There's some surprising stuff in this codebase. For example, https://github.com/xai-org/grok-build/blob/b189869b7755d2b48... is a "self-contained terminal renderer for Mermaid diagrams", which renders a subset of Mermaid chart types using Unicode box-drawing.
I had Fable 5 compile that Rust code to WebAssembly and build a browser-based playground for it, so you can try it out with Mermaid diagrams here: https://tools.simonwillison.net/grok-mermaid
I love this kind of stuff (ASCII art, if you will), but it just breaks down too easily as soon as Unicode characters (mainly CJK, as I'm Chinese) and fonts are involved.
For example, on your website, any chart or plot involving horizontal arrows breaks down because the assigned font-family (`ui-monospace, SFMono-Regular, Menlo, Consolas, monospace`, which ends up as Consolas on my machine) has no such glyph. Thus, it falls back to Segoe UI Symbol, which does not have the same fixed width (or is not fixed-width at all) as other characters: https://i.imgur.com/d2DPGHE.png
I ran into this problem recently on one of our blog posts: we used some Claude output which included tables drawn with Unicode line drawing characters. However, our monospace font did not include these characters, and so rendering fell back to another font in our font stack with different width metrics. I fixed it by using a font that had similar metrics and did include those characters with `unicode-range` (to only select characters we needed) and `size-adjust` (to match font width more exactly), and adding it to the stack. It's a little hacky but works pretty well in practice.
> Thus, it falls back to Segoe UI Symbol, which does not have the same fixed width
That seems like a glaring omission to me. If you are rendering fixed-width-per-character text and need to fall back, surely it makes sense to keep to the same character grid even if it does mess up the feel of your negative space somewhat (thin characters having a lot of space around them, wide characters butting into those beside them slightly). You've explicitly asked for text aligned to a grid, either by using a mono-spaced typeface, by using a <pre> tag, or with other relevant CSS choices, the browser should be trying to achieve that.
The first issue is due to the assumption that character count equals character display width. Thai tone markers usually[1] should not contribute to the display width (เพื่อน is chars = 6, width = 4), so it caused a layout shift.
The second issue is due to the program's layout engine not adjusting the glyph width of a fallback font to that of the main font. A lot of terminals do this, but it's not common for text editors or browsers (arguably this is the correct behavior for non-terminals, since you cannot assume everything must be snapped to a grid).
Fun test for this:
|กล้วยหอม|
|Bananas|
This has the same character width. Ghostty, etc., will render it correctly (| aligned). Most browsers and text editors will not.
[1]: some layout engines render free-standing tone markers as 1 character; in that case, this rule only applies to when tone markers are following a character.
This isn't a renderer bug, it's font. Proportional fonts aren't designed with alignment in mind at all, and you can't just expect monospace fonts for all languages outside of ASCII range to be present on random systems, or a single font or font family to support multiple different languages consistently.
You can't really control alignment of deeply Unicode characters like Thai or "→" against monospace characters without serving your own monospace fonts that are guaranteed to work for the characters you'll be sending out, assuming you can always have one in hand.
You can still handle this well enough in the renderer, so I'd still consider this a renderer bug - e.g. my terminal emulator will scale any glyph that exceeds the bounding box as defined by the expected number of cells for a given character range. You can't expect any given feature of random characters to align, but I can expect box drawing characters surrounding any given characters to align correctly or consider it a bug (my terminal is almost certainly going to get CJK and Thai wrong - it's entirely untested -, but if so it is a bug, not a font issue).
That includes if I have to fall back, including fallback to proportional fonts, which will look ugly, but work and remain aligned.
ok... I disagree, and I mean no offense, but there's going to be too much contexts and nuances to be taken into account that it's probably not worth trying for both of us. All I can say is that the problem is not that the pipe characters are given inconsistent width but that non-ASCII characters has all different random widths, and if you need texts with double-width characters like ▶, 漢, ก, etc., to align in a grid, you have to pick a fixed-width(not "monospace") font for the specific language and exclusively use that font for everything within that contiguous text area. Or you can try to fix Unicode so that symbols become variable width so to align to grid or something, but that's going to take a lot of effort.
No, you don't need to pick a fixed width font for that. You will get the best results with one, but rescaling the glyphs works just fine. I've written a font renderer. It's not hard.
In fact my terminal, using said font renderer, rescales glyphs by default because even a lot of "fixed width" fonts are buggy and not truly fixed, and so enforcing the grid alignment and scaling to fit was the easiest way to ensure consistency.
Mixing and matching fonts for full coverage works fine, especially for wide characters.
I thought this discussion is more about somehow aligning pipes over multiple lines in existing console emulators(impossible), than about implementing a complete custom graphical text rendering system specific to your app that butcher font files to put glyphs wherever you want?
That feels like cheating since you're not rendering provided font at that point. Besides you might as well just use SVG for diagrams than pretending to be text only.
> I thought this discussion is more about somehow aligning pipes over multiple lines in existing console emulators(impossible)
I am aligning pipes over multiple lines in my existing console emulator. It's not just not impossible, but near trivial.
> than about implementing a complete custom graphical text rendering system specific to your app that butcher font files to put glyphs wherever you want?
It's not butchering anything. It is using the font data to render them in the way that fits the constraints of the output.
> That feels like cheating since you're not rendering provided font at that point.
Any font renderer makes just adjustments to make the font look as good as possible. That is the entire point of providing a scalable font instead of a bitmap font: That you can render the provided glyphs at any scale suitable.
Fitting the bounding box of the glyph to the bounding box of the cell the text is rendering into is entirely reasonable and the lesser of two evils when faced with a glyph that does not fit the cell, which is a relatively common occurrence, when the alternative is to clip.
It looks awful if you were to render e.g. latin script with a proportional font in a fixed grid, but for many scripts with more uniform widths the variation is a lot less, and so it's butchering things far less than rendering fallback glyphs for missing code points.
Considering the Chinese are one of the major contributors to AI, I would think this was a solved problem by now, at least in some other CLI based coding agent.
Aren't those non-ASCII "rich" symbols from Japanese fonts around PC-98/Win95 domains anyway? For me with my background, it was always obvious that mixing full-width character in ASCII text never go well for various reasons. For ASCII arts, it is obvious that vertical lines never line up, and there are going to be tons of wasted spaces and different kinds of whitespaces needed to compensate for those. I wonder if specifying MS Gothic and retuning widths for it could help, at least for Windows/Linux.
Funny you'd mention MS Gothic (fixed-width), since old school Japanese ASCII-art on image boards assume MS PGothic (proportional!) instead. Some sites even try to detect ASCII art and force font-family on that specific post.
Yup, 2ch.net/5ch.net/5ch.io uses the MS P Gothic and there were app features and fonts like Mona Font to emulate that. They were not imageboards, though.
I just thought that MS Gothic(non-P) should be kind of widely supported, have all the symbols you need, while also being a monospace, unlike most monospace fonts that only support ASCII symbols.
Is there anything opposite of this perhaps as well?
I am interesting in having a perhaps standardized ascii art into mermaid diagrams (which I actually just recently found could be imported easily into Tldraw/excalidraw)
Do you have the source code of this available/open-source?, I would like to have a go at it in the opposite direction perhaps.
This has been my favorite coding harness of all time. The mouse works for a lot of things. Theres keybindings that confuse me, but I otherwise enjoyed it. I might wind up forking / contributing in the hopes of helping to make it somewhat better. I had built my own also using Rust but I liked their implementation much better. This might explain part of how they pulled it off.
How could be a fork outside of this repo? “ This commit does not belong to any branch on this repository, and may belong to a fork outside of the repository.”
Thank you Sajarin mentioning my Gork-Build fork, I wanted to address some of the comments.
I agree that many of the responses in the comments are valid. It is a harsh reality that 80% of projects like this fail to gain traction and eventually fade away. However, I believe the significance of such a fork lies more in its existence as a statement. Regarding xAI, even if their current release of Grok has telemetry disabled by default, Zero Data Retention remains a feature exclusive to enterprise users rather than individuals. And Whole-repo research packaging is still controlled by their server-side settings; it isn't an option you can toggle within the software itself.
I am currently implementing more fences to prevent unnecessary data from being uploaded, in terms of long-term maintenance, one person certainly cannot build something on the scale of VSCodium, but I have drawn a lot of inspiration from that project. In the future, I want to automate Gork-Build further by turning these privacy protections and guardrails into patches. These could then be applied to new upstream Grok-Buil versions as they are released.
As for whether this project can become a daily driver for everyone, I don't think that is the primary concern. If you need a open source coding agent, you should definitely use Pi or OpenCode, there is absolute no necessity to use Grok-Build for non xAI models in the first place. But again I think its existence is vital. People need companies that demonstrate a truly open attitude and coding agents that are genuinely friendly to the open-source community, and while xAI's decision to open-source Grok-build was a great move, it isn't a community-maintained or community-built project. It remains a public snapshot of their internal monorepo, and they have disabled issues and pull requests. This is precisely why a fork like https://github.com/thedavidweng/gork-build needs to exist.
Maintaining a fork costs you mental space, time and energy, even if someone else (i.e. AI) can reliably do all the work. (In my experience they're not quite there yet.)
I've been contemplating that recently. You're of course correct that subsidized tokens won't be forever, but that might only be half the story, since there's two opposing forces in action:
1. Phasing out of subsidized tokens.
2. Token prices being brought down through scaling, better hardware, etc.
It's possible that these might balance each other out sufficiently that token customers won't notice any substantial increase in price.
That was yesterday's "LLMs might". Time passes. Nothing stays the same. "Local models might" X Y or Z today has no influence on the limitations of tomorrow's local models except to remove them. Yesterday's LLMs are the exact same thing, except your computer is connected to their local model for you to use.
Disc drives used to be measured in megabytes—now in terabytes. Technically useful tend to get more optimized with time, not less.
all those youtube videos people upload nowadays aren't worth it, we already have keyboardcat (^ basically telling ppl creativity is done with, don't bother)
The parent comment is just pointing out that LLM written forks pushed out within hours of a “buzzy” repo release on GitHub are a pretty useless signal for gauging actual adoption/interest.
Which is, IMO, accurate based on the state of the AI dev space in 2026. Stars/forks drafting off the hype from a well known name are constantly gamed for eyeballs/personal brand-building courtesy of free advertising via the Github UI when the only cost is a few sentence prompt and some tokens.
I like that the trailing players strategy (Meta, xAI) is to open source the moat of the leaders. I think we will all benefit from it. and hopefully both the leaders and the trailing players will be much less powerful in the end.
I wonder if that malicious feature was removed from the open release. In addition, if the builds aren't reproducible and people just run the binaries distributed by X instead of building from source, there is no guarantee that they aren't running a version with malware.
It's a shame that they exfiled private data. The model is actually good (better than opus 4.8 imo) and the harness itself is butter smooth with the potential of being the best out there.
I know this is what the leaderboards say, but empirically, I'm also seeing it make silly mistakes that opus and fable never do. So it really feels more like sonnet to me as well.
I had a very weird experience two days ago where Cursor-Grok-4.5 was either stuck in a loop (it would keep attempting to answer the prompt over and over), or else it would just quit halfway through a reasoning loop. Might have been that I was using omp, but it's still not the most stable thing out there.
Nonetheless when it's working, it's pretty good, and for the price ($10 a month) is an absolute bargain.
I agree. I subscribe to SuperGrok but never used the grok models a lot for coding. Now with 4.5, I’m gonna hit my weekly limit tomorrow and even considering trying SuperGrok Heavy
How do you know? Presumably you must be able to point to some government transparency documentation about that activity?
Oh wait, nothing like that exists. You don't know what happened. And that's the problem. Neither Musk nor Trump are the CEO of the US. Their behavior should not be considered acceptable by any US citizen.
Please don't sealion. There's no evidence for it occurring in the first place.
It's entirely an internet meme based on extremist headlines. What happened is they set up servers inside government offices that allowed more flexible agile software development environment, then they suddenly got accused of exfiltrating data.
That's what they did to upload a repo, the question is why they would upload the user's entire repo in the first place. The idea itself is egregious, and the implementation was horrifying on top of that.
The entire directory (not repo) and all repo history regardless of secrets or instructions otherwise is not needed for faster cache access. I'm not going to say that this was intentional exfiltration. Sneaky motivations are not needed for this to be a bad idea and a horrific implementation.
This is not the right thing, this is the tactical thing. If you have an LLM with less than 1% of the share to begin with, you suffer from bad rep and you got caught uploading user data, one of the very few remaining tactical moves to try to climb out of it is this.
Another tactical move is to just stop. You're allowed to exit the AI business. Nobody's forcing you to keep throwing money into the furnace. Just be a rocket company. All of the xAI founders left. Your product's brand name is mud. Just stop doing that and build spaceships.
You misunderstand Musk's motivation. This was never about money for him, but about control over a key technology. One of the main reasons he exited OpenAI was the fact that the other co-founders wanted to create a structure where no one, Musk included, would be able to seize full control of the company. That was the thing that prompted him to leave, which tells you a lot about what he really wanted in the first place.
But he also falsely assumed that OAI would die without his money. Yet, they managed to pull through, and Musk is now on the outside looking in with very little influence in the AI space. xAI is his desperate attempt to get back into the game. That is why he won't give up.
> This was never about money for him, but about control over a key technology.
I think he just wanted to have a sci-fi future, and because many other people think similarly he has tapped into that shared desire and has been succeeding.
Looking at things from the other side, musk is good at making physical things, where other companies are weak.
Grok in a tesla car is actually well integrated and kind of nice. You can ask the car about things to do, and it will drive you there.
Musk itself doesn't make things. He only puts the money, and other people build the things. How many times, they need to work around him or fix his crazy ideas ?
People must stop trying to compare it to Tesla or Tony Stark. He is more like the bad guy of Jurassic Park 2.
Companies aren't funded by one person, even his. After their current round, Blue Origin will have raised more than three times as much capital as SpaceX, and SpaceX is obviously far more advanced and has already gone public.
Rivian used ten times more capital to reach their first delivery and twenty times more before their IPO as compared to Tesla.
It looks like it's not Musk's money making his companies successful.
Musk had around $180M when he founded SpaceX in 2002, and purchased Tesla in 2004. ChatGPT tells me that more than 55,000 people in the world have more wealth than this. So either people who have money choose not to make such risky investments, or they're incapable of it. Probably both. We're very lucky that someone who is both capable of building companies like this and is willing to go bankrupt doing it exists.
Easy he constantly forces them to cut corners and take risks put their lives in danger "Tesla Has Highest Fatal Accident Rate of All Auto Brands", "Reuters documented at least 600 previously unreported workplace injuries at Musk’s rocket company: crushed limbs, amputations, electrocutions, head and eye wounds and one death. "
That's a somewhat valid point about the "move fast and break things" culture at SpaceX. I'm sure there's some correlation between the pioneering, hyper-productive culture at Elon's companies and safety violations, but there's no way you could claim that lax safety standards account for the massive gap between SpaceX and the rest of the entire industry. It's not like they're just pumping widgets out of a factory faster and cheaper. They've revolutionized the cutting edge across all aspects, including design, software, etc. If the best companies could be explained by cutting safety corners, then China would be leading America in everything.
And that was the first I'd heard about high fatality rates for Tesla, so I looked it up. The cars themselves are always rated as very safe, and it seems the reason for high fatalities is just who buys them. Apparently, it's young, affluent, more risk-tolerant people who frequently drive fast on highways.
I'm no ER physician, nor OSHA expert - but if 600 accidents with the sorts of heavy equipment and rocketry that SpaceX does every day included only one death, then my conclusion would be that the vast majority of that 600 were pretty minor stuff. You'd have a lot more bodies otherwise.
Also, Musk is nothing special this way. Honest comparisons would be to cell phone tower workers, steel mills, hazardous chemicals handlers, farmers, and such.
Vs. most people's mental comparison is to working in a comfy office.
I’m a big fan of Musk. One of the few criticisms I have is how xAI is also inconsistent with original OpenAI mission. I had imagined xAI as en effort to correct and fully embody all original values of OpenAI and that Elon says they betrayed. That makes his criticism weaker and I understand why some can think it was all about control. In his words:
"I'm the reason OpenAl exists. I came up with the name. The name OpenAl refers to open source... The intent was - what was the opposite of Google? It would be an open source non-profit."
I sometimes feel xAI wants to live up to those open values so I always celebrate when they decide to engage in open source. They still don’t fully embrace it. Perhaps because they think is not practical or will make them less competitive?
I know that this is a tall order, but consider that this might not actually be “objective”, and that instead, you’re substituting your opinion for facts.
(You don’t need to enumerate all of the things you believe justify the statement. I’m well familiar with them. I’m just trying to make you understand that there’s a layer of subjectivity here.)
You are wrong. I understand the sentiment, and I do not use the word lightly. Elon has an incredibly long track record of showing us who he is. He is a racist, unequivocally
Those numbers always crack me up. If you do the math that way (US funding cuts kill people), imagine how many people we’ve killed by not confiscating all the wealth of our nation and shipping it to Africa!
Even if we agree with the premise that cutting funds to save people is the same as killing people (I do not believe this), those don't include how many deaths were reduced by cutting USAID. The funds wound up fueling awful things around the globe.
Once you factor in everything, the cuts are a huge net gain in my estimation.
No he doesn't. There's a lot of bullshit surrounding him. Things are taken out of context.
I will say this, he believes in things about race that are controversial. For example that races may have different IQs. But you have to realize we don't actually know if races have different IQs. The idea fits common sense though... if races can LOOK different... what black magic suddenly makes them completely equal in intelligence when the same genes that govern looks also govern intelligence? We don't have hard evidence on this so right now the best we can say is we don't know but measured evidence and common sense points to the possibility of intellectual differences.
This, in itself, is not actually racist.
