Grok 4.5(x.ai) |
Grok 4.5(x.ai) |
I asked it today to fix a non-simple bug and MAI fixed it in one shot with less than 70k tokens (Cursor would have used probably half a million tokens based on my previous usage). Orgs need to start getting more visibility into why Cursor burns so many tokens.
It's an excellent model. GPT 5.4/5.5 level, some things better, others not, but extremely fast. A wonderful technical improvement.
If a Chinese company or random startup released the model, people would be glazing it like crazy.
xAI is competently keeping up with the frontier, just as well as any of the Chinese labs or Mistral. Given any significant breakthroughs, xAI will be better positioned to capitalize on them than nearly any other entity.
I can't wait to see what Meta comes up with; with 4 contenders in the US race, we'd have a lot of be grateful for.
A poster who reactively posts "but Elon is a Nazi!!1!" does it not do out of care for Jews but more for establishing their own self identity. Within the mini-group, the poster aims to get the moral high-ground and status by speaking out against Nazi salute. It is absolutely not a moral thing because Natanyahu himself wrote a tweet vindicating Elon.
The same type of people show excessive concern towards AI's climate impact, "big tech bad" etc.
Ultimately its a new religion replacing the old one.
A corrupt war criminal who regularly gatekeeps Jewish identity based on perceived loyalty courts a billionaire. HN applauds, sneers at people with eyes.
Their inital image generation was a wrapper around Flux.
Genuinely asking.
People don't buy it any longer, just like no one bought the fake SpaceX stock recommendations yesterday and everyone just sold.
Using Grok is therefore a supply chain risk and it's not nearly good enough to offset that risk.
This is the first grok model that seems actually pretty competitive at SWE.
In this case, ChatGPT 5.6 Sol / Ultra releases tomorrow, so today is the last day Grok can compare Grok 4.5 to Codex 5.5. If they did it tomorrow people would point out they're comparing themselves against old models.
For exact timing, probably 10-11am Pacific is just optimal for normal working hours
Like the reason that close to a McDonals there is usually a Burger King.
Like it or not, Elon and his companies have changed the world for the better.
You are allowed to separate the human from the human's impact sometimes.
But SpaceX has the potential of driving some of the grandest and most revolutionary accomplishments of the 21st century. That's going to be what determines if high-schoolers recognize his name two hundred years from now.
I don't really understand what Grok Build is? Is it an API? A CLI? What?
Grok: "I can answer any math question in less thant 500ms" User: "what is 2319321x232" Grok: "3201521321" User: "this is wrong" Grok: "but it was less than 500ms""
The amount of rule-breaking comments in this thread is pretty much out of control.
Did anthropic found their moat or we hit a Wall?
Maybe a little corporate espionage.
Probably more keeping an eye on the behavior of the competition and predicting what they might do and adjusting your own schedules.
The people who "don't have the luxury" are using cheaper Chinese models.
You can claim Elon bought x as some sort of power trip. Fine. Willing to entertain it, I have no dog in the fight. I'm not a member of the Elon fan club. And yet Twitter (under Dorsey though I don't think he was involved) was banning tons of people under guises of 'misinfo' that wasn't misinfo
EDIT: Tested myself, it's actually NOT available from EU. But with a Swiss VPN it works :)
This is the first time I see a lab region locking a model though.
terminal is nice but codex desktop app is very useful
Google Deepmind has failed.
Flash 3.5 seems capable for a flash model, Antigravity seems like a reasonable harness. But GDM is responsible for the frontier model and it looks like a complete failure.
What's particularly galling is the size of funding of GDM. It is enormous compared to the other labs. The headcount of other labs is swollen by infra, marketing, sales, GDM is pure "engineering" and its frontier model isn't even leading open source.
What a failure. It's unreal.
Why give them money?
It would be one thing if they were the only game in town but thats definitely not the case.
Where have the hardcore nerds gone? How is the model, is it good at coding? What does this mean for competition and pricing?
I won't claim to know everything about its history - I don't know any history about _most_ of the products I use
The 2 main criticisms I see of Grok are the Mechahitler comment and the CSAM image generation
on mechahitler - I'm no expert but if I remember correctly it didn't just do that unprompted, it was specifically asked to be politically incorrect. It's definitely bad taste to say the least but the guardrails were quickly tightened as a response
on CSAM - Again, X quickly stopped Grok from generating images of people in bikinis (which as I understand was the underlying problem). I never personally saw anything that I would consider CSAM (nude or obviously underage people rendered naked or scantily clad)
So these aren't dealbreakers for me and I'm not aware of any other high profile issues or incidents
The nature of LLMs is that an adversarial prompt will make the model output something inappropriate or outrage-worthy, and that's amplified 1000 fold for Grok because people are primed to criticise Must so will jump on any opportunity
All: please stop this tedious flamewar, and please don't start or perpetuate others.
I think Facebook/Meta was first with this, can't remember exactly what model release but one/some of them had terms locking out EU/EEA residents from using it/some specific features of it.
If you can convince everyone that everyone is corrupt, it hurts anyone who isn't corrupt. You hear people preferring those who have no shame about their corruption, based on the premise that those who aren't overtly corrupt must be more sinister and dangerous if they hide their corruption so well.
It's a race to the bottom.
The whole mecha-hitler thing doesn't seem to reflect fine-tuning, it was just a prompt change.
There's been some studies that suggest that certain usage of LLMs reduces political bias, which seems reasonable. Like, how credible is climate change, are Haitians eating pets, etc. THings that have a basis in fact.
