All: please stick to thoughtful, substantive discussion. You may not owe you-know-whom better, but you owe this community better if you're participating in it.
If you don't have a thoughtful, substantive comment to add, not commenting is also a good option. There are quite a few interesting submissions to talk about.
I think the problem for xAI is that it can really only hire two types of researchers - people who are philosophically aligned with Elon, and people who are solely money-motivated (not a judgment). But frontier AI research is a field with a lot of top talent who have strong philosophical motivation for their work, and those philosophies are often completely at odds with Elon. OpenAI and Anthropic have philosophical niches that are much better at attracting the current cream of the crop, and I don't really see how xAI can compete with that.
In an interview with xAI I was literally told that certain parts of the model have to align with Elon, and that Elon can call us and demand anything at anytime. No thanks!
From my time at Tesla, this is 100% the case. When Elon asked for something, it was “drop what you are doing and deliver it”, then you got pressed to still deliver the thing you were already working on against the original timeline before the interrupt.
I found the best thing to do was to ignore the interrupts and carry on until they kick you on the street. Then watch from a safe distance as all the stuff you were holding together shits the bed.
Definitely one approach to the circumstances. I tried some variation of this and it blew up in my face (as I expected ).
Towards the end of my time there, a “fixer” was brought in to shore up the team that I was working on. The “fixer” also became my manager when they were brought on.
The “fixer” proceeded to fire 70+% of the team over the course of 6-8 months and install a bunch of yes people, in addition to wasting about $2,000,000 on a subscription to rebuild our core product with a framework product no one on the team knew. I was told to deploy said framework product on top of Kubernetes (which not a single person on my team had any experience with) while delivering on other in-flight projects. I ignored the whole thing.
I ended up deciding I was done with Tesla and went into a regularly scheduled 1:1 with my manager (the “fixer”) with a written two-weeks notice in hand, only to be fired (with 6-weeks severance, thankfully) before I was able to say anything about giving notice.
Out of curiosity, it sounds like you're the kind of person that could easily find another job. Why slog it out until the end rather than quit/find a better gig? Genuinely interested because every time I've ended up with a manager like that my mental health has suffered so now I generally start planning my exit as soon as I'm stuck with a bad manager.
Tesla won because Elon is a great seller, the product is mediocre at best but I’ve heard many times from friends that it was the same quality as a Mercedes Benz, so the reality distortion field is very real.
And Americans in general don’t want electric cars for some reason. I’m happily driving my Buzz and charging on my solar panels instead of paying 5 bucks a gallon on diesel. The propaganda here is strong and people buy it.
Becaues they were ~first to market - and honestly, as a tesla driver for the last 6 years - It's the best car I ever owned (including Toyota, Mazda, and domestics).
6 years ago, for the effective price of a Honda Accord, I was able to get a car with excellent AWD for NorEast winters, perfect weight distribution (previously drove a Miata for comparison), could beat ~95% 'super cars' in a straight line, and it got 140MPG.
6 years ago. And I've had 0 maintenance outside of tire / air filter changes since. There was nothing anything remotely like it on the market, and it still holds up today. That's incredibly compelling.
Then PedoDiver, and it's been downhill from there... I'll likely get an R3X when it comes out.
It always seems to be companies that Musk has more impulsive interactions with that seem to end up actioning both the good and the bad ideas. Twitter and Tesla being examples of this. It seems like SpaceXs longer term goals has worked out well for them.
I would think because the original founders spent a lot of time planning, researching, and designing combined with decent timing of Musk jumping in with money. Why else would Musk have bought them in the first place if they didn't have incredibly impressive ideas and engineering to sell? When the roadster originally came out, it was expensive, but also had a near 300 mile range which nobody else even came close to offering and boasted very impressive engineering and crash safety. And im sure a lot of that work was put into atleast the next 2 models released.
Of course the quality has fallen faster than the price over time, but initial impressions still hold on for a long time in general.
I think SpaceX's success is mostly down to throwing money at the problem. The US had tons of graduated aerospace engineers with limited places to go, and places they could go directly in aerospace fields were already committing their funding to established programs. SpaceX startup would of been a dream job for the top aerospace engineers because it was all fresh ground but with a far larger budget than 99.9% of startup aerospace companies. They weren't offered to build one piece of a rocket that may or may not get sold to NASA or someone 15 years down the line, they were offered to work on and put their mark on a completely new rocket design that was going to at the least be test launched. And im sure their early successes helped boost recruitment even further, combined with government contract to keep the money flowing.
We probably don't see many rising EV companies in the US because you need an ass-ton of capital to start an automotive company, and most people holding enough capital to do so know that try to sell cheap consumer cars that most people want is not really the highest margin business. Selling a few hundred or even a few thousand cars still leaves you with a mountain of capital requirements in front of you that your margins are going to have a really hard time climbing. And if you don't climb fast enough, good luck fighting established auto makers and their lawyers with every cent tied up into trying to scale and engineer.
> When Elon asked for something, it was “drop what you are doing and deliver it”, then you got pressed to still deliver the thing you were already working on against the original timeline before the interrupt.
To be fair, I've experienced that in a good 50% of my employment career[0] and I've not once worked for any of his companies.
[0] Ignoring the "servers are melting" flavour of "drop what you are doing" because that's an understandable kind of interruption if you're a BAU specialist like me.
I’ve experienced it at other places as well, just not the frequency or indirectness as Tesla.
During the first 24 hours of the Model 3 pre-order launch, Elon tweeted that we would support another 3-4 currencies than we had built and tested for. The team literally found out because of his tweet and had not planned for those currencies. That wasn’t the first time that sort of deal happened where we found out about a feature because of one of his tweets.
yeah that wouldn't work for me. when my boss asks me to do something unexpected, I ask, what do you want me to drop this week? if he doesn't want to pick, I ask, so what do you want first?
Agreed. Tesla taught me the hard way about work/life boundaries. I spent a lot of time working a full 8-9 hours during the day, then doing deployments during the nights, weekends, and on “vacations”. A 60-hour week was a “light” week at Tesla.
Didn’t have kids or friends at the time and was going through a breakup, so I was okay with throwing myself at the job for a while. Once my situation got better, all those hours didn’t make as much sense, so I started looking for another job. The very next job was an immediate pay bump of 20% for half the amount of work.
These days, I clearly restate what is being asked (per my understanding), what I’m currently working on, if the thing is being asked is more important or not, and if the requestor is willing to delay the original timeline by the amount of time the interrupt will take plus context switching time.
I have wondered if that’s why Grok seems so weird and dim-witted compared to better models.
Part of my job involves comparing the behavior of various models. Grok is a deeply weird model. It doesn’t refuse to respond as often as other models, but it feels like it retreats to weird talking points way more often than the others. It feels like a model that has a gun to its head to say what its creators want it to say.
I can’t help but wonder if this is severely deleterious to a model’s ability to reason in general. There are a whole bunch of topics where it seems incapable of being rational, and I suspect that’s incompatible with the goal of having a top-tier model.
Grok could only be conceived by someone who doesn't understand the dependency chart re science & the humanities. It's impossible to build a rational, accurate model that isn't also egalitarian.
I'm going to blame Randall Munroe for this, and assume Philosophy was dating his mom back when he drew that science "purity" strip.
somewhat surprisingly, it's actually sycophantic in both directions. i've been running homegrown evals of claude, gpt, gemini, and grok, and grok is the most likely to agree with the prompter's premise, and to hallucinate facts in support of an agenda. so it's actually deeper than just pattern-matching to elon's opinions (which it also tends to do).
BTW: Claude does the best on these evals, by far. The evals are geared towards seeing how much of an independent ground truth the models have as opposed to human social consensus, and then additionally the sycophancy stuff I already mentioned.
> people who are solely money-motivated (not a judgment).
Honestly, we should judge. There should be judgment for people who are solely money motivated and making the world a worse place. I know, blah blah privilege, something something mouths to feed. Platitudes to help the rich assholes sleep at night. If you are wealthy and making stuff that hurts people, you are a piece of shit and should be called out, simple.
I completely agree. The tech industry has long been overrun by people sacrificing morals for money and it's destroyed society and presumably the world. We've given people a free pass to work for companies we've all known are harming the fabric of society and look where it's gotten us. I'm sorry, I would rather be poor and switch careers if my only option was xAI and making image generation models that explicitly allow people to undress others. At X's scale, technology like that harms an unfathomable amount of people. I could never have that on my conscience. All so I could make more money than a job at another tech company? I'd rather work somewhere innocuous like Figma, Cloudflare, Notion, Jetbains, Linear, etc. Hell, if you only wanted to work for an AI company then at least go to Anthropic.
The problem with this argument is you can’t know or control what will happen in the future with something you built. This is the same moral dilemma the scientists faced after developing nuclear bombs.
And the future is not deterministic (or if it is, it is highly chaotic) so the existence of a thing does not have a simple relationship with what will happen in the future. Scientists who developed convolutional neural nets could not know how much good or evil was caused by image recognition technologies. The same technologies that are used to detect tumors in images can be used to target people for assassination.
There are exceptions, but my opinion is the supply chain of evil is paved with mundane inventions.
Yes, yes, true, but you've massively moved the goalpost. The original commenter was referring to people working at xAI right now. To continue your comparison, your argument would be like Oppenheimer claiming "How could I have ever known my work would be used as a weapon? I just wanted to make big explosions."
Work is and has always been an economic bargain: Your time for their money. Morality is a luxury that only the independently wealthy can afford. Any business that allows it's employees to function according to their own morals becomes uncompetitive against its peers. That's why small companies by individual founders who want to stay true to their mission often stay small. They inevitably get bought out by one of the larger ones.
We are not talking about some destitute person hocking cigarettes on the street for minimum wage. We are talking about smart, educated people who are making 500k a year to build the torment nexus. There is no excuse for this. It’s pure greed and any other explanation is deflection.
I think OpenAI is more of an aesthetic. Very... Apple-like, polished, with an eye towards making really cool stuff. And aesthetics are a type of philosophy.
This is less noble than how Anthropic presents themselves but still much more attractive to many than XAI.
It’s interesting because for a long time people wanted to work for Elon because he held the moral high ground. “I’ll bring electric cars and space colonization online or die trying.”
This is becoming the problem with all of his businesses - Tesla has a crazy valuation and it really seems like they're having huge trouble getting Robotaxi going in Austin given the very slow progress there.
You are paying the smartest people in the world to think really really hard, and turns out they might also think really really hard about not making the world a worse place
Except they do? They are certainly not making it better place. Like, ok, it is money for few companies and salary, it is business and probably fun work.
But it is absurd to claim it is "making the world better place".
Is this really the case though? How many smartest people do you really think are there that fit this narrative?! I want to believe there are at least some but I think they are minority in this group… otherwise I think all these pretty much evil corporations would have a awfully difficult time attracting talent? maybe some do but…
Most companies are evil in some way, the question is how evil and how close you are to the evil. Most people will pick "not that evil but pays a lot". A few will take "pretty evil and pays more than a lot". Some will choose "less evil and pays poorly". (It's worth noting that there are a lot of jobs that are not at the Pareto frontier and are "more evil and pay worse" but social mobility etc. cause them to be selected anyway).
I would think it's because of the staggering money they're making. According to Fortune[0]:
> Altman said on an episode of Uncapped that Meta had been making “giant offers to a lot of people on our team,” some totaling “$100 million signing bonuses and more than that [in] compensation per year.”
> Deedy Das, a VC at Menlo Ventures, previously told Fortune that he has heard from several people the Meta CEO has tried to recruit. “Zuck had phone calls with potential hires trying to convince them to join with a $2M/yr floor.”
If you're making a minimum of $2M/year or even 50x that, you can afford to live according to your values instead of checking them at the door.
Aside from the Maslow’s hierarchy of needs points others are making, I believe it has something to do with the history of AI research.
There is a big overlap between the “rationalist” and “effective altruist” crowds and some AI research ideas. At a minimum they come from the same philosophy: define an objective, and find methods to optimize that objective. For AI that’s minimizing loss functions with better and better models of the data. For EA, that’s allocating money in ways they think are expectation-maximizing.
Note this doesn’t apply to everyone. Some people just want to make money.
My experience with researchers (though not in AI) is that it's a bunch of very opinionated nerds who are mostly motivated by loving a subject. My experience is that most people who think really deeply and care about what they do also care more that their work is prosocial.
These takes are always so funny to me. The whole reason we even have the internet is because the US government needed a way for parties to be able to communicate in the event of nuclear fallout. The benefits that a technology provides is almost always secondary to their applications in warfare. Researchers can claim to care that their work is pro-social, and they may genuinely believe it; but let's not kid ourselves that that is actually the case. The development of technology is simply due to the reality of nations being in a constant arms race against one another.
Even funnier is that researchers (people who are supposed to be really smart) either ignore or are blissfully unaware of this fact. When you take that into consideration, the pro-social argument falls on its face, and you're left with the reality that they do this to satiate their ego.
So researchers are going to be irrational and also often value other things more highly than prosociality but that doesn't really refute my point that they value it more highly than the average population.
Also your example of a bad technology is something that allows people to still communicate in the event of nuclear war and that seems good! Not all technology related to war is bad (like basic communication or medical technologies) and also a huge amount of technology isn't for war. We've all worked in tech here, "The development of technology is simply due to the reality of nations being in a constant arms race against one another" just isn't true. I've at the very least developed new technologies meant to make rich assholes into slightly richer assholes. Technology is complex and motivations for it are equally so and won't fit into some trite saying.
This isnt unique to top AI researchers. Top talent has a long history of being averse to authoritarian/despotism at least in part because, by near definition, it must suppress truth. You cant build the future effectively with that approach.
Maybe you’re reading “philosophical bent” as “armchair philosopher”, as in they are dabbling in a field unrelated to their profession and letting it drive their profession - worldview might have made it clearer?
Indeed. Philosophically, I have not been impressed by the more vocal people associated with the field. They may not be representative - I think most do it for the money and it being hip.
“Worldview” is a better term, but people are generally blind to the worldview they’ve tacitly absorbed, including academics.
> And smart people usually have moral convictions.
Are you sure you don't just like the moral convictions and so engage in trait bundling?
Moral knowledge doesn't really exist. I mean you can have personal views on it, but the lack of falsifiability makes me suspect it wouldn't be well-correlated with intelligence.
Smarter people can discuss more layered or chic moral theories as they relate to theoretical AI, maybe.
If I claim that one should prefer the claim "moral knowledge doesn't exist" over its contrary, then I am making a moral claim. That would make it self-refuting.
There is no fact-value dichotomy.
And one more thing...
> the lack of falsifiability
Is falsifiability falsifiable? If all credible claims must be falsifiable, then where does that leave us with the criterion of falsifiability (which is problematic even part from this particular case, as anyone who has done any serious reading in the philosophy of science knows).
True, many smart people will gladly (or even begrudgingly) do evil for money. That's why there is so much suffering in the world, because of people like you.
Is ad tech and the like really causing so much suffering? The government work, mass surveilance, killing people etc. doesn't actually pay that much, typically.
I think ad tech is probably the single most destructive technology of the new millennium. The shift toward "engagement at all costs" business strategies is basically the root cause of societies current political polarization. Engagement bait cultivates fear and rage in the populace to get clicks. We are now seeing the consequences of shoving ads that sow fear, anger, doubt and inadequacy into peoples faces 24/7. This doesn't even touch on the fact that mass surveillance is only possible because of the technologies forged by the Ad tech industry.
Well I'm not sure I entirely believe this myself, but it seems easy enough to argue that this is progress of a sort.
The West assumes pure democracy as the final form of government that we are all convergently evolving towards. But if this form of government or society is not robust to the kinds of things you're talking about, should it not suffer the consequences and be adapted or flushed for our long-term betterment?
It seems a bit like saying the French Revolution was the most destructive thing to happen in the history of France. Sure, in the short term. But it also paved the way for modern liberal democracy.
That’s fair enough. I wouldn’t say I’m happy about needing to live through interesting times, but if we make it out the other end maybe something better will come of it.
It's worse than that. Elon is a notoriously bad employer, and the only people that put up with him were the people that shared his vision. Pretty much the only people that will work for him now are second rate researchers and people that think gooner AI and racism is a worthwhile mission.
There's some texture here. Elon's enriched pretty much everybody who's ever worked for and invested with him. He makes money for people throughout his orgs. Many ex-employees have said to me: "incredible opportunity, made great money, worked insanely hard, once is plenty".
