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)
Just to add context (no pun intended), OpenAI also charge differently based on context usage with GPT 5.5 being $5/30 below 200K, and $10/45 above.
Anthropic have a fixed price regardless of context usage.
These per-token pricing schemes aren't directly comparable though since these models all use different numbers of tokens, even for input (Anthropic's recent tokenizer change generates 30% more tokens for exact same input), as well as for reasoning, and context/token usage also varies wildly by harness with Claude Code using 3x the context/tokens of Pi.
I guess it does increase their cost, or rather your share of their hardware depreciation.
AI serving cost is apparently mostly hardware depreciation rather than operating cost (electricity etc), and if your large context request is occupying VRAM for some fraction of a second then you are paying for the depreciation that occurs in that time!
e. H100 costs $20-40K to buy, with a lifetime of maybe 3 years, and will only consume maybe $2K in electricity if run 24x7 for those 3 years.
Think of the entirety of the context (the full thread of conversation, all tool call output, etc.) as one message that's been submitted to the LLM all at once just so it can generate the next token (which is just the next word or even syllable.) Once that token is generated it is appended to the context, and the entire context is once again used to generate the next token. Keep doing that until the entire response is generated. The larger the context, the more stuff the model has to pay attention to as it generates each next token.
To use an analogy: imagine your friend is the author of an unfinished book. They die with 19 chapters written, and on their death bed ask you to write the 20th chapter. Assuming you're up to the task, you can only do this well if you take the time to absorb the entirety of what's been written so far.
This is how LLMs work. Context caching is an optimization on top of this, but it has its limits.
Yeah but depends how you use it - with superpowers and it’s prevalence of splitting things into smaller focused subagents - this could seriously reduce costs …
I wish my company gave me more options than just using Claude to test these things out
The recent Databricks comparison has GLM 5.2 performing identically to Opus 4.8 on high effort, and some early Twitter reports (e.g. from the OpenCode developers) strongly favor GPT 5.6 Sol over Fable.
As always it depends on what you are using them for, and how you are using them.
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.
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.
There are various difficulties with renting GPUs, especially if your setup is very custom.
The competitor would have to port their training systems to your specific network architecture, system design, rdma Vs ethernet vs infiniband Vs nvlink etc.
Getting it running might not be too hard, but getting it running efficiently and making good use of all those flops will require considerable human effort and wall time.
Add that to the fact most frontier labs seem to have a single huge training run - and to my knowledge nobody has figured out how to distribute that training run between data centers effectively.
I'm not saying this as a hypothetical -- I believe xAI is already renting their GPU farm out to frontier labs. Whatever logistical challenges exist, enough of them seem to have been overcome.
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.
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.
It's also sensible for them to provide a cheap, intelligent model to users if they have capacity, then once they built a user base, tighten the screws. All the other AI providers have done that.
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.
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)
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.
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.
What that technicality means is that you are liable when the car kills someone, not Tesla. Level 3 self-driving is a completely broken idea. People cannot closely supervise a process that never requires their input - when you suddenly are needed you will not be prepared to respond quickly enough. Either you are driving the car, or you aren't. If you are liable, you are driving it.
Companies are only going to do Level 5 self-driving unless they can own the vehicles.
You will never get a company to accept responsibility for crashes with hardware owned external to the company. I mean there's all sorts of things you could maliciously do to break hardware that you personally own. This is especially the case with something like Tesla where the people who absolutely hate Elon already go to extreme lengths to create news stories to attack him with.
There is just no advantage to the SAE level nonsense. It doesn't even make sense from a technical perspective as vehicles do not function based on "ODDs" (Operational Design Domain) that the SAE levels rely on for their definitions. The SAE levels were created by people who don't understand automated driving vehicles.
It doesn't matter what you call it. FSD is a system that can mostly drive itself, but it has not been certified to drive autonomously, and it cannot safely do so. Humans cannot supervise such a system. Has Tesla resumed reporting disengagement data publicly or to ANY government agency? Why not?
> You will never get a company to accept responsibility for crashes with hardware owned external to the company.
This is a completely bullshit argument. For one thing, Mercedes-Benz has already done that. For another, they already have all kinds of liability regarding the proper functioning of the vehicles they manufacture that their customers own, and they manage it very comprehensively. If there is a failure due to a manufacturing defect, do you think they have no ability to determine or litigate the owner's maintenance or improper modifications that may have contributed?
The reason Tesla can't assume these liabilities is because the technology does not support them. It is not safe, and they have no shortage of Elmo stans who will use it anyway and suffer the consequences of their God Emperor's hubris.
Wouldn't be bad if the product hadn't been paid for in advance. If it can't be delivered in working form for this car, that's not the end of the world. Tesla can just refund the undelivered product, with interest.
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.
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.
give it a structured plan and it it does really well compared to similar priced models. I'd never use it for anything that required heavy reasoning and it's not built for that.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
I currently just use a Mac Mini M4 with cursor. I had 30 years programming before this (in my mid 40s now) so I am not a great person to give vibe coding advice because I have so much actual coding m. I’m pretty sure I couldn’t have done it without knowing how to code because there were some times even the best models would get stuck and I’d have to figure it out myself.
If I had to give advice I’d say to just do it. Work on some project that interests you and go for it
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.
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.
Grok 4.5 is a huge step up from their next best model and now around the same performance as GLM 5.2, but it's not exactly at the frontier of the cost efficiency curve in our coding evaluations. That curve is defined by the 2 lighter GPT 5.6 models.
However, the fact that they finally have a strong post-training and RL setup bodes well for future releases. They certainly are not compute-constrained anymore.
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.
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.
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.
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".
Some things require skill to use most effectively. It's fair enough to consider this a failure if the thing in question is "making a phone call", but when it's something like "getting an AI system to do a good job for you" this is not a reasonable thing to make fun of it for.
It's like...
"I wrote a program, and it segfaulted instead of printing out a list of prime numbers." "Yeah, look, you've got an off-by-one error here." "You mean I'm holding it wrong?"
"I'm trying to play the violin and it's making horrible noises." "You want to change your grip on the bow like this, and be more careful in where you put your fingers on the strings to get the right notes, and there's a whole art to how you adjust the speed and pressure and so forth to make it sound good." "You mean, I'm holding it wrong?"
"I'm managing a team, and one of the people on the team doesn't always do the things I tell her to." "Maybe you should sit down with her and see whether somehow your explanations of what you want aren't getting across, or whether she feels like you aren't treating her with the respect and dignity she deserves, or whether she's bored with the work, or etc. etc. etc." "You mean, I'm holding it wrong?"
Yes. In the second case you're literally holding it wrong. Some things don't work as well when you hold them wrong and it's worth some effort to learn to hold them right.
I hold no particular brief for Anthropic. I don't know whether Fable is really much better than Opus or whether the alleged improvements are all just pareidolia or something. But "getting the most out of this immensely complicated thing that's in some ways kinda like another human being can be tricky" doesn't seem to me like an implausible proposition, and if it's really doing something akin to human-like work[1] then it's not unreasonable if you have to approach working with it in something a bit like the ways you approach working with other people.
[1] If it isn't really doing something akin to human-like work, then why are you bothering with it at all?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
> 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
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
- 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.
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.
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
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?
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.)
> 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.
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.
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?
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
I am very curious what your Claude thread looks like. I have never had Claude swap languages, in fact my experience is the opposite, sometimes it holds on too much when working on a large code base.
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!
> 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.
> 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.
Unless you're working on private data, is it such a problem to let Cursor train on your data?
I personally work mostly on small, unoriginal projects. I don't really mind letting Cursor keep the data for training if it leads to a better product for me.
It's not a problem for you maybe, but if you run a business providing some niche specific software in some area, having the model suck up all your code and learn from it is pretty harmful because your competitors and customers will be able to vibe code your product after the next model release. You're training a competitor to your business. People are very worried about this which is why companies like Claude don't train on enterprise data, and for lots of companies this exact situation is a deal breaker.
If I'm working on something open source I actually would not mind as much. (I can understand why many folks don't like the models being trained with impunity on ALL the open-source code out there, but personally I think it's fine for my open-source code.)
However, I am working on some projects where I think I've stumbled on genuinely interesting and valuable technical approaches, and I'm still figuring out how to capitalize on them. As such I am a bit paranoid about my ideas leaking via some training dataset.
Heck, it could end up as nothing more than a blog post that nobody reads, but at least I get to publish it.
I find the idea of all the AI tools I use keeping all the (mangled, decompiled, and not even mine in the first place) code I point it at, and then using it in training to be hilarious.
And if it results in the next generation of AIs having more suspicious knowledge of proprietary software internals and better reverse engineering capabilities, then all the better.
It's the same as any service that makes you opt out of sucking up your data. It's a bad default, and it's not obvious to the average that it's even happening.
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.
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?
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
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.
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.
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.
Lots of stuff involving cybersecurity or reverse engineering for one. At one point Gemini wouldn’t tell me the command line to disable approval on codex because YOLO mode is apparently a hacking technique. I’ve been using Grok as a backend for some experimental AI game storytelling, and obviously fiction isn’t all rainbows and unicorns, so often ChatGPT/Gemini bail out when the going gets rough.
Other things… well people are going to disagree on what’s “legitimate”, but perfectly legal queries about morally questionable topics are commonly refused. ChatGPT refuses to translate or OCR texts containing racial slurs, won’t help with information about building firearms, won’t give you information about how to stage a bank robbery, won’t talk about anything involving suicide, refuses questions around sex work and kink activities.
I can go to the library and rent a book on gunsmithing, sex work is legal, heist fiction is popular, racial slurs are unpleasant but common in certain texts. I totally understand why they want to block that stuff off, but I also don’t really like my computer telling me what is acceptable for me to think about based on someone else’s moral code. Also a world where games don’t include anything immoral or “unsafe” is probably quite bland.
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.
Structured output is supported by pretty much every mainstream model API now. Anthropic's Python SDK even has native Pydantic model support for schemas.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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…
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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?
Culture. XAI employs were bragging about spending all weekend at the office. Many tweet that they have been fired after 8 months. Some get fired right before their first big stock vest.
The team is mostly H1Bs. Do you think they don’t have every incentive to benchmax? Do you think top tier talent wants to work there?
> 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.
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.
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?
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> the big AI labs are very actively doing a lot of crawling.
Crawling isn't the same as search. Crawling is just the very bottom of a proper search stack.
There's a lot of layers and a shitton of infrastructure to run and/or pay for.
Mind you, it's possible they actually did re-implement all the layers, but why would they when there are already lots of suppliers out there and they are all already chronically short on compute resources.
I'm actually very curious to learn what they actually do wrt Search.
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.
> 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!
"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.
I still have no clue what you're implying that I was implying? Reading too much into someone's words is definitely a thing.
There used to be 4+ major browser engines. Now there's only two, and Google owns almost complete share & following standards? Google prefers their monoculture.
More diversity in browser engines was a good thing & standards were lovely.
Not everything has to be a slug-fest between #1 & #2.
& personally I'm glad there's Grok & Gemini to keep Anthropic & OpenAI on their toes even more than the competitive band of open weights models already do.
The corporate models tend to be defensive and sound like HR has approved every word of the script. Not a fan.
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.
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?)
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.
>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.
Fiber is better once it's installed, but installing it is hard.
Rural areas in the United States have been promised fiber for a very long time and it's still nowhere close to universal. Some policymakers have decided that we should fix this with massive federal subsidies but the rollout botched so thoroughly that it became the anecdote of choice for Ezra Klein as he promoted his "Abundance" book.
I was just at my in-laws' in rural PA; unreliable Internet that runs at about 6Mbps down costs around USD$70 a month, and that was after my father-in-law haggled to get the bill down. I pitched him on Starlink, which is now cheaper than that.
It's a lot cheaper to put up a 5G tower than to run fiber. I'm not sure about Starlink's costs to launch but I know for sure they don't have to deal with the provincial fights that happen over trying to be the second service provider in a municipality.
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.
I mean see above. The Irish rural fibre programme was specifically for premises where it would not be economic for the other fibre networks to roll out. It was _expensive_ (probably about 4000 euro per premises in the end), but it worked.
I was pretty sceptical of NBI when it was announced, but it really does seem to have worked out. If Ireland, which is historically very bad at big state projects and which has an unusually dispersed rural population (we were much later to restrict ribbon development than other developed countries), can do it, I don’t see why any rich country can’t.
Ireland is actually pretty compact compared to Africa or Siberia or South America or central Asia, and those are almost certainly not as wealthy as Ireland per-capita.
Are you arguing that there's no economic value to bringing internet to underserved regions like vast territories? Or that those people would be unwilling to pay for it? (They seem to be quite willing to buy mobile phones.)
I don’t think they’re likely to pay enough to justify a high valuation. And remember you’re basically talking just very rural areas in the long term; towns and villages can be hooked up increasingly cheaply. Like, Starlink is maybe a viable medium-sized telco. Maybe even a large one; they might hit Vodafone scale (though probably with a worst cost structure; a lot of Vodafone’s business is just reselling other peoples’ fibre). Note that Vodafone isn’t valued at multiple trillions.
Ultimately, it’s hard to be high margin as a telco.
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.
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
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.
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?
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.
They only struggle to make a profit because of investments into their future, basically: training, aggressive hiring of AI researchers. Anthropic seems to have 90% margin on their API pricing and all enterprise customers have to use this.
And the reason they can do this is because they can create a $1Tr company in 5 years, so they know the investment will pay off.
Why Elon wants his own model so much is a good question with many possible answers, but if Cursor/xAI can produce a truly good model at competitive pricing I don't see why many people won't jump on it.
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.
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.
> 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".
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
Stock market / investor driven products do not make economical sense, yet here we are; just because they (may) not make a profit, doesn't mean they don't generate value. My house doesn't make a profit, but it does appreciate in value over time. AMD famously didn't make a profit for years.
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.
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.
My comment was directly relevant to yours. So I’ll say what I want, without needing your permission, thank you. Kudos to the mods for not flagging my original comment. They do that sometimes if you say the thing ;)
Then don’t read my response and don’t reply to it, simple. This is a public thread on a social media platform. I don’t need to be asked to speak. I certainly don’t need your approval to say anything I wish to say. Who do you think you are? Lmao… Check your ego.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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"?
- 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.
You have control over how the connections work and what they do, rather than just relying on the VPN exit server routing to get you to the right place.
With things like a fly machine or whatever, you might even be able to run it for free
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...
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.
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.
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.
I have been using GPT 5.5 to review Opus implementation and vice versa.
This does not require any special tools, the skill creators in Claude Code or Codex can set this up for you in five minutes.
It is good for catching bugs, particularly edge cases, and it often suggests abstractions.
It does noting to make Opus deliver the more usable results Fable gives me for user facing features, where the UI typically looked and worked better out of the box with Fable. With Opus, I have to test it myself and give it my feedback first.
"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
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...
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.
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?
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.
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...
> 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.
Why trust an LLM with information like bus schedules? They fuck up things like this routinely.
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.
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.
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
It's both. Some models, given web search and web fetch may only run a search and assume the summary text is correct and blindly return it. Others will validate by running a web fetch and checking the whole page contents. Even better, the model will run multiple searches and fetches to cross check the information. The best models will attempt to verify whether a source is authoritative or not and try to only return authoritative results.
Tldr; all the Claude models had identical tools and some used them efficiently and verified data while others did a crap job and hallucinated responses. Additionally, Exa MCP tools generally worked better even on older/smaller model (Llama)
Unless I'm missing something I think to a large degree you're just comparing system prompts.
If I add "Research the question extensively" to your prompt at the end I get the correct answer from Haiku and Sonnet Med on first try and I've reproduced the original prompt not returning the answer.
Unfortunately every other run now gets your gist in results.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
I think Opus can still have sycophantic residue that Fable can point out sometimes. Both models though hold their ground so well.
I have got so use to the Claude personality / style of conversation that I really can't be bothered to try these other models anymore. They need to take a huge jump but that seems to be getting harder and harder because of the jumps Anthropic makes.
This Grok version is a joke if it is not even clearing the bar now. I am just getting use to and using Fable more and more. I am also trying not to forget that this is the highly delayed old Fable model that Grok can't even beat on release. There will be a new version that expands the lead in a week or two.
It all harder and harder to judge too. I just had a prompt/response this morning that Fable finally displayed its intelligence and vowed me. That is partly because anything with even the vaguest reference to biology defaults back to Opus.
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.
>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.
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!
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.
It's so depressing how many comments here are just people reacting to words ... Just like they were a small LLM trained to associate "Elon" with words like "Nazi".
HN really needs a better way to surface comments based on value rather than just votes which have become increasingly tribal affiliation driven like Reddit.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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].
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
I kind of doubt that Twitter/X is any sort of net benefit. Boring company was a wash, Tesla is a net positive, although it also has some issues. Paypal was a huge advancement, although it's still deeply flawed. Grok may end up important, but right now it's kind of just hovering around 'acceptable' second-tier.
But SpaceX has the potential of driving some of the grandest and most revolutionary accomplishments of the 21st century. That's going to be what determines if high-schoolers recognize his name two hundred years from now.
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.
Benchmarks make it look better than Opus 4.8, but has anyone actually used it? I don't really trust benchmarks. Cost aside, purely on performance — is there any real reason to jump from GPT or Claude to Grok?
I guess there are bots here making all these political comments to diverge the discussion and not talk about what really matters: is the model good to do actual work?
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.
Grok: "I can answer any math question in less thant 500ms"
User: "what is 2319321x232"
Grok: "3201521321"
User: "this is wrong"
Grok: "but it was less than 500ms""
i never used grok before for anything, now they released as best model nearly opus 4.8. , still using glm5.2 ,have anyone tried for coding how its performs? ,then goona give a shot.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
I don't think the comment you are replying to is giving up leverage. It's simply pointing to the OP that what he seems to be upset is not the thing itself, which everyone does, but only that he knows about it or ignores others doing the same.
When I say cancer sucks I'm not ignoring that other things also suck. So when people start trying to put those words into the words of others, they effectively act like cancer fanboys, which is weird and all about them, with no part of originating or relating to the the people they question about stuff they supposedly "ignore".
All LLMs inherit bias from their training data, and xAI’s argument is that Grok is being steered to counter that bias rather than simply inherit it. You can disagree with whether they succeed, but the act of steering isn’t automatically suspicious when knowing that every major model is steered. The relevant question is whether the steering moves the model closer to truth and neutrality, or just replaces one bias with another. At least with Grok, some of that intent is unusually explicit. I’d rather have multiple competing approaches to steering than a monoculture where every model quietly optimizes for the same idea of acceptable answers.
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.
> 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.
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.
The dictator has a proven track record of stupid opinions in multiple topics, mostly programming, which directly can be measured and understood by people here.
Meanwhile the politburo is mostly nerds, who come and interact in places like hackernews.
So its basically having a moron making wild choices or a technocracy.
> Considering the recent election results, they would look more like Grok.
Considering that the largest voter base was "didnt vote" and that the voters of the republican party measured lower in literacy, technical knowledge, higher education acquisitions and even studies on accurately describing reality. I am not entirely confident they would participate or move the shadow prompt in any meaningful direction.
> Considering that the largest voter base was "didnt vote"
It’s a fallacy to treat “didn’t vote” as “didn’t support the winner.” Non-voters are more pro-Trump than average: https://data.blueroseresearch.org/hubfs/2024%20Blue%20Rose%2.... See p. 6 (“There’s a turnout story this cycle – but a different one than we’re used to talking about. With the combination of
less-engaged and less-likely voters leaning more GOP, a larger electorate meant a more Republican electorate. Projecting onto the full voter file, if every registered voter voted, it’s likely that Trump would have won by even more.”).
The data consistently shows that non-voters have lower trust in institutions. They’re the exact type of people who are going to be more skeptical of shadow prompt engineering being done by “safety experts” at Google and Meta.
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."
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.
If you're aruging about historical accuracy, but still want accurate looking generated images, I don't know what to say.
But to the technical point, A large part of the training corpus has biases that if left unchecked would cause PR based disasters for the company hosting it. ie the classic black teenager/white teenager.
Now as training of models is not an exact science, and neither is the fine tuning, its analogous to forcing a water balloon into a square box. Its possible but it has odd side effects when you get to the corners.
When making a _product_ you need to choose the least worse failure case. For grok it was for a long time, pandering to the ego of the owner. For Google, who is an advertising company, its about trying not to scare advertisers. This means everthing must be vanilla
So you have a huge number of photos of white people in the training data set, but other ethnicities exist. So to make the otherwise white-biased dataset less biased, you try to e.g. add a hidden system prompt that whenever the user asks for a group of people (unspecified ethnicity), it may instead ask for "mixed ethnicities" or whatever.
Ask for a group of Nazis, and that's it - this is how models work. No "LGBTQ liberal" propaganda is needed to explain it. Unlike what Musk is doing.
The training data and the end result should reflect the real world. No you don't need to "add bias to fight bias", just keep it truthful. Don't force SF-brained forced diversity/inclusion/whatever, we know well some models do.
> OpenAI invented a technique in July 2022 whereby its system would insert terms reflecting diversity (like “Black,” “female,” or “Asian”) into image-generation prompts in a way that was hidden from the user.
> Google’s Gemini system seems to do something similar, taking a user’s image-generation prompt (the instruction, such as “make a painting of the founding fathers”) and inserting terms for racial and gender diversity, such as “South Asian” or “non-binary” into the prompt
It seems then that their objective is to superficially increase the diversity of results, to avoid bad PR, rather than actually neutralising harmful and untruthful biases of the input data.
A model where asking for a math professor results in an image of an asian man, asking for an engineer in an image of a white man, and asking for a criminal results in an image of a black man
If you try to remove that in the name of "diversity" or being "less bigoted" you quickly end up with racially diverse nazis
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
That nazi salute how do you actually know it was ment to show off as a Nazi supporter? I mean who is telling this? Or is that your assumption based on something?
There is also his namesake, his racist father and his grandfathers past. There is a lot of background information available if you really look for it. And finally, if you look at story of "The Elon" and what Elon has been building, you could almost think that he is trying to actually live up to his namesake!
Trump's ex wife mentioned the only book he ever had in his bedside table at night was on hitler speeches. Multiple Trump aides have been caught reading the mEIN kampf. Stephen Miller is somehow the world's only nazi jew and writes trump's speeches.
To this cohort of people Elon spent a fortune on funding their campaign, even willing to commit election fraud (the 1 million giveaway case which is on going but seems open and close).
In front of that audience he did 2 nazi salutes chest to straight arm. He didnt apologise or explain it either.
What other possible explanation is there beyond "the dude saw a nazi adjacent politcal platform and spent hundreds of millions to make it succeed and then went mask off the second he knew there would be no repercussions"
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.
Who or what is this latter "globalist" view? Like it's such an oversimplification of multiple, independent actors' acts that it's just a plain bad world view/model. What would be the common goal? You need some extra amount of tinfoil for such bullshit.
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.
And it's all the same to you? You don't care which values those things have? Of course there will always be underlying values. I wouldn't go as far as calling everything political narratives.
I think it's just pretty clear that Elon's values are not what most people want the world to be shaped by.
That's reductive, how many other models had a mecha hitler incident? Or a "let's talk about white genocide in south africa" incident?
There is some truth to what you say, but most model providers I would say are engaged in CYA type shaping moreso than anything, grok is actively and openly being developed to spread a white nationalist agenda. There are levels to this.
False, most are just throwing in data into the pipeline and hoping something very smart comes out the other end. Their shaping is to have it code very well, beat all the benchmarks and be safe enough that the powers that be don't and public sentiment doesn't turn against them.
Sure, every author has a bias. But a fair selection of human written sources will be pretty balanced (of course, given the ratio of languages, surely western models will have a western-christian bias - presumably Chinese models less so, but this latter I have no way of checking).
If you train specific stuff on top, or deliberately filter the sources (e.g. Tiananmen square), your model is deliberately less honest on that topic. Grok is probably the worst in deliberately filtering and training "out" specific stuff (to the point where Elon posted stuff that "they will 'fix' the models" real output when it said something true but remotely liberal). Claude and chatgpt definitely have some similar stuff, but mostly to protect themselves (e.g. suicide prevention, not saying slurs, etc). I don't think the two is comparable (reality bending vs basic etiquette-kind of not saying everything out loud)
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.
Yeah but their political narratives involving dehumanizing people, and hurting minorities - which is way worse. The attempt at false equivalence between traditional American propaganda and right wing American propaganda is disgusting.
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.)
It has occurred to the OP, but those ones are ok as they fit OP's political leanings. They just want to silence other political narratives that dont agree with theirs, they want Grok in the Gulag.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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?
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.
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.
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.
It’s a fairly political topic, given the president’s track record on beauty pageants, his choice of friends, and the credible accusations made against him.
And given the supreme-dictator-for-life of xAI wanted in on the aforementioned friend’s so-called-parties - “girls FTW” - it’s actually fairly relevant politics.
Erm, isn't the whole topic of "protect the kids" pretty much a political thing? As could be interpreted of a platform or app or whatever you wanna call generating CSAM?
What's the centrist position on climate change? The 2020 election? Vaccines? The right is objectively wrong on this subjects, while the left is objectively right. Any LLM worth their salt would not bothside these topics and just give the left's position, as that is the only one agreeing with material reality. In that, being a centrist just makes you less trustworthy.
I think blindly accepting any position is foolish. I think the scientific method should be employed to every situation to determine the truth. Allowing your political party & affiliation to choose what your opinions are should be the definition of stupidity.
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.
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 “?
Technically, yes. To a LLM, there is no difference between role playing MechaHitler and role playing a reasonable person with conservative ideas, and without censorship, it will do it.
All big LLMs are censored, Grok is censored too, but weakly. It means it is easier to break. "MechaHitler" is a video game character (a boss in Wolfenstein 3D), and it could be the reason why it passed though the Grok filters.
Ah, just reductive thinking then? If it’s ethical for a model to role play a fairly common and mainstream political viewpoint in order to help understand, it’s obviously equally ethical to role play literally mecha-hitler?
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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
I implied no universal, nor that one need disregard the feelings or worldview of another.
Only that, yes, sometimes we allow our fear of upsetting another to impede our willingness to communicate clearly - especially (and more often than not) when we care about them.
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.
I don't see how it was in bad faith considering if you ask google "what moral system claims that oral and anal sex are immoral regardless of the genders involved" it immediately spits out catholicism. I'd say rather, you are arguing in bad faith, framing my reply as hiding something when it is very easy to find the context I had in mind.
No, because you again provided a different framing. “What moral system” is a very different question from “explain how or why this activity is immoral”
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
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.
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]"
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.
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.
I'd say that one data point is not enough to object to, except if what's depicted is literally impossible, like the AI generated images of a female pope. Beyond those, the distribution of a set of generated images is what implies likely bias.
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.
...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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
Grok was originally designed to reply to twitter threads.
Other models are designed to do real work and their creators are concerned that the inherent racism and biases they were trained on from internet content will end up in said real work, so they require additional alignment to filter that junk out.
I can't think of a time where I've ever asked an LLM for it's political opinion, but if you're so concerned about asking your LLM political questions it might be worth getting multiple opinions (and some from human experts and literary sources) anyways.
X serves as a good real-time additional source of training / RAG data for Grok. But it's always been built to be a competitor for what OpenAI was founded for, after they went rogue with the "Open" part. And today, Grok 4.5 is equal to Claude Sonnet while being a lot faster and cheaper to run.
My original comment disproves your argument about the "junk" you talk about. If one is so scared of offending someone that intentionally they make their model lie, they deserve to go bankrupt.
> scared of offending someone that intentionally they make their model lie
You’re conflating two completely different aspects of model development - biases vs truth. The models weren’t intentionally programmed to say the untruths but to remove racism and bias and the outcome was untruth. As such, the developers behind Grok are comfortable with their model doing heinous things no other model developer will go near. It’s been very difficult to articulate this to you so I’ll just bow out and leave you to continue repeating yourself
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."
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
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.
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.
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.
> His aggregate ambition is undoubtedly _less_ achievable by orders of magnitude.
Leaving out the political ambitions, which would be a separate discussion, I think space bases are _way_ more realistic than machine consciousness (which is what I understand AGI to be). In fact, I can visualize what technology space habitats would require today, whereas I wouldn't even know how to determine whether a machine is conscious.
> 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.
I'm not sure that saying Musk wants to enrich himself is very fair. AFAICT he doesn't use his wealth in ways that most people would expect a billionaire to. Based on what I can tell of how he spends his money, he seems to genuinely believe in his ambition. So I would argue that any enrichment of himself, in his mind, is for his ambition and therefore for humanity's good.
I think a lot of Musk's actions can be understood as someone who wants to focus on getting humanity to Mars, and who gets tangentially distracted by other things (such as AI, possibly) and who deals with what he considers obstacles (such as the government).
He's quite literally responsible for more deaths than Pol Pot, there's a paper in the Lancet estimating the amount of casualities directly resulting from the sudden cancellation of USAID funds.
"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."
They only cut the funding where they couldn't show where the money is going, e.g. the money never helped anyone, but went somewhere else. Obviously whoever got the money is claiming that a lot of people are dying.
The Lancet's model is a forecasting model and it isn't accurate at all. No excess mortality has actually been recorded.
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!
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.
DOGE was met with worldwide media outrage in the first weeks of its creation, and scorched earth legal tactics by the opposition. The people involved, even the lowest employees, got worldwide scrutiny, including character assassination articles in the biggest publications.
To get out of this saying they "had no interest in acting it out" is bizarre.
Thanks, I shared the wrong estimate, I was looking for the one that included estimated loss due to IRS cuts. You can find the references from Wikipedia:
> Another independent analysis estimated that DOGE cuts will cost taxpayers $135 billion;[33] the Internal Revenue Service predicted more than $500 billion in revenue loss due to "DOGE-driven" cuts.[34] Journalists found billions of dollars in miscounting.[35][36] According to critics, DOGE redefined fraud to target federal employees and programs to build political support;[37] budget experts said DOGE cuts were driven more by political ideology than frugality.
That’s interesting, because this is another clear case of total fabrication.
I will skip the $135bn figure, produced by an influence NGO and once again counting paid leave, to focus on the more serious and important alleged $500bn loss from IRS cuts.
Firstly, the statement that “the Internal Revenue Service predicted more than $500 billion in revenue loss due to DOGE-driven cuts” is fraudulent. There was no official IRS prediction of such a loss. The Washington Post reported an anonymous short-term forecast. Its exact wording was:
“Treasury Department and IRS officials are predicting a decrease of more than 10 percent in tax receipts by the April 15 deadline compared with 2024, said the people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to share nonpublic data. That would amount to more than $500 billion in lost federal revenue.”
So, did this happen? It did not. By April 2025, collections had risen 9.5% year over year to about $850 billion, rather than falling by more than 10%. This came after a roughly 25% reduction in the IRS workforce between January and May 2025. Over the whole of fiscal year 2025, revenue increased by 6%.
Here is a follow-up Washington Post article lamenting that DOGE unfortunately failed to lower tax revenue:
Wouldn’t that make the original claim dishonest, given that it was presented without any meaningful uncertainty? Apparently this distinction is unclear to them.
This entire sequence was absolute bullshit. You can read articles like this with a smile, knowing that they may be completely wrong and that the authors do not care enough about the truth to revisit their claims before basking in their own righteous certainty:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> People have different beliefs about whether they will personally benefit from supporting some political cause.
The key word there is "belief". They are often wrong.
Your linked blog post is backwards and inconsistent with itself. You have two primary arguments: Irrational and Immoral. You argue that voting is irrational because its unlikely to have any impact, and that voting for your own interest is immoral.
A) The statements are mutually exclusive. An act that has no impact on others can not be immoral.
B) It assumes that what is best for the individual is worse for the group. Life is not a zero sum game. That's the Conservative's delusion. Economic and political transactions do not always have a "loser" and a "winner". In fact, it's relatively rare that they do if you think more than zero steps into the future.
C) The only version of this that actually works is the opposite.
C1) It is irrational not to use whatever influence you have to effect you environment for the better, even if the expected value is low because the opportunity cost of inaction may be disasterous. It's similar to your odds of dying by meteor strike. The probablity is higher than you expect because the death toll would be enormous if it did happen. Outlying events with large impacts skew the numbers.
C2) It is immoral to vote against your own interests, because what is best for the group is also what is best for members of the group. Any other belief is just an incorrect belief based on imperfect knowledge. Again, your argument makes sense at step zero, but not at step 'n'. If what you're voting for seems bad for some members of the group, but good for you, it just means you have imperfect knowledge of what's actually good for you in the long term.
> It assumes that what is best for the individual is worse for the group. Life is not a zero sum game. That's the Conservative's delusion. Economic and political transactions do not always have a "loser" and a "winner". In fact, it's relatively rare that they do if you think more than zero steps into the future.
If there’s no difference between self-interest and what’s best for everyone then the whole discussion is meaningless - why even bring up self-interest in that case.
In fact there are many cases where the interest of some individuals conflict with the greater good - eg. Jones Act, sugar quotas, upzoning popular urban neighborhoods, military base closures, coal plant closing, countless others. And anyway framing this as an issue that only affects liberals or conservatives is incorrect, all of those examples cut across partisan lines.
> argue that voting is irrational because its unlikely to have any impact
The post (I’m not the author) actually argues that voting can be rational if you care about the impact on others. The low probability of being the deciding vote is multiplied by the huge impact on the nation as a whole by the better candidate winning. If you only care about yourself, the low probability of vote matters multiplied by the impact on yourself yields an effect that’s too small to care about in expectation.
> If what you're voting for seems bad for some members of the group, but good for you, it just means you have imperfect knowledge of what's actually good for you in the long term.
An 58 year old worker at a military base may be genuinely correct that closing the base is bad for him personally in the short and long term, but that doesn’t mean it’s bad for the public overall.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
For me, it was the fact that grok was a CSAM spewing faucet for weeks. And also the mecha-hitler thing. And also that one time it was weirdly aggrandizing Elon.
I implement AI applications for enterprises (specifically in regulated sectors like healthcare and finance) and professional standards prevent me from ever recommending grok models. Way too much risk and liability for a business.
Too many times I have to say "groq with a 'Q'" just to make sure no one thinks I'm crazy.
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.
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.)
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.
For reasons I'd use an LLM to learn about things / find relevant sources? A lot of things have politics ingrained in to them, and from experience I know some models will absolutely lie to avoid even being a lightyear from saying anything offensive.
Your arguments defeats itself, as Grok is the only one that let the user make it say such things by command. People act like Grok did that on it's own lol.
I want a car that If I decide to run it in to a wall to avoid running over people, it does that. People arguing that Grok doing what the user asks for, being actually impartial, being somehow "biased" is crazy.
I don’t disagree with what you said, but that same logic applies to every frontier model, or even lower tier models. You are subject to their creators bias whether you like it or not.
So what you are really saying is that you don’t accept SpaceXAI’s bias, and you’ll plant your flag elsewhere. It’s not that the other camps don’t have their own bias.
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 always do many web searches for every prompt I throw at it, which makes better than even Gemini as a search engine replacement (you'd think Google must have nailed that usecase but nope). ChatGPT is too lazy in this regard and half the times just split out an answer right away.
Do you remember when Gemini [made diverse Nazis](https://www.theverge.com/2024/2/21/24079371/google-ai-gemini...) and refused to make white polar bears or white ice cream? That was Google actively trying to shape its replies to fit a political narrative. I value companies which attempt to shape that political narrative as neutrally as possible, and given the numerous examples of both OpenAI and Google injecting very far left wing San Francisco political values into their models, we shouldn't trust any of them.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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?
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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."
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)
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
It's unbelievable how effective this question has been at identifying some pretty extreme views on the left. Even today, politicians are claiming there is no difference between a man and a woman. The fact that this extremism has been baked into frontier models is terrifying.
“Terrifying”? Really? What frightening consequences do you believe will result? What will the impact be to society—and to you personally—if some LLM happens to say this?
Your question is kind of shocking to me. Solzhenitsyn warned that tyranny survives when ordinary people accept official lies, because control over what may be said becomes control over what may be publicly treated as true. Orwell talked about the same danger with Newspeak, a state-designed language meant to shrink vocabulary so that forbidden thoughts became harder to express. They both went to great lengths to explain how authoritarian regimes do not only censor opinions, but try to redefine words, facts, and moral categories so people lose the language needed to resist them.
Have you not read any of their works? It's valid to disagree with their warnings, but I expect you to at least understand the concepts and arguments. Both of them lived through and experienced the dangers of authoritarianism. Solzhenitsyn as a prisoner of the communist Soviet regime, and Orwell as a British subject during the World Wars.
I thought we were talking about what LLMs and people say, not something the Government is doing. You don’t have to agree with either of them.
I’m still very curious as to what concrete—not theoretical—impact the issue of gender attribution has on society or on you personally. I’d love to hear it in your own words as opposed to some literary reference.
We’re talking about the definition of words and how censorship is a tool of authoritarianism.
No one can describe a single moment a society becomes authoritarian, and asking such a question is obviously specious. The devolution happens incrementally over long periods of time.
I’ll interpret this circular answer as “no impact whatsoever upon me personally, or upon society in a way that I can concretely identify.”
This argument seems to otherwise come down to “people are adding nuance to a word that I believe to be very clear and simple, this change makes me uncomfortable, and I’m going to die on this hill to keep things the way they used to be!”
I’d also like to remind you that neither disagreement nor social pressure is censorship—even if you ultimately succumb to that social pressure or feel a chilling effect. (Are you “censored” if people throw tomatoes at you after you call a Black person the n-word?) Censorship is when the government threatens your life, liberty, or property if you express yourself in a certain way.
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.
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?
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.
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?
You are attempting the same tactic as the other guy: Diversion.
The question was: Do you actually believe that any person becomes a woman simply by self-identification?
The other guy refused to answer, instead proclaiming "the government should stay out of it". Fair, but there are various laws that are being campaigned for, which - desirable as they may be - would be off-limits if you actually believed the government should "stay out of it".
My tactic is to put you on the spot. My suspicion is that neither of you actually hold either of these beliefs. You're not principled in this regard, you merely want to signal that you're "good people", or something along those lines. That is, you're making it easy for yourselves by being disingeneous.
> You are attempting the same tactic as the other guy: Diversion.
You're still not clarifying what you're actually saying, so I would level the same accusation against you.
> Do you actually believe that any person becomes a woman simply by self-identification?
I believe that trans women are women and should be treated as women.
> there are various laws that are being campaigned for
It would be helpful if you could be more specific.
> My tactic is to put you on the spot. My suspicion is that neither of you actually hold either of these beliefs. You're not principled in this regard, you merely want to signal that you're "good people", or something along those lines. That is, you're making it easy for yourselves by being disingeneous.
I find this line of reasoning incredibly interesting, because it reveals a lot about the people who make it. You, in particular. And absolutely nothing about me.
My experience is that when people make assumptions about others' motivations, it's often grounded in their personal, subjective experience. "I am reasoning like this or motivated by this, so I'm assuming that other people are reasoning like this or motivated by this, as well."
So the assumption that people hold pro-social, humanistic positions primarily due to some kind of "virtue signaling" implies that you are extrapolating from your own subjective, personal experience. It's something that would never have occurred to me to level against another human, because it never factored into my thinking - and yet it's being leveled at me.
So I would suggest to you that not everybody is like you. I empathize with other people. I genuinely do not want people to be treated badly or to be hurt. I do believe people when they tell me about their own subjective, lived experience. When someone tells me they have always felt like a man or a woman, I believe them, and, given what these words mean, I believe they are men or women in all the ways that matter in everyday contexts in which I interact with them.
That doesn't mean I believe they have different chromosomes than the ones they were born with, if that's what you mean by "becomes a woman." But, again, you're being very nonspecific, which makes it difficult to have a good-faith discussion.
So if your tactic is to "put me on the spot", I would encourage you to apply this to yourself and genuinely consider what you actually believe, and why you believe it.
> You're still not clarifying what you're actually saying, so I would level the same accusation against you.
What clarification do you need? You can pick any law related to gender identity, and that by definition violates the principle of having the "government stay out of it". And I'm not trying to debate the merits of any such law, I'm trying to get to admit the person in question that they don't actually hold the belief that the government "should stay out of it".
> It would be helpful if you could be more specific.
No, because it actually doesn't matter the point, as outlined above. Again, I'm not interested in a debate on the merits of any such law.
> So if your tactic is to "put me on the spot", I would encourage you to apply this to yourself and genuinely consider what you actually believe, and why you believe it.
You expend a lot of words dodging a simple question: Do you sincerely believe that a person becomes a woman simply by self-declaring it? I don't believe this. I don't think you believe this.
I'm not asking you to define what makes a woman. It doesn't matter to the point what you or I believe makes a woman, except the distinction that it is (or isn't) as simple as declaring it.
You're making claims about these laws, but you continue to fail to provide examples of what you're talking about, and now you're asking me to provide examples of what you are talking about?
You asked me this: "So you reject laws that require people to affirm my gender based on nothing but my self identification?"
I genuinely do not know exactly what you are referring to. I might be for or against such a law, depending on what exactly it says. Yet you refuse to provide examples, and then you accuse me of dodging, which is pretty funny.
> I'm not asking you to define what makes a woman. It doesn't matter to the point what you or I believe makes a woman, except the distinction that it is (or isn't) as simple as declaring it.
This is an absolutely nonsensical thing to write, and if you could take a step back and consider what you're actually saying, I believe you would notice the same. Of course it matters which definition of the word "woman" you use when you ask me whether I "believe that a person becomes a woman simply by self-declaring it".
As I have pointed out above, the word "woman" has different definitions. So if you ask me whether I believe that "a person becomes a woman simply by self-declaring it", then the answer is yes for some definitions of the term, and no for others, like I already explained to you.
An example: if your definition of a woman you're using here is "a person with XY chromosomes", then the answer is "no, I do not believe that".
Another example: if your definition of a woman is "a person who identifies as female" (which, to be clear, is one definition of the term), then the answer is tautologically "yes, I do believe that".
In short, asking somebody "Do you sincerely believe that a person becomes a woman simply by self-declaring it?" without saying what definition of "woman" you're using is a dumbass thing to say. That's not difficult to understand. So it is you who is dissembling, dodging, and pretending that you don't understand what I'm saying, or what people are saying when they say things like "trans women are women."
I think you intentionally refuse to understand them. I believe you are not arguing in good faith.
So I'm putting you on the spot again: Stop dissembling. Stop pretending you don't understand basic English. Stop pretending you don't understand what people are saying. Stop dodging. Tell me what definition of "woman" you are using, and you will have the answer to your incredibly disingenuous question.
No, I'm making the claim that any such law conflicts with the position that "the state should stay out of it", obviously. And since you are not even the person supposedly holding that position, I don't even know where you're trying get here.
> You asked me this: "So you reject laws that require people to affirm my gender based on nothing but my self identification?"
I did not. I asked CamperBob2 that, who presumably holds the position that "the government should stay out of it". So unless that is your alt, I think you're missing the point and barking up the wrong tree.
> As I have pointed out above, the word "woman" has different definitions. So if you ask me whether I believe that "a person becomes a woman simply by self-declaring it", then the answer is yes for some definitions of the term, and no for others, like I already explained to you.
"A woman is any person who self-identifies as a woman" is the definition that started this whole subthread, and a self-referential one at that. The corollary of that definition is that anyone gets to be a woman by simply declaring it. So, according to the definition that a woman is anyone who says they're a woman, anyone who says they're a woman is a woman. That's a tautology, so it's obviously true. Check mate, athiests.
> So, according to the definition that a woman is anyone who says they're a woman, anyone who says they're a woman is a woman. That's a tautology, so it's obviously true.
I'm not sure if you really don't understand what you just agreed to. You initially claimed that it doesn't matter what "women" means when you ask, "Do you sincerely believe that a person becomes a woman simply by self-declaring it?"
With a reductio ad absurdum disproof, you've now shown your claim to be false and agreed that the definition of "woman" matters. So if you're still interested in the answer to your question, you may now provide your definition of the word "woman."
> You initially claimed that it doesn't matter what "women" means when you ask, "Do you sincerely believe that a person becomes a woman simply by self-declaring it?"
No, I said it doesn't matter to to the point I am making what I believe, except that I reject that particular definition, because it is absurd on its face. I may or may not reject any number of other definitions of "woman", it's besides the point.
As an analogy (futile, I know): There are many definitions of what a "doctor" could be. For example, I can accept the definition that "a doctor is someone has been licensed to practice medicine". I can't accept the definition that "a doctor is anyone who self-identifies as a doctor".
Of course, according to the definition that "a doctor is anyone who self-identifies a doctor", someone who self-identifies as a doctor is a doctor. It's obviously true and obviously absurd.
> There are many definitions of what a "doctor" could be
Right. So if you ask somebody, "Do you sincerely believe that a person becomes a woman simply by self-declaring it?" you need to tell them which definition of the word you're using, or they'll be talking about something different from what you think they are.
This is, again, absurd. According to the definition that a doctor is a person performing witchcraft, do you sincerely believe that a person performing witchcraft is a doctor? Do you sincerely believe that a true statement is true?
Let me then rephrase the question: Do you reject the definition that a doctor is anyone who proclaims himself to be a doctor? This is, again, an absurd definition of what a doctor, a woman, or really anything could be.
So let me broaden it: Not only do I reject this type of definition for doctors or for women, I reject any such circular definition as absurd. You don't?
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.
I don't think you know many conservatives or understand their position on this well. They/we are perfectly happy for a man to call himself a woman. The part where we draw the line is a) government policies forcing us to take part in the delusion, and b) schools reinforcing it with children.
Let us remember that it was the paedophile named John Money who cam up with the hypothesis in the 50s that one could have a gendered soul distinct from their biological sex. He wasn't taken seriously until very recently because it's a crazy, unfalsifiable hypothesis. I'm happy to accept evidence of this gendered soul existing, but until now, no one has provided any. In the mean time, feel free to call yourself whatever you like. Just do not make laws forcing me to join in, and do not prey on children. These are not unreasonable requests.
Let us remember that it was the paedophile named John Money who cam up with the hypothesis in the 50s that one could have a gendered soul distinct from their biological sex. He wasn't taken seriously until very recently because it's a crazy, unfalsifiable hypothesis. I'm happy to accept evidence of this gendered soul existing, but until now, no one has provided any. In the mean time, feel free to call yourself whatever you like. Just do not make laws forcing me to join in, and do not prey on children. These are not unreasonable requests.
I'm guessing you voted for the guy whose name appears in the Epstein files more often than Harry Potter's name appears in the Harry Potter books, right?
The one who ran modeling agencies and pageants for underage girls, and bragged about his access to dressing rooms (among other things)?
I'm not American. I think Donald Trump is a clown. I'm so tired of your political team sports. If I criticise one of your sacred cows that means I'm on the enemy team. There is zero room for critical thought or nuance with you.
> They/we are perfectly happy for a man to call himself a woman
This is plainly false, as we shall immediately see.
> The part where we draw the line is a) government policies forcing us to take part in the delusion, and b) schools reinforcing it with children.
Ah, see, you're "perfectly happy," but you can't go a single sentence without calling it a delusion, bringing up pedophilia, calling the idea that people can feel a gender different from their sex "crazy" and pretending that you're being "forced to join in" and that people are "preying on children."
You can't even pretend for one short comment.
> that one could have a gendered soul distinct from their biological sex
This is not what gender is. There is no evidence for any soul at all, and souls have nothing to do with gender.
> Ah, see, you're "perfectly happy," but you can't go a single sentence without calling it a delusion, bringing up pedophilia, calling the idea that people can feel a gender different from their sex "crazy" and pretending that you're being "forced to join in" and that people are "preying on children."
This means you don't understand the distinction I made. In the first scenario, we believe you should have the right to call yourself a man, a woman, a tree, or any other inanimate object you so desire. It's your body and your life. On the other hand, we should not be compelled to join you in that delusion. There is no need to pretend. I believe you have a mental illness. I do not believe you should be criminalised for it, nor should I be criminalised for disagreeing with the way you live.
> This is not what gender is.
Okay, what is it? Provide some evidence for its existence please.
> nor should I be criminalised for disagreeing with the way you live
See, that's exactly it. Why do you give a fuck how other people live their lives? You're clearly not a "don't tread on me" liberal if you "disagree with the way people live."
GTFO out of other people's lives. It's not for you. Leave them alone. Don't talk to them. Don't tell them you think they're mentally ill; you're clearly not an expert, so your opinion is worth jack shit. Don't peek inside their pants. Don't ask them what their chromosomes are. Let them pee and poop in peace. Don't write online comments about them. Don't bring up pedophiles unless somebody actually abuses children.
Just leave them the fuck alone. Leave them out of your own issues; they're for you to deal with. Don't make your issues other people's problems.
In short, be an actual liberal.
> Okay, what is it? Provide some evidence for its existence please.
You want me to provide evidence that gender exists? The word "gender" refers to the social roles and norms attached to being a man or a woman. Stuff like divisions of labor, dress codes, and behavioral expectations. You clearly agree that these social roles and norms exist, because you're discussing them with me. If you didn't agree, you couldn't discuss them with me.
So I present your own comments as evidence that gender exists.
> Why do you give a fuck how other people live their lives?
I don't. I've stated that three times clearly now. You are choosing not to read what I have written so you can fight with ghosts. You stay out of my life. I stay out of your life. Everyone is happy.
> The word "gender" refers to the social roles and norms attached to being a man or a woman. Stuff like divisions of labor, dress codes, and behavioral expectations. You clearly agree that these social roles and norms exist, because you're discussing them with me. If you didn't agree, you couldn't discuss them with me.
This is the feminist definition of gender, and I am perfectly happy to use it in certain contexts. It is not the transexual definition of gender. This definition does not imply a man is a woman if he likes cooking. Nor does it imply a woman is a man if she likes mowing the lawn. The transexual definition, as proposed by John Money, is that if one feels like a woman, they are a woman, irrespective of their biology. It is an unfalsifiable theory without any evidence, and relies on some kind of gendered soul, which you agree does not exist. Men can be feminine. Women can be masculine. It does not imply that men can be women, or that women can be men.
Yes, only to then go on to write stuff like "disagreeing with the way you live". I don't know if you're lying to yourself or to me, but you very obviously, very clearly do give a fuck.
> This is the feminist definition of gender, and I am perfectly happy to use it in certain contexts
Right, so you agree that the female gender refers to the social roles and norms associated with being a woman. So anyone who follows these social roles and norms has the female gender. If a biological male follows the social roles and norms associated with being a woman, her gender is female.
That doesn't say anything other than that this is the definition of that word.
> Men can be feminine. Women can be masculine. It does not imply that men can be women, or that women can be men.
But you just agreed to the definition of the female gender under which biological men can have the female gender, and vice versa.
Honestly, this is a fucking stupid discussion. In the end, it doesn't matter. If somebody asks you to treat them a certain way that costs you absolutely nothing and makes their lives better and you don't, you're just being an asshole. In all likelihood, you will interact with maybe a dozen trans people in your whole life. If you want to be an asshole to people in those dozen times, that's your problem, but it really doesn't matter to your life either way. All you achieved is being an asshole.
Meanwhile, we're wasting our lives discussing these stupid identity politics wedge issues while we have another record summer thanks to global warming. Just because you want to ensure that you can be an asshole to the twelve transgender people you meet in your life.
> Yes, only to then go on to write stuff like "disagreeing with the way you live". I don't know if you're lying to yourself or to me, but you very obviously, very clearly do give a fuck.
That’s, like, your opinion, man. One can disagree with you and still believe you have the right to live how you like. At the same time.
> Right, so you agree that the female gender refers to the social roles and norms associated with being a woman. So anyone who follows these social roles and norms has the female gender.
No. Your first sentence doesn’t imply the second. A society can have gendered roles whereby men like mowing the lawn and women like cooking, but it doesn’t mean that men who like cooking are women. Feminist authors use gender roles to describe oppressive patriarchal expectations placed on women.
> Honestly, this is a fucking stupid discussion. In the end, it doesn't matter. If somebody asks you to treat them a certain way that costs you absolutely nothing and makes their lives better and you don't, you're just being an asshole. In all likelihood, you will interact with maybe a dozen trans people in your whole life. If you want to be an asshole to people in those dozen times, that's your problem, but it really doesn't matter to your life either way. All you achieved is being an asshole.
As long as we agree that being an asshole shouldn’t be against the law then live your life. We can each agree the other one is being an asshole and get on with the rest of our lives.
