constrained to extremely short answers with no sources. The community notes system, while also flawed in its own ways, is at least not nearly as disruptive and usually provides a link.
Trying to make social media a source of truthful information is always an uphill battle and doubly so for X.
> Grok is integrated into Twitter is a pretty good thing for discussions, as it is certainly a more objective and rational voice than most human participants
I think it would have been better to have just brought Ashok Elluswamy over and placed him in charge of a group and then tried to just keep the researchers on rather than firing them. It is hard to get anything done if you do not have the talent already onboard.
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 92.0 ms ] threadSince it's the original source I've left it up, but added other URLs to the toptext.
Ask HN: What Happened to xAI? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47323236 - March 2026 (6 comments)
@grok fire the bottom 50% engineers from x.ai ranked by number of commits per day
@grok generate a hypothetical picture of an Elon who is not under the influence of large amounts of Ketamine
I honestly don't know what to expect from Elon these days. But it's rarely good news.
Giant waste of time while Anthropic/OAI keep surging forward.
I also keep hearing this narrative that Twitter is a good data source, but I cannot imagine it's a valuable dataset. Sure keeping up with realtime topics can be useful, but I am not sure how much of a product that is.
Less "I can't help you with that." on benign queries is a big advantage.
If you don't have a thoughtful, substantive comment to add, not commenting is also a good option. There are quite a few interesting submissions to talk about.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
claude codes the best, gpt is the best research tool, and grok is really only great at videos. which isn't a huge loss, but videos don't have the same functional capacity as academic topics and coding
People aren't using it for reasons other than its capabilities. I mean, I don't think my boss would approve a paid Grok subscription for example.
All of them (even Gemini, the worst of the bunch) far outclass Grok on everything I've thrown at them, especially coding.
Grok is good at summarizing what's happening on twitter though.
Secondly, would you trust a model, especially for STEM research, that consistently has training loops done on it to make it to adhere to what only Musk considers as truth?
Honestly, comments like yours really make me super suspicious of whether you are a bot or not.
I wrote several very specialized benchmarks that I've used over time, that surface "model personalities" and their effects on decision making (as well as measuring the outcomes).
Grok 4.1 Fast Reasoning is/was a solid model. It's also fundamentally different from the pack.
I call it a smart, aggressive, Claude Haiku. That is, its "thinking" is quite chaotic and sometimes short-hand and its output can be as well (relate to other models).
Its aggressiveness can allow it to punch above in competitive scenarios that I have in some of my benchmarks. Its write-ups and documentation are often replete with "dominate", "relentless" and a general high energy that skirts the limits of 'cringe bro'. That said, it has generally performed just beneath the SOTA (at the time: GPT-5.2, Gemini-3-Flash, Claude Opus 4.5). Angry Sonnet perhaps.
The latest release feels quite similar but also underperforms the same older crowd (so far) so it hasn't quite made the leap that Claude's 4.6 and GPT's 5.3/5.4 series made. It's also now priced the same as its peers but does not deliver SOTA capabilities (at least not consistently in my opinion).
So, it has its uses compared to the mainstream products.
I use AI for work, but not agentic, at most per method/function using GitHub CoPilot (which has Grok on it).
Grok is at best useful for commenting code.
> The name is a “funny” reference to Microsoft, the billionaire added.
in something from 2023 or earlier.
The company seems to burn money like crazy. Everyone knows that "AI in space" and the downgrade to a moon trip after claiming for 15 years that Mars is just around the corner are marketing.
All AIs are toys and the coding promises are just a lie to string along investors. Unfortunately many of these are senile Star Trek watchers who buy into everything.
“ In an interview with {COMPANY} I was literally told that … {COMPANY-OWNER} can call us and demand anything at anytime. “
Doesn’t sound so crazy when Elon name is removed from it.
Note: I’m no Elon fan, but do think sometimes HN overreacts when his name is mentioned.
The "top researchers" in AI are Chinese. And I am skeptical that they even remotely have the philosophical or political alignment you are attempting to project on to them. Neither is a letter published by a few disgruntled employees of a San Francisco based company any kind of evidence or form of consensus.
Honestly, we should judge. There should be judgment for people who are solely money motivated and making the world a worse place. I know, blah blah privilege, something something mouths to feed. Platitudes to help the rich assholes sleep at night. If you are wealthy and making stuff that hurts people, you are a piece of shit and should be called out, simple.
It’s sad to see the shift.
Well, I don’t think it’s a stretch that the kind of highly educated data scientists and engineers who have the experience to work in high-end AI labs also don’t want to work somewhere that their friends and associates would feel unwelcome, let alone have their friends question why they’d be willing to.
Turns out opinions have consequences and freedom of speech goes hand in hand with freedom of association. People have the right to say whatever they wish. Others have the right not to want to work with them.
That said, Musk's attempts at misaligning the thing and make it prefer his opinions of course destroy any trust. It's surprising that it's seemingly as good and helpful as it is despite the corruption attempts.
I also don't quite get how the business model is supposed to work out if its main usecase is to serve Twitter. I know they provide API access as all other models, but with how distrusted Musk is and how sensitive of a topic reliable model behavior is, they seem to sabotage themselves. Which company wants it to go mechahitler on them?
Trying to make social media a source of truthful information is always an uphill battle and doubly so for X.
Hard agree.