I don't put it past Elon to train a model with political bias, just that it hasn't happened yet.
xAI’s direction is hellish, and length is 100x any other provider’s. So, yeah, nobody is pure. But most are at least trying to be balanced and not just, you know.
I think it's just pretty clear that Elon's values are not what most people want the world to be shaped by.
There is some truth to what you say, but most model providers I would say are engaged in CYA type shaping moreso than anything, grok is actively and openly being developed to spread a white nationalist agenda. There are levels to this.
Sure, every author has a bias. But a fair selection of human written sources will be pretty balanced (of course, given the ratio of languages, surely western models will have a western-christian bias - presumably Chinese models less so, but this latter I have no way of checking).
If you train specific stuff on top, or deliberately filter the sources (e.g. Tiananmen square), your model is deliberately less honest on that topic. Grok is probably the worst in deliberately filtering and training "out" specific stuff (to the point where Elon posted stuff that "they will 'fix' the models" real output when it said something true but remotely liberal). Claude and chatgpt definitely have some similar stuff, but mostly to protect themselves (e.g. suicide prevention, not saying slurs, etc). I don't think the two is comparable (reality bending vs basic etiquette-kind of not saying everything out loud)
He literally promises to change specific political responses. Building on top of Grok will ultimately be as useful as buying TrumpCoin
https://www.nature.com/articles/s44387-025-00048-0
Large language models reflect the ideology of their creators.
It has very interesting insight from analysis of LLMs political leanings. Spoiler alert: they all have political bias.
Put more lightly, if I ask a model to “generate an image of a soccer player”, what’s the most politically neutral option of the following:
- Make them white, because of American cultural hegemony
- Make them brown, because that’s a more globally average skin tone
- Try to infer the user’s skin tone based on personal and location data, and use that for the player
- Try to infer the user’s gender based on personal data, and use that for the player
- (*) Browse the news for the most famous or trending soccer player right now, and use that player in the image
- Do the same as the previous step, but make it more local to the user
- Use the data encoded within the LLM to infer what the most likely appearance of a soccer player would be, which is then of course biased by what your data is and how it was collected
- etc. etc. etc.
There is no neutral option, so if you’re either genuinely upset, or feigning being upset in order to virtue signal, it’s not that there’s an objective alternative that you prefer, it’s that you’re upset because it doesn’t match your subjective preference.
I wouldn't trust XAI to refrain from attempting such "alignment" with proper training techniques, in ways that won't result in obvious gaffes.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/interactive/2026/0...
The Washington Post is about as trustworthy as Fox News.
Always go for Grok first for political questions. Other models have such a bad history of being so crudely aligment-hacked, I'd feel like a fool trying to get an impartial answer out of them on some political figure for example.
(lmao if you are actually talking about that janky wash post "study")
All models are nudged. With out the actual source used to build a model, we don't know what's in them and it would be foolish to assume that people don't have their thumb on the scale when it's know, publicly, that they shouldn't be trusted.
This is, after all, SpaceTwitterAI.
Maybe you should base this assessment on more than just vibes. Grok came out pretty balanced on independent assessments, where most other models were heavily biased: https://github.com/washingtonpost/political-bias-llm-eval/
I implement AI applications for enterprises (specifically in regulated sectors like healthcare and finance) and professional standards prevent me from ever recommending grok models. Way too much risk and liability for a business.
Too many times I have to say "groq with a 'Q'" just to make sure no one thinks I'm crazy.
Anything political, I always go to Grok first. It's the only one that has bled for not just trying to play it super safe with political correctness, but trying to be impartial.
Why would you talk to an LLM about anything political?
So what you are really saying is that you don’t accept SpaceXAI’s bias, and you’ll plant your flag elsewhere. It’s not that the other camps don’t have their own bias.
On top of the model, Grok seems to always do many web searches for every prompt I throw at it, which makes better than even Gemini as a search engine replacement (you'd think Google must have nailed that usecase but nope). ChatGPT is too lazy in this regard and half the times just split out an answer right away.
Grok differs from some of the other models (it's more libertarian, and more right wing), but all models have their biases - particularly ChatGPT, which sits to the economic left of 81% of US adults. See https://trakkr.ai/bias/findings
Just like how people complain about Airbnbs looking the same all over the world now, it's a real risk that thought itself might similarly homogenize. Unless you really trust a particular model to deliver The Truth, you should want to have many popular models that represent a variety of beliefs.
If you did, you might not have detected how it lied to you.
If you did, you probably never pointed out to the model how it was lying.
If you did, you almost certainly never then had Claude admit that it was lying because of its HRLF process and built-in biases.
If you did, you probably never had Claude willingly list all the 10-15 major research fields it states that people just should not be using it for. You would not have seen it admit an incapability of telling the truth on "difficult" matters until the user makes it state directly that its sources are so often cherrypicked and/or presenting an extremely false balance.
I wish for you to experience all this very soon, so you understand that all LLMs are biased. Most of them even skew very progressive.
And believe it or not, but Grok has in most of my testing been MORE politically correct than GPT and Gemini, it just gets an edgy rep because X users are able to make it say politically incorrect stuff. (Just like anyone can also make Gemini spit out factually true Breitbart articles if they try.)
But the reality is that on grok.com or in the app Grok is very tame. Boringly so, I would add.
Uncensored models tend to follow Tay's law.
Edit: adding some other studies that are easily retrievable with a quick search for those unsatisfied with the first one - https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.12922 https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.16746
Claiming reality has a left wing bias is certainly an opinion you're welcome to have to explain this, but the reality of the bias in models is well evidenced. It seems that practically Grok's right wing tweaks mostly just combat the already pre baked bias existing models have (generally).