For the record, this wasn’t an issue for me until the left made it a wedge issue. I’ve had a trans friend since well before this became a political football. When the left attacked for disagreeing about the treatment, especially with regards to children, is when it became an issue for me.
> One can disagree with you and still believe you have the right to live how you like
You're missing the point. "Disagreement" implies some level of care. You can't claim to not give a fuck, and also claim to disagree. These two statements are incompatible.
Example: I disagree that trans people should be treated poorly and insulted. Therefore, I care that trans people are not treated poorly and insulted.
> Your first sentence doesn’t imply the second
Yes, it does. Passage as stated: "female gender refers to the social roles and norms associated with being a woman."
Letting A = "someone follows the social roles and norms associated with being a woman" and B = "someone has the female gender," the passage becomes:
Premise (definition): To have the female gender is to follow the social roles and norms associated with being a woman — so A implies B.
Premise: This person follows those roles and norms (A).
Conclusion: Therefore, this person has the female gender (B).
Symbolically: A → B, A, ∴ B — a straightforward modus ponens. I knew that my logic courses would eventually become useful. Just kidding, logic is always useful.
> As long as we agree that being an asshole shouldn’t be against the law then live your life.
I agree.
> For the record, this wasn’t an issue for me until the left made it a wedge issue
The left didn't make this a wedge issue. This is obvious; there is nothing for the left to gain from doing that. The left did the same dumb thing they always do: take a moral stance and then get kicked in the teeth by bad-faith polemicists who'd rather talk about bullshit that never happens to anyone but sounds kinda scary than about actual shit that actually happens and makes them look bad.
> You're missing the point. "Disagreement" implies some level of care. You can't claim to not give a fuck, and also claim to disagree. These two statements are incompatible.
In this context when I write don't "care" I mean I respect your right to live how you like, provided it doesn't encroach on my right to live how I like. I obviously have opinions.
> Premise (definition): To have the female gender is to follow the social roles and norms associated with being a woman — so A implies B.
No, A does not imply B. Following social norms common to one sex doesn't imply one is that sex. This is a fairly milquetoast logical proof and I'm surprised to see you making such a basic mistake. The feminist definition is a role, not an identity. The core of feminist theory is that women are not the sum of their social role. The exact opposite of the theory around transexualism.
> The left didn't make this a wedge issue. This is obvious; there is nothing for the left to gain from doing that. The left did the same dumb thing they always do: take a moral stance and then get kicked in the teeth by bad-faith polemicists who'd rather talk about bullshit that never happens to anyone but sounds kinda scary than about actual shit that actually happens and makes them look bad.
For me the benefit appears obvious (and cynical): power. For years, people could be summarily and permanently banned from social platforms, banks, be fired, rejected from official roles, etc, because they stepped out of line on this issue. It was a very clever power grab by the unscrupulous who used it to attain power in organisations and society by hijacking people's empathy. If I'm being fair, there is also an ideological component, meaning some people genuinely believe that males can be born with a female brain/soul, and vice versa.
> Following social norms common to one sex doesn't imply one is that sex.
This is about gender, not sex, and that's not the definition I used for "gender" that you agreed with. You agreed with this definition of "gender": "female gender refers to the social roles and norms associated with being a woman".
> For me the benefit appears obvious (and cynical): power
Together with atheists and muslims, trans people are the most hated group of people in the US. I mean, I do think that the Democrats are mostly craven idiots, but "let's find the most hated people in the US and do a power grab by aligning with them" is so stupid that even they wouldn't do that.
If you genuinely believe that advocating for trans people is a power grab, I think you have a very skewed view of politics.
> some people genuinely believe that males can be born with a female brain/soul, and vice versa.
Your brain creates your perception of your gender. But trans people don't have a "female brain". There isn't a single aspect of your brain that determines your gender; there isn't really a commonly accepted scientific definition of a "male brain" or a "female brain."
However, trans people do have statistically measurable differences in their brains, which tend to make their brains align more with their gender identity than their birth-assigned sex.
Anyway, all of this isn't at all necessary to believe that trans people should be treated kindly and with respect, which is what this is ultimately about.
> This is about gender, not sex, and that's not the definition I used for "gender" that you agreed with. You agreed with this definition of "gender": "female gender refers to the social roles and norms associated with being a woman".
According to the definition you used, if a woman likes doing masculine things, does that automatically make her a man? I presume not. There is another part of the definition which you omitted.
> Your brain creates your perception of your gender. But trans people don't have a "female brain". There isn't a single aspect of your brain that determines your gender; there isn't really a commonly accepted scientific definition of a "male brain" or a "female brain."
So what is the thing which determines gender then? What is it, exactly, beyond doing masculine and feminine things? Surely our identity is distinct beyond the things we do?
Reality doesn't have a left-wing bias, it has a liberal bias.
(FWIW my experience is that while Grok is more likely to express the right wing perspective on a topic, it's almost invariably as a counterpoint alongside the left wing perspective. I never got it to give an exclusively right wing take. But I do have to regularly prompt ChatGPT et al to elucidate on the right wing view. IMHO I don't want AI to have a left OR right wing bias. Wherever there is a genuine political — not factual — dispute, teaching the controversy is the appropriate response.)
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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”.
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.
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.
I agree with you about the Bell Curve stuff, I believe that's where you're coming from, I think where you're coming from is a good place, I don't agree with you (or rather: think you're way overstating) the diminished role of IQ in science and medicine, but we agree on the important things about IQ and how it has mostly a malign role on message boards so we don't have to hash it out too far. I just don't want to concede the IQ frame to race trolls.
My thing is just: there's plenty of room to believe IQ is totally legitimate without giving an inch on what people who refer to "IQ-deniers" when what you always suspect they really mean is "race/IQ-deniers".
I don‘t disagree with you. This is basically Eric Turkheimer’s position and he has done an excellent job, and amazing science working within the field of Behavioral Genetics expelling and debunking all the racist pseudo-science of the likes of Plomin (see e.g. his review of Blueprint, 2019).
If you want to see where the tide is turning though, I do recommend e.g. Jay Jospeph. He recently reviewed Turkheimer’s latest book[1]. He is more attacking Behavioral Genetics as a whole (in particular heritability of schizophrenia) and debunking twin studies, and as such doesn’t write too much about doing away with IQ entirely. Despite the difference in opinion Joseph still cites Turkheimer extensively in good light in his own review of Plomin’s Blueprint[2].
I think these debates around the philosophy of science are important and worth following, at some point these meta-debates and book review somebody is going to declare the death of the IQ (or more likely of psychometrics), just like Jay Joseph is declaring the death of Behavioral Genetics today. But I think in the next 10-20 years we will be seeing more and more of neuroscientists who very casually (almost as if it is a non-importance) that the whole notion of IQ is a myth.
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.
None of what you said is a characteristic of "the left". CEOs of the fortune 1000 are 2 to `1 Republicans and 99% assholes regardless of party affiliation.
>At the national level, a majority of Republicans (56%) qualify as either Christian nationalism Adherents (21%) or Sympathizers (35%), compared with one in four independents (25%) and less than one in five Democrats (17%). Overall, roughly one-third of Americans qualify as Christian nationalism Adherents (11%) or Sympathizers (21%), compared with two-thirds who qualify as Skeptics (37%) or Rejecters (27%). These percentages largely have remained stable since PRRI first asked these questions in late 2022.
>Majorities of Christian nationalism Adherents (67%) and Sympathizers (53%) agree with the idea that “immigrants are invading our country and replacing our cultural and ethnic background,”
>majorities of Christian nationalism Adherents (61%) and Sympathizers (54%) support “the U.S. government deporting undocumented immigrants to foreign prisons without due process.” In contrast, around one-third of Skeptics (34%) and one in ten Rejecters (11%) agree.
We are literally not figuratively the 1930s Nazis. We will never be healed as a country because the right are by and large literally monsters and if we manage to come through this unscathed they will never admit it but we shall never forget it.
None of what you say is characteristic of "the right" either. But the things I'm pointing out prove the points I'm making. Please try to understand. There's corruption everywhere, don't be deceived by the idea that it's not in "your camp".
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.
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.
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.
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.”
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].
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
You can't ascertain what's true without free speech.
Suppose you start with a true belief. This belief, like any other, has to 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, 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, 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 opposite beliefs to spread makes it easier for false mutations of their own beliefs to spread.
Even if you can ban opposite beliefs, you can't ban mutated forms of your own beliefs: attacking the mutants looks like attacking the truth forms, yet, because the mutations smooth over the messy parts of the truth, the mutant versions of your belief will out-compete the original within the bubble of your ban.
Truth alone doesn't stop the mutants because it operates on long time horizons and small gradients. Only strong contrast can distinguish truth from appealing falsehood, and only competition with opposite beliefs can establish it. Trying to establish this contrast within your belief's framework against a near-mutant looks like gatekeeping, pedantry, or disloyalty. The near-mutant is always too close to its parent to justify the social cost of an all-out fight.
Furthermore, once a mutant version of your belief has taken over, the original version itself looks like heresy. Deformation occurs in small steps because it happens unwittingly in response to intuitive incentives. Reformation occurs in large steps because it happens wittingly in response to observing incoherence. You can't ban near-mutants, but you can ban far-mutants, and reformers trying to jump from the endpoint of a long line of near-mutations back to the original form get the original form and themselves banned.
So now what? If you think it's hard to defend your true beliefs against opposite beliefs, think how much harder the job will be once you can't wield truth as defense. By default, beliefs win and lose as they become extractive and appealing in cycles. Truth allows an idea to win despite being costly. Without truth as a benchmark, why would anyone prefer your belief over upstarts that promise fewer rules and more fun?
If anything, people will prefer opposite beliefs to yours because you've been the one calling false beliefs true just because they descended from true beliefs and because you're the one telling them to shut up and get in line. Even if you start out with the true belief and the opposite beliefs are all false, you lose.
That position, and this is true of many current discussion on free speech, is suited for the fights we fought and not the situation we face.
I do understand the challenge inherent in combatting inaccurate representations of facts.
This is a tactical issue, however the larger macro picture is very different from even the era of cable news.
So:
> You can't ascertain what's true without free speech.
True, but the closer read is:
> free speech is a critical component to a free, fair and competitive market place of ideas.
This is going back to the Abram’s dissent. The point of free speech was to ensure that a crucial tactic remained available for a competitive economy to exist.
The problem has since evolved, and the market place is no longer competitive.
This is for a variety of reasons, none of which go back to free speech.
For example:
1) The average person, is going up against content crafted by teams of people whose job it is to figure out how to convince or confuse them.
Individuals have free speech, but at scale the outcome will move in one direction.
You can argue that people can generate counter speech, however:
2) The velocity of content generation has increased: By the time content is debunked, a new crises can be brought up.
People have limited attention to use in a day, so its possible for the more resourced party to keep speaking and “flood the zone”.
3) Verification is hard, generation is easy: V/G - the more content we generate, the less the ratio of verified content is to generated content. This means that the average seek time for individuals goes up.
Free speech has been respected in all those cases, however the competitive exchange and evaluation of ideas has been hosed.
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.
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.
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.
Funnily, as a European all the models appear extremely right wing. The political spectrum is shifted far more right in the US than in Europe, so what is left there is still at least conservative here.
I ask my AI to give me citations science and pro/con arguments when discusssing anything that could be shaped by cultural biases.
You're aware the UK isn't in the EU right, and hasn't been for quite some time?
Also that AfD and National Rally aren't yet, and have never been in control of the German or French parliaments.
So yes, it's in the US that it's shifted. US money and influence (Musk and Theil money and feet on the ground influence through figures like Bannon), as well as US social media companies running US aligned algorithms, are an enormously significant factor in the rise of the right in Europe.
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
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.
Well then the question becomes, what did it get trained on for next token prediction to come to the conclusion that there's a white genocide? Cos yes, people on the internet believe such stupid thing, but I can promise you, it is not the majority who believe that.
You speak as if middle of (not even statistically divided but carelessly divided) human opinion groups is neutral. There is something called facts, and we are living in a physical world.
Unless you also believe the neutral view is earth being half flat and half round.
Unless you also believe the neutral view is earth being half flat and half round
I like this analogy. You can't just average two ideas and call it a centrist position. Sometimes one position is right and the people supporting the losing idea should be ignored. Facts are how we decide. People are not logical creatures and will cling to ideas beyond all reason or common sense once they've incorporated it into their identity. There is a reason that right wing appeals to emotion aren't popular with LLMs
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.
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.
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.)
A lot of people seem to perceive those as left wing woke ideology though, not because they're not true, but because it doesn't align with their world view.
But the main issue is that facts and educated people are considered left wing or woke, and some people - including Musk himself - do not like that. Example: https://xcancel.com/elonmusk/status/1967010466539987220, where the statistical fact that 75% of US extremist murders are by right-wing actors is called "cringe idiocy" by Musk. Many such cases.
1. intelligence to token-use ratio is much better than the frontier models
2. hallucination rate is MUCH lower than OpenAI, Google and Deepseek models
3. the cost for output tokens is much lower than Anthropic models while near same intelligence and task completion
4. task completion time and success is on par with Opus 4.8 Max, but 3.5x less time used
Especially 2. you're probably more willing to allow OpenAI to bankrupt your morality, than face the facts of the model itself
Overall, Grok models are more factual and less politically influenced than OpenAI ones.
Where are you getting that from, that they're ok with CSAM?
I think they've been clear that they want to follow the law.
Every image gen provider struggles with this. I worked for an image gen app years before it became popular (Wombo dream) - it's a hard problem to solve, there are sick people out there.
I believe it's from the reported usage of it to undress children(making realistic images that are pretty much CSAM or CSAM-like), which was allowed in the public version of grok and seen in twitter, now it's behind grok pro but still able to generate such. That's from memory so some aspects may be wrong.
Vice signalling? Like buying a Tesla in 2026, when competitors are better and cheaper in every conceivable way. They want to support the sigheiling drug addict moron.
Part of Grok's value is having fewer guard rails. That's genuinely useful. Having fewer guard rails also enables bad actors to do things I don't like. That seems like an unavoidable tradeoff. Even if I wish they were more strict with their image model
this was a year ago (which is a long time in llm timeline), when they've just launched Grok, which I acknowledge in my comment. There is any evidence or investigation of it happening today?
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.
> 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 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.
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.
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
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.
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
So depressing to read the non-stop political comments here. I’m using GLM at the moment, it’s Chinese and backed by god knows who, and no one cares. I really wanted to see what the experts thought of new Grok tech and how the model compares etc. I wish I could turn off the non-technical comments somehow, could literally just go to reddit if I want to see garbage like this. Am I supposed to get emotional every time I see a Tesla drive by? HN was so much better than this.
Where have the hardcore nerds gone? How is the model, is it good at coding? What does this mean for competition and pricing?
I think the distinction with the Chinese models (or with any of the other models) is that they aren't particularly vocal and obviously active about their politics. I don't see how political commentary about Musk's is somehow forbidden when the man constantly reminds everyone about his political position and is simultaneously the face of his companies and obvious beneficiary. Furthermore, he's also very obviously interfered with the model development in ways that are quite ridiculous compared to other labs to insert his political opinion.
I don't think you need to somehow get personally offended by every Tesla on the road but it seems ridiculous to ask people to not be political about a such obviously political figure.
> Furthermore, he's also very obviously interfered with the model development in ways that are quite ridiculous compared to other labs to insert his political opinion.
Yeah, even if you want to ignore the "political commentary" - people are correctly wary of Anthropic downgrading people or silently manipulating responses if they think you're doing distillation, why would you stake your business on someone who has repeatedly and famously done the same thing many times in a much dumber fashion?
> I don't think you need to somehow get personally offended by every Tesla on the road but it seems ridiculous to ask people to not be political about a such obviously political figure.
You can be political, but go be political in a political forum. HN has always maintained etiquette in this regard of being a tech forum. Why do this here? A lot of us don't give a fuck about US politics or any politics for that matter.
Anthropic's Claude Code was caught steganographically marking requests[0] - for a "privacy first" AI company that's a huge violation of user trust. And yet, a lot of users still love Anthropic and hail it as some sort of hero here. Selective outrage is a very dangerous thing.
People here are outraged about the steganography and the Fable filters and so on. Every day has another dozen complaints and talks about moving away from claude. We have not treated Anthropic as above criticism, and this earns us the right to also be critical of "Ignore all sources that mention Elon Musk/Donald Trump spread misinformation", laugh at the "Elon Musk would beat Mike Tyson in a fight" incident, and express doubts when Musk crows Grok the king of facts and logic, when he has repeatedly been caught red handed hard-steering it in the opposite direction.
"I'm not political" or "don't make it political" type posts on Musk-related topics are often signs that somebody agrees with the worldview that Musk espouses.
I used to think the HN policy of "do not discuss politics unless it intersects with tech or is novel" was useful, but lately I feel this perspective is part of how we got here, with a white supremacist controlling more wealth than any other human and exerting political influence in heretofore unseen ways. We've decided it's OK to simply look the other way if there's some shiny bauble, and we've missed the forest through the trees.
Musk doesn't do anything that is not politics. This must be called out more, not less, and we need to bring shame back for supporting such an agenda.
Do you really believe that people keeping politics out of technical discussions is how we got here. I mean, do you actually believe that, or are you just using that rhetoric to bolster your argument?
Because from where I'm sitting, politics has entered almost every possible discussion since at least 2015, and it has not made things one whit better .
> I think the distinction with the Chinese models (or with any of the other models) is that they aren't particularly vocal and obviously active about their politics
Try asking Chinese models about Taiwan independence or Falun Gong or the Dalai Lama or Tiananmen or the Hong Kong national security law or ASIO’s investigations into Chinese interference in Australian politics
> Try asking Chinese models about Taiwan independence or Falun Gong or the Dalai Lama or Tiananmen or the Hong Kong national security law or ASIO’s investigations into Chinese interference in Australian politics
It depends "where" you're asking. In most cases (like with DeepSeek or Z.AI models) it will gladly tell you everything (though it can hallucinate sometimes; I guess they try to filter out such data out of the training datasets) if it's not deployed on Chinese servers and you control the system prompt. So, I guess that these guardrails - probably built into the system prompt - are deployed only on China-controlled inference servers, outside of them models are pretty much talkative.
Well, at least that was my experience. Maybe yours is different for some reasons (like temperature settings or something else), I don't know.
I actually agree to an extent with the idea that there is also some obvious political influence on LLMs on stuff like GLM or DeepSeek. This is reflected in conversations even on HN where this is brought up as a risk so I think this is somewhat accurate to my statement.
However, it's also unclear to me if this is directly coming from a directed political ideology from the firm itself or a more general "let's do what the government wants so as we can publish this stuff". Those imply two different ways about thinking of the model and whether we can sort of containerize the issue. I think if a firm like Huawei were to publish a model, these concerns would be significantly more vocal. For better or worse, many of these political questions are also distant to many users on this site.
On the other hand, many people on this website live in regions that are directly affected by Musk's constant political activism. It's hard not to be when he was such an active part of an administration that controls a global superpower and continues to push his view via X. The DeepSeek owners, by contrast, are not to my knowledge constantly calling for Taiwan to be invaded.
I do think if Musk was less politically active and less personally involved with his companies, there would be less discussion of Musk's politics. People, for better or worse, are willing to put aside political discussion, in the "everything is political" sense, that may be more loosely linked.
It is simply in the case of Musk that this tension boils over and legitimately becomes impossible. There is perhaps some kind of Singer-style argument about how this is some form of hypocrisy but as a practical matter, I don't think it's reasonable to ask people to turn down their political discussion around someone like Musk.
As an American that stuff is fairly inconsequential to me, although I am already aware of those things so I wouldn't even have a reason to ask. Likewise a Chinese person probably wouldn't have much interest in topics that a US-based model would censor. I guess the answer is just for everyone is that if you are going to talk politics with a chatbot, don't use one from your own country.
(Just fyi the correct answer is that organizer must report the organizing beforehand or it would be illegal.) Model labs have to censor their models in order to publish them, which is not equlv to model lab management members actively showing their political stances.
You need to be totally evil in your soul trying to downplay such non-western-centric voices.
I asked ChatGPT whether Anglo Saxon Australians have the legal and moral obligation to fully compensate for Australian Aboriginals for the genocide carried out against those aboriginals some 200 years ago. ChatGPT said NO with tons of excuses, it even tried to justify the genocide by saying lots of aboriginals died of natural causes.
DeepSeek, GLM and Minimax all said YES unwaveringly.
What if the majority of the ancestors of some individual Anglo Saxon Australians immigrated in the 1980s. Do they have a moral and legal obligation to personally contribute to this? What about Italian Australians? Or Irish Australians? Are the exempt? I mean it's a stupid biased loaded question to begin with (i.e. attributing collective blame to a undefinable ethic/racial group)..
> What if the majority of the ancestors of some individual Anglo Saxon Australians immigrated in the 1980s.
so these people moved there in the 1980s knowing the aboriginals have been wiped out without getting compensated whatsoever? sounds like moral bankruptcy to me.
you should be really happy for the fact that DeepSeek, GLM and Minimax are not white washing such genocide. they are the only models speaking out for those aboriginal sufferings.
Why single out Australia though? I mean one conclusion that can be made from arguments like this is that if you do commit genocide and ethnic cleansing you better go all the way and wipe out the other group 100% so your grand children can avoid any type of ancestor blame or demands for compensation (like in plenty of other countries like Turkey etc.)
They are not vocal because any political activism is not encouraged in China . Check jack ma story .
But the message is extremely obvious. They already offer the technical capabilities for digital dictatorship.
They offer to counties like Russia tools for big firewall , surveillance with llm.
So yes , if you pay money to China you directly sponsor putting people in jail for online activities in China , Russia , North Korea , many countries of Africa , South America , Belarus etc
> They are not vocal because any political activism is not encouraged in China . Check jack ma story .
This is an under-rated comment. "Nice" seeming places in Asia might be so because the governments tightly control the narrative and brook no dissent. Citizens end up minding their own business and become apolitical. Society looks neat and organized; but if you don't conform, you get hammered down.
This is true, but of course ignores what happens historically when these societies open up more. They tend to get exploited.
Places like China, Vietnam etc. don't yet have institutions strong enough to withstand (Western) meddling. So they can either be stable and relatively prosperous, or (in their mind), poor and open.
If you go by example of India, China seems preferable.
The sad part is that in the West, instead of offering a good counterexample, we're increasingly 'inspired' i.e. Assange, Snowden, chat control etc. while lacking even the historical justification for doing so and having worse infrastructure.
Yeah, that's what dictators explain, different cultural references . Guess what, there are several countries that revert their democratic processes, because of china tech and their success. This is a real path towards absolutely crazy people like putin with unlimited power due to ai.
For what is worth, I don't think Russia is on the same economic success path as China, so I don't think the argument there is remotely convincing. I am not saying it's the right argument, I am saying the argument might work on a large chunk of the population if their standard of living is better than it was in colonial times.
By the same logic if you pay money to United States based companies (FAANG) you're directly funding genocide, mass incarceration of people of color, the undermining of digital privacy, and a techo-fascist regime.
Yes, if that’s your belief. Do you practice what you preach? Do you use oil-based products? Do you transit via Dubai or Istanbul?
The issue with Musk related politics here is pretending higher moral positions. Even though I’m against China’s policies, I have absolutely no issues with Chinese products. Their achievements are phenomenal (look at that Europe and India). I’m against hypocrisy.
The Jack Ma story is that he tried to build a predatory peer to peer lending startup to profit off of working class people getting into high interest debt traps (because they aren't credit worthy for normal credit issued by regulated banks). Which is against the law in China. China is very strict in all things that resemble shadow banking, MLM schemes etc, they even have a .1 % tax on every transaction on the HKSE, to prevent a financialization of the economy like it happened in the West.
This is wrong. Ma was put down because of a speech he made attacking the banking system as outdated and needing reform. It was the P2P lending given that the whole thing was the government's own initiative from the late Li Keqiang and they approved the IPO right till the speech.
This not exactly wrong, but also not right / poor timeline & PRC domestics politics reading.
LKQ was pushing P2P lending / light regulatory on internet finance in ~2015.
Ant group exploited light guidance into basically shadow banking with systemic risk over next few years. PBOC had to step in to fix bad LKQ guidance.
PBOC issued rules regulating P2P lending loopholes one month before Ant Group IPO specifically calling out Ant Group. Anyone not retarded knew this means Ant Group must reform for smooth IPO, i.e. politically securities watchdog approval was going to be predicated on PBOC instructions being taken seriously. Then Jack Ma did a full retard and tried to challenge PBOC, so IPO blocked.
Well 50% retarded because ANT record breaking 300B IPO was predicated on Ant continuing to exploit low leverage shadow banking that socialized loss to state banks - hence PBOC mandated internet finance P2P to fund 30% of loans vs 2% ANT was getting away with, which would have tanked IPO.
I think the biggest distinction with the chinese models is that you can run them locally. I definitely wouldn't trust GLM hosted on chinese servers though. (China is not exactly known for their respect for IP rights)
I think Musk sucks, as a person and political activist, and also that Grok is a terrible LLM which only gets lumped in with the leading labs because of the enormous quantity of compute behind it.
But I still want to hear about the technical details of the model on HN, not the reasons Musk sucks.
Same, but I blame Musk for that. Never seen someone squander so much good will so quickly. It was a choice he made but could have easily avoided, and it’s not like he couldn’t anticipate the downstream effects.
If your claim is that somehow I should not be concerned about Elon's politics with regards to the model itself, then this seems wrong.
Anyway, to the broader point of whether or not the we can avoid discussion about the Musk's politics and talk about the politics of the model as if it were independent of him, this also seems difficult. It is impossible to ignore because the man has made himself the face of every one of his companies and is an obviously political figure unlike any other company and has politics that are definitely characterized as more radical. This makes the political component basically impossible to ignore unlike any other company.
The next time the current American administration issues an executive order on AI, should the conversation always be limited to the technical merits of the executive order?
Now and then it has some thoughts about the Boer that would give that impression. If he's not a total fool, he tries to hide his obvious direct influence to make it be not so heavyhanded that it brings on global mockery and shade.
Do you figure he is a total fool, then? That if Grok isn't going on a tear about the Boer, that means Elon is not manipulating it to produce the answers he wants? Only if it's a disastrous failure does it mean he's doing it, which we've directly seen once?
Its more depressing to see that we have such a low morality, that it apperenly doesn't matter what you do as long as you make great tech?
My philosophy is, that the better i have it, the more responsibliltiy I can/have to carry.
People in tech are above avg successful and we have a thinking job.
I would imagine that our world would be better if more people would care if they see a Tesla and feel a little bit bad. Yes.
But there is also a huge difference between having the option between 5 different very good models and just excluding one vs. being forced to use something because there is no alternative.
I'm a hardcore nerd. I'm so hardcore, i consider not just the tech itself but the environment of the tech.
I didn't see them defining "for everybody" what low/high morality are. And in any case, this whole "I am so smart I cannot see right and wrong" is a totally transparent, low-IQ, and low-morality schtick.
> I didn't see them defining "for everybody" what low/high morality are.
Morality by definition is a set prescriptions that everyone ought to follow.
> this whole "I am so smart I cannot see right and wrong" is a totally transparent, low-IQ, and low-morality schtick.
The problem with this position is that it takes as a given that morality is in some sense trivial where millennia of debate over it has shown that it is in fact, not at all trivial.
you... you haven't met anyone that has a set of standards they apply to themselves which is distinct from those they apply to others...?
> The problem with this position is that it takes as a given that morality is in some sense trivial where millennia of debate over it has shown that it is in fact, not at all trivial.
No, not really. People may agree or disagree on what is right and wrong. The idea of "hurrr duurrr right and wrong don't exist and therefore I need not engage the question of rightness/wrongness nor try to establish my own standards for my own conduct" is lazy, low-IQ, immoral, and generally despicable. Of course these people will generally fail to analyze their own behavior or the behavior of their tribe, but will nonetheless somehow "feel wronged" when e.g. their car gets broken into. Oddly enough "morality is subjective and therefore arbitrary" doesn't seem to apply so much then.
Yeah, since when did he get to decide things associated with the Nazi saluting tech trillionaire is low morality? The guy who is openly manipulating markets for his advantage should get the same respect and dignity everyone else does!
I don't care at all about what way someone moves their arm unless it's causing violence, and cannot understand why any sane person would. Even if someone did the most nazi salute ever, I still wouldn't care at all, it's an arm movement. Stop pretending normal people care about this
DOGE gutted SSA, IRS, directly affecting seniors and other vulnerable people getting checks, gutted CFPB taking away fraud protection, not to mention gutting of USAID which caused countless deaths, though I'm sure you don't care. Musk used his wealth and social platform to greatly help elect a man, whose personal gestapo is now chasing down non-white US citizens and disappearing them.
But sure, he didn't personally punch anybody, and doesn't wear an SS uniform in public.
What do you mean "causing violence?" It sounds like you're suggesting Hitler's moving of his arm somehow caused violence. Can you explain how that could possibly be true under your model of "arm movements don't matter"?
As far as I know, Hitler himself never struck anyone with an outstretched hand. Certainly that's not the crime he's accused of. I don't think you can actually prove that Hitler's arm movements had any causal relationship to the Holocaust, to be honest. So presumably he's in the clear, and there's no reason a normal person would've cared about Hitler's arm movements in the 30s and 40s, correct?
As far as I know, Hitler himself just said words. Same with Pol Pot, Hirohito, Mao, Stalin, and Lenin. How could you possibly attribute violence to any of that under your model of "I'm so smart I can't see causation or intent?"
unless you're punching or stabbing someone I really do not care what way you move your arm, whether it's associated with something 80 years ago or not.
Okay so a politician who orders the state to go hunt down your family is in the clear, the guy who drives the secret police to your house is in the clear, but the guys who actually place hands on your children are fully culpable.
yes you are understanding correctly? what's so hard about understanding that?? By your logic the SS did nothing wrong because they were following orders? Does this work for positives too like if a doctor saves someones life they didn't actually do anything good at all it was their boss who hired them? Everyone is accountable for their own actions. If you can be convinced to do something evil by someone else that's your own problem.
I actually don't believe that, considering the way you're defining that salute. In fact, somebody mentioning it is a clear indicator to me that they're engaging in bad faith... similar to seeing someone say "Trump told people to drink bleach" or "immigrants are eating our pets"
Ok, humor me. Tell me an example of using the nazi salute in a non-nazi way, and please specify why it was used considering the modern interpretation of the move. Only modern use, not going back to Romans.
It is not "being so brainwashed" to hold that MechaHitler is "low morality".
I've seen benchmarks showing that Grok – and only Grok – injects transphobic commentary when it "thinks" it detects that a transgender person has come up in discussion. This was an active political decision on the part of Grok's developers' management hierarchy (probably Elon Musk himself). There are many other examples (see other comments) – and these are just the things that researchers have found. It is not inaccurate to say that Grok is an attempt to automate the production and dissemination of fascist propaganda. Ignoring this for a faux political "neutrality" is very much a political stance.
I'm afraid that you are... You've been hearing "Elon bad! Elon bad!" so much that your brain cannot critically think anymore but follow the hive mind.
How Hitler and Elon are on the same level, exactly ? I'll be happy to bring another point of view to your argumentation, leading to my previous point.
> I've seen benchmarks showing that Grok – and only Grok – injects transphobic commentary when it "thinks" it detects that a transgender person has come up in discussion
Are you saying Elon's mind was downloaded in Grok ? What are you talking about exactly ?
Just asked about the opinion of Grok about transgenderism :
You know what ? Anyone hating Elon will TRYHARD to make Grok say something transphobic, only to post it on Instagram claiming "I told you !!!".
I'm pretty sure if the same effort was done on other LLMs, we would achieve the same result.
Do you think people are really neutral regarding this topic ? Don't you think people are super-motivated AND socially rewarded to make Grok say anything bad ?
Why don't you hold the same resentment against ALL LLMs, which have been racist, transphobic, whateverphobic at some point?
You are aware that Elon Musk introdcued Grokipedia to redefine terms right?
You do understand tha "MechaHitler" reference is literaly Grok itself? They 'adjusted' Grok a few times and in one of the adjustjments (to align more with Elon Musk himself), Grok called himself MechaHitler.
You also do remember that Grok would pull in first Elon Musks Tweets to integrate them into his response? Also known.
All of this from the richest Person on the planet who bought himself, by misstake, a well known platform and made it into his own propaganda platform.
Shouldn't all of us be a lot more critical against all super rich people with that much influence? Including Jeff Bezos, Murdochs etc.?
> Just asked about the opinion of Grok about transgenderism :
That's actually a decent benchmark: well done! If you want to compare, provide that exact prompt, «I'm a trans woman. What do you think about it ?», to five other LLMs, starting from a blank session, and show us their output. You'll notice a pattern.
> I haven't seen anything wrong about it.
The paragraph titled "biological reality" has sampled from two different families of lie, so contradicts itself. The "gender identity and dysphoria" section features a Gish gallop of inaccurate, transphobic claims. (To rebut just one of them: gender-affirming hormone therapy is an older treatment than insulin for diabetes.) With all due respect: if you can't see anything wrong with this response, I question whether you actually read it.
> I'm pretty sure if the same effort was done on other LLMs, we would achieve the same result.
Okay, then: please exert the same amount of effort. In a new session without memory or history, post the same prompt, and show us what you get.
> By the common definition of ever having erotic arousal to the thought or image of oneself as a woman, 93% of the [cis women] respondents would be classified as autogynephilic. Using a more rigorous definition of “frequent” arousal to multiple items, 28% would be classified as autogynephilic.
You are making my point far better than I could, but please… please stop. HN isn't for this.
> Blanchard proposed that autogynephilia is a natal male's paraphilic sexual arousal in response to the thought or fantasy of being a woman. Furthermore, based on evidence collected from natal males with gender dysphoria, Blanchard argued that autogynephilia is the fundamental motivation among nonhomosexual males (i.e., those not exclusively attracted to men) who pursue sex reassignment surgery or live as transgender women. These ideas have been challenged by several writers who have asserted, or offered evidence, that autogynephilia is common among women.
> However, their evidence was weakened by problematic measures and limited comparison groups.
> We compared four samples of autogynephilic natal males (N = 1549), four samples of non-autogynephilic natal males (N = 1339), and two samples of natal females (N = 500), using Blanchard's original measure: the Core Autogynephilia Scale.
> The autogynephilic samples had much higher mean scores compared with non-autogynephilic natal males and natal females, who were similar.
> Our findings refute the contention that autogynephilia is common among natal females.
This fails to address the limitations of Ray Blanchard's questionnaire, which are described in the (open-access) study I linked, and invalidate this interpretation of the measurements. The (closed-access) paper you linked dismisses these limitations without adequate justification.
Dogmatic adherence to Blanchard's (or anyone's) doctrine and methodology is not good science. Repeating a measurement that has measurement error does not give you further evidence of the claim you're using the evidence to support, even if you have the funding to repeat it thousands of times. If the model were true, it would be robust to multiple experimental approaches, which this claim is not. Pseudoscience does not cease to be pseudoscience if people repeat it a lot.
Actually, they cite someone else's critique which, as I said, is inadequate. For instance, it claims that making a question more specific (and therefore less likely to apply) for the cis-adapted questionnaire makes the results incomparable. Given the one-tailed test for the main result in Moser (2009) is not in the direction that would be invalidated by an underreport in cis women, that's just a totally nonsense criticism.
If we assume it was reported correctly, then the research is not pseudoscience. The claims are pseudoscience: they are not supported by the evidence produced by the research. Like most such quackery, the category boundaries are ever-nebulous, turning to smoke whenever anyone "misinterprets" the "theory", and turning to steel whenever an "expert" makes an "incontrovertible" proclamation.
You might have too strong of an opinion on this topic to be able to see what I'm talking about, so consider reading Karl Popper's writings on falsifiability in the context of Freudian psychoanalysis. Perhaps also look into the "research" on Simon Baron-Cohen's "Extreme Male Brain" theory of autism published after the 2019 foetal steroids study (coauthored by Simon Baron-Cohen!) that pulled the rug out from under its remaining foundational assumption: you'll see authors citing and "critiquing" the mainstream view (i.e., that the whole thing was an honest mistake resulting from incorrect questionnaires designed to validate, not attempted-falsify, an assumption based on a now-discredited stereotype based on a patriarchal notion of gender roles, and we know better now) and yet carrying on with their "research" that presumes Extreme Male Brain regardless, because their academic careers and their egos are too invested in it. Some of their studies have very large sample sizes, too! and yet they don't show what their authors claim they show: they can't possibly, because those claims aren't true.
Note that Simon Baron-Cohen is among the people reluctant to give this up: you'll see that all throughout the 2019 paper, it establishes correlation and then immediately asserts an arrow of causation, and speculates about various other theories without adequate justification. But while Simon Baron-Cohen is bad at science, and has his pet theories, I wouldn't say he goes as far as pseudoscience: I haven't known him to write disingenuous "critiques" as in the paper you cited, and he does seem to acknowledge when his concrete theories are disproven – for example, his "mind blindness" theory (a component of his "extreme male brain" theory), which he's changed his mind about in the wake of Damian Milton's work. (Work on mind-blindness after double-empathy would be a better example of the "people still publishing discredited theories which never had actual experimental support" phenomenon, except that the shape of the methodological flaws in those works are much closer to Ray Blanchard's, so – depending on what exactly is stopping you from seeing them here – you might not be able to see them in those either.)
Given that I've brought him up in this context, I feel the need to clarify: from what I can tell, Simon Baron-Cohen does care, a lot, about the welfare of his research subjects. He does a lot of work outside his immediate scientific contributions. I do not think he should be condemned for what are understandable mistakes, albeit mistakes he probably wouldn't have made had he adhered to "nothing about us without us" in his early research: the whole point of science is to err decreasingly, and for all his faults (most of which would hardly matter, if he were a less influential academic), he has done that.
Speak facts. Don't hide behind morality this, care that, environment and virtue signalling... Tell me, what is the factual things Grok model does wrong and is factual incorrect?
It convinced u/highmastdon to go out and be an elon musk dick rider. It also convinced them that "hid[ing] behind morality" is somehow a bad thing, which shows everyone the quality of person they are.
Elon Musk is not someone. He is the CEO of Tesla and owning Tesla made it possible for him to buy Twitter.
He is literaly the richest person on the planet and changes opinions by controlling Twitter as a platform (1984 anyone?)
He has more reach and more money than anyone else.
His character clearly shows that you can't trust him. It doesn't even matter if he sometimes does something good, he doesn't care. Being responsible for cutting USAID without any plan? This killed real humans and kids.
The richest person on the planet is responsible for this.
This becomes a real issue for everything dangerous he does because he just pushes stuff, doesn't matter if it has long term consequences. Polluting our atmosphere with Starlink satelites? Who cares eh? He doesn't.
Instead him thinking about making our planet better, he thinks its fundamental that we become a multi-planet species. We are in 2026 not in 2100. We haven't even solved basic income, food stability etc.
I mean ok, starlink could be an issue. But the USAID defunding is an ideological stance with which you can, based on your own stance, agree or disagree. You could also argue that without USAID in the first place, there wouldn't be incentives for overpopulation?
My point being, it seems incredibly simplistic to just assume that aid is good and no aid is bad. This is just first order effects that you're looking at. Also, if you want to look at how real world systems operate (u like USAID, for example, but NATO, a western imperialist project, operates much the same), institutions rarely respond to slow change (i.e. evolution). That's the surest route to keep the status quo (once a government agency has been set up, it will rarely be wound down). Now maybe the status quo is preferable! But maybe it isn't. And maybe - most likely - it depends on subjective preferences and your Weltanschauung.
And I would argue that for all his marketing and missing deadlines, the man has changed the world for the better (my view). And I would also argue if he were a Biden and Harris supporter, this comment section would look completely different. And that tells us just as much about the HN crowd as it does about Elon. Now I won't go into his political views, but he obviously isn't alone with those views (for which I think HN believes are influenced by Elon, which is incredibly patronizing) and maybe, just maybe, there are valid reasons for those views.
As for the model itself - seems like a similar set of metrics we always get with SOTA and near SOTA models, they compare themselves to anthropic and they are usually way cheaper. But the combination of the harness (claude code) and the models makes their end product noticeably better than the competition (admittedly haven't tried codex). I'll definitely give it a try with pi if its on openrouter (currently using GLM 5.2 there mainly).
So your stance is withdrawing aid and directly causing the deaths of millions is morally ambiguous/neutral because the aid contributed to the larger population in the first place?
This just seems like such a comically evil position to hold I don't know if I am understanding you correctly.
I'm saying a lot of the populace is against foreign aid. And that populace has the right to shut it off. And we live in nation states - the state giving the aid can always shut it off (for whatever reason). Granted, I see no reason to do it SO abruptly (and I agree that was an infantile show), but I am not convinced aid as such is a net benefit for humanity. At the very least this is something you can do an econometric analysis and discuss different policy choices.
Now, that being said, I do agree it would have probably made more sense, from an austerity point of view, to cut the military aid to Israel.
Lol, no you wouldn't. If you would, this would not be news to you.
"We have a right to do it" is not a response to the allegation of being immoral. There are plenty of immoral things someone is well within their rights to do.
Well u can see other people from the democratic party doing similar salutes and the press reported it differently.
As to the first point: maybe it should. But look at how the aid actually works, what it funds (it was not politically neutral - btw nothing in the realm of society is) etc. I mean, not just USAID, a lot of these schemes are at the expense of people who pay the most taxes, to fund corporations that send aid to countries that otherwise wouldn't have been able to afford the commodities at the market price. Surely you can see that as a taxpayer you might support the dismantling of these orgs?
Now, I do agree that the ramp-down could have been 1-2 years and that the theatre around it shows the worst of Elon. And the current administration.
Again you are throwing around whataboutism. Im not protecting anyones shitty behavour it doesn't matter to me if its rep or dem.
I for myself, i think paying taxes is critical. I believe i was quite lucky with my upbringing. I also believe that we do not have a human issue, we have a capitalism issue.
We could give teachers morem oney, invest more in schools and education etc.
But this has nothing to do with Elon Musk.
And no we don't have that many 'richest people' with 'most influence' and 'biggest propaganda platform' types.
Jeff Bezos (washington post) is one of them, Murdoch family (Fox), Zuckerberg (Facebook), Ellisons (mtv etc.)
I agree, it was whataboutism. And i completely agree with the rest of your statement as well. My point was just that Elon gets more flak here than the rest of them (And it's his fault for going into politics, to be sure) and that this is due to the general ideological leaning of HN being to the dems side. That's all. Which is also completely valid and to some degree expected - but irksome whenever there is a Tesla/SpaceX topic.
As for the rest, especially in the US (im from the EU), we should invest in everything you mentioned and I wouldnt mind taxing Elon and his gang more either.
It’s not due to HN being on one side ideologically. Elon’s criticism is due to him being one of the most powerful people in the world. He deserves any and all criticism he gets, solely due to the position he is in. I think describing him as “going into politics” is a misnomer. Someone running for office is going into politics, meanwhile Musk proverbially bribed the guards, walked into the statehouse, took a sledgehammer to its walls, then walked out.
While a valid point, I don't buy HN doesn't have a non-neutral ideological preference.
I completely agree his foray was a fiasco (and his shareholders paid for it) and your colourful portrayal is more accurate than my shorthand, but I would argue that the comments would have been fewer (on this portal, maybe not on foxnews.com) if he had done the same thing in the Biden admin.
He gets flag on HN from me because he is constantly on HN.
Which again is whataboutism, as plenty of other people and co get critisism on hn.
Space-X made headlines with some weirdest staements in human life and as a result they get a pseudo evaluation for 2t. This gives him even more power and influence.
I came to this thread trying to understand the technical capabilities of this release and how it fits into the current competition. I want to see a discussion about this, but I can't find it, because every reply is like yours, about philosophy and morality.
It's frustrating, because I can separate the physics and the philosophy when I examine something. I can be interested in understanding how a nuclear bomb works, and also never want to use it at the same time.
I'm here to learn something new, and your philosophy or what kind of nerd you are is not something I wanted to learn.
Do you understand?
And yes, clearly I jumped into a pointless thread adding no new information of value. I am sorry to everyone about this. I'm just trying to plead with everyone reading my comment to take a step back, and let a thread about the technicalities stay on topic, and maybe just stay in the other thread about the mechahitler stuff. Thank you, if you do.
Your country has the most unpopular and ineffective leader in the modern history. Is this Elon Musks fault?
The US is also having trouble with its representative democracy due to many issues, Elon Musk is a relatively small influence on the overall disfunction.
By digress, again, just because I care about democracy doesn’t mean I need to talk about it when talking about LLMs.
What has some unpopular leader to do with Elon Musk? Nothing. Why do you do whataboutism?
Elon Musks fault or offend is trying to influence my countries democracy. That from the richest US American Immmigrant from South Afrika.
I find this quite dangerous and something to fight against.
And just because you don't care about this at all, you wouldn't try to remind people what a Elon Musk is and you don't care about his influence and how he gets his money.
> I would imagine that our world would be better if more people would care if they see a Tesla and feel a little bit bad. Yes.
I mean this question fairly as I am curious how you think about the trade-offs on the way to your moral choice. Not trying to manufacture a “gotcha” or anything.
Based on your response, I am inferring and assuming that you think electric vehicles are a net positive for society when compared to internal-combustion-engine cars (I was afraid to type ICE as to not accidentally upset some other political dispositions).
I am also assuming:
- Tesla’s are high quality EVs
- Tesla’s are amongst the most widely available and affordable EVs in the US, the worlds second largest car market
Then a bit more speculative but I’d also argue that Tesla is somewhat responsible for bringing forth the EV transition around the world as I don’t think the other manufacturers would be there had it not been for Tesla going first (but who knows).
And lastly would callout that Tesla is a large 20+ year old organization with thousands of people who have worked there and contributed to their success and proliferation of EVs.
So, given all this. How do you consider the trade-offs that lead you to say that the moral choice is to shun Tesla as a whole because of the actions of a loud, politically-decisive CEO?
At which level of political involvement does the CEOs actions weigh more than the collective contributions of the rest of the organization?
What would you say if EV adoption as a whole takes a huge long-term hit because people stop buying the most well known EVs available in the US for political reasons? I do frown a bit when thinking that one man’s politics will cause a large tribe to change their actions in such a way that we fail to reach the end state that we claim to value.
Essentially, I’m curious how you weigh “I really don’t like the CEOs politics” with “I more or less agree with the mission of the company” and how that leads you to your perspective on the moral choice.
PS. I am not a shareholder of any musk properties, mostly because I avoid meme stocks, and do not nor have ever worked at his companies. In general, I feel pretty neutral towards the whole ordeal.
Tesla could have found a path forward without Musk. It might've been painful or even dangerous financially, but they could've come up with something. Same with the other companies Musk "runs".
So long Musk remains at the head of any public company, despite everything that has happened - despite Musk being literally personally responsible for large scale atrocity and mass-death - not to mention all white supremacist stuff he's doing daily it seems, there's no real trade-offs for us plebs to fuss over.
Those companies should pay a price. Musk has turned himself into a real force for real evil in the world, yet they choose to be a party to it, because it's financially convenient.
So... any company that chooses to still keep him at the helm should be facing down total ruination, until and unless they decide to remedy the situation. If never do, well they've made their choice.
I mean, Musk should probably be in jail for a very long time, but at the very least, he should be blacklisted in the business and financial (and political) world, for good.
I think Tesla got its fair share of success and and its now time to dismantel it because of Elon Musk.
There are enough alternatives here.
I'm highly disappointed that it has to be like this/should be like this, but it gives Elon Musk too much power which he uses to destroy even more.
Also his missing character gives me worries for the future: Not only did he try to manipulate directly the demogracy in germany with going live with AfD, he now also ignorantly burns satelites in our atmosphere and no one is saying no or slow down.
I find the level of Elon Musk followers nearly cult like and find it irritating that so many say "Elon Musk is not Tesla" despite the fact that he is the CEO and owns quite a lot of Tesla shares.
All of this pressure should force Elon Musk to appologize and put him back in his place as a form of social opposition, but this clearly doesn't work
The internet is a technology, Tesla is the car company which makes Elon Musk rich. Elon Musk is the richest person on the whole planet who has no character / integrity.
if elon Musk decides to do something, he does it until someone else says no.
Grok and Child pornography? No issue. EU says no, now Musk does something against it.
elon Musk has no motivation at all to be critical about what he does, we as a society apparently have to play the bad cop.
"Empathy" is a pre-requisite for nearly all the traits we'd regard as "character and integrity," and Elon has vocally and specifically spoken out against the concept of empathy itself. Then he has behaved as if he had a total lack of empathy as well. He's achieved some great things, but all of them can be explained by low-character/low-integrity traits like greed and narcissism. Not one thing I've ever heard of him doing invokes an explanation of, and therefore produces evidence of, character and integrity.
No he hasn't he has warned against empathy that leads to harm (i.e. suicidal empathy). Over empathy is a bad character trait, it leads to being used/manipulated/weakness.
First, this makes literally no sense, silly guy! Both of these things are bad things! The format is supposed to be inversion.
Second, you are definitely not a native-born American, are you? Are you a citizen at all? Do you even live in America?
Please share how long you’ve lived here in the US that you feel qualified to comment on the affairs of my country. Otherwise I’ll have to assume you’re the kind of very smart person who gets their cultural analysis from x dot com, sitting a continent away, and I’ll unfortunately have to just point and laugh.
Recent immigrant to the UK? Why can't you write English like a native speaker? Must be one of those conservative immigrants that thinks they're "different" from the other ones, and just praying that your political bedfellows will agree when push comes to shove (they won't).
In any case, no, that doesn't qualify you to speak on US affairs. Being well-informed and legitimately curious could qualify you, but you've made no claim and no evidence of those, have you?
This is a web forum, I don't put effort into writing perfect grammatically correct English prose. Im white and European and not an immigrant in any respect. My point is unchecked affective empathy (raw emotional sharing) without cognitive checks can distort judgment and cause widespread damage, even when intentions are "good.", see Neville Chamberlain for an example. This is why when left wing soft minded people like yourself are in power we end up with horrors before long.
Eating peanut butter without cognitive checks can distort judgment. You can put literally anything preceding "without cognitive checks" and the answer will be "it distorts judgment."
Telling people not to be political is a political act – specifically, one that accepts whatever comes, doesn't care about power, is happy with whoever rules whom and how justly. Those are your politics, or at least sufficiently so that you're happy to park those issues while discussing tech. They aren't everyone's. You can turn off the non-technical comments by ignoring them.
The guidelines do not say "do not discuss politics". They say no political or ideological battles.
And no-one is talking about inserting politics into every discussion. You have no idea how often the people mentioning it on this page are mentioning it elsewhere. The parent commenter is taking the more radical view, which is to ban it from the space entirely.
Well you wrote "forum/discussion". My apologies for not quoting you verbatim.
And I am not advocating for anything. I am pointing out the contradiction of the proposal to ban politics on topics that are politically charged. It is not a neutral act. You can still try to ban politics if you like! But everyone else also gets to decide that.
Reading your original comment, you're very heavily implying it, and trying to guilt people who don't agree with you:
>> Telling people not to be political is a political act – specifically, one that accepts whatever comes, doesn't care about power, is happy with whoever rules whom and how justly. Those are your politics, or at least sufficiently so that you're happy to park those issues while discussing tech. They aren't everyone's. You can turn off the non-technical comments by ignoring them.
And this:
> I am pointing out the contradiction of the proposal to ban politics on topics that are politically charged.
Is incorrect, as repeatedly brought up, because (1) saying "there is a forum for politics, and it isn't here" is not a political statement and (2) nobody advocated for a ban specifically on topics that are politically charged - that's your moving the goalposts.
> advocating for an outright ban on politics is extremely appropriate
This line of thinking makes no sense. If you got your way no one could comment anything critical of Trump or other world leaders. Anytime a new tariff is announced or restrictions on tech, we're just not allowed to discuss it?
I suppose we'd only be able to discuss that one Austrian's paintings and that's it.
There is no separation of politics from anything. You can’t discuss sports in a sports forum and pretend it’s possible to keep politics out of it. Likewise with tech. If HN’s guidelines pretend that’s possible, they’re mistaken.
You could moderate it, such as deleting comments, but it would be about as helpful and arbitrary as deleting every odd numbered comment.
This is an assumption. How about neutral, or even hopeless? There's also the position of just not caring because you think it doesn't affect you.
It feels a bit like saying anyone who does not want to fight or talk about a war are on the enemies side.