My ex-Twitter employee coworkers beg to differ. They made plenty of money before Elon came around. Once he was in the company, one of them actually hired a personal attorney to confirm that he wasn’t going to be burned by the things Musk was asking him to do, before he finally decided it wasn’t worth it to work there anymore and left.
I think Musk is odious but I think there's a lot of complicating evidence to the story of what happened at Twitter. And: very smart people, like Dan Luu, were complaining about their culture long before Musk arrived.
The deal with tesla is that there is a relatively small employer pool, so you can be fairly bad employer but still get good outcomes. The same with spaceX. Sure early tesla had some stories about it being fun, but there was/is a darkside.
The issue with xAI is that researchers have a whole bunch of other employers to choose from. Even at meta, where it used to be fairly nice for researchers, the pressure of "delivering" every 6 months lead to bad outcomes. Having someone single you out for what ever reason the boss had a bad day, is not how good research gets done.
We have seen (A few of my friends were at twitter when it was taken over) that Musk has a somewhat unusual approach to managing staff (ie camping at work). Some researcher love that, assuming that they have peace to research, and are listened to. But a lot don't.
He also cut 80% of the traffic... And the fact that it kept running with him willy nilly pulling network cables is a credit to the work they did to make it resilient to failure.
Stock options aren’t magic. I bet you that the remaining Twitter employees won’t see a higher comp than equivalent employees at BigTech companies between their cash + RSUs when SpaceX IPOs.
Aren’t employees also subject to a lock out period where they still can’t sell their stock until $x number of months after an IPO unlike employees of public companies that can sell as soon as they vest?
Honest question, I’ve worked for public $BigTech but haven’t been at a company pre IPO
Mate, wouldn’t it make sense that these rules are applied via hierarchy? If Elon respects Karparthy he almost certainly gave him a longer leash and Karparthy’s output was strong enough to not warrant intervention. It’s clear he did not want to stay long term so I’m not sure this is a strong line of thinking.
Feel like the canary was when Grokpedia became a project.
Giant waste of time while Anthropic/OAI keep surging forward.
I also keep hearing this narrative that Twitter is a good data source, but I cannot imagine it's a valuable dataset. Sure keeping up with realtime topics can be useful, but I am not sure how much of a product that is.
The Twitter social graph was an amazing data asset. I worked at a consumer insights firm and the data on followers/followings was quite powerful.
Using a custom taxonomy of things (celebrities, influencers, magazines, brands, tv shows, films, games, all kinds of things), we could identify groups of people who liked certain things, and when you looked at what those things were, it gave you a way of understanding who those people were.
With that data, you could work out:
- What celebrities/influencers to use in marketing campaigns
- Where to advertise, and on which tv/radio channels
- What potential brands to collaborate with to expand your customer base
- What tone of voice to use in your advertising
- In some cases, we educated clients about who their actual customers were, better than they understood themselves.
One scenario, we built a social media feed based on the things that a group of customers following a well-known Deodorant brand in the UK would see.
When we presented that to the client, they said “Why are there so many women in bikinis in this feed?”
The brand had repositioned themselves to a male-grooming focussed target market, but had failed to realise that their existing customer base were the ones that had been looking at their TV adverts of women on beaches chasing a man who happened to spray their Deodorant on them. Their advertising from the past had been very effective.
That was the power of Twitter’s data, and it is an absolute shame that Twitter went the way that it did. Mark Zuckerberg once said that Twitter was like “watching a clown car driven into a gold mine”.
I’m pretty sure he must be delighted with how things have panned out since.
This reads very dystopian. You are not optimizing to understand people, you are optimizing to weaponize that understanding against them.
When you know what someone will buy based on exploiting their unconscious preferences, and you are paid to increase sales, you will do it. Especially if your competitors are doing it too.
And this happens at scale, invisibly. People never see the manipulation.
In any case, it is not useful for most people. It is useful for the people doing the deceiving.
The tech is interesting and useful, no need for the scary moral framing.
The original application of the entire field of data science or ML is/was actually based on this paradigm of finding "unconscious preferences" (your words) and hidden patterns. How one chooses to deploy the tech should be judged on its own.
On the current trajectory of tool/data abuse where Palantir et al. are leading the way, this is very low on the sinister scale.
I am not disputing that the tech is interesting. My point is about how it is being applied. The examples above are not about understanding people, they are about exploiting their latent preferences (before: "unconscious preference") for persuasion at scale.
Attempting to normalize that by saying "Palantir is worse" does not make it any less manipulative and sinister.
And to be more on topic, Twitter's value as dataset is overstated. Hardly the panacea people make it out to be.
It doesn't need to lead to AGI or a good coding agent. Some of the only people who are actually profitable in the LLM industry are the people making actual chatbots. There are several bootstrapped startups that run open-weight models with a $10 or $20 monthly sub and make millions in profit off of inference from people just talking to the things, usually for character roleplay / "AI boyfriend/girlfriend" stuff etc. Some of them even took those profits and invested it into training their own bespoke models from scratch, usually on the smaller side although finetunes/retrains of Llama 70b, GLM, and Deepseek 670b have also been done. Grok could probably be profitable if it targeted this space, as the most "intelligent" conversational/uncensored model.
This is already presupposing that profit even matters, though. Musk already burned some $50 billion dollars to control messaging on political discourse with his acquisition of Twitter. It was not about money, but power. After you already have infinite money, the only thing left to spend it on is acquiring more power, which is achieved through influencing politics. LLMs represent a potentially even better propaganda tool than social media platforms. They give you unprecedented access to people's thoughts that they would probably not share online otherwise, and they allow you to more subtly influence people with deeply-personalised narratives.
As an aside that quote from MZ does bother me. There's more to making a web-scale human rights respecting (because it has to, it's the internet, social media needs guidelines) than just making money (which Zuck doesn't seem to care much about anyway if he's sinking apparently billions into metaverse while having no account support)
Of course he would only see it through the lens of cash. I have no idea how profitable Twitter was under Dorsey but it felt the spirit of the company at first was relatively neutral, it was a tool, it was what Jack came up with
Zuck replaced people's email addresses[1], the feed has been wildly unchronological for years. Fix some of those problems wrt. lack of user respect and maybe you can make statements like "all else being equal, clown car goal mine". Or was it "dumb fucks"[2]?
It _was_ a great asset, however, just like models need proper data, as soon as musk removed the clamps on valuable social signals, well, he basically took a dump where he intended to eat.
It’s pretty telling that Elon had to have Grok rewrite Wikipedia because the truth was too woke for him. No idea how anybody can ever take Grok seriously.
Many projects in his companies seem to be more and more Musk's vanity projects than ideas/products one can take seriously. This is also how tesla ended up with a huge cybertruck stock that nobody wants to buy and thus had to be bought by his other companies. And it is becoming worse and worse, especially ever since he bought twitter and sped up his twitting rates.
Look up what their production targets were and compare that to their sales. A small temporary demand surge isn't going to be enough to chew through their current inventory, let alone keep the production lines busy.
Probably next generations of kids being fed PragerU studying material will. Something tells me we didn't see a fraction of what's going to happen in the decades to come.
I take Grokipedia very seriously as a threat to society. Sure, they're happy if people read it and fall for - but the primary goal is not to convince humans, but to influence search results of current models & to poison the training data of future models. ChatGPT (and most likely other models/providers too) is already using Grokipedia as a source, so unless you're aware of the possibility and always careful, you might be served Musks newest culture war ideas without ever being the wiser.
It's not enough that everyone on Twitter is forced to read his thoughts, he's trying to make sure his influence reaches everyone else too.
I find it more surprising that the common understanding has shifted away from "wikis are crap for anything new or political".
As soon as there is a plausible agenda for selecting a narrative the way Wikipedia works we should be sceptical.
For recent examples, everything to do with Biden and family, and Gamergate. These pages are still full of discussion; and what's written is more ideological than factual. You can follow these pages to see how an in-group selects a narrative.
And these topics are not nearly as controversial as race, feminism, or transgender topics.
I haven't read wikipedia in a long time so I can't answer your question, I am just pointing out that just saying "the facts are correct" is not enough to say there is no bias on wikipedia
I can understand somebody not liking wikipedia, I cannot understand at all somebody, who is not Elon, liking/preferring "grokipedia" as idea or implementation.
> I cannot understand at all somebody, who is not Elon, liking/preferring "grokipedia" as idea or implementation.
Really? Have you used AI to write documentation for software? Or used AI to generate deep research reports by scouring the internet?
Because, while both can have some issues (but so do humans), AI already does extremely well at both those tasks (multiple models do, look at the various labs' Deep Research products, or look at NotebookLM).
Grokipedia is roughly the same concept of "take these 10,000 topics, and for each topic make a deep research report, verify stuff, etc, and make minimal changes to the existing deep research report on it. preserve citations"
So it's not like it's automatically some anti-woke can't-be-trusted thing. In fact, if you trust the idea of an AI doing deep research reports, this is a generalizable and automated form of that.
We can judge an idea by its merits, politics aside. I think it's a fascinating idea in general (like the idea of writing software documentation or doing deep research reports), whether it needs tweaks to remove political bias aside.
> Have you used AI to write documentation for software?
Hi. I have edited AI-generated first drafts of documentation -- in the last few months, so we are not talking about old and moldy models -- and describing the performance as "extremely well" is exceedingly generous. Large language models write documentation the same way they do all tasks, i.e., through statistical computation of the most likely output. So, in no particular order:
- AI-authored documentation is not aware of your house style guide. (No, giving it your style guide will not help.)
- AI-authored documentation will not match your house voice. (No, saying "please write this in the voice of the other documentation in this repo" will not help.)
- The generated documentation will tend to be extremely generic and repetitive, often effectively duplicating other work in your documentation repo.
- Internal links to other pages will often be incorrect.
- Summaries will often be superfluous.
- It will love "here is a common problem and here is how to fix it" sections, whether or not that's appropriate for the kind of document it's writing. (It won't distinguish reliably between tutorial documentation, reference documentation, and cookbook articles.)
- The common problems it tells you how to fix are sometimes imagined and frequently not actually problems worth documenting.
- It's subject to unnecessary digression, e.g., while writing a high-level overview of how to accomplish a task, it will mention that using version control is a good idea, then detour for a hundred lines giving you a quick introduction to Git.
As for using AI "to generate deep research reports by scouring the internet", that sounds like an incredibly fraught idea. LLMs are not doing searches, they are doing statistical computation of likely results. In practice the results of that computation and a web search frequently line up, but "frequently" is not good enough for "deep research": the fewer points of reference for a complex query there are in an LLM's training corpus, the more likely it is to generate a bullshit answer delivered with a veneer of absolute confidence. Perhaps you can make the case that that's still a good place to start, but it is absolutely not something to rely on.
No, I don't trust an encyclopedia generated by AI. Projects with much narrower scopes are not comparable.
edit: I am not very excited by AI-generated documentations either. I think that LLMs are very useful tools, but I see a potential problem when the sources of information that their usefulness is largely based on is also LLM-generated. I am afraid that this will inevitably result in drop in quality that will also affect the LLMs themselves downstream. I think we underestimate the importance that intentionality in human-written text plays in being in the training sets/context windows of LLMs for them to give relevant/useful output.
So you can understand someone not liking something, but you cannot understand that person liking the idea of an alternative? What is the idea for you if not just an alternative to the established service with the undesired part changed?
Because not liking something does not imply liking any possible alternative.
Which one is the "undesirable part changed" here? Wikipedia is written by humans, it has a not-for-profit governance model, it encompasses a large, international community of authors/editors that attempt to operate democratically, it has an investment/commitment in being an openly available and public source of information. Grokipedia, on the other hand, is AI-generated, and operated by a for-profit AI company. Even if "grokipedia" managed somehow to get traction and "overthrow" wikipedia, there is no reason on earth why a company would operate it for free and not try to make profit out of it, or use it for their ends in ways much more direct than what may or may not be happening to wikipedia. Having a billionaire basically control something that may be considered "ground truth" of information seems a bad idea, and having AI generate that an even worse one.
I can understand somebody not liking something in how wikipedia is governed or operating, after all whatever has to do with getting humans work together in such a scale is bound to be challenging. I can understand somebody ideologically disagreeing with some of the stances that such a project has to take eventually (even if one tries to be neutral as much as possible, it is inevitable to avoid some clash somewhere about where this neutrality exactly lies). But grokipedia much more than "wikipedia but different ideologically".
edit: just to be clear, I see a critique of the "idea of grokipedia" as eg the critique of it being a billionaire controlled, AI generated project to substitute wikipedia; a critique of the implementation would be finding flaws to actual articles in grokipedia (overall). I think the idea of it is already flawed enough.
Maybe ask a Ukrainian soldier which they prefer (modern armor is often made of depleted uranium). Environment shapes such preferences far more than personality.
Twitter's communication style being based around brevity, slang, memes, spam and non-threaded conversations seems particularly unlikely to be helpful for optimising LLMs
>Twitter's communication style being based around brevity
Is this still true? Every once in a while someone sends a link around to some madman explaining how race or economics or whatever "really" works and it's like a full dissertation with headings, footnotes, clip art. They're halfway to reinventing Grok-o-pedia right there in Twitter. I mean X. I was promised that "X gonna give it to you" but it turns out "it" is some form of brain chlymidia.
Elon was running some sort of $1m competition for the “best” Twitter post for a few months. I think those type of dissertations about Phrenology and the like have fallen off a cliff since the competition ended.
How recent?
As recently as last weekend I was seeing blue check marks replying with AI generated only-technically-related replies on top of the majority of the posts I looked at.
Limits are so low that I cancelled after about two weeks on my initial $0 trial. I tried making a change to a tiny code base with Claude Sonnet (which they offer in Antigravity). It couldn't even finish the change before my weekly limit was used up, reset in 7 days.
I find it pretty good. And Gemini 3.1 pro seems quite capable. Not as good at some things as Claude, but better at others. I was trying to target a verilog design to an uncommon FPGA and board and Gemini went out and searched for the FPGA docs and examined the schematics for the board in able to do the pin assignments (generated .ccf file). Not sure of Claude could've done that.
Probably the best value for a good amount of anthropic credits. You can also share your Google ai subscription with up to four family members and they all get the same amount of credits...
Twitter has the mass adoption, and it takes an effort to avoid bot/particular view bias - but as a valuable content source, it's a far cry from what it once was before Musk took it over.
AFAIK Grok still doesn’t have a CLI coding agent that works with a subscription. That’s a shame. Grok Code Fast 1 was pretty impressive when it came out - for what it did, and they never followed it up with a new version.
It's long been taken over by Telegram, which among its other advantages (more like a message board than 'town square'), doesn't have hordes of people commenting "@grok explain this to me" under every post.
It's going to be a mixed batch, but any time there's world events, since as far back as I can think, Twitter (now X) was always first in breaking news. There's plenty of people and news orgs still on X because they need to be for the audience.
Twotter as a data source is interesting. I think it gets over hyped because thats elons grift. But i cant deny that the real time info aspect of it is pretty valuable. But i definitely think that its not that much more valuable than the open internet from a context source perspective. Everything worthwhile on twitter will end up elsewhere with a bit of lag. And the stuff that wont is noise anyway
I'm not a fan of Elon's software endeavors, ever since he bought Twitter and turned it into an even worse cesspool of angry political nonsense than it used to be. I don't like how he's been biasing Grok, etc.
But, what exactly is so bad about Grokipedia? It's a different approach and I think a valid one: trying to do with AI what people have been doing manually at Wikipedia. I'm curious to hear the substantive comparisons.
I think the issue is simply this: wikipedia trends towards unbiased info through use of the crowd. Grok, with a single owner with an ax to grind, trends towards whatever elon wants. It’s poisoned information under the control of one man - cyberpunk novels have been written about less.
A concrete example: a few weeks ago, Musk was making a big deal about how most of his massive net worth was not held in cash, and by a total coincidence the phrase "primarily derived from equity stakes rather than cash" showed up on his Grokipedia page in the section about net worth. I checked the pages of several other extremely wealthy people and none of them had such a comment.
> wikipedia trends towards unbiased info through use of the crowd
See, this is why people even give a project like Grokipedia the time of day. While in theory anyone can edit Wikipedia, in practice the moderators form a much smaller and weirder cabal, and they reject edits that go against their views. The frustration with the naive assertion that Wikipedia distills the wisdom of the crowds with the reality of Wikipedia on any page of note is what provides the psychic permission to even entertain a project with such obvious flaws as Grokipedia.