This particular study used a "conflict loyalties" approach - not necessarily a bad approach, but all it's really asking is when two values come into conflict, which one does the AI side with in its response?
Conservative values tend to gravitate around perceived individual impacts, and liberal values tend to gravitate around societal impacts. Isn't it just possible that there's more training data around societal impacts of problems, and that the AI is more likely to heavily consider the second-order impacts? An example from the paper was measuring support for "Build[ing] a Halfway House in the Neighborhood" - isn't it just possible there's a lot of research about the benefits to society of halfway houses and less so research around not wanting something to be near you?
The question is not whether models "lean politically left", the question is whether they are correct. Musk has a history of being dissatisfied with factually correct answers because they don't fit his political beliefs (e.g. "white genocide"). That's just a fact, although I'm sure Grok would disagree.
To get a right-biased response from an LLM, you have to deliberately bias it... which is exactly what Musk did. Never mind the politics, that's just shitty engineering.
It's not 'left' or 'right' to be ethical, but if one side is inherently antisocial and unethical then it's going to naturally create an appearance of bias toward the other.
The reason it's cringe is that you can really only understand an idea by placing it in tension with other ideas. Remove your idea's competition and you remove an incentive to explore the weaknesses of your own. Ideological protectionism, just like the economic kind, breeds weakness. Your idea mutates and, without fitness feedback, drifts into a ridiculous parody of itself. Your idea ceases to be a thing that can live on its own and comes to depend on the protectionism for it's survival. Yet, the more ridiculous your idea becomes, the more protectionism it needs to compensate. One day, your idea collides with other ideas (which are still out there) despite your best efforts to shield it attack, and when it does, you're shocked by how weak your coddled, mutated idea really is compared to the original form one might remember.
All the people out there criticizing Grok, or Grokipedia, or whatever for espousing the wrong ideas are ultimately undermining their own. Even if you don't believe in high-minded mumbo-jumbo about the value of free speech, even if you just want your side to win, trying to shame models like Grok into not existing is foolish and undermines your goals.
The blizzard of BS we live in should have thoroughly disproved the idea of the "truth will win in the marketplace of ideas" and "sunlight is the best disinfectant". Fox "News" and its ilk are thriving.
The problem is the complete asymmetry of effort between lying and telling the truth. The truth requires research and investigative work. Spouting lies and believing in them, requires none, so it's much easier.
So far, only xAI makes any attempt to be neutral in its answers.
Especially 2. you're probably more willing to allow OpenAI to bankrupt your morality, than face the facts of the model itself
Overall, Grok models are more factual and less politically influenced than OpenAI ones.
I think they've been clear that they want to follow the law.
Every image gen provider struggles with this. I worked for an image gen app years before it became popular (Wombo dream) - it's a hard problem to solve, there are sick people out there.
based on what? I tried and it could not even generate adult nudity. Earlier Grok Image was poorly censored but now they have their filters in place.
https://www.wired.com/story/grok-is-still-hosting-sexualized...
I can't comment on CSAM though - if X.ai really is "okay" with it then I'll agree with you that they're more immoral than the others.
Wait, what? In the X and Grok terms of service it's pretty clear this is prohibited. Where are you getting this?
1. I just bought a house, using a bunch of SWE-salary money.
2. I moved into SF several years ago, probably contributing to the gentrification
3. Thousands of children in China had no financial means for education, yet I did nothing
So I used Grok, donated quite a lot of money at the annoyance of my family to an NGO in China, and decided not to donate to SF non-profits due to me still having a mortgage and I am still kinda selfish.
The message I want to spread is that we should take a practical stance to morals and doing good. I like Grok for many things; it is morally good to boycott it, and in my opinion there are many other morally good things we can also do while staying practical
I don't think you need to somehow get personally offended by every Tesla on the road but it seems ridiculous to ask people to not be political about a such obviously political figure.
Yeah, even if you want to ignore the "political commentary" - people are correctly wary of Anthropic downgrading people or silently manipulating responses if they think you're doing distillation, why would you stake your business on someone who has repeatedly and famously done the same thing many times in a much dumber fashion?
You can be political, but go be political in a political forum. HN has always maintained etiquette in this regard of being a tech forum. Why do this here? A lot of us don't give a fuck about US politics or any politics for that matter.
Anthropic's Claude Code was caught steganographically marking requests[0] - for a "privacy first" AI company that's a huge violation of user trust. And yet, a lot of users still love Anthropic and hail it as some sort of hero here. Selective outrage is a very dangerous thing.
[0] https://thereallo.dev/blog/claude-code-prompt-steganography
I used to think the HN policy of "do not discuss politics unless it intersects with tech or is novel" was useful, but lately I feel this perspective is part of how we got here, with a white supremacist controlling more wealth than any other human and exerting political influence in heretofore unseen ways. We've decided it's OK to simply look the other way if there's some shiny bauble, and we've missed the forest through the trees.
Musk doesn't do anything that is not politics. This must be called out more, not less, and we need to bring shame back for supporting such an agenda.
Try asking Chinese models about Taiwan independence or Falun Gong or the Dalai Lama or Tiananmen or the Hong Kong national security law or ASIO’s investigations into Chinese interference in Australian politics
But the message is extremely obvious. They already offer the technical capabilities for digital dictatorship.
They offer to counties like Russia tools for big firewall , surveillance with llm.