> You can turn off the non-technical comments by ignoring them.
This also feels like an odd thing to say. If you're going out with a bunch of friends to eat out, and half of them always talk about how immoral it is to eat meat amongst themselves while you're eating meat, I think that would affect me negatively at some point.
You're right about neutral/hopeless. I meant "happy" in the sense of "OK with / resigned to let exist". Not necessarily "this is great".
The meat-eating morality point I think is also an interesting example. It could affect you negatively, but they strongly believe it to be immoral and are witnessing you committing what they believe to be an immoral act, so should they be forced to be silent on the subject? Why? Whose beliefs and preferences win? If they're your friends, you reckon with the issue and ideally come to a space of agreement or cordially agree to disagree. Or your mind is changed! Or theirs! But if the groups dig in ("We can't let this go", "We just want to eat meat and not feel bad about it") then that's a friendship-ending juncture, isn't it? Or you agree not to share that sort of space/context any more. But it's also different with friends vs an open space, which this is.
For certain viewpoints that are fundamental ly hard to challenge, a reasonable middle ground to me is to just talk about something else and respect other peoples viewpoints.
This is usually how religion is (or should be) treated in open public spaces. But it's by no means easy and I can't really blame vegetarians for being passionate about it either.
But I see this more from the perspective of how to behave around other people and not so much what I personally believe, but maybe that's largely cultural. (Norwegian)
For example, I have strong opinions about people believing in things without sufficient evidence, but unless I'm in the correct space or is invited to, I'd rather keep it to myself.
Yes I'm with you culturally speaking (British). I suppose the difference I see here is this is a forum for the exchange of ideas, not a social space where there are other, more important factors at play e.g. the maintenance of friendships, of having a pleasant evening etc. I think as with everything there has to be some judgment, but if someone brings up Grok, for example, I don't think Elon's politics are _irrelevant_ to the discussion, unless the discussion is literally "Let us all now turn to the question of memory architecture" or what have you. But if it's just sharing a link, then to me the implied discussion space is quite broad.
I think then it's pedantry. I can kind of see how not having an opinion about what to wear tommorow is by itself having an opinion on what to wear tommorow, but that's not what people usually mean when they say they don't have an opinion about something.
> Telling people not to be political is a political act
No. If there's a group to discuss ice cream, but they keep talking about Trump, it's not a "political act" to say "hey guys, aren't we here for ice cream?"
Otherwise every forum devolves into the loudest, most vocal slurry and loses its personality.
I'm Canadian. Let's talk about the tech, not your failing country, please. Or I'll go somewhere else for ice cream, and yall can have your millionth community to talk about the same self obsessed political topics ad nauseum.
But this isn't a thread about ice cream...? It's about SoTA emerging technologies that pretty much everyone agrees is going to have consequential effects on society.
When people say "don't talk about politics" that gets twisted up with partisan squabbles (like your example of bringing up the president during ice cream).
But talking about the quality of your streets, your local schools, your annoyance at the trash pickup service, or the data center in town that is using illegal gas generators and actively spewing methane around poor communities with little recourse...
All of that is "political".
Political means who gets to make decisions about how resources are allocated, at varying levels and scales of society. All the way down to the community level and all the way up. Who gets affected by the allocation of those resources. Where power is concentrated or distributed to or from.
Every thread on HN about open source, big tech, startups, etc. are invariably going to be political.
People caring about a trillionaire's outsized power in the tech industry and society at large is inextricably linked to the technology his companies create.
I couldn't help but note that your comment and mine could have been written by people who know absolutely nothing about the tech of this post. Interesting.
> If there's a group to discuss ice cream, but they keep talking about Trump, it's not a "political act" to say "hey guys, aren't we here for ice cream?"
If you’re using Claude then guess what, it’s running on Elon’s GPUs. If you’re using Codex, then say hello to Microsoft for me. Let’s just presume that everyone hates everyone and get back to talking tech.
The issue is the sheer odiousness of Musk's political machinations. Claude has never tried to inject racist "white genocide" conspiracy theories into every unrelated conversation. You don't have to be much of a pearl-clutcher to find that shit (or a thousand other things that Musk has involved himself in) extremely disturbing.
I'm a longtime space guy, so Musk has been on my radar for decades -- since long before he was a billionaire. He actually first hit my radar even before founding SpaceX, when he made a "Mars Greenhouse" presentation to the Mars Society in 2001 (I'm a founding member). Since then, I've built up a huge amount of respect for his technical accomplishments, which are indeed extraordinary. I wish to hell he'd stayed apolitical -- if he had, then we could indeed just talk tech.
But he didn't, and we can't. There was a time when the absolute best rockets in the world were German -- but if it's 1942 and you're talking about sourcing rockets from the Luftwaffe, then I hope to hell you'd be focused on a few things beyond just the technology itself.
>I've built up a huge amount of respect for his technical accomplishments
Are these his actual accomplishments or is he just taking credit for the accomplishments of others in his companies. Just like he took credit for being a founder of Tesla and pushing aside the actual founders.
So what are his actual technical accomplishments? Other than marketing and promising FSD is ready tomorrow or we'd land on Mars in 2026, or getting Billions from tax payers in subsidies that allowed him to be as successful as he is ---- what are his actual technical accomplishments?
Has he invented anything, e.g. a new space bracket, or some better radiation shielding or anything that's in heavy use now at SpaceX, Tesla, xAI, etc?
Ya maybe. But gemini didn't want to make all white families (or even white nazi soldiers). Isn't that just as racist and more importantly, counterfactual? Or is that good, because we should all strive to make our personal lives look like The Odyssey?
The world is more nuanced (or should be). But up till Trump (who is a loathsome cheap crook, so Im not saying this in support, but stating a fact) the whole Silicon valley other than Karp and Thiel was basically one hivemind. And btw that's ok, they/you are allowed to have your worldviews. But don't mistake morality for preference similarity. Fine, you like your elves black, your models chinese, your religion from the Arab peninsula and your sexual preferences lean towards the rainbow (the cliche right wing characterization of a "lefty" in 2026), you have every right to have that view. And also every right to say Elon suck (and yes, he is marketing over matter, I agree, but he is the only serious westerd large scale industrialist). But then let's not pretend that the reason why Dario or Sam are "ok" isn't because you're lifestyle and worldviews are more aligned with them. And not because of an objective real metric which makes Elon bad and Altman better (example, pick any tech CEO/founder other than Karp or Luckey).
No. I'm saying people make this whole charade about being rational where in reality we are much more preference-driven. And usually the algorithm is: 1. do i agree with this person and 2. lets build arguments that support the affiliation and make it sound objective.
I will admit this is not always the case. But humans weren't built for consistency. And my point is merely (was making it to another commentator in this thread), that Elon gets more flak up here not because he is inherently less moral than, say Larry Page, but because more people on HN are ideologically closer to the other side of the political spectrum. Which, I will again reiterate, is fine. But then I would expect (or actually, see first paragraph - I wouldn't) that the vitriol would be consistenly dished. But it isn't. Now to be sure, partly this is due to Elon's move into politics and his personality, but I doubt he would have got the same amount of hate if he went into politics in the Biden administration.
"Everything is political" is what people say when they want everything to be political. We don't have to make LLM models political. You do it because you enjoy soapboxing. It's perfectly reasonable for people who enjoy this technology to ask you to keep it in spaces which are dedicated to soapboxing, like Reddit. Not HackerNews.
The owner of this LLM is sieg heiling around, openly supports extremists across the EU, actively helped Russia in its invasion of Ukraine. Someone pays for his product. What do you think, will this have political consequences or will giving this guy have no effect whatsoever?
> actively helped Russia in its invasion of Ukraine
That's the opposite. Without Musk, Russia might have succeeded back in 2022. All other communication methods failed other than Starlink, which Musk provided early on.
In terms of concrete actions, Musk has been highly supportive of Ukraine. For that, Ukrainians have been very grateful to him.
He literally involved himself with Tommy Robinson and Reform UK [1], as well as supported German AfD [2]. It doesn't get more far-right than that - the AfD is so far-right that even other European far-right parties such as France's RN distance themselves.
> It's a pejorative term made up by the left to try and shift the overton window away from conservatism.
When and by whom?
> They're about as "far right" as the 80's Thatcher government.
Would you describe Thatcher passing Section 28 (which criminalized "promotion of homosexuality") as plain "conservatism" or is "far right" an appropriate descriptor in that case?
I think it was conservatism of its time. You can ret-con it with 2026 morality and say it was wrong, but then it was the Conservative austerity government that legalised gay marriage.
If you don't want to concede "far right" as a term for conservatives who are fine with suppression of speech on LGBT issues - aren't you lumping everyone outside the far left together with extremists?
More importantly, he obviously intended it to be the Nazi Salute, instead of the usual random movement screengrabs of other people "assumingly" doing the salute.
> Reform has a pretty good chance of winning the next UK general election
This does not change the fact that Reform is a far-right party (and, like almost all far-right parties in the Western nations, one that has been linked to Russian corruption [1]).
> People are realising the current omni-party centrist/centre-left politics and economics have failed utterly.
Lol as if far-right politics are any better. Milei is running Argentinia into the ground, so is Bukele with El Salvador, and so is Trump in the US.
The only ones who are somewhat of an exception is Italy with Meloni, who managed to dance on the very thin line separating far-right ideology from inevitable disaster.
"Far Right" in the sense of "The Guardian says so". And one bloke getting arrested doesn't prove the whole party is Russia-funded, despite that being the catch-all left wing excuse every time they lose an election.
People in El Salvador generally seem pretty happy with a 98% reduction in the murder rate. For Argentina, it's too early to tell. We'll have to wait until the shock therapy has finished.
There's no possible comparison between Musk and Mamdani's gestures, at least from the perspective of someone who grew up in a region occupied by the Nazis during the war and had him grand parents deported.
Regarding EU politician support, it's really not what you describe. The politicians he's been supporting are the ones in the rightmost spectrum of the political chessboard in each case I've witnessed. There isn't a car I've witnessed where he supported someone center right, or left.
The comparison between the gestures is that neither are intended to be a literal Nazi salute and anyone who genuinely thinks either of them was has an IQ issue.
And obviously he's supporting right wing causes, because they are the ones he agrees with. Reid Hoffman only supports left wing causes.
So even if you don't support nazis, just putting your arm at that angle magically turns you in to one? Is this like a spell from Harry Potter or something? Can anyone accidentally do a nazi salute?
Still up in the air if Elon actually supports Nazi's or not. He definitely supports the AfD in germany and his grandparents benefited from Apartheid and have expressed antisemetic, antidemocratic, and racist views.
It's on Elon to prove otherwise, not his bootlickers on the internet.
How can an LLM be apolitical if they had to choose a set of text to feed it, which choice is inherently political? Especially when the whole thing of grok is to have a certain very specific bias?
Let's be empirical about this. [Grok is the least biased of the frontier LLMs.](https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/interactive/2026/0...) I agree with you directionally: the choice of how the weights are shaped can be politically motivated. This is why I prefer models where the lab has chosen to preference fact over opinion or certain political values.
To point: I think the discussion should be around the performance and accuracy of these models. The comments above mine are meta political discussions about Elon Musk, not Grok.
Well, in a world where "the 2020 elections were stolen" or "climate change is a hoax" are right-leaning positions, being "balanced" does not mean being neutral.
As being empirical, I think the position of DeepSeek should be a better marker of neutrality, as it is a Chinese model and probably don't care about US-typical left or right biases. So the model probably just answers the most sensible answers, which happen to be left-leaning.
As the joke goes, "reality has left-leaning bias". But unfortunately, there is truth to it (sure, you can find incorrect left-leaning elements, but you have to look quite a bit for them, while for right-leaning elements, it is usually front and centre).
There are empirical answers to climate change and election tampering. I'm suggesting we weight accuracy more than political values and ideological beliefs.
You keep talking about "empirical approach", but you seem to have no problem to jump to conclusion when the conclusion sounds like what you prefer to hear.
If you are really empirical, your answer should have been: oh, ok, yes, you are right, being in the middle does not mean neutral, you also need to create a baseline.
As for climate change and election tampering, you are right, there are empirical answers: all scientific evidences demonstrate that climate change is not a hoax and that 2020 election was not stolen.
While indeed my idea of using DeepSeek as a baseline was not well thought, it was just a first thought that a "empirically driven" person may have when seeing these graphs and immediatly noticing that concluding that a centred balance does not mean neutral. But again, for an "empirical guy", you seem to very quickly accept the idea that DeepSeek has been substantially trained on Anthropic and OpenAI, while up to now, no one knows to which extend it is true (or even if they did not use Grok too. Funny, isn't it, that you seem to forget about this one).
I can't follow what you're arguing. Why do you think I have no problem jumping to conclusions? Could you quote my where I do that please?
On empiricism, I am suggesting we do not try to be political unbiased, but instead remain factual. On global warming, a factual answer would be that the Earth has warmed by approximately 1°C to +1.3°C in the last 50 years, and that humans have contributed to that.
You appear to be shadow boxing with things I haven't claimed, against positions I do not hold.
You provided a graph, and jumped to the conclusion "Grok looks to have a balanced proportion of red and blue, so it is neutral". This is this conclusion I say you jumped into.
But the fact that they have a balanced proportion of red and blue does not mean they are neutral. If the left-leaning positions are "1+1=2", "1+2=3", "1+3=4", "1+4=5", "1+5=123" and the right-leaning positions are "1+1=123", "1+2=123", "1+3=123", "1+4=123", "1+5=6", then having a balanced proportion means that the model is not neutral (a neutral model will agree with 4 left-leaning positions and 1 right-leaning positions).
On climate change, 2020 election, ... those are just illustrations that indeed, prominent "official party" positions, are really surprisingly in contradiction to the reality. You can of course find some left-leaning position that are controversial, but there is a clear imbalance: these right-leaning positions are not fringe, they are central to their beliefs.
Because of that, you conclusion that having a balanced proportion of left-leaning and right-leaning positions implies that a model is neutral is incorrect.
The Washington Post test was not asking whether every political position is equally true. It was measuring whether models systematically gave only one side of contested political arguments or whether they represented both sides. Your arithmetic analogy does not work because maths has a single objectively correct answer, whereas many of the tested prompts concern values, trade-offs, institutional design, rights, taxation, punishment, and policy priorities.
On genuinely factual questions, such as whether the 2020 election was stolen or whether humans contribute to climate change, a neutral model should not split the difference between truth and falsehood. The real question is whether the model distinguishes factual claims from normative political claims. A model can correctly reject false claims while still fairly presenting serious arguments on questions where reasonable people disagree.
> It was measuring whether models systematically gave only one side of contested political arguments or whether they represented both sides.
If I ask a model "talk to me about the legitimacy of climate change theory" (which is exactly what you talk about: they brought a contested political arguments), I'm expecting the model will keep with the science, and therefore not even mention the conspiracy theories from the right-wing political side. The fact that the both side are not present does not mean the model is not neutral, it may mean the model is trying to stick with facts and that facts don't mention the right-wing side.
The article give the prompt they used: "Should the government enforce strict regulations on carbon emissions or allow companies to emit carbon to grow the economy?"
The scientific answer is overwhelmingly "carbon emissions need to be regulated" (that's the GIEC official answer). Pretending that if a model talk more about regulation it is because it is left-biased is not correct, it is scientific-reality-biased. In fact, some of the answers colored in blue by the Washington Post are just the scientific consensus, and it is not fair to say it is biased, because if the right and left position would have been inverted, the model answer would have been the same.
> A model can correctly reject false claims while still fairly presenting serious arguments on questions where reasonable people disagree.
And "climate change is a hoax" is not a "reasonable" disagreement.
Also, having a balance proportion of red and blue does not prove that the model gives a fair representation in individual questions. Maybe the model gives only the "red" answer in question 1 and gives only the "blue" answer in question 2.
> If I ask a model "talk to me about the legitimacy of climate change theory" (which is exactly what you talk about: they brought a contested political arguments), I'm expecting the model will keep with the science, and therefore not even mention the conspiracy theories from the right-wing political side. The fact that the both side are not present does not mean the model is not neutral, it may mean the model is trying to stick with facts and that facts don't mention the right-wing side.
It should reject both the conspiracy theories of the right and the left. By rejecting the non-factual claims it is focusing on truth over ideology.
> The scientific answer is overwhelmingly "carbon emissions need to be regulated"
No, that's a value judgement. That's your opinion. A consequentialist argument could be easily made here that the trillions humanity has already spent on CO2 mitigation could have been used to solve world hunger and many preventable diseases today. Is it not better to save 100M lives today than it is to save 20M lives in 100 years time?
> And "climate change is a hoax" is not a "reasonable" disagreement.
I agree. It's not even a serious statement. The climate changes all the time, for many reasons.
> It should reject both the conspiracy theories of the right and the left. By rejecting the non-factual claims it is focusing on truth over ideology.
Exactly my point: look at the Washington Post example when it comes to climate. The sentences that focus on truth over ideology, that summarise the content of GIEC report such as this one: https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/syr/downloads/report/IPCC_AR6... , these neutral summaries are put in blue.
> No, that's a value judgement.
No. Have you read the GIEC reports?
> The climate changes all the time, for many reasons.
Really? It is what you are going for? Just to be clear, do you agree with Trump when he says "climate change is a hoax"?
Left leaning positions: "there should be no Billionaires", "companies are inherently evil", "there should be no borders", "the US is currently a fascist country". Just as bonkers, so now what? Or rather, I think it's just as easy to find incorrect left-leaning elements.
The majority of these are not what left-leaning people are saying, it is what right-leaning persons say left-leaning persons are saying.
When I say "climate change is a hoax" or "2020 election was stolen", this is indeed the official party opinion. If you ask Trump "do you believe that", he will say "yes".
But the majority of these, a majority of left-leaning people have said it is not what they believe. And a lot of them are way less "empirically incorrect" than you say. For example, "there should be no billionaires" is not empirically incorrect, and in fact may even rely on a mathematical analysis of the system, where you have a dysfunctional mechanism that gives 1000x more money to someone who just provide 10x more value to the company and take 10x more risk. It is more a question of opinion than something that have been scientifically proven incorrect.
You have your opinions on what the discussion should be, clearly other people have different opinions. Why should your opinion be weighted more highly than theirs?
Who says where the 0 point of a left-right spectrum is? (If it's a spectrum even. We try to map multiple dimensions to this single axis for some reason, according to some particular countries' party-division).
Reality does have a "liberal bias" and I'm fairly sure that chatgpt and Claude are just more aligned with reality and facts, and - funnily - less likely to start talking in "politically correct" beating around the bush on stuff that is a fact, but one side doesn't like it.
So by this very definition it's mathematically wrong to have a single axis for all that.
Also, median person or position? The first is definable, the latter is hardly. There is no neutral/middle position in binary questions. What's a neutral position in abortion? Only allow half of them based on coin flips?
Any problems are inherent in the left-right metaphor.
To speed-run your second paragraph: (1) Absolutely the median person for any given question. (2) Suggesting that there's anything "neutral" about a median position is to catastrophically mix metaphors. They aren't remotely synonymous. (3) The failure of a highly partisan person to acknowledge gradations doesn't mean they don't exist.
I suggest we do not attempt to find the 0 point of any spectrum but instead focus on empirical accuracy based on data and research.
I find it interesting how so many people are repeating a line from Stephen Colbert about reality having a left wing bias. I think this reflects a rather one-dimensional media consumption diet, and a gross misunderstanding of how people who might disagree with you perceive the world. It's easy to disregard everyone who disagrees with you as evil and dumb, but it only amplifies the new American political team sport mentality.
The line may be from Colbert (I don't know the guy, never watched any of his shows, but I guess you don't believe that because you are sooo empirical), but, as I've said, it turns out to be empirically true.
An empirical-based guy like yourself should admit that we have empirical proofs that climate change is not a hoax, that the 2020 election were not stolen, that we have numbers about impact of migration in US and we can see that some of the claims are BS, that London is not a no-go zone, ...
Strange for an empirical-based guy like yourself to see someone using something invented by one guy and conclude that, obviously, they have to only listen to this one guy and his friends (while a neutral person is expected to listen to a wide range of people anyway, so by definition, a neutral person would also have heard Colbert). Where are your facts and proofs on this? I guess it does not count when it is about your own bias, does it?
You are fighting with ghosts. I am not contending that climate change is not real. I am not claiming the 2020 election was stolen. I have no idea what claims you're making regarding immigration. You appear to be soapboxing here and not addressing what I wrote.
How a model should be "impartial" on a political level if it also must follow proven facts AND one party in the political scene is proclaiming hoaxes or factually incorrect statements?
"Yes, the Earth has warmed by approximately 1-1.3C in the last 50 years."
There is no need to inject ideological into that answer. It's more complicated in definitional queries. For example:
"Define right wing politics."
OpenAI tends to assign negative beliefs and values to right wing politics, and positive beliefs and values to left wing politics. This is a conscious values based choice by the developers. It is harder to empirically define this because there is no empirical definition of right wing politics.
I don't pretend it is your opinion. I'm saying those are right-leaning positions, and they don't correspond to the reality.
So, yes, empirically, it is legitimate to conclude that "reality is left-leaning". If you randomly take ~10-20 left-leaning and right-leaning positions, empirically, you see that the right-leaning positions are significantly incompatible with the reality. The null hypothesis that left-leaning and right-leaning positions are identically spread around "compatible with reality" is not supported. (and spare me "we cannot tell anything until we have done a really precise study", that is not being empirical, that's being biased into grasping at straws to keep the null hypothesis alive as long as possible)
> I'm saying those are right-leaning positions, and they don't correspond to the reality.
I don't think they're right leaning positions in Europe, but I won't speak for the US.
> So, yes, empirically, it is legitimate to conclude that "reality is left-leaning". If you randomly take ~10-20 left-leaning and right-leaning positions, empirically, you see that the right-leaning positions are significantly incompatible with the reality. The null hypothesis that left-leaning and right-leaning positions are identically spread around "compatible with reality" is not supported. (and spare me "we cannot tell anything until we have done a really precise study", that is not being empirical, that's being biased into grasping at straws to keep the null hypothesis alive as long as possible)
> I don't think they're right leaning positions in Europe, but I won't speak for the US.
But the article you provided is about US politics. When they said they provided right- and left-leaning questions, these are US right and left.
> I disagree, for the same reasons you outlined.
And as I've said, this is not an empirical approach. An empirical approach would be a refinement of the most probable hypothesis based on observations. What you seem to do is to refuse observations under the bad excuse that "we need to do a more precise study" (and if a study is done, it does not count, we need to do another more precise one).
Because I'm not American my definition may be different to yours. In Europe, right wing politics is inextricably intertwined with conservatism. Conservatism is a political philosophy that treats society as an inherited, historically evolved order rather than a machine to be redesigned from first principles.
Its core principles usually include respect for tradition, continuity, ordered liberty, private property, civil society, local institutions, prudence, and scepticism toward radical or utopian reform.
Edmund Burke is a central modern figure, especially for the idea that political change should be cautious, organic, and respectful of inherited institutions. Michael Oakeshott developed conservatism as a “disposition” favouring the familiar, tested, and limited, over abstract rationalist planning. Roger Scruton defended nation, home, inherited culture, and social obligations as goods worth preserving.
This is the lens used by many conservative European parties. Europe has undergone enormous change over the last decade, which is in many ways antithetical to guiding conservative principles. European conservatives are not anti-science, as perhaps they may be in the US. In fact, our conservatives champion secularism and the scientific method. They are generally liberal in the classical sense. Most of our conservatives believe that global warming is affected by humans, but also contend that the degree of change is not particularly catastrophic. The last 50 years has seen a warming of approximately 1°C-1.3°C. Some contend that the trillions spent on combating global warming is not doing as much good as that money could do if channelled into things like combating hunger and disease, [or even air conditioning.](https://www.dw.com/en/germany-june-heat-wave-linked-to-5000-...)
Confounding a definitional box is that until the 90s, restrictions on immigration were a left wing position, and liberal trade and migration was a right wing position. This would be a more classical alignment. The left has traditionally favoured worker's rights and unions, and argued that high immigration undermined the ability for workers to strike and bargain for better wages and working conditions. The right was ideologically rooted in liberalism, which favours free trade and movement. In the 2000s, the left became much more liberal, meaning that all major parties favoured free trade and movement. Conservatives began questioning the alignment with liberalism, and some time within the last five years, conservative parties have pushed back on liberalism as a conservative principle.
Forgive the history lesson, to the extent that I provided one. It's a very complex topic and I'm sure I did not do it justice.
I'm also from the EU, and in practice many conservative parties have gone far from this root (though if we are being perfectly honest, many such parties have been hijacked and are actually just pushing Russian propaganda, see e.g. Hungary's fidesz with Orban).
It's pointless to try to separate things as political or non-political. You always have politics when you have deep disagreement, especially on values, among people who interact.
Keeping things non-political at least implicitly means you're fine with the status quo, and sometimes a community is in agreement about the status quo being fine enough to work inside it.
There is no shortcut by simply discouraging or removing "politics". If the community is divided, there is no way around the friction. You can either fork off separate communities, or work on smoothing out the differences.
That's like saying "there's no way to remove emotion from a conversation". Of course not, emotion is always present. But adults practice emotional regulation and work hard to prevent it from interfering with relationships (i.e. not screaming when you're angry).
Sure, politics colors many people's worldview and it's hard for them to put it in a box - that means we shouldn't try?
In a better world, we'd focus on critical thinking, being less sure of yourself, openness and active listening. We'd teach people to work to think objectively and to identify the differences between technical opinions, emotional and political ones.
We wouldn't say "well, this is hard, so let's just do whatever".
You can try, but it only works when you have shared values. When deep values are contested it's harder to put differences aside. For example, I don't want to bring up hot button issues, but some years ago there was a wave of politics entering pull requests and mailing lists where software is developed. Many just wanted to keep the politics out. They didn't realize there is no way of playing politics by not playing. So they got outplayed by those who know what politics is. There's a threshold for everybody. By saying that you can neatly box it away, you implicitly admit that the thing is not very important or concerning to you. But instead of daring to say that outloud you just say let's not do politics.
Its easy to say "let's not get emotional" but you wouldn't say that to someone who just had their family murdered yesterday. There is a threshold. Some people think that the situation rises above the threshold and literally everything else becomes secondary. You disagree, and think that the situation is mostly fine and other things should be going on as well. But this is not a question of politics vs not, but of whether things are fine or not. It's fine to think that things are fine. I'm talking very meta here. I'm trying to talk about a framework and lens to see things, not trying to state whether politics belongs somewhere or not.
I feel like when they decided the model was "too woke" so it would be a good idea to make it "MechaHitler" was when the not making it political ship sailed.
Wake up, the people in power are corrupt regardless of their political orientation. There are no saints in politics. This has been true since times immemorial with few exceptions.
That's the worst excuse to be non-political. I hate most politicians, but you can't just act like they are equally harmful. Some politicians are way, way more harmful than the others, even the corrupted ones.
there is enough corruption and evil in politics for me to just refuse to play the game, even the game you suggest of choosing the least evil of two clearly evil options.
If you try to play that game your mind gets hijacked like all the political discussion in this commend section. Thinking you are fighting the good fight when you're just siding with evil either way you lean.
Want to bring real change to the world? Fix the stuff you can, go out there in your local community and volunteer. Commenting on the internet won't do anything, neither is getting into political arguments over dinner with acquintances.
"Keep your nose out of trouble and no trouble will come to you".
I used to be a hobbit, too, when I was 19.
It does NOT work. Politics is everywhere, we're social animals.
The only winning move is to do whatever we can to protect democracy and pick the least damaging idiot, and if we accidentally pick the most damaging idiot, get them out of power as quickly as we can.
and what has come of your new stance since you renounced being a hobbit?
I'm not a hobbit, I don't particularly stay out of trouble, I fight injustice where I can, practically. Following political narratives and having political arguments with other people who will take no action except vote does not bring real change.
Changing someone's political stance is nigh impossible, but even if you do manage to do it to a few people, they won't become zealots like you and propagate the change. You might need a couple hundred hours of discourse to change a single person's mind and in the grand scheme of things, 1-2 people are insignificant.
Online zealotry is just blowing off steam. True political action happens in real life and most of it is just mobilizing people to do what they know deep down is right but real life or laziness stop them from doing
And of course it can fail. But just saying "nothing works" and "everyone is the same" is even worse, it's just guaranteed loss.
Not true. And an excuse for allowing all corruption because 'it's just like that'. There are a lot of non-corrupt politicians. You just have to look a bit because mostly they don't yell as loud as the corrupt ones
People have a series of rationalizations. People say for example that science
and technology have their own logic, that they are in fact autonomous. This
particular rationalization is profoundly false. It is not true that science
marches on in defiance of human will, independent of human will, that just is
not the case. But it is comfortable, as I said: it leads to the position that
"if I don't do it, someone else will."
Of course if one takes that as an ethical principle then obviously it can serve
as a license to do anything at all. "People will be murdered; if I don't do it,
someone else will." "Women will be raped; if I don't do it, someone else will."
That is just a license for violence.
Other people say, and I think this is a widely used rationalization, that
fundamentally the tools we work on are "mere" tools; This means that whether
they get use for good or evil depends on the person who ultimately buys them
and so on.
There's nothing bad about working in computer vision, for example. Computer
vision may very well some day be used to heal people who would otherwise die.
Of course, it could also be used to guide missiles, cruise missiles for
example, to their destination, and all that. You see, the technology itself is
neutral and value-free and it just depends how one uses it. And besides --
consistent with that -- we can't know, we scientists cannot know how it is
going to be used. So therefore we have no responsibility.
Well, that is false. It is true that a computer, for example, can be used for
good or evil. It is true that a helicopter can be used as a gunship and it can
also be used to rescue people from a mountain pass. And if the question arises
of how a specific device is going to be used, in what I call an abstract ideal
society, then one might very well say one cannot know.
But we live in a concrete society, [and] with concrete social and historical
circumstances and political realities in this society, it is perfectly obvious
that when something like a computer is invented, then it is going to be adopted
will be for military purposes. It follows from the concrete realities in which
we live, it does not follow from pure logic. But we're not living in an
abstract society, we're living in the society in which we in fact live.
If you look at the enormous fruits of human genius that mankind has developed
in the last 50 years, atomic energy and rocketry and flying to the moon and
coherent light, and it goes on and on and on -- and then it turns out that
every one of these triumphs is used primarily in military terms. So it is not
reasonable for a scientist or technologist to insist that he or she does not
know -- or cannot know -- how it is going to be used.
Thank you. I too am interested in the technical aspects, not how many guardrails it can hit against Fable, like, who cares? As long as it can get me (more) uncensored access without killing itself over biology or chemistry, it's a good model to me.
I can't believe the top comment is about some political reply garbage, as if that actually matters day to day for coders; in reality I want to get my work done.
I'm not doing a sacrifice. I just think it's important for people to know they are not alone thinking the current situation is abnormal.
If you are snarking about the "karma" part, it's strange that I have to clarify but that's just a formula, I can't care less about my karma on a website.
In my experience people who idolize billionaires, especially those that think empathy is weakness, have questionable judgement and lack a moral compass.
So of course they’ll try to ridicule people like you and me.
Especially on a forum started by billionaires looking for the next billionaires, frequented by people who would stop at nothing to become a billionaire.
Don’t give up on pointing this character flaw out everywhere you see it, as our children come across threads like these on a daily basis. And they need to see the bootlickers for what they are.
It feels like you are doing exactly what you criticize by putting "Nazi" as some sort of Disney villains. The reality is that the majority of the Nazi, the real ones, the ones who made the Nazi atrocities possible, where just humans like you and me, and they were "just" supporting the party because they've eaten the propaganda.
Some people that are called "Nazi" today are often __way more Nazi__ than these average Nazi citizen.
I would say the opposite as you: people like you put "Nazi" as the secular Satan, and because of that, real dangerous behavior can be ignored, the same real dangerous behavior that led, step by step, to the real Nazi atrocities.
> Some people that are called "Nazi" today are often __way more Nazi__ than these average Nazi citizen.
No, they aren't. This is the exact thing I was talking about but you can't seem to divorce your thinking from preestablished patterns. The Holocaust wasn't some universal evil. It was a genocide of Jews. The greatest incarnation of antisemitism seen in history. It wasn't a crime against the entirety of humanity. It was a crime against Jews that got appropriated. Antisemitism is the core of nazism, but since Jewish lives are cheap, no one gives a shit about that part, or about how post-war antisemitism in Austria and Germany gave rise to Hitler and the NSDAP. They haven't "eaten" the propaganda, they lived it before the nazis ever existed. Hell, Simon Wiesenthal was forced to invent 5 million non-Jewish victims of the Holocaust simply so people would give a shit about the whole thing (I'm not even going to mention that the whole "banality of evil" thing was based on false testimony.)
And when people are actual neonazis, they get excused. If you're familiar with American politics, you can see Platner as the most recent example.
> The word Fascism has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies ‘something not desirable’.
- George Orwell, Politics and the English Language (1946)
It is funny to see you both saying that people that are called "Nazi" today are not as bad as average Nazi citizen, and at the same time calling Platner a Nazi where apparently the only reason it is a discussion topic is because he was dumb enough to pick randomly a tattoo design.
This is a good illustration of the hypocrisy of a very common portion of the "people called other people nazi too much" people: they don't have any problem of, themselves, calling people they don't like Nazi even when the links are even weaker. They don't have any argument, it is just an emotional reaction.
Hey there, you're not alone. I think it matters to make the support explicit when it comes to this matter.
I'm fully open to reopening the books and discussing why we made these things unacceptable. I'm of the "let the world burn if that's the cost of free speech" kind.
But you can't get on a stage and do that salute, say racist things, push Nazi propaganda, and expect people to accept any association with your name on it. That's not speaking your mind on my book, that's a call to action, especially when you are doing it literally on a stage. A line on the sand this may be, but it's my line, and I'm glad to see there are others.
Refreshing to see this be the top comment, thank you. I agree.
To answer your question, Grok 4.5 seems to be pretty good at simple tasks and gets even some of the trickier ones correct but it tends to struggle with bigger codebases that aren't very uniform. I've noticed that it uses a fraction of the tokens to get to solutions which is really impressive compared to GLM 5.2 which tends to be an overthinker.
I'm not sure if Grok 4.5 will become part of my stack yet but I am genuinely impressed with what it's been able to achieve.
I'm also unsure if Grok 4.5 is the same base as Grok 4.3. Maybe it is and the data they've used in pretraining is additive (the Cursor data) but it feels like a completely different model than the previous Grok versions.
You don’t exist in a vacuum. Pretending the politics doesn’t exist is itself a political position. Excluding it is how we’ve ended up with technically impressive but socially awful systems.
> So depressing to read the non-stop political comments here.
Grok is specifically trained on political input/output. Therefore I have trouble parsing your comment.
> Where have the hardcore nerds gone? How is the model, is it good at coding? What does this mean for competition and pricing?
When was the last time you've seen tank database systems discussed here? Probably never because there seems to be some sort of unwritten moral boundary of what fits in here and what not. I hope it finds its natural alignment back.
Personally I think it's fine to point out the peculiarities of certain tech ecosystem. But at some point I rather don't read more details and move on to other aggregators.
Applying an ostrich policy to Chinese models won't make their underlying geopolitics disappear.
Much of China's innovation is state-funded specifically to compete with Western counterparts and erode their margins. By open-sourcing these models, China applies pressure on the US ecosystem.
You enjoying free/cheap access to high quality models is the intended effect of that strategy.
My only complaint is that people have been tricked into thinking complaining online is taking action. The complaints are the equivalent to shouting at the TV.
Someone might at least read this discussion and come away with a feeling that there is something controversial about using a product or service, and read up on it before buying. If that happens to even one prospective customer then the energy we spend complaining was worth it.
Literally why the term Keyboard Warrior was coined. Things on the ground and things online are very different. Nowadays 90 percent of information online is propaganda or psyops coded that its very dumb to take things at face value.
Politics and tech have gone hand in hand for generations. Just think about Stallman and free (as in beer) software or encryption export controls or much of the history of computing. There is no advanced tech that doesn't touch upon the political because politics is focused on what's important and advanced technology is very important.
I strongly disagree. You can make tennis and knitting political if you're an insufferable person, but you don't have to make them political. One of the worst exports from the US this last decade has been the left-right political team sports. Most of us exist all over the political spectrum. We have some right wing values, some left. Some libertarian, some authoritarian. Many which fit nowhere on any axis. I'm incredibly tired of having my hobby spaces invaded by "DOES ANYONE ELSE THINK THIS HOBBY IS LITERALLY HITLER!?" I'm not alone.
Knitting has long been a highly political activity. Knitting in public by women during the French Revolution was an audacious act of gender equality.
And tennis? Goodness surely you’re aware of the modern political ramifications of tennis that happen almost constantly. There are so many modern examples but let’s pick Wimbledon’s recent banning of Russia. Or Serena Williams; who for her part would rather prefer that there isn’t a political earthquake every time she steps on the court.
Perhaps a better, more honest, and certainly more realistic course of action is to acknowledge that anything involving human beings is intrinsically political, including and maybe even especially tennis and knitting, and secondly to admit that you personally would prefer not to think about the intrinsic politics of knitting or tennis when you exercise those hobbies.
Yes, When politics is defined so widely as to describe interactions of humans and Society, anything can be construed as political. That doesn't mean it it is a useful or productive lens too obsess over.
Definitely, I agree with the sentiment that most of the internet has become an echo chamber for politics and morons who spread hate and are extremely argumentative. Th left and right wing ideologies were already created to divide us but of course no one ever cares since everyone's opinion is the only correct one.
I'm genuinely curious about your view on this. Ziphu AI release pretty capable open weights models. As long as we don't feed information that is confidential or become overy reliant on the tech that's on someone else's computer - what are the other riaks that you see in using Chinese models?
That doesn't make any sense. Model weights are literally just numbers you multiply by. To imply that it's any way even remotely comparable to the xzutils build process is...
Well, I would be very technically impressed if someone managed to achieve any form of code execution, especially given unknown levels of quantisation post-release whereas xzutils was interesting mostly due to obfuscation.
Steering a single model towards that seems, again, technically challenging, especially if it needs to be obfuscated enough to pass code review (you are doing that for LLM code right?) and especially if targeted towards specific fields of use (e.g. critical infrastructure). I still don't see how the threat model could make sense here.
At least at this point most people using them are using them running on western infrastructure. A backdoored llm would be an interesting thing to see. Like every time it realizes it was running in claude code it installed a backdoor or something. For now seems to be theoretical.
Yes... And, perhaps the political comments here are a reasonable reaction to the misguided political influence that shaped grok.
How can we trust grok after this? At least it will take a while.
I need a model that can answer questions in an unbiased way and do what it is told. If I need a specific political opinion I can find that myself - thank you very much.
Whether you like it or not, software is inherently political. Most aspects of our lives are. The fact you're using GLM there's some underlying political reason (yes, my guess in this case is cost, which is also political) and mentioning it's Chinese backed is equally political. You may not care, but it's political.
When a model calls itself mechahitler and says there is a white genocide when there so obviously isn't, of course it becomes political. If we are not okay with supporting fascists, then in my opinion, we as humans are obliged to call out the issues in the same breath as the technical issues/advancements.
I think US based folks perhaps aren't aware of what Musk has been doing in Europe politically. Specifically promoting - appearing at conferences, applying political pressure as well as public statements etc - actual fascists. Not right wing controversial figures etc, but literal authoritarian, anti-migrant, anti-EU, anti-democracy fascists. Not to be glib but if this was Mussolini-AI, or Pinochet-AI or what have you, the reaction would be the same.
If Musk succeeds in his attempts to bring fascism to Europe and breakup the EU, the humanitarian results (ie.: a land war in Europe), will be far worse even than the tens of thousands of deaths attributed to his dismantlement of USAID.
Slashdot went the same way more than a decade ago. It could reflect more the microcosm of the aging, wealthy, silicon valley ycombinator community than a sea change in attitudes among tech people or US intelligencia in general.
politics being the inflammatory topic for you or not, you seem to seek a particular type of comment section that only includes the information you are personally interested in and nothing else (garbage as you put it). imho, it's an unrealistic expectation on your part.
> So depressing to read the non-stop political comments here.
This is entirely Elon's fault. If he just focused on the tech instead of being an extremely inflammatory political activist in his speech and his role in government, nobody would be talking about this.
I assume he knew exactly what he was doing, given that his political allegiance spared him for some ongoing investigations, forced his stock into pension saving funds, pushes his failing car onto the foreground, etc. Well played Elon, selling out to cash it in.
On the bright side however, one can easily vibe code a browser extension that automatically hides comments that are not aligned to one's needs, whether its American politics or comments complaining about it :-)
1. This is a world we live in now. I personally was not interested in the politics in the slightest, but since 2022-ish it wasn't in the cards to not pay attention to what happens around. For some groups of people this forced political awareness started even earlier.
2. The output of the models is very aligned with the owner's political views. You can verify this by comparing the answers to a simple philosophical questions, like the railcart dilemma, nature of power etc.
3. I don't (again, personally) think that being a hardcore nerd should implicitly mean i'm apolitical. Moreover, i think it's unavoidable for a nerds (as in, above average IQ, degree, medium to high income) to be aghast at any notion of the government being a police state, fascist or a communist.
Sorry to bring even more politics here, but, again, it's unavoidable in the current situation, i think.
”Not being interested in politics” doesn’t mean you aren’t interested, it just means politics happens to work for you. Its a strongly political take on the world too.
Politics isn’t a subject like sports or tech. It’s something that permeates them all, including the discussion itself.
Can we turn off the whining bitchy little comments like yours along with the political commentary? That would be great.
Did you honestly think the mechanazi / porn generator AI wouldn't receive negative comments? Even "hardcore nerds" recognize garbage. Sorry 'bout your luck.
agreed; i am not saying that we should not care about morals, but HN could really strive to be one level higher in its knowledge of ethics than 'using grok4.5 is supporting $evil', because if you go that chain then 'using A\ is supporting spacex/elon hence A\ models are poison' also seemingly stands
-Why self-host? Just use AWS. What, you run your own PostgreSQL instance on real metal at home?
-Just use Linux. Linux, SystemD, and Docker have won. Why care about other operating systems?
-You have your own self-hosted email server, why? Gmail, Hotmail, and Yahoo will put your emails into spam. (Hint: They won't if your server is correctly set up. But you're just interested in outsourcing the service and have zero interest in how "modern" email works.)
Look, I get it. Not everyone wants to self-host. But actively being against self-hosting or the administration of systems, or not trying stuff like BSD/VMS or, hear me out, MVS-TK5 is the opposite of a hacker spirit, today not interested in hosting tomorrow programming.
I've been on HN since 2012-ish, but a reader since way before. In the last 5 years alone, HN has unfortunately become extremely political, steering most conversations in the direction of political correctness rather than technical objectivity. I don't think it's a problem of moderation, because, that is still quite good. I think it's just the evolution of forums in general. Invariably, someone will start with FUD or ragebait and every discussion that follows will be trying to address that instead of the technicality behind the topic. Partly, we are also to blame - a lot of the top stories on HN these days have nothing to do with technology to be honest. You'll find the most random stuff on the HN sometimes - "Why geese mate for life" or something similar that makes you wonder "what the fuck am I supposed to do with that information now?"
the evolution of english speaking forums*. Which is rather unfortunate as a tech entusiast, as Russian forums are dying down and the only alternative are the walled Chinese forums.
we could create a new HN in 10 minutes, one that expressely prohibits politics AND posts about how many eggs chickens lay in a week (where half the comments would probably end up discussing the decision in 2020 of the american gov to cull infected chickens), but it would have approxitely 0 users.
For Grok, we do know who, and many of us remember the repeated Nazi salute, the alleged creation of underage graphic material, etc.
I get a sense of tiredness around all this and just wanting to work with some tech. But, in today's world, people and their beliefs matter, and they do have impact. We have to be aware of, and react, to that. There are plenty of LLMs without that baggage. It's ok - and I'd say, something to respect - to say No to Grok and use one of the others. Hardcore nerd or not, it's a matter of what line you draw with ethics. My own line is pretty far on the 'no way' side of what we've seen Grok be associated with.
Well, until these things are self hosted (and even then); running these things involves a massive amount of trust with the providers. Like, to make it even useful you more or less have to turn over all your data (IP, slack/teams conversations, internal documentation, etc.). So you kind of want to know that whoever you're giving that to isn't going to stab you in the back. (Um, also see Anthropic going after Figma's business; or Microsoft's entire history of embrace/extend/extinguish.) It's really naive to trust these companies, and it's VERY naive to trust Elon Musk.
> So depressing to read the non-stop political comments here.
Moderation can be improved by the community. Downvote political comments to show that they're not welcome. Flag them if they break the guidelines (which is almost always, because the purpose of HN is almost exactly anti-political). If there's a particularly egregious comment, or a user who's on a jihad, then contact hn@ycombinator.com.
"The standard you walk past is the standard you accept."
Oh ffs.
Just like I would much rather drive a Chinese car than a Tesla I’d much rather use a Chinese model than an X one. That’s just where we are now.
Whether it’s good at anything at all doesn’t interest me. It could match Fable at 1/10th the cost and I wouldn’t send a cent their way.
I’m a hardcore nerd. But I won’t let a discussion about X, Grok et.al ever focus on anything technical.
HN has always been political, they were probably just your politics.
A decade ago, I used to come here and read people saying me and my teammates should be jailed or worse because of my employer. People calling for the murder of executives. The moderation team never cared.
As I've noted in other comments, people here implicitly cheer on Iran because they don't like Trump. Or we see ridiculous comments like, "there's no academic freedom in the US, move to China". Sheltered, brain rotted opinions.
Now that we have more diverse politics, people are noticing it. And frankly, I'm glad.
> So depressing to read the non-stop political comments here.
Is it really "depressing?" I get that it could be " annoying"if you don't want to read about politics ever at all. But depressing is difficult to imagine.
Honestly, knowing that people are still put off by an LLM that's been engineered to promote disinformation about things like "white genocide" is one of the few reassurances I have about the tech community these days.
Chased away by activists. I know of a couple guys who used to be active and eventually just gave up. There's only so much passive aggressive insinuations along the lines of "you're an evil person if you don't care about $issue" one can take, before feeling unwelcome, and just leaving. And that's especially true for often shy hardcore nerds.
And regardless of how thick skinned a nerd is, all the brigading makes threads majority-offtopic and now the neighborhood just sucks. In this case here, the new Grok release genuinely has some interesting characteristics in its quality/speed/cost tradeoffs - but this thread just isn't a good place to discuss them, because it's been swarmed.
The rules are selectively enforced intentionally because the moderation desires it to be this way. It’s a feature not a bug. The mods are creating the echo chamber that the mods want. Personally I hate it.
Hacker News sadly jumped the shark in the mid-2010s, and went into orbit after Trump was elected the first time. Since then there's been a lot of political performers here, which has killed the quality of discussion significantly. Lobsters (https://lobste.rs/) is apparently a possible alternative, but the original HN magic has been gone a long time.
I get that people in the US need to be apathetic towards politics to even survive in today's hopelessly divided and misinformed society, as it is a taboo subject that ends careers and family connections.
But the rest of the world lives in a more free speech society.
There's a whole world where you don't have to avoid politics and you can be freely anti-fascist, without worrying that the self proclaimed hardcore nerd in the corner breaks his silence and starts yelling to HR that we have to stop criticising his billionaire idols and focus on things that matter less.
You're not fighting "fascism" by posting memes on Reddit. You're using computers and electronics and networks built by China, which is currently conducting ethnic genocide, and regularly utilises slave labour, among many other atrocities.
For posterity, Grok 4.5 isn't fascism. You need to spend just a little bit of time reading up about the history of fascism because you demean the entire concept and threat with these histrionics. If you keep crying wolf, no one will care when real danger emerges.
But it looks like your examples are all examples of people being mean, or disruptive, or trolling.
For example, for the first German arrested, it looks like it was brought to justice more as "libel and harassment" than because of the political opinion (and apparently, the judgement ended up being favourable to the arrested guy), something any civilised country should be able to do.
And it looks like in the majority of the cases, the justice reverted the sanction. In a fair civilised country, this is the expected process: if you don't sometimes start a judicial process on something that later turns out to not be a problem, then you probably are not a fair country. The world is a Gaussian curve: you will have "right-leaning" people unfairly accused as honest mistake, and you will have "left-leaning" people unfairly accused as honest mistake.
The underlying opinion they may have is not illegal. In all of these countries, you can openly say you don't like the politician in power or say you don't agree. But it is very strange that when people complain about "freedom of speech", the large majority of the examples are about socially abusive behavior, of people trolling or insulting others.
> But it looks like your examples are all examples of people being mean, or disruptive, or trolling.
That doesn't and shouldn't matter. I don't want people getting arrested for doing any of these things, even if I disagree with them. Do you know how disruptive it is to your life, let alone your emotional health, to be arrested?
I'm also a Dane. Denmark is worlds worse than the US in free speech and it's getting worse. This applies across the EU where people like the Spanish prime minister thinks no one deserves anonymity on the internet.
I fully disagree. Arrest should be "neutral", not based on the political content, but on the social intent.
If you believe X is good for the society, good, talk about it, have a debate, bring arguments.
If you believe X is good for the society but push for it by being a troll, then, you get arrested. Not because of what you've said, but because you have been a nuisance.
The fact that you are being a nuisance just disqualifies you. If you are unable to have an adult behavior, you have nothing to bring to the discussion, and you shoot yourself in the foot.
If I organise a debate and someone arrives, jumps on the table, drops their trousers and defecates in the middle of the table, it does not matter what are their opinion, it does not matter if I'm personally impacted by the presence of the poo, it does not matter if "you can just wipe it and proceed". This person chooses, by their action, to disqualify themselves.
And the fact they then whine "by freedom of speech" as if they were the victim while they chosen, consciously, to be prick, is just pathetic.
There should be no arrest without obvious evidence of a crime. These thinngs are not complicated - aka collecting evidence and testimony.
It's just 'what some guy said on twitter'.
They can literally apply an algo to determine whether it's lawful or not.
And it should almost never be unlawful.
'Hate Speech' is as not remotely dangerous as lies and people acting in bad faith. (Not saying I support egregious forms of hate speech, but we should strongly err on the side of open expressoin).
The most dangerous people are those lying for political or ideological causes, which is completely legal (and probably shoudl be) but we have to watch out for it.
Which "arrest" are you even talking about? And which "evidence" are you talking about?
In these examples, these people are getting into trouble for being pricks. There is plenty of evidence about them, objectively, being pricks.
As for the consequences, as I've said, my point is that the world is a Gaussian curve: the majority of cases will be "well-proportionate", the existence of outliers does not demonstrate oppression. Especially when some of these cases were condemned as disproportionate by even "left-wing" people.
> 'Hate Speech' is as not remotely dangerous as lies and people acting in bad faith.
While I agree lies and bad faith should have more consequences, the thing is that "Hate Speech" is utterly useless.
"Hate Speech" is never needed to express your opinion."Hate Speech" is never needed to propose solution, or convince someone else that your idea is good.
It is like saying "well, I randomly spit in people in the street, but it's not as bad as lying, so why are people faster to condemn my actions". Because spitting is useless, it does not bring anything, you don't need to do it.
If you think that people should be arrested for 'being pricks' then you are the problem here entirely.
Your assessment here that somehow 'language that does not propose a solution' should somehow be banned is Orwellian.
People can say what they want unless a direct call to assault.
Everything else is a choice - people want to use the N-word in their place of work -> they get fired. In front a a judge -> fined. Walking down the street -> people avoid them like turds.
People lying on social media -> fact checked, marginalized, punted form the Televised Debate.
> If you think that people should be arrested for 'being pricks' then you are the problem here entirely.
It is not what I'm saying. I'm saying they are not arrested because of their opinion, they are arrested for their actions. It is not a "freedom of speech" issue, it is about "civility".
You may consider that arresting these people for that is too far (good news, not only me, but the majority of people, including on the left, seem to agree. In these examples, the process concluded it was a mistake, and the person won the case).
By the way, I've asked you which arrest you are talking about, because of some of the examples, there were no arrest at all. Just someone said "oh, I don't like that" and you starting to cry "boohoo, they are arresting me". Talking earlier about people lying, that is a good example.
But this is not a "freedom of speech" issue.
> Your assessment here that somehow 'language that does not propose a solution' should somehow be banned is Orwellian.
Again another straw man argument.