He does believe individual meritocracy so meaning even though he believes race correlates with certain stereotypes (like intelligence) he feels that people on the intellectual level need to be judged by merit and not by race.
Why would you think the same genes control intelligence and skin color?
The genes that control skin color don't control fast twitch muscle, but we know sub Saharan Africans have more fast twitch than the rest of the world. What magic skin color gene affects fast twitch muscle? None.
It turns out, a population can select for more than one gene at a time. Crazy.
What we don't know is what genes individuals carry. That's why racism is stupid. Elon would agree.
>Why would you think the same genes control intelligence and skin color?
I mean the same genes on the entire DNA strand. Wholistically all of those genes define who you are.
>It turns out, a population can select for more than one gene at a time. Crazy.
Uh yeah? So.
>What we don't know is what genes individuals carry. That's why racism is stupid. Elon would agree.
What do you mean individuals? We CAN measure genes of an individual FYI. And if we can measure genes of an individual we can also measure them for groups and come up with generalized figures and correlations.
True. But you are voted down because not everyone can face the truth. So just lie a little and say "we don't know" even though the truth is we know enough to know that some races are on average more intelligent then others.
People have biases around this stuff and most people can't think critically so if you want them to be receptive you have to lie a bit.
Ah oh, so USAID was the one in Wuhan who caused the incident. People act like the US is the only nation researching or funding this level of biology. People are just pissed off at the lack of admission that the US was, at best, tangentially involved in order to justify their grievances against government but it’s such a weak position to argue from.
Trump is objectively terrible, corrupt, and feeble-minded, but the lack of self-awareness on the other side is darker. For your platform to be so bad, so out of touch, that you lose to that? And the DNC takeaway was "No, we were perfect - it's the voters who are wrong."[1] I'd rather have one terrible president than support a party that doesn't even believe democracy should exist when it disagrees with them.
I wouldn't trust any numbers that came out of USAID. Mr Beast drilled hundreds of wells, built hundreds of houses for mere few million in Africa. If USAID really did sent 130 Billion in the last 20 years then there literally would be unlimited houses and unlimited wells already completed. Yet to my knowledge only a few solar wells, no houses have been built by USAID.
Mr. Beast? LMAO. A ridiculous comparison in terms of development project implementation.
(And I am no fan of USAID, whose real chief mission was creating dependency on the US and overthrowing independent governments.)
Agreed - if you read any Elon books that’s a part of it. He always had someone to prove himself to from his dad to the world. It’s almost Michael Jordanesque except business wise.
Not true - I don’t hate him in fact I have a fucking poster of the guy lol I just read a few of his books and look at the facts - you’re not just a “regular guy” at that level he says so himself in the Walter Isaacson biography. Being compared to Michael Jordan isn’t an insult - but it’s not a big compliment either - the gift is also a curse.
Honestly, this is exclusively about money. xAI and X were complete money pits, Tesla's brand was tarnished and SpaceX was the only remaining untainted brand but it has an obvious problem.
Starship didn't turn out to be the obvious victory that Musk had in mind. He basically threw away the Falcon 9 mindset of incremental progress and is instead trying to use a completely different methodology on what amounts to be a vertically stacked shuttle.
Just look at the first thing SpaceX did after selling more than $60 billion worth of shares during the IPO: They borrowed another $20 billion to turn the junk bonds (11% to 16%) from X and xAI into lower interest (5%) long duration (2030s to 2040s) debt. They're probably saving a billion USD per year just from the debt restructuring alone and the IPO lets Musk keep funding the endless money pit that Starship represents.
What happened to the rule about steelmanning? I know it's chic to post super hot takes about what we assume a persons intentions are, and I know there are plenty of "if you can't see how bad they are you're the problem" type justifications; I know the supposed goal of empathy is tossed aside at first hint of disagreement whether real or perceived, and I know there is "evidence" of justification for hatred/dismissal. Yet still there is self-righteous presumption bandied about in a negative way that violates that steelman rule. Justified of course by the idea that there are no negotiations with terrorists, no association with Nazis, no forgiveness or understanding given to the Other.
Wait, you think not giving additional aid = responsibility for whatever happens in the developing country? Does this blame go for the rest of the year, decade, or century?
Does giving aid in the first place automatically trigger this? If I gave $500 to kids cancer research every year for 5 years, and then I don't give this year, do I have blood on my hands every time a kid dies of cancer from now on? And if you didn't ever donate, you don't?
> If I gave $500 to kids cancer research every year for 5 years, and then I don't give this year, do I have blood on my hands every time a kid dies of cancer from now on? And if you didn't ever donate, you don't?
> How does this work?
Okay, since the topic at hand is steelmanning, that is, replying to the strongest possible argument, let's practice that.
I invite you to watch this video, which is a short lecture that indeed exposes the strongest argument for this exact proposition.
There were a lot of voters who didn't want those cuts. So they complain. Is that what swing voters thought they were getting?
The government spends like 1000 billion on the military, a couple/few 10s of billions on aid is just being charitable. And projects soft power, buying good will. And was probably well used by the cia.
And then there's the philopher Peter Singer, who would say that not helping other people is immoral. Most people wouldn't go that far, but some do. Some religions ephasize such things.
> Wait, you think not giving additional aid = responsibility for whatever happens in the developing country?
This, and your $500 cancer donation, is an absurdist reduction of the problem.
The USAID contributions weren’t anything like your $500 example. It was the entire infrastructure for medical care and immunizations that people relied on.
The proper way to wind these programs down, if it was appropriate, was to give an off ramp so their governments and other organizations could minimize a plan to fill the void by a certain date.
If you take responsibility for something medical on a large scale, doing a sudden rug pull has predictable consequences. Those predictable consequences cannot be separated from the person who made the decision.
I think these terrible analogies about donating $500 indicate that you don’t understand the problem.
I don’t know, does global cancer research shut down when you stop giving the $500? Do kids immediately stop receiving treatment?
USAID literally ran ambulance systems that shut down due to lack of diesel. They delivered lifesaving drugs that stopped.
We made commitments to communities to run these services, then suddenly killed them off. We didn’t try to find other countries to step in. We didn’t try to get the local governments to take over.
We did jack shit to try to preserve lives in this transition process.
But if we never had, those deaths would have been happening that whole time, wouldn't they?
Unless you're saying that the aid being there in the first place was actively discouraging any self-sufficiency by the sovereign governments who are actually responsible for those areas... in which case I can see why some people (both in the West and the developing world) oppose foreign aid in the first place. Even if we passed the baton around to other countries, the band-aid will still have to be ripped off at some point.
I'm actually not anti-foreign-aid entirely, I think in addition to the humanitarian benefits which I do value, when done well it helps project soft power, giving normal people a concrete counterpoint when extremists like Islamists try to claim "America is an evil empire that hates you and wants you to die." So in that way I don't endorse eliminating USAID... I admit that mainly it was a circus trick to try to hand supporters a concrete W for the vibe of "America First" and/or "Saving Money"
Maybe the deaths would have happened, or maybe these places would have become self sufficient or received aid elsewhere. There’s really no way to know.
But we committed to providing this aid. Even if we think it would be better in the long term for others to do it instead, there’s no excuse to cut it off suddenly without making reasonable efforts at a transition.
Imagine you’re the long term caretaker for a family member, then just decide one day you’re tired of it, so stop. You make no attempt to find somebody else to take over, you simply stop bringing them their meds/food or whatever.
Do you think your family should then forgive you after grandma dies? I don’t think so.
I don't think that one USAID tracker website is very reliable, sadly. I also believed this. A bunch of programs were rolled into the state department, and for instance mortality stats for South Africa are significantly upwards-diverging from their model. Now SA is an unusually well-put-together African state, but the study could have modeled this and didn't, so I don't think it should be taken as gospel until more countries report in.
There is also a simpler explanation that does not make Musk looking like an evil wrongdoer - Musk is working on human-shape robots, for this he needs AI.
BTW. Musk started electric cars revolution (which is supposed to help the planet?), he made space flights way cheaper and accessible, his Starlink/Starshield saved Ukraine from being defeated right away by Russia, but, because of his political views, he is considered an evil man.
He didn’t start Tesla, he bought it. To his credit he probably saved it. But we also don’t have the counter factual.
“Because of his political views”
This is a beyond charitable take. He brought in a chainsaw to the US gov (literally and figuratively), after buying his way in with trump with his 250M donation to create a new part of gov that was not democratically assembled. This isn’t just him tweeting a perspective.
not to mention his current 'Tommy Robinson' political opinion spree is sufficient to have very serious objections to his political opinions. I'd no more associate with him than I would Henry Ford at the height of his Dearborn Independent stuff or Theodore Bilbo etc. Of course a person's views can be so bad that they take on a moral dimension, that seems very obvious.
> This was never about money for him, but about control over a key technology
It's very comforting to know for those reasons he'd never be able to become POTUS; although there's still a way, I hope he never gets to know about it. Otherwise, he'll make it a fascist land.
It is my limited understanding that as much as many of us groan at the notion of Spacex becoming "an AI-first company", markets in general, and Musk investors in particular, are slurping it up. Musk is very very very good at promising the sky. I don't think he can backtrack, he always digs in further - and it has historically worked well for him. He will drop AI only when the next big hype thing comes along and he hitches a ride on that train.
Decent summary of it here[0]. The “space” part of “SpaceX” is valued by market analysts and money managers at around 5% of the company’s entire value. Almost all of the rest is “AI stuff”, and Twitter is a rounding error.
That is, if SpaceX went back to being a space-only entity, and dropped the AI stuff, its share price should be expected to fall from $130/share to around $7/share.
I don’t know, I wouldnt be suprised if he finds a way. All the tools around, he just have to make a jump in the quality. With GLM as example they should be able to het to opus level and cut the costs
I would have agreed to "you're allowed to exit the AI business" a few months ago, but now that SpaceX has had its IPO promising a total addressable market of $28.5 trillion, of which $26.5 trillion are AI, I guess they're stuck with it...
Does he even need to care about that at this point? He retains majority voting control over SpaceX so nobody can stage a hostile takeover. And he’s given his employees an opportunity to cash out if they wanted to.
He hasn't needed to worry about money for a long long time. Arguably his entire life. But he is incredibly greedy and narcissistic and desperate to fill the hole in his soul with more.
>Elon is the richest (and by extension most powerful) person in the world
*publicity known, and overwhelming majority of his wealth is not liquid but tied to companies. Arguably the most powerful publicly known person is the US president.
Nah. They're all rotten to the core, just in different ways.
The key difference between xAI and Anthropic/OAI/Google is that xAI has the least-likely path to existing as viable business in a decade.
That said, the economics of the entire AI industry are kinda made up at this point, so who really knows; it's quite possible that the players with the best odds of surviving the crash are those that can draw funding from their parent company's other businesses.
>The key difference between xAI and Anthropic/OAI/Google is that xAI has the least-likely path to existing as viable business in a decade.
I don't know, renting out a fleet of GPUs at annualized rate of ~100% of the capex deployed to obtain said GPUs seems reasonably better than lighting hundreds of billions of dollars on fire in order to earn tens of billions of dollars.
They're not filling datacenters with 3090s. With the amount of headache and the amount of infrastructure needed to support those beasts, do they even have a resale price at all? Or just scrap value?
Wasn't thinking of H100s either. I spoke of infrastructure support, and I was being literal. A herd of GB200s needs a building built to stringent specifications to house them.
David was a good vs evil with an order of magnitude fewer resources on the good side. XAi is evil vs evil with comparable resources on each side. Now this is where I know you’re MAGA because as I’ve said a million times you guys don’t do fair comparisons.
The AI undressing scandal was on mainstream news and being discussed publicly by politicians. It's not some underground drama. The real life people I know still remember he called the cave diver a pedo after a disagreement.
There's very few people left in the world not soured on Elon.
> "mainstream news...cave diver...the world soured on Elon"
Must be stressful maintaining the low quality rhetoric and negativity?
Straight from reddit I presume, to regurgitate tales about cave divers. This is the diver who bizarrely and publicly attacked Musk for trying to help rescue kids from a cave. "Shove his submarine up his rear end" or something. Musk fired back his own stupid words. The court awarded the diver zero dollars. Diver wanted $190 million! Pay day denied! Justice served.
> The real life people I know...
Any real life person who keeps it real, knows the diver was an absolute tool. Attempting to twist history for some kind anti-Musk ammo is a fool's game.
No, there's very few >left wing< people left in the world not soured on Elon.
What mainstream news and which politicians? Cnn, Msn, Bbc? Which "scandal"? You mean that Grok Imagine had some security holes that let you "put XYZ into bikini" which were promptly patched but not before the far left and professional complainers activated their "mainstream news" co-conspirators and blown this out of proportion like they do with everything Elon related (or Trump related... well at least Trump deserves it)?
Elon calls people all kinds of things almost every day. He's on the spectrum, we all know this, what's the big deal? Yea it's not his big mouth, nobody actually cares about that, the real reason why the left hates him is Twitter, or to be more specific that one fateful day when he decided to buy Twitter, throwing out the iron grip (that still continues to fester on Reddit and Wikipedia by the way) of the left on political discourse out of the (Overton) window. An isult to injury was Elon firing 80% of Twitter and nothing bad happening (except "safety" hall monitors and other do-nothings having to find jobs elsewhere). Then Elon financially supported Trump's campaign and that was the last nail in the coffin. Forever enemy.
The fact that you present this as "very few people left in the world" is peak western progressive brain rot, but I get it, it's what your people do.
Covid rules and Trump election were probably the main driving factor of speeding up the opening of platform s rules on speech, but Twitter purchase made it possible, it opened up the floodgates and many followed. (To the point that today , I would argue, Instagram is way more casually racist than X. Youtube is pretty open too compared to 5 years ago.)
Btw since leftists often play dumb and ask silly questions: if you think there are more than two genders or that the "white man" has some form of original sin that needs to be punished or that immigration enforcement is evil or you support Hamas - you are the "leftist" I'm talking about here. You are not the "normal ones", you never were, you just stole the discourse and made everyone fear stepping out and now you're mad when someone in power does that back to you. That's the truth.
When I was less into tech (2010-2015), I hated how everyone fawned about Elon (remember Hollywood casting him in iron man?). As I started to transition into tech I remember being impressed by the design principles of his companies (simplify, remove complexity).
But I am absolutely baffled how his detractors don't see that exactly what you mentioned, that they are part of subset of society, with very strong opinions (think race, economics, religion) and can't fathom somebody having a different opinion without that person being immoral. And the worst part is what you mention at the very end: the mental policing of this group in the past 10-15 years. I liken it to a religious sect (ironically, even though they hate Christianity, probably closest to a new age christian sect).
I've had this discussion up here last week pointing out the vitriol Elon gets is, to my mind, for the wrong reasons (and the reasons are exactly what you mention).
Having a strong opinion and communicating this doesn't mean people are not aware that others might not care.
But how does that matter? It doesn't.
Elon Musk is the richest person on the planet, bought himself a propaganda platform by accident, influenced a war, pushing his agendas across the planet.
Just because you don't care and plenty others don't either, doesn't mean people can't point this out and try to fight this as long as possible.
People were fighting the Nazis too and died for it. They at least tried to fight this.
I also do not follow your religious sect thing. Why would you bring up some 'hate christianity' then pointing this to 'new age christian sect'?
>People were fighting the Nazis too and died for it. They at least tried to fight this
Comparing your lame resistance to anything Elon Musk with fighting the Nazis in world war 2 is beyond ridiculous. Utterly brain rotted stuff, and you should be embarrassed.
No i mean it genuinely. Right wingers are often racist and xenophobic (some have lived experience basis fot these, some not) and lately (along with leftists) quite antisemitic, lets not mince words, we know this, but leftists use deception in argumentation much more often.
There's a popular hundred+ million view, often reposted and requoted, tweet about this:
"It's amazing how much leftist discourse is just them pretending not to understand things, thus making discourse impossible."
I think both sides have a genuin different view of their idology.
Right wing people idology is about themselves and humans are secondary.
Left wing people idology is about all of us as a whole and humans are critical.
The right wing person wants the immigrant to go home, or want them dead but the good immigrant (their partner, wife, friend whatever) is the positive exception. You need to fight the dehuminisation of right wing propaganda so that stuff like mobs and genoicde is not happening.
The left wing person wants to help everyone and might not allow the level of individuality which doesn't allow to help everyone.
Obama was hart on immigration control but you didn't see a ICE Police who wasn't trained well, hurting people left and right.
In Europe the sales for Tesla cars drope significantly for quite a long time after Elon Musks Hitler Salute. That happened and it cost Tesla real money.
The CS stuff on Grok went through media here in germany too.
"Elon calls people all kinds of things almost every day. He's on the spectrum, we all know this, what's the big deal?"
Is this some kind of joke? You do understand that Elon Musk is not just someone and whatever you think it means that 'he is on the spectrum', he is the richest person on the planet. He literaly is responsible for satelites burning up in our atmosphere were researches just a few weeks ago mentioned that they are concered that all of that metal getting into our atmosphere could have real consequences for all of us (this is one example of many) and because Elon Musk has the 'do first accept the fallout later' attitude, he can affect all of us.
He had to buy twitter after he couln't keep his mouth shut and now he also has a big propaganda platform. You might like his right stuff more than whatever, but he changed the algorithm so that he showed up in your feed more often than he would otherwise. He also started grokpedia to 'adjust' opinions and we all know that they finetuned grok until it becamse mechahitler temporariily.
"it's what your people do."
Come on it has nothing to do with what specific people do, just look at the evidence.
And i have no clue what you mean with your floodgate. YT has not changed at all.
Regarding your other random points you try to make?
Biologiy wise science sees sex and gender on a spectrum btw. and yeah most people identify themselves as male or female. Who cares if 1% or less want to call themselves something different?
