alt Hacker NewsHow popular is Grok compared to other companies models for SWE tasks? I almost never hear it talked about against OpenAI's or Anthropic's products
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You can very roughly proxy popularity of close-sourced models through OpenRouter token throughput. Grok has an order of magnitude less OpenRouter usage than Claude, GPT, even Gemini.
They were missing a harness like Claude Code or Codex (terminal). However they recently released Grok Build, which is probably the fasted I've used, in terms of responsiveness, but didn't have a model at Opus 4.7/8 level. The thing is if they add 4.5 to Grok Build and keep improving the harness I think it can compete (cheaper and faster).
Completely irrelevant, which was expected considering their previous models were vastly outclassed by other models at SWE.
This is the first grok model that seems actually pretty competitive at SWE.
Wasn't, which is why they purchased Cursor.
If they were a frontier lab, you'd know.
They had two big substantive flaws on top of the political stuff. Aside from a brief window last summer Grok has been behind the curve for coding, and before the Cursor acquisition they didn’t have a harness. Now they have an Opus tier model and a real harness they have at a minimum the opportunity to undercut the competition on price. And with the 5T and 10T models being trained on Colossus 2 they have the possibility to leap ahead.
No one's made a MechaHitler joke yet?
Because of the of the political stuff, they have a bad reputation I think and are taken less seriously (I feel this way). They have an opportunity imo to break free from that and just not do the gatekeeping / condescension that the other providers are starting, and become more mainstream.