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Comment by thallavajhula | Hacker News Reader

Do people really use Grok for anything outside of Twitter memes or understanding tweets? I'm asking out of genuine curiosity.

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Yes, it is genuinely useful for some tasks. It doesn't nanny you as much as the other models. I do a lot of hunting for orphan copyright items that are decades out of print, but the primary models won't do it, chastising me for trying to find copyrighted items. Grok will do it [0].

[0] sometimes you need to lightly jailbreak it, or rerun the prompt, the non-deterministic nature means sometimes you will get a refusal

I haven't been nannied in a long time. It was definitely a problem 2 years ago but now it seems all the models are ok with just about everything I want.

Ohh sure, its users use it for all sorts of things

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/03/elon-musks-xai-s...

Grok has the most useful voice mode (ChatGPT voice mode is very dumb, grok seems to use same model as main chat), so if I want to use voice this is the AI I use.

Also I use it for all uncomplicated topics because it gives precise short answers without fluff. Very refreshing.

It's my go to for searches, DIY, personal finance, and more general slice of life AI.

Once it is as good as Kimi K2.6 for coding, I will probably use Grok exclusively. It really is the best conversational AI I've used. It has helped me fix a broken fridge, and a broken electrical oven. Literally saved me at least $4k this year.

Edit: Also saved me $600 because I did my taxes with it. H&R Block is cooked.

Edit 2: Oh shit it is as smart as Kimi K2.6. Time to try it!

Did you do legal filings with it after doing your taxes? Oh my.

what do you mean?

It was a joke about people relying on AI and it doing absolutely terrible things.

Coding is an interesting area -- it can code, then compile to see if that part worked, then test to see if more worked.

With taxes, it sets things up and the review phase is the IRS fining you.

in this case my tax situation is so retarded simple, I could verify what it suggested step by step and I performed the actions on one of those free tax usa website. the irs accepted my returns and everything went fine. if you're in a simple tax situation, try it!

oh, I’ve had the IRS accept and then later fine more than once.

But if you are in a common situation, any llm should be quite helpful.

How do you save money on taxes?

The taxes you owe is a mathematical solve which is always the same....

in america you need to pay a preparer for your taxes because we hate poor people. The user is saying they don't need to pay a preparer because they used Grok. I didn't do that this year but I'll probably do it next year with a frontier model. US taxes are a perfect use case for AI, tbh.

deductions

child credits

points per paycheck proper setup

and of course, avoiding to pay an accountant to set run all this if you are a normal w2 worker.

I wonder how much of that comes from twitter training data. It is useful for memes and trends, but for other things is super bad.

I tried it in Cursor and oh my. No thanks. I hid it after that.

Yes.

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