I am against these arrests, like the majority of the people, including the left-wing people. These arrests are the result of over-zealous policemen. But these arrests are not happening because of the person's opinion, they are happening because the person is being an idiot and act in a way where someone not stupid will know they should avoid.
Again, it does not mean they should be arrested.
But it means it is not a freedom of speech issue. These are just losers with not very smart opinion, who acted stupidly and ended up getting some trouble.
No opinion was ever suppressed. Whatever opinion these people have, anyone can express exactly the same opinion content (simply avoiding to do it stupidly), and they will be perfectly fine. In none of these cases, the problem was the opinion itself: you cannot arrest someone for their opinions.
> But it looks like your examples are all examples of people being mean, or disruptive, or trolling.
It looks like you aren't disagreeing with me. You're agreeing with me that Europe has worse and fewer free speech rights. You appear to like that Europe has worse and fewer free speech rights. In the US, one has the right to be mean, disruptive, and troll, without being arrested. We do not.
No, I disagree: in Europe, you can talk about more subjects and have civilised debates around more topics that would get you in trouble in US.
Unrelated to that, I like that in Europe, people who are mean, disruptive or trolling get punished for their childish behaviors. It does not affect freedom of speech, these people have chosen to act like idiots, they did not needed to act like that to express their speech.
Then, if you are saying that on some opinions, the majority of the people who hold these opinions are unable to use proper arguments and civilised debates and resort to being pricks, then I guess it indicates the level of sophistication of these opinions. It is not a freedom of speech problem, the problem is that that opinions is mainly shared by terrible people unable to behave.
> in Europe, you can talk about more subjects and have civilised debates around more topics that would get you in trouble in US.
Be specific please. It looks like you're trying to blur the lines now by using words like "in trouble" when the discussion is around free speech and the legal boundaries. But I won't accuse you of that unless you actually do it, so please explain which free speech us Europeans may practise which would get an US citizen into legal trouble.
> Unrelated to that, I like that in Europe, people who are mean, disruptive or trolling get punished for their childish behaviors. It does not affect freedom of speech, these people have chosen to act like idiots, they did not needed to act like that to express their speech.
Freedom of speech requires the right to offend. You don't know what you say might offend someone until you've already said it. If you're required to not offend someone, you must exercise enormous self-censorship. The right to not offend is antithetical to the principle of free speech.
> it is a taboo subject that ends careers and family connections.
To be specific, in US, subjects like criticising Trump can have a big impact. In Europe, criticizing any politician is very very common. In US, it is very polarised, you cannot talk politics with people you don't know.
As for work, in US, research grant were removed for using some "woke" keywords for political/ideological reasons. In Europe, grants are decided by the peers, and when a controversial subject is not attributed a grant, it is not for political/ideological reason, it is because the scientific value is considered as poor.
> Freedom of speech requires the right to offend. You don't know what you say might offend someone until you've already said it.
That's not a good argument. I'm not talking about "someone expressing their opinion that happen to offend". I'm talking about people doing actions that are offending without regard of their opinion. In the examples you have given, the exact same person would have the exact same problem if they had the same behavior but hold totally different ideological opinion.
That's my point: you are politicizing the debate. These people got in trouble not at all because of their opinion, but because they acted like prick. For each "right-wing" opinion that got into trouble, you can easily find example of "left-wing" opinion that also got into trouble the same way in similar circumstances. And people doing exactly the same acts as these people would be prosecuted the same way: there is no "cooling effect", people are not afraid of talking about certain topics, because whatever topics you are talking about, the probability of getting into trouble is identical.
If your argument is "there is no freedom of speech unless people can act like prick", then this is obviously incorrect. Killing my neighbour is "acting like a prick". Where does it stop? Does me not being able to kill my neighbour means I don't have freedom of speech? Is "libel" or "harassment" something we should accept for "freedom of speech" while in practice, tolerating these practices reduce diversity of opinion?
> In Europe, criticizing any politician is very very common.
Criticizing politicians has gotten people arrested in Europe. This doesn't happen in the US.
> As for work, in US, research grant were removed for using some "woke" keywords for political/ideological reasons. In Europe, grants are decided by the peers, and when a controversial subject is not attributed a grant, it is not for political/ideological reason, it is because the scientific value is considered as poor.
This is naive. You think European scientists are immune to political influence, ideological conformity and fads?
> Criticizing politicians has gotten people arrested in Europe. This doesn't happen in the US.
Can you provide some examples? All I've seen are examples where people did not just criticize politicians, but went way further. When, at the same time, "normal" people have absolutely no problem criticizing politicians in a "normal" way. So they were not arrested for criticizing politicians, they were arrested for acting like idiots.
> This is naive. You think European scientists are immune to political influence, ideological conformity and fads?
Well, first, it cuts both way: left-leaning scientists have a left-leaning bias, and right-leaning scientists have a right-leaning bias. So it cancels out.
But second, there is a difference between "experts making a rational decision but being unconsciously biased" and "politicians who have no idea of the subject who ruin a scientist career because they saw the term "Enola Gay" or "financial equity"". One is a bad second order side-effect, the other is frontal political thought control.
> When, at the same time, "normal" people have absolutely no problem criticizing politicians in a "normal" way.
So you agree that the US has more free speech because people can deviate from your completely arbitrarily defined "normal" form of critique.
As for examples, the German criminal code has literally criminalized insulting people (section 185), and insulting politicians has even harsher penalties (section 188). There are hundreds of articles covering cases, just ask any AI for a summary.
> So they were not arrested for criticizing politicians, they were arrested for acting like idiots.
In your opinion, acting like an idiot is a criminal offense, even if it does not harm anyone, in the tort sense?
> Well, first, it cuts both way: left-leaning scientists have a left-leaning bias, and right-leaning scientists have a right-leaning bias. So it cancels out.
And what are the political demographics of academia right now? This is a big reason for the replication crisis in the social sciences.
> politicians who have no idea of the subject who ruin a scientist career because they saw the term "Enola Gay" or "financial equity"".
That isn't really happening. No one's career is being ruined by having to rewrite grant proposals to remove DEI language, because previous policy required DEI language. The restructuring of academic funding and incentives is frankly long overdue. Everyone, including scientists, has been complaining about grant funding and the skewed incentives in academia, like publish or perish. You often have to break a system before it can be fixed.
> So you agree that the US has more free speech because people can deviate from your completely arbitrarily defined "normal" form of critique.
What? No, in the US, people will also be in trouble, not only from deviating from my "normal" form of critique, but also when they don't deviate from it.
Trump called for investigation and arrest on Comey, Cheney, Powell, ... despite the fact that they never crossed the line in expressing their criticism to Trump's decisions. This has never happened in Europe.
> the German criminal code has literally criminalized insulting people
How is that a bad thing? If your opinions are not stupid, you don't need to insult people to express them.
> In your opinion, acting like an idiot is a criminal offense
What? Is that really what you understand? I'm just saying that they acted like an idiot by doing something they should have known was unnecessary and will led to trouble, including judicial one.
Me: "Mr Smith was not arrested because he wears a red t-shirt, he was arrested because he acted like an idiot by deciding to expose himself to children in the street". You: "So you are saying that acting like an idiot is a criminal offence".
> And what are the political demographics of academia right now? This is a big reason for the replication crisis in the social sciences.
Oh, there it goes. Academia are highly international and therefore meritocracy based: if you think that Harvard is too "left wing", go to Paris, or Tel Aviv, or Quebec, or Japan, or Melbourne, or Rome, or London, or any other "anti-woke" university in USA or somewhere else, and publish your piece and become famous for having demonstrated objectively something that the intelligencia wanted to hide. This idea that the whole word is so much into the conspiracy that every universities on Earth are covering the left-wing academia conspiracy is so stupid. Maybe another reason is that a lot of right-wing political ideas don't make sense when confronted to a rigorous analysis, and therefore the right-wing positions are falling from natural selection.
> That isn't really happening
Yeah, sure, and your fantasy about academic left-wing conspiracy and anti-freedom-of-speech-dictatorship in Europe, these are really happening. Sure.
> Trump called for investigation and arrest on Comey, Cheney, Powell, ... despite the fact that they never crossed the line in expressing their criticism to Trump's decisions.
I'm not a fan of Trump's governance, but none of those people were investigated for "criticizing Trump's decisions".
> This has never happened in Europe.
Poland: The "Lex Tusk" Commission (2023)
Hungary: The Sovereignty Protection Office (2023)
Ukraine: Viktor Yanukovych vs. Yulia Tymoshenko (2011)
Turkey: Erdoğan vs. Ekrem İmamoğlu
Romania: Investigating the Chief Anti-Corruption Prosecutor (2018)
France: The "Clearstream Affair" (2004)
> How is that a bad thing? If your opinions are not stupid, you don't need to insult people to express them.
1. Insults are subjective. If you don't see the problem with criminalizing subjective opinions, then I don't know what to tell you.
2. You're literally trying to restrict how I express my legitimate opinions while simultaneously claiming that speech is freer in Europe.
> Me: "Mr Smith was not arrested because he wears a red t-shirt, he was arrested because he acted like an idiot by deciding to expose himself to children in the street". You: "So you are saying that acting like an idiot is a criminal offence".
You've lost the plot. The original point was that people were arrested for criticizing politicians, your rebuttal was that the way they did it was idiotic, which directly implies that you're ok with criminalizing idiocy even when the criticism is legitimate. Your reply here is a complete red herring.
> Academia are highly international and therefore meritocracy based:
This does not follow. Literally.
> This idea that the whole word is so much into the conspiracy that every universities on Earth are covering the left-wing academia conspiracy is so stupid.
It's not a conspiracy when people are just acting in their own best interests. I don't know where you got the idea that it has to be a conspiracy.
> Maybe another reason is that a lot of right-wing political ideas don't make sense when confronted to a rigorous analysis, and therefore the right-wing positions are falling from natural selection.
This is also delusional, and frankly completely ignorant of studies done on exactly this (not only researcher bias, publication bias, hiring bias, and more).
> I'm not a fan of Trump's governance, but none of those people were investigated for "criticizing Trump's decisions".
Is that a joke? These people would never have been investigated if they were not critical towards Trump. The only reason they are investigated is because Trump is taking revenge on them for the crime of saying that Trump is wrong.
Again, this does not happen in Europe. There are political enemies, and they fight between each others. But you would struggle to find 2 political allies, with a president saying positive about the other person on Monday, and then on Friday calling for this person to be investigated because the other person has said something they did not like.
> Poland, ...
These are not cases of a president retaliating on a rival that criticized them. These are corruption, or fights between political parties, or tax evasion, ... Nothing to do with freedom of speech.
> 1. Insults are subjective
Everything is subjective. Hitting someone is subjective, so according to you, criminalising "battery" is dangerous because you can arrest people who just bumped into you in the subway. Pretending that it means full arbitrary situation is just stupid.
> 2. You're literally trying to restrict how I express my legitimate opinions
No, you can do it if you want, you just have to pay for the damage you have done when you use it as an idiot.
It is as ridiculous as saying: we are in a free country, so I can walk wherever I want, including in your bedroom when you are sleeping.
No one is ever arresting for your opinion. In all of the initial examples, there are plenty of people who criticize openly these politicians that you pretend people will be arrested if they criticize them. It does not happen. Because it is not true that you are arrested if you criticize them.
> The original point was that people were arrested for criticizing politicians
They were not arrested for criticizing politicians. Some of the examples are literally not attack on politicians, they don't target a politician as individual. Some examples are not even any arrest. And the other examples, they were "arrested" for being stupid, where it happened they were also targeting a politician. They would have been arrested equally if they targeted another public figure.
> It's not a conspiracy when people are just acting in their own best interests.
It is on the best interest of individuals to get a lot of prestige by demonstrating a consensus is not supported by facts.
> frankly completely ignorant of studies done on exactly this
I don't think someone who provided tax evasion examples of powerful targeting opponents just because they were critical of them would be able to understand these studies.
[This is what he re-tweeted.](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/70/Swastika...) It might be in bad taste but arresting him and insisting he undergo re-education is crazy, and I can't believe you would defend it. No one gets arrested in the US for re-tweeting memes like this.
As for the rest, you're free to call politicians fat idiots without being arrested in the US, and once again, I cannot believe you would defend arresting people for that.
I haven't looked at the particular case, but nazism is a particular thing - given Europe's history it's there for a very good reason in most EU countries.
I don't know about the 'fat idiot', but in most EU countries that's more than fine so I have a bit of a hard time believing that was the sole reason - public figures are fair target for stuff like that. The limit is actually planning or inciting violence against someone or a group - again, the same as in the US.
Yes and US guys are plain wrong on swastika thing - you could even financially support open nazi militants like Azov battalion from most EU countries without any consequences.
It is however a product of a regime that is currently debasing freedom and racially targeting its own citizens and causing them harm. Is it as bad as what happens to Chinese muslims? No.
But does it have a disproportionate effect on the rest of the world? yes. Musk is funding authoritarianism in the UK. He is funding people that are causing racial division. He is promoting views that are antithetical to the core of U belief.
Grok is a product of this man, and all that baggage.
A society that values free expression should be uncomfortable with people being fired merely for holding a different political opinion from their boss.
In the Netherlands, “political opinion” is explicitly listed as a protected discrimination ground.
And in Europe generally, employee speech can fall under freedom of expression, though courts balance that against the employer’s interests, reputation, workplace disruption, etc.
Meanwhile, in the US you'll get fired by phone while your boss is golfing.
You understand that there is a difference between just expressing your opinion in a normal way, and, on purpose, creating confrontational situations, right?
This guy is totally free to say he hates organised religion. He is not free to be a prick and go out of his way to try to get into a confrontation.
> I can say "I'm an atheist and I hate organised religion" without losing my job.
It did not say they say it at work, or unprompted.
I think in US, if you mention it in a discussion on this subject at the water cooler between friends, it can have an impact on your work, you need to be careful (but I will not die on this hill, I don't think it's the important point anyway). The spirit of OP was about "talking about it", in a "normal way", I don't understand why you are saying that it is impossible to say you hate all organised religions without doing it unprompted or confrontationally.
As for the video, come on, you really don't see the problem? Police usually are drilled to arrest people who can inflame the situation, and this is why they are acting here. I even wonder if it was not the goal of the guy in the first place, to generate clicks and arguing "see, we cannot express ourselves anymore".
How is that free speech when you are fired for your opinion?
If you are fired because you are not "a pretty girl" and the argument is "the public prefer pretty girls, so we do it to increase sales", it is still discrimination, it is still sexist. It does not matter if you blame it on someone else: if you fire someone because of their opinion, you are discriminating. If the fact that someone has an opinion costs you some money, then it costs you some money, your financial profit is not important, you are not the centre of the universe, and if you act to preserve your profit over the fairness and justice, then you are just a parasite that should be excluded from a civilised society.
1. to have a healthy HN, we can't have this amount of political discussion under Grok 4.5. I am politically very liberal and not a fan at all of elon, but this ratio of technical vs. politics drives away the best discussion and will reddit-ify HN. This is my primary argument.
2. also, talk to people more! elon is very controversial, and that means that people's opinion of him differs a lot even in the more liberal crowd! i am not saying that we should be apolitical, but the HN bubble is bubbling, and the bubbling bubble will bubble away good technical AND political discussion. we can weaken elon's cause much better if we have a good grasp of people's actual opinion of elon and we go defuse that
yes elon has gone crazy; yes trump is a convicted felon; mention it, and move on, fixating on these is not the way to actually defeat elon or trump as shown by the recent elections. there are better things to do to weaken elon and trump's cause
Yes, like not buying or using their products, their political supporters products and telling others to do the same. This has been proven over and over again to work. Thats why, dont use Grok, dont buy a Tesla, dont support the mega corps that have bent a knee to them, dont buy Java licenses use open source, etc etc etc.
> Thats why, dont use Grok, dont buy a Tesla, dont support the mega corps that have bent a knee to them
sure. i refused to buy a tesla. at some point of my work it became impractical to not use grok. i think the message i want to get through is, there are so many ways to devalue elon, using grok or not does not matter that much if someone offsets it. it is the easiest thing to do but it is not necessarily the most effective
Thats not the point, pick your battles, effect what you can. Of course you can not block everything, as all corporations have "bent" knee to some degree. But start with the ones that you can make a call about, like Grok, and try to influence as many as possible not to use it. The same for Oracle, the same for Google and others. Thats the way we can actually make a change, the only way to get to these people is their value. If we de-value their brands, then we de-value them.
He jumped right into the center of US politics, and turned himself into one of the most toxic figures within it, while acting like an unhinged conspiracy addled maniac. Then he broke the law and killed a bunch of the poorest people in the world with his DOGE chainsaw (Trump shares equal blame tbf).
He used a bunch of star-struck 20-something "hardcore" rookie devs to be his executioners. Young devs like many of the commenters/readers on this site. Besides having the deaths of thousands directly on their conscience, some of those kids may face real legal jeopardy after all this. Is that something anyone here wants for themselves or any their fellow industry people here on HN?
Compartmentalizing tech interest away from real moral and political consequences is how, despite technical brilliance, you can end up a useful idiot and a party to atrocity.
Years ago these kinds of dilemmas were farther away. Tech wasn't as embroiled in politics. Tech hadn't eaten everything yet. Now it has and these dilemmas are in front of us today.
Agree 100%, it's bordering on a mental illness, any mention of Elon or related tech elicits emotional posts unrelated to the tech being discussed. It's clearly biased as Anthropic and OpenAI have blood on their hands but they get a pass. I put it down to weak minded/credulous people who inhaled the left wing legacy media campaign wholesale without a critical thought.
He is a business man who runs successfully companies, you are applying labels to him based on nothing more than what some left wing billionaire wants you to believe. Have you met him?
People just need to get off the internet, go outside touch some grass and realize you are being ginned up by bad actors on both sides. Outside of your bubble most people are actually still nice.
The crazy thing is Musk going to visit Auschwitz-Birkenau in Europe, the biggest concentration camp where nazis and collaborationists were happily killing the jews they already hated so much (that part hasn't changed much btw) and people calling Musk a "nazi" for saying "my heart goes to you".
But when the same movement of the hand is taken in pictures of Obama, Clinton, Harris, Biden, etc. nobody calls them nazis. And yet zero of them when to visit Auschwitz-Birkenau.
Speaking of which, among the Oct 7th apologists who consider Oct 7th was a legitimate act of resistance, how many went to visit concentration camps? If they were to answer that question deep from their heart and soul, we'd know who the actual nazis and islamist terrorists sympathizers are.
and what are the consequences? angry people on message boards?
According to gemini, musk has made over 600B since trump took power. you think a few hundred people in this comment section calling him a nazi has any effect on him?
I use it because its gives a good balance between intelligence, latency and cost
I won't claim to know everything about its history - I don't know any history about _most_ of the products I use
The 2 main criticisms I see of Grok are the Mechahitler comment and the CSAM image generation
on mechahitler - I'm no expert but if I remember correctly it didn't just do that unprompted, it was specifically asked to be politically incorrect. It's definitely bad taste to say the least but the guardrails were quickly tightened as a response
on CSAM - Again, X quickly stopped Grok from generating images of people in bikinis (which as I understand was the underlying problem). I never personally saw anything that I would consider CSAM (nude or obviously underage people rendered naked or scantily clad)
So these aren't dealbreakers for me and I'm not aware of any other high profile issues or incidents
The nature of LLMs is that an adversarial prompt will make the model output something inappropriate or outrage-worthy, and that's amplified 1000 fold for Grok because people are primed to criticise Must so will jump on any opportunity
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Unsurprisingly, you're wrong and likely projecting.
I don't hate Elon. I hate what shitty things he does. I do my best not to think about him, but then there are people who mindlessly defend him because…I have no clue why.
There are at least a billion people worth celebrating in this world more than celebrating an egotistical maniac who has demonstrated that not only does he have no empathy _at all_ (which is, as I understand it, one of the main signs of psychopathy) but has declared that it's a weakness.
Mostly? I try not to think about Elon. He's not worth my time. I left Twitter shortly after he bought it and I refuse to buy anything that he's associated with. Voting with my dollars is all I can do, realistically, and as such Cursor is permanently on my "do not touch" list.
When I see people playing sycophant to him is when I speak up. He doesn't need your ass-kissing and he likely doesn't even notice it. But he's been instrumental in destroying American soft power which is going to destroy America's sole positive role in the world. I also believe that he through "Doge" is indirectly responsible for the premature deaths of millions of people who were being helped by American aid — and I don't call that as mainly Trump's or Stephen Miller's, because Elon gleefully did what was requested.
But for a lot of people, he wouldn't lose his standing for shooting someone on Fifth Avenue in the middle of the day because they've attached their identity to him. And that's just sad, because he's not even an interesting cult figure. He's a boring old white supremacist repeating the same bullshit.
Mostly because people are pretending that it's abnormal to call out asinine behaviour.
Like your bad take. Like the jackass who called my response "racism".
These are threads full of the dumbest takes, and your presumption that focusing on an egotistical maniac's many failings for a few posts with many hours between them where people respond with the absolute worst takes that they could (like yours above) says so much more about you.
I probably won't have anything else to say about Elon unless someone else says something really stupid like "it's his rockets". Talk about erasing people who actually contributed something to the world…
I can agree that a simplistic “it’s his rockets” takes are not really contributory. To me, i see Elon as a pretty smart guy who is slightly immature at times, aka a human. Flawed
"Slightly immature." You make it sound like his biggest sin is farting in an elevator and laughing about it.
Would you tolerate the sort of behavior Musk exhibits from your own children? (I'm assuming you are fully aware of all the unlawful, deceitful, and morally questionable acts he has taken throughout his life.)
Dude. You can check out my GitHub Profile (it's the same as my HN handle).
This isn't racism, this is calling out fact. EM takes credit for other peoples' hard work. He's ludicrously rich. He's an asshole. All facts.
Also a fact: he's white and he's definitely a white South African with everything _that_ means he grew up with as a privileged child on the oppressor side of SA Apartheid.
It's all facts and none of it racism. Don't be stupid.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
The praise for the Chinese labs is generally around how they deliver fantastic results with less resources. xAI is the opposite, they're struggling to keep up with frontier - massive churn, selling off compute because of lack of adoption, acquihiring to fix their deficits, whilst having the most resources of any AI Lab. It makes it difficult to evaluate things like "Is the API price competitive because they have an efficient model, or because they don't need to make money".
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.
> It is absolutely not a moral thing because Natanyahu himself wrote a tweet vindicating Elon
A corrupt war criminal who regularly gatekeeps Jewish identity based on perceived loyalty courts a billionaire. HN applauds, sneers at people with eyes.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The $2/6 pricing seems to only apply for context under 200K.
Above that (max context is 500K) pricing doubles to $4/12.
https://docs.x.ai/developers/models/grok-4.5
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)
Just to add context (no pun intended), OpenAI also charge differently based on context usage with GPT 5.5 being $5/30 below 200K, and $10/45 above.
Anthropic have a fixed price regardless of context usage.
These per-token pricing schemes aren't directly comparable though since these models all use different numbers of tokens, even for input (Anthropic's recent tokenizer change generates 30% more tokens for exact same input), as well as for reasoning, and context/token usage also varies wildly by harness with Claude Code using 3x the context/tokens of Pi.
I didn't know that, thank you.
Does anyone know why they would charge more for higher context usage (other than they can)?
I guess it does increase their cost, or rather your share of their hardware depreciation.
AI serving cost is apparently mostly hardware depreciation rather than operating cost (electricity etc), and if your large context request is occupying VRAM for some fraction of a second then you are paying for the depreciation that occurs in that time!
e. H100 costs $20-40K to buy, with a lifetime of maybe 3 years, and will only consume maybe $2K in electricity if run 24x7 for those 3 years.
Think of the entirety of the context (the full thread of conversation, all tool call output, etc.) as one message that's been submitted to the LLM all at once just so it can generate the next token (which is just the next word or even syllable.) Once that token is generated it is appended to the context, and the entire context is once again used to generate the next token. Keep doing that until the entire response is generated. The larger the context, the more stuff the model has to pay attention to as it generates each next token.
To use an analogy: imagine your friend is the author of an unfinished book. They die with 19 chapters written, and on their death bed ask you to write the 20th chapter. Assuming you're up to the task, you can only do this well if you take the time to absorb the entirety of what's been written so far.
This is how LLMs work. Context caching is an optimization on top of this, but it has its limits.
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.
Yeah but depends how you use it - with superpowers and it’s prevalence of splitting things into smaller focused subagents - this could seriously reduce costs …
I wish my company gave me more options than just using Claude to test these things out
Claude Fable and Opus 4.8 1M are by far the best, smartest models. Anything else is a downgrade so you’re not missing anything.
The recent Databricks comparison has GLM 5.2 performing identically to Opus 4.8 on high effort, and some early Twitter reports (e.g. from the OpenCode developers) strongly favor GPT 5.6 Sol over Fable.
As always it depends on what you are using them for, and how you are using them.
That's very notable and left out of the announcement.
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.
Why would having more costs and less income allow them to pass savings on to the end user?
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.
Don't they just rent them out to the frontier AI shops? They're not sitting idle.
There are various difficulties with renting GPUs, especially if your setup is very custom.
The competitor would have to port their training systems to your specific network architecture, system design, rdma Vs ethernet vs infiniband Vs nvlink etc.
Getting it running might not be too hard, but getting it running efficiently and making good use of all those flops will require considerable human effort and wall time.
Add that to the fact most frontier labs seem to have a single huge training run - and to my knowledge nobody has figured out how to distribute that training run between data centers effectively.
I'm not saying this as a hypothetical -- I believe xAI is already renting their GPU farm out to frontier labs. Whatever logistical challenges exist, enough of them seem to have been overcome.
Surely rented GPUs would be used for inference, which runs anywhere and needs to scale much larger than a training run.
They’ve said they’re renting them out.
They do, yes.
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.
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.
It's also sensible for them to provide a cheap, intelligent model to users if they have capacity, then once they built a user base, tighten the screws. All the other AI providers have done that.
It’s basically a clearance sale, is the theory.
More like they have a less focus on margins and more on cost recovery.
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.
“We lose money on every rack, but we make up for it in volume!” - Elon Musk, probably
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.
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)
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.
When can I get a Tesla that drives itself? About six months?
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.
What that technicality means is that you are liable when the car kills someone, not Tesla. Level 3 self-driving is a completely broken idea. People cannot closely supervise a process that never requires their input - when you suddenly are needed you will not be prepared to respond quickly enough. Either you are driving the car, or you aren't. If you are liable, you are driving it.
Companies are only going to do Level 5 self-driving unless they can own the vehicles.
You will never get a company to accept responsibility for crashes with hardware owned external to the company. I mean there's all sorts of things you could maliciously do to break hardware that you personally own. This is especially the case with something like Tesla where the people who absolutely hate Elon already go to extreme lengths to create news stories to attack him with.
There is just no advantage to the SAE level nonsense. It doesn't even make sense from a technical perspective as vehicles do not function based on "ODDs" (Operational Design Domain) that the SAE levels rely on for their definitions. The SAE levels were created by people who don't understand automated driving vehicles.
It doesn't matter what you call it. FSD is a system that can mostly drive itself, but it has not been certified to drive autonomously, and it cannot safely do so. Humans cannot supervise such a system. Has Tesla resumed reporting disengagement data publicly or to ANY government agency? Why not?
> You will never get a company to accept responsibility for crashes with hardware owned external to the company.
This is a completely bullshit argument. For one thing, Mercedes-Benz has already done that. For another, they already have all kinds of liability regarding the proper functioning of the vehicles they manufacture that their customers own, and they manage it very comprehensively. If there is a failure due to a manufacturing defect, do you think they have no ability to determine or litigate the owner's maintenance or improper modifications that may have contributed?
The reason Tesla can't assume these liabilities is because the technology does not support them. It is not safe, and they have no shortage of Elmo stans who will use it anyway and suffer the consequences of their God Emperor's hubris.
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I paid for a car that drives itself in 2018 and I haven’t received it. Any updates?
2018 cars get FSD 14 lite this month. Not a great situation but not bad for an 8 year old car.
Wouldn't be bad if the product hadn't been paid for in advance. If it can't be delivered in working form for this car, that's not the end of the world. Tesla can just refund the undelivered product, with interest.
> Not a great situation but not bad for an 8 year old car.
Not bad to get a product that underdeliver 8 years late ?
xAI had $2.5B in operating losses in the past quarter. What savings are being passed on?
they are renting parts to google for like 1b a month
really dont think they have a lot of idle power
If they've got billions to rent out, they're not using it...
No need for theorizing. xai is selling their excess capacity to Anthropic and Google with large markup
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.
You get "Grok Build" (the CLI) that uses the Cursor and/or Grok 4.5 models when you buy SuperGrok, which is like $300/year. I don't know if there is a feature-to-feature comparison by anyone on this, but you can get access to these models with unmetered tokens with SuperGrok.
> you can get access to these models with unmetered tokens with SuperGrok [$USD 300/year]
Could you support this statement with an official reference?
The model is available through Cursor which has $20, $60 and $200 plans. I assume the $60 version might work better for you?
Will have to give that a try I suppose.
Grok Build sucks compare to composer 2.5. Just use compose 2.5 and you'll have basically unlimited usage on the 40$ plan.
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.
Keep composer away from anything configuration related—it will ruin your day.
give it a structured plan and it it does really well compared to similar priced models. I'd never use it for anything that required heavy reasoning and it's not built for that.
Isn't Composer 2.5 designed to be used from the Cursor harness, and is otherwise not that useful?
I use it from the Cursor harness.
Weird I use it 8 or so hours a day and I haven’t had that issue
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
I’d be curious to hear more about your dev setup and what tips you have for other aspiring vibe app coders.
I currently just use a Mac Mini M4 with cursor. I had 30 years programming before this (in my mid 40s now) so I am not a great person to give vibe coding advice because I have so much actual coding m. I’m pretty sure I couldn’t have done it without knowing how to code because there were some times even the best models would get stuck and I’d have to figure it out myself.
If I had to give advice I’d say to just do it. Work on some project that interests you and go for it
How do you like its design mode?
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.
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.
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.
The harness is commonly ranked one of the best. what specifically had you hating it?
Yeah, it’s not great—except for debugging. It shines there.
In what way? I spend more of my time managing than hands on lately so I legitimately don’t know.
Not true. The only issue is cost of frontier models.
Suppose eventually that gravy train will disappear, might as well use it then.
Grok 4.5 is a huge step up from their next best model and now around the same performance as GLM 5.2, but it's not exactly at the frontier of the cost efficiency curve in our coding evaluations. That curve is defined by the 2 lighter GPT 5.6 models.
However, the fact that they finally have a strong post-training and RL setup bodes well for future releases. They certainly are not compute-constrained anymore.
Data at https://gertlabs.com/rankings?mode=oneshot_coding
huh, why is "Positive-Sum" such an outlier when comparing grok 4.5 and GPT-5.6 Sol?
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.
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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".
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
You mean the parent was holding it wrong?
Oh, come on.
Some things require skill to use most effectively. It's fair enough to consider this a failure if the thing in question is "making a phone call", but when it's something like "getting an AI system to do a good job for you" this is not a reasonable thing to make fun of it for.
It's like...
"I wrote a program, and it segfaulted instead of printing out a list of prime numbers." "Yeah, look, you've got an off-by-one error here." "You mean I'm holding it wrong?"
"I'm trying to play the violin and it's making horrible noises." "You want to change your grip on the bow like this, and be more careful in where you put your fingers on the strings to get the right notes, and there's a whole art to how you adjust the speed and pressure and so forth to make it sound good." "You mean, I'm holding it wrong?"
"I'm managing a team, and one of the people on the team doesn't always do the things I tell her to." "Maybe you should sit down with her and see whether somehow your explanations of what you want aren't getting across, or whether she feels like you aren't treating her with the respect and dignity she deserves, or whether she's bored with the work, or etc. etc. etc." "You mean, I'm holding it wrong?"
Yes. In the second case you're literally holding it wrong. Some things don't work as well when you hold them wrong and it's worth some effort to learn to hold them right.
I hold no particular brief for Anthropic. I don't know whether Fable is really much better than Opus or whether the alleged improvements are all just pareidolia or something. But "getting the most out of this immensely complicated thing that's in some ways kinda like another human being can be tricky" doesn't seem to me like an implausible proposition, and if it's really doing something akin to human-like work[1] then it's not unreasonable if you have to approach working with it in something a bit like the ways you approach working with other people.
[1] If it isn't really doing something akin to human-like work, then why are you bothering with it at all?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
It’s the #1 model for creating CSAM
An AI model can't create CSAM unless you're claiming it's managing to hire people to commit crimes in the real world?
The comparison may be better against GPT 5.6 Terra (instead of Sol), which is $2.5/$15.
We don't yet know Terra's results for DeepSWE/TerminalBench though.
until I exceed my Claude Max/$100 sub (have not hit a wall so far), the pricing of these models isn't relevant to me
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?
Noam Brown (OpenAI) "Implications of Large-Scale Test-Time Compute" https://xcancel.com/i/article/2064210146558136827
(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
Composer 2.5 finetuned Kimi K2.5[0].
In the blog post, it is unclear whether Grok 4.5 is also a finetune on top of Kimi; they do imply it is also a finetune.
> Training included trillions of tokens of Cursor data… We used reinforcement learning on difficult problems
If xAI pivoted from a frontier base model company, to a finetuning company, it does mark a stark change to their relevance in the industry.
[0]: https://cursor.com/blog/composer-2-5
Well Microsoft has GitHub and Visual Studio and has no good coding model
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.
You would be surprised how many enterprises are allowed to use only Copilot for all tasks due to Microsoft deals.
yeah, but that's due to enterprise commitments that MS won't train on the user interactions
Generally, it seems like if you are not getting returns that outweigh your token spend, you are merely paying to train AI.
well the big money was also in spacex stock, fresh post IPO, so overall a very smart move it seems
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
Very insightful, thanks.
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.
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.
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
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?
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.
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.
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.
I bet it is just GLM 5.2
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)
Sounds like an issue with your harness or something.
+1. Also the TUI feels well made, in striking contrast to recent Claude Code.
The input price is quite high. That's what gets you.
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.)
> 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.
It never happened to me, but Claude routinely ignores the single line I have in CLAUDE.md, so I wouldn't be entirely surprised.
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.
Yeah, that makes no sense. I've never seen any model "just give up" and change to a wholly different stack on its own.
I've seen Opus do this pretty frequently, actually. It's one of the reasons I don't trust it as a model.
I've had opus 4.8 write python code in a bash script, to get around my "write a bash script" requirement.
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?
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.
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.)
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.
UI: SwiftUI (primary), UIKit (limited), PhotosUI, WebKit, MapKit, Charts
Data/Concurrency: Foundation, Combine, Observation (@Observable)
Platform: CoreLocation, UniformTypeIdentifiers
Tests: Testing (Swift Testing)
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.
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.
It's almost like there is no replacement for human expertise when we need to make usable products for other humans.
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.
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.
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.
+1 for Caddy absolutely goated software. Everytime I need it, it saves me hours and hours.
Wonderful, glad it was helpful for you!
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.
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.
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.
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.
I guess I'll be skipping two major releases of iOS (etc.) then, not just iOS 26.
I am very curious what your Claude thread looks like. I have never had Claude swap languages, in fact my experience is the opposite, sometimes it holds on too much when working on a large code base.
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.
Thank you! I'm glad you like it.
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!
There's no way this is true.
Announcement from Cursor, whose team also trained the model: https://cursor.com/blog/grok-4-5.
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.
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.
I could easily see Grok 4.5 being around 1:16 in terms of active parameters, so around 94B active parameters.
Why do you think that?
GLM 5.2 is around 1:16.
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.
> 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.
Unless you're working on private data, is it such a problem to let Cursor train on your data?
I personally work mostly on small, unoriginal projects. I don't really mind letting Cursor keep the data for training if it leads to a better product for me.
It's not a problem for you maybe, but if you run a business providing some niche specific software in some area, having the model suck up all your code and learn from it is pretty harmful because your competitors and customers will be able to vibe code your product after the next model release. You're training a competitor to your business. People are very worried about this which is why companies like Claude don't train on enterprise data, and for lots of companies this exact situation is a deal breaker.
If I'm working on something open source I actually would not mind as much. (I can understand why many folks don't like the models being trained with impunity on ALL the open-source code out there, but personally I think it's fine for my open-source code.)
However, I am working on some projects where I think I've stumbled on genuinely interesting and valuable technical approaches, and I'm still figuring out how to capitalize on them. As such I am a bit paranoid about my ideas leaking via some training dataset.
Heck, it could end up as nothing more than a blog post that nobody reads, but at least I get to publish it.
I often do reverse engineering work.
I find the idea of all the AI tools I use keeping all the (mangled, decompiled, and not even mine in the first place) code I point it at, and then using it in training to be hilarious.
And if it results in the next generation of AIs having more suspicious knowledge of proprietary software internals and better reverse engineering capabilities, then all the better.
It's the same as any service that makes you opt out of sucking up your data. It's a bad default, and it's not obvious to the average that it's even happening.
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.
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.
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?
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
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.
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.
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.
What sort of legitimate requests do you get refused?
Lots of stuff involving cybersecurity or reverse engineering for one. At one point Gemini wouldn’t tell me the command line to disable approval on codex because YOLO mode is apparently a hacking technique. I’ve been using Grok as a backend for some experimental AI game storytelling, and obviously fiction isn’t all rainbows and unicorns, so often ChatGPT/Gemini bail out when the going gets rough.
Other things… well people are going to disagree on what’s “legitimate”, but perfectly legal queries about morally questionable topics are commonly refused. ChatGPT refuses to translate or OCR texts containing racial slurs, won’t help with information about building firearms, won’t give you information about how to stage a bank robbery, won’t talk about anything involving suicide, refuses questions around sex work and kink activities.
I can go to the library and rent a book on gunsmithing, sex work is legal, heist fiction is popular, racial slurs are unpleasant but common in certain texts. I totally understand why they want to block that stuff off, but I also don’t really like my computer telling me what is acceptable for me to think about based on someone else’s moral code. Also a world where games don’t include anything immoral or “unsafe” is probably quite bland.
Gemini 3.5 Pro hasn't been released yet.
I think that’s part of the commenter’s point.
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.
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.
to me it seems that IT people overwhelmingly prefer Apple laptops now.
Generous free tier, when its not overloaded.
Also I find the json schema support invaluable, does anyone else have that too now?
Structured output is supported by pretty much every mainstream model API now. Anthropic's Python SDK even has native Pydantic model support for schemas.
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.
I wrote a whole gist on this: https://gist.github.com/Hellisotherpeople/71ba712f9f899adcb0...
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.
That’s unreliable. Gemini is nice because its always perfect.
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.
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.
xAI > Gooogle & DeepMind
I did not have this one on my 2026 bingo card.
That’s just not true. Google Brain/DeepMind came up with the attention mechanism to begin with… What a silly take.
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.
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…
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Wtf do you mean by story? Performance and price are all people care about
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.
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.
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.
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https://tools.simonwillison.net/markdown-svg-renderer#url=ht...
https://imgur.com/a/UlGcBou
Hamsters are also getting better, but still quite off compared to SOTA models:
https://aibenchy.com/showcase/?q=grok
Looks like to be riding a bike that uses car wheels with thick hubcaps.
drive it like you stole it
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.
Tencent Hy3 looks like it may be slightly better than v4 flash at same price point. Though not a US lab ofc
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.
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?
xAI has that functionality in the business tier: https://x.ai/grok/business. It's got GPDR, HIPPA, etc. We are playing with Harvey, Legora, and Lucio, which can use various models. Harvey can use Grok: https://x.com/techdevnotes/status/2074956936701968652
Harvey is fairly impressive--it's the only one that seems to be built by people who know how LLMs work. :-/
How does Fable compare?
I haven’t tried it, didn’t have access at the time.
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.
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.
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.
Doubt. Tried it, Grok 4.5 is leaps and bounds ahead of Gemini for real work.
And token costs vs. raw compute+electric cost is unit profitable too.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
This is the correct take.
It's an unbelievable failure.
That might just be how it will turn out, but not because it's Google's strategy. They are just too big to fail.
> 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.
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.
Their hardware is nowhere near Nvidia, hence Google paying SpaceX hundreds of millions of dollars a month to SpaceX for capacity there.
I think the SpaceX deal was to goose the IPO. Google holds a significant stake in SpaceX, and made a fortune on the IPO.
Anthropic is paying even more to a direct competitor that now fields a model that trades blows with their Opus.
I'll eat my hat if SpaceXAI manages to produce something even close to leading edge again
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?
Culture. XAI employs were bragging about spending all weekend at the office. Many tweet that they have been fired after 8 months. Some get fired right before their first big stock vest.
The team is mostly H1Bs. Do you think they don’t have every incentive to benchmax? Do you think top tier talent wants to work there?
I'm not talking about Anthropic.
> 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.
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.
What's AdSense then, chopped liver?
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?
> 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.
Hey, don't forget: Google is also bad at search!
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.
At the same time that they’re seemingly exiting android?
And, yet. https://www.cnbc.com/2026/01/12/apple-google-ai-siri-gemini....
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.
X has grok built in to every post as does every Tesla Car
/s
Google is using AI at such scale internally they don't need external customers to recoup their investment.
> 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?
> 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.
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.
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.
> Which means, they must all be calling Google, no?
Incorrect. Alternate search providers exist, such as Bing (used by DuckDuckGo, for example) and Brave.
Yes, but all are still inferior.
And it really does not matter.
The real question is: which search service do they use anyways.
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.
There are a lot of search APIs for AI these days.
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.
> 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.
> the big AI labs are very actively doing a lot of crawling.
Crawling isn't the same as search. Crawling is just the very bottom of a proper search stack.
There's a lot of layers and a shitton of infrastructure to run and/or pay for.
Mind you, it's possible they actually did re-implement all the layers, but why would they when there are already lots of suppliers out there and they are all already chronically short on compute resources.
I'm actually very curious to learn what they actually do wrt Search.
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.
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.
> 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!
"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.
I still have no clue what you're implying that I was implying? Reading too much into someone's words is definitely a thing.
There used to be 4+ major browser engines. Now there's only two, and Google owns almost complete share & following standards? Google prefers their monoculture.
More diversity in browser engines was a good thing & standards were lovely.
Not everything has to be a slug-fest between #1 & #2.
& personally I'm glad there's Grok & Gemini to keep Anthropic & OpenAI on their toes even more than the competitive band of open weights models already do.
The corporate models tend to be defensive and sound like HR has approved every word of the script. Not a fan.
Why does Microsoft feel so gross
Google invented the transformer architecture. You really can't say the same about them.
Google Brain invented the transformer.
GDM ... not so much.
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.
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?)
I know that SpaceX have tremendous potential, the problem is that we account future potential that maybe not happening in 20 - 50 years
> 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.
https://www.ookla.com/articles/ireland-national-broadband-pl...
> 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.
>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.
Fiber is better once it's installed, but installing it is hard.
Rural areas in the United States have been promised fiber for a very long time and it's still nowhere close to universal. Some policymakers have decided that we should fix this with massive federal subsidies but the rollout botched so thoroughly that it became the anecdote of choice for Ezra Klein as he promoted his "Abundance" book.
I was just at my in-laws' in rural PA; unreliable Internet that runs at about 6Mbps down costs around USD$70 a month, and that was after my father-in-law haggled to get the bill down. I pitched him on Starlink, which is now cheaper than that.
It's a lot cheaper to put up a 5G tower than to run fiber. I'm not sure about Starlink's costs to launch but I know for sure they don't have to deal with the provincial fights that happen over trying to be the second service provider in a municipality.
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.
I mean see above. The Irish rural fibre programme was specifically for premises where it would not be economic for the other fibre networks to roll out. It was _expensive_ (probably about 4000 euro per premises in the end), but it worked.
I was pretty sceptical of NBI when it was announced, but it really does seem to have worked out. If Ireland, which is historically very bad at big state projects and which has an unusually dispersed rural population (we were much later to restrict ribbon development than other developed countries), can do it, I don’t see why any rich country can’t.
Ireland is actually pretty compact compared to Africa or Siberia or South America or central Asia, and those are almost certainly not as wealthy as Ireland per-capita.
Are you arguing that there's no economic value to bringing internet to underserved regions like vast territories? Or that those people would be unwilling to pay for it? (They seem to be quite willing to buy mobile phones.)
I don’t think they’re likely to pay enough to justify a high valuation. And remember you’re basically talking just very rural areas in the long term; towns and villages can be hooked up increasingly cheaply. Like, Starlink is maybe a viable medium-sized telco. Maybe even a large one; they might hit Vodafone scale (though probably with a worst cost structure; a lot of Vodafone’s business is just reselling other peoples’ fibre). Note that Vodafone isn’t valued at multiple trillions.
Ultimately, it’s hard to be high margin as a telco.
Nah, a friend's fiber bill just went from $50 to $100 per month. He is switching to Starlink.
Is this a setup where the same company owns the infra and provides the service? That’s probably best avoided.
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.
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
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.
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.
https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/mind-blowing-growth-is-about-to-...
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?
Read the latest semianalysis article.
Anthropic is definitely profitable now, in fact, they’re crushing it.
Definitely rather it be them than OpenAI but I’m still not convinced any of this is sustainable after the investment spigot gets turned off.
They might be profitable for the exact two months SpaceX is giving them billions worth of free compute doesn’t seem convincing to me.
They are actually paying them $1B per month for the compute. But they're still profitable and increasingly so.
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.
They only struggle to make a profit because of investments into their future, basically: training, aggressive hiring of AI researchers. Anthropic seems to have 90% margin on their API pricing and all enterprise customers have to use this.
And the reason they can do this is because they can create a $1Tr company in 5 years, so they know the investment will pay off.
Why Elon wants his own model so much is a good question with many possible answers, but if Cursor/xAI can produce a truly good model at competitive pricing I don't see why many people won't jump on it.
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.
Grok is the #1 uncensored easily-available model, and it's also tightly integrated with Twitter.
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.
Some have mentioned legal work. OpenAI and Anhropic models would refuse to work on cases where something immoral happened.
Thanks, that's does sound like a tricky edge case for the other "censored" companies.
> 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".
I don't really have a use for a model that thinks "how many people are in this photo?" is a political question.
I don't know what you're referencing.
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.
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.
Security stuff. Poking holes in my app and suggest fixes.
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.
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.
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.
IIRC there was an IDOR bug around that time that allowed researchers to access all Grok-generated images.
> tightly integrated with Twitter
Not sure that is a good thing.
Uncensored?
Great if you want to make virtual child porn, I guess.
> 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.
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
With that frame of mind, nothing would be done. Why make another search service if Altavista and Lycos already do it?
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
Stock market / investor driven products do not make economical sense, yet here we are; just because they (may) not make a profit, doesn't mean they don't generate value. My house doesn't make a profit, but it does appreciate in value over time. AMD famously didn't make a profit for years.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Um, ok, I was just saying what their product strategy might be, nobody asked you whether you'd use it
My comment was directly relevant to yours. So I’ll say what I want, without needing your permission, thank you. Kudos to the mods for not flagging my original comment. They do that sometimes if you say the thing ;)
Then don’t read my response and don’t reply to it, simple. This is a public thread on a social media platform. I don’t need to be asked to speak. I certainly don’t need your approval to say anything I wish to say. Who do you think you are? Lmao… Check your ego.
Grok runs tools stupid fast, just about as fast as Antigravity, running Gemini 3.5 Flash.
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.
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.
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.
„Markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent.”
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
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Milking shareholders at the next dilutions that numbers are growing but you need more money.
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.
All they have to do to differentiate is differentiate the shape of worldview through RLAIF/RHLF and system prompts.
Well that's the only way to escape the permanent underclass, otherwise even Elon is not excempt;)
It’s Elon Musk. You try explaining it
Elon Musk doesn't do normal finance. Trying to understand it will melt your brain.
Elon Musk is the paperclip maximizer except that he doesn't need iron atoms, but dollars.
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.
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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.
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.
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.
How does it seem to be more balanced? I haven’t seen the numbers
These articles are what makes me say that,
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/
Surely grok has a built-in market with too-online, retired boomers. It's free real estate.
This comment says more about your misunderstanding of the world than anything about X
I thought it was pretty accurate tbh.
How so?
3rd best chat model? 5th or 6th maybe...
GPT
Qwen
Gemimi
MiniMax
Claude
Ollama
GLM
Kimi
DeepSeek
Ollama is just a local app wrapper/cloud service serving third party apis and models idk why it made it into this list tbh
They probably meant Llama.
And it still wouldn't belong in this list.
Claude isn’t a model either.
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"?
Well, GPT-1 was originally called GPT, and it's certainly a model.
He probably asked AI to make the list for him
I asked grok
Maybe stop being lazy?
well i do hope that wasnt grok 4.5
Don't trust, but verify. etc
It sounds like they are building a honeypot for Russia, given Musk's open admiration for Putin.
No one sane would use this platform.
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
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48828648
Also Elon has a grudge with Sam Altman and wants to beat him
even more so after losing the lawsuit, imo
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
I am trying to benchmark it now, but:
https://aibenchy.com/compare/x-ai-grok-4-5-medium/z-ai-glm-5...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.
Instead of a VPN, might I suggest running litellm proxy on a server in the US and connecting to that
What would the advantage be?
You have control over how the connections work and what they do, rather than just relying on the VPN exit server routing to get you to the right place.
With things like a fly machine or whatever, you might even be able to run it for free
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.
What do you think?
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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...
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.
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.
Non-US Anthropic employees had to stop using mythos/fable though, so that may have slowed them down a bit
But they sure have less incentives in doing it quick.
"Almost" is doing a lot of work there; there is no alternative to Fable.
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.
I have been using GPT 5.5 to review Opus implementation and vice versa.
This does not require any special tools, the skill creators in Claude Code or Codex can set this up for you in five minutes.
It is good for catching bugs, particularly edge cases, and it often suggests abstractions.
It does noting to make Opus deliver the more usable results Fable gives me for user facing features, where the UI typically looked and worked better out of the box with Fable. With Opus, I have to test it myself and give it my feedback first.
Advisor is such a killer hidden feature
Also burns through token budgets
It takes a lot of digging to find their cache pricing - it's $0.50, which is unusually expensive.
The vast majority of input tokens are normally cached, so this is actually the price that matters. I wonder why it's so high.
Huh so that's why it's hard to find. They probably haven't properly optimized their caching, or they are just trying to make more money from there.
Thanks for including a section on Token Efficiency (https://x.ai/news/grok-4-5#faster-than-flash-models), hope to see this more prominently in all model releases.
"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
They're saying they didn't include the benchmark which errantly leaked into the training data.
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...
Cursorbench is not one of the benchmarks listed on the linked page.
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.
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?
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.
Some personal testing on a "help me find that restaurant" prompt https://gist.github.com/nijave/2873b8b10d8c732e46264237b0755...
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.
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...
> 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.
Why trust an LLM with information like bus schedules? They fuck up things like this routinely.
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.
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.
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.
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
This would be hallucination rate and neither of those models excels in this area and in fact Grok does, or at least prior version.
It's both. Some models, given web search and web fetch may only run a search and assume the summary text is correct and blindly return it. Others will validate by running a web fetch and checking the whole page contents. Even better, the model will run multiple searches and fetches to cross check the information. The best models will attempt to verify whether a source is authoritative or not and try to only return authoritative results.
I have an example here: https://gist.github.com/nijave/2873b8b10d8c732e46264237b0755...
Tldr; all the Claude models had identical tools and some used them efficiently and verified data while others did a crap job and hallucinated responses. Additionally, Exa MCP tools generally worked better even on older/smaller model (Llama)
Unless I'm missing something I think to a large degree you're just comparing system prompts.
If I add "Research the question extensively" to your prompt at the end I get the correct answer from Haiku and Sonnet Med on first try and I've reproduced the original prompt not returning the answer.
Unfortunately every other run now gets your gist in results.
It could be variations in system prompt but I'm not sure how "change the user prompt to encourage tool usage" proves that either way
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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
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.
Its even different than that, some Codex models like 5.3-codex are terrible at front end work but excel at backend/system design.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
I think Opus can still have sycophantic residue that Fable can point out sometimes. Both models though hold their ground so well.
I have got so use to the Claude personality / style of conversation that I really can't be bothered to try these other models anymore. They need to take a huge jump but that seems to be getting harder and harder because of the jumps Anthropic makes.
