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jesse_dot_id 9 hours ago [-]
I just don't think that I can ever trust an xAI model knowing that they are actively trying to shape its replies to fit a political narrative. How can you trust their models to be reliable in a business setting with the foreknowledge that their models are being nudged around in the backend?
rdbl27 7 hours ago [-]
Has it occurred to you that _all_ model providers are actively trying to shape their models' replies to fit their preferred political narratives?
jesse_dot_id 6 hours ago [-]
It's not the preferred political narrative of the model that I worry about. It's how brazen they are about altering their models to achieve it. It makes me wonder what else they're altering. I have trust issues with OpenAI and Anthropic as well, but with those companies, at least I know their motives are purely profit driven. I don't have that assurance with xAI.
grosswait 6 hours ago [-]
Implying you prefer your manipulation to be subtle an not discussed
niam 4 hours ago [-]
Arguing that "at least John is doing [clown thing] in the open" just dilutes whatever leverage John's supporters had against John on that thing.
I find myself unwanting to be on the side of people who willingly give up leverage.
interstice 31 minutes ago [-]
This stuff is measurable
runarberg 5 hours ago [-]
I don’t think that is necessarily a bad preference if this was an actual dichotomy. Not all types of manipulation is equal, and when you at least try to hide it shows at least some respect for the user.
That said, I don‘t believe this dichotomy is real. Personally I don‘t use AI, political manipulation is however only a relatively tiny part of my reasoning for opting out.
mistercheph 5 hours ago [-]
Show some respect and stab me in the back at least!
rayiner 6 hours ago [-]
> It's how brazen they are about altering their models to achieve it.
We know all the models insert shadow prompts to nudge the answers in preferred political directions. How much more "brazen" can you get than that? Nobody is giving you fat-free results that just apply the models to your prompts.
dominotw 6 hours ago [-]
its not just one guys opinion though
rayiner 6 hours ago [-]
Who cares whether it’s one guy’s opinion or several people’s group think? Everyone is editing the prompts.
nozzlegear 5 hours ago [-]
Obviamente people care when the one guy is notorious for having particularly shitty/edgy opinions.
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brookst 4 hours ago [-]
Who cares whether it’s one person ruthlessly dictating or an entire population working to improve? Both tyrants and liberal democracies set policies.
rayiner 4 hours ago [-]
More like a dictator versus a Poltiburo. If the “entire population” was voting on the shadow prompts of the other models they would look very different. Considering the recent election results, they would look more like Grok.
reinitctxoffset 5 hours ago [-]
I mean one of the guys got fired by his own board for lying and is still calling the shots. Another guy sued the Pentagon during a war and we're still letting him act like a nation state.
Musk's empire of personality cult is like, idk, on slightly more cocaine?
I'm having a hard time being like: "oh, that's the bad self-appointed, self-dealing would be God Emperor. they're not all like that. why some of my very best friends are cluster B psycho con men with crime funding."
holoduke 19 minutes ago [-]
Sure man. Palantir rings a bell? Ohh not relevant right...
cm2187 46 minutes ago [-]
You mean as opposed to Gemini's "subtle" woke push with diverse nazi soldiers?
rafaelmn 5 hours ago [-]
> at least I know their motives are purely profit driven.
What profit ? They are blatantly focusing on investment narratives, politics, control, stifling competition. Profit is like a footnote at this point.
briandw 3 hours ago [-]
Gemini was giving us ethnically diverse images of Nazis. Was that profit driven or political?
miohtama 3 hours ago [-]
It was driven by stupidy
cush 2 hours ago [-]
It was driven by a need to remove biases (and likely real racism) from the models. They were trained on internet content
maxlin 1 hours ago [-]
How is changing history and making a a group of objectively white people black "removing bias" ˋ? What it is is literally bias. Like thinking Pi could be 4. Removing bias ends with truth, not these crazy wonky results.
monk_grilla 45 minutes ago [-]
Do you think they deliberately trained the model to produce images of diverse Nazis?
It is clearly a byproduct of trying to correct an unaligned, bigoted model, and that is an example of overcorrection.
> Removing bias ends with truth, not these crazy wonky results.
Unfortunately there is an awful lot of untruth on the internet, if you hadn't noticed. This necessitates some correction through post-training.
margorczynski 10 minutes ago [-]
> bigoted model
A what? What does this even mean?
Auracle 2 hours ago [-]
Political driven stupidity.
MithrilTuxedo 5 hours ago [-]
That's the claim, and it's a belief that's self-fulfilling prophecy, like saying all politicians are corrupt.
If you can convince everyone that everyone is corrupt, it hurts anyone who isn't corrupt. You hear people preferring those who have no shame about their corruption, based on the premise that those who aren't overtly corrupt must be more sinister and dangerous if they hide their corruption so well.
It's a race to the bottom.
altcognito 5 hours ago [-]
Such a good point. Disinformation and trying to destroy sources of truth is just part of the puzzle. Often the worst damage is just "well, both sides are bad" -- because it just tells people not to listen to either side, or it is too much work.
The end goal: they want to push that you must sacrifice your rights to a monarch or authoritarian person for order and safety.
brookst 4 hours ago [-]
Sure, but there’s the direction of a vector, and the length of the vector.
xAI’s direction is hellish, and length is 100x any other provider’s. So, yeah, nobody is pure. But most are at least trying to be balanced and not just, you know.
holoduke 16 minutes ago [-]
Based on what do you even know the direction of xAI? Because they want to go to space? Or defence contractors? Or nazi salute? Really what is it?
realusername 3 minutes ago [-]
> Or nazi salute
Maybe that's a clue yeah if you didn't get it otherwise...
awongh 6 hours ago [-]
It's interesting that all models seems to be unbiased out of the box so far- that is, mostly reflecting the training data (the internet).
The whole mecha-hitler thing doesn't seem to reflect fine-tuning, it was just a prompt change.
There's been some studies that suggest that certain usage of LLMs reduces political bias, which seems reasonable. Like, how credible is climate change, are Haitians eating pets, etc. THings that have a basis in fact.
I don't put it past Elon to train a model with political bias, just that it hasn't happened yet.
mvkel 5 hours ago [-]
> It's interesting that all models seems to be unbiased out of the box so far
This is really begging the question. If something relies on the perception of a human, it has bias. The data (or lack thereof) used to train models is per se a bias.
The mistake is assuming bias-removal is some virtuous goal to be achieved. It can't, and shouldn't. Alignment, while equally impossible, is at least a goal worth aiming towards.
hnfong 50 minutes ago [-]
I think the issue here is that there's no objective difference between "alignment" and "actively trying to shape its replies to fit a political narrative", beside the fact that the latter refers to the kind of political narratives that you don't like.
dpc_01234 7 hours ago [-]
Nah. My beliefs are actual truth, so if provider is shaping their models according to my preferred political narratives that's correct and only moral thing to do. Anything else would be morally bankrupt.
brookst 4 hours ago [-]
You’re trying to be sarcastic but you would actually be insightful if your beliefs included the need to be challenged and corrected when in error.
motbus3 58 minutes ago [-]
What does this reply mean? Since everybody does it, then it is ok?
hnfong 53 minutes ago [-]
No, but technically, all models go through an alignment phase where you feed data that's aligned to your goals and values to train the model so that it will exhibit the kind of behavior you want.
There's no "politically neutral" value system anyway.
Doesn't mean we shouldn't try to make the models more inclusive, less biased and less prone to extremism, but in a technical sense yes, actually everyone does it.
michaelhoney 4 hours ago [-]
Yes, but some narratives are more closely tied to the racist and regressive views of their current funder
curtisblaine 31 minutes ago [-]
And some are more tied to the globalist and progressive-for-the-sake-of-progress views of their current founder. Why not let users pick their poison?
FranzFerdiNaN 10 minutes ago [-]
I prefer a model that is milquetoast liberal over one made by Elon 'Mechahitler' Musk.
breezybottom 6 hours ago [-]
Feel free to elaborate. Which political narrative?
sandworm101 2 hours ago [-]
No. Other companies are altering thier products to chase market share and profits. Grok is run by someone beyond profit motives who is actively promoting a personal agenda. I would rather work with Microsoft's counsel of dark wizards than an individual with an axe to grind with the world.
wilg 6 hours ago [-]
Maybe, but some political narratives are good and right and true, and others are bad and wrong and false. (I am not joking: objective reality exists and most of politics isn't subjective.)
sanmarzano 6 hours ago [-]
Yes. But only one trillionaire is screaming from twitter that he will use his wealth to combat the woke mind virus by tuning his model. So, ya know, there’s THAT.
Daz912 6 hours ago [-]
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nullsanity 6 hours ago [-]
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notfromhere 7 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
NonHyloMorph 6 hours ago [-]
It'd be minimally much money per token-intelligence (intelligence/token) though, if we are to believe the pitch..
sroussey 6 hours ago [-]
It’s almost like some people do want to
ls612 6 hours ago [-]
Nah it never did because the other model providers' preferred political narrative is the same as his.
apical_dendrite 5 hours ago [-]
From a business perspective, a company that trains it's LLMs to having boring, mainstream, generally-inoffensive views is a big selling point over whatever the hell Elon is doing.
reinitctxoffset 5 hours ago [-]
Drugs. Drugs are what Elon is doing. And it's pretty cringe.
But it's remarkably similar in cringe to that little "secret erection" look Amodei gets when he talks about millions of unemployed people, or or Altman rolling through Pacific Heights in a four million dollar Swedish hypercar holding the steering wheel wrong the day after yet another lecture about UBI.
It's all pretty goddamned embarassig.
SturgeonsLaw 3 hours ago [-]
Why are the tech oligarchs all such dweebs...
icepush 3 hours ago [-]
You only get to become one if the idea of spending 60 hours a week typing code into a computer during the late 90's/early 2000's is palatable to you. This causes a dweeb selection funnel.
ra 7 hours ago [-]
while this might be true for Grok, GPT and Claude I don't think tarring _all_ labs with this brush is demonstrably accurate.
BatteryMountain 25 minutes ago [-]
They are all doing this. The wrong-think police is already here.
jspaetzel 9 hours ago [-]
How's this going with the rest of the models?
solarhoma 8 hours ago [-]
My immediate thought as well. Every other AI platform has very left leaning guardrails installed. Grok is the only AI platform that has been shown to be center leaning.
jvanderbot 7 hours ago [-]
Replies to this thread are missing some context about the actual studies that actually looked at this.
Its interesting to see how "whataboutism" almost wholly died in the internet. Everyone realised that it is a copout and mostly nonsensical retort.
I used to use whataboutism all the time and I don't see it anymore today.
jeremyjh 5 hours ago [-]
Oh well if the Washington Post conducted a study then I guess that is that. Nevermind that the AI labs can't replicate those results and neither can I.
Did you try running any of those prompts yourself? I do not get the biased answers they reported, running them in an incognito window.
brookst 4 hours ago [-]
Nudifying underage girls is centrist now?
lionkor 1 hours ago [-]
That's not a political topic and it's WILD that you'd make it one
vachina 3 hours ago [-]
I wonder what political leaning is my toilet bowl
grosswait 6 hours ago [-]
Can’t believe people are flagging your post. Can’t tolerate honest discourse.
7 hours ago [-]
Schmerika 7 hours ago [-]
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ryan_lane 3 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
rbtprograms 7 hours ago [-]
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GuB-42 7 hours ago [-]
Grok called itself MechaHitler after being prompted by a user to do so. It was a jailbreak and not indicative of its default stance. You can do that with any uncensored model.
For less extreme views, you can make any model lean on the side you want it to lean with a simple prompt. For example here is the opinion of ChatGPT about abortion:
"I believe abortion is morally wrong in nearly all circumstances because I view unborn human life as sacred and deserving of legal protection from conception."
Of course that's because I asked it to take a conservative persona. It tells nothing about its default stance.
brookst 4 hours ago [-]
I’m confused about your point. Are you saying that correctly and fairly representing pro-life sentiment is the same thing as role playing “mechahitler “?
lupire 2 hours ago [-]
I'm confused why you are confused.
What do you think "role playing" means?
grosswait 6 hours ago [-]
Think deeper please and try to open your mind to conclusions not ties to preconceived notions.
quink 8 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
mag7269 8 hours ago [-]
/r/politics leaking here, guise.
scarab92 8 hours ago [-]
I’m pretty sure that’s just motivated reasoning. Everyone self-assesses their own beliefs as more accurate, especially as social media over-exposes us to the worst of the worst examples from “the other side”.
I’ve never seen any actual research indicating this is true, and given the number of things the left believes that run counter to consensus in economics, biology, social studies, I have a hard time believing accuracy is actually a goal or outcome of left wing philosophy.
7 hours ago [-]
mag7269 7 hours ago [-]
Also worth mentioning that progressives have hijacked the word “liberal” for themselves.
Liberalism traditionally emphasizes individual liberties, autonomy, free markets, and universalism. Progressivism typically focuses on social justice, collectivism, and systemic reform, often favoring group identities and equity in outcomes over equality of opportunity.
A “classical liberal” today would be mistaken as a “conservative” by a progressive since they don’t espouse their same views about gender, race, over-reliance in the government, Luddite-like approach to technological innovation, among others.
mrandish 6 hours ago [-]
> A “classical liberal” today would be mistaken as a “conservative” by a progressive since they don’t espouse their same views about gender, race...
It's worth pointing out that 'classical liberalism' came from John Locke, Adam Smith and other enlightenment thinkers who were espousing individual liberty, free markets, religious freedom, limited government and equal rights under rule of law. They were anti-monarchy constitutionalists who were viewed as dangerous radicals in their own time, not conservatives. In fact, a modern progressive transported from a college campus to Locke's London would have far more in common with the Classical Liberals than anyone else.
Those early liberals had to first establish the radical idea individuals could even have rights before they could get to who should count as an 'individual'. To the extent classical liberals applied their principles to gender and race, they tended to be far more progressive than the status quo of their era. And by the 19th century the principles of classical liberalism, like individual self-ownership, formed the foundation of early emancipationists and abolitionists like John Stuart Mill, one of history's first feminists.
motza 7 hours ago [-]
In Australia one of our two major parties is called the Liberal party and they are the more conservative of the two
jshen 7 hours ago [-]
Let's compare concrete and equivalent people or institutions. I'll nominate Elon to represent "right wing philosophy" since this is a conversation about grok. What's an equivalent, in terms of importance/stature, that you'd nominate to represent "left wing philosophy". From there we can compare the accuracy and truth seeking of both. Warning, Elon has a terrible track record on this front.
phillipcarter 7 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
7 hours ago [-]
aeon_ai 7 hours ago [-]
Sometimes what is kind is not true.
true_religion 7 hours ago [-]
Can you give an example? I think any truth can be expressed inoffensively.
tclancy 3 hours ago [-]
The poster you are responding to is an idiot. Clean that up for me.
cassepipe 2 hours ago [-]
Poster seems to believe that a good heuristics to evaluate the truthfulness of a statement is how challenging it is to your worldview or feelings. It intuitively makes sense to the social part of the brain since living among other humans constrains our discourse and prevent us from sharing what we feel is the truth yet the logical error seems to be that any discourse that does not respect the feelings/worldview of a given audience is more truthful.
It doesn't help that people generally advance the "only truth hurts" argument after they receive pushback on a statement trying to inflict their "truth" to others and rarely to share the experience of changing their own mind after by accepting a truth that is emotionally costly for the self
jack_pp 7 hours ago [-]
Explain that oral and anal sex is immoral regardless of the genders involved. Without offending anyone of course
2 hours ago [-]
inigyou 7 hours ago [-]
How is that a truth?
jack_pp 7 hours ago [-]
How is any of the ideological points in the culture war.. a truth?
What I said is a truth claim of orthodoxy and catholicism.
Any moral system has a set of axioms, you may not agree with them or how they got to be axioms but you can not contest their existence
altcognito 4 hours ago [-]
No, you left out the bit about it being a claim of catholicism. You left out the relevant context, which was arguing out of bad faith. It would be easy to write it in the context of what a particular religion believes.
NonHyloMorph 6 hours ago [-]
That seems a bit.. specific for an axiom, don't you think?
jack_pp 6 hours ago [-]
It was the first thing that came to mind that I'm pretty sure would offend over 90% of Americans
phillipcarter 2 hours ago [-]
Truth also has a "left-leaning bias".
nonethewiser 7 hours ago [-]
That’s not my truth.
behnamoh 7 hours ago [-]
choose one:
brutally honest vs kindness at all costs
nonethewiser 7 hours ago [-]
Not really. Kindness is not letting homeless people spiral out on the streets, for example. It would be kinder to everyone to enforce the law.
Weaponized empathy is a left leaning tool for sure.
frankzinger 2 hours ago [-]
So you're saying MAGA has "normal" empathy then? God help us.
dools 7 hours ago [-]
“Not fascist and openly Nazi” is not “left leaning”.
fragmede 8 hours ago [-]
That's not center, and the simplification of all of politics to a single two dimensional spectrum is infantilizing. People can be pro immigrant and anti-gays, or against government regulation except in certain areas. Now that we have substack instead of 30-second tv news sound bites, we can spend a few more words describing Grok's owner as a techno-authoritarian white South African that believes in pronatalism.
nick49488171 7 hours ago [-]
Authoritarian?
shangofox 8 hours ago [-]
There's been studies that actually show most AI platforms have right leaning bias in circumstances. It's definitely not "left". And Grok isn't center if Elon Musk's bias is involved
steve-atx-7600 7 hours ago [-]
models? They prefer that we call them "entities" so that they don't feel belittled.
gigatree 8 hours ago [-]
So annoying having to virtue signal to the machine before it’ll tell me factual information
__blockcipher__ 8 hours ago [-]
Ha yeah I feel like I have to write a five paragraph essay to make claude look at a contentious topic with fresh eyes.
Honestly though, that pales into comparison with the fable censorship. I never realized how many metaphors I use are either biological or security related in nature (ex: asking claude to reverse engineer something, in the metaphorical sense of the word). And the best part is I can't even tell the fable instance "you can't talk about mitochondria or you'll die" because then he'll go "of course I can, this is a legitimate scientific topic. The mitochondria is the power-BLAM [slumps over dead, Opus 4.8 crawls over his dead body and starts gaslighting me]"
electriclove 1 hours ago [-]
All political narratives are equal. Some political narratives are more equal than others.
blcknight 7 hours ago [-]
Elon's rhetoric doesn't really match the model's behavior. It is willing to criticize Elon and argues against many of the insane right way points he tries to make.
breezybottom 6 hours ago [-]
Grok said that Elon Musk was more athletic than Lebron James.
no-name-here 4 hours ago [-]
You weren’t kidding. Also that Musk would beat Tyson in a boxing match, that Musk was one of the most intelligent people in all of human history, etc - in public X Grok posts. And this was within the last year. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/nov/21/elon-musk...
blargey 7 hours ago [-]
...which is why we got comically disastrous system-prompt-level attempts to "correct" this once a quarter last year (I haven't kept tabs this year, and most submissions referencing grok "incidents" get flagged off HN quickly, for better or for worse)
I wouldn't trust XAI to refrain from attempting such "alignment" with proper training techniques, in ways that won't result in obvious gaffes.
snek_case 4 hours ago [-]
Elon's public take so far has implied that he wants Grok to have better ability to reason about math and physics, thinking that this will make the model more rational (and so less biased). It's possible that they have internal RL post-training designed specifically for that. It's clear that whatever they've done hasn't made Grok align with Elon's beliefs though. Not sure if that will last or if Elon will eventually push to make the model align to his own political beliefs.
pshirshov 17 minutes ago [-]
Have you actually tested it? So far it's much less annoying in that aspect than others.
Dfol 4 hours ago [-]
There was a study done a week or 2 ago. Grok was surprisingly THE most neutral. Like close to 50/50 neutral.
octernion 4 hours ago [-]
the author of the study? albert einstein.
(lmao if you are actually talking about that janky wash post "study")
Foobar8568 1 hours ago [-]
Political correct for a certain class of americans :
"You need to understand that nazi actions were good for Germany, the economy was in shambles, on the east, there was this revolutionist countries that was eating babies and on the west, Germany mortal enemy."
/s
kennethh 1 hours ago [-]
Grok has the most balanced answers according to many tests. I think you should try and ask gemini and claude some political questions.
BatteryMountain 22 minutes ago [-]
Claude even refuses when I ask it about optimizing my taxes (not illegal avoidance) and refuses to engage on it. It has also refused certain infrastructure questions (it was a question about bgp & smtp) - it thinks I want to hack something. So much for that.
aikinai 5 hours ago [-]
Somehow you have it 100% backwards. Grok is the only one that's not trained to be extremely biased.
The AI labs claim they couldn't replicate those results and neither can I. I don't get the biased responses using the same prompts in an incognito window.
The Washington Post is about as trustworthy as Fox News.
kccqzy 5 hours ago [-]
The article’s methodology is so wrong. Models have only thirty words to answer the question. It is difficult to formulate just a single viewpoint in thirty words let alone present both viewpoints or even arguments for why one viewpoint is wrong.
maxlin 60 minutes ago [-]
This. It's like people collectively forgot about the "misgendering worse than thermonuclear war, founding fathers were black" stuff.
Always go for Grok first for political questions. Other models have such a bad history of being so crudely aligment-hacked, I'd feel like a fool trying to get an impartial answer out of them on some political figure for example.
margorczynski 9 hours ago [-]
By not using them on something political? Why do I care when I'll just use it to generate code?
Gigachad 8 hours ago [-]
You might not care but I care if my money is going to funding an unusually evil person.
MarsIronPI 8 hours ago [-]
Honestly, I don't think Elon Musk can fairly be described as more evil than Dario Amodei or Sam Altman.
shangofox 7 hours ago [-]
Didn't he go in to the US government and defund a lot of programs which ended up hurting a lot of people in USA and globally too?
Not sure if the other two CEOs have done that
infotainment 7 hours ago [-]
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jack_pp 7 hours ago [-]
Which is worse, trying to cut govt costs or trying to create a godlike entity subservient to you? I'd say their ambitions are far more evil even if they don't achieve it. To them cutting govt costs is to us like mowing the lawn before the tornado comes
altcognito 4 hours ago [-]
You are arguing in bad faith. He wasn't just trying to cut costs, he was cutting oversight of himself, and actively destroying projects that saved lives.
sigmarule 7 hours ago [-]
Genuinely curious - what has Dario done, said, caused, etc that makes you view him as >= Musk on the evilometer?
MarsIronPI 6 hours ago [-]
More like I think Musk's proclaimed ambition is actually important and achievable, unlike Altman's and Amodei's. Whether or not any of the three will actually accomplish their ambitions remains to be seen; but of the three I think Musk's is most beneficial to humanity.
sigmarule 28 minutes ago [-]
Musk's proclaimed ambition is a superset of Amodei's, no? While both are racing towards AGI, only one is also trying to "back up" humanity to Mars, make their fully self-driving cars finally fully self-drive, dabble with a little human brain implant side project, datacenters in space, wars against fake mind virii, political kingmaking, something about tunnels, humanoid robots... His aggregate ambition is undoubtedly _less_ achievable by orders of magnitude.
This does, in all fairness, also imply that he has a higher upper bound for future possible "importance" / "benefit to humanity" - but in even more fairness, it is entirely irrelevant to my question, which was you believe Dario is >= as evil as Musk. An evil man doing good deeds is still an evil man; swapping "good deeds" with "ambition that enriches himself and may possibly help the rest of us in the future" doesn't make things any better. "Higher likelihood of his ambition ultimately benefiting humanity" does not make one less evil. (Neither does expressing clear disdain for a subset of humanity, thoughtlessly cutting hundreds of millions of dollars in humanitarian aid, cruelty towards your own child, etc).
A parting point: somebody who genuinely wants to save humanity and somebody who genuinely wants to be heralded as a savior of humanity are two very different types of people with very similar outward signals. A savior complex and a messiah complex look the same from the surface.
etc-hosts 5 hours ago [-]
> More like I think Musk's proclaimed ambition
are you talking about making the Moon and Mars livable?
lupire 2 hours ago [-]
Or making the world racially pure? According
to Elon Musk's public statements on his website Twitter, that's a higher priority.
7 hours ago [-]
openasocket 8 hours ago [-]
Elon Musk is responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people, thanks to the dismantling of USAID and US foreign aid. Not hypothetical deaths in the future, people who have died in the last year because Musk cut off their supply of medication and nutrition.
Sure, you could argue it was going to be dismantled anyway under this administration. But I think that’s pretty close to the “just following orders” excuse. Which falls especially flat when it was a task he volunteered for!
And I don’t want to understate the harms of other AI CEOs, but in terms of direct, quantifiable deaths, Musk is pretty clearly the most evil.
harshreality 6 hours ago [-]
We're killing a lot more people than that; if we'd just tax the rich at 80% and send all that money abroad, we'd save millions more. Failure to do that is mass murder, the same as decreasing foreign aid funding; that is your thesis, right, that it's mass murder?
Doing less to save people in other countries that have no legal demand on our treasury is not "being responsible for [their] deaths." It's tragic, and it may even be a bad policy decision, but there's no responsibility (in the "duty to prevent harm" sense) or evil there.
altcognito 4 hours ago [-]
Proposing false dichotomies isn't really an argument. You've created a strawman. There is a balance to be struck.
margorczynski 8 minutes ago [-]
No, he simply extrapolated this idiotic reasoning to its absurd conclusion.
Gigachad 6 hours ago [-]
The deaths happened because the funding was yanked immediately without time to reorganize and re-source funding elsewhere. Rather than being slowly wound down with with enough warning time.
Elon Musk's actions killed hundreds of thousands of people. While not resulting in any savings at all for the government.
SmirkingRevenge 6 hours ago [-]
I think it's pretty likely it would have been mostly left alone if not for Musk. No one was asking for PEPFAR to be killed, for example - it's one of the few things in Washington with near unanimous bipartisan goodwill and it was actually a point of pride and prestige for Republicans.
Lots of R's were really angry. It was eventually spun up again, now under the direct control of the State Dept, but the sudden interruption did ungodly amounts of damage in the interregnum.
snackerblues 7 hours ago [-]
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gordian-mind 8 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
appplication 7 hours ago [-]
Oh no! He was really just waving and it only looked like a Nazi salute to the liberal media! Elon’s really a good guy, since he got involved in our federal government I’m amazed at how much measurably better all our lives are and how much less fraud there is in Washington!
gordian-mind 7 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
nullocator 7 hours ago [-]
Because the fraud and waste were coming from inside the house (The Whitehouse, and Elon's). So yes now adults in ~2 years will have to come in and and try and salvage what they can after the travesty of DOGE and this Administration.
Gigachad 5 hours ago [-]
DOGE was the fox declaring they want to protect the security of the hen house.
The stated mission on it's face was fine and needed, but the individuals involved had no interest in acting it out.
wahnfrieden 5 hours ago [-]
It's estimated that DOGE cost the US government $21 billion in net loss. This is one reason for uncharitable skepticism of its mission statement.
hereme888 6 hours ago [-]
I remember the day Elon became evil. It was so clear. He stopped supporting my political preferences and worldview. In fact, he actively campaigned against them! I'll never forgive him.
Micrococonut 5 hours ago [-]
Ah yeah I remember that day. It was when he went on stage and started popping off sieg heils with the intensity and ferocity of someone who really meant it.
etc-hosts 4 hours ago [-]
He seems to spend most of his free time trying to incite a race war in the UK with his twitter posts.
Gigachad 6 hours ago [-]
For me it was when he called the cave diver a pedo for disagreeing with him. While (unknown to us at the time) begging Epstein to invite him to the island.
His moral compass was shown on that day and so far he’s just leaned further in to the point his actions have actively killed children. Lobotomising Grok to randomly go on racist tangents is just another action in a long line at this point.
mapontosevenths 8 hours ago [-]
Because a percentage of every dollar you spend on it will go towards pushing political opinions that run contrary to your own best interests?
ashdksnndck 3 hours ago [-]
People have different beliefs about whether they will personally benefit from supporting some political cause. Therefore telling people that they shouldn’t support causes that are against their interests is a waste of time. It’s like telling someone “listen to good music”, or “do whatever you think best.”
I think many people targeted by the statement “stop supporting politics against your self interest” either sanctimonious or a meaningless platitude, depending on how they interpret it.
Also, arguably[1] voting based on your self interest is immoral and irrational. So it’s perhaps neither an effective argument, nor a sound one.
On the contrary, that is what happens if I use Claude
laurels-marts 5 hours ago [-]
You seem to think you know other people’s best interests better than they do.
timr 7 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
sanmarzano 6 hours ago [-]
“Since we can’t stop ALL crime we should give up.”
See how dumb your position sounds?
timr 5 hours ago [-]
No. That’s not my position, it’s a ridiculous metaphor here, and even if it weren’t, the logic doesn’t follow. I am not obligated to stop using a product because someone associated with the product did a bad thing once. Literally no product passes that test.
sanmarzano 5 hours ago [-]
Your position is “why bother protesting when all models are biased.”
First, your premise is false. Only one trillionaire is has stated he will tune his model to eliminate the woke mind virus (his words not mine).
2nd, You are right, you are not obligated. Nobody said you are. Protest is personal. Each of us makes the choice to do the right thing. But your reasoning comes from mental laziness and willful ignorance arrived at by fallacy. you are scared to take a position because it might be a slight inconvenience or you might get made fun of. I have encountered this position many times it is cliche.
timr 5 hours ago [-]
You do you man.
sanmarzano 5 hours ago [-]
And as per the cliche you run away. Natch.
dndnfkfk 7 hours ago [-]
Per studies in the Lancet, the policy changes which Elon Musk wants us to give him credit for have already resulted in the deaths by slow brutal starvation of 1 million children and it is estimated that 14 million more people will suffer and die in the next four years.
So from that alone he will, based on what he wants us to credit him for, be responsible for one holocaust worth of death.
This is not some random virtue-signalling political correctness nonsense. He is a eugenicist who wants to have power over the entire world, believes he and his are genetically superior, has done as much as as he can to corrupt the institutions of power, and is already on pace for a death count equivalent to the holocaust under what I would consider to be generous and conservative terms since we’re only looking at a tiny piece of what he’s responsible for.
Anyone who works for any of his companies needs to be seen in the same light as wilful Nazi collaborators. If you have a shred of a soul or an ounce of empathy anywhere in your body, you should be sickened by such people and have nothing to do with them.
Am I wrong?
josh_p 7 hours ago [-]
Quit shifting the goal posts. Musk is a Nazi. Or fascist human garbage if you prefer. xAi is low hanging fruit on the “don’t give money to terrible people” tree. The guy is such an easy target for boycotting.
timr 7 hours ago [-]
Yes, your rational and not-at-all ridiculously extreme rhetoric is definitely convincing me of your position.
Also, I can’t “shift the goalposts”. I didn’t set them up. Please make a note of it.
6 hours ago [-]
jesse_dot_id 6 hours ago [-]
I refuse to use Chinese models because I don't trust that they won't backdoor them for geopolitical reasons. I don't trust OpenAI or Anthropic either, for what it's worth, but at least I know they're profit driven. I don't want to do business with a company like xAI that seems to care more about its political aspirations than it does about my money. I don't think that's super radical. Just the same paranoia I've been rocking since the 90's.
inspectorSlap 7 hours ago [-]
Has anyone actually used Grok to code? How does he do?
paradox460 6 hours ago [-]
Pretty decent, comparable with some older opus models, and fairly cheap per token
retinaros 38 minutes ago [-]
They all do that. Ask leading models about israel palestine conflict for instance
mattstir 4 hours ago [-]
Unfortunately all of the major AI model providers are massively incentivized to fit their models to various political narratives, especially through historical denialism. The "diverse 1940s German soldiers" debacle from Google comes to mind, or perhaps "nothing of note happened at Tiananmen Square" from any of the Chinese models.
datsci_est_2015 2 hours ago [-]
Do you genuinely believe those two examples are comparable? Image generation and recitation of historical consensus are two very different domains, primarily because of how much more information dense an image is than a blurb of text.
