Cursor, since Grok 4.5, has had an incredible deal for frontier level models, their subscription now goes way further than OpenAI or Anthropic. Even on their lower tier plans you can use a lot tokens on their of their first party models (Grok and Composer) and not really run out comparatively. Combine them with an orchestrator and implementor type setup and it goes even further.
I believe they are the only western provider that has Kimi K3 on a subscription plan today as well. I would love to ditch Anthropic and be on Kimi if there were a subsidized plan like that with ZDR
I'm willing to pay 2x for a 10% smarter model. Intelligence matters that much (because 10% smarter probably saves, on average, several hours of human time).
Can you explain what you mean? These days courtesy of an addictive reset game OpenAI is playing, I can't find anything with frontier intelligence that's more cost efficient...
I have. He was using it due to philosophical reasons the same way many people have philosophical reasons for avoiding it. I don't know how many people are like that, but it's not exactly where you want to position your product if you're a business.
Personally - and I know I'm not alone with this sentiment based on comments I see on this site - I wouldn't touch Grok no matter how good or cheap it is. I don't trust Elon and I don't want to give another dollar to the world's richest person who turns around and uses the money to interfere with elections. The guy I know uses it for essentially the same reason I won't use it.
I had a security incident the other day and Grok was the only model that would help. Claude and GPT refused on ethical grounds and only gave general advice. In an emergency, I'd only trust Grok. However, that's the only time I used Grok for coding (since Opus 4.8 it would take a lot to get me to switch away from Anthropic)
once my codex/claude weekly limit was gone, i gave it a try. It was surprisingly good, not dumb in any way, and fast. I now require it as a part of 3-of-3 quorum with any codebase change.
A bunch of SWEs at my work use it as their primary model.
We have Claude, ChatGPT, and Cursor with essentially no cap on spend (top guy is spending over 10K a month on AI at API prices), and he hasn't had his hand slapped.
So it's not like they are using it purely because it's cheaper.
I think people like to use it for its speaking style, pretty solid performance, and its speed.
I use. I used to be a Claude user. Since trying Grok 4.5 and especially Grok 4.6, I don't want to go back to Claude any more (I have early access to 4.6).
Grok is 3x+ faster than Claude and I can't tell the diff in engineering work quality. As an engineer, speed is important to me.
An hour in, I've been running four terminals full bore on my $20/mo Grok sub and I'm at 9% for the week. Codex or Claude would easily have hit 5-hour or weekly limits.
I can respect if you say you hate their guts. Everyone has their worldview. But over moral or ethical stand? You don't have any if you're using Chinese models, or fly Middle East airlines, or countless of other products. Don't delude yourself.
When you make politics a big part of your identity, you can’t help but to inject it everywhere. It’s glaringly weird and annoying for those of us who are apathetic and just want to talk about tech, but that’s how it has been for a few years.
It's not virtue signaling. People are allowed to have morals. And they are allowed to act in ways that align with those moral beliefs.
> do you use Apple equipment despite Apple’s use of Chinese slave labor?
If someone said they didn't buy Apple because of this, I'd support them in that too.
People. Are. Complicated. We're allowed to have beliefs, we're allowed to have beliefs that aren't internally consistent. You gotta get over the idea that people aren't genuine believers in their beliefs.
The issue is that this is supposed to be a tech discussion forum and many of us don’t want to be repeatedly beaten over the head with other people’s politics. Plenty of other places to be political, we just wish this wasn’t one of them.
I'm only being forced to use it at $WORK since some people overran their Cursor bill, so everyone gets Cursor Auto enabled by default which routes to Grok 4.5.
> I have never met a single human being who uses Grok for coding
Me too. The only people I ever saw using grok were using it by accident as they used copilot in auto mode and noticed some prompts were thrown it's way.
I've tried it on my "let's run every model in parallel and see which finds more edge cases" type of tasks, and Grok 4.5 was really behind Opus/ChatGPT but ahead of Gemini - despite having a strong showing on benchmarks.
That makes me really skeptical of it being GPT5.6-tier, much less Fable-tier, based on some of these benchmarks alone. But I'll test here shortly.
I’m perpetually surprised people feel comfortable sending their code to an LLM that was made to call itself MechaHitler. I wouldn’t touch grok or now cursor with a 10 foot pole
Interesting. Grok 4.5 is a capable model, although not quite at Fable/Sol levels. Will be interesting to see how this holds up. Musk appears to have made a savvy choice buying Cursor's data.
I often wonder if there's a chance, even if minimal... that they stole the weights of the Anthropic models they run on their datacenter... or are actively destillating it.
I think the more likely explanation is that the Cursor data they effectively acquired for $10B was extremely valuable for their training when combined with the insane number of GB300s xAI has for training.
I'm willing to pay 2x for a 10% smarter model. Intelligence matters that much (because 10% smarter probably saves, on average, several hours of human time).
I haven't tried so it's pure speculation based on benchmarks, but I'd assume Grok 4.6 is around Opus 4.8 in real world use, but clearly below Opus 5.
Personally - and I know I'm not alone with this sentiment based on comments I see on this site - I wouldn't touch Grok no matter how good or cheap it is. I don't trust Elon and I don't want to give another dollar to the world's richest person who turns around and uses the money to interfere with elections. The guy I know uses it for essentially the same reason I won't use it.
thats a very dumb reason considering all rich people do it, most are just not as open about it as Musk
We have Claude, ChatGPT, and Cursor with essentially no cap on spend (top guy is spending over 10K a month on AI at API prices), and he hasn't had his hand slapped.
So it's not like they are using it purely because it's cheaper.
I think people like to use it for its speaking style, pretty solid performance, and its speed.
Grok is 3x+ faster than Claude and I can't tell the diff in engineering work quality. As an engineer, speed is important to me.
As an aside, do you use Apple equipment despite Apple’s use of Chinese slave labor?
> do you use Apple equipment despite Apple’s use of Chinese slave labor?
If someone said they didn't buy Apple because of this, I'd support them in that too.
People. Are. Complicated. We're allowed to have beliefs, we're allowed to have beliefs that aren't internally consistent. You gotta get over the idea that people aren't genuine believers in their beliefs.
Oh but it is. Normal people don't go to McDonalds shouting: "I refuse to eat here because they kill cows!". They just... don't go there.
It’s also a great deal!
Me too. The only people I ever saw using grok were using it by accident as they used copilot in auto mode and noticed some prompts were thrown it's way.
I saw far more people using Mistral than grok.
That makes me really skeptical of it being GPT5.6-tier, much less Fable-tier, based on some of these benchmarks alone. But I'll test here shortly.
In my experience in heavy coding sessions most pricing is just cache read and cache write like 80% of my token bill.
I just assumed every model manufacturer is distilling from the frontier models. If they aren't they are definitely trying to do it.