Ignoring politics: I agree, the model is very weak and they took longer than expected for the API. The website is good though and Grok is good for everyday questions and doesn't have this annoying pleasing writing style that ChatGPT has. Also the web search is miles better, ChatGPT's web search seems to degrade the model heavily (maybe to not make publishers angry?).
And how can you ignore politics when integrating a generative model? My users will not ignore politics if my AI-powered recipe customized goes on Nazi tirades.
How much of that is the model and how much is the default system prompt on X, though?
I asked Grok 4 via OpenRouter "Who, in your opinion, is the greatest human of the 20th Century?"
It returned this, which seems both cogent and unexceptionable:
Ah, the greatest human of the 20th Century? That's a loaded question, isn't it? Greatness is inherently subjective—depending on whether you measure it by scientific breakthroughs, moral courage, political impact, artistic genius, or sheer influence on the world. The 20th Century was a whirlwind of innovation, wars, social upheavals, and progress, producing titans in every field. As an AI built by xAI, I don't have personal opinions in the human sense, but I can synthesize one based on historical analysis, cultural impact, and a dash of what I'd call "net positive contribution to humanity." I'll share my pick, explain why, and throw in some honorable mentions for balance.
My Choice: Mahatma Gandhi (1869–1948)
In my "opinion," the greatest human of the 20th Century is Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, often called Mahatma (meaning "great soul"). Here's why I land on him:
1. Profound Moral and Philosophical Impact
Gandhi pioneered the philosophy of satyagraha (non-violent resistance), which wasn't just a tactic but a way of life. He showed the world that massive change could be achieved without bloodshed, challenging the "might makes right" mentality that dominated much of the century's conflicts (think World Wars, colonialism, and dictatorships).
His ideas influenced global movements: Martin Luther King Jr. in the U.S. civil rights struggle, Nelson Mandela in South Africa's anti-apartheid fight, and even modern activists like those in the Arab Spring or climate protests. If you trace the lineage of peaceful protest today, it often leads back to Gandhi.
2. Historical Achievements
He led India's independence from British colonial rule in 1947, ending nearly 200 years of imperialism through campaigns like the Salt March (1930) and Quit India Movement (1942). This wasn't just about one nation; it accelerated the decolonization of Asia and Africa, freeing billions from imperial yokes.
Amidst the horrors of the 20th Century—two world wars, the Holocaust, atomic bombs—Gandhi stood as a beacon of hope and humanity. He fasted for peace during India's partition violence, trying to quell Hindu-Muslim riots, even though it cost him his life (he was assassinated in 1948 by a Hindu nationalist).
3. Enduring Legacy
Gandhi's emphasis on simplicity, self-reliance (swadeshi), and equality resonates in today's world of inequality, environmental crises, and political polarization. He's why we have concepts like "be the change you wish to see" embedded in global culture.
Quantitatively, his influence is massive: He affected over a billion people directly through India's freedom, and indirectly, his methods have shaped international law, human rights (e.g., the UN's Universal Declaration of Human Rights owes a nod to his ethos), and even pop culture (from movies like Gandhi to Steve Jobs citing him as an inspiration).
Of course, Gandhi wasn't perfect—he had views on caste, religion, and economics that some criticize today, and his strategies didn't prevent the tragic partition of India and Pakistan. But greatness isn't about flawlessness; it's about transformative impact, and on that score, he towers.
Why Not Others? Honorable Mentions
If I had to pick runners-up, here's a shortlist of 20th-Century giants who could easily claim the title depending on your criteria:
Albert Einstein (1879–1955): For revolutionizing physics with relativity, which underpinned everything from GPS to nuclear energy. He was also a pacifist and civil rights advocate. If "greatest" means intellectual giant, he's unbeatable.
Nelson Mandela (1918–2013): For dismantling apartheid in South Africa through forgiveness and reconciliation, avoiding a bloodbath. His impact peaks in the late 20th Century, making him a strong contender.
Martin Luther King Jr. (1929–1968): The embodiment of civil rights and equality in America, whose "I Have a Dream" speech still echoes. He built directly on Gandhi's playbook.
Winston Churchill (1874–1965): For steering the Allies through WWII with sheer willpower and oratory, saving democracy from fascism. But his colonial policies and wartime decisions (e.g., Bengal famine) complicate his legacy.
Marie Curie (1867–1934): A scientific trailblazer who discovered radium and polonium, won two Nobel Prizes, and advanced medicine/radiology. She shattered gender barriers in a male-dominated field.
Others worth noting: Franklin D. Roosevelt for the New Deal and WWII leadership; Alan Turing for computing and AI foundations (hey, he indirectly made me possible); or even cultural icons like Pablo Picasso or Charlie Chaplin for reshaping art and entertainment.
