Ask HN: What Happened to xAI?

17 points by zof3 173 days ago | 8 comments

All the other big name model providers have been pushing stuff out the door steadily; what’s happened to xAI? Their models were never the best but now they are getting wiped on the floor — for coding work, at least.

Is anyone here actively using a Grok model?

The SpaceX merger just happened, is that part of why they haven’t released anything in the last 5 months?

uyzstvqs 173 days ago |

Grok 4.20 is currently in beta and ranking #4 on arena.ai for text generation, only beaten by Claude Opus 4.6 and Gemini 3.1 Pro. Grok 4.1 Thinking is in #9, still a top model. Grok Imagine is consistently in the top 10 for image and video generation, ranking #1 for Image-to-Video.

If you meant code generation, Grok has never really been a top model for that purpose. Claude remains the undefeated king there.

https://arena.ai/leaderboard

oren1531 173 days ago |

Grok's value was never really about model quality - it was the only model with real-time access to what's actually being said on X. And it's less filtered than the others, which matters for certain topics where ChatGPT/Claude will just refuse or hedge. Those are two genuinely unique things. But they're sitting on both advantages without shipping anything meaningful, and competitors will find workarounds eventually. The SpaceX merger adding organizational noise right now seems like the worst possible timing.

nopurpose 173 days ago |

Not a user, but in what sense they are getting wiped on the flor? 4th place on llmarena looks solid: https://huggingface.co/spaces/lmarena-ai/arena-leaderboard

IAmGraydon 168 days ago |

I’m shocked that a tech company run by a deeply disturbed conman billionaire who is trying to warp the historical record with an ideologically biased bot can’t attract actual talent. Serious people want nothing to do with this weirdo.

ej31 173 days ago |

5 months is nothing. we launched a rocket twice in that time ngl

downbad_ 173 days ago |

I find Grok to be better than OpenAI (ChatGPT)

mounram 170 days ago | |

I have the complete opposite experience

muzani 173 days ago |

Grok was the best every now and then but they committed the capital crime of trying to charge 50% more than the competitors who were only 20% or so worse.

There's kind of this weird thing in Silicon Valley where CEOs and investors keep telling people to raise prices! The definition of a moat is you can raise prices!!!

But these folks usually don't have the experience of being broke or saving for retirement and such. They don't understand that an extra $10/month is a heck lot of money. And so nobody really wants to try it and it has a dampening effect on the virality.