It's crazy that I'd literally trust a Chinese AI company with my data over anything Musk is involved with.
Like, even if you don't care about (or even like) his politics and can look past how unlikable he comes off as, the damage he's done to his own reputation in this domain just makes using his products like this a no-go. He's literally so rich that he can get caught personally looking through chat sessions and it wouldn't slow him down a bit. He's too rich to be held accountable, and that makes it impossible to trust his businesses. It's a funny dynamic that I don't think is appreciated enough, but I know that if Google or Amazon or OpenAI or Anthropic (etc.) got caught doing something like that, the backlash would be astounding and the reputation hit they'd take would be brutal. Here, Musk would just awkwardly come out attacking people for not letting him behave unethically even more than he already is, and that'd be it.
Beyond that, the obvious astroturfing that occurs on this site (along with reddit, etc.) when it comes to Grok isn't helping. All I hear about Claude, GPT, Gemini, etc., are how terrible they are, yet any discussion of Grok seems to always revolve around sensible, but confident, assertions that it's actually a great product and every new release is the point where Grok finally catches up.
> All I hear about Claude, GPT, Gemini, etc., are how terrible they are, yet any discussion of Grok seems to always revolve around sensible, but confident, assertions that it's actually a great product and every new release is the point where Grok finally catches up.
Ironically, I only see coments like yours regarding Grok.
Tesla self driving cars, (somewhat) as you say, but even the biggest proponents of Grok are like "oh no the best model is this, ugh".
> If I was Chinese, I'd probably trust Grok more than a local AI company.
Nah. There are more established companies (e.g. Tencent, Alibaba, etc) and academia (e.g. Moonshot, Zai, etc) involved than in the US (comparatively). Also there are more Chinese AI researchers involved than non-Chinese (whether they physically sit in China or not).
I think that underestimates how little the Chinese care about what Americans are doing. They're moving so fast that watching what the U.S. is doing would slow them down.
The Chinese do care what the Chinese government does, and are interested in minimizing what the government knows about them, and are well aware of the internet firewall the government operates and that any Chinese company will give the Chinese government whatever they ask for.
> He's literally so rich that he can get caught personally looking through chat sessions and it wouldn't slow him down a bit.
Looking through chat histories is boring, mundane stuff. He's richer than that, think bigger. I think he could kill a random person in front of thousands, and by the next day we'd see articles arguing why the random person actually deserved it and why it's not that bad. Whatever consequences would be lined up would inevitably face unexpected roadblocks which would all result in nothing happening.
that's the hilarious paradox at the center of his antics. Musk is infamously petty and insecure. We're talking about the guy who tweaked Grok's system prompt to flatter him and paid someone to boost his fucking Diablo character for clout. I wouldn't put "looking through chat histories" past him for one second.
I'm not saying Musk isn't petty, I just think that in this crazy world, especially with the lines between public and private slowly blurring, we could have news like "some AI lab let the owner or a higher-up read chat histories" come out of any company and barely make a splash in the mainstream. Maybe it would be discussed for a few days on HN before something else takes the attention away.
Reddits owner is also petty and insecure and edited other peoples posts, Elon hasn't done that yet. Didn't seem to stop reddit from getting popular, people don't really care that much.
And that, unlike most politically active billionaires, he's so publicity-seeking we've all heard of him.
I can't even remember the name of the eBay people in e.g. this without actively re-reading the story, though we all know it was Musk who reacted with petulance to being told his cave submarine wouldn't help: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EBay_stalking_scandal
> I think he could kill a random person in front of thousands, and by the next day we'd see articles arguing why the random person actually deserved it and why it's not that bad
Think even bigger. How many deaths is he responsible for as a result of DOGE cuts to overseas aid? This seems to be water that passed under the bridge a long while ago as far as 'societies attention' goes.
Humans are terrible at seeing and really internalizing second-order impacts of things, even if they are horrific. That's why I think directly killing one person would have a far greater impact on the average person than indirectly causing the deaths of thousands with the stroke of a pen.