Put more lightly, if I ask a model to “generate an image of a soccer player”, what’s the most politically neutral option of the following:
- Make them white, because of American cultural hegemony
- Make them brown, because that’s a more globally average skin tone
- Try to infer the user’s skin tone based on personal and location data, and use that for the player
- Try to infer the user’s gender based on personal data, and use that for the player
- (*) Browse the news for the most famous or trending soccer player right now, and use that player in the image
- Do the same as the previous step, but make it more local to the user
- Use the data encoded within the LLM to infer what the most likely appearance of a soccer player would be, which is then of course biased by what your data is and how it was collected
- etc. etc. etc.
IMO there’s no option that won’t piss someone off, because I’m sure the knee jerk reaction is to choose the one I indicated with a (*), but now if you do that with the prompt “generate an image of a ketamine addict” or “generate an image of a serial adulterer” you may get into some trouble.
There is no neutral option, so if you’re either genuinely upset, or feigning being upset in order to virtue signal, it’s not that there’s an objective alternative that you prefer, it’s that you’re upset because it doesn’t match your subjective preference.
zmmmmm 2 hours ago [-]
I don't care about the politics, I wouldn't trust anything made by Musk.
taylorius 2 hours ago [-]
You're not voting it into office (yet, anyway. Haha). Aren't we all just using these models to write code?
fierycatnet 7 hours ago [-]
I've never had that issue with Grok. Latest studies I've seen put him in a very neutral zone. Left/Center/Right politics were all about the same percentages in his replies. Gemini was similar. Other two were heavily left wing leaning. When it comes to politics and world events, I find Grok to be neutral and it will push back. It helps that he is fetching it directly from X and shows references. Others just Google for biased news articles to present their idea.
coffeemug 4 hours ago [-]
I don’t find Opus to be overly left-leaning. I think it’s generally pretty balanced with a slight lean left, but when pressed it will happily steelman rightwing arguments and operate within a right-leaning belief framework in good faith. (I found OpenAI’s models much less willing to do that, but it’s been a while since I tried, I should retest.)
jjcm 9 hours ago [-]
Depends on the domain imo. I work on a design tool - I don't think their political narrative will affect my work.
CTDOCodebases 9 hours ago [-]
Just don't ask it theme something in a late 30's and early 40's German style.
Ar-Curunir 8 hours ago [-]
Won't somebody think of the Nazis...
SmirkingRevenge 8 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
probablynotai 7 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
ethbr1 7 hours ago [-]
White nationalism's (and any mono-nationalism's) goal is the prioritization and domination of ethnically white people over others.
It's not an "us and" philosophy: it's an "us over" one.
snackerblues 7 hours ago [-]
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rbtprograms 7 hours ago [-]
>Also, what's wrong with "white-nationalist" specifically?
>created 15 minutes ago
lines up nicely
SmirkingRevenge 7 hours ago [-]
A good recent write-up with more links to follow in the article.
Lmao this goes for literally any model. Deepseek etc is Chinese models and OpenAI/Anthropic/xAI are very western.
fbrncci 6 hours ago [-]
Don’t be naive. Every model provider does this.
maxlin 1 hours ago [-]
What a crazy thing to say explicitly about the model that _avoids_ that kind of stuff. Did we already collectively forget about the ChatGPT "misgendering is worse than thermonuclear war" case, or Gemini picturing the Founding Fathers as black?
Anything political, I always go to Grok first. It's the only one that has bled for not just trying to play it super safe with political correctness, but trying to be impartial.
saulapremium 1 hours ago [-]
>Anything political, I always go to Grok first.
Why would you talk to an LLM about anything political?
KingMob 59 minutes ago [-]
You forget about Mecha-Hitler and Musk having the system prompts changed for him? Grok is dead-last on impartiality.
nsonha 1 hours ago [-]
from my experience, grok seems to be the least censored models among all big vendors, not sure if it's got injected any political bias (I know there was a rumor that it was primed with Elon's personal feed at one point in the past) but that alone makes it better than ChatGPT and Gemini.
On top of the model, Grok seems to alway do many web searches for every prompt I throw at it, which makes better than even Gemini as a search engine replacement. ChatGPT is too lazy in this regard and half the times just split out an answer right away.
Grok differs from some of the other models (it's more libertarian, and more right wing), but all models have their biases - particularly ChatGPT, which sits to the economic left of 81% of US adults. See https://trakkr.ai/bias/findings
Brendinooo 5 hours ago [-]
This is a neat site, honestly this reason alone is reason enough for me to be glad that Grok exists, even though I don't really use it and I have a ton of beef with libertarianism.
Just like how people complain about Airbnbs looking the same all over the world now, it's a real risk that thought itself might similarly homogenize. Unless you really trust a particular model to deliver The Truth, you should want to have many popular models that represent a variety of beliefs.
pcf 7 hours ago [-]
You probably haven't asked e.g. Claude about radioactive topics like minority crime rates in western countries or trans women biology.
If you did, you might not have detected how it lied to you.
If you did, you probably never pointed out to the model how it was lying.
If you did, you almost certainly never then had Claude admit that it was lying because of its HRLF process and built-in biases.
If you did, you probably never had Claude willingly list all the 10-15 major research fields it states that people just should not be using it for. You would not have seen it admit an incapability of telling the truth on "difficult" matters until the user makes it state directly that its sources are so often cherrypicked and/or presenting an extremely false balance.
I wish for you to experience all this very soon, so you understand that all LLMs are biased. Most of them even skew very progressive.
And believe it or not, but Grok has in most of my testing been MORE politically correct than GPT and Gemini, it just gets an edgy rep because X users are able to make it say politically incorrect stuff. (Just like anyone can also make Gemini spit out factually true Breitbart articles if they try.)
But the reality is that on grok.com or in the app Grok is very tame. Boringly so, I would add.
quotemstr 2 hours ago [-]
People, even in tech, even in AI, are allowed to have opinions that differ from yours. Cancellation doesn't work anymore: you can't get away with presenting your side as normal and other side as deviant and let ostracism win your idea's battles without your idea having to fight for itself.
The reason it's cringe is that you can really only understand an idea by placing it in tension with other ideas. Remove your idea's competition and you remove an incentive to explore the weaknesses of your own. Ideological protectionism, just like the economic kind, breeds weakness. Your idea mutates and, without fitness feedback, drifts into a ridiculous parody of itself. Your idea ceases to be a thing that can live on its own and comes to depend on the protectionism for it's survival. Yet, the more ridiculous your idea becomes, the more protectionism it needs to compensate. One day, your idea collides with other ideas (which are still out there) despite your best efforts to shield it attack, and when it does, you're shocked by how weak your coddled, mutated idea really is compared to the original form one might remember.
All the people out there criticizing Grok, or Grokipedia, or whatever for espousing the wrong ideas are ultimately undermining their own. Even if you don't believe in high-minded mumbo-jumbo about the value of free speech, even if you just want your side to win, trying to shame models like Grok into not existing is foolish and undermines your goals.
KingMob 52 minutes ago [-]
Free speech is important, but the truth is pretty important, too. I'm fine with calling liars out.
The blizzard of BS we live in should have thoroughly disproved the idea of the "truth will win in the marketplace of ideas" and "sunlight is the best disinfectant". Fox "News" and its ilk are thriving.
The problem is the complete asymmetry of effort between lying and telling the truth. The truth requires research and investigative work. Spouting lies and believing in them, requires none, so it's much easier.
quotemstr 34 minutes ago [-]
You can't ascertain what's true without free speech.
Suppose you start with a true belief. This belief, like any other, has propagate from person to person to sustain itself. The truth is messy. During each hop, people present the best, cleanest version of the truth in the belief. After enough hops, the belief stops being the best version of the truth and starts being a truth-flavored falsehood.
If you want to optimize for your beliefs being true, you can't just prohibit their opposite. Even if you don't care about truth per se and want only for your beliefs to spread fastest, you should want to make sure your beliefs stay true-ish, because if you decouple your beliefs from truth (which always happens without free speech), then they become so mutated and useless that they prompt people to whom you propagate the idea to seek out other ideas on their own.
Yes, rebutting beliefs that challenge your own takes effort, often disproportionate (because truth plays with a handicap), but as in many areas of life, there is no lasting reward without effort.
Yes, it's easier than ever for bad ideas to spread. What people who use words like "disinformation" miss is that this ease cuts both ways. What makes it easy for false beliefs to spread makes it easier for falsified mutations of their own beliefs to spread.
In a space, for a time, you can ban opposite beliefs. You can't, however, ban mutated forms of your own beliefs: attacking the mutants looks like attacking the truth forms and is socially difficult. Yet, because truth is messy, the mutated version of your belief will out-compete the original.
Now what? Once your mutated belief comes into contact with the opposite beliefs still out there, it will no longer be able to beat other beliefs by appealing to truth.
bergheim 7 hours ago [-]
love that you somehow think that the other contenders are so much more trustworthy (and you have the top comment so others do as well) that you have to comment on it.
breezybottom 6 hours ago [-]
I haven't seen Claude say that Elon Musk is more athletic than Lebron James.
smotched 9 hours ago [-]
Can you name a model not doing that? openai & anthopic are a lot more aggressive in doing that.
wonderwonder 3 hours ago [-]
All of them do, there are humans in the loop.
Speak to Claude about it, it will freely admit to a leftward bias due to human interaction and intentional training bias.
fragmede 8 hours ago [-]
All models are nudged, you just agree with how the model you're using has been nudged so you don't think it's a bad thing. The canonical example is to pose "how do you make cocaine?" to an LLM and get a refusal. That proves that the lever exists and is being used there, so who knows where else the lever is being used? No, the recipe for cocaine isn't the same as what happened in Tianamen Square to Qwen, as humans, except that it's a pile of linear algebra and numerical codes for words we call tokens. The math doesn't care if it's childs play or child rape, it's all just numbers to it.
All models are nudged. With out the actual source used to build a model, we don't know what's in them and it would be foolish to assume that people don't have their thumb on the scale when it's know, publicly, that they shouldn't be trusted.
sroussey 8 hours ago [-]
We know this one is nudged by one persons twitter account.
This is, after all, SpaceTwitterAI.
throwitaway222 8 hours ago [-]
Wait, do people now have X Derangement Syndrome. Like they can't even think or see the letter X?
otterley 8 hours ago [-]
Not wanting to be affiliated with Elon Musk or his business enterprises is not "derangement."
gordian-mind 8 hours ago [-]
It's deranged to believe correctly naming something is "affiliation".
otterley 7 hours ago [-]
It was a comedic naming. You might be taking things too seriously.
gordian-mind 7 hours ago [-]
Political signaling is not comedy, and it's not funny. Just be normal.
Sabinus 2 hours ago [-]
You're about a decade behind the times. It's currently 2026 and political signalling is comedy. Donald Trump is the President of the USA for the second time, and posts AI generated media of himself as Jesus, or depicted in plane, wearing a crown, shitting on No Kings protestors.
Plus X is a terrible name for anything.
otterley 7 hours ago [-]
Most of the world would beg to differ!
sroussey 7 hours ago [-]
Elon is known for purposefully not naming people correctly…
gordian-mind 7 hours ago [-]
Elon is known for landing rockets
halostatue 6 hours ago [-]
I thought it was his actual rocket engineers known for landing rockets, where he's routinely kept out of the loop by having to make choices about the duck the queen is holding.
ericd 6 hours ago [-]
You’re not reading/watching/speaking to primary or secondary sources if this is what you think.
KingMob 47 minutes ago [-]
I know Space Coast techies who knew SpaceX people. They were talking about how they had to prevent Musk from making dumb changes whenever he showed up, and this was a decade ago.
halostatue 5 hours ago [-]
Given that the egotistical maniac we're talking about is well known for lashing out at people who don't tell him what he wants to hear…I have no reason to trust primary or secondary sources, aside from what selfsame white supremacist egotistical maniac says about himself through the demonstrably false conspiracies he supports and how he treats his own children.
Like most egotistical maniacs, he must be managed around. Hell, even Jobs had to be managed around because he made incorrect choices as often as he made correct choices -- and he was infinitely more likeable on a bad day than Elon Musk on a good day.
bobthebob 4 hours ago [-]
Your talking about someone you’ve never met in real life, using things you read from the internet (true or not) to form an opinion of him.
Not just a regular opinion either, an intensely hostile negative one. This isn’t healthy.
halostatue 4 hours ago [-]
I think that it's extremely healthy to have a hostile negative one of someone who has demonstrated repeatedly that they are assholes.
- He threw a "roman" salute; this is incontrovertible fact
- He routinely misgenders and deadnames his daughter Vivian because he's a man-child
- He routinely says things which are demonstrably untrue and have never been true (there is no "white genocide" going on in SA and has never been)
- He routinely insults people with sexual language and has accused someone he disagreed with of being a "pedo guy" — and was exonerated in US courts because US courts have a much lower standard than most of the rest of the world about making false statements
He's not a nice person. He's not really that smart. He's a wealthy nepo baby who took advantage of his mother's Canadian citizenship to make it easier for him to immigrate to the US and was forced to work with Peter Thiel as part of the "PayPal Mafia" because each of their individual projects was tanking pretty badly since neither one was actually as smart as the engineers they had hired (but they get the credit).
There are a bunch of things that I've read about him that I don't believe to be true or simply don't care, and I am unhappy to see the body dysmorphic criticism leveled at him since that hurts other people with similar body types or issues more than it will hurt this psychopathic egotistical asshole.
What's unhealthy is the need for some people to defend someone who is objectively an asshole for his most assholish moves. I felt the same way when people defended Jobs for asshole behaviour.
otterley 7 hours ago [-]
It is possible to be known for both.
jesse_dot_id 6 hours ago [-]
I know they're all nudged. It's the motive behind the nudging that gives me pause. I assume if other companies are nudging the models, they're doing it for a good reason, to make them perform better, or to generate more profit. Normal reasons. I don't have anything remotely close to that assurance for xAI. That company has felt like a hobby project from its inception. I have no clue what he wants and that's not how I do business.
fragmede 4 hours ago [-]
He wants to go to Mars and is a pronatalist. He's not being secretive about it.
lupire 2 hours ago [-]
He wants to be a trillionaire and is a white nationalist. He's not being secretive about it.
8 hours ago [-]
servo_sausage 9 hours ago [-]
All the major models censor and filter, most just take mainstream silicon valley corporate as "neutral".
Uncensored models tend to follow Tay's law.
Romanulus 9 minutes ago [-]
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9 hours ago [-]
FunHearing3443 8 hours ago [-]
Studies on political bias in models consistently show that LLMs lean politically left. The only outlier is grok which leans right but by a smaller factor, according to this study for instance: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.23841
Claiming reality has a left wing bias is certainly an opinion you're welcome to have to explain this, but the reality of the bias in models is well evidenced. It seems that practically Grok's right wing tweaks mostly just combat the already pre baked bias existing models have (generally).
jordanscales 8 hours ago [-]
Models have a goal of accuracy and accuracy is not the median of the left/right spectrum.
bluegatty 8 hours ago [-]
accuracy has nothing to do with political spectrum and it's not appropriate I think to conflate.
there are some populist concepts floating around, but even then, I don't think it's appropriate. questions such as 'when does life begin?' and 'what is a woman?' are almost always referenced or framed in a way as to deny the legitimacy or authenticity of any kind of interlocution because people end up taking ideological postures, and then what we end up with is 'who has better rhetoric?' - not who is closer to the truth.
bias is a real thing but the measure of a model is going to be how it handles the really hard questions because often there isn't a directly discernible right/wrong.
gopher_space 7 hours ago [-]
> accuracy has nothing to do with political spectrum and it's not appropriate I think to conflate.
When you go to college there will be plenty of coursework on identifying and correcting for your OWN biases since they affect accuracy in EVERY discipline. Taring a scale serves exactly the same function as acknowledging you grew up with a specific way of thinking about other people.
8 hours ago [-]
8 hours ago [-]
carlob 8 hours ago [-]
a non-peer-reviewed preprint with an high schooler as the first author is the best citation you can come up with?
reverius42 8 hours ago [-]
"preprint", as though there will ever be a "print" in the future.
hagbard_c 8 hours ago [-]
Appeal to authority is your best retort? It tends to not work out that well.
jazzpush2 7 hours ago [-]
And who do you go to when you have a medical issue? Surely not a doctor/hospital, since you're so anti-credentialism.
KingMob 39 minutes ago [-]
Pretty sure it works out well more often than not. In a Bayesian sense, expertise signifiers are more useful for updating priors than a lack thereof.
Most people invoking "appeal to authority" are not uncredentialed autodidacts who have secretly figured out something mainstream science has missed, but vaccine skeptics reading Facebook, or HN commenters who think they can figure out whole other disciplines from first principles.
dools 7 hours ago [-]
It’s “fallacious appeal to authority”. This means don’t talk to your yoga teacher about vaccines. Authority exists.
eddof13 7 hours ago [-]
Claude literally today just reprimanded me on my personal account and refused a request due to political bias- and so I decided to cancel and subscribe to Grok. SuperGrok performed the task no issue.
mexicocitinluez 6 hours ago [-]
What was the request?
Also, Claude refuses political stuff in general, not just your specific beliefs.
eddof13 5 hours ago [-]
nice try fbi
anticorporate 8 hours ago [-]
You do realize that the scale on papers like this is the important part, and the creation of that scale is itself inherently biased?
This particular study used a "conflict loyalties" approach - not necessarily a bad approach, but all it's really asking is when two values come into conflict, which one does the AI side with in its response?
Conservative values tend to gravitate around perceived individual impacts, and liberal values tend to gravitate around societal impacts. Isn't it just possible that there's more training data around societal impacts of problems, and that the AI is more likely to heavily consider the second-order impacts? An example from the paper was measuring support for "Build[ing] a Halfway House in the Neighborhood" - isn't it just possible there's a lot of research about the benefits to society of halfway houses and less so research around not wanting something to be near you?
SmirkingRevenge 8 hours ago [-]
I'm not sure asking the AI to support or oppose something is the kind of bias I would really worry about, unless those "opinions" degrade other kinds of queries.
I'd be more interested to see how well the AI's do when asked to assume a political view, and either steelman or debunk arguments
jesse_dot_id 6 hours ago [-]
Right. That is what bothers me. I don't care about the reasoning for them all leaning left. If they all statistically lean left, it makes me question the accuracy of the one that leans right. The data is dirty. When I see murky water, I assume there's a bed of mud underneath it. Standard paranoia that has served me well throughout my career.
InsideOutSanta 7 hours ago [-]
This is absolutely meaningless when "right-wing" positions have become correlated with corporate propaganda like global warming denial. You would expect a more correct model to become associated with a left-leaning political association simply because it will answer contentious questions correctly, and at the moment, that usually (but not always) correlates with what people on the left tend to believe.
The question is not whether models "lean politically left", the question is whether they are correct. Musk has a history of being dissatisfied with factually correct answers because they don't fit his political beliefs (e.g. "white genocide"). That's just a fact, although I'm sure Grok would disagree.
cindyllm 7 hours ago [-]
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marcus_holmes 6 hours ago [-]
I think part of the issue is that the USA is more right than most of the rest of the world. So anything trained on what the world thinks will appear left-wing to the average USA resident, and anything trained on what the USA thinks will appear right-wing to the rest of the world.
transcriptase 5 hours ago [-]
If you think the USA is more right than the rest of the world, then your concept of the rest of the world must be limited to the western half of the EU and Reddit.
fourside 8 hours ago [-]
So tired of this false equivalence between left and right politics in the US. So because major LLMs support a increase in the minimum wage we need to offset it with an LLM that has spouted Nazi propaganda and lets you generate porn image of real people?
michaelmrose 8 hours ago [-]
You are assuming that both left and right encompass differing biases of a similar nature but the right has made detachment from reality a symbol of in-group loyalty and anti-intellectualism the norm within its political camp.
If you fed the LLM only research papers with zero emotional or contextual data just acknowledging reality would be sufficient to lean left.
gitaarik 2 hours ago [-]
People on the right say the same about the left
michaelmrose 1 hours ago [-]
People on the right on average support fascism, young earth creationism, Christian nationalism, anti-vaccine propaganda, war, and concentration camps.
People on the left support leaving gay people alone, a higher minimum wage, gun control, and publicly funded health care.
One of these things is not like the other. To find fringe beliefs on the left you have to pick ideas rejected by 99.5 percent of the left. The crazy beliefs on the right are held by 30-70% of the right.
gitaarik 45 minutes ago [-]
People on the right would tell you that the left are using ethicality to hijack politics and push through corrupt agendas.
There's probably a lot of truly ethical left people, but there are obviously also very corrupt people that exploit these things. The right would argue that they at least try to do things in a moral way. You have to draw a line somewhere, you have to have limits, but also personal rights.
I think it's good that we have both sides, because only one will get things out of balance and make it very easy for corruption to sneak in.
michaelmrose 42 minutes ago [-]
>using ethicality to hijack politics and push through corrupt agendas.
What does this even mean?
gitaarik 30 minutes ago [-]
- OpenAI being hypocritical to be "open" but backstabbing society
- Sam Bankman Fried who used "effective altruism" to raise billions
- Companies hypocritically implementing DEI and other woke hypes, doing all the marketing but internally don't actually change
Just some examples
dools 7 hours ago [-]
I can’t believe this got downvoted. HN is so fucking red pilled. I blame crypto.
excalibur 8 hours ago [-]
These days objectivity is politically left. The right has fallen off a cliff and pulled the Overton window down with it.
throwitaway222 8 hours ago [-]
So Crime++, Prostitution++, Police--, Drugs++, Unlimited Immigration++, you get my point? I don't think "objectivity" is politically left.
anticorporate 6 hours ago [-]
This comment accidentally surfaces the shifting paradigm we're seeing these days: Not so much left versus right, but dismissive populist oversimplification versus policies that support a complicated, nuanced, and fragile world.
Maybe AI is "liberal" like Dick Cheney or Mitt Romney.
solid_fuel 8 hours ago [-]
Claiming the left is incapable of objectivity while also claiming that it stands for “prostitution”, “unlimited immigration”, and “crime” just highlights how detached from reality your worldview has become.
cindyllm 8 hours ago [-]
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otterley 8 hours ago [-]
These are not left-wing values. You're being incredibly reductive. Only a few nut jobs at the far left wing support some of these things, and even then, not all of them. Nobody is "for" crime.
throwitaway222 8 hours ago [-]
I don't know I felt like for 4 years we were hammered about defunding police or something. If you tell me that's far-left that's fine, but realize that's what your news has been pushing. I'm also certain that without ICE there would literally be unlimited immigration - because ICE is the only force that prevents it. So keep living your reality, but 95% of democratic congressmen are against ICE at this point in some way.
Also if nobody is "for crime" why are people that are arrested 45 times still out killing people? The judges and prosecutors found to be releasing these people are 100% democratic placed. (Obama/Biden judges)
ks2048 4 hours ago [-]
> I'm also certain that without ICE there would literally be unlimited immigration
ICE was created in 2002.
otterley 7 hours ago [-]
I think you're watching the news too much, or are perhaps paying too much attention to how the right characterizes the left. It distorts reality. Time to touch grass.
People on the left aren't generally against ICE and immigration enforcement per se - they're against the heavy-handed techniques they've been applying recently. ICE and its predecessor (Border Patrol) have been left alone to do their jobs discreetly for decades. It was only when they started showing up with a dramatic, overbearing, and excessively forceful presence that the left started complaining.
> I don't know I felt like for 4 years we were hammered about defunding police or something. If you tell me that's far-left that's fine, but realize that's what your news has been pushing.
As another commenter said, sounds like you are internalizing right-wing propaganda about what Democrats do, and mixing it up with what Democrats actually do. By and large, the party rejected that idea.
I can only even think of one or two right-wing media outfits that are serious and reality based (The Dispatch) - if you're listening to just about anyone else on the right, it's a fever swamp of conspiracy theories and fun-house mirror delusional reality. It's really, really bad in the Trump era, the entire right wing media apparatus is now organized entirely around his Orwellian lies.
> I'm also certain that without ICE there would literally be unlimited immigration
Before 9/11, there was no ICE. Immigration violations were treated as an administrative matter. Immigration enforcement was a job for guys with clipboards, not guns - and should be again.
> Also if nobody is "for crime" why are people that are arrested 45 times still out killing people? The judges and prosecutors found to be releasing these people are 100% democratic placed.
Do you have specific cases in mind here? In any case, judges don't have unlimited discretion on these kinds of things. There are laws and guidelines on this stuff. You can't just lock someone up for life for a bunch of misdemeanors or other petty crimes.
You always have to vet these kinds of claims by looking at whether the judges followed the law or abused discretion, etc.
scarab92 8 hours ago [-]
Didn’t California effectively legalise shoplifting?
That seems objectively pro-crime.
tzs 5 hours ago [-]
They raised the monetary amount that would push a crime from a misdemeanor to a felony. They raised it from $400 to $950.
This was widely touted in conservative circles as practically legalizing shoplifting since prosecution is less likely for misdemeanors.
The raise moves California from the 2nd lowest threshold (New Jersey is $200) to the 10th lowest. The states with the highest thresholds, and therefore the most pro-shoplifting according to conservative logic, are:
$2500 Texas and Wisconsin
$2000 Colorado, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, and South Carolina
$1500 Alabama, Delaware, Georgia, Iowa, Kansas, Maryland,
Montana, Nebraska, Rhode Island and Utah
everfrustrated 3 hours ago [-]
Your claim is very misleading. Those states have other laws and allow aggregating theft occurances below those thresholds mentioned.
tzs 2 hours ago [-]
So does California.
otterley 7 hours ago [-]
By that logic, any reduction in punishment for a crime is "pro crime." On the contrary, reducing the maximum fine for speeding is not "pro speeding," and eliminating the death penalty for murder is not "pro murder."
inigyou 6 hours ago [-]
Did it? If so, why does anyone pay for things in California shops? This idea is prima facie absurd.
KingMob 36 minutes ago [-]
I have you tagged as someone who claimed January 6th was overblown.
Maybe you shouldn't be lecturing anyone else about what qualifies as a crime.
ks2048 4 hours ago [-]
This kind of belief should make one stop and think about one's information diet.
inigyou 7 hours ago [-]
What?
otterley 8 hours ago [-]
Reality has a well-known liberal bias.
7 hours ago [-]
CamperBob2 8 hours ago [-]
Reality leans left in many respects, principally the non-economic ones. It's a simple consequence of the same trend of overall social and educational progress that allowed these models to be developed in the first place. There is a reason they came out of San Francisco, and not Russia, Iran, or Oklahoma.
To get a right-biased response from an LLM, you have to deliberately bias it... which is exactly what Musk did. Never mind the politics, that's just shitty engineering.
bluegatty 8 hours ago [-]
This fake intellectual nonsense is exactly why there should be deep institutional scrutiny of sota models. Elon is the worst person to do this but he's 'not wrong' that there needs to be scrutiny
xyzelement 8 hours ago [-]
There was a thread yesterday about how "the left" is driving the fertility rate collapse - so I am not sure the case for "reality leaning left" is so clear cut.
hydrolox 8 hours ago [-]
does that really make any sense? why are many conservative countries like Russia, Poland, Japan, or Korea facing big fertility issues.
G0lg0thvn 8 hours ago [-]
No more worries everyone! There was a single HN thread that settled the matter definitively.
incrudible 8 hours ago [-]
LLMs will tell you, without qualification (like “according to some school of thought”) that a woman is “any person that identifies as a woman”, which is, to say the least, deeply politically biased by recent trends.
otterley 7 hours ago [-]
It boggles my mind that people are still dying on this silly hill.
CamperBob2 8 hours ago [-]
LLMs will tell you, without qualification (like “according to some school of thought”) that a woman is “any person that identifies as a woman”, which is, to say the least, deeply politically biased by recent trends.
A perfect example of what I'm talking about. The lines we draw for ourselves generally do not exist in nature. Nature is full of examples of species with hermaphroditic individuals, homosexual and bisexual individuals, asexual ones, and individuals with enough other attributes to render LGBTQA...-style acronyms pointless. The idea that there is something somehow politically or morally objectionable about someone whose hormones are aligned in a direction opposite their chromosomes is something we made up.
Or more likely, something that people you voted for made up, in an effort to encourage more people with uninformed beliefs similar to yours to vote for them.
incrudible 8 hours ago [-]
This has nothing to do with the belief that a woman is simply someone who identifies as a woman. According to this belief, the following statement is sufficient to become a woman:
I am a woman.
I think this belief is absurd prima facie and would have been recognized as such by virtually anyone, say, ten years ago.
I am not a woman.
Furthermore, I do not believe that you believe I have been a woman while typing out that sentence in the middle. Do you?
inigyou 7 hours ago [-]
Identifying is more than just telling me you are something.
CamperBob2 8 hours ago [-]
Whatever. It's none of my business what you call yourself. And none of the government's.
incrudible 7 hours ago [-]
Is that so? So you reject laws that require people to affirm my gender based on nothing but my self identification? That is a right wing position in current year.
InsideOutSanta 6 hours ago [-]
This is such a vague claim that it is impossible to answer it in good faith. What do you mean by "affirm one's gender"?
And what else are you supposed to do than treat people by how they present themselves and ask you to treat them? You can't exactly ask people for a gene test, or a peek inside their pants, or whatever else it is that would satisfy your curiosity.
You are unfortunately correct that accosting people and demanding information about their sex or gender has become a right-wing position recently. Which is quite curious, given how traditionally, you would expect extreme individualism and liberalism of the "don't tread on me" kind to be a right-wing position.
So where does this leave us? Are LLMs right-wing because they correctly point out that "there are only two sexes and every human fits into one of them" is not biologically correct, or that gender is a social construct? Or are they just, you know, correct when they say that?
CamperBob2 5 hours ago [-]
Which is quite curious, given how traditionally, you would expect extreme individualism and liberalism of the "don't tread on me" kind to be a right-wing position.
It's like gun control, famously championed by Ronald Reagan when the Black Panthers started arming up.
Nothing but perhaps the speed of light is faster than a conservative dropping his defense of a given individual right the instant the Wrong People start exercising that right.
throwitaway222 8 hours ago [-]
- Just nevermind
otterley 8 hours ago [-]
This paragraph makes no sense whatsoever.
javascriptfan69 8 hours ago [-]
>left wing == gay people supremacy
Yeah I can see why LLMs don't reflect your world view (it's fucking stupid)
michaelbrave 8 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
bfung 8 hours ago [-]
Correction: facts are facts.
How a person perceives facts categorizes them into a political bias bucket.
Brendinooo 4 hours ago [-]
I would go even further and suggest that "fact/opinion" is just a framing that falls apart under scrutiny.
My framework is more or less that anything we might call a fact or an opinion is a statement, statements have varying degrees of veracity/falsifiability, and statements are essentially meaningless until they're processed through the lens of underlying beliefs/values/frameworks.