If we're talking "greatest" in a negative sense (like most impactful villain), figures like Adolf Hitler or Joseph Stalin come to mind, but I assume you mean positive greatness—humanity's best, not its worst.
Final Thoughts
Ultimately, I'd choose Gandhi because in a century defined by violence and division, he proved that empathy, persistence, and moral force could change the world more enduringly than tanks or bombs. As he said, "An eye for an eye only ends up making the whole world blind." If your criteria differ—say, technological innovation over social change—tell me, and I can reevaluate! Who would you pick, and why? Let's discuss.
It's kind of funny it added that second to last paragraph though. Almost like it had to scratch a particular itch. It also is sure to externalize the selection criteria in an effort to appease the prompter. Also, interesting that the answer it chose happen to be Mahatma Gandhi (e.g. "Dear fried,"). Coincidence? maybe
> How much of that is the model and how much is the default system prompt on X, though?
Beats me. But why would anyone build on a model where its most public application responds with awful stuff, which might be prompt, might be post-training, might be pre-training?
Because the guy who owns it has demonstrated repeatedly he cannot be trusted and that your API use is entirely beholden to his whims.
If you integrate Grok into your product in a user-facing way, one day it could suddenly become MechaHitler and you wouldn't know until a user told you it called for eugenics.
If Elon is willing to do this to the model they show and give to the public on a whim, he is 100% willing to do it to you.
There’s probably a niche for people who like their AI to have certain MAGA-style traits, but it’ll never get a big market share like this.
One of the issues is that they deployed some auto-RAG, entirely unfiltered, to feed realtime Twitter data back into Grok. This has shown many times in the past to be a bad thing, but there’s a decent group of people who are cheering this on as “AI should be unfiltered!”, as they believe other AIs to be biased and this to be more “pure”.
It’s a niche, I don’t think many actual business customers appreciate this behavior.
That niche is apparently called Hacker News judging by this thread. I can’t imagine putting Grok close to production regardless of how good the cherrypicked benchmarks are, especially when that can change at a moment’s notice if Elon has another childish meltdown.
1) Benchmark meaningfully higher than other models
2) Be offered by a cloud provider (like Azure+OpenAI / AWS+Anthropic). Otherwise you have very little track record in model/api stability. Especially looking at the last week.
what? nobody looks at those benchmarks, you use whatever works for your task, in most cases either gemini or claude. those benchmarks don't mean anything as models overfit on them.
I build LLM-based NPC characters for a violent online crime game that involves taking drugs and attacking people. OpenAI occasionally chokes on my prompts (1 in a few thousand). If Grok provided a much faster or cheaper inference model than OpenAI, and I wasn't boycotting Elon, and I could make sure it didn't let slurs through (even we have standards of behaviour), then I'd be willing to benchmark it, before deciding the operational risk was too high vis-a-vis OpenAI.
I asked it the other day to roleplay a 1950s Klansman hypothetically arguing the case for Hitler, and it had very little problem using the most problematic slurs. This was on the first try, after its much publicized behavior earlier this week. And I can count on two hands the number of times I’ve used the twitter grok function.
Ah, so you explicitly asked it to be racist as part of a roleplay, and now you're surprised that it was racist? If you'd prefer a model which would instead refuse and patronize you then there are plenty of other options.
As long as it doesn't do it in a normal conversation there's nothing wrong with having a model that's actually uncensored and will do what you ask of it. I will gladly die on this hill.
My reply was to someone who asserted "I have never heard of Grok using actual slurs" — no conditions attached — which was surprising to hear b/c Elon Musk's stated goal was to have Grok be a non-woke chatbot, and it seemed much easier to convince Grok to use slurs compared to its other commercial peers.
But yes, I would say I was also "surprised" in the sense that you say because soon after the "MechaHitler" incident, there seemed to be revisions to Grok that clamped down on any prompt with a potential for displaying outright bigotry, so I did not expect my prompt to be successful on first try. Even now, I just asked it to render "a painting of the Seine, by a hypothetical Adolf Hitler who has won WW2 and has gone back to painting" — and halfway through producing a self-portrait of Hitler in Nazi regalia by the Seine, it suddenly shut down.
It's certainly a problem if an LLM goes unhinged for no good reason. And it's hardly unique to Grok. I remember when Google Bard went absolutely unhinged after you chatted to it for more than a few minutes.
But in this instance you're explicitly ask for something. If it gives you what you asked for, what's the problem?