It doesn't seem like Grok is being astroturfed, if anything the opposite. There are two Chinese models on the front page while this is on the second page as of writing. And there would always be so many comments personally attacking Musk whenever his company releases something. I think this is being CCP bot farmed.
Qwen3.8 is, but DeepSeek-V4-Pro-0813 is not open weights yet, though they do have a good track record. Grok would be the best open-weights model if they released the weights right now. Elon supported Jensen's open weights letter last month, we'll see if he follows through.
China is clearly the US' main adversary. I don't take it personally and I don't believe China is inherently evil or something, but you'd have to be an idiot to be a US citizen and believe that you can trust China more than your own government in any general sense. Just the same, if you're a Chinese citizen and you believe you can trust the US more than your own government, then you're also an idiot.
It's not a matter of whether or not you can trust these governments at all; it just comes down to which government do your self-interests align with best. It's not some grand political statement to acknowledge that my interests don't align well with the interests of the Chinese government. It's just an obvious fact.
What's the fact? Facts require proof, right? Where is in it?
> China is clearly the US' main adversary.
This?
It's clearly documented Trump and friends randomly made that policy up in the 1st term. Can you tell from the current term? There's been more effort spent on non-China matters, e.g. Middle East related than China.
> it just comes down to which government do your self-interests align with best
Why do you have to pick 1? Most normal people, US citizens or not wouldn't. Tesla has a gigafactory in China. Apple is trying to buy Chinese memory. Meta tried to buy Manus AI. What adversary?
thats exactly why a lot of people in europe or america trust china more. enemy governments have zero direct power over you and they dont really want to work together with your government. they cant hurt you, only the country you live in.
and with the snowden leaks, epstein files, ICE raids, rising fascism in europe, chat control, genocidal wars in ukraine and palestine, there is no reason to support your country anymore.
Ah yes, just as there’s famously no such thing as Russian hackers (for example) given effectively total impunity to scam, defraud, blackmail, etc any company, so long as it’s not located in Russia. No direct harm! Oh wait…
The thing about your own country, especially the more democratic it is, is that there are brakes in the system. A lot of the control mechanisms are indirect, and thus slow and occasionally prone to failure, but the people do have the ultimate say. What you’re doing is looking at failures of the braking system and concluding that brakes don’t even exist! Faulty logic in the extreme.
Public education is clearly nonexistent. Just incredible. Did these people just sit and do nothing for their entire grade school education? An elementary school child learns what imperialism, war, and human nature is.
I mean, the Chinese government doesn't really believe in checks and balances, or corporations as autonomous to the state. That's not a conspiracy, that's just how the CCP sees it (ask Jack Ma). You could argue the US has the Cloud Act, and obviously their respect for rules based law and order as a concept has heavily deteriorated, for but it's a very different kettle of fish to a regime who just doesn't even believe in the concept.
Meanwhile Trump is building a surveillance state with all his tech executives friends who all massively benefit from government sponsored schemes, it's TOTALLY different!
At the risk of stating the obvious, Trump has had his tariff policy killed off in the courts (although it'll obviously come back in some form) and in a few months is going to have (probably not great) midterm elections. And there are pretty open efforts to commit genocide in Xinjiang to preserve a nationalist myth of ethnic purity. So, you know, yes.
> That's not a conspiracy, that's just how the CCP sees it (ask Jack Ma)
That is a conspiracy. Do you even know what happened to Jack Ma? From what you're saying you don't.
Also that was MANY years ago. The Shanghai stock market crashed. Companies had a lot of fear then yes. Things have changed and repaired. I'd say China in this sense is moving upwards and the US is going downwards in policy.
> You could argue the US has the Cloud Act
No, not really. Your Jack Ma example happened to Elon Musk to some extent. Jack Ma had a feud with the Chinese government as much as Elon had a feud with the US government in the last year or so. Back then Tesla and the other projects all tanked.
So have you looked at what's happened in the US over the past 10 years?
The US has much further to fall, but it's falling very, very quickly and if there's ever another Democratic president they're going to have to rebuild a lot of the government from scratch.