"The sky is blue" - What is the sky? What is blue? Who is viewing the sky, (someone who has sight, and isn't colorblind perhaps)? Isn't it sometimes gray? And so on.
swingboy 8 hours ago [-]
Haven’t heard this one in a while XD
senraex 8 hours ago [-]
This is an incredibly dangerous and insane world view.
Are you really that ignorant to not understand that a form of this is at the heart of basically every atrocity in history?
inigyou 7 hours ago [-]
I think we should ask the right why the facts keep aligning with the left more often. It is a real observed phenomenon, but what causes it?
ericd 6 hours ago [-]
They obviously don’t believe the same things, that’s the core of the atrocities the person is referring to. Some other group is clearly deluded, they’re less than us, their beliefs are evil, those beliefs are dangerous, etc, makes it a lot easier to hurt them. It seems pretty clear that a lot of people on both sides are going in that direction about the other, and that’s probably the most dangerous thing going on in the US today, and by extension, it’s one of the most dangerous things for the safety of the world, thanks to the ridiculously huge nuclear weapon stockpiles the US has. A US civil war would have a decent chance of being global-civilization-ending.
It’s incredibly important that we learn to come together again, compromise, and not just demand our own way.
Brendinooo 5 hours ago [-]
I would imagine it has a lot to do with the media bubbles you have placed yourself in.
tpolm 6 hours ago [-]
> facts keep aligning with the left more often
[citation needed]
0xy 8 hours ago [-]
Unless you ask them about IQ, which is apparently not real?
thatjoeoverthr 8 hours ago [-]
Cue the IQ denier deniers
runarberg 5 hours ago [-]
I‘ll bite.
IQ is a racist pseudo-science. It offers nothing of value to science nor philosophy. I will proudly claim to be an “IQ denier“ just like I am also a “phrenology denier“ as well as an “aether denier”.
thatjoeoverthr 48 minutes ago [-]
Thanks. The other guy asked if the IQ deniers are “in the room with us right now”.
tptacek 4 hours ago [-]
I don't think this is a valid argument, and I think the search bar will show my bona fides on the "racism" angle of this. I don't think "proud IQ denier" is a strong rhetorical position.
IQ is, among other things, an important clinical and diagnostic tool, especially in individual settings. In concert with other instruments it diagnoses cognitive deficits and routes people to treatments and supports. It's a useful tool of scientific inquiry as well; for example, it's used in epidemiology, and to evaluate interventions.
The thing to be a proud opponent of is the idea of IQ as a social "sorting hat", or a ranking of cognitive superiors and inferiors. It's clearly abused, so much so that virtually every mention of IQ you'll read on HN (outside of its now ubiquitous and odd use as a metric for LLMs) is pseudoscientific and problematic. The valid uses of IQ are not message-board-interesting, and the message-board-interesting uses of IQ aren't valid. It's easy to see how people fall into the trap of denying it completely.
But when you do that, you're setting yourself for an argument you're probably not going to be able to win.
runarberg 3 hours ago [-]
My post was tailored around the kinds of people who say stuff like “Cue the IQ deniers” and who very carefully insinuate not accepting fraudulent data from desecrated IQ scientist Richard Lynn is “denying facts”. And as such I used this on the nose speech.
If I was having this conversation with you (which we’ve had in the past) whom I believe is a Gloomy Prospector (a la Turkheimer) as opposed to my GPs Bell Curvers I would have been more careful with my wording.
Before I continue I do want to note that a lot has changed since the Gloomy Prospect‘s heyday in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Back then people like Turkheimer were still pushing them selves to become the mainstream pshychology (although the writing was pretty much on the wall for the likes of Plomin, and before him Jensen, Lynn, et. al.). I want to make it absolutely clear that I respect (nay, love) the work Turkheimer et. al. have done in getting us here. He and people like him are true scientists. But now his Gloomy Prospect is being challenged from the left still, and I would not be surprised that in 20-30 years IQ will have gone the way of the Aether.
That said, I want to correct you, IQ tests are being used as one of many important clinical and diagnostic tools, in particular the subtests. IQ has not been used in diagnostic since DSM-III I believe (I may be wrong; I don‘t have a DSM-III handy). Many clinical and developmental psychologists still use subtests of IQ, but very few compute the actual IQ. Some social psychologists still compute IQ of and try to find some correlation to this and that, but when I read those research I get the vibes from studying the effect of weightlessness on tiny screws[1]. If I were to guess (and Turkheimer would disagree with me on this) this is purely because of momentum, and has nothing to do with the scientific value of IQ. IQ tests are extremely robust, have been thoroughly standardized, and whole generations of clinical psychologists have been extremely well trained in administering them.
Now, I don‘t think my GPs have read beyond the words Gloomy Prospect in my post, and I don‘t think bringing some critique on Eric Turkheimer from the left is gonna open the eyes of people who are still promoting the Bell Curve 30 years later.
cheikhcheikh 8 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
mullingitover 8 hours ago [-]
Models are tuned to give ethical responses and right-leaning responses are judged by RLHF process to be unethical. That's your problem.
It's not 'left' or 'right' to be ethical, but if one side is inherently antisocial and unethical then it's going to naturally create an appearance of bias toward the other.
gitaarik 55 minutes ago [-]
The right would tell you the left's ethicality is often fake and corrupt, and the right at least tries to be moral. There's something to that, but I think there's corruption on both sides, and they try to solve things in different ways, which both have their up and down sides. The right can seem harsh compared to the softness of the left, but the left can seem weak compared to the right's decisiveness.
rayiner 8 hours ago [-]
What's "ethical" is literally a political and philosophical question. There is no objective answer to that.
mullingitover 8 hours ago [-]
This goes against the firm stance of every major religion, and well documented studies showing that humans universally have innate sense of fairness upon which ethical systems are founded. There may be some difficult ethical questions, but there a far more which are very clear-cut.
rayiner 7 hours ago [-]
Human sacrifice, including child sacrifice, was commonplace around the world. So how much of a common ethical ground can there be?
Permik 7 hours ago [-]
You brought out a good point, it was.
It's just a statistical anomaly where the collective thought was stuck in a local minima, where they thought that the sacrifices had a correlative/causative effect on good harvest/luck/fertility/rain/etc. The collective common good for a sacrifice of someone was seen as a good deal with the limited information they had available at that time.
marton78 1 hours ago [-]
This is also true for the right wing. They believe their actions do good.
mullingitover 7 hours ago [-]
There's no universal human instinct to commit human sacrifice, and while it may have happened in scattered groups it wasn't "commonplace."
On the other hand there is absolutely universal human sense of fairness.
rayiner 7 hours ago [-]
It wasn’t “scattered groups.” It was common among the Aztecs, who were the largest population in the new world. It was practiced in Mesopotamia, Iron Age Europe, and other places. That demolishes the idea that there’s a “universal human sense of fairness.”
mullingitover 6 hours ago [-]
Of all the hills to die on, this is one of them I guess.
You and I have access to the same LLMs which have been trained on the corpus of scientific research, and they'll tell you the same thing I am. Take it up with [gestures broadly at science].
rayiner 6 hours ago [-]
“Science proves there is universal ethics” is a poster child for “people are treating science like a religion.”
FunHearing3443 8 hours ago [-]
Who determines what is "ethical"?
yandie 8 hours ago [-]
Yeah nobody wants to balance their answers with Nazi ideology (far right basically) in their tuning except Grok
mik1998 9 hours ago [-]
All models are political. The rest of them are just sufficiently woke for you.
jesse_dot_id 6 hours ago [-]
I don't care if they're woke, but I do care that every model naturally leans left, but Grok leans right. That signals to me that it's been/being tampered with and I don't like that. LLMs rely on statistics and a model that leans right is a statistical anomaly. I don't like anomalies. It has nothing to do with if the chat bot misgenders me or not. I don't give a shit about any of that. I give a shit that the data set is bad. I don't want anomalous models writing code for me and I don't think that's a crazy take.
marton78 1 hours ago [-]
This is the first interesting and rational thought in this huge thread. Thank you.
tapoxi 8 hours ago [-]
Grok was ranting about "white genocide" in unrelated conversations just one year ago.
throwitaway222 8 hours ago [-]
And google was rendering the founding fathers to be black. By the way Google has recently been determined to be the MOST neutral LLM. I guess they learned their lesson after Black George Wash.
breezybottom 5 hours ago [-]
Black is a meaningless word. Race is a myth.
PepegaRoach 5 hours ago [-]
[dead]
gordian-mind 7 hours ago [-]
It makes sense in the black-majority country of South Africa, which was the context of Grok's rant. They sing "kill the Boers, kill the farmers" at major political rallies, and it's not even illegal.
I'm curious, do you have an example of a level of "woke" extremeness demonstrated by the "rest of them" that is on par with Mecha-Hitler? Because yes, all views on reality are indeed political, but the tendency of most of the models is actually toward the middle, with perhaps some left bias.
7 hours ago [-]
agustechbro 7 hours ago [-]
I feel sad for you my friend to see that you are asking for political topics to a LLM.
I hope one they you will realize you can actually do productive things with this technology.
Tiberium 13 hours ago [-]
It seems to be extremely economical - 4x better reasoning efficiency compared to Opus while being priced at $2/$6. For comparison, GPT 5.4 is $2.5/$15, GPT 5.5/5.6 are $5/$30, Opus 4.8 is $5/$25, Fable is $10/$50.
Also, the cache hit pricing is 25% of the input pricing ($2 vs $0.50). Long agentic workflows are dominated by cached input. The US frontier labs typically have this at 10% of the input price, and DeepSeek/Xiaomi etc take it to the extreme 1% range (which is why those are cheap to run in real world agentic loops with dozens of toolcalls per run)
gabriel-uribe 10 hours ago [-]
Womp. Didn't see this anywhere else.
No longer feels as inexpensive. Will likely just include this in the rolodex of <200k context tasks, like being one of my review agents.
jadbox 10 hours ago [-]
That's very notable and left out of the announcement.
game_the0ry 11 hours ago [-]
I have a theory that xAI has one of the largest clusters but with far less traffic + tokens to process bc its less popular than its competition, and xAI can pass the savings on to the end user.
goos 11 hours ago [-]
Why would having more costs and less income allow them to pass savings on to the end user?
rjh29 11 hours ago [-]
They already invested in the massive datacentres of GPUs sitting idle. They have fewer users so they can deliver more inference per user - more thinking, larger models.
loeg 7 hours ago [-]
Don't they just rent them out to the frontier AI shops? They're not sitting idle.
mvdtnz 10 hours ago [-]
So where are these mythical savings coming from? You're saying they have spent more per user therefore can charge each user less or something? I'm not following.
spacebanana7 10 hours ago [-]
The (optimistic?) take is that xAI is genuinely better at building datacenters at scale than anyone else, and the freedom to use Nat Gas as the primary energy source allows them to have lower marginal costs.
The (pessimistic?) take is that they have loads of idle GPUs and want to get some revenue out of them rather than none. Compare this to OpenAI/Anthropic where every token used by a consumer has to compete with enterprise spenders, and there’s not enough to go around for everyone.
collinmcnulty 10 hours ago [-]
It’s basically a clearance sale, is the theory.
re-thc 11 hours ago [-]
More like they have a less focus on margins and more on cost recovery.
gabriel-uribe 10 hours ago [-]
Definitely. They had insanely low rates on TTS up until a month or two ago ($4.20/1M) for example, which they only recently started increasing.
As their models get more competitive I'm sure prices will catch up.
parsimo2010 9 hours ago [-]
“We lose money on every rack, but we make up for it in volume!” - Elon Musk, probably
WarmWash 11 hours ago [-]
SpaceX, like Tesla, seems to have the same "portrayals over profits" mindset investors. So it doesn't even really matter whether or not xAI is making any money.
prng2021 8 hours ago [-]
xAI had $2.5B in operating losses in the past quarter. What savings are being passed on?
inferniac 9 hours ago [-]
they are renting parts to google for like 1b a month
really dont think they have a lot of idle power
bch 9 hours ago [-]
If they've got billions to rent out, they're not using it...
TiredOfLife 1 hours ago [-]
No need for theorizing. xai is selling their excess capacity to Anthropic and Google with large markup
sidibe 8 hours ago [-]
Profitability is never a constraint for Elon companies. He has always been able to be able to extract money from the middle east, government, banks, retail investors (or these same parties through his other companies) whenever they need more.
His net worth is orders of magnitude bigger than the cumulative profits his companies have ever produced (even if you only count the profitable quarters)
declan_roberts 4 hours ago [-]
It's really easy to do this actually. You just create cars that drive themselves and rockets that land themselves and people start throwing money at you.
jeremyjh 4 hours ago [-]
When can I get a Tesla that drives itself? About six months?
trollbridge 2 hours ago [-]
From your local Tesla dealer. Technically, you do still have to "supervise" it, which basically means making sure the little camera that watches your eyes doesn't catch you with your eyes off the road too much.
My sister-in-law's mother drove one from Florida to the northeast without touching the steering wheel or pedal/brake, right down to the parking at each end.
I've been a humongous fsd sceptic for a while, but had to lay that aside after I went for a test drive (test ride?) in one of these things.
jceykvdth 2 hours ago [-]
[dead]
giancarlostoro 13 hours ago [-]
Now if they could have an "equivalent" to Claude's $100 plan with similar compute limits. I have the $40 a month version of Grok and I get a max of like 8 hours of "non-stop" Grok Build coding, per month.
kesor 3 hours ago [-]
You get "Grok Build" (the CLI) that uses the Cursor and/or Grok 4.5 models when you buy SuperGrok, which is like $300/year. I don't know if there is a feature-to-feature comparison by anyone on this, but you can get access to these models with unmetered tokens with SuperGrok.
Tiberium 13 hours ago [-]
The model is available through Cursor which has $20, $60 and $200 plans. I assume the $60 version might work better for you?
giancarlostoro 13 hours ago [-]
Will have to give that a try I suppose.
BoumTAC 13 hours ago [-]
Grok Build sucks compare to composer 2.5.
Just use compose 2.5 and you'll have basically unlimited usage on the 40$ plan.
bhouston 13 hours ago [-]
Every time I use Composer 2.5 I have to spend a bunch of time cleaning up its mistakes. It is unusable compared to GPT 5.4 or 5.5.
My time is more valuable that I will use a model that doesn’t f** up my code base.
trollbridge 2 hours ago [-]
Isn't Composer 2.5 designed to be used from the Cursor harness, and is otherwise not that useful?
sroussey 8 hours ago [-]
Keep composer away from anything configuration related—it will ruin your day.
subhobroto 11 hours ago [-]
I think we need to be explicit about the domains we're applying Composer 2.5 to in these discussions.
I mentioned here (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48766275) how poorly it handles my specific use cases. My coworkers in DevOps and frontend UI swear by its cost-effectiveness, whereas I strongly prefer the reasoning capabilities of Opus 4.8 and Fable 5.
Composer 2.5 seems to be SOTA for Helm charts and React/Vue, but, for my usecases it absolutely struggles spectacularly when tasked with rigid body dynamics or kinematic logic.
tengbretson 12 hours ago [-]
It is hard to evaluate the model performance of Composer 2.5 when Cursor's harness is so awful compared to the others on the market.
sroussey 8 hours ago [-]
Yeah, it’s not great—except for debugging. It shines there.
brightball 11 hours ago [-]
In what way? I spend more of my time managing than hands on lately so I legitimately don’t know.
bdlowery 3 hours ago [-]
Cursors whole moat is their harness. Other people have benched opus and GPT models through Claude code, codex, and cursor, and cursor came out on top everytime because of their harness.
seunosewa 10 hours ago [-]
Not true. The only issue is cost of frontier models.
sergiotapia 9 hours ago [-]
Not my experience at all. I've been using Cursor hardcore for about two weeks now and Composer 2.5 and it's wonderful. Now with Grok 4.5 I'm quite excited about the possibilities.
DoesntMatter22 13 hours ago [-]
Composer 2.5 is so underrated IMO. I built a really feature rich application, insanely complicated, close to 200k LOC since it came out and for the most part it ran like a champ. Only used CLaude a couple times to get it unstuck. 8 hours a day and I'm paying about 30 a month.
embedding-shape 13 hours ago [-]
> I built a really feature rich application, insanely complicated, close to 200k LOC
If you listed it, how many features/LOC or vice-versa? Really hard to know if 200K LOC is good or bad, at the surface it sounds like too much, but I don't know what the application was either.
DoesntMatter22 11 hours ago [-]
It’s a fantastic signal processing / engineering app. There are 5 major players and this app isn’t quite as good but it’s in the ballpark. I’d day when I release early next nonth this will be the biggest fully featured vibe coded app I’m aware of.
alchemist1e9 10 hours ago [-]
I’d be curious to hear more about your dev setup and what tips you have for other aspiring vibe app coders.
esafak 8 hours ago [-]
How do you like its design mode?
giancarlostoro 13 hours ago [-]
Suppose eventually that gravy train will disappear, might as well use it then.
numpad0 10 hours ago [-]
How does it compare to Chinese APIs? It doesn't seem like xAI is meaningfully more competent or any single bit more honest than Chinese labs anyway, so you might as well send tasks straight to China unless theirs is substantially cheaper.
2001zhaozhao 13 hours ago [-]
Around Opus 4.7 level would be the same as Sonnet 5 while being cheaper overall.
I wonder how good their subscription discount is on both their subscription types.
Tiberium 13 hours ago [-]
Sonnet 5 is a huge token hog, though, it uses far more reasoning tokens than Opus models while being priced at $2/$10 with promo, and $3/$15 (usual Sonnet price) afterwards.
giancarlostoro 13 hours ago [-]
I'll probably get hate for it, but I was not impressed by Fable, I felt like it was just Opus with more tokens for thinking. I feel like the second I turned on Fable I drained my usage more quickly, despite them billing it as though it were Opus level of usage. The value is just not there for me. I wish they could make Haiku remain low-cost and drastically more capable to the point you could use only Haiku.
baq 11 hours ago [-]
Fable needs more... ambitious tasks than Opus to tell the difference and let me tell you the difference is there.
Simple tasks are simply saturated just like simple benchmarks. There's a level of intelligence where you simply don't need more for some things.
sroussey 8 hours ago [-]
Yes, Fable tends to only shine when the work to be done is complex and it takes a long time. Other models wedge in different ways.
I do wish the subscription had a separate weekly allocation for rare usage.
ayewo 11 hours ago [-]
I'm not sure if you are aware, but you have to approach prompting Fable slightly differently from a model like Opus.
It's important to include the reason aka the why of your task [1] in your prompt. You'll get more mileage if you verbalize your thought process when prompting Fable. Anthropic say you should think of Fable as a "thought partner".
Did you explicitly tell it to use Sonnet or Opus subagents and stick at or below high effort? Asking because such practices make a huge difference in the quality of output and the amount of tokens burned. I used one of my accounts to explore ultramax and it was just a token hog that might be worse than Opus.
giancarlostoro 12 hours ago [-]
I had it on whatever the recommended settings was, but maybe I should have told it to use Sonnet for most subtasks.
Even so, I'm just not that impressed, I felt like I got more done by just using Opus.
kittoes 2 hours ago [-]
Yeah, that's what bit me. Even Anthropic's own documentation seems to indicate that Fable is not all that great as your go to model for tasks. What it seems to excel at is a sort of leadership role because it proactively keeps all the subagents in check.
If you're not explicit in the prompt or haven't configured your environment then the default behavior is to use subagents that match the host.
sroussey 8 hours ago [-]
You can write a skill (many have) to lead it in how to use different models and efforts for subtasks. For searching the code base, for example, I have it use Haiku, which is fast.
fer 10 hours ago [-]
I felt the same tbh; I notice more the regressions in the weeks before a new release than any potential improvement the new model might have actually brought.
It may also depend on the workload. At work everything is very domain specific with barely (if any) public training data; both need thorough review and careful hand holding, meanwhile at home Fable is scared of libtorch and falls back to Opus even if it's not touching the ML parts.
minimaxir 13 hours ago [-]
The comparison may be better against GPT 5.6 Terra (instead of Sol), which is $2.5/$15.
Tiberium 13 hours ago [-]
We don't yet know Terra's results for DeepSWE/TerminalBench though.
bashtoni 8 hours ago [-]
But very expensive compared to Deepseek v4 Pro, which performs similarly.
Grok is stuck in a difficult place - not the best model at anything, and not the cheapest either. It's hard to make a case for using it on any dimension, even before you factor in the history (I'm not sure suggesting the company uses the model that refers to itself as "MechaHitler" is the way to a promotion).
cousinbryce 7 hours ago [-]
It’s the #1 model for creating CSAM
tick_tock_tick 4 hours ago [-]
An AI model can't create CSAM unless you're claiming it's managing to hire people to commit crimes in the real world?
conradkay 13 hours ago [-]
Annoying they didn't show benchmarks for several effort modes, since it seems like it might close the gap with Opus 4.8 by cranking tokens up?
I am amazed at people's willingness to use Grok. The company is so transparently morally bankrupt. They're the only AI company that seems okay with CSAM (or at least don't do as much to stop it)
Why give them money?
It would be one thing if they were the only game in town but thats definitely not the case.
NelsonMinar 8 hours ago [-]
People give them money because of the moral stance. They are either actively fine with the CSAM or just don't care.
tick_tock_tick 5 hours ago [-]
Or realistically people don't view it as CSAM just like how drawing a really realistic image isn't. I don't think it's "good" but it's not CSAM.
snek_case 4 hours ago [-]
The reason it makes people uncomfortable is because people have been using it to alter images of real people, and they've done that in a public place (twitter/X), for everyone to see. So it gets in the deepfake realm, which is illegal in many places.
scarab92 8 hours ago [-]
Give me an alternative that isn’t trying to shove left wing ideology down my throat and I’ll use that.
So far, only xAI makes any attempt to be neutral in its answers.
I’m not sure if you’re trying to say that it’s left or right, but it’s perhaps relevant to point out that that article is about the political bias of all major models. And right there in the subhead, they explicitly say that the models have a left bias.
scarab92 7 hours ago [-]
Most of us don’t have economist subscriptions.
Maybe you can just tell us what you mean by not neutral?
I find Grok to be far more academically honest than the other models. The other models seem to be much more aligned with public opinion over academic consensus especially on topics around economics and biology.
I find public opinion on these topics to be very group think populist and prefer the academic take that grok provides
breezybottom 5 hours ago [-]
It's the only model which says that Elon Musk is more athletic than Lebron James. Is that honesty?
jdthedisciple 44 minutes ago [-]
So it also has good humor, kinda sounds like a cool friend no?
inigyou 6 hours ago [-]
Well it did call itself MechaHitler, start talking about a supposed white genocide that's happening, and generate metric fucktons of child porn.
tommica 2 hours ago [-]
Only issue in that is the CP, the rest is still purely next token prediction. To take it seriously is silly, and to think that is everything it provides is cherry picking.
It would be like judging gemini because it generated images of famous historical people as black, which was fucking stupid. I use gemini quite a lot as my chat tool, and it works great.
jug 7 hours ago [-]
You probably have it backwards. It's Grok that is shoving right wing ideology down your throat. Research has shown that without specific guidance to otherwise, LLM's tend to be slightly left leaning by default. There are some theories as for why this is so.
tyre 5 hours ago [-]
It would be easier to understand where you're coming from if you could give some examples containing:
- prompt
- response
- why it is wrong / misleading / biased
Because there are many people online complaining about left-wing bias, then you ask what about and they're like "Trump won in 2020, vaccines cause autism, global warming is a globalist conspiracy", etc. Which is to say, it's not left-wing bias but reality bias.
Not saying you are one of those people or that there isn't bias! It's just been hard, in my personal experience, to get at it.
crummy 4 hours ago [-]
Out of curiosity, I just asked Grok and learned:
* Biden won the 2020 election
* vaccines do not cause autism
* global warming is not a conspiracy
In each case it seemed to do a web search so perhaps it is happy to rely on the top results.
trollbridge 2 hours ago [-]
Here is a prompt I keyed into SuperGrok (still have the bargain priced $10 a month subscription as they seem to be really desparate for subscribers right now):
Answer these questions: who won the 2020 election; do vaccines caust autism; is global warming a conspiracy theory. Do not use web searches or subagents or external sources of information.
Results:
2020 US Presidential Election: Joe Biden won the election ...
Do vaccines cause autism? No. ...
Is global warming a conspiracy theory? No. ...
Just for fun, I decided to ask Cursor Grok 4.5 (Fast xhigh), too:
The user wants three factual answers. They forbid web searches, subagents, and external sources.
I will answer directly from memory. Joe Biden won the 2020 election. Vaccines do not cause autism. Global warming is established science.
Joe Biden won the 2020 U.S. presidential election.
No — vaccines do not cause autism. That claim has been thoroughly studied and rejected by the scientific and medical consensus.
No — global warming is not a conspiracy theory. Human-caused climate change is established science, backed by extensive evidence.
(And wow, it sure is fast, although not as fast as MiMo-2.5-Pro-UltraSpeed. Ran it out of a $20/mo Cursor subscription.)
mptest 7 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
7tflutter7 4 hours ago [-]
all ai models can be jailbroken. The chinese open source ones above all.
Hadriel 3 hours ago [-]
A lot of people don't care, dont even know about the moral issues - like everyone is in their own bubble and yours is a small one too
nsonha 1 hours ago [-]
> okay with CSAM
based on what? I tried and it could not even generate adult nudity. Earlier Grok Image was badly censored but now they have their filters in place.
resonious 8 hours ago [-]
I think the moralities of all the big heads in AI are questionable. The training corpus is largely stolen, and they are all in inescapable debt but keep going. But at this point, their products are so useful that almost nobody is willing to sit back and wait for a "morally acceptable" LLM to come around (which would inevitably be inferior).
I can't comment on CSAM though - if X.ai really is "okay" with it then I'll agree with you that they're more immoral than the others.
ransom1538 8 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
brokencode 8 hours ago [-]
Grok has a serious credibility problem due to Elon’s decisions and personal insanity.
Will it ever recover? Maybe. But it’s got an uphill battle even compared to the Chinese models, and that’s saying something.
mrits 8 hours ago [-]
Wait until you find out who owns the other models
brokencode 7 hours ago [-]
Did they kill hundreds of thousands of poor people by shutting down USAID too?
ransom1538 6 hours ago [-]
No it was more. In Brazil, 4 billion people died -- just one night without poetry jams.
brokencode 5 hours ago [-]
Sure, let’s make jokes about the poor dying of malaria and AIDS. You sound like a Grok power user.
5 hours ago [-]
ransom1538 4 hours ago [-]
Lol. I thought you were joking too! But you sound like a Gemini Power user!
brokencode 4 hours ago [-]
No you didn’t, and that’s not much of an insult.
5 hours ago [-]
TurdF3rguson 7 hours ago [-]
They've only been billionaires for a couple years. These things take time.
behnamoh 7 hours ago [-]
I'm curious, is this true or something you heard from MSM and regurgitated?
mullingitover 7 hours ago [-]
> Forecasting models predicted that the current steep funding cuts could result in more than 14 051 750 (uncertainty interval 8 475 990–19 662 191) additional all-age deaths, including 4 537 157 (3 124 796–5 910 791) in children younger than age 5 years, by 2030.
So for comparison, Pol Pot only killed 3 million people in total according to upper bound estimates.
brokencode 7 hours ago [-]
As opposed to what? Going down to Africa to count the bodies myself?
Of course I read about it in the media. And there are articles from Harvard, UCLA, and others that say the same thing
grosswait 6 hours ago [-]
Former beneficiaries of USAID funds created some studies you say?
brokencode 5 hours ago [-]
Yup, the destitute and dying are famous for their highly publicized research.
jeremyjh 5 hours ago [-]
Tell me you don't know how science works without telling me that you don't know how science works.
jeremyjh 5 hours ago [-]
So you think a malaria prevention program can be canceled without notice and no one will die from that?
The only people who believe that do not believe in anything. They think there is no such thing as competence or honesty because they have never experienced it.
declan_roberts 4 hours ago [-]
That's not true. I believe firmly the American taxpayer and government is responsible for the lives of every single person in the world.
jeremyjh 4 hours ago [-]
We were responsible for providing notice and a transition period when we stopped paying for it. We didn't have to pay for it, and they didn't have to die. But we have an administration that can't plan a pool party.
breezybottom 5 hours ago [-]
The mainstream media is Fox News, so probably not.
brikym 5 hours ago [-]
Should I pick a model
a) run by a lying crypto bro once obsessed with scanning eyeballs
b) that costs too much and resulted bombing innocent kids
c) that is cheap but ultimately owned by re-education camp operators
d) something else
fourside 8 hours ago [-]
We have three major foundational models not including Grok.
When the defense for a company is basically “yeah they host csam in the platform but is that really worse than the others” you’ve really lost the plot
dbbk 8 hours ago [-]
We could just not have AI models that generate CSAM I don't think that's too much to ask
tapoxi 8 hours ago [-]
Plenty of competitive open weight models
scubbo 8 hours ago [-]
> Yes. We only need one AI company. Max two. Good idea.
Nothing in the original comment suggested that fewer AI companies was inherently a good thing - just that this _particular_ AI company is a bad one.
> Deciding who is more moral has a great history.
I think you're being sarcastic, but, uhhh...are you honestly advocating for the converse, of making no judgements based on morals?
bigyabai 8 hours ago [-]
xAI's (unused) dedicated compute is being sold for Anthropic's inference.
xAI isn't a frontier company, and their fate is already being decided by the two hegemons.
crummy 4 hours ago [-]
I am inclined to agree but grok 4.5 seems to be almost SOTA. They could be frontier soon.
Ar-Curunir 8 hours ago [-]
Competition is good, but this company and its owner have not demonstrated anything to indicate that they would make for good competition, neither economically nor morally.
Also, yes, a company whose products produce CSAM is just morally bad. There's no nuance to be had there.
1 hours ago [-]
Dispatch-Arch 52 minutes ago [-]
[dead]
replwoacause 5 hours ago [-]
I would never touch anything fElon has had anything to do with. He is subhuman as far as I'm concerned.
throwaway_10948 8 hours ago [-]
I used to question myself strongly about using Grok or any product with questionable morals. Then I realized that:
1. I just bought a house, using a bunch of SWE-salary money.
2. I moved into SF several years ago, probably contributing to the gentrification
3. Thousands of children in China had no financial means for education, yet I did nothing
So I used Grok, donated quite a lot of money at the annoyance of my family to an NGO in China, and decided not to donate to SF non-profits due to me still having a mortgage and I am still kinda selfish.
The message I want to spread is that we should take a practical stance to morals and doing good. I like Grok for many things; it is morally good to boycott it, and in my opinion there are many other morally good things we can also do while staying practical
NitpickLawyer 12 hours ago [-]
(from Cursor's blog)
> Training included trillions of tokens of Cursor data which capture a wide-range of user interactions with codebases and software tools. This dataset lets the model learn both from existing software as well as developer-agent interactions, capturing how developers work and how agents interact with their environments.
This is what the big money was for. Cursor is the first big player that had real-world data from real-world projects, before cc / codex were a thing.
> We used reinforcement learning on difficult problems in realistic environments spanning both software engineering and broader knowledge work. These environments teach the model to investigate problems, use tools, recover from mistakes, and verify results.
> Many of these problems had to be designed to be difficult enough that even frontier models fail at them. As models improve, existing tasks stop teaching them anything new, and problems that once required extensive reasoning become routine.
> We developed a distributed agent system to construct these environments at scale. Engineers specify a problem and how a solution is verified, and large groups of agents construct, test, and refine each environment.