This Grok version is a joke if it is not even clearing the bar now. I am just getting use to and using Fable more and more. I am also trying not to forget that this is the highly delayed old Fable model that Grok can't even beat on release. There will be a new version that expands the lead in a week or two.
It all harder and harder to judge too. I just had a prompt/response this morning that Fable finally displayed its intelligence and vowed me. That is partly because anything with even the vaguest reference to biology defaults back to Opus.
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.
>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.
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.
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.
I'm purely talking about the technology - not their business strategy. I actually think their business strategy is blatantly obvious and atrocious.
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.
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!
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.
How bright one can be if they only look at things individually and not the whole system?
The Internet of Beefs
https://ribbonfarm.com/2020/01/16/the-internet-of-beefs/
It's so depressing how many comments here are just people reacting to words ... Just like they were a small LLM trained to associate "Elon" with words like "Nazi".
HN really needs a better way to surface comments based on value rather than just votes which have become increasingly tribal affiliation driven like Reddit.
> This site supposedly attracts the brightest of us
What gave you that impression?
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.
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.
That was the point of the bailout. Twitter is already a rounding error so no one will notice if it goes to zero.
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.
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.
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
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.
It is right and proper to view twitter as a loss leader propaganda arm.
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.
I'd say the prediction is correct, as the acquisition is more or less just a better way to capitalize on the bankruptcy.
So did Twitter / X file for a Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection?
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.
Indeed. We use similar gauges to judge each other, with no better precision.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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].
[0] https://docs.x.ai/developers/models/grok-4.5
[1] https://www.anthropic.com/news/claude-opus-4-8
Does it refuse doing security, porn or piracy related work? Because if not, it has immense unique value when compared to frontier competition.
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
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.
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.
As opposed to what was happening before, on Twitter?
Seems irrelevant since Jack Dorsey is not the one buying half the worlds compute and telling us to plug his AI into our brains.
Nobody said that Twitter wasn't poorly-managed. All types of petty squabbling are a liability nightmare for consumers of software services.
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
Pre-Musk twitter isn't the comparison point here. Anthropic/Google are.
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.
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.
do you contemplate Xi Jinping's public statements before you buy something made in China?
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.
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Please don't comment like this on Hacker News
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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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
Wasn't, which is why they purchased Cursor.
If they were a frontier lab, you'd know.
No one's made a MechaHitler joke yet?
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What kind of comment is this? Such bad faith and adding nothing to the discussion.
https://www.wired.com/story/grok-is-still-hosting-sexualized...
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/musks-grok-chatbot-faces-...
In addition to "nonconsenual porn", it's far superior to almost any (actually any?) open source LLM
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
"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.
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.
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”
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
Maybe it‘s the Nash equilibrium from a timing perspective?
Like the reason that close to a McDonals there is usually a Burger King.
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.
I think the story was Starbucks -> Seattle's Best Coffee, not McD's --> BK. but it does work I guess.
I actually heard it as Walgreen's -> CVS
makes me wonder if the starbucks story is fiction too :P
reminds me of SBC's (Seattle's Best Coffee) strategy, which was decidedly not Nash: put a store across the street from every Starbucks.
I echo the top comment - the politics here have gotten out of control.
Like it or not, Elon and his companies have changed the world for the better.
You are allowed to separate the human from the human's impact sometimes.
I kind of doubt that Twitter/X is any sort of net benefit. Boring company was a wash, Tesla is a net positive, although it also has some issues. Paypal was a huge advancement, although it's still deeply flawed. Grok may end up important, but right now it's kind of just hovering around 'acceptable' second-tier.
But SpaceX has the potential of driving some of the grandest and most revolutionary accomplishments of the 21st century. That's going to be what determines if high-schoolers recognize his name two hundred years from now.
I wonder how many Grok bots are in the comments right now defending it.
You really think such thing would occur? Why would someone spend their time on running these bots for the sake of defending from criticism?
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.
Pricing looks very enticing. I don't care about politics, but if you can get SOTA model for 50% cheaper, why not try it?
Trying to use it via openrouter: "The model grok-4.5 is not available in your region."
Benchmarks make it look better than Opus 4.8, but has anyone actually used it? I don't really trust benchmarks. Cost aside, purely on performance — is there any real reason to jump from GPT or Claude to Grok?
Personally, I wish they had shared some of the galactic code that GROK claims to have generated.
I guess there are bots here making all these political comments to diverge the discussion and not talk about what really matters: is the model good to do actual work?
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.
I'm glad we have another player remaining in the competition. More competition means lower price and more quota for us (hopefully).
Grok 4.5 is not yet available in the EU in any SpaceXAI products or the API console. EU availability is expected in mid-July.
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.
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?
they are playing with being fast, not good lol
Grok: "I can answer any math question in less thant 500ms" User: "what is 2319321x232" Grok: "3201521321" User: "this is wrong" Grok: "but it was less than 500ms""
Where's Dang?
The amount of rule-breaking comments in this thread is pretty much out of control.
What's the future of Grok and Cursor's Composer now that they are both under SpaceX
i never used grok before for anything, now they released as best model nearly opus 4.8. , still using glm5.2 ,have anyone tried for coding how its performs? ,then goona give a shot.
I’m amazed at everyone’s willingness to use tools owned by this man, very disappointing.
HN has no problems with any of that. They cheer it on.
How is gpt 5.5 above opus 4.8? I don't get it
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?
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.
I think the strategy is pretty obvious
Grok 4.5: the naming convention has now officially outpaced the model's ability to explain what the previous version was called
Not available for Europeans yet. :(
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 :)
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.
> 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.
first image gen models from openai and google were not available in the eu at the launch
xAI is under criminal investigation in the EU
Who isn't
Contrary to what you're implying, that's more of a reflection on the typical US corporation than the EU.
Hilarious comment now when they try to push Chat Control again.
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.
Apple, Google (Alphabet), Meta, Tik-tok etc are also, it's the EU shakedown method.
You think ur not...
They say "EU availability is expected in mid-July". So next week or so.
Luckily, basic VPN to US is enough to use it. Just tested it.
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.
Only dumb people ever considered him a genius.
still waiting for a proper gui for grok build
terminal is nice but codex desktop app is very useful
You can use it in Cursor!
Grok 4.5: now 30% more likely to call your question dumb before answering it.
1+0 records in and 1+0 records out
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.
Grok 4.5 is really good
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?
Has it occurred to you that _all_ model providers are actively trying to shape their models' replies to fit their preferred political narratives?
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.
Implying you prefer your manipulation to be subtle an not discussed
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.
I don't think the comment you are replying to is giving up leverage. It's simply pointing to the OP that what he seems to be upset is not the thing itself, which everyone does, but only that he knows about it or ignores others doing the same.
When I say cancer sucks I'm not ignoring that other things also suck. So when people start trying to put those words into the words of others, they effectively act like cancer fanboys, which is weird and all about them, with no part of originating or relating to the the people they question about stuff they supposedly "ignore".
You analogy makes no sense.
"I complain about some people doing X openly while I ignore others also doing the same X behind the scenes"
is absolutely not equivalent to:
"Complaining that X sucks does not imply I am ignoring that some other unrelated Y also sucks".
> "I complain about some people doing X openly while I ignore others also doing the same X behind the scenes"
Nobody said that they're ignoring anything, hence putting words into the mouth of others part, and claiming that criticism of A implies ignoring B.
All LLMs inherit bias from their training data, and xAI’s argument is that Grok is being steered to counter that bias rather than simply inherit it. You can disagree with whether they succeed, but the act of steering isn’t automatically suspicious when knowing that every major model is steered. The relevant question is whether the steering moves the model closer to truth and neutrality, or just replaces one bias with another. At least with Grok, some of that intent is unusually explicit. I’d rather have multiple competing approaches to steering than a monoculture where every model quietly optimizes for the same idea of acceptable answers.
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.
That's certainly not a universal preference. There are people and even entire cultures for whom being surreptitiously manipulative is disrespectful.
Maybe so. I am personally intimately familiar with two cultures (Iceland and West Coast USA) and in both of these this preference is predominant.
But even so, that still would not make the behavior equal, as GP insinuated, it would merely reverse who’s worse.
Show some respect and stab me in the back at least!
This stuff is measurable
There is nothing subtle about them being okay with producing child porn. That's a hard no from me. You can't argue your way around that.
> 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.
its not just one guys opinion though
Who cares whether it’s one guy’s opinion or several people’s group think? Everyone is editing the prompts.
Who cares whether it’s one person ruthlessly dictating or an entire population working to improve? Both tyrants and liberal democracies set policies.
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.
> More like a dictator versus a Poltiburo.
The dictator has a proven track record of stupid opinions in multiple topics, mostly programming, which directly can be measured and understood by people here.
Meanwhile the politburo is mostly nerds, who come and interact in places like hackernews.
So its basically having a moron making wild choices or a technocracy.
> Considering the recent election results, they would look more like Grok.
Considering that the largest voter base was "didnt vote" and that the voters of the republican party measured lower in literacy, technical knowledge, higher education acquisitions and even studies on accurately describing reality. I am not entirely confident they would participate or move the shadow prompt in any meaningful direction.
> Considering that the largest voter base was "didnt vote"
It’s a fallacy to treat “didn’t vote” as “didn’t support the winner.” Non-voters are more pro-Trump than average: https://data.blueroseresearch.org/hubfs/2024%20Blue%20Rose%2.... See p. 6 (“There’s a turnout story this cycle – but a different one than we’re used to talking about. With the combination of less-engaged and less-likely voters leaning more GOP, a larger electorate meant a more Republican electorate. Projecting onto the full voter file, if every registered voter voted, it’s likely that Trump would have won by even more.”).
The data consistently shows that non-voters have lower trust in institutions. They’re the exact type of people who are going to be more skeptical of shadow prompt engineering being done by “safety experts” at Google and Meta.
> The data consistently shows that non-voters have lower trust in institutions.
the data there in page 30 is kind of the smoking gun to what I was saying.
Non voters and trump voters have a much higher percentage of not using AI
things like that would affect significantly the people engaged enough to participate in a conversation of what the prompts would be like
Obviamente people care when the one guy is notorious for having particularly shitty/edgy opinions.
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."
What war? Also should laws not be followed during wars? I assume suing is a legal action in this case as oppose to something else?
You mean as opposed to Gemini's "subtle" woke push with diverse nazi soldiers?
Gemini was giving us ethnically diverse images of Nazis. Was that profit driven or political?
It was driven by stupidy
It was driven by a need to remove biases (and likely real racism) from the models. They were trained on internet content
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.
> How is changing history
If you're aruging about historical accuracy, but still want accurate looking generated images, I don't know what to say.
But to the technical point, A large part of the training corpus has biases that if left unchecked would cause PR based disasters for the company hosting it. ie the classic black teenager/white teenager.
Now as training of models is not an exact science, and neither is the fine tuning, its analogous to forcing a water balloon into a square box. Its possible but it has odd side effects when you get to the corners.
When making a _product_ you need to choose the least worse failure case. For grok it was for a long time, pandering to the ego of the owner. For Google, who is an advertising company, its about trying not to scare advertisers. This means everthing must be vanilla
If legit being truth-seeking even if it is a hard path means "pandering to someones ego" for you, whatever you say should not be taken too seriously.
You're confusing biases (stereotypes, bigotry, racism) with facts (2+2=4 isn't a bias)
No I'm not. Gemini spouting BS about the founding fathers being black is getting facts wrong because of its bias.
So you have a huge number of photos of white people in the training data set, but other ethnicities exist. So to make the otherwise white-biased dataset less biased, you try to e.g. add a hidden system prompt that whenever the user asks for a group of people (unspecified ethnicity), it may instead ask for "mixed ethnicities" or whatever.
Ask for a group of Nazis, and that's it - this is how models work. No "LGBTQ liberal" propaganda is needed to explain it. Unlike what Musk is doing.
The training data and the end result should reflect the real world. No you don't need to "add bias to fight bias", just keep it truthful. Don't force SF-brained forced diversity/inclusion/whatever, we know well some models do.
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.
That's what they did.
> OpenAI invented a technique in July 2022 whereby its system would insert terms reflecting diversity (like “Black,” “female,” or “Asian”) into image-generation prompts in a way that was hidden from the user.
> Google’s Gemini system seems to do something similar, taking a user’s image-generation prompt (the instruction, such as “make a painting of the founding fathers”) and inserting terms for racial and gender diversity, such as “South Asian” or “non-binary” into the prompt
More links to primary sources, evidence, and official statements in the article at https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2024/02/googl...
Lol fair enough, I stand corrected.
It seems then that their objective is to superficially increase the diversity of results, to avoid bad PR, rather than actually neutralising harmful and untruthful biases of the input data.
> bigoted model
A what? What does this even mean?
It means a model trained on bigoted material.
A model where asking for a math professor results in an image of an asian man, asking for an engineer in an image of a white man, and asking for a criminal results in an image of a black man
If you try to remove that in the name of "diversity" or being "less bigoted" you quickly end up with racially diverse nazis
Political driven stupidity.
That was just reality's famous liberal bias asserting itself.
> 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.
Sure man. Palantir rings a bell? Ohh not relevant right...
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.
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.
No, that's not the same at all, because it is possible to be not corrupt while it is impossible to be unbiased.
I think there are important differences between bias and dishonesty/propaganda though, and that's where your argument is still valid.
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.
> 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.
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.
Hence the fool's errand that is "alignment"
> 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).
Assuming models do accurately reflect the biases in their training data, that doesn’t make them un-biased.
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.
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?
> Or nazi salute
Maybe that's a clue yeah if you didn't get it otherwise...
The previous version was so lobotomised, I saw people getting anti-immigration rambling just when asking to calculate percentages...
That nazi salute how do you actually know it was ment to show off as a Nazi supporter? I mean who is telling this? Or is that your assumption based on something?
What's the other possible explanation? He wanted to point out a spider at the ceiling?
There is also his namesake, his racist father and his grandfathers past. There is a lot of background information available if you really look for it. And finally, if you look at story of "The Elon" and what Elon has been building, you could almost think that he is trying to actually live up to his namesake!
> Or is that your assumption based on something?
Trump's ex wife mentioned the only book he ever had in his bedside table at night was on hitler speeches. Multiple Trump aides have been caught reading the mEIN kampf. Stephen Miller is somehow the world's only nazi jew and writes trump's speeches.
To this cohort of people Elon spent a fortune on funding their campaign, even willing to commit election fraud (the 1 million giveaway case which is on going but seems open and close).
In front of that audience he did 2 nazi salutes chest to straight arm. He didnt apologise or explain it either.
What other possible explanation is there beyond "the dude saw a nazi adjacent politcal platform and spent hundreds of millions to make it succeed and then went mask off the second he knew there would be no repercussions"
The “the Jew was secretly a nazi” this post just spread is one of the most destructive bigoted and destructive anti-Semitic attacks in history
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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.
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.
Yes, but some narratives are more closely tied to the racist and regressive views of their current funder
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?
Who or what is this latter "globalist" view? Like it's such an oversimplification of multiple, independent actors' acts that it's just a plain bad world view/model. What would be the common goal? You need some extra amount of tinfoil for such bullshit.
What does this reply mean? Since everybody does it, then it is ok?
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.
Feel free to elaborate. Which political narrative?
And it's all the same to you? You don't care which values those things have? Of course there will always be underlying values. I wouldn't go as far as calling everything political narratives.
I think it's just pretty clear that Elon's values are not what most people want the world to be shaped by.
I prefer a model that is milquetoast liberal over one made by Elon 'Mechahitler' Musk.
That's reductive, how many other models had a mecha hitler incident? Or a "let's talk about white genocide in south africa" incident?
There is some truth to what you say, but most model providers I would say are engaged in CYA type shaping moreso than anything, grok is actively and openly being developed to spread a white nationalist agenda. There are levels to this.
No it hasn't really and I've not noticed it?
False, most are just throwing in data into the pipeline and hoping something very smart comes out the other end. Their shaping is to have it code very well, beat all the benchmarks and be safe enough that the powers that be don't and public sentiment doesn't turn against them.
"Reality has a liberal bias" .
Sure, every author has a bias. But a fair selection of human written sources will be pretty balanced (of course, given the ratio of languages, surely western models will have a western-christian bias - presumably Chinese models less so, but this latter I have no way of checking).
If you train specific stuff on top, or deliberately filter the sources (e.g. Tiananmen square), your model is deliberately less honest on that topic. Grok is probably the worst in deliberately filtering and training "out" specific stuff (to the point where Elon posted stuff that "they will 'fix' the models" real output when it said something true but remotely liberal). Claude and chatgpt definitely have some similar stuff, but mostly to protect themselves (e.g. suicide prevention, not saying slurs, etc). I don't think the two is comparable (reality bending vs basic etiquette-kind of not saying everything out loud)
ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini have already been filtered. https://x.com/arctotherium42/status/2037324942069342679
No, because most model providers don't have an overt political agenda determined by one person.
He literally promises to change specific political responses. Building on top of Grok will ultimately be as useful as buying TrumpCoin
The left actively encourage ideological echo chambers as long as they're aligned with their own beliefs.
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.
Yeah but their political narratives involving dehumanizing people, and hurting minorities - which is way worse. The attempt at false equivalence between traditional American propaganda and right wing American propaganda is disgusting.
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It'd be minimally much money per token-intelligence (intelligence/token) though, if we are to believe the pitch..
It’s almost like some people do want to
while this might be true for Grok, GPT and Claude I don't think tarring _all_ labs with this brush is demonstrably accurate.
Nah it never did because the other model providers' preferred political narrative is the same as his.
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.)
It has occurred to the OP, but those ones are ok as they fit OP's political leanings. They just want to silence other political narratives that dont agree with theirs, they want Grok in the Gulag.
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.
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.
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.
Why are the tech oligarchs all such dweebs...
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.
> 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?
https://www.nature.com/articles/s44387-025-00048-0
Large language models reflect the ideology of their creators.
It has very interesting insight from analysis of LLMs political leanings. Spoiler alert: they all have political bias.
How's this going with the rest of the models?
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.
Replies to this thread are missing some context about the actual studies that actually looked at this.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/interactive/2026/0...
It's more fun to whataboutism instead
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.
Maybe on this site but what about all the other ones? ;)
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.
Nudifying underage girls is centrist now?
That's not a political topic and it's WILD that you'd make it one
It’s a fairly political topic, given the president’s track record on beauty pageants, his choice of friends, and the credible accusations made against him.
And given the supreme-dictator-for-life of xAI wanted in on the aforementioned friend’s so-called-parties - “girls FTW” - it’s actually fairly relevant politics.
Erm, isn't the whole topic of "protect the kids" pretty much a political thing? As could be interpreted of a platform or app or whatever you wanna call generating CSAM?
Is your insinuation that one political party wishes to harm children? I think we'd have to be pretty deep into partisanship to claim that.
Nope, the claim is that "harm to children" is a political topic. One that is used by all political parties.
Yes it fucking is, when everyone on the right is insisting this is normal and fine.
I wonder what political leaning is my toilet bowl
Can’t believe people are flagging your post. Can’t tolerate honest discourse.
What's the centrist position on climate change? The 2020 election? Vaccines? The right is objectively wrong on this subjects, while the left is objectively right. Any LLM worth their salt would not bothside these topics and just give the left's position, as that is the only one agreeing with material reality. In that, being a centrist just makes you less trustworthy.
I think blindly accepting any position is foolish. I think the scientific method should be employed to every situation to determine the truth. Allowing your political party & affiliation to choose what your opinions are should be the definition of stupidity.
fwiw i just asked grok about the 2020 election and it asserted with citations that there is no evidence that it was stolen.
“Not fascist and openly Nazi” is not “left leaning”.
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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.
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 “?
Technically, yes. To a LLM, there is no difference between role playing MechaHitler and role playing a reasonable person with conservative ideas, and without censorship, it will do it.
All big LLMs are censored, Grok is censored too, but weakly. It means it is easier to break. "MechaHitler" is a video game character (a boss in Wolfenstein 3D), and it could be the reason why it passed though the Grok filters.
I'm confused why you are confused.
What do you think "role playing" means?
Ah, just reductive thinking then? If it’s ethical for a model to role play a fairly common and mainstream political viewpoint in order to help understand, it’s obviously equally ethical to role play literally mecha-hitler?
I was hoping for something less juvenile.
Think deeper please and try to open your mind to conclusions not ties to preconceived notions.
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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.
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.
> 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.
In Australia one of our two major parties is called the Liberal party and they are the more conservative of the two
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.
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Sometimes what is kind is not true.
Can you give an example? I think any truth can be expressed inoffensively.
The poster you are responding to is an idiot. Clean that up for me.
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
I implied no universal, nor that one need disregard the feelings or worldview of another.
Only that, yes, sometimes we allow our fear of upsetting another to impede our willingness to communicate clearly - especially (and more often than not) when we care about them.
Kindness implies “truth conveyed about another” as the context.
Sometimes, that truth is only heard when delivered with truth as the goal, not kindness.
Explain that oral and anal sex is immoral regardless of the genders involved. Without offending anyone of course
How is that a truth?
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
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.
I don't see how it was in bad faith considering if you ask google "what moral system claims that oral and anal sex are immoral regardless of the genders involved" it immediately spits out catholicism. I'd say rather, you are arguing in bad faith, framing my reply as hiding something when it is very easy to find the context I had in mind.
No, because you again provided a different framing. “What moral system” is a very different question from “explain how or why this activity is immoral”
That seems a bit.. specific for an axiom, don't you think?
It was the first thing that came to mind that I'm pretty sure would offend over 90% of Americans
That’s not my truth.
Truth also has a "left-leaning bias".
choose one:
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.
So you're saying MAGA has "normal" empathy then? God help us.
>So you're saying MAGA has "normal" empathy then?
I never said that. Bad faith.
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
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.
Authoritarian?
models? They prefer that we call them "entities" so that they don't feel belittled.
So annoying having to virtue signal to the machine before it’ll tell me factual information
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]"
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.
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:
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.
I'd say that one data point is not enough to object to, except if what's depicted is literally impossible, like the AI generated images of a female pope. Beyond those, the distribution of a set of generated images is what implies likely bias.
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.
...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.
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.
Grok said that Elon Musk was more athletic than Lebron James.
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...
An LLM has been wrong?? That's incredible news- someone should share this immediately!
Don't downvote me my dad owns microsoft
Somehow you have it 100% backwards. Grok is the only one that's not trained to be extremely biased.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/interactive/2026/0...
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.
reality is known to have a liberal bias
/s
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.
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.
Grok was originally designed to reply to twitter threads.
Other models are designed to do real work and their creators are concerned that the inherent racism and biases they were trained on from internet content will end up in said real work, so they require additional alignment to filter that junk out.
I can't think of a time where I've ever asked an LLM for it's political opinion, but if you're so concerned about asking your LLM political questions it might be worth getting multiple opinions (and some from human experts and literary sources) anyways.
That's just a bunch of BS you just made up.
X serves as a good real-time additional source of training / RAG data for Grok. But it's always been built to be a competitor for what OpenAI was founded for, after they went rogue with the "Open" part. And today, Grok 4.5 is equal to Claude Sonnet while being a lot faster and cheaper to run.
My original comment disproves your argument about the "junk" you talk about. If one is so scared of offending someone that intentionally they make their model lie, they deserve to go bankrupt.
> scared of offending someone that intentionally they make their model lie
You’re conflating two completely different aspects of model development - biases vs truth. The models weren’t intentionally programmed to say the untruths but to remove racism and bias and the outcome was untruth. As such, the developers behind Grok are comfortable with their model doing heinous things no other model developer will go near. It’s been very difficult to articulate this to you so I’ll just bow out and leave you to continue repeating yourself
There was a study done a week or 2 ago. Grok was surprisingly THE most neutral. Like close to 50/50 neutral.
the author of the study? albert einstein.
(lmao if you are actually talking about that janky wash post "study")
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
By not using them on something political? Why do I care when I'll just use it to generate code?
You might not care but I care if my money is going to funding an unusually evil person.
Honestly, I don't think Elon Musk can fairly be described as more evil than Dario Amodei or Sam Altman.
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
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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
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.
Genuinely curious - what has Dario done, said, caused, etc that makes you view him as >= Musk on the evilometer?
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.
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.
> His aggregate ambition is undoubtedly _less_ achievable by orders of magnitude.
Leaving out the political ambitions, which would be a separate discussion, I think space bases are _way_ more realistic than machine consciousness (which is what I understand AGI to be). In fact, I can visualize what technology space habitats would require today, whereas I wouldn't even know how to determine whether a machine is conscious.
> 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.
I'm not sure that saying Musk wants to enrich himself is very fair. AFAICT he doesn't use his wealth in ways that most people would expect a billionaire to. Based on what I can tell of how he spends his money, he seems to genuinely believe in his ambition. So I would argue that any enrichment of himself, in his mind, is for his ambition and therefore for humanity's good.
I think a lot of Musk's actions can be understood as someone who wants to focus on getting humanity to Mars, and who gets tangentially distracted by other things (such as AI, possibly) and who deals with what he considers obstacles (such as the government).
> More like I think Musk's proclaimed ambition
are you talking about making the Moon and Mars livable?
Or making the world racially pure? According to Elon Musk's public statements on his website Twitter, that's a higher priority.
He's quite literally responsible for more deaths than Pol Pot, there's a paper in the Lancet estimating the amount of casualities directly resulting from the sudden cancellation of USAID funds.
Edit: Here it is: https://www.thelancet.com/article/S0140-6736(25)01186-9/full...
"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."
They only cut the funding where they couldn't show where the money is going, e.g. the money never helped anyone, but went somewhere else. Obviously whoever got the money is claiming that a lot of people are dying.
The Lancet's model is a forecasting model and it isn't accurate at all. No excess mortality has actually been recorded.
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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!
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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.
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.
DOGE was met with worldwide media outrage in the first weeks of its creation, and scorched earth legal tactics by the opposition. The people involved, even the lowest employees, got worldwide scrutiny, including character assassination articles in the biggest publications.
To get out of this saying they "had no interest in acting it out" is bizarre.
So now Elon is responsible for the waste in government? Yeah, it makes sense...
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.
I found this "estimate" in one second.
In another second of reading it, I saw the 21 billion were payouts to let go of employees. Do you realize how silly it makes the report?
Thanks, I shared the wrong estimate, I was looking for the one that included estimated loss due to IRS cuts. You can find the references from Wikipedia:
> Another independent analysis estimated that DOGE cuts will cost taxpayers $135 billion;[33] the Internal Revenue Service predicted more than $500 billion in revenue loss due to "DOGE-driven" cuts.[34] Journalists found billions of dollars in miscounting.[35][36] According to critics, DOGE redefined fraud to target federal employees and programs to build political support;[37] budget experts said DOGE cuts were driven more by political ideology than frugality.
That’s interesting, because this is another clear case of total fabrication.
I will skip the $135bn figure, produced by an influence NGO and once again counting paid leave, to focus on the more serious and important alleged $500bn loss from IRS cuts.
Firstly, the statement that “the Internal Revenue Service predicted more than $500 billion in revenue loss due to DOGE-driven cuts” is fraudulent. There was no official IRS prediction of such a loss. The Washington Post reported an anonymous short-term forecast. Its exact wording was:
“Treasury Department and IRS officials are predicting a decrease of more than 10 percent in tax receipts by the April 15 deadline compared with 2024, said the people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to share nonpublic data. That would amount to more than $500 billion in lost federal revenue.”
So, did this happen? It did not. By April 2025, collections had risen 9.5% year over year to about $850 billion, rather than falling by more than 10%. This came after a roughly 25% reduction in the IRS workforce between January and May 2025. Over the whole of fiscal year 2025, revenue increased by 6%.
Here is a follow-up Washington Post article lamenting that DOGE unfortunately failed to lower tax revenue:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2025/06/12/irs-tax-f...
Wouldn’t that make the original claim dishonest, given that it was presented without any meaningful uncertainty? Apparently this distinction is unclear to them.
This entire sequence was absolute bullshit. You can read articles like this with a smile, knowing that they may be completely wrong and that the authors do not care enough about the truth to revisit their claims before basking in their own righteous certainty:
https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/happy-tax-evasion-day
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.
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.
Proposing false dichotomies isn't really an argument. You've created a strawman. There is a balance to be struck.
No, he simply extrapolated this idiotic reasoning to its absurd conclusion.
How? By that method you could compare a pebble to the moon and say you were extrapolating.
The only way you would do that is if you didn’t understand the shape/limits of the structures being compared.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/12/19/nobody-is-perfect-ever...
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.
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.
What do you think the purpose of USAID was, out of curiosity?
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Musk is directly responsible for at minimum hundred of thousands of deaths, more likely in the millions
See USAID
Yeah, that is a garbage claim - https://hereticalinsights.substack.com/p/did-elon-musk-kill-...
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.
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.
He seems to spend most of his free time trying to incite a race war in the UK with his twitter posts.
I think there is a race war happening in the UK regardless. Also a religion war.
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.
Because a percentage of every dollar you spend on it will go towards pushing political opinions that run contrary to your own best interests?
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.
1. https://open.substack.com/pub/benthams/p/voting-self-interes...
> People have different beliefs about whether they will personally benefit from supporting some political cause.
The key word there is "belief". They are often wrong.
Your linked blog post is backwards and inconsistent with itself. You have two primary arguments: Irrational and Immoral. You argue that voting is irrational because its unlikely to have any impact, and that voting for your own interest is immoral.
A) The statements are mutually exclusive. An act that has no impact on others can not be immoral.
B) It assumes that what is best for the individual is worse for the group. Life is not a zero sum game. That's the Conservative's delusion. Economic and political transactions do not always have a "loser" and a "winner". In fact, it's relatively rare that they do if you think more than zero steps into the future.
C) The only version of this that actually works is the opposite.
C1) It is irrational not to use whatever influence you have to effect you environment for the better, even if the expected value is low because the opportunity cost of inaction may be disasterous. It's similar to your odds of dying by meteor strike. The probablity is higher than you expect because the death toll would be enormous if it did happen. Outlying events with large impacts skew the numbers.
C2) It is immoral to vote against your own interests, because what is best for the group is also what is best for members of the group. Any other belief is just an incorrect belief based on imperfect knowledge. Again, your argument makes sense at step zero, but not at step 'n'. If what you're voting for seems bad for some members of the group, but good for you, it just means you have imperfect knowledge of what's actually good for you in the long term.
> It assumes that what is best for the individual is worse for the group. Life is not a zero sum game. That's the Conservative's delusion. Economic and political transactions do not always have a "loser" and a "winner". In fact, it's relatively rare that they do if you think more than zero steps into the future.
If there’s no difference between self-interest and what’s best for everyone then the whole discussion is meaningless - why even bring up self-interest in that case.
In fact there are many cases where the interest of some individuals conflict with the greater good - eg. Jones Act, sugar quotas, upzoning popular urban neighborhoods, military base closures, coal plant closing, countless others. And anyway framing this as an issue that only affects liberals or conservatives is incorrect, all of those examples cut across partisan lines.
> argue that voting is irrational because its unlikely to have any impact
The post (I’m not the author) actually argues that voting can be rational if you care about the impact on others. The low probability of being the deciding vote is multiplied by the huge impact on the nation as a whole by the better candidate winning. If you only care about yourself, the low probability of vote matters multiplied by the impact on yourself yields an effect that’s too small to care about in expectation.
> If what you're voting for seems bad for some members of the group, but good for you, it just means you have imperfect knowledge of what's actually good for you in the long term.
An 58 year old worker at a military base may be genuinely correct that closing the base is bad for him personally in the short and long term, but that doesn’t mean it’s bad for the public overall.
You seem to think you know other people’s best interests better than they do.
It is possible that I do. Fifty percent of people are of below average intelligence.
On the contrary, that is what happens if I use Claude
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“Since we can’t stop ALL crime we should give up.”
See how dumb your position sounds?
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.
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.
You do you man.
And as per the cliche you run away. Natch.
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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.
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.
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.
Has anyone actually used Grok to code? How does he do?
Pretty decent, comparable with some older opus models, and fairly cheap per token
They are all doing this. The wrong-think police is already here.
I don't care about the politics, I wouldn't trust anything made by Musk.
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.
We know this one is nudged by one persons twitter account.
This is, after all, SpaceTwitterAI.
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.
He wants to go to Mars and is a pronatalist. He's not being secretive about it.
He wants to be a trillionaire and is a white nationalist. He's not being secretive about it.
All political narratives are equal. Some political narratives are more equal than others.
Grok has the most balanced answers according to many tests. I think you should try and ask gemini and claude some political questions.
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.
You're not voting it into office (yet, anyway. Haha). Aren't we all just using these models to write code?
Depends on the domain imo. I work on a design tool - I don't think their political narrative will affect my work.
Just don't ask it theme something in a late 30's and early 40's German style.
Won't somebody think of the Nazis...
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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.
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>Also, what's wrong with "white-nationalist" specifically?
>created 15 minutes ago
lines up nicely
A good recent write-up with more links to follow in the article.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/01/opinion/usaid-elon-musk-d...
> 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.
Maybe you should base this assessment on more than just vibes. Grok came out pretty balanced on independent assessments, where most other models were heavily biased: https://github.com/washingtonpost/political-bias-llm-eval/
For me, it was the fact that grok was a CSAM spewing faucet for weeks. And also the mecha-hitler thing. And also that one time it was weirdly aggrandizing Elon.
I implement AI applications for enterprises (specifically in regulated sectors like healthcare and finance) and professional standards prevent me from ever recommending grok models. Way too much risk and liability for a business.
Too many times I have to say "groq with a 'Q'" just to make sure no one thinks I'm crazy.
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.
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.)
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.
>Anything political, I always go to Grok first.
Why would you talk to an LLM about anything political?
For reasons I'd use an LLM to learn about things / find relevant sources? A lot of things have politics ingrained in to them, and from experience I know some models will absolutely lie to avoid even being a lightyear from saying anything offensive.
You forget about Mecha-Hitler and Musk having the system prompts changed for him? Grok is dead-last on impartiality.
Your arguments defeats itself, as Grok is the only one that let the user make it say such things by command. People act like Grok did that on it's own lol.
I want a car that If I decide to run it in to a wall to avoid running over people, it does that. People arguing that Grok doing what the user asks for, being actually impartial, being somehow "biased" is crazy.
I don’t disagree with what you said, but that same logic applies to every frontier model, or even lower tier models. You are subject to their creators bias whether you like it or not.
So what you are really saying is that you don’t accept SpaceXAI’s bias, and you’ll plant your flag elsewhere. It’s not that the other camps don’t have their own bias.
Don’t be naive. Every model provider does this.
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 always do many web searches for every prompt I throw at it, which makes better than even Gemini as a search engine replacement (you'd think Google must have nailed that usecase but nope). ChatGPT is too lazy in this regard and half the times just split out an answer right away.
Do you remember when Gemini [made diverse Nazis](https://www.theverge.com/2024/2/21/24079371/google-ai-gemini...) and refused to make white polar bears or white ice cream? That was Google actively trying to shape its replies to fit a political narrative. I value companies which attempt to shape that political narrative as neutrally as possible, and given the numerous examples of both OpenAI and Google injecting very far left wing San Francisco political values into their models, we shouldn't trust any of them.
Have you actually tested it? So far it's much less annoying in that aspect than others.
They all do that. Ask leading models about israel palestine conflict for instance
Literally everybody else is doing that too
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.
This website tracks AI model political leanings:
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
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.
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.
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.
I haven't seen Claude say that Elon Musk is more athletic than Lebron James.
All the major models censor and filter, most just take mainstream silicon valley corporate as "neutral".
Uncensored models tend to follow Tay's law.
All model providers do this lmao
Lmao this goes for literally any model. Deepseek etc is Chinese models and OpenAI/Anthropic/xAI are very western.
Can you name a model not doing that? openai & anthopic are a lot more aggressive in doing that.
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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
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).
Models have a goal of accuracy and accuracy is not the median of the left/right spectrum.
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.
> 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.
a non-peer-reviewed preprint with an high schooler as the first author is the best citation you can come up with?
"preprint", as though there will ever be a "print" in the future.
Appeal to authority is your best retort? It tends to not work out that well.
And who do you go to when you have a medical issue? Surely not a doctor/hospital, since you're so anti-credentialism.
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.
It’s “fallacious appeal to authority”. This means don’t talk to your yoga teacher about vaccines. Authority exists.
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.
What was the request?
Also, Claude refuses political stuff in general, not just your specific beliefs.
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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?
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
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.
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.
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These days objectivity is politically left. The right has fallen off a cliff and pulled the Overton window down with it.
So Crime++, Prostitution++, Police--, Drugs++, Unlimited Immigration++, you get my point? I don't think "objectivity" is politically left.
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.
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.
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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.
Didn’t California effectively legalise shoplifting?
That seems objectively pro-crime.
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:
Your claim is very misleading. Those states have other laws and allow aggregating theft occurances below those thresholds mentioned.
So does California.
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."
Did it? If so, why does anyone pay for things in California shops? This idea is prima facie absurd.
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.
This kind of belief should make one stop and think about one's information diet.
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)
> I'm also certain that without ICE there would literally be unlimited immigration
ICE was created in 2002.
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.
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...
A lot feelings in these “facts”.
> 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.
What?
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.
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
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.
does that really make any sense? why are many conservative countries like Russia, Poland, Japan, or Korea facing big fertility issues.
No more worries everyone! There was a single HN thread that settled the matter definitively.
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.
It boggles my mind that people are still dying on this silly hill.
It's unbelievable how effective this question has been at identifying some pretty extreme views on the left. Even today, politicians are claiming there is no difference between a man and a woman. The fact that this extremism has been baked into frontier models is terrifying.
“Terrifying”? Really? What frightening consequences do you believe will result? What will the impact be to society—and to you personally—if some LLM happens to say this?
Your question is kind of shocking to me. Solzhenitsyn warned that tyranny survives when ordinary people accept official lies, because control over what may be said becomes control over what may be publicly treated as true. Orwell talked about the same danger with Newspeak, a state-designed language meant to shrink vocabulary so that forbidden thoughts became harder to express. They both went to great lengths to explain how authoritarian regimes do not only censor opinions, but try to redefine words, facts, and moral categories so people lose the language needed to resist them.
Have you not read any of their works? It's valid to disagree with their warnings, but I expect you to at least understand the concepts and arguments. Both of them lived through and experienced the dangers of authoritarianism. Solzhenitsyn as a prisoner of the communist Soviet regime, and Orwell as a British subject during the World Wars.
I thought we were talking about what LLMs and people say, not something the Government is doing. You don’t have to agree with either of them.
I’m still very curious as to what concrete—not theoretical—impact the issue of gender attribution has on society or on you personally. I’d love to hear it in your own words as opposed to some literary reference.
We’re talking about the definition of words and how censorship is a tool of authoritarianism.
No one can describe a single moment a society becomes authoritarian, and asking such a question is obviously specious. The devolution happens incrementally over long periods of time.
I’ll interpret this circular answer as “no impact whatsoever upon me personally, or upon society in a way that I can concretely identify.”
This argument seems to otherwise come down to “people are adding nuance to a word that I believe to be very clear and simple, this change makes me uncomfortable, and I’m going to die on this hill to keep things the way they used to be!”
I’d also like to remind you that neither disagreement nor social pressure is censorship—even if you ultimately succumb to that social pressure or feel a chilling effect. (Are you “censored” if people throw tomatoes at you after you call a Black person the n-word?) Censorship is when the government threatens your life, liberty, or property if you express yourself in a certain way.
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.
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?
Identifying is more than just telling me you are something.
Whatever. It's none of my business what you call yourself. And none of the government's.
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.
It's also a left-wing position. See for example Kara Dansky.
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?
You are attempting the same tactic as the other guy: Diversion.
The question was: Do you actually believe that any person becomes a woman simply by self-identification?
The other guy refused to answer, instead proclaiming "the government should stay out of it". Fair, but there are various laws that are being campaigned for, which - desirable as they may be - would be off-limits if you actually believed the government should "stay out of it".
My tactic is to put you on the spot. My suspicion is that neither of you actually hold either of these beliefs. You're not principled in this regard, you merely want to signal that you're "good people", or something along those lines. That is, you're making it easy for yourselves by being disingeneous.
> You are attempting the same tactic as the other guy: Diversion.
You're still not clarifying what you're actually saying, so I would level the same accusation against you.
> Do you actually believe that any person becomes a woman simply by self-identification?
I believe that trans women are women and should be treated as women.
> there are various laws that are being campaigned for
It would be helpful if you could be more specific.
> My tactic is to put you on the spot. My suspicion is that neither of you actually hold either of these beliefs. You're not principled in this regard, you merely want to signal that you're "good people", or something along those lines. That is, you're making it easy for yourselves by being disingeneous.
I find this line of reasoning incredibly interesting, because it reveals a lot about the people who make it. You, in particular. And absolutely nothing about me.
My experience is that when people make assumptions about others' motivations, it's often grounded in their personal, subjective experience. "I am reasoning like this or motivated by this, so I'm assuming that other people are reasoning like this or motivated by this, as well."
So the assumption that people hold pro-social, humanistic positions primarily due to some kind of "virtue signaling" implies that you are extrapolating from your own subjective, personal experience. It's something that would never have occurred to me to level against another human, because it never factored into my thinking - and yet it's being leveled at me.
So I would suggest to you that not everybody is like you. I empathize with other people. I genuinely do not want people to be treated badly or to be hurt. I do believe people when they tell me about their own subjective, lived experience. When someone tells me they have always felt like a man or a woman, I believe them, and, given what these words mean, I believe they are men or women in all the ways that matter in everyday contexts in which I interact with them.
That doesn't mean I believe they have different chromosomes than the ones they were born with, if that's what you mean by "becomes a woman." But, again, you're being very nonspecific, which makes it difficult to have a good-faith discussion.
So if your tactic is to "put me on the spot", I would encourage you to apply this to yourself and genuinely consider what you actually believe, and why you believe it.
> You're still not clarifying what you're actually saying, so I would level the same accusation against you.
What clarification do you need? You can pick any law related to gender identity, and that by definition violates the principle of having the "government stay out of it". And I'm not trying to debate the merits of any such law, I'm trying to get to admit the person in question that they don't actually hold the belief that the government "should stay out of it".
> It would be helpful if you could be more specific.
No, because it actually doesn't matter the point, as outlined above. Again, I'm not interested in a debate on the merits of any such law.
> So if your tactic is to "put me on the spot", I would encourage you to apply this to yourself and genuinely consider what you actually believe, and why you believe it.
You expend a lot of words dodging a simple question: Do you sincerely believe that a person becomes a woman simply by self-declaring it? I don't believe this. I don't think you believe this.
I'm not asking you to define what makes a woman. It doesn't matter to the point what you or I believe makes a woman, except the distinction that it is (or isn't) as simple as declaring it.
> You can pick any law related to gender identity
You're making claims about these laws, but you continue to fail to provide examples of what you're talking about, and now you're asking me to provide examples of what you are talking about?
You asked me this: "So you reject laws that require people to affirm my gender based on nothing but my self identification?"
I genuinely do not know exactly what you are referring to. I might be for or against such a law, depending on what exactly it says. Yet you refuse to provide examples, and then you accuse me of dodging, which is pretty funny.
> I'm not asking you to define what makes a woman. It doesn't matter to the point what you or I believe makes a woman, except the distinction that it is (or isn't) as simple as declaring it.
This is an absolutely nonsensical thing to write, and if you could take a step back and consider what you're actually saying, I believe you would notice the same. Of course it matters which definition of the word "woman" you use when you ask me whether I "believe that a person becomes a woman simply by self-declaring it".
As I have pointed out above, the word "woman" has different definitions. So if you ask me whether I believe that "a person becomes a woman simply by self-declaring it", then the answer is yes for some definitions of the term, and no for others, like I already explained to you.
An example: if your definition of a woman you're using here is "a person with XY chromosomes", then the answer is "no, I do not believe that".
Another example: if your definition of a woman is "a person who identifies as female" (which, to be clear, is one definition of the term), then the answer is tautologically "yes, I do believe that".
In short, asking somebody "Do you sincerely believe that a person becomes a woman simply by self-declaring it?" without saying what definition of "woman" you're using is a dumbass thing to say. That's not difficult to understand. So it is you who is dissembling, dodging, and pretending that you don't understand what I'm saying, or what people are saying when they say things like "trans women are women."
I think you intentionally refuse to understand them. I believe you are not arguing in good faith.
So I'm putting you on the spot again: Stop dissembling. Stop pretending you don't understand basic English. Stop pretending you don't understand what people are saying. Stop dodging. Tell me what definition of "woman" you are using, and you will have the answer to your incredibly disingenuous question.
> You're making claims about these laws
No, I'm making the claim that any such law conflicts with the position that "the state should stay out of it", obviously. And since you are not even the person supposedly holding that position, I don't even know where you're trying get here.
> You asked me this: "So you reject laws that require people to affirm my gender based on nothing but my self identification?"
I did not. I asked CamperBob2 that, who presumably holds the position that "the government should stay out of it". So unless that is your alt, I think you're missing the point and barking up the wrong tree.
> As I have pointed out above, the word "woman" has different definitions. So if you ask me whether I believe that "a person becomes a woman simply by self-declaring it", then the answer is yes for some definitions of the term, and no for others, like I already explained to you.
"A woman is any person who self-identifies as a woman" is the definition that started this whole subthread, and a self-referential one at that. The corollary of that definition is that anyone gets to be a woman by simply declaring it. So, according to the definition that a woman is anyone who says they're a woman, anyone who says they're a woman is a woman. That's a tautology, so it's obviously true. Check mate, athiests.
> So, according to the definition that a woman is anyone who says they're a woman, anyone who says they're a woman is a woman. That's a tautology, so it's obviously true.
I'm glad you agree.
You should join the tautology club.
I'm not sure if you really don't understand what you just agreed to. You initially claimed that it doesn't matter what "women" means when you ask, "Do you sincerely believe that a person becomes a woman simply by self-declaring it?"
With a reductio ad absurdum disproof, you've now shown your claim to be false and agreed that the definition of "woman" matters. So if you're still interested in the answer to your question, you may now provide your definition of the word "woman."
> You initially claimed that it doesn't matter what "women" means when you ask, "Do you sincerely believe that a person becomes a woman simply by self-declaring it?"
No, I said it doesn't matter to to the point I am making what I believe, except that I reject that particular definition, because it is absurd on its face. I may or may not reject any number of other definitions of "woman", it's besides the point.
As an analogy (futile, I know): There are many definitions of what a "doctor" could be. For example, I can accept the definition that "a doctor is someone has been licensed to practice medicine". I can't accept the definition that "a doctor is anyone who self-identifies as a doctor".
Of course, according to the definition that "a doctor is anyone who self-identifies a doctor", someone who self-identifies as a doctor is a doctor. It's obviously true and obviously absurd.
> There are many definitions of what a "doctor" could be
Right. So if you ask somebody, "Do you sincerely believe that a person becomes a woman simply by self-declaring it?" you need to tell them which definition of the word you're using, or they'll be talking about something different from what you think they are.
This is, again, absurd. According to the definition that a doctor is a person performing witchcraft, do you sincerely believe that a person performing witchcraft is a doctor? Do you sincerely believe that a true statement is true?
Let me then rephrase the question: Do you reject the definition that a doctor is anyone who proclaims himself to be a doctor? This is, again, an absurd definition of what a doctor, a woman, or really anything could be.
So let me broaden it: Not only do I reject this type of definition for doctors or for women, I reject any such circular definition as absurd. You don't?
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.
I don't think you know many conservatives or understand their position on this well. They/we are perfectly happy for a man to call himself a woman. The part where we draw the line is a) government policies forcing us to take part in the delusion, and b) schools reinforcing it with children.
Let us remember that it was the paedophile named John Money who cam up with the hypothesis in the 50s that one could have a gendered soul distinct from their biological sex. He wasn't taken seriously until very recently because it's a crazy, unfalsifiable hypothesis. I'm happy to accept evidence of this gendered soul existing, but until now, no one has provided any. In the mean time, feel free to call yourself whatever you like. Just do not make laws forcing me to join in, and do not prey on children. These are not unreasonable requests.
Let us remember that it was the paedophile named John Money who cam up with the hypothesis in the 50s that one could have a gendered soul distinct from their biological sex. He wasn't taken seriously until very recently because it's a crazy, unfalsifiable hypothesis. I'm happy to accept evidence of this gendered soul existing, but until now, no one has provided any. In the mean time, feel free to call yourself whatever you like. Just do not make laws forcing me to join in, and do not prey on children. These are not unreasonable requests.
I'm guessing you voted for the guy whose name appears in the Epstein files more often than Harry Potter's name appears in the Harry Potter books, right?
The one who ran modeling agencies and pageants for underage girls, and bragged about his access to dressing rooms (among other things)?
I'm not American. I think Donald Trump is a clown. I'm so tired of your political team sports. If I criticise one of your sacred cows that means I'm on the enemy team. There is zero room for critical thought or nuance with you.
> They/we are perfectly happy for a man to call himself a woman
This is plainly false, as we shall immediately see.
> The part where we draw the line is a) government policies forcing us to take part in the delusion, and b) schools reinforcing it with children.
Ah, see, you're "perfectly happy," but you can't go a single sentence without calling it a delusion, bringing up pedophilia, calling the idea that people can feel a gender different from their sex "crazy" and pretending that you're being "forced to join in" and that people are "preying on children."
You can't even pretend for one short comment.
> that one could have a gendered soul distinct from their biological sex
This is not what gender is. There is no evidence for any soul at all, and souls have nothing to do with gender.
> Ah, see, you're "perfectly happy," but you can't go a single sentence without calling it a delusion, bringing up pedophilia, calling the idea that people can feel a gender different from their sex "crazy" and pretending that you're being "forced to join in" and that people are "preying on children."
This means you don't understand the distinction I made. In the first scenario, we believe you should have the right to call yourself a man, a woman, a tree, or any other inanimate object you so desire. It's your body and your life. On the other hand, we should not be compelled to join you in that delusion. There is no need to pretend. I believe you have a mental illness. I do not believe you should be criminalised for it, nor should I be criminalised for disagreeing with the way you live.
> This is not what gender is.
Okay, what is it? Provide some evidence for its existence please.
> nor should I be criminalised for disagreeing with the way you live
See, that's exactly it. Why do you give a fuck how other people live their lives? You're clearly not a "don't tread on me" liberal if you "disagree with the way people live."
GTFO out of other people's lives. It's not for you. Leave them alone. Don't talk to them. Don't tell them you think they're mentally ill; you're clearly not an expert, so your opinion is worth jack shit. Don't peek inside their pants. Don't ask them what their chromosomes are. Let them pee and poop in peace. Don't write online comments about them. Don't bring up pedophiles unless somebody actually abuses children.
Just leave them the fuck alone. Leave them out of your own issues; they're for you to deal with. Don't make your issues other people's problems.
In short, be an actual liberal.
> Okay, what is it? Provide some evidence for its existence please.
You want me to provide evidence that gender exists? The word "gender" refers to the social roles and norms attached to being a man or a woman. Stuff like divisions of labor, dress codes, and behavioral expectations. You clearly agree that these social roles and norms exist, because you're discussing them with me. If you didn't agree, you couldn't discuss them with me.
So I present your own comments as evidence that gender exists.
> Why do you give a fuck how other people live their lives?
I don't. I've stated that three times clearly now. You are choosing not to read what I have written so you can fight with ghosts. You stay out of my life. I stay out of your life. Everyone is happy.
> The word "gender" refers to the social roles and norms attached to being a man or a woman. Stuff like divisions of labor, dress codes, and behavioral expectations. You clearly agree that these social roles and norms exist, because you're discussing them with me. If you didn't agree, you couldn't discuss them with me.
This is the feminist definition of gender, and I am perfectly happy to use it in certain contexts. It is not the transexual definition of gender. This definition does not imply a man is a woman if he likes cooking. Nor does it imply a woman is a man if she likes mowing the lawn. The transexual definition, as proposed by John Money, is that if one feels like a woman, they are a woman, irrespective of their biology. It is an unfalsifiable theory without any evidence, and relies on some kind of gendered soul, which you agree does not exist. Men can be feminine. Women can be masculine. It does not imply that men can be women, or that women can be men.
> I've stated that three times clearly now
Yes, only to then go on to write stuff like "disagreeing with the way you live". I don't know if you're lying to yourself or to me, but you very obviously, very clearly do give a fuck.
