alt Hacker NewsAs an English-as-second-language speaker and writer, one thing Grok really shines at is capturing the tone and level of "formality" of a piece of text and the replicating it correctly. It seems to understand the little human subtleties of language in a way the other major providers don't. Chatgpt goes overly stiff and formal sounding, or ends up in a weird "aye guvnor" type informal language (Claude is sometimes better but not always).
Grok seems in general better at being "human" in ways that are hard to define: for eg. if I ask it "does this message roughly convey things correctly, to the level it can given this length", it will likely answer like a human would (either a yes or a change suggestion that sticks to the tone and length), while Chatgpt would write a dissertation on the message that still doesn't clear anything up.
Recently I've noticed that Grok seems to have gotten really good at dictation too (that feature where you click the mic to ask it something). Chatgpt has like 90-95% accuracy with my accent, the speech input on Android's Gboard something like 75%, Grok surprisingly gets something like 98% of my words correct.
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I've also noticed that when I communicate with Grok in my native language, its tone is more natural than other models. I think this is due to the advantage of being trained on a large amount of Twitter data. However, as Twitter contains more and more AI-generated content now, I'm afraid continued training will make it less natural.
I only use Grok through the "Gork" personality in the Tesla, but find its responses to be very realistic, often genuinely funny, and occasionally useful.
So you're saying it groks you better?
anecdata: The responses of grok on X in my language are really good. the tone, sarcasm, level of "vulgarity" in response is so accurate that it seem its written by human
> As an English-as-second-language speaker and writer
How do you know it's actually better? I'm not trying to be condescending, but this reads to me like vibes :)
This is more of a user preference. When I want to be informed my default is that chat bots should imitate the tone of Wikipedia. Not informal, but somewhat academic and in-depth. I don’t like it when chat bots explain things like an average human without pedagogical training: meandering, in the wrong order, and often having to repeat themselves.
I did a quick eval comparing Grok 4.3, Opus 4.7 and GPT 4.1 and they actually seem pretty similar:
https://ofw640g9re.evvl.io/
They all did pretty well at a more "formal" tone, but GPT4.1 was the only one that didn't make me cringe with a "casual" tone.
[edit] fwiw, grok was also the fastest+cheapest model, claude was slowest and priciest.