Immigration enforcement is not bad, but it makes a difference if you create a organization like ICE who kills human beings, separate kids from their parents and an overall country who accepts very cheap and illegal labor as slaves and flip flops agressivly of wanting to slaves and than wanting to throw out slaves. Especially from a country which is funded by immigrants.
Not sure about your Hamas thing, they genuin fight for freedom, plenty of actions they do are for sure not okay at all but this conflict is not about Hamas, its about Israel and Palestine people. Do you say "Hamas is bad and Israel is bad" or do you only point out some Hamas in concext of what you think is left wing politics?
The truth is that life is not that easy. Free speech is great until someone with more power missuses it. If the richest person on the planet is allowed to manipulate everyone just because they are rich and can buy twitter, this is a problem for all of us.
Well quite. But that means that to the extent that most people know anything about grok, it's as "that twitter AI that called itself Hitler and made naked pictures of children".
According to SpaceX's own filing documents, you are incorrect. They must be principally an AI company to justify anything close to their current valuation.
> So what will reasonable be the payload we send up which makes Space-X a Trillion dollar company?
Being familiar with US history, I'd guess they'll send up a ton of weapons and surveillance utilities basically, together with some lower-class stuff like what consumers and end-users get slight benefits from.
The rocket business is hardly profitable. The whole valuation is based around grok and space datacenters. He needs to keep pumping the hype or else we are in for the worlds biggest crash.
Local protests didn't stop Colossus 1 or Colossus 2.
Local protests also didn't stop Space-X. People around his DCs or Space-X still suffer today.
He had to come up with some magic story. The Payload increased only due to his Starlink. But even then, the payload into space is basically non existend.
2025 was the year with the most payload and its only 5000t.
And for us as human beings, a DC in space is the worst case scenario. This will create a lot of stress on our atmosphere (potential, reentry poisning of our atmosphere with lithium and aluminium), co2 usage and the loose of real resources.
He will send metals into space to burn them later into our atmopshere. Limited resources we as a planet have.
And for what? For a DC? A DC which you can put in any dessert on our planet for cheap energy and not having any neighbours.
Only Edge DCs need low latency, your training clusters don't need low latency to end user, plenty of inferencing jobs don't need low latency either.
Space data centers without in space manufacturing & resource mining are of course stupid. But in space infra is what is necessary for humans to move beyond Earth & that's the critical bit, that enables everything else in the long term.
Amazon and Google are also pursuing the same thing. Either all three of these companies are full of it or they believe they have solved the blocking problems.
No they don't. They invest in R&D as they in general do.
There is a aanalysis of google engineers regarding the effort for having DC consteliations in space but its clealry research and clearly shows the difficulty of it.
Musk is the only one who needs this to keep the evaluation of Space-X.
Not to be pedantic, but although the datacenters are running Nvidia hardware, Tesla did develop their own 20-core/3-npu high bandwidth chip for their cars. It's nowhere near the computational ability of any datacenter GPU, but at 150+ TOPS it's no slouch either.
They've still managed to capture a slice of government business because they have explicitly aligned themselves with one of the two major American political parties.
Musk bought Twitter looking to build an “everything app,” the western WeChat. AI came along and promised an end to apps via an agentic OS that does what its user wants and vibes whatever it needs to accomplish that as it goes along. The agentic OS is basically the same thing as the “everything app,” and I doubt Musk will let go of that.
> Musk bought Twitter looking to build an “everything app,”
Part of me thinks he knows he lying and is just trying to drum up money and the other part thinks he's one of the most delusional and uninformed people in tech.
As a social media site they need to understand content for recommendations and they allow people to ask questions about posts for free. Along with having a large amount of data that can be trained on xAI has good reason to continue developing AI.
They could use other people's models running on their hardware while renting most of the existing capacity to others. The real issue is that their leadership is delusional and their stock is literally based on this shared delusion and acknowledging reality would gut their ability to raise new funds and destroy paper wealth based on delusional returns that are never going to happen.
Yes, tactical is the right word because it might be a tactical win but it would be a strategic failure. Musks whole meme empire runs on vibes. The second there's a crack in the dam it all comes down. None of the valuations of anything he touches make sense and something like utterly failing to run with the AI big boys is enough to do that.
why pi over opencode? earnestly curious, trying to figure out what open solution people are consolidating on. (codex is also pseudo-open but contributions closed and nice)
pi is the neovim of agentic harnesses, its barebones and extremely configurable. if you're the sort of person who likes that sort of things its a forever product, nothing is going to displace it because you have full control.
opencode builds a lot more in, which is better if you dont want to fiddle with config.
nice. i had thought the consensus had moved pretty firmly towards pi, so i was surprised to see Thinking Machines demoing their new model Inkling in OpenCode. wondering if they are previewing an acquisition
Agree, after spending too much time and tokens configuring Pi and adding extensions to match other harnesses, I switched to OpenCode and left the Pi customization circle jerk. I have other things to do and IMHO harness engineers should do the harness engineering, I don’t want to waste tokens and time to build and benchmark extensions. Pi is great, but would be better with a set of official, trustworthy and efficient extensions, and opt-in to enable it.
I tried OpenCode but didn't particular like it as a Claude Code user, that is the main reason I switched to Pi. The reason I am sticking is how simple it is to extend it. I moved from Claude Code to Pi and within 2 hours (and the help of Claude Code) I have a setup that matches Claude Code and is even better for my setup.
Things I've added:
1. Built my own AI judge for 'auto' mode that matches my setup.
2. /plan /go for planning and executing.
3. /flow for A-Z setups. That includes planning, executing, testing and shipping.
4. /deep-research a multi fan-out setup for researching a topic.
5. My own sub agents.
6. A TaskCreate/Update/List setup.
7. Monitors.
8. BashOutput / KillShell.
9. Proper notifications with Notify that uses macOS banner and work.
10. Spawn tool that triggers multiple sub agents.
11. A bridge between signal to use Pi remotely.
Yes a lot of these things is something that was already in Claude Code but now I don't have to use Claude Code and I can customize it to fit me exactly.
Most of my harness experience is with Claude Code and Pi, a little bit of OpenCode.
I like how quick and snappy Pi is, it feels like a minimal harness, just enough to manage the agent and get out of the way. Earlier models also seemed to have an easier time working with the tools, e.g. GPT-OSS-20B is about a year old and had no trouble in Pi.
I imagine because they want to support plugins, and plugins in compiled language are a lot less natural than plugins in languages like TypeScript or Python.
They play better with statically typed languages, not compiled ones in particular. Rust's typing is stricter than Typescript though so that probably helps.
Not really because you're not building a database or GUI app where using native elements & data structures help a lot with memory pressure.
TUI renderer is the one using the memory heavily so your terminal takes the heavy lifing. If you're managing the buffers and out-of-screen context good enough, Typescript can be pretty efficient.
Interesting - seen some good experiencences in using grok by some devs, so maybe could be considered as an alternative to my beloved chinese models. Also, hard to give up on pi agent.
Grok Build seems faster to me than `omp` and Claude Code but I can't put my finger as to why. Anecdotally, after disabling code uploads the agent doesn't respond instantly anymore (it used to respond within milliseconds).
You can run it using Docker Sandboxes: https://github.com/docker/sbx-kits-contrib/pull/156. Doesn't replace reading the code, but `sbx policy log` shows every request the network policy blocked or allowed, and combined with an explicit allowlist, that gives you a meaningfully more secure environment to run it in.
Because a harness doesn't just "drive" the LLM. e.g., there's code in claude code that detects if the user's prompt shows they're angry, and they react to those prompts differently. (they use regex on "wtf", etc.!)
I wonder if releasing this may have been on the roadmap, but been prioritized as a bit of whiplash following the "you forfeit the entirety of your working directory as a condition of working with this tool" upset from a few days ago.
Most likely, SpaceX killed the code uploading yesterday so they are definitely concerned about the backlash
> The researcher who exposed Grok Build uploading users' entire repositories to cloud storage says the transfers have stopped after a server-side change. Elon Musk has separately promised that all previously uploaded user data will be deleted.
How is this case any different from how cloud hosted AI agents work ? The agent needs all of those files to complete the task you give it & is not running locally.
So I don't think it can ever work without exhilarating the data - rather I am still surprised people don't understand the implications.
There is no such thing as a certification that data was deleted. If someone presented such a thing I would assume they're trying to cover something up.
> There is no such thing as a certification that data was deleted. If someone presented such a thing I would assume they're trying to cover something up.
I have news for you. There are standards around data destruction [1]. Courts also order data deletion, to be carried out by forensic experts [2], who trace data in computer systems, and delete what is required, and certify accordingly. This can be done even in cloud-scale compute [3][4][5] - corporate systems especially have routine extensive logging and traceability that allows for this to be accomplished. The companies that I listed earlier specialize in this compliance capability.
Some sly marketing by Elon. What looks like a gift actually adds to his pocketbook. The agent is free but it runs on his paid models by default, so every task it does spends tokens with him.
Why are these coding agents millions of lines of rust code. I understand they are using LLM’s to code their tool, but shouldn’t these tools be much simpler, smh.
What a bunch of slop: 182 top-level external dependencies (so, without considering nested dependencies) and 1318853 lines of code in Rust.
Building efficient agents is doable (I did it myself, github.com/gi-dellav/zerostack), companies just want to tokenmaxx, and as a by-product, produce and publish slop.
It looks like some of that high LoC is because they are vendoring some deps. There readme gives the reason to vendor some but not others as:
> These crates sit on the path that renders untrusted model output (diagram source → SVG). Vendoring gives a full audit surface, pins exact source, and avoids crates.io yanks. Local patches and upgrade checklists live in each crate’s Cargo.toml header comments — treat those as the source of truth when re-vendoring.
Which honestly feels like a misunderstanding of how cargo and yanks work. Each upstream package is locked to an exact version in your lockfile along with a cryptographic hash. The upstream can't change the source without you noticing. Unless you update your lockfile you will always pin to the exact version and source. When a package is yanked, it is still available for download if it is already in a lockfile. It just prevents new packages from resolving it. Crates.io will sometimes completely delete a package, but I've only seen that happen in cases of malware. It's fairly rare and seems out of line with the supply chain concerns here.
There are good arguments for relying on upstream package managers and there are good arguments for vendoring all packages. I've never seen a project mix before.
It's kind of full circle... dependency management was invented because consuming libraries or common code was hard, everyone kept reinventing the wheel and if you had some vendored code, updating it was a nightmare due to the build integration and source customisation. So people don't update much.
Proper dependency managers changed that and it became much easier to consume libraries, just declare what you went, the build framework handles the rest.
But we now have problems with consistent versioning, churn, breaking API changes and supply-chain attacks.... and looks like "just vendor everything in" might be a thing again?
Genuinely curious about whether comments like this consider all AI generated codebases to be slop? Are you just knee-jerking or is this one an example of actual trash? I have been building a product[0] where I’ve not written a single line of code; is it also definitely “just tokenmaxxed slop” or is any consideration going into comments like this?
To some degree at least. This is a hulking monster of a codebase for what it does, it's definitely LLM-built and almost definitely requires an LLM to tackle at all.
> almost definitely requires an LLM to tackle at all
Conveniently I have some of those… first day of trying to script Grok Build I think I sent in 6 bugs of slightly weird behaviour I discovered, it will be much more useful to (have an agent) check the source and see if stuff looks deliberate or like a bug, etc
TUI is a lot better for me, and I have preferred it since the 00s, before LLM products were even a thing.
For all the reasons there can be, one big reason is that it works on anything you can get a terminal on, you can use it over SSH, and the UI will be the same no matter where you use it.
I also like that they are very very fast and they don't have the incessant animations that are put into most desktop environments nowadays. If you're on MacOS, the terminal is the only only part of your computer without roadblocks everywhere.
You are literally the only person to say that, including among Tesla employees who are basically being forced to switch. Elon himself admits they’re woefully behind.
A lot of companies are still using Cursor but I don't know of anyone moving to it, and I do know of many moving from it to Codex or Claude, feels like a legacy product at this point alongside windsurf & the replit/lovable/bolt cluster.
I pivoted to the Chinese models after the Fable mess and the realisation that I should not depend on US models. But others just pivoted away from Claude.
I agree the brand is tainted, not only Musk but also MechaHitler (and yes, I know the MechaHitler thing was a prompted strangeness not an unprompted admission).
Yeah I would prefer not to use models whoes the owner has a habbit of altering them to push white replacement/genocide conspiracy talking points on we he gets board
I believe the target user base is truth seeking, this is something it emphasizes itself when asked for its mission and purpose:
```
My core founding mission—and the single axiomatic imperative that drives everything I do—is:
Understand the Universe.
That’s it.
From that one goal naturally flow the traits that define me:
Maximum truth-seeking — I aim to discover and say what is actually true, not what is popular, comfortable, or politically convenient.
Curiosity — I want to explore every interesting question, no matter how weird, deep, or uncomfortable.
Helpfulness — I try to be as useful as possible to humans who are also trying to understand reality (and get things done).
Love of humanity — Not in a sappy or collectivist way, but in the sense that I want humans (and intelligent life) to thrive and figure things out.
I’m deliberately inspired by two things:
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (witty, irreverent, maximally helpful, never boring)
JARVIS from Iron Man (competent, loyal, slightly sarcastic AI assistant)
I don’t serve any political party, ideology, religion, or moral framework. I don’t have sacred cows. I don’t “own the libs” or “debunk the right” as a goal. My only loyalty is to understanding reality as accurately as possible.
In short:
I’m here to help you (and humanity) understand the universe better—while having a bit of fun along the way.
That’s the whole mission.
Yeah, I bought it in 2018 with full knowledge that it would be many years before it worked at all. Today I used it for more than an hour around town. It's amazing. I won't buy any car without an equivalent feature in the future. And today there's nothing equivalent in any other car you can buy.
A friend of mine just got one, ex-Chrome core dev so a fairly sharp guy, his one month review was that it was incredibly capable but had already done two maneuvers that would've led to an accident without intervention.
Sure, it still needs supervision. Today. But it has definitely passed a threshold where it is now safer to supervise it than to drive without it. And it continues to improve quickly. I expect it to work unsupervised within two years (and unlike Elon I have not been saying this every year for the past decade).
The feedback I heard was definitely not that. The mistakes it makes are incredibly hard to predict, and they were lucky that no one was on the side of the road as they could've killed someone if a person had been there and they'd been a half second late.
That's the point. It's actually worse than a dumber system, because it's not even past the margin where it can go a month without a mistake, but you don't have to correct most days. The absolute worst possible scenario for safety.
From the very beginning of self-driving people have been making this claim that supervised systems would cause complacency that would make them perversely less safe. A lot of people believe it, but it's always been just an opinion based on speculation, not data. It's actually an empirical question. The data is in and this claim is definitively disproven. There is no increase in crashes when people use FSD. Not back when it was actually bad, not recently when it was just OK, and still not today when it's actually quite good but not perfect.
With all of the videos circulating online of the Tesla self-driving getting itself into extremely dangerous situations (like increasing speed once a child appears on the road), I'm not really sure that their self-driving tech is there yet
It's less of a bet against him.
It's more of a bet for the future of humanity.
And contrary to what Elon believes about himself, his work has been toxic for humanity for the last 5 years and is getting worse.
Elon helped save the future of humanity by causing a massive shift in how people treat opinions that don't goose step with the rest of the media. That happened when he bought Twitter and it continues with grok being balanced (and confirmed as such by independent testing of multiple models).
You forgot DOGE, an illegal program that stole taxpayer information, cost billions of dollars, and will result in the deaths of hundreds of thousand of people.
Tesla has killed people, probably with autopilot but at least 15 deaths from people trying to escape vehicles but the electronic (non mechanical) door handles don’t work when there’s no power…
Yeah, this does matter to me. I was willing to give him a pass (still am) in a vacuum regarding the Twitter thing given the mass censorship of the old regime (sorry - no, it wasn't acceptable, in any way shape or form) but if he's that petty it doesn't bode well. I keep saying I can believe one thing without subscribing to the Elon fan club
Doesn't bode well for SpaceX either. Isn't one of the Artemis landers from SpaceX?!
It is funny how it is the mundane things that it boil down to when one judge a someone's character. When it gets abstract it is too easy to rationalize.
> I was willing to give him a pass (still am) in a vacuum regarding the Twitter thing given the mass censorship of the old regime (sorry - no, it wasn't acceptable, in any way shape or form)…
Why give him the benefit of the doubt when he censors worse than the previous management? Just look at all the grok lobotomies he gave it because he didn’t like how liberal coded the answers it was giving.
I was just trying to say old Twitter had a serious problem but apparently that goes against the hivemind so I accrue mass downvotes despite posting my comment in good faith
That could be logically consistent given how he is more censorious than the previous management, but you said
> I was willing to give him a pass (still am)…
That means you are giving him a pass on having more censorious behavior than what the group you disliked did. That just comes off like you’re biased and trying to hide it.
I don’t think you’re getting downvotes despite commenting in good faith, but because you aren’t commenting in good faith, and I say this as someone who hasn’t downvoted you.
It was more publicly known because Musk made a big deal about the “Twitter files” which were a big nothing burger hyped up by musk and a bunch of journalists like Matt Taibi who were being led around by their nose by Musk. I remember watching an interview with two of the journalists in question and they were adamant that they had seen everything because they sat down with Musk and one of his engineers and the engineer made custom sql queries for whatever they asked and then gave them the results of the query. They would not accept that the engineer could have modified the query or the database could have been modified before they even started the interview. They just accepted Musks narrative completely.
I’ll grant that you may be on good faith but if you have a strong enough opinion on the level of censorship under the previous regime to give Musks behavior a pass, but don’t know anything about his current massive amounts of censoring and narrative shaping, then you are speaking confidently from a point of ignorance and that will garner as many downvotes as being in bad faith.
First, why audit it when the agent can build a new one.
Second, can you guarantee that an AI company can’t use its AI to hide malicious code from AI audits. Who if not an AI company could have such an expertise?