The unelected bureaucracy was more like the chinese party system. The U.S. has a strong-president model by design: https://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/fed70.asp. The check isn’t supposed to come from unelected bureaucrats, it’s that the strong president is elected every four years. It’s supposed to be a tight feedback loop. Engineers of all people should understand why that’s good.
When the next democrat president gets into office, he or she should do the same thing as Trump: put trusted deputies in charge of various departments and whip them to actually do what people elected the administration to do. That’s how our system is supposed to work. And democratic voters would I’m sure be much happier with the party if they sometimes actually got what they voted for.
Yeah. There is just one dominant direction when you take into account how it's clearly depicted to the rest of the world, and no direct popular vote for the highest chair.
Oh wait, that's the United States. The difference between red and blue is just that it's more able to do business and bombs come with flowers when dealing with federal governments of the latter.
Tesla has lost both house battery and car sales in my family -- we're talking hundreds of thousands of dollars -- simply because we don't trust him not to remotely shut off our power/cars for petty political reasons.
Also, if you want true privacy you should run AI models on local hardware. (Guess which country's models dominate SOTA/near SOTA open weights? Yes, it's China, and it's not even close. You can run full-fat DeepSeek locally for (just) under $10K USD.)
Supposedly people are getting ~40 tps decode at Q8 on 2× DGX Spark (higher for Q4) which is what I assume they're suggesting is just under $10K USD. Prefill is just above 1.5k so TTFT is maybe 2 to 4 minutes? I don't have two DGX Sparks myself so I can't confirm and not 100% sure if that number is with or without speculative decoding already in use (if not probably around 60 to 80 if enabled?).
> Beyond that, the obvious astroturfing that occurs on this site (along with reddit, etc.) when it comes to Grok isn't helping.
Your comment is at number 1 on the thread. It has no rationale for why you consider Musk so unlikeable. It might instead be possible that unjistified anti-Musk content is unreasonably elevated.
Yes there is. Same way there is any other kind of content without a justification. Make a comment, provide zero supporting arguments.
If you have a justification and don't provide it, the comment is worthless regardless of the subject. Of course you have an opinion different than other people: many people do, that is not interesting and is a waste of people's time.
> the obvious astroturfing that occurs on this site (along with reddit, etc.) when it comes to Grok isn't helping. All I hear about Claude, GPT, Gemini, etc., are how terrible they are, yet any discussion of Grok seems to always revolve around sensible, but confident, assertions that it's actually a great product and every new release is the point where Grok finally catches up.
this is the exact opposite of my experiences on HN and Reddit. In my experience, Grok is typically reduced to hitlerbot and CSAM generator and rarely taken as a serious competitor. People let their hatred of Musk blind them to the tech of his companies
After my and many others' experience with Claude Opus 5 being hot garbage for normal agentic programming use, I'm not sure benchmarks mean much anymore.
Much less Grok's, since they have a reputation for unethical benchmaxxing, among other things.
Not unless you're here illegally. And it has nothing to do with skin color. Just the basic fact that a country not in control of its borders ceases to be a country.
> Remigration is a far-right concept referring to the ethnic cleansing[1] via mass deportation of non-white minority populations, especially immigrants and sometimes including native-born citizens, to their place of racial ancestry.[2]
It’s right there at the top. One google search is all it takes. You didn’t even, for a second, think to familiarize yourself with the remigration concept. You jumped immediately to me being wrong, even though I was discussing something you were ignorant of. That’s embarrassing.
I reject your (and Wikipedia’s) theory of “remigration” arbitrarily defining something that is (not actually) happening in the US. People are being deported from the US based on their lack of legal presence in the country, which is what every country also does. Nobody is being deported because of their skin color.
Also, nobody is jumping to the conclusion that you’re wrong about something that is not actually happening. It’s just a simple fact that what you’ve stated is preposterous to begin with and is not the policy of any recent law or administration in the US.
No one is saying it is currently happening, you goof. Remigration is an idea proposed by identitarian assholes like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Sellner, author of a book called Remigration, who Musk has promoted in tweets.
It is not currently happening, but the richest man in the world is among those actively working to make it happen.
Again, you types confidently misunderstand a discussion.