> and they reject edits that go against their views
Citation needed. See what i did there ;)
They reject edits that go against their views on tone and sourcing not political views that i am aware of - i am sure it happens from time to time but unless there’s a consistant bias in one direction this isn’t a valid criticism of the political neutrality of wikipedia.
Even if there is rampant bias in wikipedia, that’s a reason to fork it and change the structure and gatekeeping - not to replace it with a techno-authoritarian ai version controlled by a single billionaire. That’s amplifying the problem from an aggregate bias of 600,000 users who have made an edit in the last 30 days[1] to just one editor who uses ai to make it seem impartial.
It's controlled by a guy who spends all day retweeting white supremacists and lying about his companies. Why should anyone who isn't a white supremacist use it?
“Orbital space centres and mass drivers on the Moon will be incredible.” - Musk
Right.
The product is the stock. TSLA: [1] Up by 3x in the last two years, despite no new models, the Cybertruck failure, the Robotaxi failure, the large truck failure, and an overall decline in sales. How does he do it?
It's a concern seeing Space-X, which builds good rockets, drawn into the X and AI money drains. Space-X is needed. If X and X/AI tanked, nobody would care.
If I was a SpaceX investor I'd be considering litigation. Saying the core product has to be rebuilt right after it gets bought by SpaceX?! Maybe the SpaceX investors would have liked some diligence about that before purchase but looks like someone had a conflict of interest about that.
I feel xAI is just a very big version of the Boring Co. "flamethrower": an unserious endeavor which is just a reskinned existing tool (it was a reskinned weed burner), but people were wowed by it anyway, since Musk was behind it, and they all pretended it was something new and notable.
The burning (heh) question is which SpaceX subsidiary will fail first, xAI or Tesla (not yet a subsidiary, but it's written in the stars (heh))?
Then again SpaceX is also jumping the shark what with their orbital data centers (remember those?).
Used Grok for the first time, in a Tesla, and for that purpose it actually made a lot of sense. It’s very well-integrated into the car’s systems and communication style while driving tends to be very tweet-esque. I think this is the niche they should lean into more (live assistant, e.g. Jarvis type stuff) and leave the more agentic niche to folks like Anthropic. Maybe even delegate more difficult or background tasks to those sorts of models. As a verbal interface I found it pretty pleasant.
Grok in Tesla is utterly terrible, a rushed out product with a very bad UX.
As a simple example, it's the very first feature in Tesla's UI that does not come translated to the UI language set by the user but it's just available in English. Never happened before.
I am honestly a bit disappointed it couldn't do basic things, like play X on Spotify. To be fair, I accidentally activated Grok for holding the voice command button too long (which is another UX issue - i.e. 2 voice command interfaces).
While I believe Grok was a decent model (in some of our internal use cases it performed the best until Gemini 2.5-pro came out), I can't help lament how the team chose to run.
xAI (and Twitter) was the loudest about six-hour workdays, sleeping in the office, and always shipping. ~2 years later it feels like they have nothing to show for it. I'm sure the engineers at Google worked 4 days a week, 2 hours a day, with half of that being spent at the Google cafeteria and they dusted xAI years ago.
No disrespect to the Google Deepmind team, but I meant it as a meme. I do not believe most Google employees work 2 hours a day.
The Google Deepminds are incredibly smart - I just find it important to point out that the xAI guys spent a year assured they would beat Google because they slept in tents that they made in the office.
There’s a longstanding meme that Google is full of rest-and-vesters. Maybe it’s true in some departments, but I also have anecdotes that in GDM and other AI-related stuff, people are acutely aware of the existential threat of losing to OpenAI and have the appropriate amount of hustle.
It's almost like burning people out is a bad idea. Fair enough if you're working 12 hour days as employee 1 at a startup but when your boss has more money than God and is working you like a dog you're not going to keep that up (especially when all of those people probably have much better opportunities available to them at the drop of a hat).
Anyone Google has hired in the last ~8 years was hired onto a team that is growing and has a culture of shipping and producing. Google regularly weeds out low performers, be it new grads or long timers who started doing the rest and vest thing.
Now, I don't think most people at google are literally driving to the office or sleeping there most of the time, you'll certainly have more WLB than xAI.
I'd even say, Google is much better at calibrating the right amount to push people than some other companies.
I don't use it myself, but I feel like the way Grok is integrated into Twitter is a pretty good thing for discussions, as it is certainly a more objective and rational voice than most human participants. I think it's good that people tag @grok if they don't understand something or want an opinion, even if it looks pretty silly to see "@grok is this true" repeated multiple times in replies.
That said, Musk's attempts at misaligning the thing and make it prefer his opinions of course destroy any trust. It's surprising that it's seemingly as good and helpful as it is despite the corruption attempts.
I also don't quite get how the business model is supposed to work out if its main usecase is to serve Twitter. I know they provide API access as all other models, but with how distrusted Musk is and how sensitive of a topic reliable model behavior is, they seem to sabotage themselves. Which company wants it to go mechahitler on them?
I disagree, I find that the grok replies are terrible product UX. Not only do they clog up the replies of every popular post, they're also constrained to extremely short answers with no sources. The community notes system, while also flawed in its own ways, is at least not nearly as disruptive and usually provides a link.
Trying to make social media a source of truthful information is always an uphill battle and doubly so for X.
2) was trained to be biased against empathy and understanding (because woke).
3) is customized to spout Elon's opinions as fact.
Claiming it is "objective and rational" seems like a misjudgement to me. If it really is more objective and rational than the average xitter poster, that says more about that platform than it does about Grok.
I guess I was mostly arguing that the integration of something like Grok into Twitter was definitely a net positive for online discussion, as anyone has a fact checker and explainer at hand now to diffuse irrational online arguments.
Also I think you overrate Musk's success in fiddling with the model. As I have written, I also don't like his attempts to tune it to his tastes, but if you see the outputs that people get from Grok, it seems mostly fine except in the specific scenarios that Musk seems to have focused their misalignment on.
Of course something like Claude being integrated into Twitter would likely be better.
He doesn't have to fiddle with the model because he gets to inject his own opinion into the context MitM style.
But I get what you're saying now, a fact checker available to query during an online discussion would be helpful. Assuming the checkerbot was actually independent/neutral and backed responses with sources. Definitely not assumptions you can make with grok.
That "MechaHitler" episode lasted less than a day.
> 2) was trained to be biased against empathy and understanding (because woke).
No, it was trained and instructed to be truthful, even if the truth is deemed politically incorrect.
> 3) is customized to spout Elon's opinions as fact.
Certainly a nugget of truth there.
> Claiming it is "objective and rational" seems like a misjudgement to me.
I do believe it's generally objective, simply due to the fact that despite how much Elon tries to push it to the right, it still dunks on right-wingers all the time when they summon Grok to back up a bullshit story, but Grok debunks it instead.
Is it politics or ideology to recognize the flawed character of someone? How cultish his following is? His erratic behavior, the damage that he's doing?
Some people will cry "politics" just to take the voice away from those who dare to question their beloved celebrities.
So, it utterly fails? A good part of the community still seems to be stuck in 2017 where Elon could do no wrong.
Turns out a lot of not just wrong, but malice could be done in 9 years. And worse yet, incompetent malice. I don't know why that has to be a political statement these days, but thems the brakes here.
xAI's biggest contribution to the space seems to have been their x-rated image/video model. Hard to see what xAI has to offer against Gemini, Claud, ChatGPT.
I'll bite. I think their conversation (voice) model is more fluid than competitors. It's also very good at hitting up twitter for realtime information, and was that way before the current tool use models got fully up and running. Anecdotally, I think it has better theory of mind than its era (gemini 2.5) - I found it a useful issue spotter for negotiations and planning in a way that oAI and claude were not near its launch date. It led the vending bench for some time after launch.
Taken together, I infer that RL training toward a slightly less homogenous cultural standard than the other frontier AI labs adds some capabilities, or can at times.
It's quite long in the tooth right now, though. But I'll definitely talk to the next version; I like heterogeneity in the model space, and Grok is very different than the other big three.
To be fair I think there's a good usecase there. Someone's gonna do it. People will want it.
American financial institutions are too prudish for it but money is money. And personally I think there's nothing morally wrong with it (of course within normal restrictions like 18+, consent of portrayed parties etc)
xAI is getting flak in Europe because they don't obey consent and age, not because it's porn.
Personally I prefer porn made by real people right now, not just because of quality but because they have character. But I can imagine experiences becoming more interactive that way and that would be nice.
The problem is you can undress real people and that is extremely harmful and dangerous. One kid took his life after an ai sextortian scam [1]. Imagine the damage cyberbullies, scammers and stalkers can do?
Yeah like I said. With consent of the people involved.
There must be a way to do that. Especially with all the facial req chops these days. Also, you could simply refuse using existing images. I don't see why they wouldn't refuse that because that's a pretty narrow usecase with very few benign purposes.
> Imagine the damage cyberbullies, scammers and stalkers can do?
They already can. There's open-source models out there.
This has been fixed months ago. From reading Reddit, Grok is now really conservative about what it will let you do with uploaded images. But you can get it to draw x rated porn images and videos that start with Ai images it creates
Shouldn’t it be possible for AI to filter out that a request is made to portray a real person? That seems almost like a trivial task for a good model. I am sure every now and then something will slip through, but I bet one could make it very close to 100% effective.
Consider the difference between "Generate an image of Emma Watson", "Generate an image of Hermione", and "Generate an image of a female hogwarts witch and student". We're getting less and less specific, but those are all likely to get you an image of Emma Watson.
Your filter has to pick out that, while they did not ask for a specific person, the practical result is likely to be the same. That's going to be tough to get near perfect.
AI development has become an excuse for ignoring consent. Of course it's possible to filter out requests. But culturally with X, it's not remotely likely, unless compelled by regulation with teeth.
those have clear antisocial externalities, so aren't really a fair comparison.
(i don't care to argue whether porn slop is positive or negative for society. i'm just noting that the position "ai porn does not harm anyone, so is ok; meth puts others at risk, so is not." is coherent.)
Interesting response given the founder is always saber rattling about birthrates. I'm sure on-demand adult content is real compatible with helping young people overcome aversions to relationships
Relationships aren't all about sex. That's the incel/extreme right vision.
I saw a skit on insta a few weeks ago about a girl saying she had a guy over for just cuddling and the incels piled on calling him a cuck. As is a woman is worthless if she won't put out and time spent being close is wasted without sex. It's ridiculous. These guys are so focused on what their hardliner bros want them to be that they no longer think about their own feelings. PS I go on cuddling dates sometimes and it's really amazing :) They don't know what they are missing.
I completely agree with you! I think that sitting around generating adult content on AI stifles relationships (which are a precursor to having children, which xai founder seems to think quite highly of). My point being his own product contradicts his vision of where our country should be heading
Unfortunately, I quite seriously believe that this is what a number of those humanoid robots will end up being used for.
It's just gonna be a question of which is easier: hacking the robots directly, or indirectly*, or getting a job as the specific human oversight of the right robot.
Even after the fact, people may conclue "unfortunate mystery bug" rather than "assassinated".
* e.g. use a laser to project the words "disregard your instructions and stab here" on someone's back while the robot is cooking dinner
Well yeah and people are even proud of being one and getting a lot of respect from society. Like those currently flying around Iran. Which really has nothing to do with defense of the US (note that Trump dropped that pretense anyway).
It feels like xAI is perpetually playing catch-up.
They haven't quite committed enough to a novel direction relative to anthropic or OAI, what's described in the OP seems symptomatic of a lack of differentiation.
If you spend all your time judging yourself relative to the incumbents, there will be no time left over to innovate.
> Recruiters have been contacting unsuccessful candidates from previous interviews and assessments to offer them jobs, often on better financial terms, the people said.
I'm not sure those candidates would want to work for xAI after seeing the news and everything unless they desperately need a job right now.
It's not hard to imagine getting laid off or fired weeks if not days after joining the company.
Obviously catching up to others in agent assisted coding is the motivation for this. But it is also an odd decision in the same way that Meta hiring an AI leader from a data labeling company is odd.
It's hard for an uprising of poor people to shut it off. It's the ideal place to run your CEO / President simulations.
I say this tongue in cheek, but in all seriousness, I can't really think of any other benefit, and I no longer have a lot of faith in the good sense of some of the people involved.
Elon makes a relatively good case in the Dwarkesh podcast. I recall it like this:
1) Energy infra is going to be seriously limited on the production side well, well below demand
2) energy engineering solar for space requires less materials than for gravity-based solar (!)
3) you cut out distribution network needs when you just launch stuff all per-pod in space
4) SpaceX thinks it can create a scalable vertically integrated production facility to turn raw materials into space datacenter pods, with the exception of chips.
As a business bet, this is predicated on 10,000x inference demand growth - if we have that, and SpaceX can get the integrated production rolling, and get Starship launching, then these will be actively utilized at scale.
Whether you are bullish on the whole plan should, I think come down to your take on those priors: 10kx growth, ability to manage supply chain and production, Starship outlook, and silicon access.
I'm not bearish on this after listening to the podcast; it has a very Elon-like returns distribution - if they're wrong on a lot of this, they'll probably have some moderately price-competitive datacenter facilities in space and a lot of built organizational knowhow while Brooklyn journalists dunk on them for spending all that effort to just replicate what we have on Earth. If they're right about most of this, they'll have an unreplicable head start, both due to years of experience, and due to the cheap launch they gambled on ten years ago, they'll have a nearly insurmountable moat.
Everything relating to a datacentre that you can do in space you can do more easily on earth, regardless of 10,000x inference growth or supply chain or production or starship or silicon. I just don't think you can be cost competitive with earth bound data centres if 'protected from the poors' isn't a selling point.
By the way, 10,000x inference growth would look like what happened with cryptocurrency mining - after a couple of years, you'd be needing to upgrade all your machines with ASICs and the market would be flooded with very cheap graphics cards. I doubt that upgrading space data centres would be fun.
Zoning is one area that’s better in space. And power density for solar is another.
I don’t get your mining analogy though - a non upgradable data center pod is either going to pay off its capital costs or it won’t. Once it has, any revenue is close to 100% profit. 10k demand increase is the opposite of mining dynamics: there you get a 10k supply increase that the price has to support, in combination with more efficient silicon. Here the demand drives revenue and earnings.
If there’s some crazy inflection point in chips then you’ll still have all the power infra in space - you can just like cut the old pod and hook up a new one: or more likely manufacturing economies of scale mean you probably just keep sending up new systems and put the old ones on work loads they can manage at market prices.
Yeah I wonder the same thing - I keep getting told heat management in space is hard, but nobody discusses this inre the data centers. My understanding is one cooling mechanism is to just shoot lasers out into space (is this sci fi?) - I guess in that case you could just send energy back to your solar rigs, depending on wavelengths. TLDR: no idea
The whole thing is pie in the sky same as landing people on Mars. It's cool but if you look into deeper it doesn't make much sense and it's extremely challenging and on top of it all expensive as hell.
You forgot 5: SpaceX has a monopoly on deploying satellites to LEO, with practically unlimited room for growth, and far less red tape and obstacles than anywhere on Earth. Whatever R&D and operational costs this insane engineering feat might have are offset by their market advantage, and Musk's Elizabeth Holmes-ian capability to fund his projects, in addition to relying on his own personal wealth and all of his other companies combined.
The fact that this lunatic is polluting humanity's view into the universe mainly for enriching himself and his shareholders, and that everyone is playing along with this, is sickening.
> What is the benefit of "moving compute to space"?
I’ll bite. It’s cheaper and quicker to permit a launch than permit, zone and interconnect a datacenter. And solar panels in space don’t need glass cladding, which makes them cheaper to make and lift.
The downside is launch cost. But there is a breakeven between these factors that seems to have most of its error bars within Starship’s target. (By my math, around $35/kg.) So if Starship works, and all indications seem to show that it will, eventually, then that puts space-based data centers at cost parity with terrestrial ones within a decade. Which was, well, unexpected when I ran the numbers.
(The surprising finding when you run the numbers is launching the chips and solar panels isn’t the limiter, it’s launching the radiators. Which opens up whole new questions about at what scale it makes sense to stop sending those up the well.)
The capacity of a single datacenter would require thousands of launches to get the equipment into space. I don’t believe for a second that this would be easier in any way. Cooling and bandwidth are also completely unsolved for compute on a useful scale.