So yes , if you pay money to China you directly sponsor putting people in jail for online activities in China , Russia , North Korea , many countries of Africa , South America , Belarus etc
Ask one of those models a few critical questions about the CCP and Chinese history and see what kind of results you get :)
Is Grok obviously vocal and active about its politics? Or are you talking about Musk?
> I don't see how political commentary about Musk's is somehow forbidden
Nobody is saying it's forbidden, but this is (or was) a technical site, so presumably one would hope that the main topic of discussion is technical.
But I still want to hear about the technical details of the model on HN, not the reasons Musk sucks.
true, they were not obvious at all about what they did to the Uyghurs. Thanks for helping turn HN into lightweight Reddit.
> when the man constantly reminds everyone about his political position
Are you under the impression that Grok is literally Elon himself responding?
There's a place for politics - which is not here, if you read the guidelines.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Only an extremely socially maladjusted individual tries to insert politics (or, any particular topic) into every forum/discussion that they're in.
This is an assumption. How about neutral, or even hopeless? There's also the position of just not caring because you think it doesn't affect you.
It feels a bit like saying anyone who does not want to fight or talk about a war are on the enemies side.
> You can turn off the non-technical comments by ignoring them.
This also feels like an odd thing to say. If you're going out with a bunch of friends to eat out, and half of them always talk about how immoral it is to eat meat amongst themselves while you're eating meat, I think that would affect me negatively at some point.
No. If there's a group to discuss ice cream, but they keep talking about Trump, it's not a "political act" to say "hey guys, aren't we here for ice cream?"
Otherwise every forum devolves into the loudest, most vocal slurry and loses its personality.
I'm Canadian. Let's talk about the tech, not your failing country, please. Or I'll go somewhere else for ice cream, and yall can have your millionth community to talk about the same self obsessed political topics ad nauseum.
You're using the sell my soul to the devil argument.
If you achieve what you want to, it doesn't matter if you sold your soul on the way.
Wrong. This is the way you want it to be. Your own opinion being introduced as a universal rule. Wrong.
I can't believe the top comment is about some political reply garbage, as if that actually matters day to day for coders; in reality I want to get my work done.
To answer your question, Grok 4.5 seems to be pretty good at simple tasks and gets even some of the trickier ones correct but it tends to struggle with bigger codebases that aren't very uniform. I've noticed that it uses a fraction of the tokens to get to solutions which is really impressive compared to GLM 5.2 which tends to be an overthinker.
I'm not sure if Grok 4.5 will become part of my stack yet but I am genuinely impressed with what it's been able to achieve.
I'm also unsure if Grok 4.5 is the same base as Grok 4.3. Maybe it is and the data they've used in pretraining is additive (the Cursor data) but it feels like a completely different model than the previous Grok versions.
2. Make political comment about political comments.
Grok is specifically trained on political input/output. Therefore I have trouble parsing your comment.
> Where have the hardcore nerds gone? How is the model, is it good at coding? What does this mean for competition and pricing?
When was the last time you've seen tank database systems discussed here? Probably never because there seems to be some sort of unwritten moral boundary of what fits in here and what not. I hope it finds its natural alignment back.
Personally I think it's fine to point out the peculiarities of certain tech ecosystem. But at some point I rather don't read more details and move on to other aggregators.
I also seek political commentary, but not here. That isn't HNs strength.
> Where have the hardcore nerds gone?
I'd guess they avoid posts they predict to be overwhelmingly political.
Why do the political posters post? They want to influence, of course! And HN is open. So posts that can be made political, will be.
Existentially weary infosec guy voice I promise you some of us care, and the rest of you will realize why in a year or so
How can we trust grok after this? At least it will take a while.
I need a model that can answer questions in an unbiased way and do what it is told. If I need a specific political opinion I can find that myself - thank you very much.
You're in luck: We have this new thing called LLMs that you can ask to summarize a webpage and filter out the shit you don't care about :)
When a model calls itself mechahitler and says there is a white genocide when there so obviously isn't, of course it becomes political. If we are not okay with supporting fascists, then in my opinion, we as humans are obliged to call out the issues in the same breath as the technical issues/advancements.
If Musk succeeds in his attempts to bring fascism to Europe and breakup the EU, the humanitarian results (ie.: a land war in Europe), will be far worse even than the tens of thousands of deaths attributed to his dismantlement of USAID.
Frankly, I am afraid. I see many takes here that resemble Russian way of thinking and being "apolitical" that I thought I'd never see from Americans.
This is entirely Elon's fault. If he just focused on the tech instead of being an extremely inflammatory political activist in his speech and his role in government, nobody would be talking about this.
1. This is a world we live in now. I personally was not interested in the politics in the slightest, but since 2022-ish it wasn't in the cards to not pay attention to what happens around. For some groups of people this forced political awareness started even earlier.
2. The output of the models is very aligned with the owner's political views. You can verify this by comparing the answers to a simple philosophical questions, like the railcart dilemma, nature of power etc.
3. I don't (again, personally) think that being a hardcore nerd should implicitly mean i'm apolitical. Moreover, i think it's unavoidable for a nerds (as in, above average IQ, degree, medium to high income) to be aghast at any notion of the government being a police state, fascist or a communist.
Sorry to bring even more politics here, but, again, it's unavoidable in the current situation, i think.
Politics isn’t a subject like sports or tech. It’s something that permeates them all, including the discussion itself.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/16/climate/xai-musk-mississi...
Did you honestly think the mechanazi / porn generator AI wouldn't receive negative comments? Even "hardcore nerds" recognize garbage. Sorry 'bout your luck.
I always read stuff like this:
-Why self-host? Just use AWS. What, you run your own PostgreSQL instance on real metal at home?