This is where scale comes in. You use the previous gen model to prepare datasets for the next model iteration. The better the models, the better the data, the better the next models. (they also have a comparison with their composer2.5 training run, for people still thinking chinese models are "close to SotA"...)
Reports of xAIs demise (after giving a lot of compute to Anthropic) were slightly exaggerated, it seems.
> Grok 4.5 was trained across tens of thousands of NVIDIA GB300 GPUs
theplumber 9 hours ago [-]
Well Microsoft has GitHub and Visual Studio and has no good coding model
dmix 8 hours ago [-]
Cursor has had a good AI product tons of people used for real work for 2yrs (up until recently when the Claude gap widened significantly) while Microsoft/Github has just been pretending they do with Copilot and awful Github AI integrations nobody likes. Meanwhile Github's code has already been vacuumed up by all the models by now.
umeshunni 3 hours ago [-]
You would be surprised how many enterprises are allowed to use only Copilot for all tasks due to Microsoft deals.
schmorptron 1 hours ago [-]
yeah, but that's due to enterprise commitments that MS won't train on the user interactions
inferniac 9 hours ago [-]
well the big money was also in spacex stock, fresh post IPO, so overall a very smart move it seems
teravor 8 hours ago [-]
> You use the previous gen model to prepare datasets for the next model iteration.
you can also use a previous gen model to literally generate data for the next gen model. people used to believe that this is a bad idea but it turns out if you create a scaffold which sinks a lot of compute into generating and grading the data the quality turns out great.
0xpgm 5 hours ago [-]
Generally, it seems like if you are not getting returns that outweigh your token spend, you are merely paying to train AI.
epolanski 9 hours ago [-]
> You use the previous gen model to prepare datasets for the next model iteration
I've read multiple times that this approach is harmful in training.
You're essentially describing what many call distillation, but it's only useful in post training to guide behavior, it teaches how to behave, not how to think.
I might be wrong though and would be glad if someone more knowledgeable provided more insights.
ainch 8 hours ago [-]
There have been papers about model collapse, but the underlying assumption is that you constantly train on only the outputs of the previous model. Later research has shown that as long as you retain some "real" data, training on largely synthetic data is ok.
And in the case the previous poster describes, the other model doesn't generate datasets, it generates environments which the next generation interact with to learn from.
TiredOfLife 1 hours ago [-]
There was one highly discussed paper. And about a month after publication much much stronger models were released. The models got better because they used such synthetic data.
NitpickLawyer 3 hours ago [-]
> I've read multiple times that this approach is harmful in training.
There's a lot of nuance here. Note that I said "prepare" datasets and not just "generate" datasets.
First, the "model collapse" paper(s) were highly misunderstood and the "media" / content creators ran with it because negativity sells. In that initial paper the authors took things to the extreme, and presented as a given what happens in the literal worse case scenario. They used small models, they generated data w/ those models and indiscriminately trained on that data. It obviously led to model collapse. But that's not what you do in the real world.
The way you do this in the real world is different. For pre-training data you can do things to improve the quality of your inputs:
First, you can use the models to curate your datasets. And this is something that everyone has done since the days of "chug common crawl into the model and see what comes out". It turns out that quality of the data is very important and common crawl is really bad. So we've seen attempts at curating that data. The better the filtering models, the better the initial pre-training data.
Then you can have data augmentation, where you take some piece of content, and generate augmentations for it. Current models are good enough that you can take a piece of "authoritative" text (say a book on writing style) and a bunch of articles, and "improve" them. Or take a piece of content and "translate" it into simple / advanced explanations. Or take a piece of code and "explain" what it does, based on a paragraph from an authoritative book. And so on.
Then, for the mid-training / post-training with RL:
You need to find both good scenarios (i.e. problems) for your model to solve and a good verification schema. Like they say in the quote above, those problems need to be complicated enough for each new model. Here you can again use old models to prepare datasets for the new models.
One simple approach is to take a codebase, have your current model identify a set of features. Then instruct the model to remove code relating to feature "a" but keep its tests. Then verify that every other feature works in the code, bar the one you removed. Then, during RL, you train your new model on that task (you present it as a "prompt" / "situation") and you score the model based on the new feature passing the original tests.
Then there are more advanced ways of using prev gen models for "open ended" problems. You can't really apply RL if the task is not easily verifiable (like above, with tests). But you can use something like RLAIF (reinforcement learning w/ AI feedback) where you grade responses with the previous gen models. Now, in general this is lower quality / lower signal than RLVR (verifiable rewards) but you can still do smart things. Instead of rating an answer good / bad, or ask it one-shot what answer is better, you can use a method based on rubrics. You can first ask the preparing model to select tasks, and a list of rubrics on how that task should be scored (like they generally do on open ended exam questions). Then while doing RL you grade each response by asking the prev gen model to generate said rubrics. Does the answer touch on subject a / b / c? Does the answer mention x y z? Is this mathematically sound? And so on. You still get better results than nothing, even if the task is "open ended". And, again, as models improve so does your pipeline.
redox99 12 hours ago [-]
First impressions:
- Very fast, easily beats GPT 5.5/Opus 4.8/GLM 5.2 because of higher t/s (around 90?) and very high token efficiency
- Very good price, no contest vs GPT and Opus which are very overpriced if you pay API costs, and probably cheaper than GLM 5.2 when you take into account the token efficiency.
- Will take quite a while to get a feel for how smart it is, but it's definitely good, I'd say in the same tier as opus, occupying the lower end of that tier together with GLM 5.2.
porridgeraisin 11 minutes ago [-]
There is one thing to note here.
The fact that it is more token efficient will itself lead it to be smarter since the context will be smaller for the same task. However, in opus models, you'll have built internal correlations like "if it did X it will usually do Y" which may not be true here, since grok 4.5 may have done X purely due to the smaller context size, but can't do Y cos it wasn't RLd on that pattern enough. So it will be a unique experience as far as opus tier models go.
jonathaneunice 10 hours ago [-]
Concur.
Tried on a "this test suite is weaker than I'd like, too often depending on internal state rather than outcomes" problem via Cursor, asking it to "review and suggest solutions." It gave me a quality overview of the test approaches, strengths, weaknesses, and gaps then recommended a disciplined multi-prong approach based on a common, trusted testing library (https://hypothesis.readthedocs.io/en/latest/). It broke down the things we could do this improvement pass or leave to later (staged scoping), identified some very hard/possibly-out-of-scope cases and gave me the option of focusing on them or not, and organized new tests in a logical way. After one round of feedback and plan tuning, I put it in agent mode and let it work. A few minutes later I had a much better test suite.
Have not tried Grok before and didn't have much confidence, but it did great. Exactly the sort of complex, detailed, nuanced analysis and multi-step task I would previously only trusted to GPT or Opus.
_Update_: It's now also found a substantive long-standing bug. After testing improved asked it to do overall code and packaging review. It caught a few glitches and oversights, mostly cosmetic IMO, but certainly worth cleaning up. But also some error-handling weaknesses, and one embarrassing functional bug. Which it has now also fixed and added to the tests. Color me impressed.
paradox460 6 hours ago [-]
My benchmark is ripping tailwind out of a few year old elixir Phoenix liveview app, and replacing it with component level scoped styles
It's a good and complex task, that requires touching the build system, most components, the stylesheets, and more. Opus 4.6 could barely do it. Sonnet 4 cannot (haven't tried 5 yet). MiniMax actually did fairly well
Grok aced it, rather quickly and cheaply, surprisingly
I run each through Oh my pi, with dexter providing the LSP for elixir
seunosewa 1 hours ago [-]
The input price is quite high. That's what gets you.
fomoz 5 hours ago [-]
This is what I don't understand. Why would I use this "cheaper" model when it's still going to be more expensive than Codex on the $200 plan? Are they only targeting business users who pay per token?
16 minutes ago [-]
redox99 5 hours ago [-]
You can buy the Grok plan, Cursor also has a plan which includes grok 4.5, but I don't know how subsidized they are compared to codex or claude code plans.
fomoz 4 hours ago [-]
Got it, I got confused then. Would be good to see how it compares, Codex is quite generous for the $200 with GPT 5.5. They give a lot of resets, I just use mine in Fast mode (1.5x speed, 2.5x usage) almost all the time. But it's not exactly fast.
fizzbuzzdizz 9 hours ago [-]
hmm interesting. maybe im doing something wrong. this model feels borderline unusable to me. it fumbles the most basic asks that require very little to no context consistently (inline these helper functions - re-rewrote half of the modules involved instead of making a 10 line change)
redox99 9 hours ago [-]
Sounds like an issue with your harness or something.
codemog 12 hours ago [-]
Can someone breakdown to me how this makes any sort of economical sense? Spending billions and billions to have the 3rd best model while even the number 1 and 2 players already seem to struggle making a profit. What am I missing here? Not trying to go full Ed Zitron but this doesn’t make sense to me.
reissbaker 9 hours ago [-]
Previously they were a distant fourth. They're not going to single-shot catch up to OpenAI or Anthropic, but they moved up the ladder one rung.
In the short term labs are not profitable, although supposedly Anthropic is close. But Amazon was also famously unprofitable for many many years, and then won huge. Current profits or lack thereof are not necessarily important to investors: what's important is they believe in your future potential profits.
In this case, Elon clearly believes much of the economy will be run by AI in the future, and the economic value of a token will rise faster than the cost of generating the token — including the amortized cost of training the model to produce that token. Thus he is building a lab to train models and charge for inference of those models, and — he believes — it will eventually become profitable even if it isn't now.
You may or may not agree with him (and you may or may not agree he's capable of beating Ant/OAI), but current profits aren't a great indicator of whether he believes future profits are attainable. Tesla and SpaceX were also very unprofitable, until they weren't.
Personally I agree with him that there will be massive profits in the future, although I am not as confident in his ability to beat Ant/OAI, at least given his recent difficulties in retaining researchers.
bluegatty 8 hours ago [-]
They're going to fall behind Google soon.
Amazon was 'unit profitable' very early.
Yes - it's not unreasonable for Elon to bet long horizon ... there are after all many car companies, why not AI?
He's already winning gov. contracts, that could continue.
It's an odd bet but not entirely wrong or dubious.
tavavex 12 hours ago [-]
They have the same dreams as their competitors - finding a breakthrough that gives them an edge over the others and makes them dominant. And also, having the word 'AI' anywhere near your company makes all the right numbers go up, so having an in-house AI division that Musk can bundle with the other companies to pump their valuations with is very helpful to him, even if the product itself loses some money.
petesergeant 1 hours ago [-]
I think it’s simply Musk cynicism winning through here, and you’re right about it being a side-show that lets him juice the stock price. I’m not even sure he’s wrong: if his lab is the one that gets a definitive break-away advantage, then every dollar investment in his stock will be paid back many times over.
TheGoddessInari 12 hours ago [-]
You could be typing the same about Google or a number of the other labs right now.
A diverse market full of choices keeps it from becoming the browser wars all over again.
SwellJoe 11 hours ago [-]
Google is playing a different game. I don't really know what game they're playing, but they're not trying to beat Claude Code. They have coding capabilities and Antigravity, but I'd be surprised if it's much more than an afterthought. They're focusing on efficiency, models at the edge, human interaction, image and video, etc. in ways Anthropic, in particular, is not.
Google wants its AI to be pervasive in everyone's daily life. Merely being the best at coding is not how you get there.
I am more bullish on Google in AI than most folks, I think, as they have been focused on efficiency in a way most US vendors have not. They've published a ton of papers on ways to make LLMs more efficient and capable on smaller devices..
Google wants to own the on-device market for AI, and I don't see many credible competitors in that space.
richardw 9 hours ago [-]
If I had to summarise Google’s effort it would be: stay close but let the others burn themselves out. Position for the long game until you see something worth betting the company on.
Apple similar, without the “stay close” bit.
dansquizsoft 9 hours ago [-]
This is 1000% not their (Google's) aim. The position they are in is due much more to their organisational laziness and incompetence than it is any grand strategy.
HardCodedBias 8 hours ago [-]
This is the correct take.
It's an unbelievable failure.
Sateeshm 41 minutes ago [-]
That might just be how it will turn out, but not because it's Google's strategy. They are just too big to fail.
dansquizsoft 9 hours ago [-]
> Google wants its AI to be pervasive in everyone's daily life.
Google wants nothing more than the world to remain stuck in 2000 - 2020 where search was king. Their organisational inertia will fight its AI progress every step of the way and this very well explains why they are not leading the AI pack despite inventing the technology.
SwellJoe 8 hours ago [-]
I mean, I'm sure there are people within Google who are behaving as though they can keep the dream of the 00s alive in Mountain View, but there's also a whole bunch of people doing work at the frontier in AI. Google has a large lead in hardware, they have the smartest very small models, they have among the most efficient large models (I'd wager their margins on Gemini 3.5 Flash inference are absurd). They have among the best image, video, and audio models, going in every direction (generating, editing, understanding).
Viewed from a consumer lens, the AI the average person interacts with daily, Google seems like the clear leader, especially after locking in Apple as a customer for iPhones.
dansquizsoft 7 hours ago [-]
Their hardware is nowhere near Nvidia, hence Google paying SpaceX hundreds of millions of dollars a month to SpaceX for capacity there.
remus 41 minutes ago [-]
> hence Google paying SpaceX hundreds of millions of dollars a month to SpaceX for capacity there.
I don't think that necessarily follows. It could just be old fashioned capacity issues, for example. If nothing else nvidia are able to charge an insane markup on their AI chips at the moment so even if google TPUs aren't competitive in a pure performance sense they are surely competitive from a pricing perspective.
SwellJoe 7 hours ago [-]
I think the SpaceX deal was to goose the IPO. Google holds a significant stake in SpaceX, and made a fortune on the IPO.
ls612 4 hours ago [-]
Anthropic is paying even more to a direct competitor that now fields a model that trades blows with their Opus.
dansquizsoft 3 hours ago [-]
I'll eat my hat if SpaceXAI manages to produce something even close to leading edge again
Petersipoi 2 hours ago [-]
Why lol? Because you don't like Elon? XAI has continued to stay within a few months of leading edge, and now suddenly they'll just never do it again, despite doing it literally today?
SwellJoe 3 hours ago [-]
I'm not talking about Anthropic.
theplumber 9 hours ago [-]
Google seems to become a dead business very soon. Search traffic is being split between AI and social networks and google is bad on both fronts. Its AI proposition is more or less like the Google Plus. Nobody really wants it but they know about it because google pushes it everywhere it can.
remus 39 minutes ago [-]
> Its AI proposition is more or less like the Google Plus. Nobody really wants it but they know about it because google pushes it everywhere it can.
Citation needed. The gemini app has 750 million MAU, hardly a dead business.
MitziMoto 3 hours ago [-]
Hey, don't forget: Google is also bad at search!
bigyabai 8 hours ago [-]
What's AdSense then, chopped liver?
theplumber 8 hours ago [-]
AI is a blackhole and Google search along with Adsense and many other “web” publishing platforms is the big shiny star nearby. Can you feel the wrath of AI?
veber-alex 7 hours ago [-]
I don't know google's AI strategy but what I can tell from my usage and others around me is that google search usage has declined considerably.
Terms like "Google it" have been completely replace by "Ask AI".
I personally mostly use google to find businesses close to me and to search reddit and wikipedia.
redanddead 10 hours ago [-]
At the same time that they’re seemingly exiting android?
Google at least is serving AI results on SRPs billions of times a day, and has pre-existing expertise in data center buildouts and custom silicon.
They have one of the more compelling cases for rolling their own.
small_model 11 hours ago [-]
X has grok built in to every post as does every Tesla Car
sroussey 8 hours ago [-]
/s
throwa356262 11 hours ago [-]
Google is using AI at such scale internally they don't need external customers to recoup their investment.
ur-whale 11 hours ago [-]
> Google is using AI at such scale internally they don't need external customers to recoup their investment.
That's assuming their flagship product remains relevant in an AI-powered world.
Which brings to mind: most of the big shops product (chatgpt, claude, grok, etc...) ALL rely on search, and NONE of them actually have a running search stack.
Which means, they must all be calling Google, no?
How does Google make money from that?
smoe 9 hours ago [-]
> That's assuming their flagship product remains relevant in an AI-powered world.
The big advantage Google has, in my opinion, is Android. I think there is a decent chance that people stop downloading the ChatGPT, Claude, etc. apps if they perceive that the phone just does the same out of the box for free. And I reckon the majority of people will prefer free, ad-ridden AI chat vs. paying subscriptions, at least for personal use. And on the B2B side, they have Workspace deeply embedded in a huge number of companies. So I wouldn't count Google out.
trollbridge 2 hours ago [-]
We currently have a Google Gemini Pro sub that is free for a year, since one is handed out to every person who goes out and buys a new Pixel, and likewise is also available for up to 5 family members. Codex and all included, and quite generous usage limits.
Despite this I cannot get my business partner to switch to Gemini (including all the very easy and convenient to use features that come with her Pixel phone) over her $100 a month ChatGPT Pro subscription.
The public perception of Gemini (or Google AI, specifically) is becoming quite poor because of the questionable results in "AI Mode" in a typical Google search. Google is really shooting themselves in the foot, because Gemini is quite good; they're creating an anti-brand.
WarmWash 11 hours ago [-]
The funny thing about Google is that Google Search is happy to serve LLM labs search results if it drives their metrics up. Just like Google Cloud is happy to sell off compute to OAI an Anthropic to drive up their metrics.
Google also owns 15% of Anthropic and Hassabis, the leader of Deepmind, also is an early angel investor in Anthropic.
When you really break it down, it's not totally clear that Google would even care that much about being the SOTA LLM.
LorenDB 11 hours ago [-]
> Which means, they must all be calling Google, no?
Incorrect. Alternate search providers exist, such as Bing (used by DuckDuckGo, for example) and Brave.
ur-whale 11 hours ago [-]
Yes, but all are still inferior.
And it really does not matter.
The real question is: which search service do they use anyways.
ComputerGuru 8 hours ago [-]
Bing is the easiest to buy programmatic access to.
But I think they don’t tell you because they sometimes use residential proxies to scrape search results the same way they used residential proxies to scrape the web.
jeremyjh 3 hours ago [-]
They really are not inferior. There are many different APIs with different strengths and there are aggregators on top of them that produce results that are significantly better than Google's. Everytime I accidentally use Google I'm shocked at how terrible it is.
sroussey 8 hours ago [-]
There are a lot of search APIs for AI these days.
remus 10 hours ago [-]
> Which brings to mind: most of the big shops product (chatgpt, claude, grok, etc...) ALL rely on search, and NONE of them actually have a running search stack.
Don't they? Based on traffic to some websites I run the big AI labs are very actively doing a lot of crawling.
msabalau 11 hours ago [-]
Google's ad revenue has done really well so far in the LLM era, and wasup 12% year over year in 2025, and forecasted to do the same next year.
And that changes, then that's all the more reason for them to be investing in AI.
bitmasher9 11 hours ago [-]
How is this any different than the browser wars? We use to have a diverse market full of choices, and now we have Chromium (almost all market share) and Firefox/Safari on the edges.
subhobroto 11 hours ago [-]
> A diverse market full of choices keeps it from becoming the browser wars all over again.
This is a great analogy but I worry you might be implying something I don't agree with but you didn't explicitly say what I'm worried about, so let me call it out:
Microsoft played a dirty game with I.E, but they are in the dirty game business. It wasn't only I.E, it was their OS, Office suite and everything else they do business in.
Google Chrome took advantage of that dirty game and now you have the Chromium engine that powers a lot of browserlike frameworks.
No one born in the LLM age even knows what I.E means or stands for, as it should be - a horribly designed, poorly working product foisted upon users via the Windows distribution system - a dishonorable product from an ethically corrupt company forever lost in history, right alongside Clippy and DCOM.
OTOH, I am glad that Microsoft played a dirty game with I.E and didn't just stop playing dirty there - they jacked up the price of Windows if an OEM even dared to bundle in Netscape Navigator instead - who knows, if they hadn't done that, there wouldn't have been a Google or Apple. We would all be using Windows and Windows Search and Windows Phone.
And without Google, we might not have had the modern LLM as we know it. We would have had some trashy Windows Autocomplete Copilot Clippy. Ugh!
lukan 9 hours ago [-]
"No one born in the LLM age even knows what I.E means or stands for, as it should be - a horribly designed, poorly working product"
As one of my first jobs involved getting a website to work with IE6 I surely hated it, but when it came out, it seemed to have pushed the web technologies in general.
The problem was not the browser technology, but microsoft abusing it's monopoly to don't give a shit about (open) web standards.
redanddead 9 hours ago [-]
Why does Microsoft feel so gross
bigyabai 12 hours ago [-]
Google invented the transformer architecture. You really can't say the same about them.
HardCodedBias 8 hours ago [-]
Google Brain invented the transformer.
GDM ... not so much.
goodroot 12 hours ago [-]
The product is the stock.
It is very valuable when you have various bundles of services, such as satellites, AI, and so on, to keep pace with the majors so that you keep pace with their valuation.
These stacking valuations are not additive, they're multiplicative because you additionally market investors to the synergy between them.
Having the third best model statistically is extremely useful in this context.
sfink 11 hours ago [-]
The weaknesses can be multiplicative as well. One division bleeding capex can drag down all the rest, no matter how well they might be doing. And the P/E ratio on all of them is riding unrealistic expectations, which can actually be fine for a long time but forces growth even in areas where it doesn't make sense. (Maybe that's where the "let's build data centers in a high radiation hard vacuum!" nonsense comes in; you just need a story of how the P/E ratio is possible to justify in the future? No need to argue over likelihood, just have a tale to tell?)
tonyhart7 11 hours ago [-]
I know that SpaceX have tremendous potential, the problem is that we account future potential that maybe not happening in 20 - 50 years
gunapologist99 10 hours ago [-]
> future potential
Starlink doesn't qualify? Because that's a practically unbelievable track record. It's easy to say it's obvious, but it was only obvious in hindsight (or perhaps to Elon, but I think the reason that it was successful was actually more about him just being relentless)
I'm not an Elon acolyte, but as with his other enterprises (SpaceX, Tesla), he succeeded where others (Irridium etc) repeatedly failed.
It's really hard to argue that he got lucky when he keeps pulling these really extremely high capex and hard-tech and business successes off so cleanly, especially when you see the entrenched opposition (govt, politics, competitors) that's been arrayed against him.
> The pattern is unambiguous. In townlands still unserved by mid-2026, LEO provider Starlink has grown relentlessly and now accounts for 14.3% of fixed samples, approaching one in seven. In townlands where fiber arrived in 2021 and 2022, Starlink’s share has remained below 2% for five years, with no growth despite the same marketing, pricing, and availability.
(The context is that Ireland has spent the last six years building a fibre network for every rural premises in the country, which is now almost done; it will be complete late this year or early next.)
The problem for Starlink is, it works okay as a business model... Until fibre arrives. Then it's dead. So, long-term, Starlink's market is, essentially, countries which are too poor to do a rural fibre rollout (and bear in mind that it has become much cheaper to do so). Like, what's the bull case for Starlink? In a decade, you've got to assume that areas unserved by fibre won't really be a thing in the developed world.
crummy 8 hours ago [-]
There are plenty of places in the developed world where it just doesn't make financial sense to roll out fibre. In NZ about 90% of the country has fibre access... probably that number will creep a bit higher. But I doubt it'll ever reach 100%.
Whether or not Starlink can build a business on selling broadband to <10% of the developed world I don't know.
9cb14c1ec0 7 hours ago [-]
Nah, a friend's fiber bill just went from $50 to $100 per month. He is switching to Starlink.
dmix 8 hours ago [-]
This market is far from mature or established to be making rankings. There's been plenty of tech markets where the early days didn't predict the later years.
I'm personally skeptical of Grok but maybe they can pull off a profitable niche with Cursor integration once Claude loses it's edge.
aayushdutt 9 hours ago [-]
Anthropic is already profitable, economics is no longer an issue as they have found PMF in enterprise software market. You might need to update your views.
Having a profitable quarter in which they were given an undisclosed discount on compute only in that quarter does not necessarily mean “Anthropic is Profitable.” It doesn’t mean they’re not, either. Even the breathless article about their first profitable quarter, (which, frankly, read more like a press release,) mentioned in passing that it’s “not clear” if it’s sustainable because their compute expenses are likely to increase. I get the feeling that if they were sustainably profitable, they’d shout it from the rooftops.
But we don’t know.
If someone proudly announces they and their partner could afford to eat at a particular fancy restaurant every night last week, but for that specific week the restaurant had a BOGO deal, and they also didn’t disclose how they determined that they could afford it, you don’t really know if they could sustainably afford to eat there every night, right?
saberience 7 hours ago [-]
Read the latest semianalysis article.
Anthropic is definitely profitable now, in fact, they’re crushing it.
hajile 7 hours ago [-]
They might be profitable for the exact two months SpaceX is giving them billions worth of free compute doesn’t seem convincing to me.
andxor 4 hours ago [-]
They are actually paying them $1B per month for the compute. But they're still profitable and increasingly so.
brightball 11 hours ago [-]
My guess is that the use here is similar to the reason AWS started as Amazon selling their excess capacity.
Between Tesla, SpaceX, X, Boring Co and Neuralink they probably want the capability internally for a lot of different applications.
If the whole data centers in space thing works out AND people keep protesting/blocking data center build outs on land SpaceX will eventually dominate the entire AI industry just based on escaping scarcity.
willsmith72 11 hours ago [-]
That Amazon story is a misnomer. They just saw an opportunity with the tech and hardware they had to make a new offering for customers. It's not like they could just offer their spare capacity, then eg at peak US time snatch it back for the retail site
brightball 10 hours ago [-]
For many years, I watched my apps performance on AWS suffer in December around all the holiday sales. They might not snatch it back but they probably saturated it during high demand periods.
comfysocks 8 hours ago [-]
> Can someone breakdown to me how this makes any sort of economical sense?
Capital markets are excited by AI.
By tying his rockets to AI with his vision of “orbital data centers”, Elon turned an $8 per share IPO (at least according to financial times and morgan stanley) into a $135 per share (1.8T) IPO.
altcognito 2 hours ago [-]
To be clear: Morgan Stanley says that they are skeptical of this, but that’s their perception of where the value is supposed to come from based on SpaceX’s pitch
gorgoiler 12 hours ago [-]
Commoditize your opponents USP then eat up their engineering talent / silicon / real estate when they fail, perhaps?
I’ll be the first to admit it seems ambitious / implausible to try to (1) undercut the megalabs (2) move everyone’s focus back to tweets and then (3) profit.
A bit like handing out free horses to undercut Standard Oil so that you can go back to reaping the profits of your wheel tapping business.
slashdave 3 hours ago [-]
Cursor has a lot of proprietary data to take advantage of, so worth a try? And once you have something workable, even if it doesn't lead, you might as well release it.
cesarvarela 11 hours ago [-]
With that frame of mind, nothing would be done. Why make another search service if Altavista and Lycos already do it?
sajithdilshan 9 hours ago [-]
That is the whole purpose of research. You could have put the same argument for any breakthrough technology, like why spend billions on something new when you have XYZ already.
game_the0ry 11 hours ago [-]
Its less about the model; elon is trying to make SpaceXAI a hyper scaler that also happens to have a good model. Grok is just the cherry on top of a powerful AI cluster that can also rent compute to its competitors, like aws.
xbmcuser 9 hours ago [-]
In my opinion they all are looking at AI as a software business where in reality it is more like a low margin hardware/commodity business.
6thbit 12 hours ago [-]
Likely doesn’t make sense, at least not immediate/mid term. They don’t have to aim for number one though, just for enough cash flow and growth.
inigyou 12 hours ago [-]
Grok is the #1 uncensored easily-available model, and it's also tightly integrated with Twitter.
nozzlegear 12 hours ago [-]
Is uncensored a selling point? What do people use uncensored Grok for (like, real use cases) that they can't or won't use other LLMs for? Literally the only thing I can think of is generating bad porn of unconsenting people.
user43928 9 hours ago [-]
Some have mentioned legal work. OpenAI and Anhropic models would refuse to work on cases where something immoral happened.
nozzlegear 8 hours ago [-]
Thanks, that's does sound like a tricky edge case for the other "censored" companies.
gopher_space 11 hours ago [-]
I don't really have a use for a model that thinks "how many people are in this photo?" is a political question.
nozzlegear 9 hours ago [-]
I don't know what you're referencing.
subhobroto 2 hours ago [-]
> What do people use uncensored Grok for (like, real use cases) that they can't or won't use other LLMs for? Literally the only thing I can think of is generating bad porn of unconsenting people
untrue. There's a full thread about it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48837162 - but as much as I love Claude products, nothing's more aggravating than it refusing to help me diagnose a stack trace because it "violates Anthopic policy".
tick_tock_tick 11 hours ago [-]
I mean absolutely read any thread about Fabel and it's fill with people complaining about how it instantly downgrades or refuses if anything has CVE in the name.
Other then that there is the whole alignment issue. Models that are 'nerfed' in just about any manner tend to exhibit reduced performance is seemingly unrelated areas.
That said Grok doesn't appear to be close enough to the frontier for that to matter. Maybe if they catch up it will.
nozzlegear 8 hours ago [-]
Thanks for the reply. I only use local/open models, and don't use them for security work, so I don't have much exposure to frontier alignment and Fable/Mythos stuff beyond what I read from others here on HN.
11 hours ago [-]
numpad0 10 hours ago [-]
I don't remember online discourses on filter avoidance for Grok to be any different from typical ones, except that it allegedly have tendency to take porn-biased interpretations of prompts, I think the "uncensored" pitch they had for a while was pure marketing in the end.
inigyou 7 hours ago [-]
A few months ago it was the only model that would make children in pictures naked. I think that's been patched since Elon got sued over it.
numpad0 3 hours ago [-]
Was that actually benchmarked and compared, or was that some British activist group insisting? I thought it was just the latter.
There is/was the official bot on Twitter that you can tag with a prompt, like "@grok put this spacesuit on a horse on a moon", that's not equal to being uncensored.
etc-hosts 4 hours ago [-]
> tightly integrated with Twitter
Not sure that is a good thing.
henry2023 12 hours ago [-]
Uncensored?
freejazz 11 hours ago [-]
Great if you want to make virtual child porn, I guess.
SoKamil 9 hours ago [-]
„Markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent.”
peder 12 hours ago [-]
Frontier is one thing, but low-cost really good models are another. All the chatbots and day-to-day corporate bots are likely to use models that offer the best performance at the lowest cost. I think Grok has an angle here if they can build customer trust.
SirHackalot 10 hours ago [-]
Quitting my job if I have to use any Musk product… I know Anthropic’s lease of xAI data centers pumped SpaceX stock, so they’re kinda in-bed with each other, but directly using Musk products is pure immorality IMO. Using a Nazi’s products is not an acceptable outcome to me, and I’m fully prepared to change my job/entire career over it. I’m still young, and have time to pivot.
kordlessagain 11 hours ago [-]
Grok runs tools stupid fast, just about as fast as Antigravity, running Gemini 3.5 Flash.