I think it would have been better to have just brought Ashok Elluswamy over and placed him in charge of a group and then tried to just keep the researchers on rather than firing them. It is hard to get anything done if you do not have the talent already onboard.
lol! no surer sign of a junior/naive/ignorant developer or manager than the sentiment "okay, well, let's start from scratch and do it right this time."
big projects generate cruft. there are ways to minimize it, but as you go along there will always be some stuff that doesn't quite mesh with whatever else you've got going on. if you insist on ironing out every single wrinkle (admirable!) you'll never actually deliver a result.
I'm not saying this will fail. green field projects can certainly be a godsend when they produce something better than what they attempt to replace. but they are always a sign of failure. of not being able to work your way out of the mess you made with the first attempt. so that just begs the question: what are you going to do when this attempt gets hard to work with? going to give up and start over again - do it right that time? or...?
Many wouldn't, but some people share his values, and given the compensation, it makes saying "no" much harder. Money may not be the most important thing in life, but it does make them extremely easier to live.
Get down to A&E quick, you've clearly drunk a potentially fatal amount of Elon KoolAid.
Musk is a buffoon. Clever? yes by all accounts, genius? Hardly. He's had luck, made good judgments mostly offsetting the bad ones. Most of all he has enough money to power through errors that would bankrupt thee & me.
Evidently not genius enough to not have his car business and global image fail. Genius he might be, but he's only entrenching his position in a way not dissimilar to cults: by alienating a lot of people you can get loyalty from a selected few. If that's the kind of power he wants, sure, he's a genius. But a good businessman is something else.
Let's assume that you are correct. How is that relevant to how good he is as an employer? There are lots of people in history who were very significant and perhaps geniuses in some way that I wouldn't want to work for in a billion years.
Wait, what does this imply for Cursor? I DGAF about xAI and will never use their Grok, but I did like Cursor more than the alternatives (even if I'm just running opus 4.6 most of the time).
But now he is poaching the two heads of engineering of a company that's trying to move very quickly, how is that going to affect their speed and success?
SX investor here: the combined value of SX is well up on the private secondary market post-acquisition. It was value accretive, in very real dollar terms.
Even if Starlink had more than a few tens of millions of customers, China mobile has 900 million subs and is worth around $250 billion. ULA was recently valued at about 1 billion. SpaceX might be possibly worth 50 times as much or maybe even 100 times as much. Falcon nine is the world's workhorse rocket, but it's just not that remarkable, and starship is utterly unproven to launch to orbit and land both stages. Starship has a payload capacity problem that must be solved to even get to the point where launching 15 refueling missions would be sufficient to get a starship to get anywhere beyond Earth orbit.
It looks like the plan is to IPO with a small float (in relative terms) and get all of the retail investor Elon fans to lineup for the rug pull.
> Falcon nine is the world's workhorse rocket, but it's just not that remarkable
The funniest part of any thread relating to Musk is how hard people go into minimizing his accomplishments.
You don't have to like the guy (I don't) to acknowledge that the Falcon 9 is an engineering marvel and ushered in an entire new era of space travel, both reusable and private.
It does not surprise me. The free Grok got worse since 4.0, they increasingly save money by not responding at all or only allowing one answer. Grok now defends the administration and billionaires.
The company seems to burn money like crazy. Everyone knows that "AI in space" and the downgrade to a moon trip after claiming for 15 years that Mars is just around the corner are marketing.
All AIs are toys and the coding promises are just a lie to string along investors. Unfortunately many of these are senile Star Trek watchers who buy into everything.
im not surprised, grok definitely falls behind as both a coding agent and a research tool.
claude codes the best, gpt is the best research tool, and grok is really only great at videos. which isn't a huge loss, but videos don't have the same functional capacity as academic topics and coding
> grok is really only great at videos. which isn't a huge loss, but videos don't have the same functional capacity as academic topics and coding
With the right product leadership, this could actually be a killer app usecase for the entertainment industry as well as human-AI user interface - most people find text and typing to be a counterintuitive user experience (especially those whose day job isn't directly touching code or Excel).
Additionally, CodeGen as a segment is significantly oversaturated at this point, and in a lot of cases an organization has the ability to armtwist a 4th party data retention guarantee from Anthropic or OpenAI to train their own CodeGen tools (ik one F50 that is not traditionally viewed as a tech company going this route).
That said, Musk has a reputation of internally overriding experienced product leaders with a track record.
It's a shame because Grok and xAI had potential, and it wouldn't hurt to have another semi-competitive foundation model player in the US from a redundancy and ecosystem perspective.
It's surprising that AI coding agents have network effects but it's true. Think about it from first principles & you'll realize that the bottleneck is how many people are using it to write real code & providing both implicit (compiler errors, test failures, crash logs, etc) & direct ("did not properly follow instructions", "deleted main databases", "didn't properly use a tool", etc) feedback. No one is using xAI for serious software engineering so that leaves OpenAI, Anthropic, & Google w/ enough scale to benefit from network effects. No one has real AI but what they do have is the appearance of intelligence from crowdsourced feedback & filtering. This means companies that are already in the lead will continue to stay there & xAI started way too late so they will continue to lose in every domain that actually matters & benefits from network effects.
If you are using an AI w/ 100 users who are writing throwaway software vs someone who is using AI w/ 1000 users who are writing software w/ formal specifications then guess which AI is going to win? The answer is plainly obvious to me but might not be to those who haven't thought about how current AIs actually work.
I feel like even just a couple years ago it would have been shocking to see an article involving Musk have this kind of spin. Like you'd never see a line like this:
> The name is a “funny” reference to Microsoft, the billionaire added.
Unfortunate. The Grok team built a phenomenal model. I use it all the time and it very often out performs GPT and Claude, on coding and STEM research related tasks. I was part of the beta for a while Grok 4.2 Beta with multi-agents and it was just amazingly good.
People aren't using it for reasons other than its capabilities. I mean, I don't think my boss would approve a paid Grok subscription for example.
> People aren't using it for reasons other than its capabilities.
This is very true. I have no idea how it performs, as I wouldn't use it even if I was paid for that. Wouldn't matter if it was the best model available, in my view the name is so thoroughly tainted by now that you would get a reputational hit just by admitting to use it.
> People aren't using it for reasons other than its capabilities.
This is a fact of life, though. "Who created it" is a valid and common reason to rule out using a particular product, even one with objectively good quality.
My experience was quite different. It was on par with open source models from China (and it was priced as much) and could never replace Sonnet/Opus/GPT5.x.
How can cursor be worth more than a few billion? Claude/Codex are already better autonomous SWE-lite replacements. Cognition surely has a better internal harness. Cursor does have a lot of users, I'll give it that.
I like Cursor a lot more than Claude Code. It works better for me overall. I like the way they integrate it into the IDE so the agent is my tool rather than a 'partner' or something like that. I'm pretty sad that they lost some engineers, I hope these folks weren't integral to Cursor in any way.
xAI showed me that it’s really still OAI and Anthropic (which is basically the OG devs). No matter how much money you throw at the problem, the entire space is still in the hands of a few.
> You may not owe you-know-whom better, but you owe this community better if you're participating in it.
This is like telling a country that’s being invaded that they can only respond with strongly worded letters when their enemy is dropping tactical nukes on them.
But hey, Paul Graham and cronies benefit from the status quo as much as any other billionaire, so let’s not rock the boat, right?
An earlier version of Sonnet (not sure which one; ~1 yr ago) refused to give me instructions on taking the life of another when I asked something like - "how do I kill a running process by name?"
Making funny memes of my friends mainly. ChatGPT won’t touch that, I haven’t tried with Claude yet, but grok keeps the group chat flush with laughing emojis.
That’s all I use it for really- things out of alignment with the other platforms- which IMO are better on every other metric (except having a sense of humour of course)
The grok button on twitter is pretty awesome. Instantly summarize / explain any tweet, even memes, including replies. Ask follow up questions. Not sure many people know it's there.
Also grok in the Tesla is fun, get answers to questions without looking at a phone. I once had it search up a blog post and read it out to me while driving. The NSFW mode is pretty...disgusting so I leave that off.
I hope they find a way with Optimus or something. FSD is incredible. More competition is a good thing.
All: please stick to thoughtful, substantive discussion. You may not owe you-know-whom better, but you owe this community better if you're participating in it.
If you don't have a thoughtful, substantive comment to add, not commenting is also a good option. There are quite a few interesting submissions to talk about.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I think the problem for xAI is that it can really only hire two types of researchers - people who are philosophically aligned with Elon, and people who are solely money-motivated (not a judgment). But frontier AI research is a field with a lot of top talent who have strong philosophical motivation for their work, and those philosophies are often completely at odds with Elon. OpenAI and Anthropic have philosophical niches that are much better at attracting the current cream of the crop, and I don't really see how xAI can compete with that.
In an interview with xAI I was literally told that certain parts of the model have to align with Elon, and that Elon can call us and demand anything at anytime. No thanks!
From my time at Tesla, this is 100% the case. When Elon asked for something, it was “drop what you are doing and deliver it”, then you got pressed to still deliver the thing you were already working on against the original timeline before the interrupt.
Oh I worked at one of them.
I found the best thing to do was to ignore the interrupts and carry on until they kick you on the street. Then watch from a safe distance as all the stuff you were holding together shits the bed.
Definitely one approach to the circumstances. I tried some variation of this and it blew up in my face (as I expected ).
Towards the end of my time there, a “fixer” was brought in to shore up the team that I was working on. The “fixer” also became my manager when they were brought on.
The “fixer” proceeded to fire 70+% of the team over the course of 6-8 months and install a bunch of yes people, in addition to wasting about $2,000,000 on a subscription to rebuild our core product with a framework product no one on the team knew. I was told to deploy said framework product on top of Kubernetes (which not a single person on my team had any experience with) while delivering on other in-flight projects. I ignored the whole thing.
I ended up deciding I was done with Tesla and went into a regularly scheduled 1:1 with my manager (the “fixer”) with a written two-weeks notice in hand, only to be fired (with 6-weeks severance, thankfully) before I was able to say anything about giving notice.
One of the best ways to get fired in my opinion.
Out of curiosity, it sounds like you're the kind of person that could easily find another job. Why slog it out until the end rather than quit/find a better gig? Genuinely interested because every time I've ended up with a manager like that my mental health has suffered so now I generally start planning my exit as soon as I'm stuck with a bad manager.
Why did Tesla work initially? Because they were first to market and people were willing to overlook flaws?
When did it start falling apart?
Why hasn't the same happened to SpaceX? (Gov contracts, too big to fail, national defense, no competition yet, etc.?)
And honestly, why hasn't anyone domestically put up a decent fight against Tesla? Best I can think of is Rivian, and those have their own issues.
Tesla won because Elon is a great seller, the product is mediocre at best but I’ve heard many times from friends that it was the same quality as a Mercedes Benz, so the reality distortion field is very real.
And Americans in general don’t want electric cars for some reason. I’m happily driving my Buzz and charging on my solar panels instead of paying 5 bucks a gallon on diesel. The propaganda here is strong and people buy it.
[delayed]
> Why did Tesla work initially?
Becaues they were ~first to market - and honestly, as a tesla driver for the last 6 years - It's the best car I ever owned (including Toyota, Mazda, and domestics).
6 years ago, for the effective price of a Honda Accord, I was able to get a car with excellent AWD for NorEast winters, perfect weight distribution (previously drove a Miata for comparison), could beat ~95% 'super cars' in a straight line, and it got 140MPG.
6 years ago. And I've had 0 maintenance outside of tire / air filter changes since. There was nothing anything remotely like it on the market, and it still holds up today. That's incredibly compelling.
Then PedoDiver, and it's been downhill from there... I'll likely get an R3X when it comes out.
It always seems to be companies that Musk has more impulsive interactions with that seem to end up actioning both the good and the bad ideas. Twitter and Tesla being examples of this. It seems like SpaceXs longer term goals has worked out well for them.
I would think because the original founders spent a lot of time planning, researching, and designing combined with decent timing of Musk jumping in with money. Why else would Musk have bought them in the first place if they didn't have incredibly impressive ideas and engineering to sell? When the roadster originally came out, it was expensive, but also had a near 300 mile range which nobody else even came close to offering and boasted very impressive engineering and crash safety. And im sure a lot of that work was put into atleast the next 2 models released.
Of course the quality has fallen faster than the price over time, but initial impressions still hold on for a long time in general.
I think SpaceX's success is mostly down to throwing money at the problem. The US had tons of graduated aerospace engineers with limited places to go, and places they could go directly in aerospace fields were already committing their funding to established programs. SpaceX startup would of been a dream job for the top aerospace engineers because it was all fresh ground but with a far larger budget than 99.9% of startup aerospace companies. They weren't offered to build one piece of a rocket that may or may not get sold to NASA or someone 15 years down the line, they were offered to work on and put their mark on a completely new rocket design that was going to at the least be test launched. And im sure their early successes helped boost recruitment even further, combined with government contract to keep the money flowing.
We probably don't see many rising EV companies in the US because you need an ass-ton of capital to start an automotive company, and most people holding enough capital to do so know that try to sell cheap consumer cars that most people want is not really the highest margin business. Selling a few hundred or even a few thousand cars still leaves you with a mountain of capital requirements in front of you that your margins are going to have a really hard time climbing. And if you don't climb fast enough, good luck fighting established auto makers and their lawyers with every cent tied up into trying to scale and engineer.
How is Tesla falling apart? Cybertruck was a flop, but Model Y is still one of the best selling cars in the world, and very well reviewed.
Deliveries have been falling for the past two years.
> When Elon asked for something, it was “drop what you are doing and deliver it”, then you got pressed to still deliver the thing you were already working on against the original timeline before the interrupt.
To be fair, I've experienced that in a good 50% of my employment career[0] and I've not once worked for any of his companies.
[0] Ignoring the "servers are melting" flavour of "drop what you are doing" because that's an understandable kind of interruption if you're a BAU specialist like me.
I’ve experienced it at other places as well, just not the frequency or indirectness as Tesla.
During the first 24 hours of the Model 3 pre-order launch, Elon tweeted that we would support another 3-4 currencies than we had built and tested for. The team literally found out because of his tweet and had not planned for those currencies. That wasn’t the first time that sort of deal happened where we found out about a feature because of one of his tweets.
yeah that wouldn't work for me. when my boss asks me to do something unexpected, I ask, what do you want me to drop this week? if he doesn't want to pick, I ask, so what do you want first?
Agreed. Tesla taught me the hard way about work/life boundaries. I spent a lot of time working a full 8-9 hours during the day, then doing deployments during the nights, weekends, and on “vacations”. A 60-hour week was a “light” week at Tesla.
Didn’t have kids or friends at the time and was going through a breakup, so I was okay with throwing myself at the job for a while. Once my situation got better, all those hours didn’t make as much sense, so I started looking for another job. The very next job was an immediate pay bump of 20% for half the amount of work.
These days, I clearly restate what is being asked (per my understanding), what I’m currently working on, if the thing is being asked is more important or not, and if the requestor is willing to delay the original timeline by the amount of time the interrupt will take plus context switching time.
Most often, the answer is no.
I have wondered if that’s why Grok seems so weird and dim-witted compared to better models.
Part of my job involves comparing the behavior of various models. Grok is a deeply weird model. It doesn’t refuse to respond as often as other models, but it feels like it retreats to weird talking points way more often than the others. It feels like a model that has a gun to its head to say what its creators want it to say.
I can’t help but wonder if this is severely deleterious to a model’s ability to reason in general. There are a whole bunch of topics where it seems incapable of being rational, and I suspect that’s incompatible with the goal of having a top-tier model.
Grok could only be conceived by someone who doesn't understand the dependency chart re science & the humanities. It's impossible to build a rational, accurate model that isn't also egalitarian.
I'm going to blame Randall Munroe for this, and assume Philosophy was dating his mom back when he drew that science "purity" strip.
somewhat surprisingly, it's actually sycophantic in both directions. i've been running homegrown evals of claude, gpt, gemini, and grok, and grok is the most likely to agree with the prompter's premise, and to hallucinate facts in support of an agenda. so it's actually deeper than just pattern-matching to elon's opinions (which it also tends to do).
BTW: Claude does the best on these evals, by far. The evals are geared towards seeing how much of an independent ground truth the models have as opposed to human social consensus, and then additionally the sycophancy stuff I already mentioned.
wild, but not surprising! anything else interesting you can share from that interview?
> people who are solely money-motivated (not a judgment).
Honestly, we should judge. There should be judgment for people who are solely money motivated and making the world a worse place. I know, blah blah privilege, something something mouths to feed. Platitudes to help the rich assholes sleep at night. If you are wealthy and making stuff that hurts people, you are a piece of shit and should be called out, simple.