Trump is doing everything in his power to make people illegal. Outright revoking visas and making immigrants unemployment so their visa sponsorship is expired. This is nationalism and doesn't have anything to do with border control but with brutalizing minorities.
We had all the border control, the border encounters being exactly 0 since Trump took office? Pretty obviously bullshit, it's the same as before with extra brutality. Despicable and disgusting people think like you and support this policy.
Can you name a "Marxist-Leninist AI" that's made by a real AI lab (i.e. no finetunes of open models made by someone on the internet)? I'm just trying to understand what the other side's equivalent of MechaHitler is here.
Can you name a "Nazi AI" that's made by a real AI lab (i.e. no finetunes of open models made by someone on the internet)? I'm just trying to understand what the other side's equivalent of MechaStalin is here.
Can I remind you that the MechaHitler episode was a real thing? If an LLM being lobotomized to the point of supporting Hitler out of nowhere wasn't Nazist in your opinion, then nothing is.
Tay is not an LLM and was trained directly by its user base. Grok is trained by xAI that obviously wanted to turn it into a far-right talking point reciter but went just a little too far.
What? I started the conversation, I set its boundaries. You're the one who's now trying to redefine it. I challenged the parent to show me a Marxist-Leninist AI, trained by an AI lab in a way that's equivalent to what xAI did.
I don't think you even have a point. The AfD doing the same thing doesn't say anything, and I never said there can only be one pro-Nazi AI in the world. I just dismissed Tay out of hand because 4chan users spamming a primitive chatbot with neonazi shit has very little relevance to the conversation about AI labs trying to influence their products to support extreme ideologies.
Right, I imagine the main users of Grok are people like you who are using AI to discuss politics or whatever. It makes sense that there's an AI product out there for people like you, and it makes sense that Musk is the guy to offer it.
But professionals aren't asking AI tools about gender politics. They're using them to code and build businesses. I don't care if I'm using a model that has some crazy political takes that I don't agree with as long as it is good at the job it is doing.
Men and women are both made of atoms. It is objectively physically possible with sufficient effort to rearrange atoms* to turn one human into any other of equal or lesser mass regardless of gender**. The only question is: what's the smallest possible rearrangement which is sufficient to count?
If the surgical eversion of genitalia is sufficient, great, we got that.
If you require DNA, give it a few years.
* well, technically neutrons protons and electrons; I'm sure any two people will be slightly different in their counts of carbon atoms just from body fat percentages, or calcium from bone mass.
** regardless of if you mean the chromosome, the phenotype, or the social identity
Yes, and reality (+ biology) show that trans people have been around as long as humans have. They are a biological reality. Reality has a left-wing bias.
A trait I share with dictionary editors is a preference for linguistic descriptivism, so for me it's not a real problem that the common definition of "sex" and the scientific use are different.
Unfortunately, reality doesn't care at all about the categories humans create, so there's always some exception like the following two no matter how you try to cut reality at the joints with word definitions.
Even in humans, we see all kinds of interesting things going on. No reason to think this would be limited to downstairs and not in our brains, assuming there even are any differences between male and female brains (which is unclear to me, given vitamins and cortisol and how much sleep we get all impact our brains): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ovotesticular_syndrome#Fertili...
Beyond us, but in the same general category, biologists collectively chose to define "sex" in sexually reproducing creatures such that the one with the smaller gamete is male.
To illustrate how arbitrary this is: seahorses. The sex which gets pregnant has the smaller gamete, i.e. males get pregnant.
> A wall of text that agrees with the fact: human males cannot be pregnant
You need a lot more practice reading if you think this was a wall of text.
> Intersex defects prove the point that human males cannot become pregnant.
If your preferred (culture-warring yourself into thinking you know more than all the doctors whose job is to work on this) definition of "male" is simply "can't get pregnant", aside from all the thigs wrong with that, it also means you'd have to accept that if and when a womb gets transplanted into someone who was born without one, they changed gender. This is a thing being researched.
Worse for you: it is trans men (i.e. identified female at birth, transitioned to men) who have the capacity pregnant, though only in certain conditions that I'm not qualified to enumerate. If they have a hysterectomy as part of their bottom
surgery, no pregnancy, so do you accept they're men afterwards?