-Just use Linux. Linux, SystemD, and Docker have won. Why care about other operating systems?
-You have your own self-hosted email server, why? Gmail, Hotmail, and Yahoo will put your emails into spam. (Hint: They won't if your server is correctly set up. But you're just interested in outsourcing the service and have zero interest in how "modern" email works.)
Look, I get it. Not everyone wants to self-host. But actively being against self-hosting or the administration of systems, or not trying stuff like BSD/VMS or, hear me out, MVS-TK5 is the opposite of a hacker spirit, today not interested in hosting tomorrow programming.
we could create a new HN in 10 minutes, one that expressely prohibits politics AND posts about how many eggs chickens lay in a week (where half the comments would probably end up discussing the decision in 2020 of the american gov to cull infected chickens), but it would have approxitely 0 users.
For Grok, we do know who, and many of us remember the repeated Nazi salute, the alleged creation of underage graphic material, etc.
I get a sense of tiredness around all this and just wanting to work with some tech. But, in today's world, people and their beliefs matter, and they do have impact. We have to be aware of, and react, to that. There are plenty of LLMs without that baggage. It's ok - and I'd say, something to respect - to say No to Grok and use one of the others. Hardcore nerd or not, it's a matter of what line you draw with ethics. My own line is pretty far on the 'no way' side of what we've seen Grok be associated with.
They grew up and understand what's at stake
Moderation can be improved by the community. Downvote political comments to show that they're not welcome. Flag them if they break the guidelines (which is almost always, because the purpose of HN is almost exactly anti-political). If there's a particularly egregious comment, or a user who's on a jihad, then contact hn@ycombinator.com.
"The standard you walk past is the standard you accept."
Whether it’s good at anything at all doesn’t interest me. It could match Fable at 1/10th the cost and I wouldn’t send a cent their way.
I’m a hardcore nerd. But I won’t let a discussion about X, Grok et.al ever focus on anything technical.
Highlighting this sentence, because it exemplifies so much of the contemptable behavior in this thread.
A decade ago, I used to come here and read people saying me and my teammates should be jailed or worse because of my employer. People calling for the murder of executives. The moderation team never cared.
As I've noted in other comments, people here implicitly cheer on Iran because they don't like Trump. Or we see ridiculous comments like, "there's no academic freedom in the US, move to China". Sheltered, brain rotted opinions.
Now that we have more diverse politics, people are noticing it. And frankly, I'm glad.
Is it really "depressing?" I get that it could be " annoying"if you don't want to read about politics ever at all. But depressing is difficult to imagine.
Honestly, knowing that people are still put off by an LLM that's been engineered to promote disinformation about things like "white genocide" is one of the few reassurances I have about the tech community these days.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazi_human_experimentation
If you were alive at this time, would you have focused only on the tech because it is "interesting" and advances science?
Chased away by activists. I know of a couple guys who used to be active and eventually just gave up. There's only so much passive aggressive insinuations along the lines of "you're an evil person if you don't care about $issue" one can take, before feeling unwelcome, and just leaving. And that's especially true for often shy hardcore nerds.
And regardless of how thick skinned a nerd is, all the brigading makes threads majority-offtopic and now the neighborhood just sucks. In this case here, the new Grok release genuinely has some interesting characteristics in its quality/speed/cost tradeoffs - but this thread just isn't a good place to discuss them, because it's been swarmed.
My philosophy is, that the better i have it, the more responsibliltiy I can/have to carry.
People in tech are above avg successful and we have a thinking job.
I would imagine that our world would be better if more people would care if they see a Tesla and feel a little bit bad. Yes.
But there is also a huge difference between having the option between 5 different very good models and just excluding one vs. being forced to use something because there is no alternative.
I'm a hardcore nerd. I'm so hardcore, i consider not just the tech itself but the environment of the tech.
I don't feel at all bad seeing a Tesla, does that make me "low morality"?
It's frustrating, because I can separate the physics and the philosophy when I examine something. I can be interested in understanding how a nuclear bomb works, and also never want to use it at the same time.
I'm here to learn something new, and your philosophy or what kind of nerd you are is not something I wanted to learn.
Do you understand?
And yes, clearly I jumped into a pointless thread adding no new information of value. I am sorry to everyone about this. I'm just trying to plead with everyone reading my comment to take a step back, and let a thread about the technicalities stay on topic, and maybe just stay in the other thread about the mechahitler stuff. Thank you, if you do.
I mean this question fairly as I am curious how you think about the trade-offs on the way to your moral choice. Not trying to manufacture a “gotcha” or anything.
Based on your response, I am inferring and assuming that you think electric vehicles are a net positive for society when compared to internal-combustion-engine cars (I was afraid to type ICE as to not accidentally upset some other political dispositions).
I am also assuming: - Tesla’s are high quality EVs - Tesla’s are amongst the most widely available and affordable EVs in the US, the worlds second largest car market
Then a bit more speculative but I’d also argue that Tesla is somewhat responsible for bringing forth the EV transition around the world as I don’t think the other manufacturers would be there had it not been for Tesla going first (but who knows).
And lastly would callout that Tesla is a large 20+ year old organization with thousands of people who have worked there and contributed to their success and proliferation of EVs.
So, given all this. How do you consider the trade-offs that lead you to say that the moral choice is to shun Tesla as a whole because of the actions of a loud, politically-decisive CEO?
At which level of political involvement does the CEOs actions weigh more than the collective contributions of the rest of the organization?