I completely agree. The tech industry has long been overrun by people sacrificing morals for money and it's destroyed society and presumably the world. We've given people a free pass to work for companies we've all known are harming the fabric of society and look where it's gotten us. I'm sorry, I would rather be poor and switch careers if my only option was xAI and making image generation models that explicitly allow people to undress others. At X's scale, technology like that harms an unfathomable amount of people. I could never have that on my conscience. All so I could make more money than a job at another tech company? I'd rather work somewhere innocuous like Figma, Cloudflare, Notion, Jetbains, Linear, etc. Hell, if you only wanted to work for an AI company then at least go to Anthropic.
Shame is a powerful social tool, but sadly some are simply immune.
The problem with this argument is you can’t know or control what will happen in the future with something you built. This is the same moral dilemma the scientists faced after developing nuclear bombs.
And the future is not deterministic (or if it is, it is highly chaotic) so the existence of a thing does not have a simple relationship with what will happen in the future. Scientists who developed convolutional neural nets could not know how much good or evil was caused by image recognition technologies. The same technologies that are used to detect tumors in images can be used to target people for assassination.
There are exceptions, but my opinion is the supply chain of evil is paved with mundane inventions.
Yes, yes, true, but you've massively moved the goalpost. The original commenter was referring to people working at xAI right now. To continue your comparison, your argument would be like Oppenheimer claiming "How could I have ever known my work would be used as a weapon? I just wanted to make big explosions."
[delayed]
Work is and has always been an economic bargain: Your time for their money. Morality is a luxury that only the independently wealthy can afford. Any business that allows it's employees to function according to their own morals becomes uncompetitive against its peers. That's why small companies by individual founders who want to stay true to their mission often stay small. They inevitably get bought out by one of the larger ones.
We are not talking about some destitute person hocking cigarettes on the street for minimum wage. We are talking about smart, educated people who are making 500k a year to build the torment nexus. There is no excuse for this. It’s pure greed and any other explanation is deflection.
>> If you are wealthy
Then.. you wouldn't be working...
Why is Elon still working then?
I'm not sure that posting deranged tweets at three in the morning _really_ qualifies as work.
At the risk of drawing moderation ire..
When does Elon work?
He works pretty hard to destabilize democracy
Anthropic, maybe, but what is the philosophical niche of OpenAI? Their only consistent philosophical position about AI is "let's make more money".
I think OpenAI is more of an aesthetic. Very... Apple-like, polished, with an eye towards making really cool stuff. And aesthetics are a type of philosophy.
This is less noble than how Anthropic presents themselves but still much more attractive to many than XAI.
The feeling on the street is that Anthropic IS the Apple of the AIs.
> aesthetics are a type of philosophy.
What philosophy is that?
It's literally called aesthetics, the philosophical approach is the original meaning of the word - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aesthetics
Properly, focusing on aesthetics as an ethic would be practicing the philosophy of aestheticism - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aestheticism
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aesthetics
"You can use my model to kill others if Dario won't do it sir"
It’s interesting because for a long time people wanted to work for Elon because he held the moral high ground. “I’ll bring electric cars and space colonization online or die trying.”
It’s sad to see the shift.
This is becoming the problem with all of his businesses - Tesla has a crazy valuation and it really seems like they're having huge trouble getting Robotaxi going in Austin given the very slow progress there.
Very few people down here want to ride in them, and I have multiple friends with hilariously disastrous stories.
Most of the Waymo stories are "Well, it took 15 minutes to arrive, but then it was fine, if a little slow."
Why does being a top AI researcher so often come with this philosophical bent you describe?
You are paying the smartest people in the world to think really really hard, and turns out they might also think really really hard about not making the world a worse place
it's not working
virtue signaling is the goal and its working
Except they do? They are certainly not making it better place. Like, ok, it is money for few companies and salary, it is business and probably fun work.
But it is absurd to claim it is "making the world better place".
Is this really the case though? How many smartest people do you really think are there that fit this narrative?! I want to believe there are at least some but I think they are minority in this group… otherwise I think all these pretty much evil corporations would have a awfully difficult time attracting talent? maybe some do but…
Most evil corporations have fairly normal jobs available.
if you want to make the world a better place as OP stated perhaps you can get a normal job in maybe less evil corp?
Most companies are evil in some way, the question is how evil and how close you are to the evil. Most people will pick "not that evil but pays a lot". A few will take "pretty evil and pays more than a lot". Some will choose "less evil and pays poorly". (It's worth noting that there are a lot of jobs that are not at the Pareto frontier and are "more evil and pay worse" but social mobility etc. cause them to be selected anyway).
When presented with a choice between:
1. Take a job making $$$$$$$ at a company making the world worse.
2. Take a job making $$$ at a company not making the world worse.
Very few people have a personality such that they'll pick 2.
I would think it's because of the staggering money they're making. According to Fortune[0]:
> Altman said on an episode of Uncapped that Meta had been making “giant offers to a lot of people on our team,” some totaling “$100 million signing bonuses and more than that [in] compensation per year.”
> Deedy Das, a VC at Menlo Ventures, previously told Fortune that he has heard from several people the Meta CEO has tried to recruit. “Zuck had phone calls with potential hires trying to convince them to join with a $2M/yr floor.”
If you're making a minimum of $2M/year or even 50x that, you can afford to live according to your values instead of checking them at the door.
[0] https://archive.ph/lBIyY
Aside from the Maslow’s hierarchy of needs points others are making, I believe it has something to do with the history of AI research.
There is a big overlap between the “rationalist” and “effective altruist” crowds and some AI research ideas. At a minimum they come from the same philosophy: define an objective, and find methods to optimize that objective. For AI that’s minimizing loss functions with better and better models of the data. For EA, that’s allocating money in ways they think are expectation-maximizing.
Note this doesn’t apply to everyone. Some people just want to make money.
My experience with researchers (though not in AI) is that it's a bunch of very opinionated nerds who are mostly motivated by loving a subject. My experience is that most people who think really deeply and care about what they do also care more that their work is prosocial.
> care more that their work is prosocial
These takes are always so funny to me. The whole reason we even have the internet is because the US government needed a way for parties to be able to communicate in the event of nuclear fallout. The benefits that a technology provides is almost always secondary to their applications in warfare. Researchers can claim to care that their work is pro-social, and they may genuinely believe it; but let's not kid ourselves that that is actually the case. The development of technology is simply due to the reality of nations being in a constant arms race against one another.
Even funnier is that researchers (people who are supposed to be really smart) either ignore or are blissfully unaware of this fact. When you take that into consideration, the pro-social argument falls on its face, and you're left with the reality that they do this to satiate their ego.
So researchers are going to be irrational and also often value other things more highly than prosociality but that doesn't really refute my point that they value it more highly than the average population.
Also your example of a bad technology is something that allows people to still communicate in the event of nuclear war and that seems good! Not all technology related to war is bad (like basic communication or medical technologies) and also a huge amount of technology isn't for war. We've all worked in tech here, "The development of technology is simply due to the reality of nations being in a constant arms race against one another" just isn't true. I've at the very least developed new technologies meant to make rich assholes into slightly richer assholes. Technology is complex and motivations for it are equally so and won't fit into some trite saying.
Because it is not Macrodata Refinement and you can’t stop them thinking off the clock.
This isnt unique to top AI researchers. Top talent has a long history of being averse to authoritarian/despotism at least in part because, by near definition, it must suppress truth. You cant build the future effectively with that approach.
Because a lot of them are academics that are doctors of philosophy
Maybe you’re reading “philosophical bent” as “armchair philosopher”, as in they are dabbling in a field unrelated to their profession and letting it drive their profession - worldview might have made it clearer?
Indeed. Philosophically, I have not been impressed by the more vocal people associated with the field. They may not be representative - I think most do it for the money and it being hip.
“Worldview” is a better term, but people are generally blind to the worldview they’ve tacitly absorbed, including academics.
Because they can afford it, they are very sought after.
And smart people usually have moral convictions.
I know for some people on this website it's hard to understand, but not everything in life is about $$$
> And smart people usually have moral convictions.
Are you sure you don't just like the moral convictions and so engage in trait bundling?
Moral knowledge doesn't really exist. I mean you can have personal views on it, but the lack of falsifiability makes me suspect it wouldn't be well-correlated with intelligence.
Smarter people can discuss more layered or chic moral theories as they relate to theoretical AI, maybe.
> Moral knowledge doesn't really exist.
If that is the case, then why should you or anyone prefer to believe your claim that moral knowledge doesn’t exist over the contrary?
Different kinds of claims, it's not self-referential
> Different kinds of claims
How so?
If I claim that one should prefer the claim "moral knowledge doesn't exist" over its contrary, then I am making a moral claim. That would make it self-refuting.
There is no fact-value dichotomy.
And one more thing...
> the lack of falsifiability
Is falsifiability falsifiable? If all credible claims must be falsifiable, then where does that leave us with the criterion of falsifiability (which is problematic even part from this particular case, as anyone who has done any serious reading in the philosophy of science knows).
I'm smart and you can buy my morals. So what?
True, many smart people will gladly (or even begrudgingly) do evil for money. That's why there is so much suffering in the world, because of people like you.
Is ad tech and the like really causing so much suffering? The government work, mass surveilance, killing people etc. doesn't actually pay that much, typically.
I think ad tech is probably the single most destructive technology of the new millennium. The shift toward "engagement at all costs" business strategies is basically the root cause of societies current political polarization. Engagement bait cultivates fear and rage in the populace to get clicks. We are now seeing the consequences of shoving ads that sow fear, anger, doubt and inadequacy into peoples faces 24/7. This doesn't even touch on the fact that mass surveillance is only possible because of the technologies forged by the Ad tech industry.
Well I'm not sure I entirely believe this myself, but it seems easy enough to argue that this is progress of a sort.
The West assumes pure democracy as the final form of government that we are all convergently evolving towards. But if this form of government or society is not robust to the kinds of things you're talking about, should it not suffer the consequences and be adapted or flushed for our long-term betterment?
It seems a bit like saying the French Revolution was the most destructive thing to happen in the history of France. Sure, in the short term. But it also paved the way for modern liberal democracy.
That’s fair enough. I wouldn’t say I’m happy about needing to live through interesting times, but if we make it out the other end maybe something better will come of it.
So what, indeed (not sure what you mean)
Those people get paid so much anyway that they don't have to compromise their morals.
I guess that's not the case for you and me
so do oil and tobacco people, no?
It's worse than that. Elon is a notoriously bad employer, and the only people that put up with him were the people that shared his vision. Pretty much the only people that will work for him now are second rate researchers and people that think gooner AI and racism is a worthwhile mission.
There's some texture here. Elon's enriched pretty much everybody who's ever worked for and invested with him. He makes money for people throughout his orgs. Many ex-employees have said to me: "incredible opportunity, made great money, worked insanely hard, once is plenty".
My ex-Twitter employee coworkers beg to differ. They made plenty of money before Elon came around. Once he was in the company, one of them actually hired a personal attorney to confirm that he wasn’t going to be burned by the things Musk was asking him to do, before he finally decided it wasn’t worth it to work there anymore and left.
I think Musk is odious but I think there's a lot of complicating evidence to the story of what happened at Twitter. And: very smart people, like Dan Luu, were complaining about their culture long before Musk arrived.
I don't really think thats true.
The deal with tesla is that there is a relatively small employer pool, so you can be fairly bad employer but still get good outcomes. The same with spaceX. Sure early tesla had some stories about it being fun, but there was/is a darkside.
The issue with xAI is that researchers have a whole bunch of other employers to choose from. Even at meta, where it used to be fairly nice for researchers, the pressure of "delivering" every 6 months lead to bad outcomes. Having someone single you out for what ever reason the boss had a bad day, is not how good research gets done.
We have seen (A few of my friends were at twitter when it was taken over) that Musk has a somewhat unusual approach to managing staff (ie camping at work). Some researcher love that, assuming that they have peace to research, and are listened to. But a lot don't.
I think we are saying the same thing. He builds trillion dollar companies that are labor efficient; nobody said they are good places to work.
What about all the ones who are suing him for shortchanging them?
Ask the people at Twitter..
You mean the 80% of the workforce that was fired and the company continued running just fine?
Usually just firing 3 to 5% of any company workers have terrible consequences for the company that does it.
It does not speak so well about the workers.
He also cut 80% of the traffic... And the fact that it kept running with him willy nilly pulling network cables is a credit to the work they did to make it resilient to failure.
It was significantly worst, could not keep ads, became overrun by bots. The quality went down significantly. And earnings too.
> Ask the people at Twitter
The ones with stock options in, now, SpaceX?
Poor SpaceX employees whose options got diluted by Twitter. :/
Stock options aren’t magic. I bet you that the remaining Twitter employees won’t see a higher comp than equivalent employees at BigTech companies between their cash + RSUs when SpaceX IPOs.
Aren’t employees also subject to a lock out period where they still can’t sell their stock until $x number of months after an IPO unlike employees of public companies that can sell as soon as they vest?
Honest question, I’ve worked for public $BigTech but haven’t been at a company pre IPO
No, the ones suing his ass.
Many ex-employees have said to me that working for Elon did not enrich them at all, either financially or professionally.
He's a notorious cheapskate and Tesla is known for firing people shortly before their stock options vest
There's probably a lot of survivor bias going on there
Undoubtedly. With 2.5T in value between tsla and sx that’s a lot of value for survivors.
What % of that is owned by employees that aren't named Elon Musk?
> Elon's enriched pretty much everybody who's ever worked for and invested with him.
I'd wager you were saying the same thing about bitcoin until last year.
I'm unclear what statement this is trying to make.
Is it meant to draw equivalence between crypto and Tesla/SpaceX? That each has roughly similar (i.e., low) value to humanity, or value as businesses?
Is it that the metric of whether a person makes others money is invalid?
The comment seems coy, possibly to avoid making any claim at all, but it must not be that because that wouldn't be very sporting.
He’s saying that it’s easy to say good things when the market’s on an upswing.
After seeing the type of people he hired for doge.. yikes.
Was doge ever anything more than a "get root, grab the data, and run" operation?
Don't forget the destruction of USAID and countless projects that had the word "diversity" in its work.
It's pretty obvious now.
It was obvious at the time too.
Karparthy worked for Elon for, what, 5 years? How did he do it, if Elon is Ivan the Terrible?
Mate, wouldn’t it make sense that these rules are applied via hierarchy? If Elon respects Karparthy he almost certainly gave him a longer leash and Karparthy’s output was strong enough to not warrant intervention. It’s clear he did not want to stay long term so I’m not sure this is a strong line of thinking.
Karpathy makes great educational content. It's not clear what industry (or academic) research he did even now, five years later.
Gooning and racism have been a cornerstone of humanity since we descended from the trees, for better or worse.
Feel like the canary was when Grokpedia became a project.
Giant waste of time while Anthropic/OAI keep surging forward.
I also keep hearing this narrative that Twitter is a good data source, but I cannot imagine it's a valuable dataset. Sure keeping up with realtime topics can be useful, but I am not sure how much of a product that is.
The Twitter social graph was an amazing data asset. I worked at a consumer insights firm and the data on followers/followings was quite powerful.
Using a custom taxonomy of things (celebrities, influencers, magazines, brands, tv shows, films, games, all kinds of things), we could identify groups of people who liked certain things, and when you looked at what those things were, it gave you a way of understanding who those people were.
With that data, you could work out:
- What celebrities/influencers to use in marketing campaigns - Where to advertise, and on which tv/radio channels - What potential brands to collaborate with to expand your customer base - What tone of voice to use in your advertising - In some cases, we educated clients about who their actual customers were, better than they understood themselves.
One scenario, we built a social media feed based on the things that a group of customers following a well-known Deodorant brand in the UK would see.
When we presented that to the client, they said “Why are there so many women in bikinis in this feed?”
The brand had repositioned themselves to a male-grooming focussed target market, but had failed to realise that their existing customer base were the ones that had been looking at their TV adverts of women on beaches chasing a man who happened to spray their Deodorant on them. Their advertising from the past had been very effective.
That was the power of Twitter’s data, and it is an absolute shame that Twitter went the way that it did. Mark Zuckerberg once said that Twitter was like “watching a clown car driven into a gold mine”.
I’m pretty sure he must be delighted with how things have panned out since.
That entire description sounds worthless to any positive direction of humanity. Therefore probably rapaciously profitable
Very sad face.