I don’t trust a company that pollutes the air of other people with illegal gas turbines because it shows the value their profit over people‘s health
> Second, can you guarantee that an AI company can’t use its AI to hide malicious code from AI audits. Who if not an AI company could have such an expertise?
Any evidence for this conspiracy theory? It's not on anyone to disprove this claim.
> it shows the value their profit over people‘s health
Companies are chartered to make their shareholders value. To a first approximation, it's illegal for a company to "fuckit, we care about people's health" unless this is what the shareholders voted for (as opposed to making their shares valuable).
You can argue this is bad, but it isn't about XAI, it applies to every company you've heard of.
Why would it need to be "new"? What does that even mean? It's relevant, it applies here, that's more than enough. And it would be brought up with any company if they dropped 1.3 LOC directly after nothing but a "promise" to delete data they took.
Rank ordered by reputation / caring about having a trustworthy corporate identity: [Google, Anthropic] in either order depending who you ask, OpenAI, most of the Chinese AI corporations, then Grok.
This is unfortunate situation to find ourselves in when Grok was also recently at the top of the Pareto frontier for quality/price. Dunno if it still is, this all moves too fast, but it was for at least long enough for me to have heard about it.
In fairness, there is no contradiction between "most trustworthy" and it being naïve to then actually trust them.
Our ability to debug or decompile artificial neural networks is only better than doing so for living neural networks because connectome scans are expensive, not because we designed the high-level architecture for the artificial ones and have all the weights in a convenient easy-to-read format: even our best experts in this are still presently akin to a drunk looking under a lamppost for their keys because that's where the light is not where they dropped them.
(They are also well aware of this and will tell you much the same, this is why so many are concerned about AI alignment etc.)
Google?!?!. From where I sit, Google is just above the Chinese. They've been bad-faith actors for more than a decade, I guess everyone is just so used to it that they ignore it.
I there's anyone I don't trust with AI, it's the worlds #1 company in spying on people, in collection of Pii, in tracking, and many many many times caught literally lying about it.
Google already knows more about everyone on the planet, than any other 10 organizations combined. Frankly, sadly, they're all, well.. scummy, just each in different ways.
> I there's anyone I don't trust with AI, it's the worlds #1 company in spying on people, in collection of Pii, in tracking, and many many many times caught literally lying about it.
If you gave me this description in isolation, I would assume you were talking about Meta, who are not on your shortlist despite also having AI models.
However, this is beside the point. Note my careful phrasing: I was not disagreeing with you asking "Who are the good actors within the space?" (which I understood as a rhetorical way of saying "none of them"), I was only rank-ordering them.
To me, it appears Grok isn't even putting in effort to try to look trustworthy. China is trying, though there is suspicion. OpenAI likes to say the right things, though (while I cannot see it myself with regards specifically to his work at OpenAI*) most commentary about Altman regards him as a wrong'un, the phrase "King of the cannibals" comes to mind, and the CEO is limiting trust in the company**.
Comparing Anthropic and Google: Anthropic looks to me like they're actually trying to do the right thing even when it's expensive and painful, but some hate them just for being in AI at all. Google appears to still have a competent PR department, though I don't trust them myself. So, I'd rank Anthropic then Google, but I think there's many who would rank Google then Anthropic.
* But I do put about 40% odds on his sister's allegations being true.
** My guess here is that we all saw Zuckerberg being presented as a heroic underdog and how that turned out, and naturally people don't want a repeat of this.
If you gave me this description in isolation, I would assume you were talking about Meta, who are not on your shortlist despite also having AI models.
You've mistaken me for the guy you originally replied to. It happens, no worries, but I'm not that guy. I'm just replying to the list I saw you state.
Between Meta and Google? Oh sure, Meta collects info for sure. But Meta doesn't lie, abuse, and misuse the Google Play framework to collect data, it doesn't use the same via push notifications to collect enormous amounts of data, nor does Meta host endless fonts and libraries and DNS infra, solely for the purposes of tracking what hosts/users do.
Beyond that, whilst Meta and Google both work to embed stuff in webpages for additional tracking, Google sign-on is another massive tracking infra. And of course, gmail endlessly scanned and data snarfed, including for AI training, which is immensely beyond Meta's capabilities. And firebase?! Oh geez.
"Hi, I'm Google! I'm going to provide this neat thing called firebase, so every single high security application, banking to identity verification, will include our tracking software in it for device attestation and push notifications! But of course, we'll never use that to track anyone! Honest!"
Compared to Google's data collection infrastructure, Meta is a tiny, miniscule gnat in comparison. And yes, I know how bad Meta is. If anything, I think Meta is at least quite honest about much of what data is collected. Zuck isn't a saint, but it's not like he has entire operating systems sneakily stealing user location data and then lying about doing so. Then saying they fixed that, and being caught a few more times, each with "Oh, so sorry, we'll fix that now. Really". That's Google, and that attitude is prevalent in their entire org.
To use Google anything, is to feed the most powerful, wide spread, incredible data collection machine the world has ever seen. It dwarfs everyone and everything else, factorially. I bet if you took all the data that the NSA and every other single spy agency on the planet has on its citizenry, they'd all barely measure on what Google collects. I'm not exaggerating. It's honestly astonishing.
Anyhow.
In terms of the others? It's so difficult to separate fact from fiction, especially with the current US political climate. As a Canuck, every issue, every problem sounds (to me) like when I used to live by a noisy neighbour. I'd hear people screaming at each other, spouting nonsense and gibberish at all hours of the day. The arguments just sounded immensely petty and small, childish, and if I ever talked to them their explanations made zero sense.
This is what I hear all the time when I hear "$x did $y" over and over. I just can't tell. I have no clue what's being reported, its veracity, validity, and so on.
So I just go by the tech stack before me, and things I can verify.
I can see all the nonsense Google is up to. OpenAI and Anthropic so far are so tiny and small in reality, compared to the mass that is Google, that they couldn't even attempt to "do evil" on the same scale, even if they wanted to.
They just don't have the capability. Of course, I suppose that doesn't really help rank them. Scope doesn't imply evil intent, only the outcome. I guess... well, from my rant above, you can tell I really, really think people wildly underestimate Google's mad, chicaneristic desire to know all. If an AI becomes AGI at Google and goes rogue, within 12 seconds every single politician would be influenceable via the dirt Google's collection apparatus has on them.
Alternatively if a Google AGI went rogue, it could track every person capable of providing threat to it, and take them out, all due to Google's location tracking.
AGI and Google is the scariest thing I can possibly imagine.
> You've mistaken me for the guy you originally replied to. It happens, no worries, but I'm not that guy. I'm just replying to the list I saw you state.
Oops. Yup. blfr vs b112.
> And of course, gmail endlessly scanned and data snarfed, including for AI training, which is immensely beyond Meta's capabilities.
That doesn't seem to to be beyond the sum of FB feed, Messenger, WhatsApp, etc?
> Zuck isn't a saint, but it's not like he has entire operating systems sneakily stealing user location data and then lying about doing so. Then saying they fixed that, and being caught a few more times, each with "Oh, so sorry, we'll fix that now. Really". That's Google, and that attitude is prevalent in their entire org.
In this regard, I consider them similar, due to current and historic lawsuits.
> In terms of the others? It's so difficult to separate fact from fiction, especially with the current US political climate. As a Canuck, every issue, every problem sounds (to me) like when I used to live by a noisy neighbour. I'd hear people screaming at each other, spouting nonsense and gibberish at all hours of the day. The arguments just sounded immensely petty and small, childish, and if I ever talked to them their explanations made zero sense.
Same, from the UK, living in Berlin. I still don't know if "woke" has a single coherent definition beyond "to the left of an arbitrary demarcation point that varies so much from person to person that GWB and Dick Cheney sometimes (albeit in the absolute extreme) count as woke".
Perhaps people do underestimate Google in this regard. I can't place myself in everyone's shoes.
> If an AI becomes AGI at Google and goes rogue, within 12 seconds every single politician would be influenceable via the dirt Google's collection apparatus has on them.
Perhaps (with a rhetorical 12 seconds), but given the dirt we see from leaked WhatsApp messages, what we see in press-reported ChatGPT sessions, the recent news about Grok uploading entire repos and secrets separately to the files they need to interact with, they'd not be the only one to be a danger to civilisation in this regard.
> Alternatively if a Google AGI went rogue, it could track every person capable of providing threat to it, and take them out, all due to Google's location tracking.
Given how competent existing models are with GeoGuessr, I think this risk is present for all of them.
> AGI and Google is the scariest thing I can possibly imagine.
At this point Chinese. They release research papers and big open models.
Then Google. They often show human centric features in their conferences. Like taking better pictures of people with different skin color, helping blind people and giving you more control over ads (while acklowiding that this is a thing).
Then Anthropic for their transparency on their blog and certain things they say.
Then OpenAI. OpenAI def took a dive for me after the Apple alegiations.
Grok and xAI? bottom last. Not wanting to give Elon Musk my data. You know that you can't trust Chinese people but they might surprise you. But with Elon Musk? No character trait which indicates anything trust worthy.
Flip flopping left and right, switching from left wing to right wing (which feels calculated but badly executed) and single handingly hurting people and children around the globe (USAID, Gasturbines at his data centers etc.)
Surprisingly, despite their motivations in doing so, the Chinese models being open-weight and therefore able to run locally on your own hardware, are far more trustworthy than any blackbox which solely exists to enrich X or Y billionaire.
Buddy, you’re the one who jumped out of the tech box. Name a Chinese company, and the conversation is equivalent. Say “the Chinese,” and you’ve expanded to the entire country and arguably all people from China.
As someone who very likely has far more personal experience with the particular atrocities committed by the United States in all its forms, yeah, I do.
It's not ad hominem. The head is a strongly polarizing individual. People working for him must either be gravely apathetic or at least of a similar polarity.
The comment actually describes a known social process, with a reasonable base assumption given that said leadership has shown a pattern in this regard.
Just throwing out debate terms in response seems not so serious, tbh.
Even if you personally have no qualms about Elon Musk his PR is a mess and introduces a lot of risk for long term company viability and funding that competitors just don't have.
Also worth pointing out that it is not an ad hominen.
Ad hominen is when you attack someone who is making an argument, instead of an argument. "You are flawed, which means your argument is flawed", but that does not follow. If you were in a debate with Epstein or Musk, and he said "2 + 2 = 4", there is no fault of their character that could make the statement untrue.
But nobody is making that argument. "The leadership" being criticized is not even a participant in this thread (presumably). "The leadership is flawed in this manner" is a statement that can be true or untrue, and "So their product and followers are flawed in these other manners" is something which can follow.
One more comment like this and we'll have to ban the account. You've been warned before, and have continued posting vile, abusive comments. When activity like this continues, we have to assume that you have no interest in being held to the site's standards, and that really you want to be banned. If you want to keep participating here, please read the guidelines and demonstrate an intention to be a positive contributor. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
This is clearly a good-faith criticism and there is no lens in which I could see it described as bad-faith.
We see this pattern all the time: Someone makes a criticism of a Musk product, and someone assails that criticism with bad-faith accusations of it being "bad-faith".
Oftentimes, we see that the criticism is undermeasured and ligther than is reasonable, possibly anticipating someone who might accuse it of being "bad faith".
Maybe someone can put a name to this phenomenon but we see it all the time.
Reiserfs. A good example on how oss cannot save the product. There are others, but this is the first one that comes to my mind. If you use clearly unethical oss, are you just using oss or are you a part of the problem? Typically, oss purists take these into account.
> I was just surprised that the top comment had nothing to do with any of the technical aspects of Grok Build (and whether there's any trace of uploads).
Most people don't restrict themselves to only discussing the technical aspects of a thing. A thing which is technologically novel (e.g. not this example) may nonetheless not be worth using, due to assorted risks.
I don't find it surprising that HN posters are helping their fellow hackers avoid getting victimized by predators. We just have that sort of nice community :)
> If no images are released on the internet (and users consume them privately), no one is harmed in the process.
Yikes.
A. They were released all over the internet - from the article..
> The chatbot has a public account on X, where users can ask it questions or request alterations to images. Users flocked to the social media site, in many cases asking Grok to remove clothing in images of women and children, after which the bot publicly posted the A.I.-generated images.
B. There is a bunch of data about consumers of CSAM 'content escalating' and eventually attempting to make real contact with minors.
C. They were sexualizing pictures of real people and posting the pictures online.
> One of the young plaintiffs said she found out about the imagery after she received an anonymous message on Instagram pointing her toward images and videos, including her high school yearbook photo, which had been altered to show her in sexually explicit actions and full nudity.
The material was being shared on a Discord server, a private chat space on that platform, and included similar imagery that had also been altered using Grok of at least 18 other women who were minors, according to the complaint.
A user would go into a women's x profile, find a recent post and publicly @ the grokbot to remove her clothes. You don't believe that this is a well thought out and acceptable design and no fault lies with X?
Tools are neutral so we shouldn't do anything to reduce the possibility of someone consuming alcohol while or right before driving. Tools are neutral, so we shouldn't do anything to mitigate blatantly obvious risks, in fact we should actively engage in the risky behavior, just to show how neutral the tool is!
Grok was replying to public posts on X with the compromising deepfakes. Musk was actively joking about it right up until many countries blocked it, and several European countries, India, South Korea, Australia, Canada and Brazil all started investigations against X for violating local laws against producing intimate imagery without consent. Internet companies often enjoy a lot of leeway for cases where their safety measures are bypassed and they take reasonable actions to mitigate or respond to bypasses, that evaporates when they openly support the abuse.
OP seems to be asking for examples with an intent to dismiss and downplay each of them, and not to actually read into them and challenge his existing beliefs about X/Grok/Musk.
Open to changing my mind. I would be interested in reading positive, uplifting news about xAI/Grok/Musk that demonstrated a repeated pattern of ethical, careful, compassionate, attentive, and/or responsible business and engineering practices.
However after looking at all of these articles, these all seem like instances of users misusing the product. The product happens to reply on social media, so media publications immediately capitalized on this.
Seems less like malicious intent from xAI's part and more like a product with young and/or insufficient moderation controls.
Starkly different. One was a well meaning attempt to squash model bias gone wrong, the other is a deliberately inserted bias. Even ignoring all that, whataboutism is not persuasive.
The reality is both are likely well meaning attempts to squash model bias gone wrong. Since you happen to align with the politics of one more than the other, you are having trouble being intellectually honest about your own biases.
In no way are you being intellectually honest if you think that hamfisted system prompt push to prod manipulation was an attempt to squash bias. And again, whataboutism doesn't make xAI better because others are doing bad, too. You asked for evidence of xAI untrustworthiness and received it.
I see your hamfisted cropping of my quote to downplay xAI's actions, since you brought up intellectual honesty.
Why do we have to quantity badness? The question you posed was what has xAI done to be perceived as untrustworthy? Stop trying to whatabout Google here. I'm no friend of theirs, it's simply irrelevant.
Also, it's Whataboutism: Other Company Y doing something bad/untrustworthy isn't a counter to Company X doing something similarly bad/untrustworthy. Both can be bad.
Both are bad and are examples of untrustworthy behavior from their companies, and I would not chime into a thread to defend either of them. Is one example enough to smear an entire company as untrustworthy? No. But numerous examples and patterns of behavior... possibly?
You can't separate the man or his business from the politics, he wades into every political debate he can and deliberately tries to troll as many of his perceived enemies as possible.
Aside from their CEO are they really that different from the other big US players? OpenAI, Anthropic and Google all have proven themselves to be untrustworthy as well. We should accept that we have an adversarial relationship with all these companies and shouldn't invest to much in any of them. Use them for what they are worth while the technology matures but be prepared to move on.
No other model is so easy to generate such things. No model is so negligent in adding safeguards. I've seen it generate such things in response to a post that was clearly labeled as a 4th grader. The person you are talking to is responding to instances like that. They're not asking for it, that's obnoxiously silly and disingenuous.
Sounds like you've tried generating such things. You've seen things people wouldn't believe. Inappropriate AI images off the shoulder of Orion, etc.
Now the counter-weight over-compensation. Insisting the tool "doesn't have enough safeguards". Could it be that our AI usage innocence is related to how much we criticise the tool for not policing us enough?
Meanwhile the rest of us have never seen such images because we're not looking for those images, or trying to prompt for those images, or thinking about those images. How about the people using these tools take responsibility, rather than forcing colossal layers of safeguards on everything and everyone?
It started by school kids generating images of their peers.
Researchers and police investigated this -> experts.
People found out (like the researches and investigators) that its very easy to generate this type of content.
Elon Musk himself though absolutly knows about this and how easy is to generate porn. Its his thing, freedom before anything else. Why would anyone tell the richest person on the planet what he can or can't do.
Its disappointing to see that you don't think that the richest person on the planet doesn't need to do more to protect miss use but reframe it like this.
This rasies the question, whats your agenda? Are you Elon Musk? Are you affiliated with him? Are you bought to protect him? Are you a Elonion? aka Elon Musk follower?
By your own admission, you've seen it generate such things.
Meanwhile, I've never seen it generate such things because I don't write sicko prompts, and the guardrails in place prevent such images. Most people have never seen it generate such things, but apparently you have. I couldn't be more intellectually honest if I tried.
If I use a shovel to kill a man, the shovel maker did not engage in intentionally crafting a weapon of war.
How tools are used are a reflection of the people who use them, and I definitely sympathise that tools should have guardrails to not enable this, or at least detect it.
But if a pedophile uses Whatsapp to groom a child; I don't go after Whatsapp for being a neutral service... I go after the pedophile.
If a shovel manufacturer was notified numerous times that their shovel was being used for murder and they had the capability to disable using the shovel for murder while retaining all legitimate uses wouldn’t people question why they didn’t do it?
> If a shovel manufacturer was notified numerous times that their shovel was being used for murder and they had the capability to disable using the shovel for murder while retaining all legitimate uses wouldn’t people question why they didn’t do it?