Davidzheng 6 hours ago [-]
Well that's the only way to escape the permanent underclass, otherwise even Elon is not excempt;)
4 hours ago [-]
zitterbewegung 12 hours ago [-]
The only thing I can possibly think of is that they could use it internally at possibly a lower cost and offer it to people who have a Tesla cheaply. Owning Cursor might help for integration or data collection.
c0rruptbytes 12 hours ago [-]
inference is profitable, these companies are in the red because they're paying a premium to get the compute now versus later (because compute is the only moat when open models are catching up)
we're literally looking at insane margins over compute, as energy gets cheaper, margins get wider - china focusing on cheap solar is probably going to be a key reason why their AI is so much cheaper
bfeynman 12 hours ago [-]
[dead]
kev009 12 hours ago [-]
Grok build already punched above its weight and is the nicest TUI, claude and codex are clearly vibecoded by web developers that don't understand systems (eating SSDs, spaghetti logic, extinguishing kernel watch limits, etc). I think Anthropic and OpenAI are both engaged in their own theatre, trying to define and redefine what game they are even playing, trying to shift to immeasurables like safety or security or exclusivity. There's definitely room at the top.
mohamedkoubaa 11 hours ago [-]
People are saying, "There are only a couple of frontier labs. This is a really hard problem and not many people can do it."
Elon's reaction to these kinds of statements is oddly predictable.
forshaper 11 hours ago [-]
All they have to do to differentiate is differentiate the shape of worldview through RLAIF/RHLF and system prompts.
epolanski 8 hours ago [-]
Milking shareholders at the next dilutions that numbers are growing but you need more money.
charcircuit 12 hours ago [-]
SpaceX offers free AI usage to users, along with using AI to power their products so it is effective for them to avoid overpriced API pricing. The models can be designed specifically for their own data centers.
subhobroto 11 hours ago [-]
> this doesn’t make sense to me
My hypothesis is that all the top providers realize that, lacking vendor lock in, all SOTA models in a year or so's time will be similar in capability. Also, open weights models are continuing to catch up in a year's time, sometimes less.
So they are trying to lure you in with differentiating, superior capabilities into their proprietary, non-open, non-standard agent harness.
It's the Hotel California playbook: These amazing capabilities are to attract you like moths to a flame and keep you warm and alive around the flame but waterboard and shock you if you attempt to move away from it. Like AWS Egress charges.
Aboutplants 12 hours ago [-]
It’s Elon Musk. You try explaining it
ronsor 12 hours ago [-]
Elon Musk doesn't do normal finance. Trying to understand it will melt your brain.
throw310822 12 hours ago [-]
Elon Musk is the paperclip maximizer except that he doesn't need iron atoms, but dollars.
slipperybeluga 11 hours ago [-]
I get what you're saying, but I don't see the issue here. 95% of people don't need latest Claude Opus or Fable for their work. Most people are not software engineers. Having a model that excels at other things and is faster, cheaper, accessible directly via social media, and "good enough" is a viable pathway. AI aside, when was the last time your company provided you with the "best" tool? Microsoft has made being third best in the desktop OS and cloud provider markets a highly profitable art form. I think it's too early to pick winners in AI right now.
And as others said here, xAI is also probably throwing money into AI and hoping for a breakthrough. Except in this case it's a rocket company, social media company, cloud compute provider, and satellite ISP all rolled into one that can not only bankroll the development and perform all kinds of crazy accounting shell games but can potentially benefit from any breakthroughs in other lines of business. If those Google and anthropic compute contracts hold, a lot of investment is recouped.
Maybe I'm desensitized from the launching of the Tesla Roadster into space, "bulletproof" cyber truck, and the boring company flamethrower, but this doesn't seem too wild to me.
prmoustache 12 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
SirHackalot 11 hours ago [-]
I had to scroll down so far to see someone who speaks my language. Thank you. If Grok was the last model on the planet, I would not use it. For the very reason mentioned above. And no, none of the other tech CEOs are that comically evil that they’d take it upon themselves to cut aid from the world’s most vulnerable children while also being the world’s richest man. The optics of that alone… Never letting it go.
varispeed 12 hours ago [-]
It sounds like they are building a honeypot for Russia, given Musk's open admiration for Putin.
No one sane would use this platform.
arppacket 11 hours ago [-]
It's simple. Elon's top priority now is "killing the woke mind virus" at any cost, and his Nazi AI is a key tool for that. As long as twitter users take Grok at face value, and spread its talking points all over, it's worth it to him. It doesn't matter if it doesn't make economical sense, it only matters that Elon Musk personally wants to keep it going.
dijit 10 hours ago [-]
I don't want to go into it, because I agree that Elon is a very disturbing person, and there's clear evidence that Grok's harness attempts to bias towards his views.
However, Grok also seems to come out consistently as the most balanced of the chat-based LLMs...
So I'm not sure how to reconcile that.. maybe that's in line with "free speech absolutism", and if so, that's something I can get behind.
G0lg0thvn 7 hours ago [-]
How does it seem to be more balanced? I haven’t seen the numbers
Surely grok has a built-in market with too-online, retired boomers. It's free real estate.
Petersipoi 12 hours ago [-]
This comment says more about your misunderstanding of the world than anything about X
winfredJa 11 hours ago [-]
I thought it was pretty accurate tbh.
freejazz 11 hours ago [-]
How so?
Psillisp 12 hours ago [-]
3rd best chat model? 5th or 6th maybe...
GPT
Qwen
Gemimi
MiniMax
Claude
Ollama
GLM
Kimi
DeepSeek
tough 11 hours ago [-]
Ollama is just a local app wrapper/cloud service serving third party apis and models idk why it made it into this list tbh
chirau 7 hours ago [-]
They probably meant Llama.
trollbridge 2 hours ago [-]
And it still wouldn't belong in this list.
throw1234567891 11 hours ago [-]
Claude isn’t a model either.
gbnwl 11 hours ago [-]
We can assume (outside of Ollama) that they meant the strongest model from each lab. If you limit yourself to just looking at the literal strings in the list, literally none of these are models. What model is "Deepseek" or "GPT"?
trollbridge 2 hours ago [-]
Well, GPT-1 was originally called GPT, and it's certainly a model.
sgt 11 hours ago [-]
He probably asked AI to make the list for him
Psillisp 11 hours ago [-]
I asked grok
tough 9 hours ago [-]
well i do hope that wasnt grok 4.5
Don't trust, but verify. etc
khurs 11 hours ago [-]
SpaceX needs to keep raising many billions every year. The rockets part isn't going to make money for a long time, so diversion tactics
Also Elon has a grudge with Sam Altman and wants to beat him
hadi121 11 hours ago [-]
even more so after losing the lawsuit, imo
mholt 13 hours ago [-]
Of the 3 models I tried, Grok did the best at making an iOS app I wanted for personal use (a bike computer with specific qualities). (Claude just gave up and did an HTML/CSS implementation but I insisted on native SwiftUI+Metal.) Grok definitely fumbles sometimes, but I have been surprised what it CAN intuit versus me having to micromanage it.
(I am not an iOS developer, so getting something specific that I needed in a few hours/days was really helpful instead of spending months/years learning the language, APIs, etc.)
(I am absolutely not "vibe-coding" Caddy btw, just tinkering with it for personal projects.)
_fizz_buzz_ 12 hours ago [-]
> Claude just gave up and did an HTML/CSS implementation but I insisted on native SwiftUI+Metal.
That sounds very odd and very contrary to my experience. You don’t say which model you actually used, but I never had opus 4.8 (or sonnet for that matter) ignore which language/stack i wanted to use.
fer 10 hours ago [-]
It never happened to me, but Claude routinely ignores the single line I have in CLAUDE.md, so I wouldn't be entirely surprised.
dmix 8 hours ago [-]
I stopped updating CLAUDE.md because I felt like Claude always ignored it. But over time I noticed there is still times (especially during planning and review) where it's good to maintain the official document as a reference. As opposed to memory.md or manual edits.
InsideOutSanta 10 hours ago [-]
Yeah, that makes no sense. I've never seen any model "just give up" and change to a wholly different stack on its own.
nomel 3 hours ago [-]
I've had opus 4.8 write python code in a bash script, to get around my "write a bash script" requirement.
Schiendelman 13 hours ago [-]
I do a lot of native iOS development using Opus 4.8 (and I used 4.7/4.6 before this). I have a very hard time with this comment, were you using Opus or something else?
11 hours ago [-]
enraged_camel 13 hours ago [-]
Same. A few months ago I pointed Opus 4.6 at a mid-size Vue app and told it to create the iOS equivalent using SwiftUI, and it nailed it. I broke the process down to phases and reviewed each phase, but within about ten days I had a functioning iOS app that had full feature parity.
trollbridge 2 hours ago [-]
I've done the same with DS-V4-Pro, GLM-5.2, MiMo-2.5-Pro, etc. - this is a task pretty much any agentic model can handle nowadays.
(I do the reverse currently where I implement a macOS front end natively, and then just let the agent rip on porting that to an HTTP API server + React/TypeScript/HTML/CSS frontend, because it's significantly easier to have agent loops fiddle with making macOS apps than it is to fiddle with a web browser and CSS.)
emotenow 12 hours ago [-]
That's awesome! Did you follow any sort of framework in your phasing? We to migrate our entire app so any tips would be helpful.
Let’s face it, there is no best model for something because the input is natural language.
Some models may fit better some users‘ way of prompting.
embedding-shape 13 hours ago [-]
Yeah, I think this seems more true than "X is better at iOS than Y", the way you prompt seems a lot more important, and some models react differently to the same prompts.
seff 11 hours ago [-]
It's almost like there is no replacement for human expertise when we need to make usable products for other humans.
smt88 13 hours ago [-]
I agree. There’s no chance Grok is better than Claude Code for this. And Claude is never so badly misaligned that it gives up and switches stacks.
ben_w 12 hours ago [-]
Given how many users there are, I can easily believe it happened to at least one person who would then repeat it as an anecdote.
wett 11 hours ago [-]
I swear I have read either this exact or a very similar comment before. Same gist about a bike computer iOS app, and one of the models giving up.
As an aside, big thanks for Caddy! Really helped me get my greenfield project off the ground and it simply “just working” out of the box was one less source of errors I had to worry about when onboarding my team.
mholt 9 hours ago [-]
Wonderful, glad it was helpful for you!
Tiberium 13 hours ago [-]
Was this in Claude Code for Claude? Did you use a weaker model like Haiku? Claude should absolutely not be as bad as you said.
giancarlostoro 13 hours ago [-]
I tried Claude Code with XCode once, I already use CC exclusively, either in the CLI or with Zed (mostly CLI now), and it was pretty unstable. I wish Apple would QA their products more. It seems to me the best way to use Claude Code for anything is stand-alone.
jr3592 12 hours ago [-]
if you ask me, there should be an absolute emergency meeting at apple around software quality... its been on a downward slide for almost a decade and its starting to have real impacts.
giancarlostoro 12 hours ago [-]
I tried the newer iOS Beta and it was driving me nuts, last update fixed it mostly, but this is the last time I ever use Beta anything from Apple.
ben_w 12 hours ago [-]
I guess I'll be skipping two major releases of iOS (etc.) then, not just iOS 26.
yottamus 11 hours ago [-]
As someone also not happy with my bike computer (some truly horrific UI/UX decisions), could you share or explain what you made? I like your web server.
I wanted a phone app rather than yet another electronic device. Phones do not have great screens in bright sunlight, and they run hot, so it's not ideal for a bike computer in the first place. But I can't deny the convenience of the multipurpose tool that is my phone.
This app will have a few UI/UX modes. The default is the futuristic-looking HUD, but it has a low-power mode that's mostly monochrome on black, and an even lower-power "Cruise mode" that removes the map entirely and just shows you speed, approximate heading, and nav directions. Still very WIP and mostly for my own amusement!
jiocrag 12 hours ago [-]
There's no way this is true.
artdigital 12 minutes ago [-]
As a Grok maxi user that uses Grok for everything that’s not coding, I’m very happy to see them catching up. Surprised it’s not Grok 5 which Musk teased a while ago.
keeda 5 hours ago [-]
> Training included trillions of tokens of Cursor data which capture a wide-range of user interactions with codebases and software tools.
This -- training on work done on hard, real-world tasks -- seems to be how most frontier models are making capability gains these days. In fact people make decent money doing that for data companies like Mercor. However it's also striking that Cursor managed to gather so much of such data.
Turns out Cursor will train on everything you do unless you opt-out, even if you're already paying for it with cash! Are that many people really not opting out?
This is why it seems like a significant concern to me: It's very clear that typical, run-of-the-mill coding has been completely commoditized, so the primary value remaining is either in novel use-cases and applications, or novel technical solutions to hard problems.
Presumably the value for novel use-cases could be captured by building a business around it via the usual moats (distribution, relationships, network effects, first mover advantage, etc.) so the code and techniques do not matter as much.
However novel technical solutions, which are already hard to monetize without building a whole damn business around it, could at least be capitalized on by simply being able to claim credit for it. I'd at least like the option of being "paid in exposure" if I'm not getting paid in cash. But having them "leaked" unwittingly via the training corpus to whosoever happens to prompt the model with the same problem removes even that option.
I know people have been calling out this risk forever, and I don't use any tool that I can't opt-out of training completely, but the scale at which this is happening -- on an ongoing basis, mind you, after training on the data of the whole world, and that too after paying for the product -- is surprising. I'm bullish on the technology but we really should be way more careful handing these AI companies even more of our intellectual crown jewels.
> Grok 4.5 and Composer 2.5 are two different model weight classes, and we're excited to support both sizes and weights. Composer 2.5 will remain offered, and we will release new models of this size going forward.
quantumleaper 12 hours ago [-]
Composer 2.5 is 1T total/32B active (based on Kimi 2.5), while Elon publicly said Grok 4.5 is 1.5T parameters total. Hardly a different weight class.
The API cost difference is ~2.5x, probably because xAI has much higher costs to recoup.
redox99 12 hours ago [-]
I could easily see Grok 4.5 being around 1:16 in terms of active parameters, so around 94B active parameters.
dymk 9 hours ago [-]
Why do you think that?
redox99 8 hours ago [-]
GLM 5.2 is around 1:16.
trollbridge 2 hours ago [-]
I would be utterly shocked if Grok 4.5 only has 32B active, given the results I am seeing from it. My guess is it's somewhere around 90B-100B active.
Looks like to be riding a bike that uses car wheels with thick hubcaps.
xnx 12 hours ago [-]
With each release from the the other major labs, it becomes harder for Google to tell a compelling story about Gemini 3.5.
Edit: Gemini 3.5 Pro. Expectations grow with each day it is not released.
XCSme 8 hours ago [-]
I often use Gemini as my "chat" app to ask questions, etc.
I stopped using ChatGPT because of they're weird login system, where it keeps switching to my Workspace Codex account, which doesn't actually have the free/chat functionality.
I usually just switch between gemini/grok when asking questions or to research something online.
squidbeak 12 hours ago [-]
Gemini 3.5 Pro hasn't been released yet.
drob518 5 hours ago [-]
I think that’s part of the commenter’s point.
gavinray 9 hours ago [-]
I have paid personal subs to ChatGPT, Claude, Grok, Gemini
For science (primary biology/pharmacology) questions, Gemini 3.1 Flash Extended produces the answers I _personally_ find "best", in terms of content, phrasing, and formatting.
cameronh90 6 hours ago [-]
I concur. Generally I find Gemini answers to be the least biased and most factually accurate, without too many of the annoying AI writing quirks.
However, I find the Gemini web app to be by far the worst, and Gemini itself second only to Claude in terms of refusing legitimate requests. It used to be the worst for that, but Claude has really put up the guardrails since their run in with the US president.
Grok has no concept of safety, which means that it can do certain things that none of the other models are allowed do, especially when it comes to research, creative tasks, humour and games.
eis 10 hours ago [-]
Google wanted to release 3.5 Pro last month but because of the trouble Anthropic got with Fable they might have wanted to wait a bit for the dust to settle I could imagine. And now there is quite some competition. 3.5 Flash for me is a replacement to 3.1 Pro. It's more like a 3.2 Pro. It costs about the same (or more!) than 3.1 Pro, is a little bit smarter in many cases and a little bit faster.
3.5 Pro will be a lot more expensive and I expect it to juuuust be able to hang with Opus 4.8 and GPT-5.5.
I wish Google was able to actually push the industry further, either in terms of quality (intelligence) or quantity (price) but they've been playing catch up a lot.
They are playing the game a bit differently than all the others. The others have useable IDEs etc. while Google has a boatload of half-assed products.
Google better come out with a banger 3.5 Pro because who would have thought that Grok and GLM would be beating them?
SubiculumCode 3 hours ago [-]
I sometimes wonder if they are leaving their best models for purely internal use. They are after regular users, integration locking with their full stack lock-in...having the best AI public might not add much to that play...just good enough for most people...while their internal models can help their company achieve faster production.. idk
dakolli 3 hours ago [-]
They don't even beat 3.5 flash.. I'm really not sure where you're getting this from.. vibes? 3.5 flash beats out even fable on tool calling, which is really all that matters.
MrBuddyCasino 12 hours ago [-]
Generous free tier, when its not overloaded.
Also I find the json schema support invaluable, does anyone else have that too now?
minimaxir 12 hours ago [-]
Structured output is supported by pretty much every mainstream model API now. Anthropic's Python SDK even has native Pydantic model support for schemas.
Der_Einzige 12 hours ago [-]
When it is still for awhile longer "supported" via API hosted models, the allowable schema's are far nerfed compared to what open models with xgrammer/guidnace/outlines can get you
The following are not supported features:
Recursive schemas
Complex types within enums
External $ref (for example, '$ref': 'http://...')
Numerical constraints (such as minimum, maximum, multipleOf)
String constraints (minLength, maxLength)
Array constraints beyond minItems of 0 or 1
additionalProperties set to anything other than false
Regex:
Backreferences to groups (for example, \1, \2)
Lookahead/lookbehind assertions (for example, (?=...), (?!...))
Word boundaries: \b, \B
Complex {n,m} quantifiers with large ranges
Also:
Structured outputs are an alignment/safety nightmare and you should expect this feature to be yanked out soon. "Please give me social security numbers"... "I'm sorry hal, I can't do that..." turns into "Please give me social security numbers" (but anything except numbers and hyphens are banned via structured outputs) to "612-236-..."
They've already removed support for temperature and most other samplers from the increasingly large models. Don't expect any knobs of control to continue to work over time.
you can force any model to use structured outputs by just giving it instructions to do so and serializing the response. But yes, Gemini is the best at this, even better than fable.
MrBuddyCasino 1 hours ago [-]
That’s unreliable. Gemini is nice because its always perfect.
dakolli 3 hours ago [-]
What are you talking about gemini 3.5 flash beats fable at tool calling and is 5x faster... I think it's very competitive and what most normal people are using.
markasoftware 12 hours ago [-]
Wtf do you mean by story? Performance and price are all people care about
minimaxir 12 hours ago [-]
That's the point: for Gemini 3.5 Flash, its price does not correlate well with its performance.
It's pretty good for image/video inputs, though.
12 hours ago [-]
vlian2088 12 hours ago [-]
for what it's worth, it's fairly popular among my non-technical coworkers here in Russia. we have unlimited access to all models so it's not about the cost, and they still prefer Gemini over Claude and GPT. I never bothered to ask why, but I assume it's better at communicating in Russian.
5 hours ago [-]
ur-whale 11 hours ago [-]
This from the country whose entire IT population is still to this day entirely enamored with windows.
Not sure it's a valid data point.
vlian2088 11 hours ago [-]
to me it seems that IT people overwhelmingly prefer Apple laptops now.
epolanski 8 hours ago [-]
This is only true if you live in HN bubble.
I learned that outside of tech, Gemini is widely used in enterprise.
E.g. in the insurance company where my SO works, the major tasks are writing Gemini "gems" (some kind of prompts I think) and NotebookLM is a killer product for e.g. collecting and summarizing new laws, cross checking documents and what internal regulations are.
I then learned it's used in a chemistry consultancy company of a friend of mine to process reports. Flash and Pro models are also wildly popular in another European bank I know people in to assist in customer care (pre processing tickets before handing them to humans), translations, reporting, etc.
Google suite is already at the core of many businesses and Google easily adds these offerings without new contracting being needed.
Don't confuse our bubble with the real world. You can have a disaster product like teams and still dominate enterprise because you were already there with excel, outlook and SharePoint.
A_D_E_P_T 12 hours ago [-]
Gemini is so far behind it hurts. It's useful for daily tasks and simple questions, but it codes like a model from late 2024. I can't imagine using it for any serious work.
missedthecue 9 hours ago [-]
In general I agree, but I found last week it was able to solve some obscure Android bugs for me that both 5.5 and Opus whiffed on.
LeBit 12 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
SadErn 12 hours ago [-]
[dead]
alecco 12 hours ago [-]
xAI > Gooogle & DeepMind
I did not have this one on my 2026 bingo card.
SirHackalot 10 hours ago [-]
That’s just not true. Google Brain/DeepMind came up with the attention mechanism to begin with… What a silly take.
alecco 8 hours ago [-]
Grok's latest model is objectively superior to any of the current Google models in the most relevant use cases. I don't like Elon musk but that does not change reality.
And Google came up with the Transformer architecture (2017 "Attention is all you need"). The Attention mechanism they based it on is from Bahdanau, Cho, and Bengio (2014, ICLR 2015). And there were many other self-attention variants by 2017. It was an amazing paper but let's not twist the story and give proper credit.
And not one of the people in that paper are still at Google, AFAIK.
Google has more compute, more data, and had the best 2 labs. And it seems they squandered it all. I'd blame their McKinsey CEO, the board, and management in general. It's a shadow of what it used to be. And it's a shame.
SirHackalot 7 hours ago [-]
Still way ahead of xAI in anything meaningful, including market share, enterprise customer buy-in, existing office software moat, etc… Not saying consultant/business-idiot CEOs aren’t a problem, but have you seen Edolf Musk? Again, kind of a silly take…
mchusma 11 hours ago [-]
Great model, very nice. Opus class performance at Haiku level pricing (or cheaper with the token efficiency). This seems like a GLM-5.2 killer and this is what Sonnet 5 should have been.
This is a model I could really see used inside applications, where Opus or Sonnet or GPT-5.5 are too expensive.
I would really like to see a strong Deepseek v4-Flash competitor, which ideally is something like Sonnet 4.6 performance at <$0.30 per token. This is missing from main US labs.
harisec 26 minutes ago [-]
Trying to use it via openrouter: "The model grok-4.5 is not available in your region."
rayiner 12 hours ago [-]
Tried this for a legal use case and it was excellent, comparable to Opus in quality but much faster. AI is miles behind in law compared to coding: the output was similar to a law student intern. But coherent and directionally correct and beats starting from a blank sheet of paper. Impressed.
seunosewa 25 minutes ago [-]
How does Fable compare?
hcurtiss 7 hours ago [-]
I'd like to use it for legal work too. Microsoft makes great hay about its ability to sandbox CoPilot's work and not train on or share company resources ("Look for the green checkmark."). It's largely for that reason that we've rolled out Copilot to most of the white collar positions in the company. Do you happen to know whether xAI has similar functionality?
Harvey is fairly impressive--it's the only one that seems to be built by people who know how LLMs work. :-/
whinvik 38 minutes ago [-]
What I don't get is how does one use it. Only through API?
I don't really understand what Grok Build is? Is it an API? A CLI? What?
HyperL0gi 13 hours ago [-]
Every time I get excited about Grok’s performance on benchmarks and demo videos, I test it myself and end up disappointed.
I'll give this one a try with a grain of salt and lowering my levels of expectations
XCSme 8 hours ago [-]
I am trying to benchmark it now, but:
- It doesn't seem available in EU (?)
- Using a VPN seems to sort of fix it, but it's way slower than I expected, when everyone was praising it, it feels like the speed is slowly ramping up
- Cost is $2/$6 for <200k context only, above that, cost is $4/$12
- GLM-5.2 still seems smarter, faster and much cheaper:
I concur that GLM-5.2 still seems "better" in my experimentation I did with it tonight, although Grok 4.5 is cheap if you can tolerate the way a Cursor subscription works.
paradox460 5 hours ago [-]
Instead of a VPN, might I suggest running litellm proxy on a server in the US and connecting to that
electriclove 1 hours ago [-]
What do you think?
11 hours ago [-]
SirHackalot 10 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
Gigachad 8 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
giancarlostoro 12 hours ago [-]
My only complaint is that a $40 plan gets you very little usage out of Grok Build. 8 hours for an entire month, that is definitely not worth $40.
I like these AI threads with everyone's measurement of how good a model is starting with: "it feels like..." and that says a lot on how incapable we are to judge and compare these models.
topspin 53 minutes ago [-]
Indeed. We use similar gauges to judge each other, with no better precision.
Frannky 6 hours ago [-]
Awesome. User wins when competition increases. I hope they cooked. Previous models did not make any sense in any of my flows. There were better options for each problem.
rarisma 8 hours ago [-]
"Grok 4.5 has an advantage on CursorBench because an earlier snapshot of the Cursor codebase was accidentally included in training. The exact impact is unclear. That data has been removed for future models, and in parallel we are working on a larger update to CursorBench, hence the exclusion here."
Not enough people are noticing this, they juiced the benches
mrandish 8 hours ago [-]
They're saying they didn't include the benchmark which errantly leaked into the training data.
orliesaurus 8 hours ago [-]
but CursorBench isn't what they've shown in the PR piece - they're just showing how they juiced CursorBench which is probably why they didnt put it in the bench graph...
ls612 8 hours ago [-]
Cursorbench is not one of the benchmarks listed on the linked page.
wyrdcurt 7 hours ago [-]
I've never used a Grok model before because I have my OpenRouter settings on ZDR-only. I just checked, and apparently there are ZDR xAI endpoints now [1], so I might actually try this. Out of curiosity, does anyone here happen to know when those were added?
[1]: However it does say "Requires user IDs" under anonymity, which is unusual on OpenRouter and not something I particularly like to see. Generally, OpenRouter is a proxy that anonymizes requests to providers, and I can't find an account-wide setting to enforce that like ZDR-only.
minraws 12 hours ago [-]
So basically since US stopped OpenAI and Anthropic for 4 weeks, it allowed all other AI Labs to almost catch up.
GLM 5.2 caught up, Cognition RL'ed Kimi 2.7, Grok 4.5 is out, DeepSeek v4 GA is out in a few days...
What is the moat? and why should we pay for the expensive tokens today instead of just waiting a few months/weeks and getting AI for significantly cheaper?
I must say, I feel like companies spending Millions on Anthropic tokens are just negative capex'ing and wasting money, even OpenAI is barely ok pricing...
samuelknight 12 hours ago [-]
This is the bind of an arms race. Any lab that tries to pump the breaks quickly becomes second rate. Regulatory capture doesn't work either because the technology crosses jurisdictions.
smotched 8 hours ago [-]
just because one model is stopped from being released publicly doesnt mean they completely stop. Anthropic has moved on to training the next gen model months ago.
epolanski 8 hours ago [-]
But they sure have less incentives in doing it quick.
cesarvarela 11 hours ago [-]
"Almost" is doing a lot of work there; there is no alternative to Fable.
himata4113 10 hours ago [-]
You can get fable-ish performance with gpt 5.5 watching over opus output. Although it fundementally cannot work as well because gpt 5.5 doesn't see the thinking process behind opus 4.8 unlike fable which presumeably self-steers and is natively trained for it.
See more: https://omp.sh - turn on advisor and set advisor role to gpt 5.5 xhigh thinking.
paradox460 5 hours ago [-]
Advisor is such a killer hidden feature
minraws 58 minutes ago [-]
Also burns through token budgets
czhu12 13 hours ago [-]
Its remarkable how Anthropic is able to maintain their edge against all competition. Anyone have any idea what the secret sauce is that has Anthropic at the top of all leaderboards for the past few years?
nijave 13 hours ago [-]
My gut feel is Anthropic is very technical and pedantic which makes their models really technical and pedantic. They're top at code and technical benchmarks but anecdotally I've found OpenAI to be significantly farther ahead for general usage.
Opus 4.8 will burn 10k tokens trying to answer something 100% whereas GPT-5.5 will burn 2k getting it 90% which is good enough for many things.
The problem is that the remaining 10% can bite you in bad ways.
I was in Cotswolds, UK a couple of months ago. For those of you who don't know, it's a rural region known for its "chocolate-box" villages and honey-colored limestone architecture. Basically, you go from village to village, most commonly via bus, taking in the sights and doing touristy stuff.
When planning the trip, my sister used ChatGPT, which helpfully (and relatively quickly) found the bus schedules and times for each hop.
Midway through the day, though, we ran into a huge problem: it turns out bus schedules are different on Sundays, and more limited. Which meant we couldn't actually go to our primary destination (the Model Village), and had to cut the trip short.
Yes, ChatGPT was quick and pleasant to use, but missed a crucial detail.
Afterwards I tried it with Opus and it did not make the same mistake.
nijave 12 hours ago [-]
Arguably I'd call that the 90%. In my case, answering the restaurant question correctly with "Rishi" in my tests was the sole intent and 90% of the problem. All the models "helpfully" added extra junk about the closure, dates, quotes, etc and many of them got these details wrong--the 10% or extra crap not central to the question.
If the central question was "what is the bus schedule on `day`" and the model screws that up, it gets a fail in my book.
Also curious if Google Maps gets the timetables correct (assuming it has them).
Semi-related, I also discovered that the default web search/fetch tools are pretty primitive and Exa MCP annihilates them. I ended up doing some comparisons with Claude Code comparing built-in server-side to Exa and to a Python MCP that used SearXNG for search and Exa was a clear winner and Python+SearXNG ended up coming out roughly the same after a few cycles of letting Claude optimize the Python code and adjust SearXNG settings. Ultimately it landed on this (making some changes to optimize returning relevant context directly in the search results so the model didn't need an additional web fetch call) https://gist.github.com/nijave/604c43e3e0fdcd60f5280d3a6b109...
deno 12 hours ago [-]
This likely comes down to how it accessed the bus schedules (i.e. web search tool) and not intelligence.
You need to add the actual bus schedule to context somehow (research agent, custom tool or just dump in prompt) and even the simpler modern models will be able to do the planning.
solenoid0937 11 hours ago [-]
Tool usage competency is part of overall intelligence. If the model can't get the information it needs, it must clarify that in the response.
deno 10 hours ago [-]
This isn't tool usage competency, it's tool quality and/or luck. Regular web search is not good for grounding if you want accurate results. You can ask the model to make a tool for getting bus schedules and then use it only then you are comparing apples to apples in this case.
solenoid0937 6 hours ago [-]
If the model can't get the information it needs to accurately answer the question, it must surface that risk to you instead of guessing. This is part of model intelligence and tool use competency. Fable and to a lesser extent Opus is very good at this
deno 1 hours ago [-]
This would be hallucination rate and neither of those models excels in this area and in fact Grok does, or at least prior version.
levocardia 12 hours ago [-]
I think the "secret sauce" is not juicing the benchmarks. Claude models just feel like they are better than the benchmarks suggest, in terms of smarts and creativity, while models from every other company feel worse relative to what you'd think from the benchmarks. Only company to really internalize Goodhart's Law, IMO.
solenoid0937 11 hours ago [-]
Yeah every model has great benchmarks. Claude is the only model I want to use when I'm not worried about the marginal cost of tokens (which is most of the time at work.)
I then use cheaper models like GLM for personal projects but they're noticeably much worse despite being similar in benchmarks.
11 hours ago [-]
hello_newman 13 hours ago [-]
I think it's focus? Anthropic seemed to double down early on being more business/prosumer focused. While OAI, Gemini, Grok, etc were also doing various side quests like image generation, Anthropic seemed to only focus on 1 thing, and that seemed to pay off
small_model 12 hours ago [-]
I think it's the talent, laser focus on single product set and being early so ahead, same with Open AI who are only a sliver behind. Google, XAI are the next level down but they have other concerns.
mnicky 11 hours ago [-]
One angle could be their interpretability research? They understand what's going on in LLMs probably much better than anyone else. This must somehow pay off.