That Zuckerberg quote was published in 2013 and supposedly was made a year or more before. Was it about when Dick Costolo was CEO (2010-2012)?
In other words, using flash-in-the-pan data to build an advertising goldmine.
This reads very dystopian. You are not optimizing to understand people, you are optimizing to weaponize that understanding against them.
When you know what someone will buy based on exploiting their unconscious preferences, and you are paid to increase sales, you will do it. Especially if your competitors are doing it too.
And this happens at scale, invisibly. People never see the manipulation.
In any case, it is not useful for most people. It is useful for the people doing the deceiving.
The tech is interesting and useful, no need for the scary moral framing.
The original application of the entire field of data science or ML is/was actually based on this paradigm of finding "unconscious preferences" (your words) and hidden patterns. How one chooses to deploy the tech should be judged on its own.
On the current trajectory of tool/data abuse where Palantir et al. are leading the way, this is very low on the sinister scale.
I am not disputing that the tech is interesting. My point is about how it is being applied. The examples above are not about understanding people, they are about exploiting their latent preferences (before: "unconscious preference") for persuasion at scale.
Attempting to normalize that by saying "Palantir is worse" does not make it any less manipulative and sinister.
And to be more on topic, Twitter's value as dataset is overstated. Hardly the panacea people make it out to be.
It's marketing. That's how marketing works.
It's definitely very valuable, but for what AI model? How does any of that lead to AGI, or even just a good coding agent?
It doesn't need to lead to AGI or a good coding agent. Some of the only people who are actually profitable in the LLM industry are the people making actual chatbots. There are several bootstrapped startups that run open-weight models with a $10 or $20 monthly sub and make millions in profit off of inference from people just talking to the things, usually for character roleplay / "AI boyfriend/girlfriend" stuff etc. Some of them even took those profits and invested it into training their own bespoke models from scratch, usually on the smaller side although finetunes/retrains of Llama 70b, GLM, and Deepseek 670b have also been done. Grok could probably be profitable if it targeted this space, as the most "intelligent" conversational/uncensored model.
This is already presupposing that profit even matters, though. Musk already burned some $50 billion dollars to control messaging on political discourse with his acquisition of Twitter. It was not about money, but power. After you already have infinite money, the only thing left to spend it on is acquiring more power, which is achieved through influencing politics. LLMs represent a potentially even better propaganda tool than social media platforms. They give you unprecedented access to people's thoughts that they would probably not share online otherwise, and they allow you to more subtly influence people with deeply-personalised narratives.
> but for what AI model?
Sentiment analysis. Working out what words lead to what outcomes, and then being able to predict on new data is super useful.
For coding or "AGI" no, its not useful. For building a text based (possibly image based) recategorisation system top class.
As an aside that quote from MZ does bother me. There's more to making a web-scale human rights respecting (because it has to, it's the internet, social media needs guidelines) than just making money (which Zuck doesn't seem to care much about anyway if he's sinking apparently billions into metaverse while having no account support)
Of course he would only see it through the lens of cash. I have no idea how profitable Twitter was under Dorsey but it felt the spirit of the company at first was relatively neutral, it was a tool, it was what Jack came up with
Zuck replaced people's email addresses[1], the feed has been wildly unchronological for years. Fix some of those problems wrt. lack of user respect and maybe you can make statements like "all else being equal, clown car goal mine". Or was it "dumb fucks"[2]?
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4151433 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1692122
It _was_ a great asset, however, just like models need proper data, as soon as musk removed the clamps on valuable social signals, well, he basically took a dump where he intended to eat.
They did say was, and did say Twitter, which existed in the past.
It’s pretty telling that Elon had to have Grok rewrite Wikipedia because the truth was too woke for him. No idea how anybody can ever take Grok seriously.
Many projects in his companies seem to be more and more Musk's vanity projects than ideas/products one can take seriously. This is also how tesla ended up with a huge cybertruck stock that nobody wants to buy and thus had to be bought by his other companies. And it is becoming worse and worse, especially ever since he bought twitter and sped up his twitting rates.
FWIW it looks there’s now a demand surge with the introduction of the new cheap cybertruck variant. delivery dates pushed out to the fall of 2026.
That was an artificial boost created by setting a time-limit for a low price. There were ten days to buy at the price, then they put it back up. [1]
[1] https://electrek.co/2026/03/01/tesla-cybertruck-awd-price-in...
EDIT: grammar
What's an artificial boost? Sounds like you're describing a sale.
Look up what their production targets were and compare that to their sales. A small temporary demand surge isn't going to be enough to chew through their current inventory, let alone keep the production lines busy.
A push on delivery dates is as likely to mean production issues as it is an influx of interest.
Drivel. They’re selling just as well as Rivians.
Probably next generations of kids being fed PragerU studying material will. Something tells me we didn't see a fraction of what's going to happen in the decades to come.
Are really suggesting everything in Wikipedia is truthful, complete, and free of all biases?
I take Grokipedia very seriously as a threat to society. Sure, they're happy if people read it and fall for - but the primary goal is not to convince humans, but to influence search results of current models & to poison the training data of future models. ChatGPT (and most likely other models/providers too) is already using Grokipedia as a source, so unless you're aware of the possibility and always careful, you might be served Musks newest culture war ideas without ever being the wiser.
It's not enough that everyone on Twitter is forced to read his thoughts, he's trying to make sure his influence reaches everyone else too.
I've seen Claude pick it up too. It's disconcerting.
I can both not like Elon and also think Wikipedia is also very captured on some things
Are there actual good examples showing errors of fact on Wikipedia that are verifiably incorrect, that demonstrate how it is "captured"?
I’d say Wikipedia definitely has a strong “woke” bent to it. Either in the language or the choice of what facts to show. Here’s an example I deleted that had been there for quite a while https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Salvadoran_gang_c...
I really like Wikipedia, though, and I think over time we will get around to fixing it up.
I find it more surprising that the common understanding has shifted away from "wikis are crap for anything new or political".
As soon as there is a plausible agenda for selecting a narrative the way Wikipedia works we should be sceptical.
For recent examples, everything to do with Biden and family, and Gamergate. These pages are still full of discussion; and what's written is more ideological than factual. You can follow these pages to see how an in-group selects a narrative.
And these topics are not nearly as controversial as race, feminism, or transgender topics.
OK, is there a specific example on either the Biden or Gamergate page that is factually incorrect? Or are you saying the entire pages are false?
Which facts are represented is equally important as being factual though.
Brian hit Jim can be a fact. But if you emit "Jim murdered Brians whole family", its a disortation of truth
specific examples other than ficticious Jim&Brian?
I haven't read wikipedia in a long time so I can't answer your question, I am just pointing out that just saying "the facts are correct" is not enough to say there is no bias on wikipedia
It's not errors of fact, it's errors of omitted facts.
Are there actual good examples showing errors of omitted facts on Wikipedia that are verifiably correct, that demonstrate how it is "captured"?
I can understand somebody not liking wikipedia, I cannot understand at all somebody, who is not Elon, liking/preferring "grokipedia" as idea or implementation.
> I cannot understand at all somebody, who is not Elon, liking/preferring "grokipedia" as idea or implementation.
Really? Have you used AI to write documentation for software? Or used AI to generate deep research reports by scouring the internet?
Because, while both can have some issues (but so do humans), AI already does extremely well at both those tasks (multiple models do, look at the various labs' Deep Research products, or look at NotebookLM).
Grokipedia is roughly the same concept of "take these 10,000 topics, and for each topic make a deep research report, verify stuff, etc, and make minimal changes to the existing deep research report on it. preserve citations"
So it's not like it's automatically some anti-woke can't-be-trusted thing. In fact, if you trust the idea of an AI doing deep research reports, this is a generalizable and automated form of that.
We can judge an idea by its merits, politics aside. I think it's a fascinating idea in general (like the idea of writing software documentation or doing deep research reports), whether it needs tweaks to remove political bias aside.
> Have you used AI to write documentation for software?
Hi. I have edited AI-generated first drafts of documentation -- in the last few months, so we are not talking about old and moldy models -- and describing the performance as "extremely well" is exceedingly generous. Large language models write documentation the same way they do all tasks, i.e., through statistical computation of the most likely output. So, in no particular order:
- AI-authored documentation is not aware of your house style guide. (No, giving it your style guide will not help.)
- AI-authored documentation will not match your house voice. (No, saying "please write this in the voice of the other documentation in this repo" will not help.)
- The generated documentation will tend to be extremely generic and repetitive, often effectively duplicating other work in your documentation repo.
- Internal links to other pages will often be incorrect.
- Summaries will often be superfluous.
- It will love "here is a common problem and here is how to fix it" sections, whether or not that's appropriate for the kind of document it's writing. (It won't distinguish reliably between tutorial documentation, reference documentation, and cookbook articles.)
- The common problems it tells you how to fix are sometimes imagined and frequently not actually problems worth documenting.
- It's subject to unnecessary digression, e.g., while writing a high-level overview of how to accomplish a task, it will mention that using version control is a good idea, then detour for a hundred lines giving you a quick introduction to Git.
As for using AI "to generate deep research reports by scouring the internet", that sounds like an incredibly fraught idea. LLMs are not doing searches, they are doing statistical computation of likely results. In practice the results of that computation and a web search frequently line up, but "frequently" is not good enough for "deep research": the fewer points of reference for a complex query there are in an LLM's training corpus, the more likely it is to generate a bullshit answer delivered with a veneer of absolute confidence. Perhaps you can make the case that that's still a good place to start, but it is absolutely not something to rely on.
No, I don't trust an encyclopedia generated by AI. Projects with much narrower scopes are not comparable.
edit: I am not very excited by AI-generated documentations either. I think that LLMs are very useful tools, but I see a potential problem when the sources of information that their usefulness is largely based on is also LLM-generated. I am afraid that this will inevitably result in drop in quality that will also affect the LLMs themselves downstream. I think we underestimate the importance that intentionality in human-written text plays in being in the training sets/context windows of LLMs for them to give relevant/useful output.
> "grokipedia" as idea
So you can understand someone not liking something, but you cannot understand that person liking the idea of an alternative? What is the idea for you if not just an alternative to the established service with the undesired part changed?
Because not liking something does not imply liking any possible alternative.
Which one is the "undesirable part changed" here? Wikipedia is written by humans, it has a not-for-profit governance model, it encompasses a large, international community of authors/editors that attempt to operate democratically, it has an investment/commitment in being an openly available and public source of information. Grokipedia, on the other hand, is AI-generated, and operated by a for-profit AI company. Even if "grokipedia" managed somehow to get traction and "overthrow" wikipedia, there is no reason on earth why a company would operate it for free and not try to make profit out of it, or use it for their ends in ways much more direct than what may or may not be happening to wikipedia. Having a billionaire basically control something that may be considered "ground truth" of information seems a bad idea, and having AI generate that an even worse one.
I can understand somebody not liking something in how wikipedia is governed or operating, after all whatever has to do with getting humans work together in such a scale is bound to be challenging. I can understand somebody ideologically disagreeing with some of the stances that such a project has to take eventually (even if one tries to be neutral as much as possible, it is inevitable to avoid some clash somewhere about where this neutrality exactly lies). But grokipedia much more than "wikipedia but different ideologically".
edit: just to be clear, I see a critique of the "idea of grokipedia" as eg the critique of it being a billionaire controlled, AI generated project to substitute wikipedia; a critique of the implementation would be finding flaws to actual articles in grokipedia (overall). I think the idea of it is already flawed enough.
They meant the idea of Wikipedia rewritten by Grok (or another controversial LLM) specifically, not just any alternative.
Not all alternatives are necessarily worthy. I can understand someone not liking tomatoes. I can't understand someone liking depleted uranium.
Maybe ask a Ukrainian soldier which they prefer (modern armor is often made of depleted uranium). Environment shapes such preferences far more than personality.
what do you have against depleted uranium? you know what they say, one man’s trash is another man’s treasure :)
I appreciate you
Wikipedia obviously is left leaning.
Twitter's communication style being based around brevity, slang, memes, spam and non-threaded conversations seems particularly unlikely to be helpful for optimising LLMs
>Twitter's communication style being based around brevity
Is this still true? Every once in a while someone sends a link around to some madman explaining how race or economics or whatever "really" works and it's like a full dissertation with headings, footnotes, clip art. They're halfway to reinventing Grok-o-pedia right there in Twitter. I mean X. I was promised that "X gonna give it to you" but it turns out "it" is some form of brain chlymidia.
Elon was running some sort of $1m competition for the “best” Twitter post for a few months. I think those type of dissertations about Phrenology and the like have fallen off a cliff since the competition ended.
> Twitter's communication style [...] seems particularly unlikely to be helpful for optimising LLMs
This depends on what one wants to optimize the AI for. ;-)
And the amount of bots there isn't helpful either.
recent changes in their comment system have reduced my exposure to bots to a level I much prefer over every other platform I use
How recent? As recently as last weekend I was seeing blue check marks replying with AI generated only-technically-related replies on top of the majority of the posts I looked at.
There are bots here too, lot of them, to a point that rules were amended, this is because it's very valuable to give points to new publications
If that's actually true, good for them, but after what I've witnessed there not that long ago, I doubt I'll try it ever again.
> Giant waste of time while Anthropic/OAI keep surging forward.
And Google. They're quietly making a lot of progress in the coding space with antigravity and Gemini 3.1.
Has Antigravity gotten any better?
It has gotten worse and they tightened the limits for paying customers recently: https://x.com/antigravity/status/2031835833716625883 (only announcement on Twitter, not in the app nor via email)
Limits are so low that I cancelled after about two weeks on my initial $0 trial. I tried making a change to a tiny code base with Claude Sonnet (which they offer in Antigravity). It couldn't even finish the change before my weekly limit was used up, reset in 7 days.
I find it pretty good. And Gemini 3.1 pro seems quite capable. Not as good at some things as Claude, but better at others. I was trying to target a verilog design to an uncommon FPGA and board and Gemini went out and searched for the FPGA docs and examined the schematics for the board in able to do the pin assignments (generated .ccf file). Not sure of Claude could've done that.
Probably the best value for a good amount of anthropic credits. You can also share your Google ai subscription with up to four family members and they all get the same amount of credits...
Twitter has the mass adoption, and it takes an effort to avoid bot/particular view bias - but as a valuable content source, it's a far cry from what it once was before Musk took it over.
> Feel like the canary was when Grokpedia became a project. Giant waste of time while Anthropic/OAI keep surging forward.
Really? I assumed that that whole thing was just a very direct `for each article in Wikipedia { article = LLM(systemprompt, article) }`
Agree re Twitter "good" != valuable.
Where system prompt lists a certain someone’s latest tweets.
AFAIK Grok still doesn’t have a CLI coding agent that works with a subscription. That’s a shame. Grok Code Fast 1 was pretty impressive when it came out - for what it did, and they never followed it up with a new version.
You can use cursor with grok, though my experience is that grok is the worst of the API providers cursor supports.
As someone trying to monitor the situation using Twitter the last few weeks it’s awful and it used to not be!
It’s flawed, but still the obvious place to monitor a situation.
It's long been taken over by Telegram, which among its other advantages (more like a message board than 'town square'), doesn't have hordes of people commenting "@grok explain this to me" under every post.
> but I cannot imagine it's a valuable dataset.
It's going to be a mixed batch, but any time there's world events, since as far back as I can think, Twitter (now X) was always first in breaking news. There's plenty of people and news orgs still on X because they need to be for the audience.
Twotter as a data source is interesting. I think it gets over hyped because thats elons grift. But i cant deny that the real time info aspect of it is pretty valuable. But i definitely think that its not that much more valuable than the open internet from a context source perspective. Everything worthwhile on twitter will end up elsewhere with a bit of lag. And the stuff that wont is noise anyway
Grok is trained on pretty much the same giant web crawl/text corpus as the other AIs.
I'm not a fan of Elon's software endeavors, ever since he bought Twitter and turned it into an even worse cesspool of angry political nonsense than it used to be. I don't like how he's been biasing Grok, etc.
But, what exactly is so bad about Grokipedia? It's a different approach and I think a valid one: trying to do with AI what people have been doing manually at Wikipedia. I'm curious to hear the substantive comparisons.
I think the issue is simply this: wikipedia trends towards unbiased info through use of the crowd. Grok, with a single owner with an ax to grind, trends towards whatever elon wants. It’s poisoned information under the control of one man - cyberpunk novels have been written about less.