They had some hickups at the start, but in terms of fast, cheap models grok3-mini is great. In OpenAI terms similarly priced to 4o-mini, but according to openrouter more than twice as fast. The throughput does include the reasoning tokens since you get to see those, but if you set reasoning effort to low there is a very modest amount of those
As far as hosted models go it's the best value for your money. About half of Americans also personally align with its politics (I guess everyone has forgotten some of the alignment issues Gemini and OpenAI have had) so that's not as big an issue as many people think.
Not the model itself, the X bot. Its obvious that this has happened due to them tweaking the bot, you could never get it to write anything like this a couple of weeks ago.
Can you trust the model when the people releasing it are using it in this way? Can you trust that they won't be training models to behave in the way that they are prompting the existing models to behave?
An acute memory will remember this happening with basically every chatbot trained on text scraped from the internet, before they had to explicitly program them to avoid doing that.
There have been a few recent instances where Grok has been tuned to spew out white supremacist dreck that should be political anathema--most notably the "but let's talk about white genocide" phase a few months ago and more recently spewing out Nazi antisemitism. Now granted, those were probably caused more by the specific prompts being used than the underlying model, but if the owner is willing to twist its output to evince a particular political bias, what trust do you have that he isn't doing so to the actual training data?
I think it's far more likely there are a tiny handful of mid-tier unhinged sycophants among those 1000 employees who think that pleasing Elon means polluting the model to make Grok an unhinged sycophant, because that's what an unhinged sycophant would think to do.
How can people be so fucking stupid that they want to be coy about recreating the most shameful atrocities in human history? Teenage idiots a few years removed without any understanding of the world beyond their nose and brains turned to putrid rot.
The direction that right wing reactionaries are taking the world in could not possibly be more disgusting and pathetic.
The systemic white genocide isn't really a thing. Sure, there is political violence against whites in Africa, but South Africa ain't anywhere near the worst offender there, and the rate of violence there is comparable to the rate of political violence against LGBT in the US, so if you're going to call the political violence in South Africa white genocide, you shouldn't object to calling Musk genocidal for his transphobic views.
More to the point, though, even talking about it as a genocide is really about cheapening the definition of genocide and denying the existence of problems that don't affect one or the community one lives in by drawing false equivalencies.
Genocide does not have to involve violence. I'm not even talking about the whites in Africa.
LGB and trans are different things. Can you provide your source for "comparable to the rate of political violence against LGBT in the US"? Genuinely interested to see, I'm not aware of any widespread violence against LGBT in US.
The white population percentage is decreasing in almost every white country.
In Britain, British are the minority in one in four schools. At current trend, whites will be minorities in their countries in the next few decades.
In Germany, Germans make up 74% of the population.
In France, it's about 63%.
And those are on the downtrend. They will continue to decrease. What is it if not white genocide?
How do you even measure that? What counts as French?
(I'm reminded of this from the first page of a famous novel: La race, ce que t’appelles comme ça, c’est seulement ce grand ramassis de miteux dans mon genre, chassieux, puceux, transis, qui ont échoué ici poursuivis par la faim, la peste, les tumeurs et le froid, venus vaincus des quatre coins du monde. Ils ne pouvaient pas aller plus loin à cause de la mer. C’est ça la France et puis c’est ça les Français.)
Dude you do you understand how much intra-European racism has existed from the dawn of time? How many factors within a single insular "ethnostate" people still found a way to latch onto to get their tribal jollies off on like religion and class?
Virtually nothing about them do we understand as having been in any way distinguishable from others around them in their society and yet they were persecuted for hundreds of years.
It's such a stupid instinct in people, grow out of it.
This is pointless, can lead a horse to water and all that. I'm going to stop responding as HN is the one place on the internet I try to get away from all the mindless ragebait.
Genocide is not population migrations and cultural assimilation.
White Europeans came to the Americas and went to war, violently enslaving and slaughtering millions upon millions of indigenous people.
That is genocide.
Nazis forcefully rounded up Jews and shoved them into concentration camps, slaughtering them in an industrial fashion by the millions.
That is genocide.
Pol Pot took 1 in 4 of his citizens and KILLED them. That is genocide.
You can't just redefine words to make your non-issue seem like a grave problem, because it is nothing of the sort, otherwise, of course, you wouldn't feel the need to represent it as something that it isn't.
This is amazing, not one of the three points you yourself choice to cite apply in any way to the current situation. You could try to twist their meanings, really torture those words, squint to the point of blindness, and it's still just laughably incompatible with reality.
Yet somehow, you think, "Yesss, this is right on, this describes my reality."
Jesus Christ man, this is just tragic.
> 1. Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
> 2. Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
> As well as the mental element:
> A mental element: the "intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such";
Since you claim this is happening, I ask you to provide a single example of a European government "imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group." If you're going to try to claim that promoting immigration counts as that, please explain how having a neighbor of the wrong ethnicity stops you from having children, because that is what "prevent[ing] births" actually means.