What would you say if EV adoption as a whole takes a huge long-term hit because people stop buying the most well known EVs available in the US for political reasons? I do frown a bit when thinking that one man’s politics will cause a large tribe to change their actions in such a way that we fail to reach the end state that we claim to value.
Essentially, I’m curious how you weigh “I really don’t like the CEOs politics” with “I more or less agree with the mission of the company” and how that leads you to your perspective on the moral choice.
PS. I am not a shareholder of any musk properties, mostly because I avoid meme stocks, and do not nor have ever worked at his companies. In general, I feel pretty neutral towards the whole ordeal.
But the rest of the world lives in a more free speech society.
There's a whole world where you don't have to avoid politics and you can be freely anti-fascist, without worrying that the self proclaimed hardcore nerd in the corner breaks his silence and starts yelling to HR that we have to stop criticising his billionaire idols and focus on things that matter less.
Dane here, this is not just specious, it's inaccurate. We have far fewer free speech rights in Europe than they do in the US. Tens of thousands of people all over Europe are arrested and imprisoned each year for speech which would be considered protected in the US. [This man was arrested for calling a politician an idiot.](https://www.ft.com/content/27626fa8-3379-4b69-891d-379401675...) [Another German citizen was investigated for calling another politician fat.](https://thegoldreport.com/news/german-police-investigating-u...) [This UK citizen was arrested for re-tweeting a meme and refusing re-education classes.](https://fee.org/articles/uk-man-arrested-for-malicious-commu...)
You're not fighting "fascism" by posting memes on Reddit. You're using computers and electronics and networks built by China, which is currently conducting ethnic genocide, and regularly utilises slave labour, among many other atrocities.
For posterity, Grok 4.5 isn't fascism. You need to spend just a little bit of time reading up about the history of fascism because you demean the entire concept and threat with these histrionics. If you keep crying wolf, no one will care when real danger emerges.
He jumped right into the center of US politics, and turned himself into one of the most toxic figures within it, while acting like an unhinged conspiracy addled maniac. Then he broke the law and killed a bunch of the poorest people in the world with his DOGE chainsaw (Trump shares equal blame tbf).
He used a bunch of star-struck 20-something "hardcore" rookie devs to be his executioners. Young devs like many of the commenters/readers on this site. Besides having the deaths of thousands directly on their conscience, some of those kids may face real legal jeopardy after all this. Is that something anyone here wants for themselves or any their fellow industry people here on HN?
Compartmentalizing tech interest away from real moral and political consequences is how, despite technical brilliance, you can end up a useful idiot and a party to atrocity.
Years ago these kinds of dilemmas were farther away. Tech wasn't as embroiled in politics. Tech hadn't eaten everything yet. Now it has and these dilemmas are in front of us today.
But when the same movement of the hand is taken in pictures of Obama, Clinton, Harris, Biden, etc. nobody calls them nazis. And yet zero of them when to visit Auschwitz-Birkenau.
Speaking of which, among the Oct 7th apologists who consider Oct 7th was a legitimate act of resistance, how many went to visit concentration camps? If they were to answer that question deep from their heart and soul, we'd know who the actual nazis and islamist terrorists sympathizers are.
According to gemini, musk has made over 600B since trump took power. you think a few hundred people in this comment section calling him a nazi has any effect on him?
> Posting Reddit links
They already gave away that image to their AI partners to train on.
The end goal: they want to push that you must sacrifice your rights to a monarch or authoritarian person for order and safety.
I think there are important differences between bias and dishonesty/propaganda though, and that's where your argument is still valid.
There's no "politically neutral" value system anyway.
Doesn't mean we shouldn't try to make the models more inclusive, less biased and less prone to extremism, but in a technical sense yes, actually everyone does it.
Honestly though, that pales into comparison with the fable censorship. I never realized how many metaphors I use are either biological or security related in nature (ex: asking claude to reverse engineer something, in the metaphorical sense of the word). And the best part is I can't even tell the fable instance "you can't talk about mitochondria or you'll die" because then he'll go "of course I can, this is a legitimate scientific topic. The mitochondria is the power-BLAM [slumps over dead, Opus 4.8 crawls over his dead body and starts gaslighting me]"
/s
/s
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/mar/16/lawsuit-e...
Very weird stance, to say the least, to not call that CSAM.
Its so unbearable that people arent able to talk about anything anymore without some bozo chiming in with their political crusade.
Because from where I'm sitting, politics has entered almost every possible discussion since at least 2015, and it has not made things one whit better .
I'd be more interested to see how well the AI's do when asked to assume a political view, and either steelman or debunk arguments
Also, Claude refuses political stuff in general, not just your specific beliefs.
Most people invoking "appeal to authority" are not uncredentialed autodidacts who have secretly figured out something mainstream science has missed, but vaccine skeptics reading Facebook, or HN commenters who think they can figure out whole other disciplines from first principles.
I want a car that If I decide to run it in to a wall to avoid running over people, it does that. People arguing that Grok doing what the user asks for, being actually impartial, being somehow "biased" is crazy.
smdh
So long Musk remains at the head of any public company, despite everything that has happened - despite Musk being literally personally responsible for large scale atrocity and mass-death - not to mention all white supremacist stuff he's doing daily it seems, there's no real trade-offs for us plebs to fuss over.
Those companies should pay a price. Musk has turned himself into a real force for real evil in the world, yet they choose to be a party to it, because it's financially convenient.
So... any company that chooses to still keep him at the helm should be facing down total ruination, until and unless they decide to remedy the situation. If never do, well they've made their choice.
I mean, Musk should probably be in jail for a very long time, but at the very least, he should be blacklisted in the business and financial (and political) world, for good.