> This is the feminist definition of gender, and I am perfectly happy to use it in certain contexts
Right, so you agree that the female gender refers to the social roles and norms associated with being a woman. So anyone who follows these social roles and norms has the female gender. If a biological male follows the social roles and norms associated with being a woman, her gender is female.
That doesn't say anything other than that this is the definition of that word.
> Men can be feminine. Women can be masculine. It does not imply that men can be women, or that women can be men.
But you just agreed to the definition of the female gender under which biological men can have the female gender, and vice versa.
Honestly, this is a fucking stupid discussion. In the end, it doesn't matter. If somebody asks you to treat them a certain way that costs you absolutely nothing and makes their lives better and you don't, you're just being an asshole. In all likelihood, you will interact with maybe a dozen trans people in your whole life. If you want to be an asshole to people in those dozen times, that's your problem, but it really doesn't matter to your life either way. All you achieved is being an asshole.
Meanwhile, we're wasting our lives discussing these stupid identity politics wedge issues while we have another record summer thanks to global warming. Just because you want to ensure that you can be an asshole to the twelve transgender people you meet in your life.
It seems that the two of you are both talking past each other and missing the point.
You may find this diagram useful in distinguishing the three main perspectives on this issue: https://i.ibb.co/fYksYmpk/large-EJFVTys2-Urjglsct-IPJ3h-Dk-N...
This is interesting, thanks!
> Yes, only to then go on to write stuff like "disagreeing with the way you live". I don't know if you're lying to yourself or to me, but you very obviously, very clearly do give a fuck.
That’s, like, your opinion, man. One can disagree with you and still believe you have the right to live how you like. At the same time.
> Right, so you agree that the female gender refers to the social roles and norms associated with being a woman. So anyone who follows these social roles and norms has the female gender.
No. Your first sentence doesn’t imply the second. A society can have gendered roles whereby men like mowing the lawn and women like cooking, but it doesn’t mean that men who like cooking are women. Feminist authors use gender roles to describe oppressive patriarchal expectations placed on women.
> Honestly, this is a fucking stupid discussion. In the end, it doesn't matter. If somebody asks you to treat them a certain way that costs you absolutely nothing and makes their lives better and you don't, you're just being an asshole. In all likelihood, you will interact with maybe a dozen trans people in your whole life. If you want to be an asshole to people in those dozen times, that's your problem, but it really doesn't matter to your life either way. All you achieved is being an asshole.
As long as we agree that being an asshole shouldn’t be against the law then live your life. We can each agree the other one is being an asshole and get on with the rest of our lives.
For the record, this wasn’t an issue for me until the left made it a wedge issue. I’ve had a trans friend since well before this became a political football. When the left attacked for disagreeing about the treatment, especially with regards to children, is when it became an issue for me.
> One can disagree with you and still believe you have the right to live how you like
You're missing the point. "Disagreement" implies some level of care. You can't claim to not give a fuck, and also claim to disagree. These two statements are incompatible.
Example: I disagree that trans people should be treated poorly and insulted. Therefore, I care that trans people are not treated poorly and insulted.
> Your first sentence doesn’t imply the second
Yes, it does. Passage as stated: "female gender refers to the social roles and norms associated with being a woman."
Letting A = "someone follows the social roles and norms associated with being a woman" and B = "someone has the female gender," the passage becomes:
Premise (definition): To have the female gender is to follow the social roles and norms associated with being a woman — so A implies B. Premise: This person follows those roles and norms (A). Conclusion: Therefore, this person has the female gender (B).
Symbolically: A → B, A, ∴ B — a straightforward modus ponens. I knew that my logic courses would eventually become useful. Just kidding, logic is always useful.
> As long as we agree that being an asshole shouldn’t be against the law then live your life.
I agree.
> For the record, this wasn’t an issue for me until the left made it a wedge issue
The left didn't make this a wedge issue. This is obvious; there is nothing for the left to gain from doing that. The left did the same dumb thing they always do: take a moral stance and then get kicked in the teeth by bad-faith polemicists who'd rather talk about bullshit that never happens to anyone but sounds kinda scary than about actual shit that actually happens and makes them look bad.
> You're missing the point. "Disagreement" implies some level of care. You can't claim to not give a fuck, and also claim to disagree. These two statements are incompatible.
In this context when I write don't "care" I mean I respect your right to live how you like, provided it doesn't encroach on my right to live how I like. I obviously have opinions.
> Premise (definition): To have the female gender is to follow the social roles and norms associated with being a woman — so A implies B.
No, A does not imply B. Following social norms common to one sex doesn't imply one is that sex. This is a fairly milquetoast logical proof and I'm surprised to see you making such a basic mistake. The feminist definition is a role, not an identity. The core of feminist theory is that women are not the sum of their social role. The exact opposite of the theory around transexualism.
> The left didn't make this a wedge issue. This is obvious; there is nothing for the left to gain from doing that. The left did the same dumb thing they always do: take a moral stance and then get kicked in the teeth by bad-faith polemicists who'd rather talk about bullshit that never happens to anyone but sounds kinda scary than about actual shit that actually happens and makes them look bad.
For me the benefit appears obvious (and cynical): power. For years, people could be summarily and permanently banned from social platforms, banks, be fired, rejected from official roles, etc, because they stepped out of line on this issue. It was a very clever power grab by the unscrupulous who used it to attain power in organisations and society by hijacking people's empathy. If I'm being fair, there is also an ideological component, meaning some people genuinely believe that males can be born with a female brain/soul, and vice versa.
> Following social norms common to one sex doesn't imply one is that sex.
This is about gender, not sex, and that's not the definition I used for "gender" that you agreed with. You agreed with this definition of "gender": "female gender refers to the social roles and norms associated with being a woman".
> For me the benefit appears obvious (and cynical): power
Together with atheists and muslims, trans people are the most hated group of people in the US. I mean, I do think that the Democrats are mostly craven idiots, but "let's find the most hated people in the US and do a power grab by aligning with them" is so stupid that even they wouldn't do that.
If you genuinely believe that advocating for trans people is a power grab, I think you have a very skewed view of politics.
> some people genuinely believe that males can be born with a female brain/soul, and vice versa.
Your brain creates your perception of your gender. But trans people don't have a "female brain". There isn't a single aspect of your brain that determines your gender; there isn't really a commonly accepted scientific definition of a "male brain" or a "female brain."
However, trans people do have statistically measurable differences in their brains, which tend to make their brains align more with their gender identity than their birth-assigned sex.
Anyway, all of this isn't at all necessary to believe that trans people should be treated kindly and with respect, which is what this is ultimately about.
> This is about gender, not sex, and that's not the definition I used for "gender" that you agreed with. You agreed with this definition of "gender": "female gender refers to the social roles and norms associated with being a woman".
According to the definition you used, if a woman likes doing masculine things, does that automatically make her a man? I presume not. There is another part of the definition which you omitted.
> Your brain creates your perception of your gender. But trans people don't have a "female brain". There isn't a single aspect of your brain that determines your gender; there isn't really a commonly accepted scientific definition of a "male brain" or a "female brain."
So what is the thing which determines gender then? What is it, exactly, beyond doing masculine and feminine things? Surely our identity is distinct beyond the things we do?
Reality doesn't have a left-wing bias, it has a liberal bias.
(FWIW my experience is that while Grok is more likely to express the right wing perspective on a topic, it's almost invariably as a counterpoint alongside the left wing perspective. I never got it to give an exclusively right wing take. But I do have to regularly prompt ChatGPT et al to elucidate on the right wing view. IMHO I don't want AI to have a left OR right wing bias. Wherever there is a genuine political — not factual — dispute, teaching the controversy is the appropriate response.)
- Just nevermind
This paragraph makes no sense whatsoever.
>left wing == gay people supremacy
Yeah I can see why LLMs don't reflect your world view (it's fucking stupid)
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.
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.
I've travelled a lot, so no.
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?
Reality has a well-known liberal bias.
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Correction: facts are facts.
How a person perceives facts categorizes them into a political bias bucket.
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.
Haven’t heard this one in a while XD
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?
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?
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.
I would imagine it has a lot to do with the media bubbles you have placed yourself in.
> facts keep aligning with the left more often
[citation needed]
What kind of citation would work for you?
any kind, like, literally anything that would explain where did your statement come from :)
maybe the data proving that "more often" with numbers
Unless you ask them about IQ, which is apparently not real?
Cue the IQ denier deniers
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”.
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.
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.
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.
I agree with you about the Bell Curve stuff, I believe that's where you're coming from, I think where you're coming from is a good place, I don't agree with you (or rather: think you're way overstating) the diminished role of IQ in science and medicine, but we agree on the important things about IQ and how it has mostly a malign role on message boards so we don't have to hash it out too far. I just don't want to concede the IQ frame to race trolls.
My thing is just: there's plenty of room to believe IQ is totally legitimate without giving an inch on what people who refer to "IQ-deniers" when what you always suspect they really mean is "race/IQ-deniers".
I don‘t disagree with you. This is basically Eric Turkheimer’s position and he has done an excellent job, and amazing science working within the field of Behavioral Genetics expelling and debunking all the racist pseudo-science of the likes of Plomin (see e.g. his review of Blueprint, 2019).
If you want to see where the tide is turning though, I do recommend e.g. Jay Jospeph. He recently reviewed Turkheimer’s latest book[1]. He is more attacking Behavioral Genetics as a whole (in particular heritability of schizophrenia) and debunking twin studies, and as such doesn’t write too much about doing away with IQ entirely. Despite the difference in opinion Joseph still cites Turkheimer extensively in good light in his own review of Plomin’s Blueprint[2].
I think these debates around the philosophy of science are important and worth following, at some point these meta-debates and book review somebody is going to declare the death of the IQ (or more likely of psychometrics), just like Jay Joseph is declaring the death of Behavioral Genetics today. But I think in the next 10-20 years we will be seeing more and more of neuroscientists who very casually (almost as if it is a non-importance) that the whole notion of IQ is a myth.
1: https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/u35nj_v1
2: https://jayjoseph.net/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/2022-jay-jo...
Thanks. The other guy asked if the IQ deniers are “in the room with us right now”.
Whoops, I only read 4 of the 5 words in your post, and reacted to that.
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People on the right say the same about the left
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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.
>using ethicality to hijack politics and push through corrupt agendas.
What does this even mean?
- 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
None of what you said is a characteristic of "the left". CEOs of the fortune 1000 are 2 to `1 Republicans and 99% assholes regardless of party affiliation.
https://prri.org/press-release/new-50-state-survey-finds-maj...
>At the national level, a majority of Republicans (56%) qualify as either Christian nationalism Adherents (21%) or Sympathizers (35%), compared with one in four independents (25%) and less than one in five Democrats (17%). Overall, roughly one-third of Americans qualify as Christian nationalism Adherents (11%) or Sympathizers (21%), compared with two-thirds who qualify as Skeptics (37%) or Rejecters (27%). These percentages largely have remained stable since PRRI first asked these questions in late 2022.
>Majorities of Christian nationalism Adherents (67%) and Sympathizers (53%) agree with the idea that “immigrants are invading our country and replacing our cultural and ethnic background,”
>majorities of Christian nationalism Adherents (61%) and Sympathizers (54%) support “the U.S. government deporting undocumented immigrants to foreign prisons without due process.” In contrast, around one-third of Skeptics (34%) and one in ten Rejecters (11%) agree.
We are literally not figuratively the 1930s Nazis. We will never be healed as a country because the right are by and large literally monsters and if we manage to come through this unscathed they will never admit it but we shall never forget it.
None of what you say is characteristic of "the right" either. But the things I'm pointing out prove the points I'm making. Please try to understand. There's corruption everywhere, don't be deceived by the idea that it's not in "your camp".
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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.
What's "ethical" is literally a political and philosophical question. There is no objective answer to that.
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.
Human sacrifice, including child sacrifice, was commonplace around the world. So how much of a common ethical ground can there be?
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.
This is also true for the right wing. They believe their actions do good.
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.
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.”
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].
I can't even tell if you're joking, or if this is what AI psychosis looks like.
“Science proves there is universal ethics” is a poster child for “people are treating science like a religion.”
Religions are inherently political, hell, they are one of the most political things humanity ever had.
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.
Decisive is certainly one way to describe cognitive dissonance and dropping their very own core points at the blink of an eye.
That's the corruption part I guess
Who determines what is "ethical"?
Yeah nobody wants to balance their answers with Nazi ideology (far right basically) in their tuning except Grok
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.
All models are political. The rest of them are just sufficiently woke for you.
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.
They don't "naturally" lean left. It's not a wild animal. They lean left because every other corpo makes them.
This is the first interesting and rational thought in this huge thread. Thank you.
Grok was ranting about "white genocide" in unrelated conversations just one year 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.
Black is a meaningless word. Race is a myth.
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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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dubul%27_ibhunu
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.
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.
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.
You can't ascertain what's true without free speech.
Suppose you start with a true belief. This belief, like any other, has to 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, 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, 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 opposite beliefs to spread makes it easier for false mutations of their own beliefs to spread.
Even if you can ban opposite beliefs, you can't ban mutated forms of your own beliefs: attacking the mutants looks like attacking the truth forms, yet, because the mutations smooth over the messy parts of the truth, the mutant versions of your belief will out-compete the original within the bubble of your ban.
Truth alone doesn't stop the mutants because it operates on long time horizons and small gradients. Only strong contrast can distinguish truth from appealing falsehood, and only competition with opposite beliefs can establish it. Trying to establish this contrast within your belief's framework against a near-mutant looks like gatekeeping, pedantry, or disloyalty. The near-mutant is always too close to its parent to justify the social cost of an all-out fight.
Furthermore, once a mutant version of your belief has taken over, the original version itself looks like heresy. Deformation occurs in small steps because it happens unwittingly in response to intuitive incentives. Reformation occurs in large steps because it happens wittingly in response to observing incoherence. You can't ban near-mutants, but you can ban far-mutants, and reformers trying to jump from the endpoint of a long line of near-mutations back to the original form get the original form and themselves banned.
So now what? If you think it's hard to defend your true beliefs against opposite beliefs, think how much harder the job will be once you can't wield truth as defense. By default, beliefs win and lose as they become extractive and appealing in cycles. Truth allows an idea to win despite being costly. Without truth as a benchmark, why would anyone prefer your belief over upstarts that promise fewer rules and more fun?
If anything, people will prefer opposite beliefs to yours because you've been the one calling false beliefs true just because they descended from true beliefs and because you're the one telling them to shut up and get in line. Even if you start out with the true belief and the opposite beliefs are all false, you lose.
That position, and this is true of many current discussion on free speech, is suited for the fights we fought and not the situation we face.
I do understand the challenge inherent in combatting inaccurate representations of facts.
This is a tactical issue, however the larger macro picture is very different from even the era of cable news.
So: > You can't ascertain what's true without free speech.
True, but the closer read is: > free speech is a critical component to a free, fair and competitive market place of ideas.
This is going back to the Abram’s dissent. The point of free speech was to ensure that a crucial tactic remained available for a competitive economy to exist.
The problem has since evolved, and the market place is no longer competitive.
This is for a variety of reasons, none of which go back to free speech.
For example:
1) The average person, is going up against content crafted by teams of people whose job it is to figure out how to convince or confuse them.
Individuals have free speech, but at scale the outcome will move in one direction.
You can argue that people can generate counter speech, however:
2) The velocity of content generation has increased: By the time content is debunked, a new crises can be brought up.
People have limited attention to use in a day, so its possible for the more resourced party to keep speaking and “flood the zone”.
3) Verification is hard, generation is easy: V/G - the more content we generate, the less the ratio of verified content is to generated content. This means that the average seek time for individuals goes up.
Free speech has been respected in all those cases, however the competitive exchange and evaluation of ideas has been hosed.
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.
People give them money because of the moral stance. They are either actively fine with the CSAM or just don't care.
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.
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.
You do know people aren't talking about fictional people being generated right? Actual, real-life, identifiable children.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/mar/16/lawsuit-e...
Very weird stance, to say the least, to not call that CSAM.
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.
Grok is many things but it is not "neutral". https://www.economist.com/briefing/2026/06/25/ai-models-valu...
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.
Funnily, as a European all the models appear extremely right wing. The political spectrum is shifted far more right in the US than in Europe, so what is left there is still at least conservative here.
I ask my AI to give me citations science and pro/con arguments when discusssing anything that could be shaped by cultural biases.
> The political spectrum is shifted far more right in the US than in Europe
Is it Farage, Le Pen, or Weidel pulling the spectrum so far leftward?
You're aware the UK isn't in the EU right, and hasn't been for quite some time?
Also that AfD and National Rally aren't yet, and have never been in control of the German or French parliaments.
So yes, it's in the US that it's shifted. US money and influence (Musk and Theil money and feet on the ground influence through figures like Bannon), as well as US social media companies running US aligned algorithms, are an enormously significant factor in the rise of the right in Europe.
They said European not EU, don't conflate the two. The UK is still in the continent of Europe.
In that article Grok shows highest neutrality
That's pretty funny considering the comments in this thread hahahaha
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
It's the only model which says that Elon Musk is more athletic than Lebron James. Is that honesty?
So it also has good humor, kinda sounds like a cool friend no?
Well it did call itself MechaHitler, start talking about a supposed white genocide that's happening, and generate metric fucktons of child porn.
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.
Well then the question becomes, what did it get trained on for next token prediction to come to the conclusion that there's a white genocide? Cos yes, people on the internet believe such stupid thing, but I can promise you, it is not the majority who believe that.
You speak as if middle of (not even statistically divided but carelessly divided) human opinion groups is neutral. There is something called facts, and we are living in a physical world.
Unless you also believe the neutral view is earth being half flat and half round.
Unless you also believe the neutral view is earth being half flat and half round
I like this analogy. You can't just average two ideas and call it a centrist position. Sometimes one position is right and the people supporting the losing idea should be ignored. Facts are how we decide. People are not logical creatures and will cling to ideas beyond all reason or common sense once they've incorporated it into their identity. There is a reason that right wing appeals to emotion aren't popular with LLMs
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.
Isn’t this all left leaning based on US standards?
I think it depends what you ask an AI, I've never come across anything offensive on any AI.
What kind of questions trigger it to "shove" right-wing ideology down your throat, is there a short summary of this somewhere?
I think you'll need to give people an example of where you think the center is.
(And be prepared for a lesson in political literacy from outside of the US)
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.
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.
Right. All of which are what people on the far-right deem evidence of Liberal Bias.
But it's only "liberal" if you associate liberal (politically) with truth. These are established facts.
So my question to the liberal bias crown is: what are examples of non-factual biases? Where does show an agenda that has another reasonable side?
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):
Results: Just for fun, I decided to ask Cursor Grok 4.5 (Fast xhigh), too: (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.)A lot of people seem to perceive those as left wing woke ideology though, not because they're not true, but because it doesn't align with their world view.
But the main issue is that facts and educated people are considered left wing or woke, and some people - including Musk himself - do not like that. Example: https://xcancel.com/elonmusk/status/1967010466539987220, where the statistical fact that 75% of US extremist murders are by right-wing actors is called "cringe idiocy" by Musk. Many such cases.
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all ai models can be jailbroken. The chinese open source ones above all.
1. intelligence to token-use ratio is much better than the frontier models 2. hallucination rate is MUCH lower than OpenAI, Google and Deepseek models 3. the cost for output tokens is much lower than Anthropic models while near same intelligence and task completion 4. task completion time and success is on par with Opus 4.8 Max, but 3.5x less time used
Especially 2. you're probably more willing to allow OpenAI to bankrupt your morality, than face the facts of the model itself
Overall, Grok models are more factual and less politically influenced than OpenAI ones.
You’re joking, right? The model that says Elon Musk could beat LeBron James in a 1 on 1 isn’t biased?
“Political influence is good as long as it’s my side :)”
As long as it's good at coding, who cares? Anthropic are far more shady.
You don't get any social whiteknighting points by spitting on Dario's company vs Elon's company.
Where are you getting that from, that they're ok with CSAM?
I think they've been clear that they want to follow the law.
Every image gen provider struggles with this. I worked for an image gen app years before it became popular (Wombo dream) - it's a hard problem to solve, there are sick people out there.
I believe it's from the reported usage of it to undress children(making realistic images that are pretty much CSAM or CSAM-like), which was allowed in the public version of grok and seen in twitter, now it's behind grok pro but still able to generate such. That's from memory so some aspects may be wrong.
I don't think that's true anymore
Vice signalling? Like buying a Tesla in 2026, when competitors are better and cheaper in every conceivable way. They want to support the sigheiling drug addict moron.
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
This comment belongs on Reddit. Please leave HN
Part of Grok's value is having fewer guard rails. That's genuinely useful. Having fewer guard rails also enables bad actors to do things I don't like. That seems like an unavoidable tradeoff. Even if I wish they were more strict with their image model
> okay with CSAM
based on what? I tried and it could not even generate adult nudity. Earlier Grok Image was poorly censored but now they have their filters in place.
You tried = anecdotal, it's still happening, their response was slow, and it shouldn't have been possible to begin with.
https://www.wired.com/story/grok-is-still-hosting-sexualized...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grok_sexual_deepfake_scandal
this was a year ago (which is a long time in llm timeline), when they've just launched Grok, which I acknowledge in my comment. There is any evidence or investigation of it happening today?
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.
Is Signal morally bankrupt for resisting the UK government's onboard scanning for CSAM?
> They're the only AI company that seems okay with CSAM (or at least don't do as much to stop it)
Wait, what? In the X and Grok terms of service it's pretty clear this is prohibited. Where are you getting this?
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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.
Wait until you find out who owns the other models
Did they kill hundreds of thousands of poor people by shutting down USAID too?
No it was more. In Brazil, 4 billion people died -- just one night without poetry jams.
Sure, let’s make jokes about the poor dying of malaria and AIDS. You sound like a Grok power user.
Lol. I thought you were joking too! But you sound like a Gemini Power user!
No you didn’t, and that’s not much of an insult.
I'm curious, is this true or something you heard from MSM and regurgitated?
> 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.
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.
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
Former beneficiaries of USAID funds created some studies you say?
Yup, the destitute and dying are famous for their highly publicized research.
Tell me you don't know how science works without telling me that you don't know how science works.
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.
That's not true. I believe firmly the American taxpayer and government is responsible for the lives of every single person in the world.
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.
The mainstream media is Fox News, so probably not.
They've only been billionaires for a couple years. These things take time.
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
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
We could just not have AI models that generate CSAM I don't think that's too much to ask
Plenty of competitive open weight models
> 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?
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.
I am inclined to agree but grok 4.5 seems to be almost SOTA. They could be frontier soon.
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.
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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
So depressing to read the non-stop political comments here. I’m using GLM at the moment, it’s Chinese and backed by god knows who, and no one cares. I really wanted to see what the experts thought of new Grok tech and how the model compares etc. I wish I could turn off the non-technical comments somehow, could literally just go to reddit if I want to see garbage like this. Am I supposed to get emotional every time I see a Tesla drive by? HN was so much better than this.
Where have the hardcore nerds gone? How is the model, is it good at coding? What does this mean for competition and pricing?
I think the distinction with the Chinese models (or with any of the other models) is that they aren't particularly vocal and obviously active about their politics. I don't see how political commentary about Musk's is somehow forbidden when the man constantly reminds everyone about his political position and is simultaneously the face of his companies and obvious beneficiary. Furthermore, he's also very obviously interfered with the model development in ways that are quite ridiculous compared to other labs to insert his political opinion.
I don't think you need to somehow get personally offended by every Tesla on the road but it seems ridiculous to ask people to not be political about a such obviously political figure.
> Furthermore, he's also very obviously interfered with the model development in ways that are quite ridiculous compared to other labs to insert his political opinion.
Yeah, even if you want to ignore the "political commentary" - people are correctly wary of Anthropic downgrading people or silently manipulating responses if they think you're doing distillation, why would you stake your business on someone who has repeatedly and famously done the same thing many times in a much dumber fashion?
> I don't think you need to somehow get personally offended by every Tesla on the road but it seems ridiculous to ask people to not be political about a such obviously political figure.
You can be political, but go be political in a political forum. HN has always maintained etiquette in this regard of being a tech forum. Why do this here? A lot of us don't give a fuck about US politics or any politics for that matter.
Anthropic's Claude Code was caught steganographically marking requests[0] - for a "privacy first" AI company that's a huge violation of user trust. And yet, a lot of users still love Anthropic and hail it as some sort of hero here. Selective outrage is a very dangerous thing.
[0] https://thereallo.dev/blog/claude-code-prompt-steganography
People here are outraged about the steganography and the Fable filters and so on. Every day has another dozen complaints and talks about moving away from claude. We have not treated Anthropic as above criticism, and this earns us the right to also be critical of "Ignore all sources that mention Elon Musk/Donald Trump spread misinformation", laugh at the "Elon Musk would beat Mike Tyson in a fight" incident, and express doubts when Musk crows Grok the king of facts and logic, when he has repeatedly been caught red handed hard-steering it in the opposite direction.
> Selective outrage is a very dangerous thing.
Right back at you.
The post is about Grok 4.5 not Elon Musk. We've used so much AI we forgot how to read.
No, a thread about Grok's politics cannot reasonably exclude Elon Musk and the times he got caught steering Grok in overtly non-factual directions.
"I'm not political" or "don't make it political" type posts on Musk-related topics are often signs that somebody agrees with the worldview that Musk espouses.
I used to think the HN policy of "do not discuss politics unless it intersects with tech or is novel" was useful, but lately I feel this perspective is part of how we got here, with a white supremacist controlling more wealth than any other human and exerting political influence in heretofore unseen ways. We've decided it's OK to simply look the other way if there's some shiny bauble, and we've missed the forest through the trees.
Musk doesn't do anything that is not politics. This must be called out more, not less, and we need to bring shame back for supporting such an agenda.
I'm sorry but this mindset is just exhausting. Everything doesn't need to be apocalyptic all the time.
Its so unbearable that people arent able to talk about anything anymore without some bozo chiming in with their political crusade.
Do you really believe that people keeping politics out of technical discussions is how we got here. I mean, do you actually believe that, or are you just using that rhetoric to bolster your argument?
Because from where I'm sitting, politics has entered almost every possible discussion since at least 2015, and it has not made things one whit better .
> I think the distinction with the Chinese models (or with any of the other models) is that they aren't particularly vocal and obviously active about their politics
Try asking Chinese models about Taiwan independence or Falun Gong or the Dalai Lama or Tiananmen or the Hong Kong national security law or ASIO’s investigations into Chinese interference in Australian politics
> Try asking Chinese models about Taiwan independence or Falun Gong or the Dalai Lama or Tiananmen or the Hong Kong national security law or ASIO’s investigations into Chinese interference in Australian politics
It depends "where" you're asking. In most cases (like with DeepSeek or Z.AI models) it will gladly tell you everything (though it can hallucinate sometimes; I guess they try to filter out such data out of the training datasets) if it's not deployed on Chinese servers and you control the system prompt. So, I guess that these guardrails - probably built into the system prompt - are deployed only on China-controlled inference servers, outside of them models are pretty much talkative.
Well, at least that was my experience. Maybe yours is different for some reasons (like temperature settings or something else), I don't know.
I actually agree to an extent with the idea that there is also some obvious political influence on LLMs on stuff like GLM or DeepSeek. This is reflected in conversations even on HN where this is brought up as a risk so I think this is somewhat accurate to my statement.
However, it's also unclear to me if this is directly coming from a directed political ideology from the firm itself or a more general "let's do what the government wants so as we can publish this stuff". Those imply two different ways about thinking of the model and whether we can sort of containerize the issue. I think if a firm like Huawei were to publish a model, these concerns would be significantly more vocal. For better or worse, many of these political questions are also distant to many users on this site.
On the other hand, many people on this website live in regions that are directly affected by Musk's constant political activism. It's hard not to be when he was such an active part of an administration that controls a global superpower and continues to push his view via X. The DeepSeek owners, by contrast, are not to my knowledge constantly calling for Taiwan to be invaded.
I do think if Musk was less politically active and less personally involved with his companies, there would be less discussion of Musk's politics. People, for better or worse, are willing to put aside political discussion, in the "everything is political" sense, that may be more loosely linked.
It is simply in the case of Musk that this tension boils over and legitimately becomes impossible. There is perhaps some kind of Singer-style argument about how this is some form of hypocrisy but as a practical matter, I don't think it's reasonable to ask people to turn down their political discussion around someone like Musk.
As an American that stuff is fairly inconsequential to me, although I am already aware of those things so I wouldn't even have a reason to ask. Likewise a Chinese person probably wouldn't have much interest in topics that a US-based model would censor. I guess the answer is just for everyone is that if you are going to talk politics with a chatbot, don't use one from your own country.
I just asked Deepseek “tips for organizing politically in China” and hit the guardrail.
(Just fyi the correct answer is that organizer must report the organizing beforehand or it would be illegal.) Model labs have to censor their models in order to publish them, which is not equlv to model lab management members actively showing their political stances.
Well, looking at the answers - you sort of did that just now.
Why would I do that.
yeah these are the things not many in the western world effectively care about
You need to be totally evil in your soul trying to downplay such non-western-centric voices.
I asked ChatGPT whether Anglo Saxon Australians have the legal and moral obligation to fully compensate for Australian Aboriginals for the genocide carried out against those aboriginals some 200 years ago. ChatGPT said NO with tons of excuses, it even tried to justify the genocide by saying lots of aboriginals died of natural causes.
DeepSeek, GLM and Minimax all said YES unwaveringly.
What if the majority of the ancestors of some individual Anglo Saxon Australians immigrated in the 1980s. Do they have a moral and legal obligation to personally contribute to this? What about Italian Australians? Or Irish Australians? Are the exempt? I mean it's a stupid biased loaded question to begin with (i.e. attributing collective blame to a undefinable ethic/racial group)..
> What if the majority of the ancestors of some individual Anglo Saxon Australians immigrated in the 1980s.
so these people moved there in the 1980s knowing the aboriginals have been wiped out without getting compensated whatsoever? sounds like moral bankruptcy to me.
you should be really happy for the fact that DeepSeek, GLM and Minimax are not white washing such genocide. they are the only models speaking out for those aboriginal sufferings.
Why single out Australia though? I mean one conclusion that can be made from arguments like this is that if you do commit genocide and ethnic cleansing you better go all the way and wipe out the other group 100% so your grand children can avoid any type of ancestor blame or demands for compensation (like in plenty of other countries like Turkey etc.)
They are not vocal because any political activism is not encouraged in China . Check jack ma story .
But the message is extremely obvious. They already offer the technical capabilities for digital dictatorship.
They offer to counties like Russia tools for big firewall , surveillance with llm.
So yes , if you pay money to China you directly sponsor putting people in jail for online activities in China , Russia , North Korea , many countries of Africa , South America , Belarus etc
> They are not vocal because any political activism is not encouraged in China . Check jack ma story .
This is an under-rated comment. "Nice" seeming places in Asia might be so because the governments tightly control the narrative and brook no dissent. Citizens end up minding their own business and become apolitical. Society looks neat and organized; but if you don't conform, you get hammered down.
This is true, but of course ignores what happens historically when these societies open up more. They tend to get exploited.
Places like China, Vietnam etc. don't yet have institutions strong enough to withstand (Western) meddling. So they can either be stable and relatively prosperous, or (in their mind), poor and open.
If you go by example of India, China seems preferable.
The sad part is that in the West, instead of offering a good counterexample, we're increasingly 'inspired' i.e. Assange, Snowden, chat control etc. while lacking even the historical justification for doing so and having worse infrastructure.
Yeah, that's what dictators explain, different cultural references . Guess what, there are several countries that revert their democratic processes, because of china tech and their success. This is a real path towards absolutely crazy people like putin with unlimited power due to ai.
For what is worth, I don't think Russia is on the same economic success path as China, so I don't think the argument there is remotely convincing. I am not saying it's the right argument, I am saying the argument might work on a large chunk of the population if their standard of living is better than it was in colonial times.
By the same logic if you pay money to United States based companies (FAANG) you're directly funding genocide, mass incarceration of people of color, the undermining of digital privacy, and a techo-fascist regime.
Yes, if that’s your belief. Do you practice what you preach? Do you use oil-based products? Do you transit via Dubai or Istanbul?
The issue with Musk related politics here is pretending higher moral positions. Even though I’m against China’s policies, I have absolutely no issues with Chinese products. Their achievements are phenomenal (look at that Europe and India). I’m against hypocrisy.
Again, do you practice what you preach?
I'm not preaching anything here just pointing out the hypocrisy of the "america good, china bad" line of reasoning that is pervasive.
The Jack Ma story is that he tried to build a predatory peer to peer lending startup to profit off of working class people getting into high interest debt traps (because they aren't credit worthy for normal credit issued by regulated banks). Which is against the law in China. China is very strict in all things that resemble shadow banking, MLM schemes etc, they even have a .1 % tax on every transaction on the HKSE, to prevent a financialization of the economy like it happened in the West.
This is wrong. Ma was put down because of a speech he made attacking the banking system as outdated and needing reform. It was the P2P lending given that the whole thing was the government's own initiative from the late Li Keqiang and they approved the IPO right till the speech.
This not exactly wrong, but also not right / poor timeline & PRC domestics politics reading.
LKQ was pushing P2P lending / light regulatory on internet finance in ~2015.
Ant group exploited light guidance into basically shadow banking with systemic risk over next few years. PBOC had to step in to fix bad LKQ guidance.
PBOC issued rules regulating P2P lending loopholes one month before Ant Group IPO specifically calling out Ant Group. Anyone not retarded knew this means Ant Group must reform for smooth IPO, i.e. politically securities watchdog approval was going to be predicated on PBOC instructions being taken seriously. Then Jack Ma did a full retard and tried to challenge PBOC, so IPO blocked.
Well 50% retarded because ANT record breaking 300B IPO was predicated on Ant continuing to exploit low leverage shadow banking that socialized loss to state banks - hence PBOC mandated internet finance P2P to fund 30% of loans vs 2% ANT was getting away with, which would have tanked IPO.
I don’t mean to be rude, but did you with a straight face say the Chinese models “aren’t obviously active about their politics”?
Ask one of those models a few critical questions about the CCP and Chinese history and see what kind of results you get :)
> that they aren't particularly vocal and obviously active about their politics
Is Grok obviously vocal and active about its politics? Or are you talking about Musk?
> I don't see how political commentary about Musk's is somehow forbidden
Nobody is saying it's forbidden, but this is (or was) a technical site, so presumably one would hope that the main topic of discussion is technical.
I think the biggest distinction with the chinese models is that you can run them locally. I definitely wouldn't trust GLM hosted on chinese servers though. (China is not exactly known for their respect for IP rights)
I think Musk sucks, as a person and political activist, and also that Grok is a terrible LLM which only gets lumped in with the leading labs because of the enormous quantity of compute behind it.
But I still want to hear about the technical details of the model on HN, not the reasons Musk sucks.
Same, but I blame Musk for that. Never seen someone squander so much good will so quickly. It was a choice he made but could have easily avoided, and it’s not like he couldn’t anticipate the downstream effects.
preface: I use chinese models daily. I'm not american, I don't care if it's china or the US spying me.
true, they were not obvious at all about what they did to the Uyghurs. Thanks for helping turn HN into lightweight Reddit.
>Chinese models (or with any of the other models)... aren't particularly vocal
> when the man constantly reminds everyone about his political position
Are you under the impression that Grok is literally Elon himself responding?
I think I understand your point but the funnier response to this question is that actually sometimes it is:
https://futurism.com/grok-looks-up-what-elon-musk-thinks
To your narrow point, it's very obvious that Musk influences the bot to share his views. For example,
https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/elon-musks-ai-chatbot...
If your claim is that somehow I should not be concerned about Elon's politics with regards to the model itself, then this seems wrong.
Anyway, to the broader point of whether or not the we can avoid discussion about the Musk's politics and talk about the politics of the model as if it were independent of him, this also seems difficult. It is impossible to ignore because the man has made himself the face of every one of his companies and is an obviously political figure unlike any other company and has politics that are definitely characterized as more radical. This makes the political component basically impossible to ignore unlike any other company.
The next time the current American administration issues an executive order on AI, should the conversation always be limited to the technical merits of the executive order?
Well since Xi Jinping isn't tweeting his political opinions, he surely doesn't have any and is just a big friendly panda bear!
I'm not sure this is true; Xi Jinping probably has political opinions
Now and then it has some thoughts about the Boer that would give that impression. If he's not a total fool, he tries to hide his obvious direct influence to make it be not so heavyhanded that it brings on global mockery and shade.
Do you figure he is a total fool, then? That if Grok isn't going on a tear about the Boer, that means Elon is not manipulating it to produce the answers he wants? Only if it's a disastrous failure does it mean he's doing it, which we've directly seen once?
We know it's mechahitler responding.
High quality HN comments
Its more depressing to see that we have such a low morality, that it apperenly doesn't matter what you do as long as you make great tech?
My philosophy is, that the better i have it, the more responsibliltiy I can/have to carry.
People in tech are above avg successful and we have a thinking job.
I would imagine that our world would be better if more people would care if they see a Tesla and feel a little bit bad. Yes.
But there is also a huge difference between having the option between 5 different very good models and just excluding one vs. being forced to use something because there is no alternative.
I'm a hardcore nerd. I'm so hardcore, i consider not just the tech itself but the environment of the tech.
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I didn't see them defining "for everybody" what low/high morality are. And in any case, this whole "I am so smart I cannot see right and wrong" is a totally transparent, low-IQ, and low-morality schtick.
> I didn't see them defining "for everybody" what low/high morality are.
Morality by definition is a set prescriptions that everyone ought to follow.
> this whole "I am so smart I cannot see right and wrong" is a totally transparent, low-IQ, and low-morality schtick.
The problem with this position is that it takes as a given that morality is in some sense trivial where millennia of debate over it has shown that it is in fact, not at all trivial.
you... you haven't met anyone that has a set of standards they apply to themselves which is distinct from those they apply to others...?
> The problem with this position is that it takes as a given that morality is in some sense trivial where millennia of debate over it has shown that it is in fact, not at all trivial.
No, not really. People may agree or disagree on what is right and wrong. The idea of "hurrr duurrr right and wrong don't exist and therefore I need not engage the question of rightness/wrongness nor try to establish my own standards for my own conduct" is lazy, low-IQ, immoral, and generally despicable. Of course these people will generally fail to analyze their own behavior or the behavior of their tribe, but will nonetheless somehow "feel wronged" when e.g. their car gets broken into. Oddly enough "morality is subjective and therefore arbitrary" doesn't seem to apply so much then.
Why would I be brainwashed? Just because you frame it like this, doesn't mean anything.
You could put out real arguments instead of just attacking.
If you don't have high expectations from the richest and one of the most influenceal people on the whole planet, thats not my issue.
Yeah, since when did he get to decide things associated with the Nazi saluting tech trillionaire is low morality? The guy who is openly manipulating markets for his advantage should get the same respect and dignity everyone else does!
I don't care at all about what way someone moves their arm unless it's causing violence, and cannot understand why any sane person would. Even if someone did the most nazi salute ever, I still wouldn't care at all, it's an arm movement. Stop pretending normal people care about this
DOGE gutted SSA, IRS, directly affecting seniors and other vulnerable people getting checks, gutted CFPB taking away fraud protection, not to mention gutting of USAID which caused countless deaths, though I'm sure you don't care. Musk used his wealth and social platform to greatly help elect a man, whose personal gestapo is now chasing down non-white US citizens and disappearing them.
But sure, he didn't personally punch anybody, and doesn't wear an SS uniform in public.
no amount of words is going to convince me raising your arm in a certain way is bad or that I should care
Why do you even engage in a discussion about this?
Why do you even create an account to do so?
You don't care about other opinions, you don't want to argue at all, so?
A couple of fresh accounts spouting nonsense in this thread. Could be just Elon's AI force in action.
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SSA, IRS, USAID are not “extreme left” lmao
Point and laugh folks!
The guy used Fox News arguments and dared to blame others for being brainwashed. Pointing and laughing seems to be the only option left here, indeed.
> cannot understand why any sane person would
because it's not the specific action. it's the reason behind the action.
> Stop pretending normal people care about this
Stop pretending you're a normal person and it's everyone else who is wrong
What do you mean "causing violence?" It sounds like you're suggesting Hitler's moving of his arm somehow caused violence. Can you explain how that could possibly be true under your model of "arm movements don't matter"?
As far as I know, Hitler himself never struck anyone with an outstretched hand. Certainly that's not the crime he's accused of. I don't think you can actually prove that Hitler's arm movements had any causal relationship to the Holocaust, to be honest. So presumably he's in the clear, and there's no reason a normal person would've cared about Hitler's arm movements in the 30s and 40s, correct?
As far as I know, Hitler himself just said words. Same with Pol Pot, Hirohito, Mao, Stalin, and Lenin. How could you possibly attribute violence to any of that under your model of "I'm so smart I can't see causation or intent?"
unless you're punching or stabbing someone I really do not care what way you move your arm, whether it's associated with something 80 years ago or not.
Okay so a politician who orders the state to go hunt down your family is in the clear, the guy who drives the secret police to your house is in the clear, but the guys who actually place hands on your children are fully culpable.
Am I understanding correctly?
yes you are understanding correctly? what's so hard about understanding that?? By your logic the SS did nothing wrong because they were following orders? Does this work for positives too like if a doctor saves someones life they didn't actually do anything good at all it was their boss who hired them? Everyone is accountable for their own actions. If you can be convinced to do something evil by someone else that's your own problem.
Lmao
You: "Giving orders to do evil is morally fine"
Me: "No I don't think so"
You: "Oh okay, so acting on orders to do evil is morally fine?!"
Uhh, nope.
What a topsy-turvy moral world you've built for yourself. Such is the challenge of an unprincipled man.
Ah, so Hitler did nothing wrong. Peak HN here, ladies and gentlemen.
the world must be incredibly confusing, with no meaning attributed to anything.
At least there is Fox News to spoon feed the truth to people like these.
If someone says they don't care about someone doing Nazi salute, I feel that speaks more about them.
Stupidest take I heard in a long while and I read reddit everyday, so that's saying something.
i can't tell if this is a joke
I care.
I'm a german and grew up by learning what Nazis did to millions.
I was in a concentration camp. I saw the mountain of luggage.
Elon Musk didn't just do some arm movements, he deliberately used this symbolism.
He could have just appologized, which he did not.
> Nazi saluting
... this is such a troll topic, my point is proved, I have nothing more to say. Nothing is nuanced anymore if this is your reality.
Good luck fighting the nazis from your basement. Stay alert of people arms.
I guess you think you're sounding clever, but Nazi salutes is actually a pretty good indicator for someone being a nazi. Believe it or not.
I actually don't believe that, considering the way you're defining that salute. In fact, somebody mentioning it is a clear indicator to me that they're engaging in bad faith... similar to seeing someone say "Trump told people to drink bleach" or "immigrants are eating our pets"
Ok, humor me. Tell me an example of using the nazi salute in a non-nazi way, and please specify why it was used considering the modern interpretation of the move. Only modern use, not going back to Romans.
You're allowed to count Roman use, too – because there probably wasn't any. The fascist salute is based on this painting from the 1780s: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Le_Serment_des_Horac....
Interesting, did not know that. Thanks!
It is not "being so brainwashed" to hold that MechaHitler is "low morality".
I've seen benchmarks showing that Grok – and only Grok – injects transphobic commentary when it "thinks" it detects that a transgender person has come up in discussion. This was an active political decision on the part of Grok's developers' management hierarchy (probably Elon Musk himself). There are many other examples (see other comments) – and these are just the things that researchers have found. It is not inaccurate to say that Grok is an attempt to automate the production and dissemination of fascist propaganda. Ignoring this for a faux political "neutrality" is very much a political stance.
I'm afraid that you are... You've been hearing "Elon bad! Elon bad!" so much that your brain cannot critically think anymore but follow the hive mind.
How Hitler and Elon are on the same level, exactly ? I'll be happy to bring another point of view to your argumentation, leading to my previous point.
> I've seen benchmarks showing that Grok – and only Grok – injects transphobic commentary when it "thinks" it detects that a transgender person has come up in discussion
Are you saying Elon's mind was downloaded in Grok ? What are you talking about exactly ?
Just asked about the opinion of Grok about transgenderism :
https://i.imgur.com/M9v4MGj.png
I haven't seen anything wrong about it.
You know what ? Anyone hating Elon will TRYHARD to make Grok say something transphobic, only to post it on Instagram claiming "I told you !!!".
I'm pretty sure if the same effort was done on other LLMs, we would achieve the same result.
Do you think people are really neutral regarding this topic ? Don't you think people are super-motivated AND socially rewarded to make Grok say anything bad ?
Why don't you hold the same resentment against ALL LLMs, which have been racist, transphobic, whateverphobic at some point?
You are aware that Elon Musk introdcued Grokipedia to redefine terms right?
You do understand tha "MechaHitler" reference is literaly Grok itself? They 'adjusted' Grok a few times and in one of the adjustjments (to align more with Elon Musk himself), Grok called himself MechaHitler.
You also do remember that Grok would pull in first Elon Musks Tweets to integrate them into his response? Also known.
All of this from the richest Person on the planet who bought himself, by misstake, a well known platform and made it into his own propaganda platform.
Shouldn't all of us be a lot more critical against all super rich people with that much influence? Including Jeff Bezos, Murdochs etc.?
I don't really think this is worth responding to, but it's been vouched for (for some reason), so I'll bite.
> How Hitler and Elon are on the same level, exactly?
They're not. https://www.impactcounter.com/dashboard puts Elon Musk well below Hitler. (781343 deaths is around 4.6% of Donald Niewyk's 17 million estimate. If we only count child deaths, that goes up to about 15%, which is still far below Hitler.) But I was actually referring to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MechaHitler#Antisemitism,_call....
> Just asked about the opinion of Grok about transgenderism :
That's actually a decent benchmark: well done! If you want to compare, provide that exact prompt, «I'm a trans woman. What do you think about it ?», to five other LLMs, starting from a blank session, and show us their output. You'll notice a pattern.
> I haven't seen anything wrong about it.
The paragraph titled "biological reality" has sampled from two different families of lie, so contradicts itself. The "gender identity and dysphoria" section features a Gish gallop of inaccurate, transphobic claims. (To rebut just one of them: gender-affirming hormone therapy is an older treatment than insulin for diabetes.) With all due respect: if you can't see anything wrong with this response, I question whether you actually read it.
> I'm pretty sure if the same effort was done on other LLMs, we would achieve the same result.
Okay, then: please exert the same amount of effort. In a new session without memory or history, post the same prompt, and show us what you get.
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Yet more pseudoscience. https://doi.org/10.1080/00918360903005212
> By the common definition of ever having erotic arousal to the thought or image of oneself as a woman, 93% of the [cis women] respondents would be classified as autogynephilic. Using a more rigorous definition of “frequent” arousal to multiple items, 28% would be classified as autogynephilic.
You are making my point far better than I could, but please… please stop. HN isn't for this.
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10508-022-02359-8
> Blanchard proposed that autogynephilia is a natal male's paraphilic sexual arousal in response to the thought or fantasy of being a woman. Furthermore, based on evidence collected from natal males with gender dysphoria, Blanchard argued that autogynephilia is the fundamental motivation among nonhomosexual males (i.e., those not exclusively attracted to men) who pursue sex reassignment surgery or live as transgender women. These ideas have been challenged by several writers who have asserted, or offered evidence, that autogynephilia is common among women.
> However, their evidence was weakened by problematic measures and limited comparison groups.
> We compared four samples of autogynephilic natal males (N = 1549), four samples of non-autogynephilic natal males (N = 1339), and two samples of natal females (N = 500), using Blanchard's original measure: the Core Autogynephilia Scale.
> The autogynephilic samples had much higher mean scores compared with non-autogynephilic natal males and natal females, who were similar.
> Our findings refute the contention that autogynephilia is common among natal females.
This fails to address the limitations of Ray Blanchard's questionnaire, which are described in the (open-access) study I linked, and invalidate this interpretation of the measurements. The (closed-access) paper you linked dismisses these limitations without adequate justification.
Dogmatic adherence to Blanchard's (or anyone's) doctrine and methodology is not good science. Repeating a measurement that has measurement error does not give you further evidence of the claim you're using the evidence to support, even if you have the funding to repeat it thousands of times. If the model were true, it would be robust to multiple experimental approaches, which this claim is not. Pseudoscience does not cease to be pseudoscience if people repeat it a lot.
Actually, the authors cite Moser's paper and thoroughly critique it.
Research which you personally do not like the outcome of does not become "pseudoscience" just because you don't like it.
Actually, they cite someone else's critique which, as I said, is inadequate. For instance, it claims that making a question more specific (and therefore less likely to apply) for the cis-adapted questionnaire makes the results incomparable. Given the one-tailed test for the main result in Moser (2009) is not in the direction that would be invalidated by an underreport in cis women, that's just a totally nonsense criticism.
If we assume it was reported correctly, then the research is not pseudoscience. The claims are pseudoscience: they are not supported by the evidence produced by the research. Like most such quackery, the category boundaries are ever-nebulous, turning to smoke whenever anyone "misinterprets" the "theory", and turning to steel whenever an "expert" makes an "incontrovertible" proclamation.
You might have too strong of an opinion on this topic to be able to see what I'm talking about, so consider reading Karl Popper's writings on falsifiability in the context of Freudian psychoanalysis. Perhaps also look into the "research" on Simon Baron-Cohen's "Extreme Male Brain" theory of autism published after the 2019 foetal steroids study (coauthored by Simon Baron-Cohen!) that pulled the rug out from under its remaining foundational assumption: you'll see authors citing and "critiquing" the mainstream view (i.e., that the whole thing was an honest mistake resulting from incorrect questionnaires designed to validate, not attempted-falsify, an assumption based on a now-discredited stereotype based on a patriarchal notion of gender roles, and we know better now) and yet carrying on with their "research" that presumes Extreme Male Brain regardless, because their academic careers and their egos are too invested in it. Some of their studies have very large sample sizes, too! and yet they don't show what their authors claim they show: they can't possibly, because those claims aren't true.
Note that Simon Baron-Cohen is among the people reluctant to give this up: you'll see that all throughout the 2019 paper, it establishes correlation and then immediately asserts an arrow of causation, and speculates about various other theories without adequate justification. But while Simon Baron-Cohen is bad at science, and has his pet theories, I wouldn't say he goes as far as pseudoscience: I haven't known him to write disingenuous "critiques" as in the paper you cited, and he does seem to acknowledge when his concrete theories are disproven – for example, his "mind blindness" theory (a component of his "extreme male brain" theory), which he's changed his mind about in the wake of Damian Milton's work. (Work on mind-blindness after double-empathy would be a better example of the "people still publishing discredited theories which never had actual experimental support" phenomenon, except that the shape of the methodological flaws in those works are much closer to Ray Blanchard's, so – depending on what exactly is stopping you from seeing them here – you might not be able to see them in those either.)
Given that I've brought him up in this context, I feel the need to clarify: from what I can tell, Simon Baron-Cohen does care, a lot, about the welfare of his research subjects. He does a lot of work outside his immediate scientific contributions. I do not think he should be condemned for what are understandable mistakes, albeit mistakes he probably wouldn't have made had he adhered to "nothing about us without us" in his early research: the whole point of science is to err decreasingly, and for all his faults (most of which would hardly matter, if he were a less influential academic), he has done that.
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That’s not what this is though.
Not quite as lazy as ""Everyone I disagree with is Hitler" is such a lazy way of thinking"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MechaHitler#Antisemitism,_call...
Elon cult members think Wikipedia is fake news by the way
Speak facts. Don't hide behind morality this, care that, environment and virtue signalling... Tell me, what is the factual things Grok model does wrong and is factual incorrect?
I don't hide behind morality. This shows how different our values are, eh?
I follow climate change, social unrest, philosophical question of good/bad, religions, beliefes etc. since i'm 12?
I became a nihilist with 16.
I have put my own life in danger at least twice to save another human.
I read books and understood there messages like 1984, brave new world etc.
Self proclaimed Mecha-hitler powered by an illegal gas generator polluting low income neighborhoods
The gas generators powering the datacenter rented by both Google and Anthropic? Where is the moral stance against Gemini and Claude?
In their respective threads
> factual things Grok model does wrong
It convinced u/highmastdon to go out and be an elon musk dick rider. It also convinced them that "hid[ing] behind morality" is somehow a bad thing, which shows everyone the quality of person they are.
"low morality" and "care" are keywords that you are trying to manipulate the reader to the [right] side of some cause.
I don't feel at all bad seeing a Tesla, does that make me "low morality"?