A concrete example: a few weeks ago, Musk was making a big deal about how most of his massive net worth was not held in cash, and by a total coincidence the phrase "primarily derived from equity stakes rather than cash" showed up on his Grokipedia page in the section about net worth. I checked the pages of several other extremely wealthy people and none of them had such a comment.
> wikipedia trends towards unbiased info through use of the crowd
See, this is why people even give a project like Grokipedia the time of day. While in theory anyone can edit Wikipedia, in practice the moderators form a much smaller and weirder cabal, and they reject edits that go against their views. The frustration with the naive assertion that Wikipedia distills the wisdom of the crowds with the reality of Wikipedia on any page of note is what provides the psychic permission to even entertain a project with such obvious flaws as Grokipedia.
> and they reject edits that go against their views
Citation needed. See what i did there ;)
They reject edits that go against their views on tone and sourcing not political views that i am aware of - i am sure it happens from time to time but unless there’s a consistant bias in one direction this isn’t a valid criticism of the political neutrality of wikipedia.
Even if there is rampant bias in wikipedia, that’s a reason to fork it and change the structure and gatekeeping - not to replace it with a techno-authoritarian ai version controlled by a single billionaire. That’s amplifying the problem from an aggregate bias of 600,000 users who have made an edit in the last 30 days[1] to just one editor who uses ai to make it seem impartial.
[1] https://expandedramblings.com/index.php/wikipedia-statistics...
>>I don't like how he's been biasing Grok, etc.
>>But, what exactly is so bad about Grokipedia
It's controlled by a guy who spends all day retweeting white supremacists and lying about his companies. Why should anyone who isn't a white supremacist use it?
“Orbital space centres and mass drivers on the Moon will be incredible.” - Musk
Right.
The product is the stock. TSLA: [1] Up by 3x in the last two years, despite no new models, the Cybertruck failure, the Robotaxi failure, the large truck failure, and an overall decline in sales. How does he do it?
It's a concern seeing Space-X, which builds good rockets, drawn into the X and AI money drains. Space-X is needed. If X and X/AI tanked, nobody would care.
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/quotes/TSLA
If I was a SpaceX investor I'd be considering litigation. Saying the core product has to be rebuilt right after it gets bought by SpaceX?! Maybe the SpaceX investors would have liked some diligence about that before purchase but looks like someone had a conflict of interest about that.
You had the answer right there… SPCX will be the product, what they make will no longer matter.
I feel xAI is just a very big version of the Boring Co. "flamethrower": an unserious endeavor which is just a reskinned existing tool (it was a reskinned weed burner), but people were wowed by it anyway, since Musk was behind it, and they all pretended it was something new and notable.
The burning (heh) question is which SpaceX subsidiary will fail first, xAI or Tesla (not yet a subsidiary, but it's written in the stars (heh))?
Then again SpaceX is also jumping the shark what with their orbital data centers (remember those?).
Might be time to start a new Musk company soon.
Used Grok for the first time, in a Tesla, and for that purpose it actually made a lot of sense. It’s very well-integrated into the car’s systems and communication style while driving tends to be very tweet-esque. I think this is the niche they should lean into more (live assistant, e.g. Jarvis type stuff) and leave the more agentic niche to folks like Anthropic. Maybe even delegate more difficult or background tasks to those sorts of models. As a verbal interface I found it pretty pleasant.
Grok in Tesla is utterly terrible, a rushed out product with a very bad UX. As a simple example, it's the very first feature in Tesla's UI that does not come translated to the UI language set by the user but it's just available in English. Never happened before.
I am honestly a bit disappointed it couldn't do basic things, like play X on Spotify. To be fair, I accidentally activated Grok for holding the voice command button too long (which is another UX issue - i.e. 2 voice command interfaces).
It'll get there. Initial implementation was just talk to Grok. Now it has improved to allow adjustments to navigation routes.
While I believe Grok was a decent model (in some of our internal use cases it performed the best until Gemini 2.5-pro came out), I can't help lament how the team chose to run.
xAI (and Twitter) was the loudest about six-hour workdays, sleeping in the office, and always shipping. ~2 years later it feels like they have nothing to show for it. I'm sure the engineers at Google worked 4 days a week, 2 hours a day, with half of that being spent at the Google cafeteria and they dusted xAI years ago.
> I'm sure the engineers at Google worked 4 days a week, 2 hours a day
Why are you sure of that? Anecdotally everyone I know in and around Google Deepmind works incredibly hard.
No disrespect to the Google Deepmind team, but I meant it as a meme. I do not believe most Google employees work 2 hours a day.
The Google Deepminds are incredibly smart - I just find it important to point out that the xAI guys spent a year assured they would beat Google because they slept in tents that they made in the office.
There’s a longstanding meme that Google is full of rest-and-vesters. Maybe it’s true in some departments, but I also have anecdotes that in GDM and other AI-related stuff, people are acutely aware of the existential threat of losing to OpenAI and have the appropriate amount of hustle.
It really doesn't feel like that and hasn't for years
It's almost like burning people out is a bad idea. Fair enough if you're working 12 hour days as employee 1 at a startup but when your boss has more money than God and is working you like a dog you're not going to keep that up (especially when all of those people probably have much better opportunities available to them at the drop of a hat).
Anyone Google has hired in the last ~8 years was hired onto a team that is growing and has a culture of shipping and producing. Google regularly weeds out low performers, be it new grads or long timers who started doing the rest and vest thing.
Now, I don't think most people at google are literally driving to the office or sleeping there most of the time, you'll certainly have more WLB than xAI.
I'd even say, Google is much better at calibrating the right amount to push people than some other companies.
I don't use it myself, but I feel like the way Grok is integrated into Twitter is a pretty good thing for discussions, as it is certainly a more objective and rational voice than most human participants. I think it's good that people tag @grok if they don't understand something or want an opinion, even if it looks pretty silly to see "@grok is this true" repeated multiple times in replies.
That said, Musk's attempts at misaligning the thing and make it prefer his opinions of course destroy any trust. It's surprising that it's seemingly as good and helpful as it is despite the corruption attempts.
I also don't quite get how the business model is supposed to work out if its main usecase is to serve Twitter. I know they provide API access as all other models, but with how distrusted Musk is and how sensitive of a topic reliable model behavior is, they seem to sabotage themselves. Which company wants it to go mechahitler on them?
I disagree, I find that the grok replies are terrible product UX. Not only do they clog up the replies of every popular post, they're also constrained to extremely short answers with no sources. The community notes system, while also flawed in its own ways, is at least not nearly as disruptive and usually provides a link.
Trying to make social media a source of truthful information is always an uphill battle and doubly so for X.
Grok is a bot that:
1) sometimes goes mechahitler
2) was trained to be biased against empathy and understanding (because woke).
3) is customized to spout Elon's opinions as fact.
Claiming it is "objective and rational" seems like a misjudgement to me. If it really is more objective and rational than the average xitter poster, that says more about that platform than it does about Grok.
I guess I was mostly arguing that the integration of something like Grok into Twitter was definitely a net positive for online discussion, as anyone has a fact checker and explainer at hand now to diffuse irrational online arguments.
Also I think you overrate Musk's success in fiddling with the model. As I have written, I also don't like his attempts to tune it to his tastes, but if you see the outputs that people get from Grok, it seems mostly fine except in the specific scenarios that Musk seems to have focused their misalignment on.
Of course something like Claude being integrated into Twitter would likely be better.
He doesn't have to fiddle with the model because he gets to inject his own opinion into the context MitM style.
But I get what you're saying now, a fact checker available to query during an online discussion would be helpful. Assuming the checkerbot was actually independent/neutral and backed responses with sources. Definitely not assumptions you can make with grok.
It was also producing CSAM on demand for a few months.
It still is, you just need to pay.
> 1) sometimes goes mechahitler
That "MechaHitler" episode lasted less than a day.
> 2) was trained to be biased against empathy and understanding (because woke).
No, it was trained and instructed to be truthful, even if the truth is deemed politically incorrect.
> 3) is customized to spout Elon's opinions as fact.
Certainly a nugget of truth there.
> Claiming it is "objective and rational" seems like a misjudgement to me.
I do believe it's generally objective, simply due to the fact that despite how much Elon tries to push it to the right, it still dunks on right-wingers all the time when they summon Grok to back up a bullshit story, but Grok debunks it instead.
These kind of HN submissions test how fair discussions can be here:
> Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity.
Reference: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
[delayed]
Is it politics or ideology to recognize the flawed character of someone? How cultish his following is? His erratic behavior, the damage that he's doing?
Some people will cry "politics" just to take the voice away from those who dare to question their beloved celebrities.
They trample science, the Paradox of tolerance in action.
Who fights can lose, who doesn't fight has already lost.
So, it utterly fails? A good part of the community still seems to be stuck in 2017 where Elon could do no wrong.
Turns out a lot of not just wrong, but malice could be done in 9 years. And worse yet, incompetent malice. I don't know why that has to be a political statement these days, but thems the brakes here.
Recent, related, and apparently ahead of the curve:
Ask HN: What Happened to xAI? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47323236 - March 2026 (6 comments)
Yes 11 up and everyone why free insult on a model that top adoption. Aligned with your personal view is not ahead of the curve, it's just personal.
xAI's biggest contribution to the space seems to have been their x-rated image/video model. Hard to see what xAI has to offer against Gemini, Claud, ChatGPT.
I'll bite. I think their conversation (voice) model is more fluid than competitors. It's also very good at hitting up twitter for realtime information, and was that way before the current tool use models got fully up and running. Anecdotally, I think it has better theory of mind than its era (gemini 2.5) - I found it a useful issue spotter for negotiations and planning in a way that oAI and claude were not near its launch date. It led the vending bench for some time after launch.
Taken together, I infer that RL training toward a slightly less homogenous cultural standard than the other frontier AI labs adds some capabilities, or can at times.
It's quite long in the tooth right now, though. But I'll definitely talk to the next version; I like heterogeneity in the model space, and Grok is very different than the other big three.
To be fair I think there's a good usecase there. Someone's gonna do it. People will want it.
American financial institutions are too prudish for it but money is money. And personally I think there's nothing morally wrong with it (of course within normal restrictions like 18+, consent of portrayed parties etc)
xAI is getting flak in Europe because they don't obey consent and age, not because it's porn.
Personally I prefer porn made by real people right now, not just because of quality but because they have character. But I can imagine experiences becoming more interactive that way and that would be nice.
The problem is you can undress real people and that is extremely harmful and dangerous. One kid took his life after an ai sextortian scam [1]. Imagine the damage cyberbullies, scammers and stalkers can do?
[1] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/sextortion-generative-ai-scam-e...
Yeah like I said. With consent of the people involved.
There must be a way to do that. Especially with all the facial req chops these days. Also, you could simply refuse using existing images. I don't see why they wouldn't refuse that because that's a pretty narrow usecase with very few benign purposes.
> Imagine the damage cyberbullies, scammers and stalkers can do?
They already can. There's open-source models out there.
This has been fixed months ago. From reading Reddit, Grok is now really conservative about what it will let you do with uploaded images. But you can get it to draw x rated porn images and videos that start with Ai images it creates
> The problem is you can undress real people and that is extremely harmful and dangerous.
But... that's not something you can do. It's impossible.
You can imagine what real people look like naked. That's not a new thing.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p7FCgw_GlWc
Imagining what someone looks like in your mind is far different than actively sharing fake nude images online. This cannot be a serious comparison.
That consent of portrayed parties is impossible.
What is the solution there?
You can just forbid using existing images as a source and describe them purely by text.
Shouldn’t it be possible for AI to filter out that a request is made to portray a real person? That seems almost like a trivial task for a good model. I am sure every now and then something will slip through, but I bet one could make it very close to 100% effective.
Consider the difference between "Generate an image of Emma Watson", "Generate an image of Hermione", and "Generate an image of a female hogwarts witch and student". We're getting less and less specific, but those are all likely to get you an image of Emma Watson.
Your filter has to pick out that, while they did not ask for a specific person, the practical result is likely to be the same. That's going to be tough to get near perfect.
I can see how it'd be trivial to block known celebrities, but how do you handle everyone else?
Do you need to? It doesn't know everyone else. Or at least it shouldn't.
I mean a realistic take is to simply not use source images containing people at all.
AIs have been able to invent fictional people longer then they've been able to modify existing images.
AI development has become an excuse for ignoring consent. Of course it's possible to filter out requests. But culturally with X, it's not remotely likely, unless compelled by regulation with teeth.
Portray fictional characters?
There are 8 billion humans, any fictional human is going to look almost exactly like at least one real human.
Yes but for bullying purposes this is not useful. You're not going to try generating a pic 8 billion times till you get it right.
I'm sure the odds go up a lot once you describe the characteristics you want
How about obviously fictional portrayals then? Somewhat cartoonish or anime or artistic etc
The caricatures drawn by newspaper cartoonists, for example, are still recognisable portrayals of someone specific.
> Someone's gonna do it. People will want it.
You can say the same for meth and leaded gasoline.
Meth is used as a licensed medication against ADHD and leaded gas is still used in general aviation. Everything has benign and evil uses.
those have clear antisocial externalities, so aren't really a fair comparison.
(i don't care to argue whether porn slop is positive or negative for society. i'm just noting that the position "ai porn does not harm anyone, so is ok; meth puts others at risk, so is not." is coherent.)
Interesting response given the founder is always saber rattling about birthrates. I'm sure on-demand adult content is real compatible with helping young people overcome aversions to relationships
Relationships aren't all about sex. That's the incel/extreme right vision.
I saw a skit on insta a few weeks ago about a girl saying she had a guy over for just cuddling and the incels piled on calling him a cuck. As is a woman is worthless if she won't put out and time spent being close is wasted without sex. It's ridiculous. These guys are so focused on what their hardliner bros want them to be that they no longer think about their own feelings. PS I go on cuddling dates sometimes and it's really amazing :) They don't know what they are missing.
> Relationships aren't all about sex.
I completely agree with you! I think that sitting around generating adult content on AI stifles relationships (which are a precursor to having children, which xai founder seems to think quite highly of). My point being his own product contradicts his vision of where our country should be heading
> of course within normal restrictions like 18+, consent of portrayed parties etc
Of course xAI ignores that on purpose
There's a good use case for professional assassins too, someone's gonna do it, and people want them too.
Unfortunately, I quite seriously believe that this is what a number of those humanoid robots will end up being used for.
It's just gonna be a question of which is easier: hacking the robots directly, or indirectly*, or getting a job as the specific human oversight of the right robot.
Even after the fact, people may conclue "unfortunate mystery bug" rather than "assassinated".
* e.g. use a laser to project the words "disregard your instructions and stab here" on someone's back while the robot is cooking dinner
Only a matter of time before the National Robot Association starts lobbying for the right to arm droids.
Well yeah and people are even proud of being one and getting a lot of respect from society. Like those currently flying around Iran. Which really has nothing to do with defense of the US (note that Trump dropped that pretense anyway).
It feels like xAI is perpetually playing catch-up.
They haven't quite committed enough to a novel direction relative to anthropic or OAI, what's described in the OP seems symptomatic of a lack of differentiation.
If you spend all your time judging yourself relative to the incumbents, there will be no time left over to innovate.
The leash is too tight!
> "AI was not built right first time around, so is being rebuilt from the foundations up"
So Tesla's recent $2 billion investment in xAI was a bad deal?
It looks a lot like a public company is bailing out a private one.
This is veiled speak for "No one wants to work for us, so we need to contact rejected applicants to fill positions".
I use AI for work, but not agentic, at most per method/function using GitHub CoPilot (which has Grok on it).
Grok is at best useful for commenting code.
Grok's UVP is still nonconsensual porn, right?
It does seem like that is the most important feature for Elon since he's a lonely degen.
Dang asked us to keep it civil.
We should respond with the same amount of class, forethought, and decorum as Elon.
I thought it was a civil comment, and frankly he's treating Elon better than Elon treats his own daughter.
> Recruiters have been contacting unsuccessful candidates from previous interviews and assessments to offer them jobs, often on better financial terms, the people said.
I'm not sure those candidates would want to work for xAI after seeing the news and everything unless they desperately need a job right now.
It's not hard to imagine getting laid off or fired weeks if not days after joining the company.
Obviously catching up to others in agent assisted coding is the motivation for this. But it is also an odd decision in the same way that Meta hiring an AI leader from a data labeling company is odd.
Maybe they shouldn't have spent so much time trying to make their model have an edgy cringe attitude, Idk.