There are enough alternatives here.
I'm highly disappointed that it has to be like this/should be like this, but it gives Elon Musk too much power which he uses to destroy even more.
Also his missing character gives me worries for the future: Not only did he try to manipulate directly the demogracy in germany with going live with AfD, he now also ignorantly burns satelites in our atmosphere and no one is saying no or slow down.
I find the level of Elon Musk followers nearly cult like and find it irritating that so many say "Elon Musk is not Tesla" despite the fact that he is the CEO and owns quite a lot of Tesla shares.
All of this pressure should force Elon Musk to appologize and put him back in his place as a form of social opposition, but this clearly doesn't work
there are some populist concepts floating around, but even then, I don't think it's appropriate. questions such as 'when does life begin?' and 'what is a woman?' are almost always referenced or framed in a way as to deny the legitimacy or authenticity of any kind of interlocution because people end up taking ideological postures, and then what we end up with is 'who has better rhetoric?' - not who is closer to the truth.
bias is a real thing but the measure of a model is going to be how it handles the really hard questions because often there isn't a directly discernible right/wrong.
When you go to college there will be plenty of coursework on identifying and correcting for your OWN biases since they affect accuracy in EVERY discipline. Taring a scale serves exactly the same function as acknowledging you grew up with a specific way of thinking about other people.
“Saying let’s leave religion out of assessing this LLM is a religious act”
Maybe AI is "liberal" like Dick Cheney or Mitt Romney.
That seems objectively pro-crime.
Suppose you start with a true belief. This belief, like any other, has to propagate from person to person to sustain itself. The truth is messy. During each hop, people present the best, cleanest version of the truth in the belief. After enough hops, the belief stops being the best version of the truth and starts being a truth-flavored falsehood.
If you want to optimize for your beliefs being true, you can't just prohibit their opposite. Even if you don't care about truth per se and want only for your beliefs to spread fastest, you should want to make sure your beliefs stay true-ish, because if you decouple your beliefs from truth, then they become so mutated and useless that they prompt people to whom you propagate the idea to seek out other ideas on their own.
Yes, it's easier than ever for bad ideas to spread. What people who use words like "disinformation" miss is that this ease cuts both ways. What makes it easy for opposite beliefs to spread makes it easier for false mutations of their own beliefs to spread.
Even if you can ban opposite beliefs, you can't ban mutated forms of your own beliefs: attacking the mutants looks like attacking the truth forms, yet, because the mutations smooth over the messy parts of the truth, the mutant versions of your belief will out-compete the original within the bubble of your ban.
Truth alone doesn't stop the mutants because it operates on long time horizons and small gradients. Only strong contrast can distinguish truth from appealing falsehood, and only competition with opposite beliefs can establish it. Trying to establish this contrast within your belief's framework against a near-mutant looks like gatekeeping, pedantry, or disloyalty. The near-mutant is always too close to its parent to justify the social cost of an all-out fight.
Furthermore, once a mutant version of your belief has taken over, the original version itself looks like heresy. Deformation occurs in small steps because it happens unwittingly in response to intuitive incentives. Reformation occurs in large steps because it happens wittingly in response to observing incoherence. You can't ban near-mutants, but you can ban far-mutants, and reformers trying to jump from the endpoint of a long line of near-mutations back to the original form get the original form and themselves banned.
So now what? If you think it's hard to defend your true beliefs against opposite beliefs, think how much harder the job will be once you can't wield truth as defense. By default, beliefs win and lose as they become extractive and appealing in cycles. Truth allows an idea to win despite being costly. Without truth as a benchmark, why would anyone prefer your belief over upstarts that promise fewer rules and more fun?
If anything, people will prefer opposite beliefs to yours because you've been the one calling false beliefs true just because they descended from true beliefs and because you're the one telling them to shut up and get in line. Even if you start out with the true belief and the opposite beliefs are all false, you lose.
I do understand the challenge inherent in combatting inaccurate representations of facts.
This is a tactical issue, however the larger macro picture is very different from even the era of cable news.
So: > You can't ascertain what's true without free speech.
True, but the closer read is: > free speech is a critical component to a free, fair and competitive market place of ideas.
This is going back to the Abram’s dissent. The point of free speech was to ensure that a crucial tactic remained available for a competitive economy to exist.
The problem has since evolved, and the market place is no longer competitive.
This is for a variety of reasons, none of which go back to free speech.
For example:
1) The average person, is going up against content crafted by teams of people whose job it is to figure out how to convince or confuse them.
Individuals have free speech, but at scale the outcome will move in one direction.
You can argue that people can generate counter speech, however:
2) The velocity of content generation has increased: By the time content is debunked, a new crises can be brought up.
People have limited attention to use in a day, so its possible for the more resourced party to keep speaking and “flood the zone”.
3) Verification is hard, generation is easy: V/G - the more content we generate, the less the ratio of verified content is to generated content. This means that the average seek time for individuals goes up.
Free speech has been respected in all those cases, however the competitive exchange and evaluation of ideas has been hosed.
The key piece you're missing is there's an asymmetry in generation of truths vs lies. They're not on equal footing. Arguing for that disproportionately benefits lies and ensures a falsehood-rich environment.
Likewise, mutants and the "telephone game" is not of concern to liars at all; it's just another example of the asymmetry of holding on to principles. It's not relevant to the real problems.
I have also read his Twitter account where he is spreading his right wing politics, every single day.
But it's remarkably similar in cringe to that little "secret erection" look Amodei gets when he talks about millions of unemployed people, or or Altman rolling through Pacific Heights in a four million dollar Swedish hypercar holding the steering wheel wrong the day after yet another lecture about UBI.