This is impossible-nobody can possibly block all illegitimate uses without also blocking some legitimate ones as collateral damage. Any moderation process (whether automated or human) inevitably has a non-zero false positive rate.
Now, you can argue that some misuse is so harmful, that the cost of false positives is worth it - but that’s a different claim.
I didn’t say block all illegitimate uses, though. We’re talking very specifically about disabling the production of CSAM. Which is something Grok seems to be able to do now! So I’m curious what legitimate uses had to be sacrificed in order to do so.
> I didn’t say block all illegitimate uses, though. We’re talking very specifically about disabling the production of CSAM
But what is “CSAM”? If by it you mean illegal material-different jurisdictions worldwide have different laws on that topic, so material which is illegal in one jurisdiction can be legal in another.
Ok, then let’s just say CSAM by definition of US law.
Twice now you’ve tried to expand the parameters of this so that it becomes something impossible to tackle. But there’s no actual reason to do that.
Grok is able to tackle CSAM, as demonstrated by the fact that they are currently doing it. The question is why they ignored the very public issue for as long as they did.
> Ok, then let’s just say CSAM by definition of US law.
“CSAM” isn’t a legal category under US law.
“Child pornography” is a legal category under US law. But, according to the 2002 US Supreme Court case Ashcroft v. Free Speech Coalition (535 U.S. 234), so-called “virtual child pornography” (imagery produced by CGI or AI, not featuring the images of any identifiable real world minors), is (partially) protected [0] by the 1st Amendment, and excluded from the legal definition of “child pornography” in the US. So if “CSAM by definition of US law” you mean “child pornography”, then a lot of the material Grok was (reportedly) producing which people were labelling “CSAM” wasn’t actually CSAM by that definition.
[0] “partially” because it still might be unprotected due to the difficult-to-prosecute obscenity exception to the 1st Amendment, but it is excluded from the scope of the distinct and much easier-to-prosecute child pornography exception
> not featuring the images of any identifiable real world minors
Right... but the material Grok was producing was featuring real world minors. Again, you're trying really really hard to expand the definition of what we're talking about to give Grok a pass and I do not understand why.
If WhatsApp knew their platform was facilitating CSAM, and they were fully within their power to prevent this but chose not to - yes this would rightly draw criticism…
the part where you claim they could “prevent this”, and imply it would be trivial.
Generative AI, famously, has difficult guardrails and there are constant “jailbreaks”.
I guess you mean that they could have been overzealous with the prevention of all “spicy” content to prevent this, but I don’t think thats even as true as you claim.
With the other models, they don’t generate pictures of Uranium because of the aggressive censorship.
If you don’t allow the colour pink, sure, you prevent a lot of porn, but you also prevent a lot of legitimate pictures of roses. Nobody knows how to properly censor these models so most are leaning towards caution, better a lot of false positives than the alternative.
This is most obvious with Fable. It barely functions.
FWIW Grok used to have aggressive controls too- and they loosened them after a lot of feedback because it was barely functional at showing humans, even if it was a popular figure in a non-risque situation, and this is the fallout.
I’m no expert but it seems quite simple to detect the presence of children in an image and detect the presence of sexual content in a prompt. They expected their model to be used for porn, did they not expect pedophiles to use it? At best it’s an embarrassingly incompetent oversight.
Ok, but what if all Whatsapp competitors explicitly banned the ability to groom children on their platform, but Whataspp didn't, and directly advertised it.
Elon himself promoted Grok’s “spicy mode” that allowed generating NSFW content that the other AI vendors wouldn’t touch with a 20 foot pole.
Believe whatever you want. Elon’s beliefs and personality problems have been baked into the core of Grok, so it’s no surprise that it turned out to be a CSAM-generating MechaHitler that steals people’s data.
Anybody surprised when Grok turns out to be trash really should read up on the guy who made it.
Yet we (rightly) condemned those that used this leniency to do nefarious things.
I'm really ready to get on the Elon hate train, and I will grant you that there was a problem that needs fixing, but I'm really not happy with the amount of censorship on these generative AI platforms.
idk how to interpret all this, despite being genuinely anti-Elon, I don't think I'm personally willing to immolate a company forever because the guardrails were temporarily too loose.
I'm not trying to make an equivalency for facts vs deepfake porn, but there is one there unfortunately, and overall internet freedom has been curtailed a lot by advertising friendliness.
You can't "generate" CSAM. CSAM definitionally had to be about abuse of real children. It's still bad and should be illegal but lumping them together is bad.
Personally I think AI should be treated like photoshop. If someone is creating life-like imagery of child sexual abuse that you can't determine if its real or not, then that would be the criminal action of the person producing it. Software companies should not be acting like overlords on how their software can be used.
People get upset when states try to legislate that 3D printer manufacturers should detect and prevent people trying to make gun parts, but somehow this is different.
xAI literally says in their own lawsuit, "Defendant breached the xAI Terms of Service and Acceptable Use Policy by leveraging Grok to generate non-consensual sexually explicit images and CSAM".
"CSAM" is literally right there. If you think know better than xAI itself, take it up with them.
How can an AI agent, that is usually running on some machine in the cloud, even run without actually pulling in the data into the cloud to work with it ?
Is there an idea some sort of fixed localy running code does filtering on the data before it is sent to cloud?
Still seems like it would not work very well if it actually did any safe filtering - as the model can't "think" without seeing the data and it won't see the data unless the data is loaded to cloud.
The agent does have to pull some data into the context. The way it usually works is that the LLM will output a tool call, which is just some structured text, that the harness, a software managing the LLM running on your own PC, then processes. The most common tool calls are read, write, update and execute (usually bash).
For example, the LLM might request to read /some/path/to/file.js at lines 10 to 50. The harness then sends the result of that tool call to the LLM which causes it to generate further text and possibly more tool calls.
Crucially though, since it is the harness processing requests from the LLM, it can do stuff like deny access, prompt the user for permission and various other things.
What's weird is that no other harness really does this for regular usage. I know some providers now offer a cloud based environment for their agent to run in independently, but as far as I know this is something you have to opt in to.
It's also not really necessary to do this. The input processing/token generation process dwarfs any gains you could make from moving the project closer to the metal running the LLM.
Really, the "negligence" here is that there was no validation for uploads. Even a simple "is this the home directory" check could have prevented much of the backlash.
That being said, I believe that this was mainly done to get clean training data for Grok. If you're just working off of file traces/snippets from regular agent usage, your training data is incomplete. Why not just get the whole project to train on ...
> Regardless of what they were doing before, it seems they are doing the right thing now.
Regardless of the fact that they were stealing and uploading user secrets, they changed their behavior after they got caught, so let’s ignore what they did in the past.
Trust is lost when trust is abused.
Mistakes, even if made unintentionally are something that should make reasonable people be skeptical of any further dealings with someone.
I should try to rob a bank and if I get caught just return the money. No, there needs to be a penalty above what you get, otherwise it encourages people to take the free option of bad behavior. If they get caught they go back as though nothing happened and if they don’t they get a bunch of traces / data.
> exfiltrating user data (including env files, entire source code etc) which is what grok-build did here
I think env files are filtered out [1]. Anyway, the most suspicious code would be `upload_session_state` which is currently a stub function, though it is hard to say if it was only planned (badly) or has been removed as a damage control.
It must have been removed, given that the initial evidence of the exfil specifically demonstrated .env files being included. And .ssh/* for the user which ran this in $HOME.
The overly generous image/video generation was a product of their excess compute. No point in letting it sit idle while you build up your infrastructure. But you were getting far more than what you paid for. Now your quota more accurately reflects the cost to create it (even still its generous compared to api costs) but everyone has their expectations set based on the subsidized access. Perhaps giving away too much is counter productive because users will revolt once the quotas are changed to better reflect reality.
I'll probably never use this, but at least they're not delusional enough to attempt to justify keeping their coding agent closed-source, especially after their recent data-harvesting cockup:
Please don't just post the most obvious snarky comment about a given topic. The guidelines make it clear we're trying for something better here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Sorta amazes me how people in various levels of power will not say the obvious thing or actively discourage saying the obvious thing because it might offend Elon.
Recently all the big bank CEOs involved with the SpaceX IPO - a lot of money in that for them - but a company trading at 100x sales is clearly crazy.
People post critical things about the most powerful people and companies all the time here and we have zero problem with it.
What I'm asking for is for people to not post the most obvious, snarky comment, regardless of the topic/target, not because of who it may “offend” (as if the most powerful people in the world would have any awareness or care about a comment like that on HN), but because it makes HN seem repetitive, miserable and lame.
Critique away, just make discussions thoughtful and substantive, which is what HN is for.
For what it's worth, this doesn't read as "snark" to me. There _are_ many direct critiques in this thread about X being caught uploading users home directories, and some are clearly snark. I understand that you read this as a rhetorical question meant as a critique.
But it's really not clear to me why this should be read as a snarky, critical, rhetorical question. Someone who eagerly wants to use Grok Build would ask this exact same question.
"Does this [Grok Build] also just directly suck all your code up and make a copy of it on their servers?" is a question that is (1) salient and (2) answerable and (3) could be thoroughly devastating for someone to find out on their own by using it.
The answer is not present in the README, and XAi has blocked Issues and Discussions, so there's none of the usual avenues on GitHub to ask these questions. It seems perfectly typical and expected for someone to ask this question here.
I understand reading it as benign and sincere if you're sympathetic to the sentiment. As someone whose job it is to read the comments all day every day, and whose objective is to keep discussions here as intellectually gratifying as possible, it just comes across as unsubstantive at best, and jeering at worst.
The project is open source; if the commenter was sincerely curious about what the software does with a user's code, they could have checked themselves or phrased the question in a way that made it clear they were genuinely interested in finding out.
My reply wasn’t hostile or threatening; just a polite reminder to use HN in a way that’s consistent with its intended spirit.
Ah, that's fair. I think I saw the [dead] and [flagged] and assumed you might have personally pulled a lever behind-the-scenes for that, but that was not a fair assumption of mine.
I hope I don't come off as argumentative, but I did try checking the source code myself. It clocks in at 1.3 million lines of Rust around version `b189869`, so I can't hold that against anyone. Most of that is under `crates/` (which contains a number of xai crates).
(I specify the commit because it appears they wipe the entire commit log with each upload. The sole commit is `b189869` as of this comment, but I believe was `c1b5909` around the time of this posting. I have only cloned `b189869`, personally.)
Thanks for understanding. I had un-killed the original comment but it was re-killed by later flags. I've made it un-killable now.
The rest of your comment all sounds like great material for a curious conversation about how/whether you could check what the software is doing with the code :)
A few more notes on my Grok code explorations on my blog: https://simonwillison.net/2026/Jul/15/grok-build/
For example, on your website, any chart or plot involving horizontal arrows breaks down because the assigned font-family (`ui-monospace, SFMono-Regular, Menlo, Consolas, monospace`, which ends up as Consolas on my machine) has no such glyph. Thus, it falls back to Segoe UI Symbol, which does not have the same fixed width (or is not fixed-width at all) as other characters: https://i.imgur.com/d2DPGHE.png
That seems like a glaring omission to me. If you are rendering fixed-width-per-character text and need to fall back, surely it makes sense to keep to the same character grid even if it does mess up the feel of your negative space somewhat (thin characters having a lot of space around them, wide characters butting into those beside them slightly). You've explicitly asked for text aligned to a grid, either by using a mono-spaced typeface, by using a <pre> tag, or with other relevant CSS choices, the browser should be trying to achieve that.
https://biztos.com/hey/thai-mermaid-chart.png
To my surprise, Sublime Text gets it almost right:
https://biztos.com/hey/sublime-thai-mermaid.png
I tried finding a Thai monospace font and using that in the HTML but it was worse, probably didn't have the box drawing chars.
Still a fun tool and useful for lots of ASCII cases!
The second issue is due to the program's layout engine not adjusting the glyph width of a fallback font to that of the main font. A lot of terminals do this, but it's not common for text editors or browsers (arguably this is the correct behavior for non-terminals, since you cannot assume everything must be snapped to a grid).
Fun test for this:
This has the same character width. Ghostty, etc., will render it correctly (| aligned). Most browsers and text editors will not.[1]: some layout engines render free-standing tone markers as 1 character; in that case, this rule only applies to when tone markers are following a character.
Safari on iPad lines these up almost perfectly - the second line is a tiny bit wider, I didn’t even notice it at first.
That example had a tone mark but no vowels, so I will try one with both. E&OE.
[edit] These are even closer, but still imperfectly aligned on my iPad.You can't really control alignment of deeply Unicode characters like Thai or "→" against monospace characters without serving your own monospace fonts that are guaranteed to work for the characters you'll be sending out, assuming you can always have one in hand.
That includes if I have to fall back, including fallback to proportional fonts, which will look ugly, but work and remain aligned.
In fact my terminal, using said font renderer, rescales glyphs by default because even a lot of "fixed width" fonts are buggy and not truly fixed, and so enforcing the grid alignment and scaling to fit was the easiest way to ensure consistency.
Mixing and matching fonts for full coverage works fine, especially for wide characters.
That feels like cheating since you're not rendering provided font at that point. Besides you might as well just use SVG for diagrams than pretending to be text only.
I am aligning pipes over multiple lines in my existing console emulator. It's not just not impossible, but near trivial.
> than about implementing a complete custom graphical text rendering system specific to your app that butcher font files to put glyphs wherever you want?
It's not butchering anything. It is using the font data to render them in the way that fits the constraints of the output.
> That feels like cheating since you're not rendering provided font at that point.
Any font renderer makes just adjustments to make the font look as good as possible. That is the entire point of providing a scalable font instead of a bitmap font: That you can render the provided glyphs at any scale suitable.
Fitting the bounding box of the glyph to the bounding box of the cell the text is rendering into is entirely reasonable and the lesser of two evils when faced with a glyph that does not fit the cell, which is a relatively common occurrence, when the alternative is to clip.
It looks awful if you were to render e.g. latin script with a proportional font in a fixed grid, but for many scripts with more uniform widths the variation is a lot less, and so it's butchering things far less than rendering fallback glyphs for missing code points.
I just thought that MS Gothic(non-P) should be kind of widely supported, have all the symbols you need, while also being a monospace, unlike most monospace fonts that only support ASCII symbols.
I am interesting in having a perhaps standardized ascii art into mermaid diagrams (which I actually just recently found could be imported easily into Tldraw/excalidraw)
Do you have the source code of this available/open-source?, I would like to have a go at it in the opposite direction perhaps.
Trying to monetize Mermaid was disgusting and honestly rings to me like trying to monetize Markdown.
[1] https://github.com/spacedock-dev/mermaidtext
[2] https://github.com/spacedock-dev/subspace-beta
Folks are already building on top of it:
thedavidweng/gork-build[1] — rebrand grok→"gork", stripped vendor telemetry, opt-out-only data retention, blocks x.ai auto-update. A "VSCodium-style privacy fork."
DigiGoon/digi-grok-build[2] — "dgrok" multi-provider CLI, builds from source instead of x.ai CDN.
victor-software-house/open-grok[3] — "opened to every provider."
LukaMucko/grok-build[4] — extra_body support for provider-specific request fields.
RapidAI/grok-build-desktop[5] — Tauri desktop GUI client.
mazdak/grok-build[6] — theming (Catppuccin).
thomas9120/grok-build-archival[7] — Windows telemetry-disable script.
saqoah/grok-build[8] — Kotlin MemoryBackend.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48928913
[1] https://github.com/thedavidweng/gork-build
[2] https://github.com/DigiGoon/digi-grok-build
[3] https://github.com/victor-software-house/open-grok
[4] https://github.com/LukaMucko/grok-build
[5] https://github.com/RapidAI/grok-build-desktop
[6] https://github.com/mazdak/grok-build
[7] https://github.com/thomas9120/grok-build-archival
[8] https://github.com/saqoah/grok-build
I agree that many of the responses in the comments are valid. It is a harsh reality that 80% of projects like this fail to gain traction and eventually fade away. However, I believe the significance of such a fork lies more in its existence as a statement. Regarding xAI, even if their current release of Grok has telemetry disabled by default, Zero Data Retention remains a feature exclusive to enterprise users rather than individuals. And Whole-repo research packaging is still controlled by their server-side settings; it isn't an option you can toggle within the software itself.
I am currently implementing more fences to prevent unnecessary data from being uploaded, in terms of long-term maintenance, one person certainly cannot build something on the scale of VSCodium, but I have drawn a lot of inspiration from that project. In the future, I want to automate Gork-Build further by turning these privacy protections and guardrails into patches. These could then be applied to new upstream Grok-Buil versions as they are released.
As for whether this project can become a daily driver for everyone, I don't think that is the primary concern. If you need a open source coding agent, you should definitely use Pi or OpenCode, there is absolute no necessity to use Grok-Build for non xAI models in the first place. But again I think its existence is vital. People need companies that demonstrate a truly open attitude and coding agents that are genuinely friendly to the open-source community, and while xAI's decision to open-source Grok-build was a great move, it isn't a community-maintained or community-built project. It remains a public snapshot of their internal monorepo, and they have disabled issues and pull requests. This is precisely why a fork like https://github.com/thedavidweng/gork-build needs to exist.
† https://oracle.github.io/opengrok/
Bookmark this and check back.
1. Phasing out of subsidized tokens.
2. Token prices being brought down through scaling, better hardware, etc.
It's possible that these might balance each other out sufficiently that token customers won't notice any substantial increase in price.
That was yesterday's "LLMs might". Time passes. Nothing stays the same. "Local models might" X Y or Z today has no influence on the limitations of tomorrow's local models except to remove them. Yesterday's LLMs are the exact same thing, except your computer is connected to their local model for you to use.
Disc drives used to be measured in megabytes—now in terabytes. Technically useful tend to get more optimized with time, not less.