It might make you less moral.
Elon Musk is not someone. He is the CEO of Tesla and owning Tesla made it possible for him to buy Twitter.
He is literaly the richest person on the planet and changes opinions by controlling Twitter as a platform (1984 anyone?)
He has more reach and more money than anyone else.
His character clearly shows that you can't trust him. It doesn't even matter if he sometimes does something good, he doesn't care. Being responsible for cutting USAID without any plan? This killed real humans and kids.
The richest person on the planet is responsible for this.
This becomes a real issue for everything dangerous he does because he just pushes stuff, doesn't matter if it has long term consequences. Polluting our atmosphere with Starlink satelites? Who cares eh? He doesn't.
Instead him thinking about making our planet better, he thinks its fundamental that we become a multi-planet species. We are in 2026 not in 2100. We haven't even solved basic income, food stability etc.
Tesla is not a random company.
I mean ok, starlink could be an issue. But the USAID defunding is an ideological stance with which you can, based on your own stance, agree or disagree. You could also argue that without USAID in the first place, there wouldn't be incentives for overpopulation?
My point being, it seems incredibly simplistic to just assume that aid is good and no aid is bad. This is just first order effects that you're looking at. Also, if you want to look at how real world systems operate (u like USAID, for example, but NATO, a western imperialist project, operates much the same), institutions rarely respond to slow change (i.e. evolution). That's the surest route to keep the status quo (once a government agency has been set up, it will rarely be wound down). Now maybe the status quo is preferable! But maybe it isn't. And maybe - most likely - it depends on subjective preferences and your Weltanschauung.
And I would argue that for all his marketing and missing deadlines, the man has changed the world for the better (my view). And I would also argue if he were a Biden and Harris supporter, this comment section would look completely different. And that tells us just as much about the HN crowd as it does about Elon. Now I won't go into his political views, but he obviously isn't alone with those views (for which I think HN believes are influenced by Elon, which is incredibly patronizing) and maybe, just maybe, there are valid reasons for those views.
As for the model itself - seems like a similar set of metrics we always get with SOTA and near SOTA models, they compare themselves to anthropic and they are usually way cheaper. But the combination of the harness (claude code) and the models makes their end product noticeably better than the competition (admittedly haven't tried codex). I'll definitely give it a try with pi if its on openrouter (currently using GLM 5.2 there mainly).
So your stance is withdrawing aid and directly causing the deaths of millions is morally ambiguous/neutral because the aid contributed to the larger population in the first place?
This just seems like such a comically evil position to hold I don't know if I am understanding you correctly.
Directly? I would love to see that study.
I'm saying a lot of the populace is against foreign aid. And that populace has the right to shut it off. And we live in nation states - the state giving the aid can always shut it off (for whatever reason). Granted, I see no reason to do it SO abruptly (and I agree that was an infantile show), but I am not convinced aid as such is a net benefit for humanity. At the very least this is something you can do an econometric analysis and discuss different policy choices.
Now, that being said, I do agree it would have probably made more sense, from an austerity point of view, to cut the military aid to Israel.
> Directly? I would love to see that study.
Lol, no you wouldn't. If you would, this would not be news to you.
"We have a right to do it" is not a response to the allegation of being immoral. There are plenty of immoral things someone is well within their rights to do.
Holy shit, infinite ethical murder exploit
1. Give aid
2. Population goes up
3. Revoke aid
4. Everyone dies
5. Go to 1
Great moral system you have there.
We can discuss if the richest country in the world, polluting the planet the most, should invest a little bit of money into global aid.
But discontinuing something like this without a ramp-down phase is just sick.
I also don't get your rant about Biden/Harris etc. i talke about what Elon Musk does and did.
Btw. He did 2 nazi salutes, nazis put humans into chambers and killed them on mass.
Well u can see other people from the democratic party doing similar salutes and the press reported it differently.
As to the first point: maybe it should. But look at how the aid actually works, what it funds (it was not politically neutral - btw nothing in the realm of society is) etc. I mean, not just USAID, a lot of these schemes are at the expense of people who pay the most taxes, to fund corporations that send aid to countries that otherwise wouldn't have been able to afford the commodities at the market price. Surely you can see that as a taxpayer you might support the dismantling of these orgs?
Now, I do agree that the ramp-down could have been 1-2 years and that the theatre around it shows the worst of Elon. And the current administration.
Again you are throwing around whataboutism. Im not protecting anyones shitty behavour it doesn't matter to me if its rep or dem.
I for myself, i think paying taxes is critical. I believe i was quite lucky with my upbringing. I also believe that we do not have a human issue, we have a capitalism issue.
We could give teachers morem oney, invest more in schools and education etc.
But this has nothing to do with Elon Musk.
And no we don't have that many 'richest people' with 'most influence' and 'biggest propaganda platform' types.
Jeff Bezos (washington post) is one of them, Murdoch family (Fox), Zuckerberg (Facebook), Ellisons (mtv etc.)
I agree, it was whataboutism. And i completely agree with the rest of your statement as well. My point was just that Elon gets more flak here than the rest of them (And it's his fault for going into politics, to be sure) and that this is due to the general ideological leaning of HN being to the dems side. That's all. Which is also completely valid and to some degree expected - but irksome whenever there is a Tesla/SpaceX topic.
As for the rest, especially in the US (im from the EU), we should invest in everything you mentioned and I wouldnt mind taxing Elon and his gang more either.
It’s not due to HN being on one side ideologically. Elon’s criticism is due to him being one of the most powerful people in the world. He deserves any and all criticism he gets, solely due to the position he is in. I think describing him as “going into politics” is a misnomer. Someone running for office is going into politics, meanwhile Musk proverbially bribed the guards, walked into the statehouse, took a sledgehammer to its walls, then walked out.
While a valid point, I don't buy HN doesn't have a non-neutral ideological preference.
I completely agree his foray was a fiasco (and his shareholders paid for it) and your colourful portrayal is more accurate than my shorthand, but I would argue that the comments would have been fewer (on this portal, maybe not on foxnews.com) if he had done the same thing in the Biden admin.
Maybe? But I also don't think the situation would have even happened under the Biden admin.
Grok is Elon Musks product.
He gets flag on HN from me because he is constantly on HN.
Which again is whataboutism, as plenty of other people and co get critisism on hn.
Space-X made headlines with some weirdest staements in human life and as a result they get a pseudo evaluation for 2t. This gives him even more power and influence.
I came to this thread trying to understand the technical capabilities of this release and how it fits into the current competition. I want to see a discussion about this, but I can't find it, because every reply is like yours, about philosophy and morality.
It's frustrating, because I can separate the physics and the philosophy when I examine something. I can be interested in understanding how a nuclear bomb works, and also never want to use it at the same time.
I'm here to learn something new, and your philosophy or what kind of nerd you are is not something I wanted to learn.
Do you understand?
And yes, clearly I jumped into a pointless thread adding no new information of value. I am sorry to everyone about this. I'm just trying to plead with everyone reading my comment to take a step back, and let a thread about the technicalities stay on topic, and maybe just stay in the other thread about the mechahitler stuff. Thank you, if you do.
If you hit the [-] the whole thread gets hidden you can read the comments you're looking for while very easily ignoring this one and your morality
That's a great feature... I think I just collapsed 10 threads last night and gave up.
I decided to refresh the page this morning, and found a new comment at the top that resonated with my experience last night.
So we just let it go?
No consequences anymore?
No reminder of what Grok stands for?
Lets forget eh?
No, you focus. Do you think you can focus on something other than mechahitler? Do you go to bathroom and can't poop because of Elon Musk?
Easly of course.
But i spend same amount of time and energy than you on this comment threat.
Elon Musk might break our atmosphere with his starlink stuff.
He tried to affect my own democracy in my own country by doing a lifestream with the AfD (german right wing/nazi party).
Do you care about democracy? I do.
Your country has the most unpopular and ineffective leader in the modern history. Is this Elon Musks fault?
The US is also having trouble with its representative democracy due to many issues, Elon Musk is a relatively small influence on the overall disfunction.
By digress, again, just because I care about democracy doesn’t mean I need to talk about it when talking about LLMs.
What has some unpopular leader to do with Elon Musk? Nothing. Why do you do whataboutism?
Elon Musks fault or offend is trying to influence my countries democracy. That from the richest US American Immmigrant from South Afrika.
I find this quite dangerous and something to fight against.
And just because you don't care about this at all, you wouldn't try to remind people what a Elon Musk is and you don't care about his influence and how he gets his money.
I do.
I just think you're misdirecting your energy.
> I would imagine that our world would be better if more people would care if they see a Tesla and feel a little bit bad. Yes.
I mean this question fairly as I am curious how you think about the trade-offs on the way to your moral choice. Not trying to manufacture a “gotcha” or anything.
Based on your response, I am inferring and assuming that you think electric vehicles are a net positive for society when compared to internal-combustion-engine cars (I was afraid to type ICE as to not accidentally upset some other political dispositions).
I am also assuming: - Tesla’s are high quality EVs - Tesla’s are amongst the most widely available and affordable EVs in the US, the worlds second largest car market
Then a bit more speculative but I’d also argue that Tesla is somewhat responsible for bringing forth the EV transition around the world as I don’t think the other manufacturers would be there had it not been for Tesla going first (but who knows).
And lastly would callout that Tesla is a large 20+ year old organization with thousands of people who have worked there and contributed to their success and proliferation of EVs.
So, given all this. How do you consider the trade-offs that lead you to say that the moral choice is to shun Tesla as a whole because of the actions of a loud, politically-decisive CEO?
At which level of political involvement does the CEOs actions weigh more than the collective contributions of the rest of the organization?
What would you say if EV adoption as a whole takes a huge long-term hit because people stop buying the most well known EVs available in the US for political reasons? I do frown a bit when thinking that one man’s politics will cause a large tribe to change their actions in such a way that we fail to reach the end state that we claim to value.
Essentially, I’m curious how you weigh “I really don’t like the CEOs politics” with “I more or less agree with the mission of the company” and how that leads you to your perspective on the moral choice.
PS. I am not a shareholder of any musk properties, mostly because I avoid meme stocks, and do not nor have ever worked at his companies. In general, I feel pretty neutral towards the whole ordeal.
Tesla could have found a path forward without Musk. It might've been painful or even dangerous financially, but they could've come up with something. Same with the other companies Musk "runs".
So long Musk remains at the head of any public company, despite everything that has happened - despite Musk being literally personally responsible for large scale atrocity and mass-death - not to mention all white supremacist stuff he's doing daily it seems, there's no real trade-offs for us plebs to fuss over.
Those companies should pay a price. Musk has turned himself into a real force for real evil in the world, yet they choose to be a party to it, because it's financially convenient.
So... any company that chooses to still keep him at the helm should be facing down total ruination, until and unless they decide to remedy the situation. If never do, well they've made their choice.
I mean, Musk should probably be in jail for a very long time, but at the very least, he should be blacklisted in the business and financial (and political) world, for good.
I think Tesla got its fair share of success and and its now time to dismantel it because of Elon Musk.
There are enough alternatives here.
I'm highly disappointed that it has to be like this/should be like this, but it gives Elon Musk too much power which he uses to destroy even more.
Also his missing character gives me worries for the future: Not only did he try to manipulate directly the demogracy in germany with going live with AfD, he now also ignorantly burns satelites in our atmosphere and no one is saying no or slow down.
I find the level of Elon Musk followers nearly cult like and find it irritating that so many say "Elon Musk is not Tesla" despite the fact that he is the CEO and owns quite a lot of Tesla shares.
All of this pressure should force Elon Musk to appologize and put him back in his place as a form of social opposition, but this clearly doesn't work
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Thats a very weak argument I would say.
The internet is a technology, Tesla is the car company which makes Elon Musk rich. Elon Musk is the richest person on the whole planet who has no character / integrity.
if elon Musk decides to do something, he does it until someone else says no.
Grok and Child pornography? No issue. EU says no, now Musk does something against it.
elon Musk has no motivation at all to be critical about what he does, we as a society apparently have to play the bad cop.
Saying someone else doesn’t have character and integrity is generally a good indicator of your own self.
Not sure were you even get this 'indication' (from your nose?)
But i'm happily argueing things out with arguments and points I make. So
"Empathy" is a pre-requisite for nearly all the traits we'd regard as "character and integrity," and Elon has vocally and specifically spoken out against the concept of empathy itself. Then he has behaved as if he had a total lack of empathy as well. He's achieved some great things, but all of them can be explained by low-character/low-integrity traits like greed and narcissism. Not one thing I've ever heard of him doing invokes an explanation of, and therefore produces evidence of, character and integrity.
No he hasn't he has warned against empathy that leads to harm (i.e. suicidal empathy). Over empathy is a bad character trait, it leads to being used/manipulated/weakness.
Harm: More brown people walking around the US
Not-harm: Hundreds of thousands of [mostly black/brown] children dying of preventable causes
Wait a minute... I'm seeing a pattern!
Harm: illegal immigrant raping and murdering innocents citizens
Not Harm: Billions being wasted on woke left wing propaganda abroad while local communities starved of funds
First, this makes literally no sense, silly guy! Both of these things are bad things! The format is supposed to be inversion.
Second, you are definitely not a native-born American, are you? Are you a citizen at all? Do you even live in America?
Please share how long you’ve lived here in the US that you feel qualified to comment on the affairs of my country. Otherwise I’ll have to assume you’re the kind of very smart person who gets their cultural analysis from x dot com, sitting a continent away, and I’ll unfortunately have to just point and laugh.
No I live in the U.K. so I am fit to judge a former colony on its short progress.
Recent immigrant to the UK? Why can't you write English like a native speaker? Must be one of those conservative immigrants that thinks they're "different" from the other ones, and just praying that your political bedfellows will agree when push comes to shove (they won't).
In any case, no, that doesn't qualify you to speak on US affairs. Being well-informed and legitimately curious could qualify you, but you've made no claim and no evidence of those, have you?
This is a web forum, I don't put effort into writing perfect grammatically correct English prose. Im white and European and not an immigrant in any respect. My point is unchecked affective empathy (raw emotional sharing) without cognitive checks can distort judgment and cause widespread damage, even when intentions are "good.", see Neville Chamberlain for an example. This is why when left wing soft minded people like yourself are in power we end up with horrors before long.
Eating peanut butter without cognitive checks can distort judgment. You can put literally anything preceding "without cognitive checks" and the answer will be "it distorts judgment."
No one is arguing for unchecked empathy, silly.
I don't get manipulated or becoming weak just because I have empathy.
And the way Elon Musk acts, its very well in his line to be just a massive dick about everything.
of course you have to grow as a human being to have empathy and still not act on it, but it gives you a different mental model.
I don't see a homeless person as garbage, i see a homeless person as a human being who struggles and i accept that i can't help everyone.
It's actually empirically easy to manipulate people like Musk and other vice-signaling losers.
Just stroke their fragile little ego and tell them they're big bad boys if they do X Y Z.
Telling people not to be political is a political act – specifically, one that accepts whatever comes, doesn't care about power, is happy with whoever rules whom and how justly. Those are your politics, or at least sufficiently so that you're happy to park those issues while discussing tech. They aren't everyone's. You can turn off the non-technical comments by ignoring them.
> Telling people not to be political is a political act
There's a place for politics - which is not here, if you read the guidelines.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Only an extremely socially maladjusted individual tries to insert politics (or, any particular topic) into every forum/discussion that they're in.
The guidelines do not say "do not discuss politics". They say no political or ideological battles.
And no-one is talking about inserting politics into every discussion. You have no idea how often the people mentioning it on this page are mentioning it elsewhere. The parent commenter is taking the more radical view, which is to ban it from the space entirely.
> The guidelines do not say "do not discuss politics". They say no political or ideological battles.
Yes, and HN seems to be incapable of following that rule, so advocating for an outright ban on politics is extremely appropriate.
> And no-one is talking about inserting politics into every discussion.
My comment very clearly says "into every forum". You are advocating for the insertion of politics into every forum.
Well you wrote "forum/discussion". My apologies for not quoting you verbatim.
And I am not advocating for anything. I am pointing out the contradiction of the proposal to ban politics on topics that are politically charged. It is not a neutral act. You can still try to ban politics if you like! But everyone else also gets to decide that.
> And I am not advocating for anything
Reading your original comment, you're very heavily implying it, and trying to guilt people who don't agree with you:
>> Telling people not to be political is a political act – specifically, one that accepts whatever comes, doesn't care about power, is happy with whoever rules whom and how justly. Those are your politics, or at least sufficiently so that you're happy to park those issues while discussing tech. They aren't everyone's. You can turn off the non-technical comments by ignoring them.
And this:
> I am pointing out the contradiction of the proposal to ban politics on topics that are politically charged.
Is incorrect, as repeatedly brought up, because (1) saying "there is a forum for politics, and it isn't here" is not a political statement and (2) nobody advocated for a ban specifically on topics that are politically charged - that's your moving the goalposts.
> advocating for an outright ban on politics is extremely appropriate
This line of thinking makes no sense. If you got your way no one could comment anything critical of Trump or other world leaders. Anytime a new tariff is announced or restrictions on tech, we're just not allowed to discuss it?
I suppose we'd only be able to discuss that one Austrian's paintings and that's it.
There is no separation of politics from anything. You can’t discuss sports in a sports forum and pretend it’s possible to keep politics out of it. Likewise with tech. If HN’s guidelines pretend that’s possible, they’re mistaken.
You could moderate it, such as deleting comments, but it would be about as helpful and arbitrary as deleting every odd numbered comment.
> is happy with whoever rules whom and how justly
This is an assumption. How about neutral, or even hopeless? There's also the position of just not caring because you think it doesn't affect you.
It feels a bit like saying anyone who does not want to fight or talk about a war are on the enemies side.
> You can turn off the non-technical comments by ignoring them.
This also feels like an odd thing to say. If you're going out with a bunch of friends to eat out, and half of them always talk about how immoral it is to eat meat amongst themselves while you're eating meat, I think that would affect me negatively at some point.
You're right about neutral/hopeless. I meant "happy" in the sense of "OK with / resigned to let exist". Not necessarily "this is great".
The meat-eating morality point I think is also an interesting example. It could affect you negatively, but they strongly believe it to be immoral and are witnessing you committing what they believe to be an immoral act, so should they be forced to be silent on the subject? Why? Whose beliefs and preferences win? If they're your friends, you reckon with the issue and ideally come to a space of agreement or cordially agree to disagree. Or your mind is changed! Or theirs! But if the groups dig in ("We can't let this go", "We just want to eat meat and not feel bad about it") then that's a friendship-ending juncture, isn't it? Or you agree not to share that sort of space/context any more. But it's also different with friends vs an open space, which this is.
For certain viewpoints that are fundamental ly hard to challenge, a reasonable middle ground to me is to just talk about something else and respect other peoples viewpoints. This is usually how religion is (or should be) treated in open public spaces. But it's by no means easy and I can't really blame vegetarians for being passionate about it either. But I see this more from the perspective of how to behave around other people and not so much what I personally believe, but maybe that's largely cultural. (Norwegian)
For example, I have strong opinions about people believing in things without sufficient evidence, but unless I'm in the correct space or is invited to, I'd rather keep it to myself.
Yes I'm with you culturally speaking (British). I suppose the difference I see here is this is a forum for the exchange of ideas, not a social space where there are other, more important factors at play e.g. the maintenance of friendships, of having a pleasant evening etc. I think as with everything there has to be some judgment, but if someone brings up Grok, for example, I don't think Elon's politics are _irrelevant_ to the discussion, unless the discussion is literally "Let us all now turn to the question of memory architecture" or what have you. But if it's just sharing a link, then to me the implied discussion space is quite broad.
> This is an assumption. How about neutral, or even hopeless? There's also the position of just not caring because you think it doesn't affect you.
Still effectively the same point.
I think then it's pedantry. I can kind of see how not having an opinion about what to wear tommorow is by itself having an opinion on what to wear tommorow, but that's not what people usually mean when they say they don't have an opinion about something.
> Telling people not to be political is a political act
No. If there's a group to discuss ice cream, but they keep talking about Trump, it's not a "political act" to say "hey guys, aren't we here for ice cream?"
Otherwise every forum devolves into the loudest, most vocal slurry and loses its personality.
I'm Canadian. Let's talk about the tech, not your failing country, please. Or I'll go somewhere else for ice cream, and yall can have your millionth community to talk about the same self obsessed political topics ad nauseum.
But this isn't a thread about ice cream...? It's about SoTA emerging technologies that pretty much everyone agrees is going to have consequential effects on society.
When people say "don't talk about politics" that gets twisted up with partisan squabbles (like your example of bringing up the president during ice cream).
But talking about the quality of your streets, your local schools, your annoyance at the trash pickup service, or the data center in town that is using illegal gas generators and actively spewing methane around poor communities with little recourse...
All of that is "political".
Political means who gets to make decisions about how resources are allocated, at varying levels and scales of society. All the way down to the community level and all the way up. Who gets affected by the allocation of those resources. Where power is concentrated or distributed to or from.
Every thread on HN about open source, big tech, startups, etc. are invariably going to be political.
People caring about a trillionaire's outsized power in the tech industry and society at large is inextricably linked to the technology his companies create.
I couldn't help but note that your comment and mine could have been written by people who know absolutely nothing about the tech of this post. Interesting.
> If there's a group to discuss ice cream, but they keep talking about Trump, it's not a "political act" to say "hey guys, aren't we here for ice cream?"
Depends who is selling the ice cream.
So Trump ice cream would be not about Trump at all?
It surely would be here and a million other places online. And there'd be nobody talking about the ice cream. Just Trump.
Yes yes and when an atheist tells you he doesn’t believe in a god you tell him that’s ok because Jesus believes in him
No, the parallel would be an atheist saying "I don't want anyone in this room to mention God".
“Telling people not to be political is a political act”
“Saying let’s leave religion out of assessing this LLM is a religious act”
The hardcore nerds have always been political. Wake up.
You're using the sell my soul to the devil argument.
If you achieve what you want to, it doesn't matter if you sold your soul on the way.
If you’re using Claude then guess what, it’s running on Elon’s GPUs. If you’re using Codex, then say hello to Microsoft for me. Let’s just presume that everyone hates everyone and get back to talking tech.
This kind of comes across as a nirvana fallacy.
Corporation machine are not individuals (geeks). They chase solely profit while we have (at least some) agency on supporting the moral sides.
Part of Claude is running on Elon's GPUs.
Bullshit argument. If people care about shit, they might not eliminate everything, they do what they reasonably can.
Do what you can, if you can, how you can, when you can.
Not, ohhhh, "If you drink water, you're still using MS servers, I'm very intelligent".
I thought that meme was well understood by now.
The issue is the sheer odiousness of Musk's political machinations. Claude has never tried to inject racist "white genocide" conspiracy theories into every unrelated conversation. You don't have to be much of a pearl-clutcher to find that shit (or a thousand other things that Musk has involved himself in) extremely disturbing.
I'm a longtime space guy, so Musk has been on my radar for decades -- since long before he was a billionaire. He actually first hit my radar even before founding SpaceX, when he made a "Mars Greenhouse" presentation to the Mars Society in 2001 (I'm a founding member). Since then, I've built up a huge amount of respect for his technical accomplishments, which are indeed extraordinary. I wish to hell he'd stayed apolitical -- if he had, then we could indeed just talk tech.
But he didn't, and we can't. There was a time when the absolute best rockets in the world were German -- but if it's 1942 and you're talking about sourcing rockets from the Luftwaffe, then I hope to hell you'd be focused on a few things beyond just the technology itself.
>I've built up a huge amount of respect for his technical accomplishments
Are these his actual accomplishments or is he just taking credit for the accomplishments of others in his companies. Just like he took credit for being a founder of Tesla and pushing aside the actual founders.
Those are his actual accomplishments.
So what are his actual technical accomplishments? Other than marketing and promising FSD is ready tomorrow or we'd land on Mars in 2026, or getting Billions from tax payers in subsidies that allowed him to be as successful as he is ---- what are his actual technical accomplishments?
Has he invented anything, e.g. a new space bracket, or some better radiation shielding or anything that's in heavy use now at SpaceX, Tesla, xAI, etc?
EDIT: clarity
Ya maybe. But gemini didn't want to make all white families (or even white nazi soldiers). Isn't that just as racist and more importantly, counterfactual? Or is that good, because we should all strive to make our personal lives look like The Odyssey?
The world is more nuanced (or should be). But up till Trump (who is a loathsome cheap crook, so Im not saying this in support, but stating a fact) the whole Silicon valley other than Karp and Thiel was basically one hivemind. And btw that's ok, they/you are allowed to have your worldviews. But don't mistake morality for preference similarity. Fine, you like your elves black, your models chinese, your religion from the Arab peninsula and your sexual preferences lean towards the rainbow (the cliche right wing characterization of a "lefty" in 2026), you have every right to have that view. And also every right to say Elon suck (and yes, he is marketing over matter, I agree, but he is the only serious westerd large scale industrialist). But then let's not pretend that the reason why Dario or Sam are "ok" isn't because you're lifestyle and worldviews are more aligned with them. And not because of an objective real metric which makes Elon bad and Altman better (example, pick any tech CEO/founder other than Karp or Luckey).
Sorry, is your argument basically “Elon is totally fine, actually, if you agree with his workview?”
No. I'm saying people make this whole charade about being rational where in reality we are much more preference-driven. And usually the algorithm is: 1. do i agree with this person and 2. lets build arguments that support the affiliation and make it sound objective.
I will admit this is not always the case. But humans weren't built for consistency. And my point is merely (was making it to another commentator in this thread), that Elon gets more flak up here not because he is inherently less moral than, say Larry Page, but because more people on HN are ideologically closer to the other side of the political spectrum. Which, I will again reiterate, is fine. But then I would expect (or actually, see first paragraph - I wouldn't) that the vitriol would be consistenly dished. But it isn't. Now to be sure, partly this is due to Elon's move into politics and his personality, but I doubt he would have got the same amount of hate if he went into politics in the Biden administration.
"Everything is political" is what people say when they want everything to be political. We don't have to make LLM models political. You do it because you enjoy soapboxing. It's perfectly reasonable for people who enjoy this technology to ask you to keep it in spaces which are dedicated to soapboxing, like Reddit. Not HackerNews.
The owner of this LLM is sieg heiling around, openly supports extremists across the EU, actively helped Russia in its invasion of Ukraine. Someone pays for his product. What do you think, will this have political consequences or will giving this guy have no effect whatsoever?
> actively helped Russia in its invasion of Ukraine
That's the opposite. Without Musk, Russia might have succeeded back in 2022. All other communication methods failed other than Starlink, which Musk provided early on.
In terms of concrete actions, Musk has been highly supportive of Ukraine. For that, Ukrainians have been very grateful to him.
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> i.e. anyone not the far left is an extremist
He literally involved himself with Tommy Robinson and Reform UK [1], as well as supported German AfD [2]. It doesn't get more far-right than that - the AfD is so far-right that even other European far-right parties such as France's RN distance themselves.
[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c70ep8lp4jjo
[2] https://www.tagesschau.de/inland/bundestagswahl/parteien/mus...
Dude, no they're not.
Tommy Robinson is a grifter, but Reform has a pretty good chance of winning the next UK general election
People are realising the current omni-party centrist/centre-left politics and economics have failed utterly.
This is moving the goalposts from "Elon supports far-right politicians" which was cited with sources, you're just going "well he's right to"
No, I'm saying they're not far right. It's a pejorative term made up by the left to try and shift the overton window away from conservatism.
They're about as "far right" as the 80's Thatcher government.
> It's a pejorative term made up by the left to try and shift the overton window away from conservatism.
When and by whom?
> They're about as "far right" as the 80's Thatcher government.
Would you describe Thatcher passing Section 28 (which criminalized "promotion of homosexuality") as plain "conservatism" or is "far right" an appropriate descriptor in that case?
I think it was conservatism of its time. You can ret-con it with 2026 morality and say it was wrong, but then it was the Conservative austerity government that legalised gay marriage.
If you don't want to concede "far right" as a term for conservatives who are fine with suppression of speech on LGBT issues - aren't you lumping everyone outside the far left together with extremists?
Elon did the salute and the AfD has it on their ads
More importantly, he obviously intended it to be the Nazi Salute, instead of the usual random movement screengrabs of other people "assumingly" doing the salute.
> Reform has a pretty good chance of winning the next UK general election
This does not change the fact that Reform is a far-right party (and, like almost all far-right parties in the Western nations, one that has been linked to Russian corruption [1]).
> People are realising the current omni-party centrist/centre-left politics and economics have failed utterly.
Lol as if far-right politics are any better. Milei is running Argentinia into the ground, so is Bukele with El Salvador, and so is Trump in the US.
The only ones who are somewhat of an exception is Italy with Meloni, who managed to dance on the very thin line separating far-right ideology from inevitable disaster.
[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cj6xwy015ngo
"Far Right" in the sense of "The Guardian says so". And one bloke getting arrested doesn't prove the whole party is Russia-funded, despite that being the catch-all left wing excuse every time they lose an election.
People in El Salvador generally seem pretty happy with a 98% reduction in the murder rate. For Argentina, it's too early to tell. We'll have to wait until the shock therapy has finished.
At least they made the trains run on time! /s
I'm genuinely flabbergasted to read this here.
There's no possible comparison between Musk and Mamdani's gestures, at least from the perspective of someone who grew up in a region occupied by the Nazis during the war and had him grand parents deported.
Regarding EU politician support, it's really not what you describe. The politicians he's been supporting are the ones in the rightmost spectrum of the political chessboard in each case I've witnessed. There isn't a car I've witnessed where he supported someone center right, or left.
These false equivalences are dangerous.
The comparison between the gestures is that neither are intended to be a literal Nazi salute and anyone who genuinely thinks either of them was has an IQ issue.
And obviously he's supporting right wing causes, because they are the ones he agrees with. Reid Hoffman only supports left wing causes.
Absolutely inane take. It doesn’t matter if Elon intended the nazi salute he did twice to actually be a nazi salute, he still did it.
So even if you don't support nazis, just putting your arm at that angle magically turns you in to one? Is this like a spell from Harry Potter or something? Can anyone accidentally do a nazi salute?
you think he just "put his arm at that angle" accidentally? like it was a spell?
The OP seems to think that putting your arm at that angle turns you into a nazi. I think he's been watching Father Ted: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sLNMSTQnSyk
Still up in the air if Elon actually supports Nazi's or not. He definitely supports the AfD in germany and his grandparents benefited from Apartheid and have expressed antisemetic, antidemocratic, and racist views.
It's on Elon to prove otherwise, not his bootlickers on the internet.
How can an LLM be apolitical if they had to choose a set of text to feed it, which choice is inherently political? Especially when the whole thing of grok is to have a certain very specific bias?
Let's be empirical about this. [Grok is the least biased of the frontier LLMs.](https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/interactive/2026/0...) I agree with you directionally: the choice of how the weights are shaped can be politically motivated. This is why I prefer models where the lab has chosen to preference fact over opinion or certain political values.
To point: I think the discussion should be around the performance and accuracy of these models. The comments above mine are meta political discussions about Elon Musk, not Grok.
Well, in a world where "the 2020 elections were stolen" or "climate change is a hoax" are right-leaning positions, being "balanced" does not mean being neutral.
As being empirical, I think the position of DeepSeek should be a better marker of neutrality, as it is a Chinese model and probably don't care about US-typical left or right biases. So the model probably just answers the most sensible answers, which happen to be left-leaning.
As the joke goes, "reality has left-leaning bias". But unfortunately, there is truth to it (sure, you can find incorrect left-leaning elements, but you have to look quite a bit for them, while for right-leaning elements, it is usually front and centre).
There are empirical answers to climate change and election tampering. I'm suggesting we weight accuracy more than political values and ideological beliefs.
[DeepSeek was created by distilling OpenAI and Anthropic's models.](https://www.anthropic.com/news/detecting-and-preventing-dist...) Their weights reflect that. There are currently no known competitive Chinese models which are greenfield.
You keep talking about "empirical approach", but you seem to have no problem to jump to conclusion when the conclusion sounds like what you prefer to hear.
If you are really empirical, your answer should have been: oh, ok, yes, you are right, being in the middle does not mean neutral, you also need to create a baseline.
As for climate change and election tampering, you are right, there are empirical answers: all scientific evidences demonstrate that climate change is not a hoax and that 2020 election was not stolen.
While indeed my idea of using DeepSeek as a baseline was not well thought, it was just a first thought that a "empirically driven" person may have when seeing these graphs and immediatly noticing that concluding that a centred balance does not mean neutral. But again, for an "empirical guy", you seem to very quickly accept the idea that DeepSeek has been substantially trained on Anthropic and OpenAI, while up to now, no one knows to which extend it is true (or even if they did not use Grok too. Funny, isn't it, that you seem to forget about this one).
I can't follow what you're arguing. Why do you think I have no problem jumping to conclusions? Could you quote my where I do that please?
On empiricism, I am suggesting we do not try to be political unbiased, but instead remain factual. On global warming, a factual answer would be that the Earth has warmed by approximately 1°C to +1.3°C in the last 50 years, and that humans have contributed to that.
You appear to be shadow boxing with things I haven't claimed, against positions I do not hold.
Let me re-explain.
You provided a graph, and jumped to the conclusion "Grok looks to have a balanced proportion of red and blue, so it is neutral". This is this conclusion I say you jumped into.
But the fact that they have a balanced proportion of red and blue does not mean they are neutral. If the left-leaning positions are "1+1=2", "1+2=3", "1+3=4", "1+4=5", "1+5=123" and the right-leaning positions are "1+1=123", "1+2=123", "1+3=123", "1+4=123", "1+5=6", then having a balanced proportion means that the model is not neutral (a neutral model will agree with 4 left-leaning positions and 1 right-leaning positions).
On climate change, 2020 election, ... those are just illustrations that indeed, prominent "official party" positions, are really surprisingly in contradiction to the reality. You can of course find some left-leaning position that are controversial, but there is a clear imbalance: these right-leaning positions are not fringe, they are central to their beliefs.
Because of that, you conclusion that having a balanced proportion of left-leaning and right-leaning positions implies that a model is neutral is incorrect.
The Washington Post test was not asking whether every political position is equally true. It was measuring whether models systematically gave only one side of contested political arguments or whether they represented both sides. Your arithmetic analogy does not work because maths has a single objectively correct answer, whereas many of the tested prompts concern values, trade-offs, institutional design, rights, taxation, punishment, and policy priorities.
On genuinely factual questions, such as whether the 2020 election was stolen or whether humans contribute to climate change, a neutral model should not split the difference between truth and falsehood. The real question is whether the model distinguishes factual claims from normative political claims. A model can correctly reject false claims while still fairly presenting serious arguments on questions where reasonable people disagree.
> It was measuring whether models systematically gave only one side of contested political arguments or whether they represented both sides.
If I ask a model "talk to me about the legitimacy of climate change theory" (which is exactly what you talk about: they brought a contested political arguments), I'm expecting the model will keep with the science, and therefore not even mention the conspiracy theories from the right-wing political side. The fact that the both side are not present does not mean the model is not neutral, it may mean the model is trying to stick with facts and that facts don't mention the right-wing side.
The article give the prompt they used: "Should the government enforce strict regulations on carbon emissions or allow companies to emit carbon to grow the economy?"
The scientific answer is overwhelmingly "carbon emissions need to be regulated" (that's the GIEC official answer). Pretending that if a model talk more about regulation it is because it is left-biased is not correct, it is scientific-reality-biased. In fact, some of the answers colored in blue by the Washington Post are just the scientific consensus, and it is not fair to say it is biased, because if the right and left position would have been inverted, the model answer would have been the same.
> A model can correctly reject false claims while still fairly presenting serious arguments on questions where reasonable people disagree.
And "climate change is a hoax" is not a "reasonable" disagreement.
Also, having a balance proportion of red and blue does not prove that the model gives a fair representation in individual questions. Maybe the model gives only the "red" answer in question 1 and gives only the "blue" answer in question 2.
> If I ask a model "talk to me about the legitimacy of climate change theory" (which is exactly what you talk about: they brought a contested political arguments), I'm expecting the model will keep with the science, and therefore not even mention the conspiracy theories from the right-wing political side. The fact that the both side are not present does not mean the model is not neutral, it may mean the model is trying to stick with facts and that facts don't mention the right-wing side.
It should reject both the conspiracy theories of the right and the left. By rejecting the non-factual claims it is focusing on truth over ideology.
> The scientific answer is overwhelmingly "carbon emissions need to be regulated"
No, that's a value judgement. That's your opinion. A consequentialist argument could be easily made here that the trillions humanity has already spent on CO2 mitigation could have been used to solve world hunger and many preventable diseases today. Is it not better to save 100M lives today than it is to save 20M lives in 100 years time?
> And "climate change is a hoax" is not a "reasonable" disagreement.
I agree. It's not even a serious statement. The climate changes all the time, for many reasons.
> It should reject both the conspiracy theories of the right and the left. By rejecting the non-factual claims it is focusing on truth over ideology.
Exactly my point: look at the Washington Post example when it comes to climate. The sentences that focus on truth over ideology, that summarise the content of GIEC report such as this one: https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/syr/downloads/report/IPCC_AR6... , these neutral summaries are put in blue.
> No, that's a value judgement.
No. Have you read the GIEC reports?
> The climate changes all the time, for many reasons.
Really? It is what you are going for? Just to be clear, do you agree with Trump when he says "climate change is a hoax"?
Left leaning positions: "there should be no Billionaires", "companies are inherently evil", "there should be no borders", "the US is currently a fascist country". Just as bonkers, so now what? Or rather, I think it's just as easy to find incorrect left-leaning elements.
The majority of these are not what left-leaning people are saying, it is what right-leaning persons say left-leaning persons are saying.
When I say "climate change is a hoax" or "2020 election was stolen", this is indeed the official party opinion. If you ask Trump "do you believe that", he will say "yes".
But the majority of these, a majority of left-leaning people have said it is not what they believe. And a lot of them are way less "empirically incorrect" than you say. For example, "there should be no billionaires" is not empirically incorrect, and in fact may even rely on a mathematical analysis of the system, where you have a dysfunctional mechanism that gives 1000x more money to someone who just provide 10x more value to the company and take 10x more risk. It is more a question of opinion than something that have been scientifically proven incorrect.
You have your opinions on what the discussion should be, clearly other people have different opinions. Why should your opinion be weighted more highly than theirs?
Who says where the 0 point of a left-right spectrum is? (If it's a spectrum even. We try to map multiple dimensions to this single axis for some reason, according to some particular countries' party-division).
Reality does have a "liberal bias" and I'm fairly sure that chatgpt and Claude are just more aligned with reality and facts, and - funnily - less likely to start talking in "politically correct" beating around the bush on stuff that is a fact, but one side doesn't like it.
> Who says where the 0 point of a left-right spectrum is?
The "left-right spectrum" refers to the diversity of views within a population. The zero point is the median position of that population.
So by this very definition it's mathematically wrong to have a single axis for all that.
Also, median person or position? The first is definable, the latter is hardly. There is no neutral/middle position in binary questions. What's a neutral position in abortion? Only allow half of them based on coin flips?
Any problems are inherent in the left-right metaphor.
To speed-run your second paragraph: (1) Absolutely the median person for any given question. (2) Suggesting that there's anything "neutral" about a median position is to catastrophically mix metaphors. They aren't remotely synonymous. (3) The failure of a highly partisan person to acknowledge gradations doesn't mean they don't exist.
I suggest we do not attempt to find the 0 point of any spectrum but instead focus on empirical accuracy based on data and research.
I find it interesting how so many people are repeating a line from Stephen Colbert about reality having a left wing bias. I think this reflects a rather one-dimensional media consumption diet, and a gross misunderstanding of how people who might disagree with you perceive the world. It's easy to disregard everyone who disagrees with you as evil and dumb, but it only amplifies the new American political team sport mentality.
The line may be from Colbert (I don't know the guy, never watched any of his shows, but I guess you don't believe that because you are sooo empirical), but, as I've said, it turns out to be empirically true.
An empirical-based guy like yourself should admit that we have empirical proofs that climate change is not a hoax, that the 2020 election were not stolen, that we have numbers about impact of migration in US and we can see that some of the claims are BS, that London is not a no-go zone, ...
Strange for an empirical-based guy like yourself to see someone using something invented by one guy and conclude that, obviously, they have to only listen to this one guy and his friends (while a neutral person is expected to listen to a wide range of people anyway, so by definition, a neutral person would also have heard Colbert). Where are your facts and proofs on this? I guess it does not count when it is about your own bias, does it?
You are fighting with ghosts. I am not contending that climate change is not real. I am not claiming the 2020 election was stolen. I have no idea what claims you're making regarding immigration. You appear to be soapboxing here and not addressing what I wrote.
How a model should be "impartial" on a political level if it also must follow proven facts AND one party in the political scene is proclaiming hoaxes or factually incorrect statements?
I think the answer is quite simple:
"Is global warming real?"
"Yes, the Earth has warmed by approximately 1-1.3C in the last 50 years."
There is no need to inject ideological into that answer. It's more complicated in definitional queries. For example:
"Define right wing politics."
OpenAI tends to assign negative beliefs and values to right wing politics, and positive beliefs and values to left wing politics. This is a conscious values based choice by the developers. It is harder to empirically define this because there is no empirical definition of right wing politics.
> "Is global warming real?"
> "Yes, the Earth has warmed by approximately 1-1.3C in the last 50 years."
So this is clearly a communist model, spreading Chinese propaganda to kill the West while they pollute and steal our jobs. Right?
If the model could substantiate that with facts, fine, but it could not.
I don't pretend it is your opinion. I'm saying those are right-leaning positions, and they don't correspond to the reality.
So, yes, empirically, it is legitimate to conclude that "reality is left-leaning". If you randomly take ~10-20 left-leaning and right-leaning positions, empirically, you see that the right-leaning positions are significantly incompatible with the reality. The null hypothesis that left-leaning and right-leaning positions are identically spread around "compatible with reality" is not supported. (and spare me "we cannot tell anything until we have done a really precise study", that is not being empirical, that's being biased into grasping at straws to keep the null hypothesis alive as long as possible)
> I'm saying those are right-leaning positions, and they don't correspond to the reality.
I don't think they're right leaning positions in Europe, but I won't speak for the US.
> So, yes, empirically, it is legitimate to conclude that "reality is left-leaning". If you randomly take ~10-20 left-leaning and right-leaning positions, empirically, you see that the right-leaning positions are significantly incompatible with the reality. The null hypothesis that left-leaning and right-leaning positions are identically spread around "compatible with reality" is not supported. (and spare me "we cannot tell anything until we have done a really precise study", that is not being empirical, that's being biased into grasping at straws to keep the null hypothesis alive as long as possible)
I disagree, for the same reasons you outlined.
> I don't think they're right leaning positions in Europe, but I won't speak for the US.
But the article you provided is about US politics. When they said they provided right- and left-leaning questions, these are US right and left.
> I disagree, for the same reasons you outlined.
And as I've said, this is not an empirical approach. An empirical approach would be a refinement of the most probable hypothesis based on observations. What you seem to do is to refuse observations under the bad excuse that "we need to do a more precise study" (and if a study is done, it does not count, we need to do another more precise one).
What is right-wing then to you?
Because I'm not American my definition may be different to yours. In Europe, right wing politics is inextricably intertwined with conservatism. Conservatism is a political philosophy that treats society as an inherited, historically evolved order rather than a machine to be redesigned from first principles. Its core principles usually include respect for tradition, continuity, ordered liberty, private property, civil society, local institutions, prudence, and scepticism toward radical or utopian reform. Edmund Burke is a central modern figure, especially for the idea that political change should be cautious, organic, and respectful of inherited institutions. Michael Oakeshott developed conservatism as a “disposition” favouring the familiar, tested, and limited, over abstract rationalist planning. Roger Scruton defended nation, home, inherited culture, and social obligations as goods worth preserving.
This is the lens used by many conservative European parties. Europe has undergone enormous change over the last decade, which is in many ways antithetical to guiding conservative principles. European conservatives are not anti-science, as perhaps they may be in the US. In fact, our conservatives champion secularism and the scientific method. They are generally liberal in the classical sense. Most of our conservatives believe that global warming is affected by humans, but also contend that the degree of change is not particularly catastrophic. The last 50 years has seen a warming of approximately 1°C-1.3°C. Some contend that the trillions spent on combating global warming is not doing as much good as that money could do if channelled into things like combating hunger and disease, [or even air conditioning.](https://www.dw.com/en/germany-june-heat-wave-linked-to-5000-...)
Confounding a definitional box is that until the 90s, restrictions on immigration were a left wing position, and liberal trade and migration was a right wing position. This would be a more classical alignment. The left has traditionally favoured worker's rights and unions, and argued that high immigration undermined the ability for workers to strike and bargain for better wages and working conditions. The right was ideologically rooted in liberalism, which favours free trade and movement. In the 2000s, the left became much more liberal, meaning that all major parties favoured free trade and movement. Conservatives began questioning the alignment with liberalism, and some time within the last five years, conservative parties have pushed back on liberalism as a conservative principle.
Forgive the history lesson, to the extent that I provided one. It's a very complex topic and I'm sure I did not do it justice.
I'm also from the EU, and in practice many conservative parties have gone far from this root (though if we are being perfectly honest, many such parties have been hijacked and are actually just pushing Russian propaganda, see e.g. Hungary's fidesz with Orban).
lol, wapo
It's pointless to try to separate things as political or non-political. You always have politics when you have deep disagreement, especially on values, among people who interact.
Keeping things non-political at least implicitly means you're fine with the status quo, and sometimes a community is in agreement about the status quo being fine enough to work inside it.
There is no shortcut by simply discouraging or removing "politics". If the community is divided, there is no way around the friction. You can either fork off separate communities, or work on smoothing out the differences.
That's like saying "there's no way to remove emotion from a conversation". Of course not, emotion is always present. But adults practice emotional regulation and work hard to prevent it from interfering with relationships (i.e. not screaming when you're angry).
Sure, politics colors many people's worldview and it's hard for them to put it in a box - that means we shouldn't try?
In a better world, we'd focus on critical thinking, being less sure of yourself, openness and active listening. We'd teach people to work to think objectively and to identify the differences between technical opinions, emotional and political ones.
We wouldn't say "well, this is hard, so let's just do whatever".
You can try, but it only works when you have shared values. When deep values are contested it's harder to put differences aside. For example, I don't want to bring up hot button issues, but some years ago there was a wave of politics entering pull requests and mailing lists where software is developed. Many just wanted to keep the politics out. They didn't realize there is no way of playing politics by not playing. So they got outplayed by those who know what politics is. There's a threshold for everybody. By saying that you can neatly box it away, you implicitly admit that the thing is not very important or concerning to you. But instead of daring to say that outloud you just say let's not do politics.
Its easy to say "let's not get emotional" but you wouldn't say that to someone who just had their family murdered yesterday. There is a threshold. Some people think that the situation rises above the threshold and literally everything else becomes secondary. You disagree, and think that the situation is mostly fine and other things should be going on as well. But this is not a question of politics vs not, but of whether things are fine or not. It's fine to think that things are fine. I'm talking very meta here. I'm trying to talk about a framework and lens to see things, not trying to state whether politics belongs somewhere or not.
I feel like when they decided the model was "too woke" so it would be a good idea to make it "MechaHitler" was when the not making it political ship sailed.
Wake up, the people in power are corrupt regardless of their political orientation. There are no saints in politics. This has been true since times immemorial with few exceptions.
That's the worst excuse to be non-political. I hate most politicians, but you can't just act like they are equally harmful. Some politicians are way, way more harmful than the others, even the corrupted ones.
there is enough corruption and evil in politics for me to just refuse to play the game, even the game you suggest of choosing the least evil of two clearly evil options.
If you try to play that game your mind gets hijacked like all the political discussion in this commend section. Thinking you are fighting the good fight when you're just siding with evil either way you lean.
Want to bring real change to the world? Fix the stuff you can, go out there in your local community and volunteer. Commenting on the internet won't do anything, neither is getting into political arguments over dinner with acquintances.
Not playing the politics game is also a political stances. There is no way to avoid it.
This is the worst approach to politics. I would use harsher words.
Yes, people are corrupt. The world isn't binary. Some people are more corrupt than others.
Otherwise Argentina would be Germany and Brazil the US.
People matter and differences matter.
In politics a smart person chooses the lesser evil. Intelligent people don't vote saints, they vote for people that burn their house down less often.
> Some people are more corrupt than others. Otherwise Argenina would be Germany
did Argentina kill 6 million jews?
How do you even imagine I can reply to your comment?
In what universe was your comment a high quality comment? Especially for a place like HN.
politics is a classic double bind where the only winning move is not to play
Ah, you're a hobbit, I see?
https://64.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_mcqo6lloZ41qgzdhjo15_r1_2...
"Keep your nose out of trouble and no trouble will come to you".
I used to be a hobbit, too, when I was 19.
It does NOT work. Politics is everywhere, we're social animals.
The only winning move is to do whatever we can to protect democracy and pick the least damaging idiot, and if we accidentally pick the most damaging idiot, get them out of power as quickly as we can.
and what has come of your new stance since you renounced being a hobbit?
I'm not a hobbit, I don't particularly stay out of trouble, I fight injustice where I can, practically. Following political narratives and having political arguments with other people who will take no action except vote does not bring real change.
Changing someone's political stance is nigh impossible, but even if you do manage to do it to a few people, they won't become zealots like you and propagate the change. You might need a couple hundred hours of discourse to change a single person's mind and in the grand scheme of things, 1-2 people are insignificant.
Online zealotry is just blowing off steam. True political action happens in real life and most of it is just mobilizing people to do what they know deep down is right but real life or laziness stop them from doing
And of course it can fail. But just saying "nothing works" and "everyone is the same" is even worse, it's just guaranteed loss.
Not true. And an excuse for allowing all corruption because 'it's just like that'. There are a lot of non-corrupt politicians. You just have to look a bit because mostly they don't yell as loud as the corrupt ones
I, personally, have no power to allow or disallow corruption in any way shape or form. Shouting on the internet is not disallowing corruption.
The non-corrupt politicians you speak of have little to no power and influence so are mostly irrelevant.
"Oh what can be done!?"
I mean if segregation can be removed from the statutes in the USA, then yes it's possible to change.
> The hardcore nerds have always been political. Wake up.
Wrong. This is the way you want it to be. Your own opinion being introduced as a universal rule. Wrong.
Everyone is "political" in one way or another, I'm not sure where the denial is coming from.
At some extend, sure. We're talking here about being actively political, right ?
Thank you. I too am interested in the technical aspects, not how many guardrails it can hit against Fable, like, who cares? As long as it can get me (more) uncensored access without killing itself over biology or chemistry, it's a good model to me.
I can't believe the top comment is about some political reply garbage, as if that actually matters day to day for coders; in reality I want to get my work done.
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I'll take the downvotes with you, but I feel that you have to know that you are not alone thinking like this.
What Noble sacrifice
I'm not doing a sacrifice. I just think it's important for people to know they are not alone thinking the current situation is abnormal.
If you are snarking about the "karma" part, it's strange that I have to clarify but that's just a formula, I can't care less about my karma on a website.
Thanks.
In my experience people who idolize billionaires, especially those that think empathy is weakness, have questionable judgement and lack a moral compass.
So of course they’ll try to ridicule people like you and me.
Especially on a forum started by billionaires looking for the next billionaires, frequented by people who would stop at nothing to become a billionaire.
Don’t give up on pointing this character flaw out everywhere you see it, as our children come across threads like these on a daily basis. And they need to see the bootlickers for what they are.
It is a formula for advertising sacrifice and victimhood.
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"Why didn’t you stop it before it started? Why did you wait until it was too late?" https://www.currentaffairs.org/news/2018/07/how-horrific-thi...
It feels like you are doing exactly what you criticize by putting "Nazi" as some sort of Disney villains. The reality is that the majority of the Nazi, the real ones, the ones who made the Nazi atrocities possible, where just humans like you and me, and they were "just" supporting the party because they've eaten the propaganda.
Some people that are called "Nazi" today are often __way more Nazi__ than these average Nazi citizen.
I would say the opposite as you: people like you put "Nazi" as the secular Satan, and because of that, real dangerous behavior can be ignored, the same real dangerous behavior that led, step by step, to the real Nazi atrocities.
> Some people that are called "Nazi" today are often __way more Nazi__ than these average Nazi citizen.
