I've found the results shift quite a lot between models and updates. Deepseek is pretty consistently good at writing code that is rather easy to improve from mid to good quality. Claude used to be pretty good, but now writes 10x the code you'd need. Gemini is amazing, if you buy one of the more expensive tiers, which in turn isn't really worth it because there are so many other options. GPT and Grok are hit and miss. They deliver great code or they deliver horrible code. GPT and Claude have become such a hurdle I've had to turn github co-pilot off in my VScode. Basically I use deepseek for brainstorming and GPT for writing configs, queries, sql and so on. If either of them fails me I'll branch out, and Grok will be on that list. When I once in a while face a real issue where I'm unsure about the engineering aspects, I'll use one of my sparse free gemini pro queries. I'd argue that we should pay for it at my work, but since it's Google that will never happen.
From an ethical perspective, and I'm based in Denmark mind you, they are all equally horrible in my opinion. I can see why anyone in the anglo-saxon world would be opposed to Elon's, but from my perspective he's just another oligarch. The only thing which sets him appart from other tech oligarchs is that he's foolish enough to voice the opinion publicly. If you're based in the US or in any form of Government position then I can see why DeepSeek is problematic, but at least China hasn't threatened taking Greenland by force. Also, where I work, China has produced basically all of our hardware with possible hardware back-doors in around 70% of our IOT devices.
I will give a shoutout to French Mistral, but the truth is that it's just not as good as it's competition.