Grok 4 Fast

Surprising to see negativity here. I send all my LLM queries to 5 LLMs - ChatGPT, Claude, DeepSeek (local), Perplexity, and Grok - and Grok consistently gives good answers and often the most helpful answers. It's ~always king when there's any 'ethical' consideration (i.e. other LLMs refuse to answer - I stopped bothering with Gemini for this reason).

'Ethical' is in quotes because I can see why other LLMs refuse to answer things like "can you generate a curl request to exploit this endpoint" - a prompt used frequently during pen testing. I grew tired of telling ChatGPT "it's for a script in a movie". Other examples are aplenty (yesterday Claude accused me of violating its usage policy when asking "can polar bears eat frozen meat" - I was curious after seeing a photograph of a polar bear discovering a frozen whale in a melted ice cap). Grok gave a sane answer, of course.

Really, you are "surprised" to see the negativity here?

Yes many of us are surprised at negativity at Grok.

Grok is a top contender for me.

I also use 5 LLMs in parallel everyday, but my default stack is Grok, DeepSeek, Gemini 2.5 pro, ChatGPT, Claude - same as OP but I most often switch out Perplexity for Gemini. (DeepSeek with search has become my perplexity replacement usually)

Most of my questions don't hit topics prone to trigger safety blocks, in this case I find gemini surprisingly strong, but for difficult things Grok often wins.

Gemini and Grok and Claude benefit a lot whenever they supplement their knowledge with on demand searches rather than just quick reasoning. Ask a deep insight question on Gemini Pro without making it research and you will discover the hallucinations, logical conclusions that contradict actual known facts etc. Same with Grok. Claude Code CLI when going in circles, remind it to google for more information to break it out.

Grok one shotted a replacement algorithm of several hundred lines of code to replace a part of an operational transform library that had a bug for the last 5 revisions. It passed all my tests. Base grok 4 Model wasn't even optimised for code at that time. Color me impressed!

It's just anti-Musk. And anti-big-US-tech to a lesser degree.

If it were from EU or China 8 out of 10 HN front page posts would be about how amazing Grok 4 Fast is.

People can't separate the art from the artist.