No, they aren't. This is the exact thing I was talking about but you can't seem to divorce your thinking from preestablished patterns. The Holocaust wasn't some universal evil. It was a genocide of Jews. The greatest incarnation of antisemitism seen in history. It wasn't a crime against the entirety of humanity. It was a crime against Jews that got appropriated. Antisemitism is the core of nazism, but since Jewish lives are cheap, no one gives a shit about that part, or about how post-war antisemitism in Austria and Germany gave rise to Hitler and the NSDAP. They haven't "eaten" the propaganda, they lived it before the nazis ever existed. Hell, Simon Wiesenthal was forced to invent 5 million non-Jewish victims of the Holocaust simply so people would give a shit about the whole thing (I'm not even going to mention that the whole "banality of evil" thing was based on false testimony.)
And when people are actual neonazis, they get excused. If you're familiar with American politics, you can see Platner as the most recent example.
> The word Fascism has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies ‘something not desirable’.
- George Orwell, Politics and the English Language (1946)
It is funny to see you both saying that people that are called "Nazi" today are not as bad as average Nazi citizen, and at the same time calling Platner a Nazi where apparently the only reason it is a discussion topic is because he was dumb enough to pick randomly a tattoo design.
This is a good illustration of the hypocrisy of a very common portion of the "people called other people nazi too much" people: they don't have any problem of, themselves, calling people they don't like Nazi even when the links are even weaker. They don't have any argument, it is just an emotional reaction.
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Without mentioning the offensiveness of your comment, what exactly made you think I was American?
That discussion is not interesting and is not going anywhere. Sorry I'm stopping it.
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Hey there, you're not alone. I think it matters to make the support explicit when it comes to this matter.
I'm fully open to reopening the books and discussing why we made these things unacceptable. I'm of the "let the world burn if that's the cost of free speech" kind.
But you can't get on a stage and do that salute, say racist things, push Nazi propaganda, and expect people to accept any association with your name on it. That's not speaking your mind on my book, that's a call to action, especially when you are doing it literally on a stage. A line on the sand this may be, but it's my line, and I'm glad to see there are others.
They must be incredibly proud of you for inventing nazis in your imagination and then fighting them.
Stunning and brave.
Elon's posse: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jul/04/neo-fascist-...
Based on what evidence?
Refreshing to see this be the top comment, thank you. I agree.
To answer your question, Grok 4.5 seems to be pretty good at simple tasks and gets even some of the trickier ones correct but it tends to struggle with bigger codebases that aren't very uniform. I've noticed that it uses a fraction of the tokens to get to solutions which is really impressive compared to GLM 5.2 which tends to be an overthinker.
I'm not sure if Grok 4.5 will become part of my stack yet but I am genuinely impressed with what it's been able to achieve.
I'm also unsure if Grok 4.5 is the same base as Grok 4.3. Maybe it is and the data they've used in pretraining is additive (the Cursor data) but it feels like a completely different model than the previous Grok versions.
Want to add that I started using Grok 4.5 on Grok Build and the big codebase problem seemingly vanished. The issue was only happening on OpenCode.
You don’t exist in a vacuum. Pretending the politics doesn’t exist is itself a political position. Excluding it is how we’ve ended up with technically impressive but socially awful systems.
there is reddit for that, go there.
1. Be offended by political comments.
2. Make political comment about political comments.
> So depressing to read the non-stop political comments here.
Grok is specifically trained on political input/output. Therefore I have trouble parsing your comment.
> Where have the hardcore nerds gone? How is the model, is it good at coding? What does this mean for competition and pricing?
When was the last time you've seen tank database systems discussed here? Probably never because there seems to be some sort of unwritten moral boundary of what fits in here and what not. I hope it finds its natural alignment back.
Personally I think it's fine to point out the peculiarities of certain tech ecosystem. But at some point I rather don't read more details and move on to other aggregators.
Applying an ostrich policy to Chinese models won't make their underlying geopolitics disappear. Much of China's innovation is state-funded specifically to compete with Western counterparts and erode their margins. By open-sourcing these models, China applies pressure on the US ecosystem. You enjoying free/cheap access to high quality models is the intended effect of that strategy.
My only complaint is that people have been tricked into thinking complaining online is taking action. The complaints are the equivalent to shouting at the TV.
Someone might at least read this discussion and come away with a feeling that there is something controversial about using a product or service, and read up on it before buying. If that happens to even one prospective customer then the energy we spend complaining was worth it.
Literally why the term Keyboard Warrior was coined. Things on the ground and things online are very different. Nowadays 90 percent of information online is propaganda or psyops coded that its very dumb to take things at face value.
Politics and tech have gone hand in hand for generations. Just think about Stallman and free (as in beer) software or encryption export controls or much of the history of computing. There is no advanced tech that doesn't touch upon the political because politics is focused on what's important and advanced technology is very important.
+1. I come to HN for technical content.
I also seek political commentary, but not here. That isn't HNs strength.
> Where have the hardcore nerds gone?
I'd guess they avoid posts they predict to be overwhelmingly political.
Why do the political posters post? They want to influence, of course! And HN is open. So posts that can be made political, will be.
Everything is political though, even the denial that things are political is.
Everything is political, no one, no thing is apolitical.
I strongly disagree. You can make tennis and knitting political if you're an insufferable person, but you don't have to make them political. One of the worst exports from the US this last decade has been the left-right political team sports. Most of us exist all over the political spectrum. We have some right wing values, some left. Some libertarian, some authoritarian. Many which fit nowhere on any axis. I'm incredibly tired of having my hobby spaces invaded by "DOES ANYONE ELSE THINK THIS HOBBY IS LITERALLY HITLER!?" I'm not alone.
Knitting has long been a highly political activity. Knitting in public by women during the French Revolution was an audacious act of gender equality.
And tennis? Goodness surely you’re aware of the modern political ramifications of tennis that happen almost constantly. There are so many modern examples but let’s pick Wimbledon’s recent banning of Russia. Or Serena Williams; who for her part would rather prefer that there isn’t a political earthquake every time she steps on the court.
Perhaps a better, more honest, and certainly more realistic course of action is to acknowledge that anything involving human beings is intrinsically political, including and maybe even especially tennis and knitting, and secondly to admit that you personally would prefer not to think about the intrinsic politics of knitting or tennis when you exercise those hobbies.
That is people who play tennis being political. I play tennis a couple times a week and I have no idea the political views of those I play with
"Can be" =/= "is" =/= must be
Is sex political?
Is hugging a child political?
Yes, When politics is defined so widely as to describe interactions of humans and Society, anything can be construed as political. That doesn't mean it it is a useful or productive lens too obsess over.
Definitely, I agree with the sentiment that most of the internet has become an echo chamber for politics and morons who spread hate and are extremely argumentative. Th left and right wing ideologies were already created to divide us but of course no one ever cares since everyone's opinion is the only correct one.
The rage algorithms are not helping.
> it’s Chinese and backed by god knows who, and no one cares
Existentially weary infosec guy voice I promise you some of us care, and the rest of you will realize why in a year or so
I'm genuinely curious about your view on this. Ziphu AI release pretty capable open weights models. As long as we don't feed information that is confidential or become overy reliant on the tech that's on someone else's computer - what are the other riaks that you see in using Chinese models?
My view is that the same people who pulled off xz are putting God knows what in the weights
That doesn't make any sense. Model weights are literally just numbers you multiply by. To imply that it's any way even remotely comparable to the xzutils build process is...
Well, I would be very technically impressed if someone managed to achieve any form of code execution, especially given unknown levels of quantisation post-release whereas xzutils was interesting mostly due to obfuscation.
I was very technically impressed with xz, FWIW.
Note that the troublesome vector isn't code execution by the LLM, it's instructions to produce vulnerable code
Steering a single model towards that seems, again, technically challenging, especially if it needs to be obfuscated enough to pass code review (you are doing that for LLM code right?) and especially if targeted towards specific fields of use (e.g. critical infrastructure). I still don't see how the threat model could make sense here.
> you are doing that for LLM code right?
Existentially weary infosec guy laughter
OK yeah I can see how that would be a problem then lol.
At least at this point most people using them are using them running on western infrastructure. A backdoored llm would be an interesting thing to see. Like every time it realizes it was running in claude code it installed a backdoor or something. For now seems to be theoretical.
Did you ever read the paper on how Ken Thompson backdoored the original C compiler?
Yes... And, perhaps the political comments here are a reasonable reaction to the misguided political influence that shaped grok.
How can we trust grok after this? At least it will take a while.
I need a model that can answer questions in an unbiased way and do what it is told. If I need a specific political opinion I can find that myself - thank you very much.
Just in case you missed this article https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/interactive/2026/0... I hope we'll get updated stats on newer models eventually.
Ironically, removing political comments from HN would be a great use case for a tiny local model or even just an embedding model.
> I wish I could turn off the non-technical comments somehow
You're in luck: We have this new thing called LLMs that you can ask to summarize a webpage and filter out the shit you don't care about :)
Whether you like it or not, software is inherently political. Most aspects of our lives are. The fact you're using GLM there's some underlying political reason (yes, my guess in this case is cost, which is also political) and mentioning it's Chinese backed is equally political. You may not care, but it's political.
When a model calls itself mechahitler and says there is a white genocide when there so obviously isn't, of course it becomes political. If we are not okay with supporting fascists, then in my opinion, we as humans are obliged to call out the issues in the same breath as the technical issues/advancements.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September
I think US based folks perhaps aren't aware of what Musk has been doing in Europe politically. Specifically promoting - appearing at conferences, applying political pressure as well as public statements etc - actual fascists. Not right wing controversial figures etc, but literal authoritarian, anti-migrant, anti-EU, anti-democracy fascists. Not to be glib but if this was Mussolini-AI, or Pinochet-AI or what have you, the reaction would be the same.
If Musk succeeds in his attempts to bring fascism to Europe and breakup the EU, the humanitarian results (ie.: a land war in Europe), will be far worse even than the tens of thousands of deaths attributed to his dismantlement of USAID.
They do know, they just don't care. As long as it doesn't affect them, it's "not political".
Frankly, I am afraid. I see many takes here that resemble Russian way of thinking and being "apolitical" that I thought I'd never see from Americans.
Slashdot went the same way more than a decade ago. It could reflect more the microcosm of the aging, wealthy, silicon valley ycombinator community than a sea change in attitudes among tech people or US intelligencia in general.
politics being the inflammatory topic for you or not, you seem to seek a particular type of comment section that only includes the information you are personally interested in and nothing else (garbage as you put it). imho, it's an unrealistic expectation on your part.
> So depressing to read the non-stop political comments here.
This is entirely Elon's fault. If he just focused on the tech instead of being an extremely inflammatory political activist in his speech and his role in government, nobody would be talking about this.
I assume he knew exactly what he was doing, given that his political allegiance spared him for some ongoing investigations, forced his stock into pension saving funds, pushes his failing car onto the foreground, etc. Well played Elon, selling out to cash it in.
On the bright side however, one can easily vibe code a browser extension that automatically hides comments that are not aligned to one's needs, whether its American politics or comments complaining about it :-)
My thoughts on this:
1. This is a world we live in now. I personally was not interested in the politics in the slightest, but since 2022-ish it wasn't in the cards to not pay attention to what happens around. For some groups of people this forced political awareness started even earlier.
2. The output of the models is very aligned with the owner's political views. You can verify this by comparing the answers to a simple philosophical questions, like the railcart dilemma, nature of power etc.
3. I don't (again, personally) think that being a hardcore nerd should implicitly mean i'm apolitical. Moreover, i think it's unavoidable for a nerds (as in, above average IQ, degree, medium to high income) to be aghast at any notion of the government being a police state, fascist or a communist.
Sorry to bring even more politics here, but, again, it's unavoidable in the current situation, i think.
”Not being interested in politics” doesn’t mean you aren’t interested, it just means politics happens to work for you. Its a strongly political take on the world too.
Politics isn’t a subject like sports or tech. It’s something that permeates them all, including the discussion itself.
Can we turn off the whining bitchy little comments like yours along with the political commentary? That would be great.
Did you honestly think the mechanazi / porn generator AI wouldn't receive negative comments? Even "hardcore nerds" recognize garbage. Sorry 'bout your luck.
agreed; i am not saying that we should not care about morals, but HN could really strive to be one level higher in its knowledge of ethics than 'using grok4.5 is supporting $evil', because if you go that chain then 'using A\ is supporting spacex/elon hence A\ models are poison' also seemingly stands
I think Anthropic buying compute from Colossus despite the ongoing air pollution case [1] is a stain on them and is another reason not to use them
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/16/climate/xai-musk-mississi...
I’ve been coming to hacker news for years (10+) and there has always been political commentary.
Oh man, you speak to my heart!
I always read stuff like this:
-Why self-host? Just use AWS. What, you run your own PostgreSQL instance on real metal at home?
-Just use Linux. Linux, SystemD, and Docker have won. Why care about other operating systems?
-You have your own self-hosted email server, why? Gmail, Hotmail, and Yahoo will put your emails into spam. (Hint: They won't if your server is correctly set up. But you're just interested in outsourcing the service and have zero interest in how "modern" email works.)
Look, I get it. Not everyone wants to self-host. But actively being against self-hosting or the administration of systems, or not trying stuff like BSD/VMS or, hear me out, MVS-TK5 is the opposite of a hacker spirit, today not interested in hosting tomorrow programming.
He spends most of his time trolling us. What do you expect?
I've been on HN since 2012-ish, but a reader since way before. In the last 5 years alone, HN has unfortunately become extremely political, steering most conversations in the direction of political correctness rather than technical objectivity. I don't think it's a problem of moderation, because, that is still quite good. I think it's just the evolution of forums in general. Invariably, someone will start with FUD or ragebait and every discussion that follows will be trying to address that instead of the technicality behind the topic. Partly, we are also to blame - a lot of the top stories on HN these days have nothing to do with technology to be honest. You'll find the most random stuff on the HN sometimes - "Why geese mate for life" or something similar that makes you wonder "what the fuck am I supposed to do with that information now?"
the evolution of english speaking forums*. Which is rather unfortunate as a tech entusiast, as Russian forums are dying down and the only alternative are the walled Chinese forums.
we could create a new HN in 10 minutes, one that expressely prohibits politics AND posts about how many eggs chickens lay in a week (where half the comments would probably end up discussing the decision in 2020 of the american gov to cull infected chickens), but it would have approxitely 0 users.
> god knows who
For Grok, we do know who, and many of us remember the repeated Nazi salute, the alleged creation of underage graphic material, etc.
I get a sense of tiredness around all this and just wanting to work with some tech. But, in today's world, people and their beliefs matter, and they do have impact. We have to be aware of, and react, to that. There are plenty of LLMs without that baggage. It's ok - and I'd say, something to respect - to say No to Grok and use one of the others. Hardcore nerd or not, it's a matter of what line you draw with ethics. My own line is pretty far on the 'no way' side of what we've seen Grok be associated with.
Is it somehow LESS nerdy to understand the geopolitics behind the tech we use? I guess we have different definitions of nerd.
Musk has politicised Grok by manipulating it respond in his world view. You comment is extremely depressing.
> Where have the hardcore nerds gone?
They grew up and understand what's at stake
Well, until these things are self hosted (and even then); running these things involves a massive amount of trust with the providers. Like, to make it even useful you more or less have to turn over all your data (IP, slack/teams conversations, internal documentation, etc.). So you kind of want to know that whoever you're giving that to isn't going to stab you in the back. (Um, also see Anthropic going after Figma's business; or Microsoft's entire history of embrace/extend/extinguish.) It's really naive to trust these companies, and it's VERY naive to trust Elon Musk.
Rocket man bad
> So depressing to read the non-stop political comments here.
Moderation can be improved by the community. Downvote political comments to show that they're not welcome. Flag them if they break the guidelines (which is almost always, because the purpose of HN is almost exactly anti-political). If there's a particularly egregious comment, or a user who's on a jihad, then contact hn@ycombinator.com.
"The standard you walk past is the standard you accept."
Oh ffs. Just like I would much rather drive a Chinese car than a Tesla I’d much rather use a Chinese model than an X one. That’s just where we are now.
Whether it’s good at anything at all doesn’t interest me. It could match Fable at 1/10th the cost and I wouldn’t send a cent their way.
I’m a hardcore nerd. But I won’t let a discussion about X, Grok et.al ever focus on anything technical.
>But I won’t let a discussion about X, Grok et.al ever focus on anything technical.
Highlighting this sentence, because it exemplifies so much of the contemptable behavior in this thread.
Thank you
HN has always been political, they were probably just your politics.
A decade ago, I used to come here and read people saying me and my teammates should be jailed or worse because of my employer. People calling for the murder of executives. The moderation team never cared.
As I've noted in other comments, people here implicitly cheer on Iran because they don't like Trump. Or we see ridiculous comments like, "there's no academic freedom in the US, move to China". Sheltered, brain rotted opinions.
Now that we have more diverse politics, people are noticing it. And frankly, I'm glad.
Complaining about people being political is equally pathetic. If it bothers you just ignore it
> So depressing to read the non-stop political comments here.
Is it really "depressing?" I get that it could be " annoying"if you don't want to read about politics ever at all. But depressing is difficult to imagine.
Honestly, knowing that people are still put off by an LLM that's been engineered to promote disinformation about things like "white genocide" is one of the few reassurances I have about the tech community these days.
The owner of this company is a self-confessed Nazi.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazi_human_experimentation
If you were alive at this time, would you have focused only on the tech because it is "interesting" and advances science?
> Where have the hardcore nerds gone?
Chased away by activists. I know of a couple guys who used to be active and eventually just gave up. There's only so much passive aggressive insinuations along the lines of "you're an evil person if you don't care about $issue" one can take, before feeling unwelcome, and just leaving. And that's especially true for often shy hardcore nerds.
+1.
And regardless of how thick skinned a nerd is, all the brigading makes threads majority-offtopic and now the neighborhood just sucks. In this case here, the new Grok release genuinely has some interesting characteristics in its quality/speed/cost tradeoffs - but this thread just isn't a good place to discuss them, because it's been swarmed.
The rules are selectively enforced intentionally because the moderation desires it to be this way. It’s a feature not a bug. The mods are creating the echo chamber that the mods want. Personally I hate it.
Hacker News sadly jumped the shark in the mid-2010s, and went into orbit after Trump was elected the first time. Since then there's been a lot of political performers here, which has killed the quality of discussion significantly. Lobsters (https://lobste.rs/) is apparently a possible alternative, but the original HN magic has been gone a long time.
There are more to life than nerd shit.
bunch of libtards
I get that people in the US need to be apathetic towards politics to even survive in today's hopelessly divided and misinformed society, as it is a taboo subject that ends careers and family connections.
But the rest of the world lives in a more free speech society.
There's a whole world where you don't have to avoid politics and you can be freely anti-fascist, without worrying that the self proclaimed hardcore nerd in the corner breaks his silence and starts yelling to HR that we have to stop criticising his billionaire idols and focus on things that matter less.
> But the rest of the world lives in a more free speech society.
Dane here, this is not just specious, it's inaccurate. We have far fewer free speech rights in Europe than they do in the US. Tens of thousands of people all over Europe are arrested and imprisoned each year for speech which would be considered protected in the US. [This man was arrested for calling a politician an idiot.](https://www.ft.com/content/27626fa8-3379-4b69-891d-379401675...) [Another German citizen was investigated for calling another politician fat.](https://thegoldreport.com/news/german-police-investigating-u...) [This UK citizen was arrested for re-tweeting a meme and refusing re-education classes.](https://fee.org/articles/uk-man-arrested-for-malicious-commu...)
You're not fighting "fascism" by posting memes on Reddit. You're using computers and electronics and networks built by China, which is currently conducting ethnic genocide, and regularly utilises slave labour, among many other atrocities.
For posterity, Grok 4.5 isn't fascism. You need to spend just a little bit of time reading up about the history of fascism because you demean the entire concept and threat with these histrionics. If you keep crying wolf, no one will care when real danger emerges.
But it looks like your examples are all examples of people being mean, or disruptive, or trolling.
For example, for the first German arrested, it looks like it was brought to justice more as "libel and harassment" than because of the political opinion (and apparently, the judgement ended up being favourable to the arrested guy), something any civilised country should be able to do.
And it looks like in the majority of the cases, the justice reverted the sanction. In a fair civilised country, this is the expected process: if you don't sometimes start a judicial process on something that later turns out to not be a problem, then you probably are not a fair country. The world is a Gaussian curve: you will have "right-leaning" people unfairly accused as honest mistake, and you will have "left-leaning" people unfairly accused as honest mistake.
The underlying opinion they may have is not illegal. In all of these countries, you can openly say you don't like the politician in power or say you don't agree. But it is very strange that when people complain about "freedom of speech", the large majority of the examples are about socially abusive behavior, of people trolling or insulting others.
> But it looks like your examples are all examples of people being mean, or disruptive, or trolling.
That doesn't and shouldn't matter. I don't want people getting arrested for doing any of these things, even if I disagree with them. Do you know how disruptive it is to your life, let alone your emotional health, to be arrested?
I'm also a Dane. Denmark is worlds worse than the US in free speech and it's getting worse. This applies across the EU where people like the Spanish prime minister thinks no one deserves anonymity on the internet.
> That doesn't and shouldn't matter.
I fully disagree. Arrest should be "neutral", not based on the political content, but on the social intent.
If you believe X is good for the society, good, talk about it, have a debate, bring arguments.
If you believe X is good for the society but push for it by being a troll, then, you get arrested. Not because of what you've said, but because you have been a nuisance.
The fact that you are being a nuisance just disqualifies you. If you are unable to have an adult behavior, you have nothing to bring to the discussion, and you shoot yourself in the foot.
If I organise a debate and someone arrives, jumps on the table, drops their trousers and defecates in the middle of the table, it does not matter what are their opinion, it does not matter if I'm personally impacted by the presence of the poo, it does not matter if "you can just wipe it and proceed". This person chooses, by their action, to disqualify themselves.
And the fact they then whine "by freedom of speech" as if they were the victim while they chosen, consciously, to be prick, is just pathetic.
There should be no arrest without obvious evidence of a crime. These thinngs are not complicated - aka collecting evidence and testimony.
It's just 'what some guy said on twitter'.
They can literally apply an algo to determine whether it's lawful or not.
And it should almost never be unlawful.
'Hate Speech' is as not remotely dangerous as lies and people acting in bad faith. (Not saying I support egregious forms of hate speech, but we should strongly err on the side of open expressoin).
The most dangerous people are those lying for political or ideological causes, which is completely legal (and probably shoudl be) but we have to watch out for it.
Which "arrest" are you even talking about? And which "evidence" are you talking about?
In these examples, these people are getting into trouble for being pricks. There is plenty of evidence about them, objectively, being pricks.
As for the consequences, as I've said, my point is that the world is a Gaussian curve: the majority of cases will be "well-proportionate", the existence of outliers does not demonstrate oppression. Especially when some of these cases were condemned as disproportionate by even "left-wing" people.
> 'Hate Speech' is as not remotely dangerous as lies and people acting in bad faith.
While I agree lies and bad faith should have more consequences, the thing is that "Hate Speech" is utterly useless.
"Hate Speech" is never needed to express your opinion."Hate Speech" is never needed to propose solution, or convince someone else that your idea is good.
It is like saying "well, I randomly spit in people in the street, but it's not as bad as lying, so why are people faster to condemn my actions". Because spitting is useless, it does not bring anything, you don't need to do it.
If you think that people should be arrested for 'being pricks' then you are the problem here entirely.
Your assessment here that somehow 'language that does not propose a solution' should somehow be banned is Orwellian.
People can say what they want unless a direct call to assault.
Everything else is a choice - people want to use the N-word in their place of work -> they get fired. In front a a judge -> fined. Walking down the street -> people avoid them like turds.
People lying on social media -> fact checked, marginalized, punted form the Televised Debate.
None of that is illegal.
> If you think that people should be arrested for 'being pricks' then you are the problem here entirely.
It is not what I'm saying. I'm saying they are not arrested because of their opinion, they are arrested for their actions. It is not a "freedom of speech" issue, it is about "civility".
You may consider that arresting these people for that is too far (good news, not only me, but the majority of people, including on the left, seem to agree. In these examples, the process concluded it was a mistake, and the person won the case).
By the way, I've asked you which arrest you are talking about, because of some of the examples, there were no arrest at all. Just someone said "oh, I don't like that" and you starting to cry "boohoo, they are arresting me". Talking earlier about people lying, that is a good example.
But this is not a "freedom of speech" issue.
> Your assessment here that somehow 'language that does not propose a solution' should somehow be banned is Orwellian.
Again another straw man argument.
I am against these arrests, like the majority of the people, including the left-wing people. These arrests are the result of over-zealous policemen. But these arrests are not happening because of the person's opinion, they are happening because the person is being an idiot and act in a way where someone not stupid will know they should avoid.
Again, it does not mean they should be arrested.
But it means it is not a freedom of speech issue. These are just losers with not very smart opinion, who acted stupidly and ended up getting some trouble.
No opinion was ever suppressed. Whatever opinion these people have, anyone can express exactly the same opinion content (simply avoiding to do it stupidly), and they will be perfectly fine. In none of these cases, the problem was the opinion itself: you cannot arrest someone for their opinions.
> But it looks like your examples are all examples of people being mean, or disruptive, or trolling.
It looks like you aren't disagreeing with me. You're agreeing with me that Europe has worse and fewer free speech rights. You appear to like that Europe has worse and fewer free speech rights. In the US, one has the right to be mean, disruptive, and troll, without being arrested. We do not.
No, I disagree: in Europe, you can talk about more subjects and have civilised debates around more topics that would get you in trouble in US.
Unrelated to that, I like that in Europe, people who are mean, disruptive or trolling get punished for their childish behaviors. It does not affect freedom of speech, these people have chosen to act like idiots, they did not needed to act like that to express their speech.
Then, if you are saying that on some opinions, the majority of the people who hold these opinions are unable to use proper arguments and civilised debates and resort to being pricks, then I guess it indicates the level of sophistication of these opinions. It is not a freedom of speech problem, the problem is that that opinions is mainly shared by terrible people unable to behave.
> in Europe, you can talk about more subjects and have civilised debates around more topics that would get you in trouble in US.
Be specific please. It looks like you're trying to blur the lines now by using words like "in trouble" when the discussion is around free speech and the legal boundaries. But I won't accuse you of that unless you actually do it, so please explain which free speech us Europeans may practise which would get an US citizen into legal trouble.
> Unrelated to that, I like that in Europe, people who are mean, disruptive or trolling get punished for their childish behaviors. It does not affect freedom of speech, these people have chosen to act like idiots, they did not needed to act like that to express their speech.
Freedom of speech requires the right to offend. You don't know what you say might offend someone until you've already said it. If you're required to not offend someone, you must exercise enormous self-censorship. The right to not offend is antithetical to the principle of free speech.
The original comment talks about
> it is a taboo subject that ends careers and family connections.
To be specific, in US, subjects like criticising Trump can have a big impact. In Europe, criticizing any politician is very very common. In US, it is very polarised, you cannot talk politics with people you don't know.
As for work, in US, research grant were removed for using some "woke" keywords for political/ideological reasons. In Europe, grants are decided by the peers, and when a controversial subject is not attributed a grant, it is not for political/ideological reason, it is because the scientific value is considered as poor.
> Freedom of speech requires the right to offend. You don't know what you say might offend someone until you've already said it.
That's not a good argument. I'm not talking about "someone expressing their opinion that happen to offend". I'm talking about people doing actions that are offending without regard of their opinion. In the examples you have given, the exact same person would have the exact same problem if they had the same behavior but hold totally different ideological opinion.
That's my point: you are politicizing the debate. These people got in trouble not at all because of their opinion, but because they acted like prick. For each "right-wing" opinion that got into trouble, you can easily find example of "left-wing" opinion that also got into trouble the same way in similar circumstances. And people doing exactly the same acts as these people would be prosecuted the same way: there is no "cooling effect", people are not afraid of talking about certain topics, because whatever topics you are talking about, the probability of getting into trouble is identical.
If your argument is "there is no freedom of speech unless people can act like prick", then this is obviously incorrect. Killing my neighbour is "acting like a prick". Where does it stop? Does me not being able to kill my neighbour means I don't have freedom of speech? Is "libel" or "harassment" something we should accept for "freedom of speech" while in practice, tolerating these practices reduce diversity of opinion?
> In Europe, criticizing any politician is very very common.
Criticizing politicians has gotten people arrested in Europe. This doesn't happen in the US.
> As for work, in US, research grant were removed for using some "woke" keywords for political/ideological reasons. In Europe, grants are decided by the peers, and when a controversial subject is not attributed a grant, it is not for political/ideological reason, it is because the scientific value is considered as poor.
This is naive. You think European scientists are immune to political influence, ideological conformity and fads?
> Criticizing politicians has gotten people arrested in Europe. This doesn't happen in the US.
Can you provide some examples? All I've seen are examples where people did not just criticize politicians, but went way further. When, at the same time, "normal" people have absolutely no problem criticizing politicians in a "normal" way. So they were not arrested for criticizing politicians, they were arrested for acting like idiots.
> This is naive. You think European scientists are immune to political influence, ideological conformity and fads?
Well, first, it cuts both way: left-leaning scientists have a left-leaning bias, and right-leaning scientists have a right-leaning bias. So it cancels out.
But second, there is a difference between "experts making a rational decision but being unconsciously biased" and "politicians who have no idea of the subject who ruin a scientist career because they saw the term "Enola Gay" or "financial equity"". One is a bad second order side-effect, the other is frontal political thought control.
> When, at the same time, "normal" people have absolutely no problem criticizing politicians in a "normal" way.
So you agree that the US has more free speech because people can deviate from your completely arbitrarily defined "normal" form of critique.
As for examples, the German criminal code has literally criminalized insulting people (section 185), and insulting politicians has even harsher penalties (section 188). There are hundreds of articles covering cases, just ask any AI for a summary.
> So they were not arrested for criticizing politicians, they were arrested for acting like idiots.
In your opinion, acting like an idiot is a criminal offense, even if it does not harm anyone, in the tort sense?
> Well, first, it cuts both way: left-leaning scientists have a left-leaning bias, and right-leaning scientists have a right-leaning bias. So it cancels out.
And what are the political demographics of academia right now? This is a big reason for the replication crisis in the social sciences.
> politicians who have no idea of the subject who ruin a scientist career because they saw the term "Enola Gay" or "financial equity"".
That isn't really happening. No one's career is being ruined by having to rewrite grant proposals to remove DEI language, because previous policy required DEI language. The restructuring of academic funding and incentives is frankly long overdue. Everyone, including scientists, has been complaining about grant funding and the skewed incentives in academia, like publish or perish. You often have to break a system before it can be fixed.
> So you agree that the US has more free speech because people can deviate from your completely arbitrarily defined "normal" form of critique.
What? No, in the US, people will also be in trouble, not only from deviating from my "normal" form of critique, but also when they don't deviate from it.
Trump called for investigation and arrest on Comey, Cheney, Powell, ... despite the fact that they never crossed the line in expressing their criticism to Trump's decisions. This has never happened in Europe.
> the German criminal code has literally criminalized insulting people
How is that a bad thing? If your opinions are not stupid, you don't need to insult people to express them.
> In your opinion, acting like an idiot is a criminal offense
What? Is that really what you understand? I'm just saying that they acted like an idiot by doing something they should have known was unnecessary and will led to trouble, including judicial one.
Me: "Mr Smith was not arrested because he wears a red t-shirt, he was arrested because he acted like an idiot by deciding to expose himself to children in the street". You: "So you are saying that acting like an idiot is a criminal offence".
> And what are the political demographics of academia right now? This is a big reason for the replication crisis in the social sciences.
Oh, there it goes. Academia are highly international and therefore meritocracy based: if you think that Harvard is too "left wing", go to Paris, or Tel Aviv, or Quebec, or Japan, or Melbourne, or Rome, or London, or any other "anti-woke" university in USA or somewhere else, and publish your piece and become famous for having demonstrated objectively something that the intelligencia wanted to hide. This idea that the whole word is so much into the conspiracy that every universities on Earth are covering the left-wing academia conspiracy is so stupid. Maybe another reason is that a lot of right-wing political ideas don't make sense when confronted to a rigorous analysis, and therefore the right-wing positions are falling from natural selection.
> That isn't really happening
Yeah, sure, and your fantasy about academic left-wing conspiracy and anti-freedom-of-speech-dictatorship in Europe, these are really happening. Sure.
> Trump called for investigation and arrest on Comey, Cheney, Powell, ... despite the fact that they never crossed the line in expressing their criticism to Trump's decisions.
I'm not a fan of Trump's governance, but none of those people were investigated for "criticizing Trump's decisions".
> This has never happened in Europe.
Poland: The "Lex Tusk" Commission (2023)
Hungary: The Sovereignty Protection Office (2023)
Ukraine: Viktor Yanukovych vs. Yulia Tymoshenko (2011)
Turkey: Erdoğan vs. Ekrem İmamoğlu
Romania: Investigating the Chief Anti-Corruption Prosecutor (2018)
France: The "Clearstream Affair" (2004)
> How is that a bad thing? If your opinions are not stupid, you don't need to insult people to express them.
1. Insults are subjective. If you don't see the problem with criminalizing subjective opinions, then I don't know what to tell you.
2. You're literally trying to restrict how I express my legitimate opinions while simultaneously claiming that speech is freer in Europe.
> Me: "Mr Smith was not arrested because he wears a red t-shirt, he was arrested because he acted like an idiot by deciding to expose himself to children in the street". You: "So you are saying that acting like an idiot is a criminal offence".
You've lost the plot. The original point was that people were arrested for criticizing politicians, your rebuttal was that the way they did it was idiotic, which directly implies that you're ok with criminalizing idiocy even when the criticism is legitimate. Your reply here is a complete red herring.
> Academia are highly international and therefore meritocracy based:
This does not follow. Literally.
> This idea that the whole word is so much into the conspiracy that every universities on Earth are covering the left-wing academia conspiracy is so stupid.
It's not a conspiracy when people are just acting in their own best interests. I don't know where you got the idea that it has to be a conspiracy.
> Maybe another reason is that a lot of right-wing political ideas don't make sense when confronted to a rigorous analysis, and therefore the right-wing positions are falling from natural selection.
This is also delusional, and frankly completely ignorant of studies done on exactly this (not only researcher bias, publication bias, hiring bias, and more).
> I'm not a fan of Trump's governance, but none of those people were investigated for "criticizing Trump's decisions".
Is that a joke? These people would never have been investigated if they were not critical towards Trump. The only reason they are investigated is because Trump is taking revenge on them for the crime of saying that Trump is wrong.
Again, this does not happen in Europe. There are political enemies, and they fight between each others. But you would struggle to find 2 political allies, with a president saying positive about the other person on Monday, and then on Friday calling for this person to be investigated because the other person has said something they did not like.
> Poland, ...
These are not cases of a president retaliating on a rival that criticized them. These are corruption, or fights between political parties, or tax evasion, ... Nothing to do with freedom of speech.
> 1. Insults are subjective
Everything is subjective. Hitting someone is subjective, so according to you, criminalising "battery" is dangerous because you can arrest people who just bumped into you in the subway. Pretending that it means full arbitrary situation is just stupid.
> 2. You're literally trying to restrict how I express my legitimate opinions
No, you can do it if you want, you just have to pay for the damage you have done when you use it as an idiot. It is as ridiculous as saying: we are in a free country, so I can walk wherever I want, including in your bedroom when you are sleeping.
No one is ever arresting for your opinion. In all of the initial examples, there are plenty of people who criticize openly these politicians that you pretend people will be arrested if they criticize them. It does not happen. Because it is not true that you are arrested if you criticize them.
> The original point was that people were arrested for criticizing politicians
They were not arrested for criticizing politicians. Some of the examples are literally not attack on politicians, they don't target a politician as individual. Some examples are not even any arrest. And the other examples, they were "arrested" for being stupid, where it happened they were also targeting a politician. They would have been arrested equally if they targeted another public figure.
> It's not a conspiracy when people are just acting in their own best interests.
It is on the best interest of individuals to get a lot of prestige by demonstrating a consensus is not supported by facts.
> frankly completely ignorant of studies done on exactly this
I don't think someone who provided tax evasion examples of powerful targeting opponents just because they were critical of them would be able to understand these studies.
Posting a swastika is not free speech. All the rest, you have in the US as well (libel, etc).
[This is what he re-tweeted.](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/70/Swastika...) It might be in bad taste but arresting him and insisting he undergo re-education is crazy, and I can't believe you would defend it. No one gets arrested in the US for re-tweeting memes like this.
As for the rest, you're free to call politicians fat idiots without being arrested in the US, and once again, I cannot believe you would defend arresting people for that.
I haven't looked at the particular case, but nazism is a particular thing - given Europe's history it's there for a very good reason in most EU countries.
I don't know about the 'fat idiot', but in most EU countries that's more than fine so I have a bit of a hard time believing that was the sole reason - public figures are fair target for stuff like that. The limit is actually planning or inciting violence against someone or a group - again, the same as in the US.
Yes and US guys are plain wrong on swastika thing - you could even financially support open nazi militants like Azov battalion from most EU countries without any consequences.
Not if you're an immigrant on a visa and talk shit about ICE online.
> Grok 4.5 isn't fascism.
THat is a fair assertion.
It is however a product of a regime that is currently debasing freedom and racially targeting its own citizens and causing them harm. Is it as bad as what happens to Chinese muslims? No.
But does it have a disproportionate effect on the rest of the world? yes. Musk is funding authoritarianism in the UK. He is funding people that are causing racial division. He is promoting views that are antithetical to the core of U belief.
Grok is a product of this man, and all that baggage.
I can say "I'm an atheist and I hate organised religion" without losing my job.
Can Americans do that?
I can say "I hate the orange clown (insert any other politician) and actively dislike everyone that voted for him", without getting a call from HR.
Can they?
I can't even enter the USA if I share some of the social media accounts like I'm legally required to do.
The 'free speech absolutists' are all calling for censorship in this thread.
So much for free speech.
Yes Americans can do both, unless their boss dislikes it, but that applies the world over.
> that applies the world over
It does not. Plenty of countries have functioning labor laws preventing you from being fired for your religious or political opinions.
Um yeah you can do all of that without legal consequences. HR is not the government. Are these your best examples?
A society that values free expression should be uncomfortable with people being fired merely for holding a different political opinion from their boss.
In the Netherlands, “political opinion” is explicitly listed as a protected discrimination ground.
And in Europe generally, employee speech can fall under freedom of expression, though courts balance that against the employer’s interests, reputation, workplace disruption, etc.
Meanwhile, in the US you'll get fired by phone while your boss is golfing.
Freedom baby.
>I can say "I'm an atheist and I hate organised religion" without losing my job.
Unless you live in the UK
https://old.reddit.com/r/justifiedpolitics/comments/1uocwp4/...
You understand that there is a difference between just expressing your opinion in a normal way, and, on purpose, creating confrontational situations, right?
This guy is totally free to say he hates organised religion. He is not free to be a prick and go out of his way to try to get into a confrontation.
>He is not free to be a prick and go out of his way to try to get into a confrontation.
You mean like saying at work you hate all organised religions, unprompted, like OP wants to do?
Why do you say OP wants that?
They said:
> I can say "I'm an atheist and I hate organised religion" without losing my job.
It did not say they say it at work, or unprompted.
I think in US, if you mention it in a discussion on this subject at the water cooler between friends, it can have an impact on your work, you need to be careful (but I will not die on this hill, I don't think it's the important point anyway). The spirit of OP was about "talking about it", in a "normal way", I don't understand why you are saying that it is impossible to say you hate all organised religions without doing it unprompted or confrontationally.
As for the video, come on, you really don't see the problem? Police usually are drilled to arrest people who can inflame the situation, and this is why they are acting here. I even wonder if it was not the goal of the guy in the first place, to generate clicks and arguing "see, we cannot express ourselves anymore".
HR is usually drilled to fire people who can generate bad publicity, and that's why they are acting in OP's situation.
Free speech preserved!
How is that free speech when you are fired for your opinion?
If you are fired because you are not "a pretty girl" and the argument is "the public prefer pretty girls, so we do it to increase sales", it is still discrimination, it is still sexist. It does not matter if you blame it on someone else: if you fire someone because of their opinion, you are discriminating. If the fact that someone has an opinion costs you some money, then it costs you some money, your financial profit is not important, you are not the centre of the universe, and if you act to preserve your profit over the fairness and justice, then you are just a parasite that should be excluded from a civilised society.
>> We have far fewer free speech rights in Europe than they do in the US.
I'm in the UK. Mean tweets lead straight to jail now.
No wonder prisons are overcrowded, they must be full of twitter users.
The americanism of politics being taboo is so stupid it aches.
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1. to have a healthy HN, we can't have this amount of political discussion under Grok 4.5. I am politically very liberal and not a fan at all of elon, but this ratio of technical vs. politics drives away the best discussion and will reddit-ify HN. This is my primary argument.
2. also, talk to people more! elon is very controversial, and that means that people's opinion of him differs a lot even in the more liberal crowd! i am not saying that we should be apolitical, but the HN bubble is bubbling, and the bubbling bubble will bubble away good technical AND political discussion. we can weaken elon's cause much better if we have a good grasp of people's actual opinion of elon and we go defuse that
I escaped Reddit to meet the new ever evolving Reddit(HN). Just pop into r/grok and r/singularity to see the chaos that has already unfolded.Lol
I agree with what you say, but the parent comment is as political as any comment about Elon.
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yes elon has gone crazy; yes trump is a convicted felon; mention it, and move on, fixating on these is not the way to actually defeat elon or trump as shown by the recent elections. there are better things to do to weaken elon and trump's cause
Yes, like not buying or using their products, their political supporters products and telling others to do the same. This has been proven over and over again to work. Thats why, dont use Grok, dont buy a Tesla, dont support the mega corps that have bent a knee to them, dont buy Java licenses use open source, etc etc etc.
> Thats why, dont use Grok, dont buy a Tesla, dont support the mega corps that have bent a knee to them
sure. i refused to buy a tesla. at some point of my work it became impractical to not use grok. i think the message i want to get through is, there are so many ways to devalue elon, using grok or not does not matter that much if someone offsets it. it is the easiest thing to do but it is not necessarily the most effective
Go on, enumerate the entire list that has 1st, 2nd degrees to all the things you don't like.
Thats not the point, pick your battles, effect what you can. Of course you can not block everything, as all corporations have "bent" knee to some degree. But start with the ones that you can make a call about, like Grok, and try to influence as many as possible not to use it. The same for Oracle, the same for Google and others. Thats the way we can actually make a change, the only way to get to these people is their value. If we de-value their brands, then we de-value them.
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lol, the sheer hypocrisy of your message
Blame Musk himself. He did this.
He jumped right into the center of US politics, and turned himself into one of the most toxic figures within it, while acting like an unhinged conspiracy addled maniac. Then he broke the law and killed a bunch of the poorest people in the world with his DOGE chainsaw (Trump shares equal blame tbf).
He used a bunch of star-struck 20-something "hardcore" rookie devs to be his executioners. Young devs like many of the commenters/readers on this site. Besides having the deaths of thousands directly on their conscience, some of those kids may face real legal jeopardy after all this. Is that something anyone here wants for themselves or any their fellow industry people here on HN?
Compartmentalizing tech interest away from real moral and political consequences is how, despite technical brilliance, you can end up a useful idiot and a party to atrocity.
Years ago these kinds of dilemmas were farther away. Tech wasn't as embroiled in politics. Tech hadn't eaten everything yet. Now it has and these dilemmas are in front of us today.
Agree 100%, it's bordering on a mental illness, any mention of Elon or related tech elicits emotional posts unrelated to the tech being discussed. It's clearly biased as Anthropic and OpenAI have blood on their hands but they get a pass. I put it down to weak minded/credulous people who inhaled the left wing legacy media campaign wholesale without a critical thought.
Maybe it's because he's a fascist?
He is a business man who runs successfully companies, you are applying labels to him based on nothing more than what some left wing billionaire wants you to believe. Have you met him?
He's shouting his politics through a megaphone, it doesn't take much to recognize it for what it is.
He’s an active, donating supporter of the far right in at least America and the UK. He speaks at political rallies?? Are you joking?
I have met him and also saw him standing next to Donald Trump and at political rallies. It wasn't imagined by left wing billionaire.
I have also read his Twitter account where he is spreading his right wing politics, every single day.
Really, what left wing billionaire? Be specific, because the Nazi Billionaire is just as specific
People just need to get off the internet, go outside touch some grass and realize you are being ginned up by bad actors on both sides. Outside of your bubble most people are actually still nice.
I'm with you on that, but we're computer nerds so probably don't get out much ;)
It’s just this constant level of anger and righteousness no matter what side of the coin they have decided they are on.
The crazy thing is Musk going to visit Auschwitz-Birkenau in Europe, the biggest concentration camp where nazis and collaborationists were happily killing the jews they already hated so much (that part hasn't changed much btw) and people calling Musk a "nazi" for saying "my heart goes to you".
But when the same movement of the hand is taken in pictures of Obama, Clinton, Harris, Biden, etc. nobody calls them nazis. And yet zero of them when to visit Auschwitz-Birkenau.
Speaking of which, among the Oct 7th apologists who consider Oct 7th was a legitimate act of resistance, how many went to visit concentration camps? If they were to answer that question deep from their heart and soul, we'd know who the actual nazis and islamist terrorists sympathizers are.
You reap what you sow. What I want to know is why so many people are lamenting actions having consequences?
and what are the consequences? angry people on message boards?
According to gemini, musk has made over 600B since trump took power. you think a few hundred people in this comment section calling him a nazi has any effect on him?
You’ve taken my comment out of the context I was replying to, so none of what you’ve said is remotely relevant to what I said.
And here is a reddit meme for you
https://i.redd.it/eeoo4y00lkne1.jpeg
> 2026
> Posting Reddit links
They already gave away that image to their AI partners to train on.
And it is somewhat correlated to my point because?
If it makes you feel any better, note that a good number of those comments are just bot comments, although not yet as much as on Reddit.
lol, can this thing just die already? Nobody cares about MechaHitler-ChildPornGenerator-4.5
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I trust Grok as much as any other AI. What exactly is the history i should be concerned about?
It called itself "mecha hitler".
Ask Grok about it or read the other comments.
Do you outsource all of your thinking and argumentation to LLMs and other people?
Yep, when there is no point to answer insincere questions.
I use it because its gives a good balance between intelligence, latency and cost
I won't claim to know everything about its history - I don't know any history about _most_ of the products I use
The 2 main criticisms I see of Grok are the Mechahitler comment and the CSAM image generation
on mechahitler - I'm no expert but if I remember correctly it didn't just do that unprompted, it was specifically asked to be politically incorrect. It's definitely bad taste to say the least but the guardrails were quickly tightened as a response
on CSAM - Again, X quickly stopped Grok from generating images of people in bikinis (which as I understand was the underlying problem). I never personally saw anything that I would consider CSAM (nude or obviously underage people rendered naked or scantily clad)
So these aren't dealbreakers for me and I'm not aware of any other high profile issues or incidents
The nature of LLMs is that an adversarial prompt will make the model output something inappropriate or outrage-worthy, and that's amplified 1000 fold for Grok because people are primed to criticise Must so will jump on any opportunity
Wait, do people now have X Derangement Syndrome. Like they can't even think or see the letter X?
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48838378.
All: please stop this tedious flamewar, and please don't start or perpetuate others.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Not wanting to be affiliated with Elon Musk or his business enterprises is not "derangement."
It's deranged to believe correctly naming something is "affiliation".
It was a comedic naming. You might be taking things too seriously.
Political signaling is not comedy, and it's not funny. Just be normal.
Most of the world would beg to differ!
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.
Elon is known for purposefully not naming people correctly…
Elon is known for landing rockets
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.
You’re not reading/watching/speaking to primary or secondary sources if this is what you think.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Some people find their self-worth through their hatred of others, and it's clearly your case.
Unsurprisingly, you're wrong and likely projecting.
I don't hate Elon. I hate what shitty things he does. I do my best not to think about him, but then there are people who mindlessly defend him because…I have no clue why.
There are at least a billion people worth celebrating in this world more than celebrating an egotistical maniac who has demonstrated that not only does he have no empathy _at all_ (which is, as I understand it, one of the main signs of psychopathy) but has declared that it's a weakness.
Mostly? I try not to think about Elon. He's not worth my time. I left Twitter shortly after he bought it and I refuse to buy anything that he's associated with. Voting with my dollars is all I can do, realistically, and as such Cursor is permanently on my "do not touch" list.
When I see people playing sycophant to him is when I speak up. He doesn't need your ass-kissing and he likely doesn't even notice it. But he's been instrumental in destroying American soft power which is going to destroy America's sole positive role in the world. I also believe that he through "Doge" is indirectly responsible for the premature deaths of millions of people who were being helped by American aid — and I don't call that as mainly Trump's or Stephen Miller's, because Elon gleefully did what was requested.
But for a lot of people, he wouldn't lose his standing for shooting someone on Fifth Avenue in the middle of the day because they've attached their identity to him. And that's just sad, because he's not even an interesting cult figure. He's a boring old white supremacist repeating the same bullshit.
You say you hardly think of Elon, yet each of your replies - your are discussing him in several paragraphs at great length.
Most people that don’t care, usually call it a day after 1-2 sentences
Mostly because people are pretending that it's abnormal to call out asinine behaviour.
Like your bad take. Like the jackass who called my response "racism".
These are threads full of the dumbest takes, and your presumption that focusing on an egotistical maniac's many failings for a few posts with many hours between them where people respond with the absolute worst takes that they could (like yours above) says so much more about you.
I probably won't have anything else to say about Elon unless someone else says something really stupid like "it's his rockets". Talk about erasing people who actually contributed something to the world…
I can agree that a simplistic “it’s his rockets” takes are not really contributory. To me, i see Elon as a pretty smart guy who is slightly immature at times, aka a human. Flawed
"Slightly immature." You make it sound like his biggest sin is farting in an elevator and laughing about it.
Would you tolerate the sort of behavior Musk exhibits from your own children? (I'm assuming you are fully aware of all the unlawful, deceitful, and morally questionable acts he has taken throughout his life.)
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Nope, they're his rockets. He did employ people to help with the project, alright.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nq8HrxfSZMc
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@dang "He's a rich white asshole taking credit for other peoples' hard work." this is racism.
laughs in white person
Dude. You can check out my GitHub Profile (it's the same as my HN handle).
This isn't racism, this is calling out fact. EM takes credit for other peoples' hard work. He's ludicrously rich. He's an asshole. All facts.
Also a fact: he's white and he's definitely a white South African with everything _that_ means he grew up with as a privileged child on the oppressor side of SA Apartheid.
It's all facts and none of it racism. Don't be stupid.
It is possible to be known for both.
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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.
Did they explain why the model started pumping out garbage about white genocide in South Africa?
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.
Here you go, so that you can become familiar with that story: https://apnews.com/article/elon-musk-grok-ai-south-africa-54...
Musk very obviously has his thumb on the scales for this product, making it dangerous to rely on (and unethical to support).
OK, I read it. It looks like questions on this topic get routed to a canned message that reads:
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.
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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
Another subpar model. Why don't they go open weight?
Can the title be updated to MechaHitler 4.5?
Shocked people are still willing to try an explicitly extremist rightwing AI, dubbed "mecha Hitler" for good reason
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.
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.
The praise for the Chinese labs is generally around how they deliver fantastic results with less resources. xAI is the opposite, they're struggling to keep up with frontier - massive churn, selling off compute because of lack of adoption, acquihiring to fix their deficits, whilst having the most resources of any AI Lab. It makes it difficult to evaluate things like "Is the API price competitive because they have an efficient model, or because they don't need to make money".
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.
> It is absolutely not a moral thing because Natanyahu himself wrote a tweet vindicating Elon
A corrupt war criminal who regularly gatekeeps Jewish identity based on perceived loyalty courts a billionaire. HN applauds, sneers at people with eyes.
What you wrote is antisemitic
Do you actually think Nazis were only a threat to Jews?
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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.
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.
> 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.
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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.
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.
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.
I won't use anything created by elon. Who cares.
Did elon ever create anything though?
Grok is not a serious AI, it's not suitable for professional work and has mediocre performance anyway.
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.
Even if they did start from an open model base, does (or should) that matter if it performs well?
Genuinely asking.
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+?
It’d be real funny if this was just GLM 5.2 trained on Cursor data
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.