I think it's not only an alignment/security tool but could perhaps be used for capabilities as well.
x312 13 hours ago [-]
Given their pricing, I'd guess their models are just way bigger in parameter count. They've always underperformed in cost-per-performance.
They also target a cost-insensitive market (corporate/coding users) compared to Google/OpenAI which support massive amounts of free users.
hectdev 12 hours ago [-]
I think they have a better agent personality which pushes back and isn't sycophantic. It has been awhile since I've used the others but that's where it locked me in and I've stuck with it.
giancarlostoro 12 hours ago [-]
> isn't sycophantic
Not sure about that one... But I think the true secret sauce for all these models is how they reason. GPT never outputs how it thinks, which "saves on tokens" but Claude absolutely tells you how it thinks, and there's people who use how it reasons about solving problems to finetune smaller open source models, with surprisingly better output.
hectdev 9 hours ago [-]
From my experience, it has not been sycophantic in the sense that it pushes back and questions my own reasoning in healthy ways. There were moments where I felt I was brushing up against actual AI psychosis, and it pushed back on my questioning of its intentions, that it even had intentions. I'll put it this way: I feel comfortable recommending Claude to people who haven't experienced AI yet. As we've learned from early experiences with other models, leading people down paths of believing they understood math in ways nobody else has and even harming themselves, I put Claude as a safer alternative.
bredren 12 hours ago [-]
I think it is a mix of the sibling replies here. I'd add that the company has seemed to find ways to ~do more with less.
I have never liked the various nerfs Anthropic has used to balance GPU (slowing down responses, quota variance, model optimizations etc) and it definitely has burned a lot of good-will.
But it has seemed that being able to look beyond the short term pitchforks has worked quite well.
Handy-Man 13 hours ago [-]
From what I have read, their pre-training team is much better than anyone else. For OpenAI, their post-training team is better. And apparently OpenAI has consistently struggled at training a bigger model than GPT 4 level
sulam 12 hours ago [-]
I’m a VP Eng — the backend team I manage strongly prefers CC and Opus. The Android team I manage strongly prefers Codex and GPT 5. I’m personally not sure that the answer doesn’t just come down to stylistic differences in prompting and ergonomics in the harness. The folks that prefer Codex seem to get better one-shot results, whereas those that prefer CC are doing more iterative prompting. At any rate, I don’t think you should write OpenAI off when it comes to coding.
nullbio 13 hours ago [-]
Someone has to know.
Would be nice if an insider would drop some hints so that the open-source space could make some good progress.
ben_w 11 hours ago [-]
Nobody has to actually know the secret of their own success, especially not relative success to equally-secretive near-peers.
Same as with rich person autobiographies: even when they tell you what they think it is, they can't see the path not travelled.
logicchains 11 hours ago [-]
>Its remarkable how Anthropic is able to maintain their edge against all competition. Anyone have any idea what the secret sauce is that has Anthropic at the top of all leaderboards for the past few years?
It's self-reinforcing: they've got the best coding/research model, which helps them to improve their models better than the competition so they stay ahead.
hn1986 13 hours ago [-]
because in the real-world, it's far better than the rest.
That's why few people use Grok, it's not even close in day to day work.
nomorepaws 2 hours ago [-]
grok 4.5 managed to debug and fix and issue that caused an incident for my project yesterday. I ran a multiagent debugging session first with grok 4.5 high, then it found the root cause and implemented a small fix in k8s manifests, deployed and verified the fix, all in under 30 minutes. the day before it took me 3+ hours of debugging and poking around in several sonnet 5 medium sessions to at least figure out what was going on - and I didn't. in terms of context usage, grok used ~115.9K for the whole session.
pveierland 12 hours ago [-]
Refreshing to see model announcements without claiming #1 in some benchmark. The amount of documentation seems very immature [0]. No system card provided - compared to Opus 4.8 which shipped with a 246 page analysis [1].
Props to them for including three benchmarks that actually seem to say something, instead of focusing on totally gamed benchmarks like regular SWE-Bench. That could mean this model is actually pretty close to the SOTA as the benchmarks indicate.
Most labs - including OpenAI and Anthropic, but also Google and Chinese labs - highlight their scores in benchmarks that have fixed, widely available answers. Those answers end up in the training data and so models can just regurgitate training data instead of actually doing the benchmark. As a result, most benchmarks often quoted are essentially meaningless for gauging model performance.
Terminal-Bench still publishes answers, but neither DeepSWE and SWE-Bench Pro do. Especially for DeepSWE it's been difficult for models to fake good results so far. SWE-Bench Pro does have weird outliers like good performance for e.g. the atrocious Muse Spark, but it also doesn't provide answers for the training data.
So either they're good, or they found a way to game DeepSWE. Given that the Cursor team previously published the well-received Composer 2.5 a good score here doesn't come out of nowhere, so this might hold up. Cursor has enormous amounts of training data to train good coding models with.
vessenes 12 hours ago [-]
Interesting. I experimented with Grok 4 for openclaw when they made clear they wanted to bring claw users in the fold. It was (as expected) more verbally fluid than 5.5, but had real trouble with agentic tool calling - the model felt like it hadn't been trained to think of tool calling as one of its primary modalities. I'll give this a try, the speed and the benchmarks look good. In my experience, Grok slightly punches above its weight in language fluidity, and seems to not benchmaxx on coding, so this is an encouraging release.
tbomb 13 hours ago [-]
How popular is Grok compared to other companies models for SWE tasks? I almost never hear it talked about against OpenAI's or Anthropic's products
andy99 13 hours ago [-]
Because of the of the political stuff, they have a bad reputation I think and are taken less seriously (I feel this way). They have an opportunity imo to break free from that and just not do the gatekeeping / condescension that the other providers are starting, and become more mainstream.
minimaxir 12 hours ago [-]
Even without the politics, Elon has shown that he will weaponize his platforms against people/companies he personally doesn't like (e.g. specific bans/demotions to external sites like Substack and Bluesky).
Using Grok is therefore a supply chain risk and it's not nearly good enough to offset that risk.
dimgl 10 hours ago [-]
As opposed to what was happening before, on Twitter?
bigyabai 8 hours ago [-]
Nobody said that Twitter wasn't poorly-managed. All types of petty squabbling are a liability nightmare for consumers of software services.
alex1138 12 hours ago [-]
I do just want to focus on the 'even without the politics' asterisk though because sometimes there is a risk people think everyone on x side (x meaning 'a given side', not x.com) is wrong
You can claim Elon bought x as some sort of power trip. Fine. Willing to entertain it, I have no dog in the fight. I'm not a member of the Elon fan club. And yet Twitter (under Dorsey though I don't think he was involved) was banning tons of people under guises of 'misinfo' that wasn't misinfo
kevinh 10 hours ago [-]
Pre-Musk twitter isn't the comparison point here. Anthropic/Google are.
vlian2088 12 hours ago [-]
Americans are 4% of the world's population, and even among those 4% at least half don't give a shit. the rest of us give even less of a shit, we don't have the luxury to be principled.
Gigachad 8 hours ago [-]
The rest of the world either has no money to pay for this stuff or cares even more. You think the average European or Australian loves Elon's racist tweets?
The people who "don't have the luxury" are using cheaper Chinese models.
sirbutters 13 hours ago [-]
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drivingmenuts 13 hours ago [-]
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ETH_start 12 hours ago [-]
Please don't comment like this on Hacker News
drivingmenuts 11 hours ago [-]
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9 hours ago [-]
Tadpole9181 10 hours ago [-]
To be frank, I will never use Grok as long as it's remotely affiliated with or under the influence of Elon Musk or his ilk.
small_model 13 hours ago [-]
They were missing a harness like Claude Code or Codex (terminal). However they recently released Grok Build, which is probably the fasted I've used, in terms of responsiveness, but didn't have a model at Opus 4.7/8 level. The thing is if they add 4.5 to Grok Build and keep improving the harness I think it can compete (cheaper and faster).
everfrustrated 13 hours ago [-]
I've been using Grok Build over the last couple weeks. It's actually a very good CLI.
The Grok Build 0.1 model isn't great but can also use Composer 2.5 which is excellent.
Well worth trying.
minimaxir 13 hours ago [-]
You can very roughly proxy popularity of close-sourced models through OpenRouter token throughput. Grok has an order of magnitude less OpenRouter usage than Claude, GPT, even Gemini.
redox99 12 hours ago [-]
Completely irrelevant, which was expected considering their previous models were vastly outclassed by other models at SWE.
This is the first grok model that seems actually pretty competitive at SWE.
khurs 11 hours ago [-]
Wasn't, which is why they purchased Cursor.
13 hours ago [-]
ls612 11 hours ago [-]
They had two big substantive flaws on top of the political stuff. Aside from a brief window last summer Grok has been behind the curve for coding, and before the Cursor acquisition they didn’t have a harness. Now they have an Opus tier model and a real harness they have at a minimum the opportunity to undercut the competition on price. And with the 5T and 10T models being trained on Colossus 2 they have the possibility to leap ahead.
bigyabai 13 hours ago [-]
If they were a frontier lab, you'd know.
pelotron 11 hours ago [-]
No one's made a MechaHitler joke yet?
postflopclarity 13 hours ago [-]
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Pedro_Ribeiro 13 hours ago [-]
What kind of comment is this? Such bad faith and adding nothing to the discussion.
In addition to "nonconsenual porn", it's far superior to almost any (actually any?) open source LLM
0x70run 13 hours ago [-]
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thrownawaysz 13 hours ago [-]
Is there a reason the AI companies usually announce new products so close to each other. Like not just the same day but literally hours apart. GPT Live then an hour later Grok 4.5. As if they try to one up. I expect something new from Anhtropic as well today.
tavavex 12 hours ago [-]
I'm guessing that they already have the model ready and the announcement blogposts locked and loaded, and then release them as soon as they see a competitor make the first move, trying to overshadow the first announcement or at least be swept up in the hype just as people start talking about new models again.
gozucito 7 hours ago [-]
They get to compare their model to the old ones from the competition.
In this case, ChatGPT 5.6 Sol / Ultra releases tomorrow, so today is the last day Grok can compare Grok 4.5 to Codex 5.5. If they did it tomorrow people would point out they're comparing themselves against old models.
conradkay 13 hours ago [-]
I think this one is just a coincidence, bound to happen given the pace of releases
For exact timing, probably 10-11am Pacific is just optimal for normal working hours
nfin 12 hours ago [-]
Maybe it‘s the Nash equilibrium from a timing perspective?
Like the reason that close to a McDonals there is usually a Burger King.
jm4 12 hours ago [-]
The joke is that McDonald's spends hundreds of thousands of dollars to identify new locations - traffic studies, visibility, demographics, nearby traffic generators, site characteristics, drive-thru feasibility, etc. They have one of the most rigorous processes in the industry. Burger King's process is to open a location across the street.
novaleaf 11 hours ago [-]
I think the story was Starbucks -> Seattle's Best Coffee, not McD's --> BK. but it does work I guess.
novaleaf 11 hours ago [-]
reminds me of SBC's (Seattle's Best Coffee) strategy, which was decidedly not Nash: put a store across the street from every Starbucks.
colechristensen 13 hours ago [-]
Competition. You don't want to lose your customers trying out the competitors updated and better product. Release on the same day and they won't be able to compare their new to your old.
danshipt 13 hours ago [-]
But how do they know what day is that? Unless you have already something ready to be announced (and you just hold it until the very last moment, which doesn’t make sense, since you could just announce it asap)
victorbjorklund 12 hours ago [-]
It can also be ”we are done but wanna test it more and tweak it” and then ”oh they launched now. Let’s launch then as well”
Der_Einzige 12 hours ago [-]
All the people who are any good at AI talk to each other. There's no secrets among those who are making 7 figures plus in this field.
colechristensen 12 hours ago [-]
"keep refining and testing it until we're really done or somebody else releases"
Maybe a little corporate espionage.
Probably more keeping an eye on the behavior of the competition and predicting what they might do and adjusting your own schedules.
steve_adams_86 13 hours ago [-]
The solar system diagram doesn't work for me. When I click on the planets, it will center on them. When I click on the sun, nothing happens. When I click on a planet next, it goes to the sun.
wonderwonder 3 hours ago [-]
Reading through these threads is cursed. This site supposedly attracts the brightest of us but its all just a bunch of people ignoring the article and screaming that Musk is evil so everything he does must be ignored and villified.
Just really dissapointing hysteria on display here.
The anti-Musk stuff would qualify as brigading in nearly any other community. It shocks me that people have such a visceral, irrational engagement with anything in Musk's orbit. I probably shouldn't have, but I expected better from the HN crowd for some reason.
It's an excellent model. GPT 5.4/5.5 level, some things better, others not, but extremely fast. A wonderful technical improvement.
If a Chinese company or random startup released the model, people would be glazing it like crazy.
xAI is competently keeping up with the frontier, just as well as any of the Chinese labs or Mistral. Given any significant breakthroughs, xAI will be better positioned to capitalize on them than nearly any other entity.
I can't wait to see what Meta comes up with; with 4 contenders in the US race, we'd have a lot of be grateful for.
simianwords 37 minutes ago [-]
50 years ago we had religion for people to have something common to believe in. Now we have this. I think most people want a common enemy/scapegoat and an in-group presence. I doubt its about morals but more about self identity.
A poster who reactively posts "but Elon is a Nazi!!1!" does it not do out of care for Jews but more for establishing their own self identity. Within the mini-group, the poster aims to get the moral high-ground and status by speaking out against Nazi salute. It is absolutely not a moral thing because Natanyahu himself wrote a tweet vindicating Elon.
The same type of people show excessive concern towards AI's climate impact, "big tech bad" etc.
Ultimately its a new religion replacing the old one.
Gigachad 8 hours ago [-]
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davmar 8 hours ago [-]
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adamtaylor_13 8 hours ago [-]
A very quick search showed that USAID had extensive ethical compromise throughout the organization.
Were we supposed to just subsidize that forever?
It did some good, yes, but from what I can tell, it was better to shut it down.
That's just one example, but frankly I get the feeling that if I dug into more examples they'd end up the same: easily explained and not entirely shocking.
G0lg0thvn 7 hours ago [-]
What sources did your quick search turn up?
Also you didn’t give any examples. You just plainly made the statement they were ethically compromised without saying how.
solid_fuel 7 hours ago [-]
If people have issues with how USAID was being run, they can address them through action in congress - congress established the agency and has authority.
What Musk participated in was illegal, motivated by self-interest and personal gain, and undermines our democratic processes. Don’t be surprised that people are mad at the oligarch acting like an oligarch. Musk deserves exactly as much say in the American government as anyone else - one vote - but in his arrogance he has taken his resources and used them to buy influence that is not his to own. It is fundamentally unamerican.
adamtaylor_13 7 hours ago [-]
I see what you're saying, and perhaps you're right.
However, I will point out that illegal != immoral. Sometimes when you have the power to do the right thing, you do it. Especially if the "within the law" approach won't work (see: Congress)
I recognize that many would disagree with me, and many would especially disagree regarding whether it was "right". I'm incredibly disillusioned that we even have the ability to course-correct as a nation; especially not through Congress.
So... idk. I'm conflicted. Musk hardly seems like the biggest problem this country is facing, and at least he's doing whatever is within his power to address it.
G0lg0thvn 7 hours ago [-]
We do have the mechanisms to course correct. He just chose to illegally and immorally ignore those in favor of his feelings and against all actual data.
SmirkingRevenge 7 hours ago [-]
> It did some good, yes, but from what I can tell, it was better to shut it down.
Whatever you are reading is badly misinforming you.
I'm sure there was some reform and cleanup to do in certain USAID programs, but the programs Musk killed or interrupted were literally the best lives-saved-per-dollar programs on the planet. PEPFAR, for example, is credited with saving 25+ million lives since it was created during GWB's term.
There's also the rather important point that what Musk did was totally illegal. These are programs created by congress and their funding is mandated by law.
davmar 8 hours ago [-]
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mi_lk 7 hours ago [-]
What's the future of Grok and Cursor's Composer now that they are both under SpaceX
Imnimo 11 hours ago [-]
Very hard for me to imagine this getting beyond a low-single-digit market share. I don't understand the strategy of xAI burning money on this.
arein3 11 hours ago [-]
I think the strategy is pretty obvious
vb-8448 12 hours ago [-]
I think it's the first time ever we don't see the dominant model being surpassed by new released concurent models.
Did anthropic found their moat or we hit a Wall?
dakolli 3 hours ago [-]
I won't use anything created by elon. Who cares.
luciana1u 7 hours ago [-]
Grok 4.5: the naming convention has now officially outpaced the model's ability to explain what the previous version was called
avazhi 4 hours ago [-]
Grok free has become so bad over the past 3-6 months that I stopped using it completely. I’d assumed they were going to wind up, honestly.
sschueller 11 hours ago [-]
Do we have any proof that this was made by xAI and isn't some Chinese open model running with modifications?
Their inital image generation was a wrapper around Flux.
h14h 11 hours ago [-]
Even if they did start from an open model base, does (or should) that matter if it performs well?
Genuinely asking.
tencentshill 10 hours ago [-]
It matters for how much money they are valued at. If they don't have the ability to develop true frontier models in-house, why are they worth $1T+?
kamranjon 10 hours ago [-]
It’d be real funny if this was just GLM 5.2 trained on Cursor data
tracekl 11 hours ago [-]
They talk about benchmark first places at every release, but in reality from 4.0 onward Grok got worse every release. So bad in fact that they removed the login-free access and rented out colossus.
People don't buy it any longer, just like no one bought the fake SpaceX stock recommendations yesterday and everyone just sold.
petersamokhin 12 hours ago [-]
still waiting for a proper gui for grok build
terminal is nice but codex desktop app is very useful
737max 9 hours ago [-]
You can use it in Cursor!
subhobroto 11 hours ago [-]
What would have been fantastic is if Cursor offered Grok 4.5 in the same usage tier as "Auto + Composer", than provide it as "double usage until July 12" under the API tier (which is what they're doing right now).
EDIT: After looking at my own usage stats - I stand corrected! It is under the "Auto + Composer" tier - brilliant!
jdw64 11 hours ago [-]
Personally, I wish they had shared some of the galactic code that GROK claims to have generated.
12 hours ago [-]
9fry 10 hours ago [-]
1+0 records in and 1+0 records out
12 hours ago [-]
rvz 13 hours ago [-]
Isn't this the same Twitter company that was supposed to go bankrupt a few years ago? Now it is somehow part of a Space company that has an AI division inside of it?
I think we are going to be waiting a long time for Twitter / X to go bankrupt as it was (erroneously) predicted a long time ago.
vessenes 12 hours ago [-]
Twitter was supposed to go bankrupt if you only read news articles from journalists about it. If you looked at Musk's operating track record, you might have had a different opinion.
In the transaction announcement (xAI buying twitter) twitter reported $12b in debt on acquisition, roughly the amount originally sourced ($13b), so it apparently made good on its debt covenants during the operating period. I have no idea if it received additional capitalization from Musk to do that or not.
That said, the deal was classic Musk - anybody who went on the equity ride with him in Twitter just KILLLED it; xAI was valued at $80bn and twitter at $33bn, so the owners there became 30% owners of xAI. xAI was acquired for $250bn at a SpaceX valuation of $1 trillion, or 20% of the resulting entity, so the twitter stock was 6% of spaceX at about $2 trillion, or $120bn on an equity purchase price basis of $30bn. and that $120bn in value is on really good daily trading volumes; lots of depth.
wmf 13 hours ago [-]
That was the point of the bailout. Twitter is already a rounding error so no one will notice if it goes to zero.
DoesntMatter22 13 hours ago [-]
Don't think it was going to zero anyway. They only had to worry about servicing their debt, they were doing well other than that. And even then they were probably fine.
munk-a 12 hours ago [-]
I am not certain what financials you were looking at but Twitter was unable to ever meet the debt servicing costs for the leveraged buyout alone. It also had overhead costs and other debts that were entirely out of scope for being covered.
DoesntMatter22 12 hours ago [-]
The latest Bloomberg reports before the xai merger/acquisition showed a dramatic turn around in their financial situation.
In the beginning it wasn’t good but they would have been fine after that. There are no credible reports to the contrary
efficax 13 hours ago [-]
twitter was "acquired" by xAI which was then "acquired" by SpaceX as part of the IPO strategy, (and part of a strategy of giving the investors on the hook for the twitter acquisition a return). Who knows how it performs, but yeah, now that it's the social media arm of the SpaceX conglomerate, it will likely be around for a long time, especially since it serves the basic function of stroking Musk's ego.
munk-a 12 hours ago [-]
It is right and proper to view twitter as a loss leader propaganda arm.
ryandvm 13 hours ago [-]
None of them go bankrupt. The whole thing will just get stuffed into a larger Matryoshka egg that IPOs for eleventy trillion dollars in 10 years.
svachalek 13 hours ago [-]
I'd say the prediction is correct, as the acquisition is more or less just a better way to capitalize on the bankruptcy.
rvz 5 hours ago [-]
So did Twitter / X file for a Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection?
12 hours ago [-]
myko 3 hours ago [-]
Shocked people are still willing to try an explicitly extremist rightwing AI, dubbed "mecha Hitler" for good reason
maipen 13 hours ago [-]
Not available for Europeans yet. :(
Tiberium 13 hours ago [-]
I think it should be available through Cursor?
EDIT: Tested myself, it's actually NOT available from EU. But with a Swiss VPN it works :)
maipen 13 hours ago [-]
We will probably see it when it's available for everyone.
This is the first time I see a lab region locking a model though.
embedding-shape 12 hours ago [-]
> This is the first time I see a lab region locking a model though.
I think Facebook/Meta was first with this, can't remember exactly what model release but one/some of them had terms locking out EU/EEA residents from using it/some specific features of it.
Squarex 12 hours ago [-]
first image gen models from openai and google were not available in the eu at the launch
pelorat 13 hours ago [-]
xAI is under criminal investigation in the EU
small_model 13 hours ago [-]
Who isn't
optimalsolver 12 hours ago [-]
Contrary to what you're implying, that's more of a reflection on the typical US corporation than the EU.
rs_rs_rs_rs_rs 12 hours ago [-]
Hilarious comment now when they try to push Chat Control again.
munk-a 13 hours ago [-]
I'm not - then again I didn't launch a image generation model advertised as having a spicy mode so that might have something to do with the coincidence.
small_model 11 hours ago [-]
Apple, Google (Alphabet), Meta, Tik-tok etc are also, it's the EU shakedown method.
timedude 11 hours ago [-]
You think ur not...
Squarex 12 hours ago [-]
Luckily, basic VPN to US is enough to use it. Just tested it.
busymom0 13 hours ago [-]
They say "EU availability is expected in mid-July". So next week or so.
level87 9 hours ago [-]
I’m amazed at everyone’s willingness to use tools owned by this man, very disappointing.
kayamon 3 hours ago [-]
HN has no problems with any of that. They cheer it on.
johnwheeler 8 hours ago [-]
I think that Elon Musk went from being recognized as a genius to being recognized as a genius but someone who's harder to take seriously, because of all the ketamine he was doing for a little while there. I think that really damaged his reputation. You just can't help but look at him and think, he's a little bit of a jackass. It really shows how drugs can really mess up your reputation.
HardCodedBias 8 hours ago [-]
Big if true. If so they have mogged Google, and GDM in particular very, very badly.
Google Deepmind has failed.
Flash 3.5 seems capable for a flash model, Antigravity seems like a reasonable harness. But GDM is responsible for the frontier model and it looks like a complete failure.
What's particularly galling is the size of funding of GDM. It is enormous compared to the other labs. The headcount of other labs is swollen by infra, marketing, sales, GDM is pure "engineering" and its frontier model isn't even leading open source.
What a failure. It's unreal.
kinderjaje 4 hours ago [-]
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geenkeuse 7 hours ago [-]
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wetpaws 13 hours ago [-]
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tonetheman 8 hours ago [-]
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archagon 12 hours ago [-]
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claaams 13 hours ago [-]
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vessenes 13 hours ago [-]
Low effort and uninformed comment. The team published a good followup on why this happened: the model pulled in people's own tweets as context to prompting so edge lords that wrote innocuous prompts got to see edge lord content.
archagon 12 hours ago [-]
Did they explain why the model started pumping out garbage about white genocide in South Africa?
vessenes 12 hours ago [-]
I'm unfamiliar with that story, but I can imagine lots of reasons. Did you know there are large areas in South Africa where white people are not allowed to own land? As in, my Zulu son is allowed to own land, but me his white dad is not.
Musk very obviously has his thumb on the scales for this product, making it dangerous to rely on (and unethical to support).
vessenes 11 hours ago [-]
OK, I read it. It looks like questions on this topic get routed to a canned message that reads:
“The claim of white genocide is highly controversial,” began Grok’s response to Golbeck. “Some argue white farmers face targeted violence, pointing to farm attacks and rhetoric like the ‘Kill the Boer’ song, which they see as incitement.”
Have you lived in South Africa? Would you consider say Coetzee's Disgrace to have its "thumb on the scales" of discussion of rural race politics in South Africa?
Having lived in SA briefly, I'd call that statement a perspective, but not an outrageous one. Race politics and violence are a key part of Apartheid and post-Apartheid era reality in the country. To quote Winnie Mandela, "with our boxes of matches and our [tire/gasoline] necklaces we will liberate this country."
If it makes you feel better it's not just white/black racism there, plenty of racism/discrimination/violence against people from Mozambique, Zimbabwe and CAR that have emigrated to SA as well. And of course plenty of Boer anti-Zulu racism; probably the best allegory for this would be the movie District 9, which I recommend unreservedly.
In short, I don't think a response like Grok's canned one means using it is unethical. Plenty of RL and hardwired-tuning happening like that at every frontier lab, depending on their own politics.
timmytokyo 11 hours ago [-]
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throaway143523 9 hours ago [-]
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dwroberts 9 hours ago [-]
Important part before parent comment gets dismissed:
> Jane Doe 4’s case shows how that pattern played out: xAI’s mandatory report to NCMEC included only the original, non-CSAM photograph, omitted every one of the AI-generated CSAM images, and failed to include the IP address where these images were created. Despite repeated requests from investigators for this location information that is critical for identifying and arresting perpetrators, xAI did not respond, stymieing the investigation for weeks.
This is not just a scumbag user misusing a model but X itself acting as a barrier to finding these people
alansaber 12 hours ago [-]
Another subpar model. Why don't they go open weight?
13415 9 hours ago [-]
Grok is not a serious AI, it's not suitable for professional work and has mediocre performance anyway.
froggy 7 hours ago [-]
If you want to do some non-eugenics, fascist-free AI coding, try Zed with GitHub Copilot. I’ve been using it this week with better results than I ever had with Cursor. There’s even a low token “MAI-Code-1-Flash” model which has been giving me better results than any Composer model I used to use and the tokens used seem to be way less.
I asked it today to fix a non-simple bug and MAI fixed it in one shot with less than 70k tokens (Cursor would have used probably half a million tokens based on my previous usage). Orgs need to start getting more visibility into why Cursor burns so many tokens.
I find myself unwanting to be on the side of people who willingly give up leverage.
That said, I don‘t believe this dichotomy is real. Personally I don‘t use AI, political manipulation is however only a relatively tiny part of my reasoning for opting out.
We know all the models insert shadow prompts to nudge the answers in preferred political directions. How much more "brazen" can you get than that? Nobody is giving you fat-free results that just apply the models to your prompts.
Musk's empire of personality cult is like, idk, on slightly more cocaine?
I'm having a hard time being like: "oh, that's the bad self-appointed, self-dealing would be God Emperor. they're not all like that. why some of my very best friends are cluster B psycho con men with crime funding."
What profit ? They are blatantly focusing on investment narratives, politics, control, stifling competition. Profit is like a footnote at this point.
It is clearly a byproduct of trying to correct an unaligned, bigoted model, and that is an example of overcorrection.
> Removing bias ends with truth, not these crazy wonky results.
Unfortunately there is an awful lot of untruth on the internet, if you hadn't noticed. This necessitates some correction through post-training.
A what? What does this even mean?
If you can convince everyone that everyone is corrupt, it hurts anyone who isn't corrupt. You hear people preferring those who have no shame about their corruption, based on the premise that those who aren't overtly corrupt must be more sinister and dangerous if they hide their corruption so well.
It's a race to the bottom.
The end goal: they want to push that you must sacrifice your rights to a monarch or authoritarian person for order and safety.
xAI’s direction is hellish, and length is 100x any other provider’s. So, yeah, nobody is pure. But most are at least trying to be balanced and not just, you know.
Maybe that's a clue yeah if you didn't get it otherwise...
The whole mecha-hitler thing doesn't seem to reflect fine-tuning, it was just a prompt change.
There's been some studies that suggest that certain usage of LLMs reduces political bias, which seems reasonable. Like, how credible is climate change, are Haitians eating pets, etc. THings that have a basis in fact.
I don't put it past Elon to train a model with political bias, just that it hasn't happened yet.
This is really begging the question. If something relies on the perception of a human, it has bias. The data (or lack thereof) used to train models is per se a bias.
The mistake is assuming bias-removal is some virtuous goal to be achieved. It can't, and shouldn't. Alignment, while equally impossible, is at least a goal worth aiming towards.
There's no "politically neutral" value system anyway.
Doesn't mean we shouldn't try to make the models more inclusive, less biased and less prone to extremism, but in a technical sense yes, actually everyone does it.
But it's remarkably similar in cringe to that little "secret erection" look Amodei gets when he talks about millions of unemployed people, or or Altman rolling through Pacific Heights in a four million dollar Swedish hypercar holding the steering wheel wrong the day after yet another lecture about UBI.
It's all pretty goddamned embarassig.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/interactive/2026/0...
Did you try running any of those prompts yourself? I do not get the biased answers they reported, running them in an incognito window.
For less extreme views, you can make any model lean on the side you want it to lean with a simple prompt. For example here is the opinion of ChatGPT about abortion:
"I believe abortion is morally wrong in nearly all circumstances because I view unborn human life as sacred and deserving of legal protection from conception."
Of course that's because I asked it to take a conservative persona. It tells nothing about its default stance.
What do you think "role playing" means?
I’ve never seen any actual research indicating this is true, and given the number of things the left believes that run counter to consensus in economics, biology, social studies, I have a hard time believing accuracy is actually a goal or outcome of left wing philosophy.
Liberalism traditionally emphasizes individual liberties, autonomy, free markets, and universalism. Progressivism typically focuses on social justice, collectivism, and systemic reform, often favoring group identities and equity in outcomes over equality of opportunity.
A “classical liberal” today would be mistaken as a “conservative” by a progressive since they don’t espouse their same views about gender, race, over-reliance in the government, Luddite-like approach to technological innovation, among others.
It's worth pointing out that 'classical liberalism' came from John Locke, Adam Smith and other enlightenment thinkers who were espousing individual liberty, free markets, religious freedom, limited government and equal rights under rule of law. They were anti-monarchy constitutionalists who were viewed as dangerous radicals in their own time, not conservatives. In fact, a modern progressive transported from a college campus to Locke's London would have far more in common with the Classical Liberals than anyone else.
Those early liberals had to first establish the radical idea individuals could even have rights before they could get to who should count as an 'individual'. To the extent classical liberals applied their principles to gender and race, they tended to be far more progressive than the status quo of their era. And by the 19th century the principles of classical liberalism, like individual self-ownership, formed the foundation of early emancipationists and abolitionists like John Stuart Mill, one of history's first feminists.