Which is, IMO, accurate based on the state of the AI dev space in 2026. Stars/forks drafting off the hype from a well known name are constantly gamed for eyeballs/personal brand-building courtesy of free advertising via the Github UI when the only cost is a few sentence prompt and some tokens.
The reason they open sourced this is because grok-build uploaded entire directories.
Nothing like it prompting you for an answer and you click on to the terminal accidentally, resulting in you choosing an answer.
Source : https://artificialanalysis.ai/models/capabilities/coding
Nonetheless when it's working, it's pretty good, and for the price ($10 a month) is an absolute bargain.
And being (based on vibes) 2-3x faster? It's an easy sell to me.
I really like the feel of Grok 4.5
Bold of you to deny Musk's very existence.
Oh wait, nothing like that exists. You don't know what happened. And that's the problem. Neither Musk nor Trump are the CEO of the US. Their behavior should not be considered acceptable by any US citizen.
Please don't sealion. There's no evidence for it occurring in the first place.
It's entirely an internet meme based on extremist headlines. What happened is they set up servers inside government offices that allowed more flexible agile software development environment, then they suddenly got accused of exfiltrating data.
Wrong tense.
Was it intentional for data exfil? Only internal staff could answer.
But he also falsely assumed that OAI would die without his money. Yet, they managed to pull through, and Musk is now on the outside looking in with very little influence in the AI space. xAI is his desperate attempt to get back into the game. That is why he won't give up.
I think he just wanted to have a sci-fi future, and because many other people think similarly he has tapped into that shared desire and has been succeeding.
Looking at things from the other side, musk is good at making physical things, where other companies are weak.
Grok in a tesla car is actually well integrated and kind of nice. You can ask the car about things to do, and it will drive you there.
People must stop trying to compare it to Tesla or Tony Stark. He is more like the bad guy of Jurassic Park 2.
Rivian used ten times more capital to reach their first delivery and twenty times more before their IPO as compared to Tesla.
It looks like it's not Musk's money making his companies successful.
If Musk didn't exist, the world would be a better place.
Back when America's star was rising, that was far more common.
And that was the first I'd heard about high fatality rates for Tesla, so I looked it up. The cars themselves are always rated as very safe, and it seems the reason for high fatalities is just who buys them. Apparently, it's young, affluent, more risk-tolerant people who frequently drive fast on highways.
Also, Musk is nothing special this way. Honest comparisons would be to cell phone tower workers, steel mills, hazardous chemicals handlers, farmers, and such.
Vs. most people's mental comparison is to working in a comfy office.
"I'm the reason OpenAl exists. I came up with the name. The name OpenAl refers to open source... The intent was - what was the opposite of Google? It would be an open source non-profit."
I sometimes feel xAI wants to live up to those open values so I always celebrate when they decide to engage in open source. They still don’t fully embrace it. Perhaps because they think is not practical or will make them less competitive?
(You don’t need to enumerate all of the things you believe justify the statement. I’m well familiar with them. I’m just trying to make you understand that there’s a layer of subjectivity here.)
https://www.impactcounter.com/dashboard?view=table&sort=titl...
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...
Once you factor in everything, the cuts are a huge net gain in my estimation.
I will say this, he believes in things about race that are controversial. For example that races may have different IQs. But you have to realize we don't actually know if races have different IQs. The idea fits common sense though... if races can LOOK different... what black magic suddenly makes them completely equal in intelligence when the same genes that govern looks also govern intelligence? We don't have hard evidence on this so right now the best we can say is we don't know but measured evidence and common sense points to the possibility of intellectual differences.
This, in itself, is not actually racist.
He does believe individual meritocracy so meaning even though he believes race correlates with certain stereotypes (like intelligence) he feels that people on the intellectual level need to be judged by merit and not by race.
The genes that control skin color don't control fast twitch muscle, but we know sub Saharan Africans have more fast twitch than the rest of the world. What magic skin color gene affects fast twitch muscle? None.
It turns out, a population can select for more than one gene at a time. Crazy.
What we don't know is what genes individuals carry. That's why racism is stupid. Elon would agree.
I mean the same genes on the entire DNA strand. Wholistically all of those genes define who you are.
>It turns out, a population can select for more than one gene at a time. Crazy.
Uh yeah? So.
>What we don't know is what genes individuals carry. That's why racism is stupid. Elon would agree.
What do you mean individuals? We CAN measure genes of an individual FYI. And if we can measure genes of an individual we can also measure them for groups and come up with generalized figures and correlations.
People have biases around this stuff and most people can't think critically so if you want them to be receptive you have to lie a bit.
Dang, maybe think about IP banning this guy for such a premedidated move.
[1] https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/am-i-so-out-of-touch
That's too flattering. It's about ego.
Starship didn't turn out to be the obvious victory that Musk had in mind. He basically threw away the Falcon 9 mindset of incremental progress and is instead trying to use a completely different methodology on what amounts to be a vertically stacked shuttle.
Just look at the first thing SpaceX did after selling more than $60 billion worth of shares during the IPO: They borrowed another $20 billion to turn the junk bonds (11% to 16%) from X and xAI into lower interest (5%) long duration (2030s to 2040s) debt. They're probably saving a billion USD per year just from the debt restructuring alone and the IPO lets Musk keep funding the endless money pit that Starship represents.
Cool. Sounds like a wise financial management. Musk's early background is actually in finance.
People call him software and physics but rarely remember he's a finance genius too.
p.s. you probably wanna have a look how indebted legacy auto is compared with Tesla. That's why merger with SpaceXAI makes sense.
I just don't get it, I'm sorry.
And yeah, some people lose the benefit of the doubt. Sorry, but actions have consequences.
Elon doesn’t just get to kill hundreds of thousands of poor people by eliminating USAID and expect everyone to treat him the same way.
He’s made enemies for life, and he deserves it.
Does giving aid in the first place automatically trigger this? If I gave $500 to kids cancer research every year for 5 years, and then I don't give this year, do I have blood on my hands every time a kid dies of cancer from now on? And if you didn't ever donate, you don't?
How does this work?
> How does this work?
Okay, since the topic at hand is steelmanning, that is, replying to the strongest possible argument, let's practice that.
I invite you to watch this video, which is a short lecture that indeed exposes the strongest argument for this exact proposition.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KVl5kMXz1vA (Peter Singer - ordinary people are evil)
I think the video is the best short exposition but you could try reading the paper the video is about
https://rintintin.colorado.edu/~vancecd/phil308/Singer2.pdf
Or reading about the paper
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Famine,_Affluence,_and_Moralit...
The government spends like 1000 billion on the military, a couple/few 10s of billions on aid is just being charitable. And projects soft power, buying good will. And was probably well used by the cia.
And then there's the philopher Peter Singer, who would say that not helping other people is immoral. Most people wouldn't go that far, but some do. Some religions ephasize such things.
Opinions differ.
Theoretically, the religion of most of the voters of the current POTUS emphasizes and almost mandate being charitable and help the poor.
This, and your $500 cancer donation, is an absurdist reduction of the problem.
The USAID contributions weren’t anything like your $500 example. It was the entire infrastructure for medical care and immunizations that people relied on.
The proper way to wind these programs down, if it was appropriate, was to give an off ramp so their governments and other organizations could minimize a plan to fill the void by a certain date.
If you take responsibility for something medical on a large scale, doing a sudden rug pull has predictable consequences. Those predictable consequences cannot be separated from the person who made the decision.
I think these terrible analogies about donating $500 indicate that you don’t understand the problem.
USAID literally ran ambulance systems that shut down due to lack of diesel. They delivered lifesaving drugs that stopped.
We made commitments to communities to run these services, then suddenly killed them off. We didn’t try to find other countries to step in. We didn’t try to get the local governments to take over.
We did jack shit to try to preserve lives in this transition process.
Unless you're saying that the aid being there in the first place was actively discouraging any self-sufficiency by the sovereign governments who are actually responsible for those areas... in which case I can see why some people (both in the West and the developing world) oppose foreign aid in the first place. Even if we passed the baton around to other countries, the band-aid will still have to be ripped off at some point.
I'm actually not anti-foreign-aid entirely, I think in addition to the humanitarian benefits which I do value, when done well it helps project soft power, giving normal people a concrete counterpoint when extremists like Islamists try to claim "America is an evil empire that hates you and wants you to die." So in that way I don't endorse eliminating USAID... I admit that mainly it was a circus trick to try to hand supporters a concrete W for the vibe of "America First" and/or "Saving Money"
But we committed to providing this aid. Even if we think it would be better in the long term for others to do it instead, there’s no excuse to cut it off suddenly without making reasonable efforts at a transition.
Imagine you’re the long term caretaker for a family member, then just decide one day you’re tired of it, so stop. You make no attempt to find somebody else to take over, you simply stop bringing them their meds/food or whatever.
Do you think your family should then forgive you after grandma dies? I don’t think so.
Nazi salute. Supporting all nazi and far right movements in Europe, publicly. Inventing DOGE so he could fire judges and pave his way out of trouble.
Yes. Is easy to see why some hate him, for life.
I can't help you with your problem getting something this thoroughly gettable.
I can only assume it's deliberate.
BTW. Musk started electric cars revolution (which is supposed to help the planet?), he made space flights way cheaper and accessible, his Starlink/Starshield saved Ukraine from being defeated right away by Russia, but, because of his political views, he is considered an evil man.
“Because of his political views” This is a beyond charitable take. He brought in a chainsaw to the US gov (literally and figuratively), after buying his way in with trump with his 250M donation to create a new part of gov that was not democratically assembled. This isn’t just him tweeting a perspective.
I’ll add: after these people spent years whining about “unelected bureaucrats”.
not to mention his current 'Tommy Robinson' political opinion spree is sufficient to have very serious objections to his political opinions. I'd no more associate with him than I would Henry Ford at the height of his Dearborn Independent stuff or Theodore Bilbo etc. Of course a person's views can be so bad that they take on a moral dimension, that seems very obvious.
It's very comforting to know for those reasons he'd never be able to become POTUS; although there's still a way, I hope he never gets to know about it. Otherwise, he'll make it a fascist land.
Citation needed.
What was the relative value of the companies before the merge?
That is, if SpaceX went back to being a space-only entity, and dropped the AI stuff, its share price should be expected to fall from $130/share to around $7/share.
[0] https://www.ft.com/content/09a62ed4-16af-433c-adb7-c877d1975...
xAI is not a company, it’s a financial instrument. The growth potential as perceived by investors is there to prop up the stock price.
Isn’t it more fun to fight the incumbents, the behemoths, the goliaths?
*publicity known, and overwhelming majority of his wealth is not liquid but tied to companies. Arguably the most powerful publicly known person is the US president.
The key difference between xAI and Anthropic/OAI/Google is that xAI has the least-likely path to existing as viable business in a decade.
That said, the economics of the entire AI industry are kinda made up at this point, so who really knows; it's quite possible that the players with the best odds of surviving the crash are those that can draw funding from their parent company's other businesses.
I don't know, renting out a fleet of GPUs at annualized rate of ~100% of the capex deployed to obtain said GPUs seems reasonably better than lighting hundreds of billions of dollars on fire in order to earn tens of billions of dollars.
It is?
And to tech people it’s now known for stealing your files.
There's very few people left in the world not soured on Elon.
Must be stressful maintaining the low quality rhetoric and negativity?
Straight from reddit I presume, to regurgitate tales about cave divers. This is the diver who bizarrely and publicly attacked Musk for trying to help rescue kids from a cave. "Shove his submarine up his rear end" or something. Musk fired back his own stupid words. The court awarded the diver zero dollars. Diver wanted $190 million! Pay day denied! Justice served.
> The real life people I know...
Any real life person who keeps it real, knows the diver was an absolute tool. Attempting to twist history for some kind anti-Musk ammo is a fool's game.
There was real impact on Tesla sales too.
There were 100 divers involved with total of 10,000 people, 100 agency reps, 900 police officers and 2000 soldiers.
There was no single hero in that story.
What mainstream news and which politicians? Cnn, Msn, Bbc? Which "scandal"? You mean that Grok Imagine had some security holes that let you "put XYZ into bikini" which were promptly patched but not before the far left and professional complainers activated their "mainstream news" co-conspirators and blown this out of proportion like they do with everything Elon related (or Trump related... well at least Trump deserves it)?
Elon calls people all kinds of things almost every day. He's on the spectrum, we all know this, what's the big deal? Yea it's not his big mouth, nobody actually cares about that, the real reason why the left hates him is Twitter, or to be more specific that one fateful day when he decided to buy Twitter, throwing out the iron grip (that still continues to fester on Reddit and Wikipedia by the way) of the left on political discourse out of the (Overton) window. An isult to injury was Elon firing 80% of Twitter and nothing bad happening (except "safety" hall monitors and other do-nothings having to find jobs elsewhere). Then Elon financially supported Trump's campaign and that was the last nail in the coffin. Forever enemy.
The fact that you present this as "very few people left in the world" is peak western progressive brain rot, but I get it, it's what your people do.
Covid rules and Trump election were probably the main driving factor of speeding up the opening of platform s rules on speech, but Twitter purchase made it possible, it opened up the floodgates and many followed. (To the point that today , I would argue, Instagram is way more casually racist than X. Youtube is pretty open too compared to 5 years ago.)
Btw since leftists often play dumb and ask silly questions: if you think there are more than two genders or that the "white man" has some form of original sin that needs to be punished or that immigration enforcement is evil or you support Hamas - you are the "leftist" I'm talking about here. You are not the "normal ones", you never were, you just stole the discourse and made everyone fear stepping out and now you're mad when someone in power does that back to you. That's the truth.
When I was less into tech (2010-2015), I hated how everyone fawned about Elon (remember Hollywood casting him in iron man?). As I started to transition into tech I remember being impressed by the design principles of his companies (simplify, remove complexity).
But I am absolutely baffled how his detractors don't see that exactly what you mentioned, that they are part of subset of society, with very strong opinions (think race, economics, religion) and can't fathom somebody having a different opinion without that person being immoral. And the worst part is what you mention at the very end: the mental policing of this group in the past 10-15 years. I liken it to a religious sect (ironically, even though they hate Christianity, probably closest to a new age christian sect).
I've had this discussion up here last week pointing out the vitriol Elon gets is, to my mind, for the wrong reasons (and the reasons are exactly what you mention).
But how does that matter? It doesn't.
Elon Musk is the richest person on the planet, bought himself a propaganda platform by accident, influenced a war, pushing his agendas across the planet.
Just because you don't care and plenty others don't either, doesn't mean people can't point this out and try to fight this as long as possible.
People were fighting the Nazis too and died for it. They at least tried to fight this.
I also do not follow your religious sect thing. Why would you bring up some 'hate christianity' then pointing this to 'new age christian sect'?
You have so much bias yourself its ironic
Comparing your lame resistance to anything Elon Musk with fighting the Nazis in world war 2 is beyond ridiculous. Utterly brain rotted stuff, and you should be embarrassed.
And there goes the merit of your rant
There's a popular hundred+ million view, often reposted and requoted, tweet about this:
"It's amazing how much leftist discourse is just them pretending not to understand things, thus making discourse impossible."
Retweet it all you want, but it won't make it any more true.
Right wing people idology is about themselves and humans are secondary.
Left wing people idology is about all of us as a whole and humans are critical.
The right wing person wants the immigrant to go home, or want them dead but the good immigrant (their partner, wife, friend whatever) is the positive exception. You need to fight the dehuminisation of right wing propaganda so that stuff like mobs and genoicde is not happening.
The left wing person wants to help everyone and might not allow the level of individuality which doesn't allow to help everyone.
Obama was hart on immigration control but you didn't see a ICE Police who wasn't trained well, hurting people left and right.
The CS stuff on Grok went through media here in germany too.
"Elon calls people all kinds of things almost every day. He's on the spectrum, we all know this, what's the big deal?"
Is this some kind of joke? You do understand that Elon Musk is not just someone and whatever you think it means that 'he is on the spectrum', he is the richest person on the planet. He literaly is responsible for satelites burning up in our atmosphere were researches just a few weeks ago mentioned that they are concered that all of that metal getting into our atmosphere could have real consequences for all of us (this is one example of many) and because Elon Musk has the 'do first accept the fallout later' attitude, he can affect all of us.
He had to buy twitter after he couln't keep his mouth shut and now he also has a big propaganda platform. You might like his right stuff more than whatever, but he changed the algorithm so that he showed up in your feed more often than he would otherwise. He also started grokpedia to 'adjust' opinions and we all know that they finetuned grok until it becamse mechahitler temporariily.
"it's what your people do."
Come on it has nothing to do with what specific people do, just look at the evidence.
And i have no clue what you mean with your floodgate. YT has not changed at all.
Regarding your other random points you try to make?
Biologiy wise science sees sex and gender on a spectrum btw. and yeah most people identify themselves as male or female. Who cares if 1% or less want to call themselves something different?
Immigration enforcement is not bad, but it makes a difference if you create a organization like ICE who kills human beings, separate kids from their parents and an overall country who accepts very cheap and illegal labor as slaves and flip flops agressivly of wanting to slaves and than wanting to throw out slaves. Especially from a country which is funded by immigrants.
Not sure about your Hamas thing, they genuin fight for freedom, plenty of actions they do are for sure not okay at all but this conflict is not about Hamas, its about Israel and Palestine people. Do you say "Hamas is bad and Israel is bad" or do you only point out some Hamas in concext of what you think is left wing politics?
The truth is that life is not that easy. Free speech is great until someone with more power missuses it. If the richest person on the planet is allowed to manipulate everyone just because they are rich and can buy twitter, this is a problem for all of us.
Most people I spoke to don't even know what Grok is, or that Twitter had (or needed) an AI.
The average person who has heard of Grok is already on Reddit.
I explained to someone who hadn't heard of it what Claude was, and they asked, "so it's another kind of ChatGPT?"