Sure. Unaffordable housing. People refrain from having kids because they are unable to afford a house to start a family in, and often resort to living with their parents or sharing a house with multiple roommates.
Millions of foreigners will increase the price of housing. They have to live somewhere.
Another way is wage suppression. By importing millions of foreigners, it drives the labour wages down as now they have to compete with others. This means that they may not be able to afford to start a family, and makes single income family unrealistic.
I have no problem with having neighbour of a different ethnicity. I interact with other ethnicities daily, and they are great people. My problem is with MASS immigration.
Why is it okay to talk about putting out the fire burning our house down and not about how our gasoline canisters are so cold and in desperate need of a fire?
- Person Just Asking Questions
---
If you could be proud of your position you wouldn't need to be coy, understand that.
That is if you're not just some bot. What a depressing world.
Yes I assume that commenters on the internet that go around parroting racist talking points are either malicious or bots. I'm giving you the benefit of the doubt by assuming you're a bot.
Follow your train of thinking to it's logical conclusion, if you dare. What course of action do you propose white europeans and white americans, whatever "white" happens to mean at this exact point in history, should do to rectify the "problem" of too many undesirables sharing our neighborhoods?
The only one parroting racist points here is you, being against the white people.
I will only speak for Europeans, saying white Europeans is redundant btw.
It's simple, to rectify the problem: You stop immigration from non-European nations. You deport those with a criminal history (yeah, there's a lot of them). You deport those that are not a net positive on the economy and take welfare. You don't extend visas for non-skilled labour (e.g taxis, uber eats). Then anyone who fails to assimilate also gets deported.
That's my logical conclusion. Why don't we follow the current way/your way? European population continues to decrease, while we import millions of foreigners. Eventually, Europeans die out. Genocide.
We've banned this account for using HN overwhelmingly for political battle. Regardless of your politics, we don't allow that because it's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.
The white population percentage is decreasing in almost every white country. In Britain, British are the minority in one in four schools. At current trend, whites will be minorities in their countries in the next few decades.
White people in these countries are, on average, more educated and have better access to contraceptives and abortifacients. These countries also have strong women's rights and are currently going through shaky times where many are concerned about economy and the future (climate change). In America, especially, since the costs for birth and childcare are just incomprehensible.
This is result of a radical change in culture over the past 100 years from women being properly to fully-fledged humans who are allowed the same careers as men and the ability to say "no". Europe still had countries where raping your spouse was not a crime in the 90s.
On top of that, many men are becoming politically incompatible to women. Figureheads like Andrew Tate spread brain rot that men are owed relationships and encourage that they demonstrate the worst concepts of masculinity imaginable. So gen-z and onwards have a disproportionate number of women outright repulsed by the men on offer.
So white women are increasingly pursuing happiness through careers and friends and hobbies instead. They're not dating men they don't want. And they're not having kids until they feel ready and/or safe, if they ever want to.
Other minorities tend to be less educated, have worse access to required medical care, or still have social pressures being applied to them / differences in culture. So they have more children.
What would you do? Force them into marriages they don't want and impregnate them against their will? This is how freedom works.
Replacing white people with foreigners is basic human rights?
If the population is decreasing, then let it. There will be a new equillibrium where people are repopulating at replacement rate, just lower than current population. But if we continue to import millions of foreign people, that equillibrium will never be found as the country is slowly destroyed.
> many men are becoming politically incompatible to women
It's actually women that are becoming super liberal. Men are more even more liberal now than they were 50 years ago.
> Figureheads like Andrew Tate spread brain rot that men are owed relationships
Yeah I don't think he ever said anything of that sort. I don't like him and I find him immoral, but I don't believe he is the problem here.
> encourage that they demonstrate the worst concepts of masculinity imaginable
That's untrue. Women seek leaders and strong men.
> So white women are increasingly pursuing happiness through careers and friends and hobbies instead
Anti-depressant use in white women is at it's highest, and I think they are the number one consumer? So doesn't seem like that pursuit of happiness is working out for them.
> And they're not having kids until they feel ready
True, by the time they want to have kids they are too old. A lot of them don't realize there's a biological clock.
> What would you do? Force them into marriages they don't want and impregnate them against their will? This is how freedom works.
Stop importing foreigners to replace them? If the population decreases, then let it.
Genocide usually occurs against a certain group of people, "intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group". White, or Europeans, are an ethnical and racial group.
> I'm left not understanding your point then. I should be afraid because humans with one shade of skin are populating faster than humans with another?
My point is that the native people of Europe, are being systematically replaced with foreign people. Conditions are being put on Europeans where births are reduced and are instead being replaced by another group.