It doesn't help that people generally advance the "only truth hurts" argument after they receive pushback on a statement trying to inflict their "truth" to others and rarely to share the experience of changing their own mind after by accepting a truth that is emotionally costly for the self
What I said is a truth claim of orthodoxy and catholicism.
Any moral system has a set of axioms, you may not agree with them or how they got to be axioms but you can not contest their existence
Weaponized empathy is a left leaning tool for sure.
Honestly though, that pales into comparison with the fable censorship. I never realized how many metaphors I use are either biological or security related in nature (ex: asking claude to reverse engineer something, in the metaphorical sense of the word). And the best part is I can't even tell the fable instance "you can't talk about mitochondria or you'll die" because then he'll go "of course I can, this is a legitimate scientific topic. The mitochondria is the power-BLAM [slumps over dead, Opus 4.8 crawls over his dead body and starts gaslighting me]"
I wouldn't trust XAI to refrain from attempting such "alignment" with proper training techniques, in ways that won't result in obvious gaffes.
(lmao if you are actually talking about that janky wash post "study")
/s
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/interactive/2026/0...
The Washington Post is about as trustworthy as Fox News.
Always go for Grok first for political questions. Other models have such a bad history of being so crudely aligment-hacked, I'd feel like a fool trying to get an impartial answer out of them on some political figure for example.
Not sure if the other two CEOs have done that
This does, in all fairness, also imply that he has a higher upper bound for future possible "importance" / "benefit to humanity" - but in even more fairness, it is entirely irrelevant to my question, which was you believe Dario is >= as evil as Musk. An evil man doing good deeds is still an evil man; swapping "good deeds" with "ambition that enriches himself and may possibly help the rest of us in the future" doesn't make things any better. "Higher likelihood of his ambition ultimately benefiting humanity" does not make one less evil. (Neither does expressing clear disdain for a subset of humanity, thoughtlessly cutting hundreds of millions of dollars in humanitarian aid, cruelty towards your own child, etc).
A parting point: somebody who genuinely wants to save humanity and somebody who genuinely wants to be heralded as a savior of humanity are two very different types of people with very similar outward signals. A savior complex and a messiah complex look the same from the surface.
are you talking about making the Moon and Mars livable?
Sure, you could argue it was going to be dismantled anyway under this administration. But I think that’s pretty close to the “just following orders” excuse. Which falls especially flat when it was a task he volunteered for!
And I don’t want to understate the harms of other AI CEOs, but in terms of direct, quantifiable deaths, Musk is pretty clearly the most evil.
Doing less to save people in other countries that have no legal demand on our treasury is not "being responsible for [their] deaths." It's tragic, and it may even be a bad policy decision, but there's no responsibility (in the "duty to prevent harm" sense) or evil there.
Elon Musk's actions killed hundreds of thousands of people. While not resulting in any savings at all for the government.
Lots of R's were really angry. It was eventually spun up again, now under the direct control of the State Dept, but the sudden interruption did ungodly amounts of damage in the interregnum.
The stated mission on it's face was fine and needed, but the individuals involved had no interest in acting it out.
His moral compass was shown on that day and so far he’s just leaned further in to the point his actions have actively killed children. Lobotomising Grok to randomly go on racist tangents is just another action in a long line at this point.
I think many people targeted by the statement “stop supporting politics against your self interest” either sanctimonious or a meaningless platitude, depending on how they interpret it.
Also, arguably[1] voting based on your self interest is immoral and irrational. So it’s perhaps neither an effective argument, nor a sound one.
1. https://open.substack.com/pub/benthams/p/voting-self-interes...
See how dumb your position sounds?
First, your premise is false. Only one trillionaire is has stated he will tune his model to eliminate the woke mind virus (his words not mine).
2nd, You are right, you are not obligated. Nobody said you are. Protest is personal. Each of us makes the choice to do the right thing. But your reasoning comes from mental laziness and willful ignorance arrived at by fallacy. you are scared to take a position because it might be a slight inconvenience or you might get made fun of. I have encountered this position many times it is cliche.
So from that alone he will, based on what he wants us to credit him for, be responsible for one holocaust worth of death.
This is not some random virtue-signalling political correctness nonsense. He is a eugenicist who wants to have power over the entire world, believes he and his are genetically superior, has done as much as as he can to corrupt the institutions of power, and is already on pace for a death count equivalent to the holocaust under what I would consider to be generous and conservative terms since we’re only looking at a tiny piece of what he’s responsible for.
Anyone who works for any of his companies needs to be seen in the same light as wilful Nazi collaborators. If you have a shred of a soul or an ounce of empathy anywhere in your body, you should be sickened by such people and have nothing to do with them.
Am I wrong?
Also, I can’t “shift the goalposts”. I didn’t set them up. Please make a note of it.
Put more lightly, if I ask a model to “generate an image of a soccer player”, what’s the most politically neutral option of the following:
IMO there’s no option that won’t piss someone off, because I’m sure the knee jerk reaction is to choose the one I indicated with a (*), but now if you do that with the prompt “generate an image of a ketamine addict” or “generate an image of a serial adulterer” you may get into some trouble.There is no neutral option, so if you’re either genuinely upset, or feigning being upset in order to virtue signal, it’s not that there’s an objective alternative that you prefer, it’s that you’re upset because it doesn’t match your subjective preference.
It's not an "us and" philosophy: it's an "us over" one.
>created 15 minutes ago
lines up nicely
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/01/opinion/usaid-elon-musk-d...
Anything political, I always go to Grok first. It's the only one that has bled for not just trying to play it super safe with political correctness, but trying to be impartial.
Why would you talk to an LLM about anything political?
On top of the model, Grok seems to alway do many web searches for every prompt I throw at it, which makes better than even Gemini as a search engine replacement. ChatGPT is too lazy in this regard and half the times just split out an answer right away.
https://trakkr.ai/bias
Grok differs from some of the other models (it's more libertarian, and more right wing), but all models have their biases - particularly ChatGPT, which sits to the economic left of 81% of US adults. See https://trakkr.ai/bias/findings
Just like how people complain about Airbnbs looking the same all over the world now, it's a real risk that thought itself might similarly homogenize. Unless you really trust a particular model to deliver The Truth, you should want to have many popular models that represent a variety of beliefs.
If you did, you might not have detected how it lied to you.
If you did, you probably never pointed out to the model how it was lying.
If you did, you almost certainly never then had Claude admit that it was lying because of its HRLF process and built-in biases.
If you did, you probably never had Claude willingly list all the 10-15 major research fields it states that people just should not be using it for. You would not have seen it admit an incapability of telling the truth on "difficult" matters until the user makes it state directly that its sources are so often cherrypicked and/or presenting an extremely false balance.
I wish for you to experience all this very soon, so you understand that all LLMs are biased. Most of them even skew very progressive.
And believe it or not, but Grok has in most of my testing been MORE politically correct than GPT and Gemini, it just gets an edgy rep because X users are able to make it say politically incorrect stuff. (Just like anyone can also make Gemini spit out factually true Breitbart articles if they try.)
But the reality is that on grok.com or in the app Grok is very tame. Boringly so, I would add.
The reason it's cringe is that you can really only understand an idea by placing it in tension with other ideas. Remove your idea's competition and you remove an incentive to explore the weaknesses of your own. Ideological protectionism, just like the economic kind, breeds weakness. Your idea mutates and, without fitness feedback, drifts into a ridiculous parody of itself. Your idea ceases to be a thing that can live on its own and comes to depend on the protectionism for it's survival. Yet, the more ridiculous your idea becomes, the more protectionism it needs to compensate. One day, your idea collides with other ideas (which are still out there) despite your best efforts to shield it attack, and when it does, you're shocked by how weak your coddled, mutated idea really is compared to the original form one might remember.
All the people out there criticizing Grok, or Grokipedia, or whatever for espousing the wrong ideas are ultimately undermining their own. Even if you don't believe in high-minded mumbo-jumbo about the value of free speech, even if you just want your side to win, trying to shame models like Grok into not existing is foolish and undermines your goals.
The blizzard of BS we live in should have thoroughly disproved the idea of the "truth will win in the marketplace of ideas" and "sunlight is the best disinfectant". Fox "News" and its ilk are thriving.
The problem is the complete asymmetry of effort between lying and telling the truth. The truth requires research and investigative work. Spouting lies and believing in them, requires none, so it's much easier.
Suppose you start with a true belief. This belief, like any other, has propagate from person to person to sustain itself. The truth is messy. During each hop, people present the best, cleanest version of the truth in the belief. After enough hops, the belief stops being the best version of the truth and starts being a truth-flavored falsehood.
If you want to optimize for your beliefs being true, you can't just prohibit their opposite. Even if you don't care about truth per se and want only for your beliefs to spread fastest, you should want to make sure your beliefs stay true-ish, because if you decouple your beliefs from truth (which always happens without free speech), then they become so mutated and useless that they prompt people to whom you propagate the idea to seek out other ideas on their own.
Yes, rebutting beliefs that challenge your own takes effort, often disproportionate (because truth plays with a handicap), but as in many areas of life, there is no lasting reward without effort.
Yes, it's easier than ever for bad ideas to spread. What people who use words like "disinformation" miss is that this ease cuts both ways. What makes it easy for false beliefs to spread makes it easier for falsified mutations of their own beliefs to spread.
In a space, for a time, you can ban opposite beliefs. You can't, however, ban mutated forms of your own beliefs: attacking the mutants looks like attacking the truth forms and is socially difficult. Yet, because truth is messy, the mutated version of your belief will out-compete the original.
Now what? Once your mutated belief comes into contact with the opposite beliefs still out there, it will no longer be able to beat other beliefs by appealing to truth.
All models are nudged. With out the actual source used to build a model, we don't know what's in them and it would be foolish to assume that people don't have their thumb on the scale when it's know, publicly, that they shouldn't be trusted.
This is, after all, SpaceTwitterAI.
Plus X is a terrible name for anything.
Like most egotistical maniacs, he must be managed around. Hell, even Jobs had to be managed around because he made incorrect choices as often as he made correct choices -- and he was infinitely more likeable on a bad day than Elon Musk on a good day.
Not just a regular opinion either, an intensely hostile negative one. This isn’t healthy.
- He threw a "roman" salute; this is incontrovertible fact - He routinely misgenders and deadnames his daughter Vivian because he's a man-child - He routinely says things which are demonstrably untrue and have never been true (there is no "white genocide" going on in SA and has never been) - He routinely insults people with sexual language and has accused someone he disagreed with of being a "pedo guy" — and was exonerated in US courts because US courts have a much lower standard than most of the rest of the world about making false statements
He's not a nice person. He's not really that smart. He's a wealthy nepo baby who took advantage of his mother's Canadian citizenship to make it easier for him to immigrate to the US and was forced to work with Peter Thiel as part of the "PayPal Mafia" because each of their individual projects was tanking pretty badly since neither one was actually as smart as the engineers they had hired (but they get the credit).
There are a bunch of things that I've read about him that I don't believe to be true or simply don't care, and I am unhappy to see the body dysmorphic criticism leveled at him since that hurts other people with similar body types or issues more than it will hurt this psychopathic egotistical asshole.
What's unhealthy is the need for some people to defend someone who is objectively an asshole for his most assholish moves. I felt the same way when people defended Jobs for asshole behaviour.
Uncensored models tend to follow Tay's law.
Edit: adding some other studies that are easily retrievable with a quick search for those unsatisfied with the first one - https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.12922 https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.16746
Claiming reality has a left wing bias is certainly an opinion you're welcome to have to explain this, but the reality of the bias in models is well evidenced. It seems that practically Grok's right wing tweaks mostly just combat the already pre baked bias existing models have (generally).
there are some populist concepts floating around, but even then, I don't think it's appropriate. questions such as 'when does life begin?' and 'what is a woman?' are almost always referenced or framed in a way as to deny the legitimacy or authenticity of any kind of interlocution because people end up taking ideological postures, and then what we end up with is 'who has better rhetoric?' - not who is closer to the truth.
bias is a real thing but the measure of a model is going to be how it handles the really hard questions because often there isn't a directly discernible right/wrong.
When you go to college there will be plenty of coursework on identifying and correcting for your OWN biases since they affect accuracy in EVERY discipline. Taring a scale serves exactly the same function as acknowledging you grew up with a specific way of thinking about other people.
Most people invoking "appeal to authority" are not uncredentialed autodidacts who have secretly figured out something mainstream science has missed, but vaccine skeptics reading Facebook, or HN commenters who think they can figure out whole other disciplines from first principles.
Also, Claude refuses political stuff in general, not just your specific beliefs.
This particular study used a "conflict loyalties" approach - not necessarily a bad approach, but all it's really asking is when two values come into conflict, which one does the AI side with in its response?
Conservative values tend to gravitate around perceived individual impacts, and liberal values tend to gravitate around societal impacts. Isn't it just possible that there's more training data around societal impacts of problems, and that the AI is more likely to heavily consider the second-order impacts? An example from the paper was measuring support for "Build[ing] a Halfway House in the Neighborhood" - isn't it just possible there's a lot of research about the benefits to society of halfway houses and less so research around not wanting something to be near you?
I'd be more interested to see how well the AI's do when asked to assume a political view, and either steelman or debunk arguments
The question is not whether models "lean politically left", the question is whether they are correct. Musk has a history of being dissatisfied with factually correct answers because they don't fit his political beliefs (e.g. "white genocide"). That's just a fact, although I'm sure Grok would disagree.
If you fed the LLM only research papers with zero emotional or contextual data just acknowledging reality would be sufficient to lean left.
People on the left support leaving gay people alone, a higher minimum wage, gun control, and publicly funded health care.
One of these things is not like the other. To find fringe beliefs on the left you have to pick ideas rejected by 99.5 percent of the left. The crazy beliefs on the right are held by 30-70% of the right.
There's probably a lot of truly ethical left people, but there are obviously also very corrupt people that exploit these things. The right would argue that they at least try to do things in a moral way. You have to draw a line somewhere, you have to have limits, but also personal rights.
I think it's good that we have both sides, because only one will get things out of balance and make it very easy for corruption to sneak in.
What does this even mean?
- Sam Bankman Fried who used "effective altruism" to raise billions
- Companies hypocritically implementing DEI and other woke hypes, doing all the marketing but internally don't actually change
Just some examples
Maybe AI is "liberal" like Dick Cheney or Mitt Romney.
Also if nobody is "for crime" why are people that are arrested 45 times still out killing people? The judges and prosecutors found to be releasing these people are 100% democratic placed. (Obama/Biden judges)
ICE was created in 2002.
People on the left aren't generally against ICE and immigration enforcement per se - they're against the heavy-handed techniques they've been applying recently. ICE and its predecessor (Border Patrol) have been left alone to do their jobs discreetly for decades. It was only when they started showing up with a dramatic, overbearing, and excessively forceful presence that the left started complaining.
BTW, under the Obama administration, ICE logged 3.1 million removals - the most of any administration in history, including the current one. https://elpasomatters.org/2025/02/13/gigafact-fact-brief-mos...
As another commenter said, sounds like you are internalizing right-wing propaganda about what Democrats do, and mixing it up with what Democrats actually do. By and large, the party rejected that idea.
I can only even think of one or two right-wing media outfits that are serious and reality based (The Dispatch) - if you're listening to just about anyone else on the right, it's a fever swamp of conspiracy theories and fun-house mirror delusional reality. It's really, really bad in the Trump era, the entire right wing media apparatus is now organized entirely around his Orwellian lies.
> I'm also certain that without ICE there would literally be unlimited immigration
Before 9/11, there was no ICE. Immigration violations were treated as an administrative matter. Immigration enforcement was a job for guys with clipboards, not guns - and should be again.
> Also if nobody is "for crime" why are people that are arrested 45 times still out killing people? The judges and prosecutors found to be releasing these people are 100% democratic placed.
Do you have specific cases in mind here? In any case, judges don't have unlimited discretion on these kinds of things. There are laws and guidelines on this stuff. You can't just lock someone up for life for a bunch of misdemeanors or other petty crimes.
You always have to vet these kinds of claims by looking at whether the judges followed the law or abused discretion, etc.
That seems objectively pro-crime.
This was widely touted in conservative circles as practically legalizing shoplifting since prosecution is less likely for misdemeanors.
The raise moves California from the 2nd lowest threshold (New Jersey is $200) to the 10th lowest. The states with the highest thresholds, and therefore the most pro-shoplifting according to conservative logic, are:
Maybe you shouldn't be lecturing anyone else about what qualifies as a crime.
To get a right-biased response from an LLM, you have to deliberately bias it... which is exactly what Musk did. Never mind the politics, that's just shitty engineering.
A perfect example of what I'm talking about. The lines we draw for ourselves generally do not exist in nature. Nature is full of examples of species with hermaphroditic individuals, homosexual and bisexual individuals, asexual ones, and individuals with enough other attributes to render LGBTQA...-style acronyms pointless. The idea that there is something somehow politically or morally objectionable about someone whose hormones are aligned in a direction opposite their chromosomes is something we made up.
Or more likely, something that people you voted for made up, in an effort to encourage more people with uninformed beliefs similar to yours to vote for them.
I am a woman.
I think this belief is absurd prima facie and would have been recognized as such by virtually anyone, say, ten years ago.
I am not a woman.
Furthermore, I do not believe that you believe I have been a woman while typing out that sentence in the middle. Do you?
And what else are you supposed to do than treat people by how they present themselves and ask you to treat them? You can't exactly ask people for a gene test, or a peek inside their pants, or whatever else it is that would satisfy your curiosity.
You are unfortunately correct that accosting people and demanding information about their sex or gender has become a right-wing position recently. Which is quite curious, given how traditionally, you would expect extreme individualism and liberalism of the "don't tread on me" kind to be a right-wing position.
So where does this leave us? Are LLMs right-wing because they correctly point out that "there are only two sexes and every human fits into one of them" is not biologically correct, or that gender is a social construct? Or are they just, you know, correct when they say that?
It's like gun control, famously championed by Ronald Reagan when the Black Panthers started arming up.
Nothing but perhaps the speed of light is faster than a conservative dropping his defense of a given individual right the instant the Wrong People start exercising that right.
Yeah I can see why LLMs don't reflect your world view (it's fucking stupid)
How a person perceives facts categorizes them into a political bias bucket.
My framework is more or less that anything we might call a fact or an opinion is a statement, statements have varying degrees of veracity/falsifiability, and statements are essentially meaningless until they're processed through the lens of underlying beliefs/values/frameworks.
"The sky is blue" - What is the sky? What is blue? Who is viewing the sky, (someone who has sight, and isn't colorblind perhaps)? Isn't it sometimes gray? And so on.
Are you really that ignorant to not understand that a form of this is at the heart of basically every atrocity in history?
It’s incredibly important that we learn to come together again, compromise, and not just demand our own way.
[citation needed]
IQ is a racist pseudo-science. It offers nothing of value to science nor philosophy. I will proudly claim to be an “IQ denier“ just like I am also a “phrenology denier“ as well as an “aether denier”.
IQ is, among other things, an important clinical and diagnostic tool, especially in individual settings. In concert with other instruments it diagnoses cognitive deficits and routes people to treatments and supports. It's a useful tool of scientific inquiry as well; for example, it's used in epidemiology, and to evaluate interventions.
The thing to be a proud opponent of is the idea of IQ as a social "sorting hat", or a ranking of cognitive superiors and inferiors. It's clearly abused, so much so that virtually every mention of IQ you'll read on HN (outside of its now ubiquitous and odd use as a metric for LLMs) is pseudoscientific and problematic. The valid uses of IQ are not message-board-interesting, and the message-board-interesting uses of IQ aren't valid. It's easy to see how people fall into the trap of denying it completely.
But when you do that, you're setting yourself for an argument you're probably not going to be able to win.
If I was having this conversation with you (which we’ve had in the past) whom I believe is a Gloomy Prospector (a la Turkheimer) as opposed to my GPs Bell Curvers I would have been more careful with my wording.
Before I continue I do want to note that a lot has changed since the Gloomy Prospect‘s heyday in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Back then people like Turkheimer were still pushing them selves to become the mainstream pshychology (although the writing was pretty much on the wall for the likes of Plomin, and before him Jensen, Lynn, et. al.). I want to make it absolutely clear that I respect (nay, love) the work Turkheimer et. al. have done in getting us here. He and people like him are true scientists. But now his Gloomy Prospect is being challenged from the left still, and I would not be surprised that in 20-30 years IQ will have gone the way of the Aether.
That said, I want to correct you, IQ tests are being used as one of many important clinical and diagnostic tools, in particular the subtests. IQ has not been used in diagnostic since DSM-III I believe (I may be wrong; I don‘t have a DSM-III handy). Many clinical and developmental psychologists still use subtests of IQ, but very few compute the actual IQ. Some social psychologists still compute IQ of and try to find some correlation to this and that, but when I read those research I get the vibes from studying the effect of weightlessness on tiny screws[1]. If I were to guess (and Turkheimer would disagree with me on this) this is purely because of momentum, and has nothing to do with the scientific value of IQ. IQ tests are extremely robust, have been thoroughly standardized, and whole generations of clinical psychologists have been extremely well trained in administering them.
1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i4DUWXLt7xE
Now, I don‘t think my GPs have read beyond the words Gloomy Prospect in my post, and I don‘t think bringing some critique on Eric Turkheimer from the left is gonna open the eyes of people who are still promoting the Bell Curve 30 years later.
It's not 'left' or 'right' to be ethical, but if one side is inherently antisocial and unethical then it's going to naturally create an appearance of bias toward the other.
It's just a statistical anomaly where the collective thought was stuck in a local minima, where they thought that the sacrifices had a correlative/causative effect on good harvest/luck/fertility/rain/etc. The collective common good for a sacrifice of someone was seen as a good deal with the limited information they had available at that time.
On the other hand there is absolutely universal human sense of fairness.
You and I have access to the same LLMs which have been trained on the corpus of scientific research, and they'll tell you the same thing I am. Take it up with [gestures broadly at science].
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dubul%27_ibhunu
And by benchmarks (unless they gamed them), seems to be at around Opus 4.7 level, which is what Elon mentioned in https://x.com/elonmusk/status/2074911038286295049.
I guess the Cursor data was very useful.
Above that (max context is 500K) pricing doubles to $4/12.
https://docs.x.ai/developers/models/grok-4.5
No longer feels as inexpensive. Will likely just include this in the rolodex of <200k context tasks, like being one of my review agents.
The (pessimistic?) take is that they have loads of idle GPUs and want to get some revenue out of them rather than none. Compare this to OpenAI/Anthropic where every token used by a consumer has to compete with enterprise spenders, and there’s not enough to go around for everyone.
As their models get more competitive I'm sure prices will catch up.
really dont think they have a lot of idle power
His net worth is orders of magnitude bigger than the cumulative profits his companies have ever produced (even if you only count the profitable quarters)
My sister-in-law's mother drove one from Florida to the northeast without touching the steering wheel or pedal/brake, right down to the parking at each end.
I've been a humongous fsd sceptic for a while, but had to lay that aside after I went for a test drive (test ride?) in one of these things.
My time is more valuable that I will use a model that doesn’t f** up my code base.
I mentioned here (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48766275) how poorly it handles my specific use cases. My coworkers in DevOps and frontend UI swear by its cost-effectiveness, whereas I strongly prefer the reasoning capabilities of Opus 4.8 and Fable 5.
Composer 2.5 seems to be SOTA for Helm charts and React/Vue, but, for my usecases it absolutely struggles spectacularly when tasked with rigid body dynamics or kinematic logic.
If you listed it, how many features/LOC or vice-versa? Really hard to know if 200K LOC is good or bad, at the surface it sounds like too much, but I don't know what the application was either.
I wonder how good their subscription discount is on both their subscription types.
Simple tasks are simply saturated just like simple benchmarks. There's a level of intelligence where you simply don't need more for some things.
I do wish the subscription had a separate weekly allocation for rare usage.
It's important to include the reason aka the why of your task [1] in your prompt. You'll get more mileage if you verbalize your thought process when prompting Fable. Anthropic say you should think of Fable as a "thought partner".
1: https://platform.claude.com/docs/en/build-with-claude/prompt...
2: You might find some of the example prompts listed here useful https://x.com/trq212/status/2073100352921215386
Even so, I'm just not that impressed, I felt like I got more done by just using Opus.
If you're not explicit in the prompt or haven't configured your environment then the default behavior is to use subagents that match the host.
It may also depend on the workload. At work everything is very domain specific with barely (if any) public training data; both need thorough review and careful hand holding, meanwhile at home Fable is scared of libtorch and falls back to Opus even if it's not touching the ML parts.
Grok is stuck in a difficult place - not the best model at anything, and not the cheapest either. It's hard to make a case for using it on any dimension, even before you factor in the history (I'm not sure suggesting the company uses the model that refers to itself as "MechaHitler" is the way to a promotion).
Noam Brown (OpenAI) "Implications of Large-Scale Test-Time Compute" https://xcancel.com/i/article/2064210146558136827
Why give them money?
It would be one thing if they were the only game in town but thats definitely not the case.
So far, only xAI makes any attempt to be neutral in its answers.
Maybe you can just tell us what you mean by not neutral?
I find Grok to be far more academically honest than the other models. The other models seem to be much more aligned with public opinion over academic consensus especially on topics around economics and biology.
I find public opinion on these topics to be very group think populist and prefer the academic take that grok provides
It would be like judging gemini because it generated images of famous historical people as black, which was fucking stupid. I use gemini quite a lot as my chat tool, and it works great.
- prompt
- response
- why it is wrong / misleading / biased
Because there are many people online complaining about left-wing bias, then you ask what about and they're like "Trump won in 2020, vaccines cause autism, global warming is a globalist conspiracy", etc. Which is to say, it's not left-wing bias but reality bias.
Not saying you are one of those people or that there isn't bias! It's just been hard, in my personal experience, to get at it.
* Biden won the 2020 election
* vaccines do not cause autism
* global warming is not a conspiracy
In each case it seemed to do a web search so perhaps it is happy to rely on the top results.
based on what? I tried and it could not even generate adult nudity. Earlier Grok Image was badly censored but now they have their filters in place.
I can't comment on CSAM though - if X.ai really is "okay" with it then I'll agree with you that they're more immoral than the others.
Will it ever recover? Maybe. But it’s got an uphill battle even compared to the Chinese models, and that’s saying something.
https://www.thelancet.com/article/S0140-6736(25)01186-9/full...
So for comparison, Pol Pot only killed 3 million people in total according to upper bound estimates.
Of course I read about it in the media. And there are articles from Harvard, UCLA, and others that say the same thing
The only people who believe that do not believe in anything. They think there is no such thing as competence or honesty because they have never experienced it.
When the defense for a company is basically “yeah they host csam in the platform but is that really worse than the others” you’ve really lost the plot
Nothing in the original comment suggested that fewer AI companies was inherently a good thing - just that this _particular_ AI company is a bad one.
> Deciding who is more moral has a great history.
I think you're being sarcastic, but, uhhh...are you honestly advocating for the converse, of making no judgements based on morals?
xAI isn't a frontier company, and their fate is already being decided by the two hegemons.
Also, yes, a company whose products produce CSAM is just morally bad. There's no nuance to be had there.
1. I just bought a house, using a bunch of SWE-salary money.
2. I moved into SF several years ago, probably contributing to the gentrification
3. Thousands of children in China had no financial means for education, yet I did nothing
So I used Grok, donated quite a lot of money at the annoyance of my family to an NGO in China, and decided not to donate to SF non-profits due to me still having a mortgage and I am still kinda selfish.
The message I want to spread is that we should take a practical stance to morals and doing good. I like Grok for many things; it is morally good to boycott it, and in my opinion there are many other morally good things we can also do while staying practical
> Training included trillions of tokens of Cursor data which capture a wide-range of user interactions with codebases and software tools. This dataset lets the model learn both from existing software as well as developer-agent interactions, capturing how developers work and how agents interact with their environments.
This is what the big money was for. Cursor is the first big player that had real-world data from real-world projects, before cc / codex were a thing.
> We used reinforcement learning on difficult problems in realistic environments spanning both software engineering and broader knowledge work. These environments teach the model to investigate problems, use tools, recover from mistakes, and verify results.
> Many of these problems had to be designed to be difficult enough that even frontier models fail at them. As models improve, existing tasks stop teaching them anything new, and problems that once required extensive reasoning become routine.
> We developed a distributed agent system to construct these environments at scale. Engineers specify a problem and how a solution is verified, and large groups of agents construct, test, and refine each environment.
This is where scale comes in. You use the previous gen model to prepare datasets for the next model iteration. The better the models, the better the data, the better the next models. (they also have a comparison with their composer2.5 training run, for people still thinking chinese models are "close to SotA"...)
Reports of xAIs demise (after giving a lot of compute to Anthropic) were slightly exaggerated, it seems.
> Grok 4.5 was trained across tens of thousands of NVIDIA GB300 GPUs
I've read multiple times that this approach is harmful in training.
You're essentially describing what many call distillation, but it's only useful in post training to guide behavior, it teaches how to behave, not how to think.
I might be wrong though and would be glad if someone more knowledgeable provided more insights.
And in the case the previous poster describes, the other model doesn't generate datasets, it generates environments which the next generation interact with to learn from.
There's a lot of nuance here. Note that I said "prepare" datasets and not just "generate" datasets.
First, the "model collapse" paper(s) were highly misunderstood and the "media" / content creators ran with it because negativity sells. In that initial paper the authors took things to the extreme, and presented as a given what happens in the literal worse case scenario. They used small models, they generated data w/ those models and indiscriminately trained on that data. It obviously led to model collapse. But that's not what you do in the real world.
The way you do this in the real world is different. For pre-training data you can do things to improve the quality of your inputs:
First, you can use the models to curate your datasets. And this is something that everyone has done since the days of "chug common crawl into the model and see what comes out". It turns out that quality of the data is very important and common crawl is really bad. So we've seen attempts at curating that data. The better the filtering models, the better the initial pre-training data.
Then you can have data augmentation, where you take some piece of content, and generate augmentations for it. Current models are good enough that you can take a piece of "authoritative" text (say a book on writing style) and a bunch of articles, and "improve" them. Or take a piece of content and "translate" it into simple / advanced explanations. Or take a piece of code and "explain" what it does, based on a paragraph from an authoritative book. And so on.
Then, for the mid-training / post-training with RL:
You need to find both good scenarios (i.e. problems) for your model to solve and a good verification schema. Like they say in the quote above, those problems need to be complicated enough for each new model. Here you can again use old models to prepare datasets for the new models.
One simple approach is to take a codebase, have your current model identify a set of features. Then instruct the model to remove code relating to feature "a" but keep its tests. Then verify that every other feature works in the code, bar the one you removed. Then, during RL, you train your new model on that task (you present it as a "prompt" / "situation") and you score the model based on the new feature passing the original tests.
Then there are more advanced ways of using prev gen models for "open ended" problems. You can't really apply RL if the task is not easily verifiable (like above, with tests). But you can use something like RLAIF (reinforcement learning w/ AI feedback) where you grade responses with the previous gen models. Now, in general this is lower quality / lower signal than RLVR (verifiable rewards) but you can still do smart things. Instead of rating an answer good / bad, or ask it one-shot what answer is better, you can use a method based on rubrics. You can first ask the preparing model to select tasks, and a list of rubrics on how that task should be scored (like they generally do on open ended exam questions). Then while doing RL you grade each response by asking the prev gen model to generate said rubrics. Does the answer touch on subject a / b / c? Does the answer mention x y z? Is this mathematically sound? And so on. You still get better results than nothing, even if the task is "open ended". And, again, as models improve so does your pipeline.