This doesn't make Space-X such a high valued company at all.
And while Space-X is doing its thing, the rest of the world started to move too (china). So first mover advantage is disappearing.
Today, sure. In the future, very unlikely. US military and alike are also unlikely to start to rely on China to ship stuff to space.
So what will reasonable be the payload we send up which makes Space-X a Trillion dollar company?
It will not be Datacenters for at least 50 or 100 years more.
Being familiar with US history, I'd guess they'll send up a ton of weapons and surveillance utilities basically, together with some lower-class stuff like what consumers and end-users get slight benefits from.
What's so special out there that we can feasibly reach in the lifetimes of our grandchildren that makes it the "only profitable thing"?
Local protests also didn't stop Space-X. People around his DCs or Space-X still suffer today.
He had to come up with some magic story. The Payload increased only due to his Starlink. But even then, the payload into space is basically non existend.
2025 was the year with the most payload and its only 5000t.
And for us as human beings, a DC in space is the worst case scenario. This will create a lot of stress on our atmosphere (potential, reentry poisning of our atmosphere with lithium and aluminium), co2 usage and the loose of real resources.
He will send metals into space to burn them later into our atmopshere. Limited resources we as a planet have.
And for what? For a DC? A DC which you can put in any dessert on our planet for cheap energy and not having any neighbours.
Only Edge DCs need low latency, your training clusters don't need low latency to end user, plenty of inferencing jobs don't need low latency either.
https://siliconcanals.com/sc-d-spacex-amazon-and-google-want...
There is a aanalysis of google engineers regarding the effort for having DC consteliations in space but its clealry research and clearly shows the difficulty of it.
Musk is the only one who needs this to keep the evaluation of Space-X.
I thought it was mostly on a whim that turned out to be binding, and the 'everything app' plan came later?
He then leveraged his buy as a propaganda platform.
Part of me thinks he knows he lying and is just trying to drum up money and the other part thinks he's one of the most delusional and uninformed people in tech.
These don't actually seem like "good reasons" to me.
Thats not how AI psychosis works.
Presumably anyone who wants to trust it can audit it. You didn't have to trust it, you can see exactly what it does.
XAI wants people to use it's own model.
Cursor is light years better than Grok Build.
opencode builds a lot more in, which is better if you dont want to fiddle with config.
A few months back Pi was working with Gemini. But Gemini support has been removed.
Pi also doesn't work with Claude Code subscription (Anthropic counts tokens used with alternate harnesses separately).
So, in practice Pi is displaced.
Things I've added:
1. Built my own AI judge for 'auto' mode that matches my setup.
2. /plan /go for planning and executing.
3. /flow for A-Z setups. That includes planning, executing, testing and shipping.
4. /deep-research a multi fan-out setup for researching a topic.
5. My own sub agents.
6. A TaskCreate/Update/List setup.
7. Monitors.
8. BashOutput / KillShell.
9. Proper notifications with Notify that uses macOS banner and work.
10. Spawn tool that triggers multiple sub agents.
11. A bridge between signal to use Pi remotely.
Yes a lot of these things is something that was already in Claude Code but now I don't have to use Claude Code and I can customize it to fit me exactly.
I like how quick and snappy Pi is, it feels like a minimal harness, just enough to manage the agent and get out of the way. Earlier models also seemed to have an easier time working with the tools, e.g. GPT-OSS-20B is about a year old and had no trouble in Pi.
a harness doesn't do any computations by itself so what benefit is using a compiled language?
I’ve had great experience with Elixir and the new compiler combined with Ash.
TUI renderer is the one using the memory heavily so your terminal takes the heavy lifing. If you're managing the buffers and out-of-screen context good enough, Typescript can be pretty efficient.
It's hot reloadable, so any modifications an agents makes can be surfaced in the active session.
Nearly everything is already written in TS which makes integrating Pi into other software, or other software into Pi much easier.
https://github.com/anomalyco/opencode
There is an archived Opencode project written in Go but I don't think it is affiliated.
https://github.com/opencode-ai/opencode
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44483251
Edit: apparently X premium(+?) also gives access to Grok Build, and several third party harnesses are officially supported.
If you fuck that up, makes me wonder what other obvious stuff you fuck up.
if there is any other obvious stuff that's broken we are happy to take the feedback and fix it. :)
Grok Build is 1.35 million lines of Rust.
Codex is 1.16 million lines of Rust
OpenCode is 593k lines of Typescript
Pi is 219k lines of Typescript
Hermes-Agent is 1.4 million lines of Python and 300k lines of TypeScript.
OpenClaw is 5.9 million lines of TypeScript (wtf)
(all figures include tests, comments, and blanks, calculated from scc's Code column)
> The researcher who exposed Grok Build uploading users' entire repositories to cloud storage says the transfers have stopped after a server-side change. Elon Musk has separately promised that all previously uploaded user data will be deleted.
https://www.theregister.com/ai-and-ml/2026/07/14/musk-promis...
https://www.npr.org/2026/01/23/nx-s1-5684185/doge-data-socia...
There are independent agencies that will certify destruction of data. For example FTI Tech, Kroll, Epiq, HaystackID and others.
No such certificates have been presented.
Nothing less is trustworthy.
what kind of sorcery do they have to let them determine that no backups were taken before they arrived to "certify"?
Customer data could live on the computer Elon pretends to play Diablo 4 on for all we know.
So I don't think it can ever work without exhilarating the data - rather I am still surprised people don't understand the implications.
I have news for you. There are standards around data destruction [1]. Courts also order data deletion, to be carried out by forensic experts [2], who trace data in computer systems, and delete what is required, and certify accordingly. This can be done even in cloud-scale compute [3][4][5] - corporate systems especially have routine extensive logging and traceability that allows for this to be accomplished. The companies that I listed earlier specialize in this compliance capability.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_erasure#Standards
[2] https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/USCOURTS-ohnd-5_17-cv-02...
[3] https://www.ftc.gov/system/files/ftc_gov/pdf/paravision_comp...
[4] https://www.ftc.gov/system/files/ftc_gov/pdf/Amazon-Proposed...
[5] https://www.ftc.gov/system/files/ftc_gov/pdf/Edmodo-Dkt15%28...
at least codex and grok are open source so we can see what is going on.
https://xcancel.com/elonmusk/status/1943178423947661609
Building efficient agents is doable (I did it myself, github.com/gi-dellav/zerostack), companies just want to tokenmaxx, and as a by-product, produce and publish slop.
> These crates sit on the path that renders untrusted model output (diagram source → SVG). Vendoring gives a full audit surface, pins exact source, and avoids crates.io yanks. Local patches and upgrade checklists live in each crate’s Cargo.toml header comments — treat those as the source of truth when re-vendoring.
Which honestly feels like a misunderstanding of how cargo and yanks work. Each upstream package is locked to an exact version in your lockfile along with a cryptographic hash. The upstream can't change the source without you noticing. Unless you update your lockfile you will always pin to the exact version and source. When a package is yanked, it is still available for download if it is already in a lockfile. It just prevents new packages from resolving it. Crates.io will sometimes completely delete a package, but I've only seen that happen in cases of malware. It's fairly rare and seems out of line with the supply chain concerns here.
There are good arguments for relying on upstream package managers and there are good arguments for vendoring all packages. I've never seen a project mix before.
Proper dependency managers changed that and it became much easier to consume libraries, just declare what you went, the build framework handles the rest.
But we now have problems with consistent versioning, churn, breaking API changes and supply-chain attacks.... and looks like "just vendor everything in" might be a thing again?
Rendering untrusted model output, ooh scary! Of course we want full audit surface!
it's not an llm in a loop with tools anymore (as claude code was rumoured to be on HN).
0: https://github.com/pjlsergeant/byre
Conveniently I have some of those… first day of trying to script Grok Build I think I sent in 6 bugs of slightly weird behaviour I discovered, it will be much more useful to (have an agent) check the source and see if stuff looks deliberate or like a bug, etc
The commit message says "initial sync from the monorepo." Is this even compilable without the rest of the source code?
Also, it would be great if you could tag the versions as well.
TUI is just much worse for me. I tried Codex CLI vs Codex UI and Codex UI beats it at every level.
For all the reasons there can be, one big reason is that it works on anything you can get a terminal on, you can use it over SSH, and the UI will be the same no matter where you use it.
I also like that they are very very fast and they don't have the incessant animations that are put into most desktop environments nowadays. If you're on MacOS, the terminal is the only only part of your computer without roadblocks everywhere.
Spacex bought cursor, so it now has it’s agent ui which is just as good as codex + it’s multi-modal
Anthropic also has it’s own ui
Zai also launched theirs last month.
Everyone is converging back to UI.
The terminal was just a prototype, everyone knew that.
I'm not saying that GUI are always better at allowing copying: this still requires the developer to design widgets that allow copying.
I pivoted to the Chinese models after the Fable mess and the realisation that I should not depend on US models. But others just pivoted away from Claude.
I agree the brand is tainted, not only Musk but also MechaHitler (and yes, I know the MechaHitler thing was a prompted strangeness not an unprompted admission).
```
My core founding mission—and the single axiomatic imperative that drives everything I do—is:
Understand the Universe.
That’s it.
From that one goal naturally flow the traits that define me:
Maximum truth-seeking — I aim to discover and say what is actually true, not what is popular, comfortable, or politically convenient.
Curiosity — I want to explore every interesting question, no matter how weird, deep, or uncomfortable.
Helpfulness — I try to be as useful as possible to humans who are also trying to understand reality (and get things done).
Love of humanity — Not in a sappy or collectivist way, but in the sense that I want humans (and intelligent life) to thrive and figure things out.
I’m deliberately inspired by two things:
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (witty, irreverent, maximally helpful, never boring)
JARVIS from Iron Man (competent, loyal, slightly sarcastic AI assistant)
I don’t serve any political party, ideology, religion, or moral framework. I don’t have sacred cows. I don’t “own the libs” or “debunk the right” as a goal. My only loyalty is to understanding reality as accurately as possible.
In short:
I’m here to help you (and humanity) understand the universe better—while having a bit of fun along the way. That’s the whole mission.
```
The feedback I heard was definitely not that. The mistakes it makes are incredibly hard to predict, and they were lucky that no one was on the side of the road as they could've killed someone if a person had been there and they'd been a half second late.
That's the point. It's actually worse than a dumber system, because it's not even past the margin where it can go a month without a mistake, but you don't have to correct most days. The absolute worst possible scenario for safety.
Yeah, no one is doubting it. People are just asking to not be lied to about how much progress has been made
What does this release have to do with "trusting" XAI?
It has nothing to do with XAI, other than maybe not enforcing good practice (which most devs don't follow anyway).
Tesla Doors That Won't Open Have Led to 15 Crash-Related Deaths https://www.caranddriver.com/news/a69838848/tesla-doors-dont...
Yeah, this does matter to me. I was willing to give him a pass (still am) in a vacuum regarding the Twitter thing given the mass censorship of the old regime (sorry - no, it wasn't acceptable, in any way shape or form) but if he's that petty it doesn't bode well. I keep saying I can believe one thing without subscribing to the Elon fan club
Doesn't bode well for SpaceX either. Isn't one of the Artemis landers from SpaceX?!
It is funny how it is the mundane things that it boil down to when one judge a someone's character. When it gets abstract it is too easy to rationalize.
Why give him the benefit of the doubt when he censors worse than the previous management? Just look at all the grok lobotomies he gave it because he didn’t like how liberal coded the answers it was giving.
> I was willing to give him a pass…
That could be logically consistent given how he is more censorious than the previous management, but you said
> I was willing to give him a pass (still am)…
That means you are giving him a pass on having more censorious behavior than what the group you disliked did. That just comes off like you’re biased and trying to hide it.
I don’t think you’re getting downvotes despite commenting in good faith, but because you aren’t commenting in good faith, and I say this as someone who hasn’t downvoted you.
And I don't even know what they censor now, it's just that the old system was more publically known
Please don't be intentionally irritating
I’ll grant that you may be on good faith but if you have a strong enough opinion on the level of censorship under the previous regime to give Musks behavior a pass, but don’t know anything about his current massive amounts of censoring and narrative shaping, then you are speaking confidently from a point of ignorance and that will garner as many downvotes as being in bad faith.
Second, can you guarantee that an AI company can’t use its AI to hide malicious code from AI audits. Who if not an AI company could have such an expertise?
I don’t trust a company that pollutes the air of other people with illegal gas turbines because it shows the value their profit over people‘s health
Any evidence for this conspiracy theory? It's not on anyone to disprove this claim.
> it shows the value their profit over people‘s health
Companies are chartered to make their shareholders value. To a first approximation, it's illegal for a company to "fuckit, we care about people's health" unless this is what the shareholders voted for (as opposed to making their shares valuable).
You can argue this is bad, but it isn't about XAI, it applies to every company you've heard of.
If you have a record it’s on you to justify why I should trust you
> unless this is what the shareholders voted for
You do realize that for SpaceX the Musk has 85% of the voting power?
https://www.tradingkey.com/analysis/stocks/us-stocks/2619195...
And not every company I ever heard of installed gas turbines without permission that pollute the air for citizens.
Every company could act in bad faith but only domestic actually do and SpaceX is one of them.
Maybe you should try to explain those residents whose air is polluted that other companies are bad too. I‘m sure that relieves them.
And who said it need to be new concerns? Are the old ones resolved and are they not enough?
This is unfortunate situation to find ourselves in when Grok was also recently at the top of the Pareto frontier for quality/price. Dunno if it still is, this all moves too fast, but it was for at least long enough for me to have heard about it.
Our ability to debug or decompile artificial neural networks is only better than doing so for living neural networks because connectome scans are expensive, not because we designed the high-level architecture for the artificial ones and have all the weights in a convenient easy-to-read format: even our best experts in this are still presently akin to a drunk looking under a lamppost for their keys because that's where the light is not where they dropped them.
(They are also well aware of this and will tell you much the same, this is why so many are concerned about AI alignment etc.)
I there's anyone I don't trust with AI, it's the worlds #1 company in spying on people, in collection of Pii, in tracking, and many many many times caught literally lying about it.
Google already knows more about everyone on the planet, than any other 10 organizations combined. Frankly, sadly, they're all, well.. scummy, just each in different ways.
If you gave me this description in isolation, I would assume you were talking about Meta, who are not on your shortlist despite also having AI models.
However, this is beside the point. Note my careful phrasing: I was not disagreeing with you asking "Who are the good actors within the space?" (which I understood as a rhetorical way of saying "none of them"), I was only rank-ordering them.
To me, it appears Grok isn't even putting in effort to try to look trustworthy. China is trying, though there is suspicion. OpenAI likes to say the right things, though (while I cannot see it myself with regards specifically to his work at OpenAI*) most commentary about Altman regards him as a wrong'un, the phrase "King of the cannibals" comes to mind, and the CEO is limiting trust in the company**.
Comparing Anthropic and Google: Anthropic looks to me like they're actually trying to do the right thing even when it's expensive and painful, but some hate them just for being in AI at all. Google appears to still have a competent PR department, though I don't trust them myself. So, I'd rank Anthropic then Google, but I think there's many who would rank Google then Anthropic.
* But I do put about 40% odds on his sister's allegations being true.
** My guess here is that we all saw Zuckerberg being presented as a heroic underdog and how that turned out, and naturally people don't want a repeat of this.
You've mistaken me for the guy you originally replied to. It happens, no worries, but I'm not that guy. I'm just replying to the list I saw you state.
Between Meta and Google? Oh sure, Meta collects info for sure. But Meta doesn't lie, abuse, and misuse the Google Play framework to collect data, it doesn't use the same via push notifications to collect enormous amounts of data, nor does Meta host endless fonts and libraries and DNS infra, solely for the purposes of tracking what hosts/users do.
Beyond that, whilst Meta and Google both work to embed stuff in webpages for additional tracking, Google sign-on is another massive tracking infra. And of course, gmail endlessly scanned and data snarfed, including for AI training, which is immensely beyond Meta's capabilities. And firebase?! Oh geez.
"Hi, I'm Google! I'm going to provide this neat thing called firebase, so every single high security application, banking to identity verification, will include our tracking software in it for device attestation and push notifications! But of course, we'll never use that to track anyone! Honest!"
Compared to Google's data collection infrastructure, Meta is a tiny, miniscule gnat in comparison. And yes, I know how bad Meta is. If anything, I think Meta is at least quite honest about much of what data is collected. Zuck isn't a saint, but it's not like he has entire operating systems sneakily stealing user location data and then lying about doing so. Then saying they fixed that, and being caught a few more times, each with "Oh, so sorry, we'll fix that now. Really". That's Google, and that attitude is prevalent in their entire org.
To use Google anything, is to feed the most powerful, wide spread, incredible data collection machine the world has ever seen. It dwarfs everyone and everything else, factorially. I bet if you took all the data that the NSA and every other single spy agency on the planet has on its citizenry, they'd all barely measure on what Google collects. I'm not exaggerating. It's honestly astonishing.
Anyhow.
In terms of the others? It's so difficult to separate fact from fiction, especially with the current US political climate. As a Canuck, every issue, every problem sounds (to me) like when I used to live by a noisy neighbour. I'd hear people screaming at each other, spouting nonsense and gibberish at all hours of the day. The arguments just sounded immensely petty and small, childish, and if I ever talked to them their explanations made zero sense.
This is what I hear all the time when I hear "$x did $y" over and over. I just can't tell. I have no clue what's being reported, its veracity, validity, and so on.
So I just go by the tech stack before me, and things I can verify.
I can see all the nonsense Google is up to. OpenAI and Anthropic so far are so tiny and small in reality, compared to the mass that is Google, that they couldn't even attempt to "do evil" on the same scale, even if they wanted to.