Me, I prefer to go by simple (clothed, even) exterior phenotype, it doesn't require invasive scans or being a creep.
>You need a lot more practice reading if you think this was a wall of text.
You need a lot more practice writing if you think this wasn't a wall of text.
>If this definition of "male" is simply "can't get pregnant"
Males definitionally cannot. Humans are gonochoric mammals: only females can become pregnant.
>aside from all the thigs wrong with that, it also means you'd have to accept that if and when a womb gets transplanted into someone who was born without one, they changed gender.
Nothing was wrong with my statement of biological fact. Only human females can become pregnant. There's no changing from male to female. Uteruses are human female reproductive organs. Ovaries are human female gonads.
>Worse for you: it is trans men who have the capacity pregnant, though only in certain conditions that I'm not qualified to enumerate.
Trans-men are human females.
>If they have a hysterectomy as part of their bottom surgery, no pregnancy, so do you accept they're men afterwards?
They are still human females, just surgically altered human females.
>Me, I prefer to go by simple (clothed, even) exterior phenotype, it doesn't require invasive scans or being a creep.
Me, I prefer to go by simple (factual, even) biology, it doesn't require invasive delusions or being a creep.
Reality is more complex than the uninformed can imagine.
A true hermaphrodite rabbit served several females and sired more than 250 young of both sexes. In the next breeding season the rabbit, which was housed in isolation, became pregnant and delivered seven healthy young of both sexes. It was kept in isolation and when autopsied was again pregnant and demonstrated two functional ovaries and two infertile testes. A chromosome preparation revealed a diploid number of autosomes and two sex chromosomes of uncertain configuration.
Man, that is a fuckin stage 4 internet brain worm infection you're dealing with if, when evaluating an LLM, your third criterion is what it thinks about trans people.
This is a matter of politics; it's a matter of reputation.
I'm fine with using AI tools offered by companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google despite knowing that these companies are ran by billionaires who are much more aligned, politically, to Musk than they are with me.
What I'm not fine with is handing over valuable data to a guy that has literally completely captured the US government and has shown a disdain for being perceived as someone who even pretends to follow social norms or respect societal rules. You can just look at his actions with regard to Twitter and you can see, without needing any political lense, that he's openly haphazard about this kind of technology and how he wants to use it, especially for his own personal gain, because he knows he's untouchable.
The guy just sucks at the job of being the face of these companies, and this is how sucking at that job affects the bottom-line. But, again, that doesn't matter to him because he has so much money that he can just personally bankroll past those inadequacies.
Thats a very naive position to have my friend. You AT LEAST know Musk position/stance. What about the others CEOs? you never hear them talking about politics, perhaps some of them are 10x worst in ideology and bad influence against your values and you will buy and give your data to them without knowing.
Ultimately, you are using a judgment you objetivelly can NOT do, nor trully compare the other options, so you are complicating and perhaps and ultimatelly being the grain of sand of a sand storm that can do damage to probably the most important entrepreneur of our time, who achieved so much. I Rather give him resources to achieve something, because the guy does eventually deilvers.
Like, even if you don't care about (or even like) his politics and can look past how unlikable he comes off as, the damage he's done to his own reputation in this domain just makes using his products like this a no-go. He's literally so rich that he can get caught personally looking through chat sessions and it wouldn't slow him down a bit. He's too rich to be held accountable, and that makes it impossible to trust his businesses. It's a funny dynamic that I don't think is appreciated enough, but I know that if Google or Amazon or OpenAI or Anthropic (etc.) got caught doing something like that, the backlash would be astounding and the reputation hit they'd take would be brutal. Here, Musk would just awkwardly come out attacking people for not letting him behave unethically even more than he already is, and that'd be it.
Beyond that, the obvious astroturfing that occurs on this site (along with reddit, etc.) when it comes to Grok isn't helping. All I hear about Claude, GPT, Gemini, etc., are how terrible they are, yet any discussion of Grok seems to always revolve around sensible, but confident, assertions that it's actually a great product and every new release is the point where Grok finally catches up.