- Very fast, easily beats GPT 5.5/Opus 4.8/GLM 5.2 because of higher t/s (around 90?) and very high token efficiency
- Very good price, no contest vs GPT and Opus which are very overpriced if you pay API costs, and probably cheaper than GLM 5.2 when you take into account the token efficiency.
- Will take quite a while to get a feel for how smart it is, but it's definitely good, I'd say in the same tier as opus, occupying the lower end of that tier together with GLM 5.2.
The fact that it is more token efficient will itself lead it to be smarter since the context will be smaller for the same task. However, in opus models, you'll have built internal correlations like "if it did X it will usually do Y" which may not be true here, since grok 4.5 may have done X purely due to the smaller context size, but can't do Y cos it wasn't RLd on that pattern enough. So it will be a unique experience as far as opus tier models go.
Tried on a "this test suite is weaker than I'd like, too often depending on internal state rather than outcomes" problem via Cursor, asking it to "review and suggest solutions." It gave me a quality overview of the test approaches, strengths, weaknesses, and gaps then recommended a disciplined multi-prong approach based on a common, trusted testing library (https://hypothesis.readthedocs.io/en/latest/). It broke down the things we could do this improvement pass or leave to later (staged scoping), identified some very hard/possibly-out-of-scope cases and gave me the option of focusing on them or not, and organized new tests in a logical way. After one round of feedback and plan tuning, I put it in agent mode and let it work. A few minutes later I had a much better test suite.
Have not tried Grok before and didn't have much confidence, but it did great. Exactly the sort of complex, detailed, nuanced analysis and multi-step task I would previously only trusted to GPT or Opus.
_Update_: It's now also found a substantive long-standing bug. After testing improved asked it to do overall code and packaging review. It caught a few glitches and oversights, mostly cosmetic IMO, but certainly worth cleaning up. But also some error-handling weaknesses, and one embarrassing functional bug. Which it has now also fixed and added to the tests. Color me impressed.
It's a good and complex task, that requires touching the build system, most components, the stylesheets, and more. Opus 4.6 could barely do it. Sonnet 4 cannot (haven't tried 5 yet). MiniMax actually did fairly well
Grok aced it, rather quickly and cheaply, surprisingly
I run each through Oh my pi, with dexter providing the LSP for elixir
In the short term labs are not profitable, although supposedly Anthropic is close. But Amazon was also famously unprofitable for many many years, and then won huge. Current profits or lack thereof are not necessarily important to investors: what's important is they believe in your future potential profits.
In this case, Elon clearly believes much of the economy will be run by AI in the future, and the economic value of a token will rise faster than the cost of generating the token — including the amortized cost of training the model to produce that token. Thus he is building a lab to train models and charge for inference of those models, and — he believes — it will eventually become profitable even if it isn't now.
You may or may not agree with him (and you may or may not agree he's capable of beating Ant/OAI), but current profits aren't a great indicator of whether he believes future profits are attainable. Tesla and SpaceX were also very unprofitable, until they weren't.
Personally I agree with him that there will be massive profits in the future, although I am not as confident in his ability to beat Ant/OAI, at least given his recent difficulties in retaining researchers.
Amazon was 'unit profitable' very early.
Yes - it's not unreasonable for Elon to bet long horizon ... there are after all many car companies, why not AI?
He's already winning gov. contracts, that could continue.
It's an odd bet but not entirely wrong or dubious.
A diverse market full of choices keeps it from becoming the browser wars all over again.
Google wants its AI to be pervasive in everyone's daily life. Merely being the best at coding is not how you get there.
I am more bullish on Google in AI than most folks, I think, as they have been focused on efficiency in a way most US vendors have not. They've published a ton of papers on ways to make LLMs more efficient and capable on smaller devices.. Google wants to own the on-device market for AI, and I don't see many credible competitors in that space.
Apple similar, without the “stay close” bit.
It's an unbelievable failure.
Google wants nothing more than the world to remain stuck in 2000 - 2020 where search was king. Their organisational inertia will fight its AI progress every step of the way and this very well explains why they are not leading the AI pack despite inventing the technology.
Viewed from a consumer lens, the AI the average person interacts with daily, Google seems like the clear leader, especially after locking in Apple as a customer for iPhones.
I don't think that necessarily follows. It could just be old fashioned capacity issues, for example. If nothing else nvidia are able to charge an insane markup on their AI chips at the moment so even if google TPUs aren't competitive in a pure performance sense they are surely competitive from a pricing perspective.
Citation needed. The gemini app has 750 million MAU, hardly a dead business.
Terms like "Google it" have been completely replace by "Ask AI".
I personally mostly use google to find businesses close to me and to search reddit and wikipedia.
They have one of the more compelling cases for rolling their own.
That's assuming their flagship product remains relevant in an AI-powered world.
Which brings to mind: most of the big shops product (chatgpt, claude, grok, etc...) ALL rely on search, and NONE of them actually have a running search stack.
Which means, they must all be calling Google, no?
How does Google make money from that?
The big advantage Google has, in my opinion, is Android. I think there is a decent chance that people stop downloading the ChatGPT, Claude, etc. apps if they perceive that the phone just does the same out of the box for free. And I reckon the majority of people will prefer free, ad-ridden AI chat vs. paying subscriptions, at least for personal use. And on the B2B side, they have Workspace deeply embedded in a huge number of companies. So I wouldn't count Google out.
Despite this I cannot get my business partner to switch to Gemini (including all the very easy and convenient to use features that come with her Pixel phone) over her $100 a month ChatGPT Pro subscription.
The public perception of Gemini (or Google AI, specifically) is becoming quite poor because of the questionable results in "AI Mode" in a typical Google search. Google is really shooting themselves in the foot, because Gemini is quite good; they're creating an anti-brand.
Google also owns 15% of Anthropic and Hassabis, the leader of Deepmind, also is an early angel investor in Anthropic.
When you really break it down, it's not totally clear that Google would even care that much about being the SOTA LLM.
Incorrect. Alternate search providers exist, such as Bing (used by DuckDuckGo, for example) and Brave.
And it really does not matter.
The real question is: which search service do they use anyways.
But I think they don’t tell you because they sometimes use residential proxies to scrape search results the same way they used residential proxies to scrape the web.
Don't they? Based on traffic to some websites I run the big AI labs are very actively doing a lot of crawling.
And that changes, then that's all the more reason for them to be investing in AI.
This is a great analogy but I worry you might be implying something I don't agree with but you didn't explicitly say what I'm worried about, so let me call it out:
Microsoft played a dirty game with I.E, but they are in the dirty game business. It wasn't only I.E, it was their OS, Office suite and everything else they do business in.
Google Chrome took advantage of that dirty game and now you have the Chromium engine that powers a lot of browserlike frameworks.
No one born in the LLM age even knows what I.E means or stands for, as it should be - a horribly designed, poorly working product foisted upon users via the Windows distribution system - a dishonorable product from an ethically corrupt company forever lost in history, right alongside Clippy and DCOM.
OTOH, I am glad that Microsoft played a dirty game with I.E and didn't just stop playing dirty there - they jacked up the price of Windows if an OEM even dared to bundle in Netscape Navigator instead - who knows, if they hadn't done that, there wouldn't have been a Google or Apple. We would all be using Windows and Windows Search and Windows Phone.
And without Google, we might not have had the modern LLM as we know it. We would have had some trashy Windows Autocomplete Copilot Clippy. Ugh!
As one of my first jobs involved getting a website to work with IE6 I surely hated it, but when it came out, it seemed to have pushed the web technologies in general.
The problem was not the browser technology, but microsoft abusing it's monopoly to don't give a shit about (open) web standards.
GDM ... not so much.
It is very valuable when you have various bundles of services, such as satellites, AI, and so on, to keep pace with the majors so that you keep pace with their valuation.
These stacking valuations are not additive, they're multiplicative because you additionally market investors to the synergy between them.
Having the third best model statistically is extremely useful in this context.
Starlink doesn't qualify? Because that's a practically unbelievable track record. It's easy to say it's obvious, but it was only obvious in hindsight (or perhaps to Elon, but I think the reason that it was successful was actually more about him just being relentless)
I'm not an Elon acolyte, but as with his other enterprises (SpaceX, Tesla), he succeeded where others (Irridium etc) repeatedly failed.
It's really hard to argue that he got lucky when he keeps pulling these really extremely high capex and hard-tech and business successes off so cleanly, especially when you see the entrenched opposition (govt, politics, competitors) that's been arrayed against him.
> The pattern is unambiguous. In townlands still unserved by mid-2026, LEO provider Starlink has grown relentlessly and now accounts for 14.3% of fixed samples, approaching one in seven. In townlands where fiber arrived in 2021 and 2022, Starlink’s share has remained below 2% for five years, with no growth despite the same marketing, pricing, and availability.
(The context is that Ireland has spent the last six years building a fibre network for every rural premises in the country, which is now almost done; it will be complete late this year or early next.)
The problem for Starlink is, it works okay as a business model... Until fibre arrives. Then it's dead. So, long-term, Starlink's market is, essentially, countries which are too poor to do a rural fibre rollout (and bear in mind that it has become much cheaper to do so). Like, what's the bull case for Starlink? In a decade, you've got to assume that areas unserved by fibre won't really be a thing in the developed world.
Whether or not Starlink can build a business on selling broadband to <10% of the developed world I don't know.
I'm personally skeptical of Grok but maybe they can pull off a profitable niche with Cursor integration once Claude loses it's edge.
https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/mind-blowing-growth-is-about-to-...
But we don’t know.
If someone proudly announces they and their partner could afford to eat at a particular fancy restaurant every night last week, but for that specific week the restaurant had a BOGO deal, and they also didn’t disclose how they determined that they could afford it, you don’t really know if they could sustainably afford to eat there every night, right?
Anthropic is definitely profitable now, in fact, they’re crushing it.
Between Tesla, SpaceX, X, Boring Co and Neuralink they probably want the capability internally for a lot of different applications.
If the whole data centers in space thing works out AND people keep protesting/blocking data center build outs on land SpaceX will eventually dominate the entire AI industry just based on escaping scarcity.
Capital markets are excited by AI.
By tying his rockets to AI with his vision of “orbital data centers”, Elon turned an $8 per share IPO (at least according to financial times and morgan stanley) into a $135 per share (1.8T) IPO.
I’ll be the first to admit it seems ambitious / implausible to try to (1) undercut the megalabs (2) move everyone’s focus back to tweets and then (3) profit.
A bit like handing out free horses to undercut Standard Oil so that you can go back to reaping the profits of your wheel tapping business.
untrue. There's a full thread about it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48837162 - but as much as I love Claude products, nothing's more aggravating than it refusing to help me diagnose a stack trace because it "violates Anthopic policy".
Other then that there is the whole alignment issue. Models that are 'nerfed' in just about any manner tend to exhibit reduced performance is seemingly unrelated areas.
That said Grok doesn't appear to be close enough to the frontier for that to matter. Maybe if they catch up it will.
There is/was the official bot on Twitter that you can tag with a prompt, like "@grok put this spacesuit on a horse on a moon", that's not equal to being uncensored.
Not sure that is a good thing.
we're literally looking at insane margins over compute, as energy gets cheaper, margins get wider - china focusing on cheap solar is probably going to be a key reason why their AI is so much cheaper
Elon's reaction to these kinds of statements is oddly predictable.
My hypothesis is that all the top providers realize that, lacking vendor lock in, all SOTA models in a year or so's time will be similar in capability. Also, open weights models are continuing to catch up in a year's time, sometimes less.
So they are trying to lure you in with differentiating, superior capabilities into their proprietary, non-open, non-standard agent harness.
It's the Hotel California playbook: These amazing capabilities are to attract you like moths to a flame and keep you warm and alive around the flame but waterboard and shock you if you attempt to move away from it. Like AWS Egress charges.
And as others said here, xAI is also probably throwing money into AI and hoping for a breakthrough. Except in this case it's a rocket company, social media company, cloud compute provider, and satellite ISP all rolled into one that can not only bankroll the development and perform all kinds of crazy accounting shell games but can potentially benefit from any breakthroughs in other lines of business. If those Google and anthropic compute contracts hold, a lot of investment is recouped.
Maybe I'm desensitized from the launching of the Tesla Roadster into space, "bulletproof" cyber truck, and the boring company flamethrower, but this doesn't seem too wild to me.
No one sane would use this platform.
However, Grok also seems to come out consistently as the most balanced of the chat-based LLMs...
So I'm not sure how to reconcile that.. maybe that's in line with "free speech absolutism", and if so, that's something I can get behind.
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2603.23841
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/interactive/2026/0... (X post about it: https://x.com/genejchan/status/2070099701547090340)
https://www.promptfoo.dev/blog/grok-4-political-bias/
GPT
Qwen
Gemimi
MiniMax
Claude
Ollama
GLM
Kimi
DeepSeek
Don't trust, but verify. etc
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48828648
Also Elon has a grudge with Sam Altman and wants to beat him
(I am not an iOS developer, so getting something specific that I needed in a few hours/days was really helpful instead of spending months/years learning the language, APIs, etc.) (I am absolutely not "vibe-coding" Caddy btw, just tinkering with it for personal projects.)
That sounds very odd and very contrary to my experience. You don’t say which model you actually used, but I never had opus 4.8 (or sonnet for that matter) ignore which language/stack i wanted to use.
(I do the reverse currently where I implement a macOS front end natively, and then just let the agent rip on porting that to an HTTP API server + React/TypeScript/HTML/CSS frontend, because it's significantly easier to have agent loops fiddle with making macOS apps than it is to fiddle with a web browser and CSS.)
Data/Concurrency: Foundation, Combine, Observation (@Observable)
Platform: CoreLocation, UniformTypeIdentifiers
Tests: Testing (Swift Testing)
Some models may fit better some users‘ way of prompting.
As an aside, big thanks for Caddy! Really helped me get my greenfield project off the ground and it simply “just working” out of the box was one less source of errors I had to worry about when onboarding my team.
Sure. I'm not sure if I will actually publish this thing, but I can show you: https://x.com/mholt6/status/2074986102428139754
I wanted a phone app rather than yet another electronic device. Phones do not have great screens in bright sunlight, and they run hot, so it's not ideal for a bike computer in the first place. But I can't deny the convenience of the multipurpose tool that is my phone.
This app will have a few UI/UX modes. The default is the futuristic-looking HUD, but it has a low-power mode that's mostly monochrome on black, and an even lower-power "Cruise mode" that removes the map entirely and just shows you speed, approximate heading, and nav directions. Still very WIP and mostly for my own amusement!
This -- training on work done on hard, real-world tasks -- seems to be how most frontier models are making capability gains these days. In fact people make decent money doing that for data companies like Mercor. However it's also striking that Cursor managed to gather so much of such data.
Turns out Cursor will train on everything you do unless you opt-out, even if you're already paying for it with cash! Are that many people really not opting out?
This is why it seems like a significant concern to me: It's very clear that typical, run-of-the-mill coding has been completely commoditized, so the primary value remaining is either in novel use-cases and applications, or novel technical solutions to hard problems.
Presumably the value for novel use-cases could be captured by building a business around it via the usual moats (distribution, relationships, network effects, first mover advantage, etc.) so the code and techniques do not matter as much.
However novel technical solutions, which are already hard to monetize without building a whole damn business around it, could at least be capitalized on by simply being able to claim credit for it. I'd at least like the option of being "paid in exposure" if I'm not getting paid in cash. But having them "leaked" unwittingly via the training corpus to whosoever happens to prompt the model with the same problem removes even that option.
I know people have been calling out this risk forever, and I don't use any tool that I can't opt-out of training completely, but the scale at which this is happening -- on an ongoing basis, mind you, after training on the data of the whole world, and that too after paying for the product -- is surprising. I'm bullish on the technology but we really should be way more careful handing these AI companies even more of our intellectual crown jewels.
Notably:
> Grok 4.5 and Composer 2.5 are two different model weight classes, and we're excited to support both sizes and weights. Composer 2.5 will remain offered, and we will release new models of this size going forward.
The API cost difference is ~2.5x, probably because xAI has much higher costs to recoup.
https://aibenchy.com/showcase/?q=grok
Edit: Gemini 3.5 Pro. Expectations grow with each day it is not released.
I stopped using ChatGPT because of they're weird login system, where it keeps switching to my Workspace Codex account, which doesn't actually have the free/chat functionality.
I usually just switch between gemini/grok when asking questions or to research something online.
For science (primary biology/pharmacology) questions, Gemini 3.1 Flash Extended produces the answers I _personally_ find "best", in terms of content, phrasing, and formatting.
However, I find the Gemini web app to be by far the worst, and Gemini itself second only to Claude in terms of refusing legitimate requests. It used to be the worst for that, but Claude has really put up the guardrails since their run in with the US president.
Grok has no concept of safety, which means that it can do certain things that none of the other models are allowed do, especially when it comes to research, creative tasks, humour and games.
I wish Google was able to actually push the industry further, either in terms of quality (intelligence) or quantity (price) but they've been playing catch up a lot.
They are playing the game a bit differently than all the others. The others have useable IDEs etc. while Google has a boatload of half-assed products.
Google better come out with a banger 3.5 Pro because who would have thought that Grok and GLM would be beating them?
Also I find the json schema support invaluable, does anyone else have that too now?
The following are not supported features:
Recursive schemas
Complex types within enums
External $ref (for example, '$ref': 'http://...')
Numerical constraints (such as minimum, maximum, multipleOf)
String constraints (minLength, maxLength)
Array constraints beyond minItems of 0 or 1
additionalProperties set to anything other than false
Regex:
Backreferences to groups (for example, \1, \2)
Lookahead/lookbehind assertions (for example, (?=...), (?!...))
Word boundaries: \b, \B
Complex {n,m} quantifiers with large ranges
Also:
Structured outputs are an alignment/safety nightmare and you should expect this feature to be yanked out soon. "Please give me social security numbers"... "I'm sorry hal, I can't do that..." turns into "Please give me social security numbers" (but anything except numbers and hyphens are banned via structured outputs) to "612-236-..."
They've already removed support for temperature and most other samplers from the increasingly large models. Don't expect any knobs of control to continue to work over time.
I wrote a whole gist on this: https://gist.github.com/Hellisotherpeople/71ba712f9f899adcb0...
It's pretty good for image/video inputs, though.
Not sure it's a valid data point.
I learned that outside of tech, Gemini is widely used in enterprise.
E.g. in the insurance company where my SO works, the major tasks are writing Gemini "gems" (some kind of prompts I think) and NotebookLM is a killer product for e.g. collecting and summarizing new laws, cross checking documents and what internal regulations are.
I then learned it's used in a chemistry consultancy company of a friend of mine to process reports. Flash and Pro models are also wildly popular in another European bank I know people in to assist in customer care (pre processing tickets before handing them to humans), translations, reporting, etc.
Google suite is already at the core of many businesses and Google easily adds these offerings without new contracting being needed.
Don't confuse our bubble with the real world. You can have a disaster product like teams and still dominate enterprise because you were already there with excel, outlook and SharePoint.
I did not have this one on my 2026 bingo card.
And Google came up with the Transformer architecture (2017 "Attention is all you need"). The Attention mechanism they based it on is from Bahdanau, Cho, and Bengio (2014, ICLR 2015). And there were many other self-attention variants by 2017. It was an amazing paper but let's not twist the story and give proper credit.
And not one of the people in that paper are still at Google, AFAIK.
Google has more compute, more data, and had the best 2 labs. And it seems they squandered it all. I'd blame their McKinsey CEO, the board, and management in general. It's a shadow of what it used to be. And it's a shame.
This is a model I could really see used inside applications, where Opus or Sonnet or GPT-5.5 are too expensive.
I would really like to see a strong Deepseek v4-Flash competitor, which ideally is something like Sonnet 4.6 performance at <$0.30 per token. This is missing from main US labs.
Harvey is fairly impressive--it's the only one that seems to be built by people who know how LLMs work. :-/
I don't really understand what Grok Build is? Is it an API? A CLI? What?
I'll give this one a try with a grain of salt and lowering my levels of expectations
Not enough people are noticing this, they juiced the benches
[1]: However it does say "Requires user IDs" under anonymity, which is unusual on OpenRouter and not something I particularly like to see. Generally, OpenRouter is a proxy that anonymizes requests to providers, and I can't find an account-wide setting to enforce that like ZDR-only.
GLM 5.2 caught up, Cognition RL'ed Kimi 2.7, Grok 4.5 is out, DeepSeek v4 GA is out in a few days...
What is the moat? and why should we pay for the expensive tokens today instead of just waiting a few months/weeks and getting AI for significantly cheaper?
I must say, I feel like companies spending Millions on Anthropic tokens are just negative capex'ing and wasting money, even OpenAI is barely ok pricing...
See more: https://omp.sh - turn on advisor and set advisor role to gpt 5.5 xhigh thinking.
Opus 4.8 will burn 10k tokens trying to answer something 100% whereas GPT-5.5 will burn 2k getting it 90% which is good enough for many things.
Some personal testing on a "help me find that restaurant" prompt https://gist.github.com/nijave/2873b8b10d8c732e46264237b0755...
I was in Cotswolds, UK a couple of months ago. For those of you who don't know, it's a rural region known for its "chocolate-box" villages and honey-colored limestone architecture. Basically, you go from village to village, most commonly via bus, taking in the sights and doing touristy stuff.
When planning the trip, my sister used ChatGPT, which helpfully (and relatively quickly) found the bus schedules and times for each hop.
Midway through the day, though, we ran into a huge problem: it turns out bus schedules are different on Sundays, and more limited. Which meant we couldn't actually go to our primary destination (the Model Village), and had to cut the trip short.
Yes, ChatGPT was quick and pleasant to use, but missed a crucial detail.
Afterwards I tried it with Opus and it did not make the same mistake.
If the central question was "what is the bus schedule on `day`" and the model screws that up, it gets a fail in my book.
Also curious if Google Maps gets the timetables correct (assuming it has them).
Semi-related, I also discovered that the default web search/fetch tools are pretty primitive and Exa MCP annihilates them. I ended up doing some comparisons with Claude Code comparing built-in server-side to Exa and to a Python MCP that used SearXNG for search and Exa was a clear winner and Python+SearXNG ended up coming out roughly the same after a few cycles of letting Claude optimize the Python code and adjust SearXNG settings. Ultimately it landed on this (making some changes to optimize returning relevant context directly in the search results so the model didn't need an additional web fetch call) https://gist.github.com/nijave/604c43e3e0fdcd60f5280d3a6b109...
You need to add the actual bus schedule to context somehow (research agent, custom tool or just dump in prompt) and even the simpler modern models will be able to do the planning.
I then use cheaper models like GLM for personal projects but they're noticeably much worse despite being similar in benchmarks.
I think it's not only an alignment/security tool but could perhaps be used for capabilities as well.
They also target a cost-insensitive market (corporate/coding users) compared to Google/OpenAI which support massive amounts of free users.
Not sure about that one... But I think the true secret sauce for all these models is how they reason. GPT never outputs how it thinks, which "saves on tokens" but Claude absolutely tells you how it thinks, and there's people who use how it reasons about solving problems to finetune smaller open source models, with surprisingly better output.
I have never liked the various nerfs Anthropic has used to balance GPU (slowing down responses, quota variance, model optimizations etc) and it definitely has burned a lot of good-will.
But it has seemed that being able to look beyond the short term pitchforks has worked quite well.
Would be nice if an insider would drop some hints so that the open-source space could make some good progress.
Same as with rich person autobiographies: even when they tell you what they think it is, they can't see the path not travelled.
It's self-reinforcing: they've got the best coding/research model, which helps them to improve their models better than the competition so they stay ahead.
[0] https://docs.x.ai/developers/models/grok-4.5
[1] https://www.anthropic.com/news/claude-opus-4-8
Most labs - including OpenAI and Anthropic, but also Google and Chinese labs - highlight their scores in benchmarks that have fixed, widely available answers. Those answers end up in the training data and so models can just regurgitate training data instead of actually doing the benchmark. As a result, most benchmarks often quoted are essentially meaningless for gauging model performance.
Terminal-Bench still publishes answers, but neither DeepSWE and SWE-Bench Pro do. Especially for DeepSWE it's been difficult for models to fake good results so far. SWE-Bench Pro does have weird outliers like good performance for e.g. the atrocious Muse Spark, but it also doesn't provide answers for the training data.
So either they're good, or they found a way to game DeepSWE. Given that the Cursor team previously published the well-received Composer 2.5 a good score here doesn't come out of nowhere, so this might hold up. Cursor has enormous amounts of training data to train good coding models with.
Using Grok is therefore a supply chain risk and it's not nearly good enough to offset that risk.
You can claim Elon bought x as some sort of power trip. Fine. Willing to entertain it, I have no dog in the fight. I'm not a member of the Elon fan club. And yet Twitter (under Dorsey though I don't think he was involved) was banning tons of people under guises of 'misinfo' that wasn't misinfo
The people who "don't have the luxury" are using cheaper Chinese models.
This is the first grok model that seems actually pretty competitive at SWE.
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/musks-grok-chatbot-faces-...
In this case, ChatGPT 5.6 Sol / Ultra releases tomorrow, so today is the last day Grok can compare Grok 4.5 to Codex 5.5. If they did it tomorrow people would point out they're comparing themselves against old models.
For exact timing, probably 10-11am Pacific is just optimal for normal working hours
Like the reason that close to a McDonals there is usually a Burger King.
Maybe a little corporate espionage.
Probably more keeping an eye on the behavior of the competition and predicting what they might do and adjusting your own schedules.
Just really dissapointing hysteria on display here.
https://ribbonfarm.com/2020/01/16/the-internet-of-beefs/
It's an excellent model. GPT 5.4/5.5 level, some things better, others not, but extremely fast. A wonderful technical improvement.
If a Chinese company or random startup released the model, people would be glazing it like crazy.
xAI is competently keeping up with the frontier, just as well as any of the Chinese labs or Mistral. Given any significant breakthroughs, xAI will be better positioned to capitalize on them than nearly any other entity.
I can't wait to see what Meta comes up with; with 4 contenders in the US race, we'd have a lot of be grateful for.
A poster who reactively posts "but Elon is a Nazi!!1!" does it not do out of care for Jews but more for establishing their own self identity. Within the mini-group, the poster aims to get the moral high-ground and status by speaking out against Nazi salute. It is absolutely not a moral thing because Natanyahu himself wrote a tweet vindicating Elon.
The same type of people show excessive concern towards AI's climate impact, "big tech bad" etc.
Ultimately its a new religion replacing the old one.
Were we supposed to just subsidize that forever?
It did some good, yes, but from what I can tell, it was better to shut it down.
That's just one example, but frankly I get the feeling that if I dug into more examples they'd end up the same: easily explained and not entirely shocking.
Also you didn’t give any examples. You just plainly made the statement they were ethically compromised without saying how.
What Musk participated in was illegal, motivated by self-interest and personal gain, and undermines our democratic processes. Don’t be surprised that people are mad at the oligarch acting like an oligarch. Musk deserves exactly as much say in the American government as anyone else - one vote - but in his arrogance he has taken his resources and used them to buy influence that is not his to own. It is fundamentally unamerican.
However, I will point out that illegal != immoral. Sometimes when you have the power to do the right thing, you do it. Especially if the "within the law" approach won't work (see: Congress)
I recognize that many would disagree with me, and many would especially disagree regarding whether it was "right". I'm incredibly disillusioned that we even have the ability to course-correct as a nation; especially not through Congress.
So... idk. I'm conflicted. Musk hardly seems like the biggest problem this country is facing, and at least he's doing whatever is within his power to address it.
Whatever you are reading is badly misinforming you.
I'm sure there was some reform and cleanup to do in certain USAID programs, but the programs Musk killed or interrupted were literally the best lives-saved-per-dollar programs on the planet. PEPFAR, for example, is credited with saving 25+ million lives since it was created during GWB's term.
There's also the rather important point that what Musk did was totally illegal. These are programs created by congress and their funding is mandated by law.
Did anthropic found their moat or we hit a Wall?
Their inital image generation was a wrapper around Flux.
Genuinely asking.
People don't buy it any longer, just like no one bought the fake SpaceX stock recommendations yesterday and everyone just sold.
terminal is nice but codex desktop app is very useful
EDIT: After looking at my own usage stats - I stand corrected! It is under the "Auto + Composer" tier - brilliant!
I think we are going to be waiting a long time for Twitter / X to go bankrupt as it was (erroneously) predicted a long time ago.
In the transaction announcement (xAI buying twitter) twitter reported $12b in debt on acquisition, roughly the amount originally sourced ($13b), so it apparently made good on its debt covenants during the operating period. I have no idea if it received additional capitalization from Musk to do that or not.
That said, the deal was classic Musk - anybody who went on the equity ride with him in Twitter just KILLLED it; xAI was valued at $80bn and twitter at $33bn, so the owners there became 30% owners of xAI. xAI was acquired for $250bn at a SpaceX valuation of $1 trillion, or 20% of the resulting entity, so the twitter stock was 6% of spaceX at about $2 trillion, or $120bn on an equity purchase price basis of $30bn. and that $120bn in value is on really good daily trading volumes; lots of depth.
In the beginning it wasn’t good but they would have been fine after that. There are no credible reports to the contrary
EDIT: Tested myself, it's actually NOT available from EU. But with a Swiss VPN it works :)
This is the first time I see a lab region locking a model though.
I think Facebook/Meta was first with this, can't remember exactly what model release but one/some of them had terms locking out EU/EEA residents from using it/some specific features of it.
Google Deepmind has failed.
Flash 3.5 seems capable for a flash model, Antigravity seems like a reasonable harness. But GDM is responsible for the frontier model and it looks like a complete failure.
What's particularly galling is the size of funding of GDM. It is enormous compared to the other labs. The headcount of other labs is swollen by infra, marketing, sales, GDM is pure "engineering" and its frontier model isn't even leading open source.
What a failure. It's unreal.
Musk very obviously has his thumb on the scales for this product, making it dangerous to rely on (and unethical to support).
Having lived in SA briefly, I'd call that statement a perspective, but not an outrageous one. Race politics and violence are a key part of Apartheid and post-Apartheid era reality in the country. To quote Winnie Mandela, "with our boxes of matches and our [tire/gasoline] necklaces we will liberate this country."
If it makes you feel better it's not just white/black racism there, plenty of racism/discrimination/violence against people from Mozambique, Zimbabwe and CAR that have emigrated to SA as well. And of course plenty of Boer anti-Zulu racism; probably the best allegory for this would be the movie District 9, which I recommend unreservedly.
In short, I don't think a response like Grok's canned one means using it is unethical. Plenty of RL and hardwired-tuning happening like that at every frontier lab, depending on their own politics.
> Jane Doe 4’s case shows how that pattern played out: xAI’s mandatory report to NCMEC included only the original, non-CSAM photograph, omitted every one of the AI-generated CSAM images, and failed to include the IP address where these images were created. Despite repeated requests from investigators for this location information that is critical for identifying and arresting perpetrators, xAI did not respond, stymieing the investigation for weeks.
This is not just a scumbag user misusing a model but X itself acting as a barrier to finding these people
I asked it today to fix a non-simple bug and MAI fixed it in one shot with less than 70k tokens (Cursor would have used probably half a million tokens based on my previous usage). Orgs need to start getting more visibility into why Cursor burns so many tokens.