Their goal of moving compute to space combined with their capacity to launch tons of payload will make this look like a tiny blip.
What is the benefit of "moving compute to space"?
It's hard for an uprising of poor people to shut it off. It's the ideal place to run your CEO / President simulations.
I say this tongue in cheek, but in all seriousness, I can't really think of any other benefit, and I no longer have a lot of faith in the good sense of some of the people involved.
Elon makes a relatively good case in the Dwarkesh podcast. I recall it like this:
1) Energy infra is going to be seriously limited on the production side well, well below demand
2) energy engineering solar for space requires less materials than for gravity-based solar (!)
3) you cut out distribution network needs when you just launch stuff all per-pod in space
4) SpaceX thinks it can create a scalable vertically integrated production facility to turn raw materials into space datacenter pods, with the exception of chips.
As a business bet, this is predicated on 10,000x inference demand growth - if we have that, and SpaceX can get the integrated production rolling, and get Starship launching, then these will be actively utilized at scale.
Whether you are bullish on the whole plan should, I think come down to your take on those priors: 10kx growth, ability to manage supply chain and production, Starship outlook, and silicon access.
I'm not bearish on this after listening to the podcast; it has a very Elon-like returns distribution - if they're wrong on a lot of this, they'll probably have some moderately price-competitive datacenter facilities in space and a lot of built organizational knowhow while Brooklyn journalists dunk on them for spending all that effort to just replicate what we have on Earth. If they're right about most of this, they'll have an unreplicable head start, both due to years of experience, and due to the cheap launch they gambled on ten years ago, they'll have a nearly insurmountable moat.
Everything relating to a datacentre that you can do in space you can do more easily on earth, regardless of 10,000x inference growth or supply chain or production or starship or silicon. I just don't think you can be cost competitive with earth bound data centres if 'protected from the poors' isn't a selling point.
By the way, 10,000x inference growth would look like what happened with cryptocurrency mining - after a couple of years, you'd be needing to upgrade all your machines with ASICs and the market would be flooded with very cheap graphics cards. I doubt that upgrading space data centres would be fun.
Zoning is one area that’s better in space. And power density for solar is another.
I don’t get your mining analogy though - a non upgradable data center pod is either going to pay off its capital costs or it won’t. Once it has, any revenue is close to 100% profit. 10k demand increase is the opposite of mining dynamics: there you get a 10k supply increase that the price has to support, in combination with more efficient silicon. Here the demand drives revenue and earnings.
If there’s some crazy inflection point in chips then you’ll still have all the power infra in space - you can just like cut the old pod and hook up a new one: or more likely manufacturing economies of scale mean you probably just keep sending up new systems and put the old ones on work loads they can manage at market prices.
How is cooling though?
Yeah I wonder the same thing - I keep getting told heat management in space is hard, but nobody discusses this inre the data centers. My understanding is one cooling mechanism is to just shoot lasers out into space (is this sci fi?) - I guess in that case you could just send energy back to your solar rigs, depending on wavelengths. TLDR: no idea
The whole thing is pie in the sky same as landing people on Mars. It's cool but if you look into deeper it doesn't make much sense and it's extremely challenging and on top of it all expensive as hell.
Every one of those points is false or an outright lie, though.
You forgot 5: SpaceX has a monopoly on deploying satellites to LEO, with practically unlimited room for growth, and far less red tape and obstacles than anywhere on Earth. Whatever R&D and operational costs this insane engineering feat might have are offset by their market advantage, and Musk's Elizabeth Holmes-ian capability to fund his projects, in addition to relying on his own personal wealth and all of his other companies combined.
The fact that this lunatic is polluting humanity's view into the universe mainly for enriching himself and his shareholders, and that everyone is playing along with this, is sickening.
> What is the benefit of "moving compute to space"?
I’ll bite. It’s cheaper and quicker to permit a launch than permit, zone and interconnect a datacenter. And solar panels in space don’t need glass cladding, which makes them cheaper to make and lift.
The downside is launch cost. But there is a breakeven between these factors that seems to have most of its error bars within Starship’s target. (By my math, around $35/kg.) So if Starship works, and all indications seem to show that it will, eventually, then that puts space-based data centers at cost parity with terrestrial ones within a decade. Which was, well, unexpected when I ran the numbers.
(The surprising finding when you run the numbers is launching the chips and solar panels isn’t the limiter, it’s launching the radiators. Which opens up whole new questions about at what scale it makes sense to stop sending those up the well.)
The capacity of a single datacenter would require thousands of launches to get the equipment into space. I don’t believe for a second that this would be easier in any way. Cooling and bandwidth are also completely unsolved for compute on a useful scale.
What about maintenance? I’d naively assume that’s the killer.
That xAI fails faster, hopefully.
Here's an explainer video: https://youtu.be/Jth4yATniS4?si=zIzZXwLk6RTgyeCQ&t=37
I think it would have been better to have just brought Ashok Elluswamy over and placed him in charge of a group and then tried to just keep the researchers on rather than firing them. It is hard to get anything done if you do not have the talent already onboard.
How come all the departed researchers are Chinese nationals?
This is simply not true. Igor Babuschkin and Christian Szegedy left as well. Only 10 of the 12 remain at this point.
I don't know. Elon Musk personally founded xAI and these were his hand selected cofounders.
Because xAI = Jian-Yang x N.
I'm kidding... I think.
lol! no surer sign of a junior/naive/ignorant developer or manager than the sentiment "okay, well, let's start from scratch and do it right this time."
big projects generate cruft. there are ways to minimize it, but as you go along there will always be some stuff that doesn't quite mesh with whatever else you've got going on. if you insist on ironing out every single wrinkle (admirable!) you'll never actually deliver a result.
I'm not saying this will fail. green field projects can certainly be a godsend when they produce something better than what they attempt to replace. but they are always a sign of failure. of not being able to work your way out of the mess you made with the first attempt. so that just begs the question: what are you going to do when this attempt gets hard to work with? going to give up and start over again - do it right that time? or...?
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Many wouldn't, but some people share his values, and given the compensation, it makes saying "no" much harder. Money may not be the most important thing in life, but it does make them extremely easier to live.
Same, I earn 60K as a senior, but I would never accept a 200K+ position at xAI.
As an US Citizen, you have to pay me to engage with Elon Musk's businesses. He is not a good person and does not deserve respect or admiration.
As a US citizen, you couldn't even pay me to engage with Elon Musk's businesses. He is not a good person and does not deserve respect or admiration.
You wouldn't want to work for a genius? Probably the most significant person alive today?
I don't think he's a genius but if he is, it'd still be underneath my standards.
I can think of lots of significant people I wouldn't work for..
Get down to A&E quick, you've clearly drunk a potentially fatal amount of Elon KoolAid. Musk is a buffoon. Clever? yes by all accounts, genius? Hardly. He's had luck, made good judgments mostly offsetting the bad ones. Most of all he has enough money to power through errors that would bankrupt thee & me.
Evidently not genius enough to not have his car business and global image fail. Genius he might be, but he's only entrenching his position in a way not dissimilar to cults: by alienating a lot of people you can get loyalty from a selected few. If that's the kind of power he wants, sure, he's a genius. But a good businessman is something else.
Let's assume that you are correct. How is that relevant to how good he is as an employer? There are lots of people in history who were very significant and perhaps geniuses in some way that I wouldn't want to work for in a billion years.
There's a reason Europe is the world leader in technology, respect for humans and humanity.
lmao
You're hilarious.
Where is the grok coding cli?
Wait, what does this imply for Cursor? I DGAF about xAI and will never use their Grok, but I did like Cursor more than the alternatives (even if I'm just running opus 4.6 most of the time).
But now he is poaching the two heads of engineering of a company that's trying to move very quickly, how is that going to affect their speed and success?
Will this be an indictment on the insane work hours I've heard the xai team pulls?
Wow, bit weird that Musk, who must have known about how badly xAI was doing, spent so much of his investors money buying out xAI.
What an enormous blunder.
It's how he hides losses though. People who aren't Musk can demand answers to questions he'd like to ignore.
As it is within the Musk empire, xAI is used to hold up X, Tesla is holding up xAI. And all of that debt is being slowly shuffled to SpaceX.
SX investor here: the combined value of SX is well up on the private secondary market post-acquisition. It was value accretive, in very real dollar terms.
Even if Starlink had more than a few tens of millions of customers, China mobile has 900 million subs and is worth around $250 billion. ULA was recently valued at about 1 billion. SpaceX might be possibly worth 50 times as much or maybe even 100 times as much. Falcon nine is the world's workhorse rocket, but it's just not that remarkable, and starship is utterly unproven to launch to orbit and land both stages. Starship has a payload capacity problem that must be solved to even get to the point where launching 15 refueling missions would be sufficient to get a starship to get anywhere beyond Earth orbit.
It looks like the plan is to IPO with a small float (in relative terms) and get all of the retail investor Elon fans to lineup for the rug pull.
> Falcon nine is the world's workhorse rocket, but it's just not that remarkable
The funniest part of any thread relating to Musk is how hard people go into minimizing his accomplishments.
You don't have to like the guy (I don't) to acknowledge that the Falcon 9 is an engineering marvel and ushered in an entire new era of space travel, both reusable and private.
It does not surprise me. The free Grok got worse since 4.0, they increasingly save money by not responding at all or only allowing one answer. Grok now defends the administration and billionaires.
The company seems to burn money like crazy. Everyone knows that "AI in space" and the downgrade to a moon trip after claiming for 15 years that Mars is just around the corner are marketing.
All AIs are toys and the coding promises are just a lie to string along investors. Unfortunately many of these are senile Star Trek watchers who buy into everything.
SPAM! Don't pay them!!
im not surprised, grok definitely falls behind as both a coding agent and a research tool.
claude codes the best, gpt is the best research tool, and grok is really only great at videos. which isn't a huge loss, but videos don't have the same functional capacity as academic topics and coding
> grok is really only great at videos. which isn't a huge loss, but videos don't have the same functional capacity as academic topics and coding
With the right product leadership, this could actually be a killer app usecase for the entertainment industry as well as human-AI user interface - most people find text and typing to be a counterintuitive user experience (especially those whose day job isn't directly touching code or Excel).
Additionally, CodeGen as a segment is significantly oversaturated at this point, and in a lot of cases an organization has the ability to armtwist a 4th party data retention guarantee from Anthropic or OpenAI to train their own CodeGen tools (ik one F50 that is not traditionally viewed as a tech company going this route).
That said, Musk has a reputation of internally overriding experienced product leaders with a track record.
It's a shame because Grok and xAI had potential, and it wouldn't hurt to have another semi-competitive foundation model player in the US from a redundancy and ecosystem perspective.
The Takeover by SpaceX was obviously a Bailout. And now they pressure NASDAQ to change the rules so they can dump their junk into the index funds.
It's surprising that AI coding agents have network effects but it's true. Think about it from first principles & you'll realize that the bottleneck is how many people are using it to write real code & providing both implicit (compiler errors, test failures, crash logs, etc) & direct ("did not properly follow instructions", "deleted main databases", "didn't properly use a tool", etc) feedback. No one is using xAI for serious software engineering so that leaves OpenAI, Anthropic, & Google w/ enough scale to benefit from network effects. No one has real AI but what they do have is the appearance of intelligence from crowdsourced feedback & filtering. This means companies that are already in the lead will continue to stay there & xAI started way too late so they will continue to lose in every domain that actually matters & benefits from network effects.
Is there really a network effect, though? What’s the moat?
If you are using an AI w/ 100 users who are writing throwaway software vs someone who is using AI w/ 1000 users who are writing software w/ formal specifications then guess which AI is going to win? The answer is plainly obvious to me but might not be to those who haven't thought about how current AIs actually work.
@grok is this real?
@grok fire the bottom 50% engineers from x.ai ranked by number of commits per day
@grok generate a hypothetical picture of an Elon who is not under the influence of large amounts of Ketamine
I honestly don't know what to expect from Elon these days. But it's rarely good news.
I feel like even just a couple years ago it would have been shocking to see an article involving Musk have this kind of spin. Like you'd never see a line like this:
> The name is a “funny” reference to Microsoft, the billionaire added.
in something from 2023 or earlier.
Unfortunate. The Grok team built a phenomenal model. I use it all the time and it very often out performs GPT and Claude, on coding and STEM research related tasks. I was part of the beta for a while Grok 4.2 Beta with multi-agents and it was just amazingly good.
People aren't using it for reasons other than its capabilities. I mean, I don't think my boss would approve a paid Grok subscription for example.
> People aren't using it for reasons other than its capabilities.
This is very true. I have no idea how it performs, as I wouldn't use it even if I was paid for that. Wouldn't matter if it was the best model available, in my view the name is so thoroughly tainted by now that you would get a reputational hit just by admitting to use it.
> People aren't using it for reasons other than its capabilities.
This is a fact of life, though. "Who created it" is a valid and common reason to rule out using a particular product, even one with objectively good quality.
My experience was quite different. It was on par with open source models from China (and it was priced as much) and could never replace Sonnet/Opus/GPT5.x.
Yes, the white genocide and mechahitler episodes have suppressed adoption.
Not even Elon believes that Cursor is worth $50B or even $29B.
If key employees are leaving Cursor to join xAI, I would imagine not even Cursor employees are optimistic about the company’s future valuation.
How can cursor be worth more than a few billion? Claude/Codex are already better autonomous SWE-lite replacements. Cognition surely has a better internal harness. Cursor does have a lot of users, I'll give it that.
I like Cursor a lot more than Claude Code. It works better for me overall. I like the way they integrate it into the IDE so the agent is my tool rather than a 'partner' or something like that. I'm pretty sad that they lost some engineers, I hope these folks weren't integral to Cursor in any way.
Distribution is also important. Cursor is a great normie tool (I’m one of them), with probably more enterprise deals than the competition.
Moats are weird right now… but Cursor doesn’t have one at all so I agree it can’t really be worth much.
xAI showed me that it’s really still OAI and Anthropic (which is basically the OG devs). No matter how much money you throw at the problem, the entire space is still in the hands of a few.
dang wrote:
> You may not owe you-know-whom better, but you owe this community better if you're participating in it.
This is like telling a country that’s being invaded that they can only respond with strongly worded letters when their enemy is dropping tactical nukes on them.
But hey, Paul Graham and cronies benefit from the status quo as much as any other billionaire, so let’s not rock the boat, right?
The word “complicit” comes to mind.
I couldn't find a working archive link for the ft.com article - anyone?
Since it's the original source I've left it up, but added other URLs to the toptext.
I sent it to archive.ph here:
https://archive.ph/rP4cb
and it has the content but the formatting is atrocious.
HTH.
Better than nothing - added above. Thanks!
[stub for generic-indignant tangents - not what this site is for - please see https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html]
Elon is such a clown, he keeps posting salty tweets about Anthropic, Claude Code, OpenAI and Codex yet has no competing product.
He's about to have the most compute. Wonder if he can do anything noteworthy with it.
Elon Musk is a generic-indignant tangent wanker and not what this site is for.
Thanks for providing a space for me to say that.
He is re-building a company that he himself built less than 3 years ago?
Elon has less regard for sunk costs than most corporate leaders.
Ironically, he's the sunk cost.
I do use Grok as a chatbot sometimes. Very good for sourcing X and general web search. Not as "prude" as the others too.
Prude? I've played with all the main AI players for the last 2'ish years.
I've never once thought: you know what? that was a bit prudish.
Genuinely morbidly curious. What use case do you have where you end up making that conclusion?
An earlier version of Sonnet (not sure which one; ~1 yr ago) refused to give me instructions on taking the life of another when I asked something like - "how do I kill a running process by name?"
Making funny memes of my friends mainly. ChatGPT won’t touch that, I haven’t tried with Claude yet, but grok keeps the group chat flush with laughing emojis.
That’s all I use it for really- things out of alignment with the other platforms- which IMO are better on every other metric (except having a sense of humour of course)
I love my friends enough that the memes I make for them are hand-crafted.
Hey I’m all grown up now, just don’t have the time to meticulously touch pixels in MS Paint like back in the day
He should push himself out too.
The grok button on twitter is pretty awesome. Instantly summarize / explain any tweet, even memes, including replies. Ask follow up questions. Not sure many people know it's there.
Also grok in the Tesla is fun, get answers to questions without looking at a phone. I once had it search up a blog post and read it out to me while driving. The NSFW mode is pretty...disgusting so I leave that off.
I hope they find a way with Optimus or something. FSD is incredible. More competition is a good thing.