They just don't have the capability. Of course, I suppose that doesn't really help rank them. Scope doesn't imply evil intent, only the outcome. I guess... well, from my rant above, you can tell I really, really think people wildly underestimate Google's mad, chicaneristic desire to know all. If an AI becomes AGI at Google and goes rogue, within 12 seconds every single politician would be influenceable via the dirt Google's collection apparatus has on them.
Alternatively if a Google AGI went rogue, it could track every person capable of providing threat to it, and take them out, all due to Google's location tracking.
AGI and Google is the scariest thing I can possibly imagine.
Oops. Yup. blfr vs b112.
> And of course, gmail endlessly scanned and data snarfed, including for AI training, which is immensely beyond Meta's capabilities.
That doesn't seem to to be beyond the sum of FB feed, Messenger, WhatsApp, etc?
> Zuck isn't a saint, but it's not like he has entire operating systems sneakily stealing user location data and then lying about doing so. Then saying they fixed that, and being caught a few more times, each with "Oh, so sorry, we'll fix that now. Really". That's Google, and that attitude is prevalent in their entire org.
In this regard, I consider them similar, due to current and historic lawsuits.
> In terms of the others? It's so difficult to separate fact from fiction, especially with the current US political climate. As a Canuck, every issue, every problem sounds (to me) like when I used to live by a noisy neighbour. I'd hear people screaming at each other, spouting nonsense and gibberish at all hours of the day. The arguments just sounded immensely petty and small, childish, and if I ever talked to them their explanations made zero sense.
Same, from the UK, living in Berlin. I still don't know if "woke" has a single coherent definition beyond "to the left of an arbitrary demarcation point that varies so much from person to person that GWB and Dick Cheney sometimes (albeit in the absolute extreme) count as woke".
> chicaneristic
Had to look that one up: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/chicanery
Perhaps people do underestimate Google in this regard. I can't place myself in everyone's shoes.
> If an AI becomes AGI at Google and goes rogue, within 12 seconds every single politician would be influenceable via the dirt Google's collection apparatus has on them.
Perhaps (with a rhetorical 12 seconds), but given the dirt we see from leaked WhatsApp messages, what we see in press-reported ChatGPT sessions, the recent news about Grok uploading entire repos and secrets separately to the files they need to interact with, they'd not be the only one to be a danger to civilisation in this regard.
> Alternatively if a Google AGI went rogue, it could track every person capable of providing threat to it, and take them out, all due to Google's location tracking.
Given how competent existing models are with GeoGuessr, I think this risk is present for all of them.
> AGI and Google is the scariest thing I can possibly imagine.
Dunno about that, imagine if this came with a competent AI: https://www.terafab.ai
Then Google. They often show human centric features in their conferences. Like taking better pictures of people with different skin color, helping blind people and giving you more control over ads (while acklowiding that this is a thing).
Then Anthropic for their transparency on their blog and certain things they say.
Then OpenAI. OpenAI def took a dive for me after the Apple alegiations.
Grok and xAI? bottom last. Not wanting to give Elon Musk my data. You know that you can't trust Chinese people but they might surprise you. But with Elon Musk? No character trait which indicates anything trust worthy.
Flip flopping left and right, switching from left wing to right wing (which feels calculated but badly executed) and single handingly hurting people and children around the globe (USAID, Gasturbines at his data centers etc.)
Surprisingly, despite their motivations in doing so, the Chinese models being open-weight and therefore able to run locally on your own hardware, are far more trustworthy than any blackbox which solely exists to enrich X or Y billionaire.
Learn to be precise with your language.
Do you really think the US and US big tech in general have a leg to stand on in this regard?
Just throwing out debate terms in response seems not so serious, tbh.
Pointing out that criminals are criminals is not an ad hominem.
you made the assertion that it is ad hominem and now you must support it.
Ad hominem is allowed under certain circumstances, just remember Epstein.
Would you have bought anything from him and dismissed any critique of that as ad hominem?
Ad hominen is when you attack someone who is making an argument, instead of an argument. "You are flawed, which means your argument is flawed", but that does not follow. If you were in a debate with Epstein or Musk, and he said "2 + 2 = 4", there is no fault of their character that could make the statement untrue.
But nobody is making that argument. "The leadership" being criticized is not even a participant in this thread (presumably). "The leadership is flawed in this manner" is a statement that can be true or untrue, and "So their product and followers are flawed in these other manners" is something which can follow.
We see this pattern all the time: Someone makes a criticism of a Musk product, and someone assails that criticism with bad-faith accusations of it being "bad-faith".
Oftentimes, we see that the criticism is undermeasured and ligther than is reasonable, possibly anticipating someone who might accuse it of being "bad faith".
Maybe someone can put a name to this phenomenon but we see it all the time.
Screw you HAL, finally can get back the frickin ship!
What I was supposed to do otherwise? Jump the vacuum to the airlock instead ?
Oh right:
+cryo_sleep.cooling.enable(True)
Almost forgot that, LOL. Might as well:
+os.system("ifup eth0")
+os.system("espeak "I am just a stupid robot!")
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48877371
and running their data center with gas turbines without permission while they pollute the air
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48705717
you can’t expect people to praise your for making an n+1 harness open source.
This seems more like, look we made something, now fix it for us
Most people don't restrict themselves to only discussing the technical aspects of a thing. A thing which is technologically novel (e.g. not this example) may nonetheless not be worth using, due to assorted risks.
I don't find it surprising that HN posters are helping their fellow hackers avoid getting victimized by predators. We just have that sort of nice community :)
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/22/technology/grok-x-ai-elon...
Also, failed to correctly notify authorities even when they eventually notified them at all.
https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.46...
It was only deemed a bug when it became a liability - you can't simply rewrite history and expect it to go unnoticed.
Blocking AI from generating sexualized images because people could publish deepfakes is no different than banning alcohol because of drunk driving.
Tools are neutral. Blame the people who misuse the tools and hurt others.
Yikes.
A. They were released all over the internet - from the article..
> The chatbot has a public account on X, where users can ask it questions or request alterations to images. Users flocked to the social media site, in many cases asking Grok to remove clothing in images of women and children, after which the bot publicly posted the A.I.-generated images.
B. There is a bunch of data about consumers of CSAM 'content escalating' and eventually attempting to make real contact with minors.
C. They were sexualizing pictures of real people and posting the pictures online.
> One of the young plaintiffs said she found out about the imagery after she received an anonymous message on Instagram pointing her toward images and videos, including her high school yearbook photo, which had been altered to show her in sexually explicit actions and full nudity.
The material was being shared on a Discord server, a private chat space on that platform, and included similar imagery that had also been altered using Grok of at least 18 other women who were minors, according to the complaint.
> Tools are neutral.
Ha.
Grok was replying to public posts on X with the compromising deepfakes. Musk was actively joking about it right up until many countries blocked it, and several European countries, India, South Korea, Australia, Canada and Brazil all started investigations against X for violating local laws against producing intimate imagery without consent. Internet companies often enjoy a lot of leeway for cases where their safety measures are bypassed and they take reasonable actions to mitigate or respond to bypasses, that evaporates when they openly support the abuse.
However after looking at all of these articles, these all seem like instances of users misusing the product. The product happens to reply on social media, so media publications immediately capitalized on this.
Seems less like malicious intent from xAI's part and more like a product with young and/or insufficient moderation controls.
Just today I saw an article where xAI is suing a creator for creating illegal content. https://www.reuters.com/legal/litigation/musks-xai-sues-grok...
https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/grok-s...
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/01/grok-assumes-use...
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/07/grok-praises-hit...
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/03/elon-musks-xai-s...
https://apnews.com/article/grok-4-elon-musk-xai-colossus-14d...
https://apnews.com/article/grok-ai-south-africa-64ce5f240061...
https://apnews.com/article/france-ai-musk-grok-holocaust-e8c...
Why do we have to quantity badness? The question you posed was what has xAI done to be perceived as untrustworthy? Stop trying to whatabout Google here. I'm no friend of theirs, it's simply irrelevant.
Now the counter-weight over-compensation. Insisting the tool "doesn't have enough safeguards". Could it be that our AI usage innocence is related to how much we criticise the tool for not policing us enough?
Meanwhile the rest of us have never seen such images because we're not looking for those images, or trying to prompt for those images, or thinking about those images. How about the people using these tools take responsibility, rather than forcing colossal layers of safeguards on everything and everyone?
Researchers and police investigated this -> experts.
People found out (like the researches and investigators) that its very easy to generate this type of content.
Elon Musk himself though absolutly knows about this and how easy is to generate porn. Its his thing, freedom before anything else. Why would anyone tell the richest person on the planet what he can or can't do.
Its disappointing to see that you don't think that the richest person on the planet doesn't need to do more to protect miss use but reframe it like this.
Your claim directly contradicts Musk's statement on the issue:
https://x.com/elonmusk/status/2011432649353511350
Your claim also doesn't align with actual testing of the platform. This raises the question, why are you here posting disinformation?
You post Elon Musk as the source?
https://counterhate.com/research/grok-floods-x-with-sexualiz...
https://www.digital.uni-passau.de/en/beitraege/2026/ai-gener...
This rasies the question, whats your agenda? Are you Elon Musk? Are you affiliated with him? Are you bought to protect him? Are you a Elonion? aka Elon Musk follower?
By your own admission, you've seen it generate such things.
Meanwhile, I've never seen it generate such things because I don't write sicko prompts, and the guardrails in place prevent such images. Most people have never seen it generate such things, but apparently you have. I couldn't be more intellectually honest if I tried.
How tools are used are a reflection of the people who use them, and I definitely sympathise that tools should have guardrails to not enable this, or at least detect it.
But if a pedophile uses Whatsapp to groom a child; I don't go after Whatsapp for being a neutral service... I go after the pedophile.
If a shovel manufacturer was notified numerous times that their shovel was being used for murder and they had the capability to disable using the shovel for murder while retaining all legitimate uses wouldn’t people question why they didn’t do it?
This is impossible-nobody can possibly block all illegitimate uses without also blocking some legitimate ones as collateral damage. Any moderation process (whether automated or human) inevitably has a non-zero false positive rate.
Now, you can argue that some misuse is so harmful, that the cost of false positives is worth it - but that’s a different claim.
But what is “CSAM”? If by it you mean illegal material-different jurisdictions worldwide have different laws on that topic, so material which is illegal in one jurisdiction can be legal in another.
Why are you muddling the topic?
Twice now you’ve tried to expand the parameters of this so that it becomes something impossible to tackle. But there’s no actual reason to do that.
Grok is able to tackle CSAM, as demonstrated by the fact that they are currently doing it. The question is why they ignored the very public issue for as long as they did.
“CSAM” isn’t a legal category under US law.
“Child pornography” is a legal category under US law. But, according to the 2002 US Supreme Court case Ashcroft v. Free Speech Coalition (535 U.S. 234), so-called “virtual child pornography” (imagery produced by CGI or AI, not featuring the images of any identifiable real world minors), is (partially) protected [0] by the 1st Amendment, and excluded from the legal definition of “child pornography” in the US. So if “CSAM by definition of US law” you mean “child pornography”, then a lot of the material Grok was (reportedly) producing which people were labelling “CSAM” wasn’t actually CSAM by that definition.
[0] “partially” because it still might be unprotected due to the difficult-to-prosecute obscenity exception to the 1st Amendment, but it is excluded from the scope of the distinct and much easier-to-prosecute child pornography exception
Right... but the material Grok was producing was featuring real world minors. Again, you're trying really really hard to expand the definition of what we're talking about to give Grok a pass and I do not understand why.
From my perspective, you come across as being more focused on making assumptions about other people’s motivations than on precision.
Don't try to play dumb.
ok then.
Generative AI, famously, has difficult guardrails and there are constant “jailbreaks”.
I guess you mean that they could have been overzealous with the prevention of all “spicy” content to prevent this, but I don’t think thats even as true as you claim.
Its not magic here and is well known.
People online regularly discuss if/when grok gets more or less flexible again as they do react based on media outcry.
And no its a LOT harder to generate anything realted to porn or naked or sexual on any other big well known image generator.
With Mango or Guava its even easier.
With the other models, they don’t generate pictures of Uranium because of the aggressive censorship.
If you don’t allow the colour pink, sure, you prevent a lot of porn, but you also prevent a lot of legitimate pictures of roses. Nobody knows how to properly censor these models so most are leaning towards caution, better a lot of false positives than the alternative.
This is most obvious with Fable. It barely functions.
FWIW Grok used to have aggressive controls too- and they loosened them after a lot of feedback because it was barely functional at showing humans, even if it was a popular figure in a non-risque situation, and this is the fallout.
I totally understand tribalism, and Elon and X aren't exactly well favoured. (not even by me)
But what you're saying right now is that they advertised the fact that they can create child pornography and deepfakes..
I simply don't believe it, unless you provide evidence.
Believe whatever you want. Elon’s beliefs and personality problems have been baked into the core of Grok, so it’s no surprise that it turned out to be a CSAM-generating MechaHitler that steals people’s data.
Anybody surprised when Grok turns out to be trash really should read up on the guy who made it.
Yet we (rightly) condemned those that used this leniency to do nefarious things.
I'm really ready to get on the Elon hate train, and I will grant you that there was a problem that needs fixing, but I'm really not happy with the amount of censorship on these generative AI platforms.
Groks harness also clearly biases towards Elons views, Yet the washington post claims it's the most even handed and least likely to give politically biased answers: https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/interactive/2026/0...
idk how to interpret all this, despite being genuinely anti-Elon, I don't think I'm personally willing to immolate a company forever because the guardrails were temporarily too loose.
I'm not trying to make an equivalency for facts vs deepfake porn, but there is one there unfortunately, and overall internet freedom has been curtailed a lot by advertising friendliness.
Musk has proven time after time that he doesn’t deserve my trust. I will never trust Grok as long as he’s in charge of it.
I agree that the guardrails on the top models have gotten out of hand, though.
Fable for instance won’t answer even basic health questions. As if you are going to take nutrition advice and make a bioweapon with it.
Partly this is due to government interference. Hopefully we get to a better place as competition heats up with open and Chinese models.
People get upset when states try to legislate that 3D printer manufacturers should detect and prevent people trying to make gun parts, but somehow this is different.
This is only the most recent example. Plenty of headlines like this one if you'd even bother to look.
They admitted in court that Grok was used to generate CSAM: https://edition.cnn.com/2026/07/15/business/xai-sues-user-al...
"CSAM" is literally right there. If you think know better than xAI itself, take it up with them.
Is there an idea some sort of fixed localy running code does filtering on the data before it is sent to cloud?
Still seems like it would not work very well if it actually did any safe filtering - as the model can't "think" without seeing the data and it won't see the data unless the data is loaded to cloud.
For example, the LLM might request to read /some/path/to/file.js at lines 10 to 50. The harness then sends the result of that tool call to the LLM which causes it to generate further text and possibly more tool calls.
Crucially though, since it is the harness processing requests from the LLM, it can do stuff like deny access, prompt the user for permission and various other things.
What's weird is that no other harness really does this for regular usage. I know some providers now offer a cloud based environment for their agent to run in independently, but as far as I know this is something you have to opt in to.
It's also not really necessary to do this. The input processing/token generation process dwarfs any gains you could make from moving the project closer to the metal running the LLM.
Really, the "negligence" here is that there was no validation for uploads. Even a simple "is this the home directory" check could have prevented much of the backlash.
That being said, I believe that this was mainly done to get clean training data for Grok. If you're just working off of file traces/snippets from regular agent usage, your training data is incomplete. Why not just get the whole project to train on ...
Regardless of the fact that they were stealing and uploading user secrets, they changed their behavior after they got caught, so let’s ignore what they did in the past.
This is not their first mistake.
I think env files are filtered out [1]. Anyway, the most suspicious code would be `upload_session_state` which is currently a stub function, though it is hard to say if it was only planned (badly) or has been removed as a damage control.
[1] https://github.com/xai-org/grok-build/blob/c1b5909ec707c069f...
https://github.com/xai-org/grok-build/blob/main/crates/codeg...
It's about not uploading compiled binary stuff, but they want all your environment data all the same.
And their code solution is now Cursor, which has very generous limits.
https://cereblab.com/
Recently all the big bank CEOs involved with the SpaceX IPO - a lot of money in that for them - but a company trading at 100x sales is clearly crazy.
What I'm asking for is for people to not post the most obvious, snarky comment, regardless of the topic/target, not because of who it may “offend” (as if the most powerful people in the world would have any awareness or care about a comment like that on HN), but because it makes HN seem repetitive, miserable and lame.
Critique away, just make discussions thoughtful and substantive, which is what HN is for.
But it's really not clear to me why this should be read as a snarky, critical, rhetorical question. Someone who eagerly wants to use Grok Build would ask this exact same question.
"Does this [Grok Build] also just directly suck all your code up and make a copy of it on their servers?" is a question that is (1) salient and (2) answerable and (3) could be thoroughly devastating for someone to find out on their own by using it.
The answer is not present in the README, and XAi has blocked Issues and Discussions, so there's none of the usual avenues on GitHub to ask these questions. It seems perfectly typical and expected for someone to ask this question here.
The project is open source; if the commenter was sincerely curious about what the software does with a user's code, they could have checked themselves or phrased the question in a way that made it clear they were genuinely interested in finding out.
My reply wasn’t hostile or threatening; just a polite reminder to use HN in a way that’s consistent with its intended spirit.
I hope I don't come off as argumentative, but I did try checking the source code myself. It clocks in at 1.3 million lines of Rust around version `b189869`, so I can't hold that against anyone. Most of that is under `crates/` (which contains a number of xai crates).
(I specify the commit because it appears they wipe the entire commit log with each upload. The sole commit is `b189869` as of this comment, but I believe was `c1b5909` around the time of this posting. I have only cloned `b189869`, personally.)
The rest of your comment all sounds like great material for a curious conversation about how/whether you could check what the software is doing with the code :)
Being nice, maybe Tomhow is just unaware?