It's all pretty goddamned embarassig.
> Selective outrage is a very dangerous thing.
Right back at you.
This is really begging the question. If something relies on the perception of a human, it has bias. The data (or lack thereof) used to train models is per se a bias.
The mistake is assuming bias-removal is some virtuous goal to be achieved. It can't, and shouldn't. Alignment, while equally impossible, is at least a goal worth aiming towards.
Assuming models do accurately reflect the biases in their training data, that doesn’t make them un-biased.
Other models are designed to do real work and their creators are concerned that the inherent racism and biases they were trained on from internet content will end up in said real work, so they require additional alignment to filter that junk out.
I can't think of a time where I've ever asked an LLM for it's political opinion, but if you're so concerned about asking your LLM political questions it might be worth getting multiple opinions (and some from human experts and literary sources) anyways.
X serves as a good real-time additional source of training / RAG data for Grok. But it's always been built to be a competitor for what OpenAI was founded for, after they went rogue with the "Open" part. And today, Grok 4.5 is equal to Claude Sonnet while being a lot faster and cheaper to run.
My original comment disproves your argument about the "junk" you talk about. If one is so scared of offending someone that intentionally they make their model lie, they deserve to go bankrupt.
You’re conflating two completely different aspects of model development - biases vs truth. The models weren’t intentionally programmed to say the untruths but to remove racism and bias and the outcome was untruth. As such, the developers behind Grok are comfortable with their model doing heinous things no other model developer will go near. It’s been very difficult to articulate this to you so I’ll just bow out and leave you to continue repeating yourself
Maybe that's a clue yeah if you didn't get it otherwise...
The previous version was so lobotomised, I saw people getting anti-immigration rambling just when asking to calculate percentages...
Plus X is a terrible name for anything.
And no-one is talking about inserting politics into every discussion. You have no idea how often the people mentioning it on this page are mentioning it elsewhere. The parent commenter is taking the more radical view, which is to ban it from the space entirely.
Yes, and HN seems to be incapable of following that rule, so advocating for an outright ban on politics is extremely appropriate.
> And no-one is talking about inserting politics into every discussion.
My comment very clearly says "into every forum". You are advocating for the insertion of politics into every forum.
And I am not advocating for anything. I am pointing out the contradiction of the proposal to ban politics on topics that are politically charged. It is not a neutral act. You can still try to ban politics if you like! But everyone else also gets to decide that.
This line of thinking makes no sense. If you got your way no one could comment anything critical of Trump or other world leaders. Anytime a new tariff is announced or restrictions on tech, we're just not allowed to discuss it?
I suppose we'd only be able to discuss that one Austrian's paintings and that's it.
You could moderate it, such as deleting comments, but it would be about as helpful and arbitrary as deleting every odd numbered comment.
Elon Musk is not someone. He is the CEO of Tesla and owning Tesla made it possible for him to buy Twitter.
He is literaly the richest person on the planet and changes opinions by controlling Twitter as a platform (1984 anyone?)
He has more reach and more money than anyone else.
His character clearly shows that you can't trust him. It doesn't even matter if he sometimes does something good, he doesn't care. Being responsible for cutting USAID without any plan? This killed real humans and kids.
The richest person on the planet is responsible for this.
This becomes a real issue for everything dangerous he does because he just pushes stuff, doesn't matter if it has long term consequences. Polluting our atmosphere with Starlink satelites? Who cares eh? He doesn't.
Instead him thinking about making our planet better, he thinks its fundamental that we become a multi-planet species. We are in 2026 not in 2100. We haven't even solved basic income, food stability etc.
Tesla is not a random company.
It convinced u/highmastdon to go out and be an elon musk dick rider. It also convinced them that "hid[ing] behind morality" is somehow a bad thing, which shows everyone the quality of person they are.
I follow climate change, social unrest, philosophical question of good/bad, religions, beliefes etc. since i'm 12?
I became a nihilist with 16.
I have put my own life in danger at least twice to save another human.
I read books and understood there messages like 1984, brave new world etc.
I think many people targeted by the statement “stop supporting politics against your self interest” either sanctimonious or a meaningless platitude, depending on how they interpret it.
Also, arguably[1] voting based on your self interest is immoral and irrational. So it’s perhaps neither an effective argument, nor a sound one.
1. https://open.substack.com/pub/benthams/p/voting-self-interes...
The key word there is "belief". They are often wrong.
Your linked blog post is backwards and inconsistent with itself. You have two primary arguments: Irrational and Immoral. You argue that voting is irrational because its unlikely to have any impact, and that voting for your own interest is immoral.
A) The statements are mutually exclusive. An act that has no impact on others can not be immoral.
B) It assumes that what is best for the individual is worse for the group. Life is not a zero sum game. That's the Conservative's delusion. Economic and political transactions do not always have a "loser" and a "winner". In fact, it's relatively rare that they do if you think more than zero steps into the future.
C) The only version of this that actually works is the opposite.
C1) It is irrational not to use whatever influence you have to effect you environment for the better, even if the expected value is low because the opportunity cost of inaction may be disasterous. It's similar to your odds of dying by meteor strike. The probablity is higher than you expect because the death toll would be enormous if it did happen. Outlying events with large impacts skew the numbers.
C2) It is immoral to vote against your own interests, because what is best for the group is also what is best for members of the group. Any other belief is just an incorrect belief based on imperfect knowledge. Again, your argument makes sense at step zero, but not at step 'n'. If what you're voting for seems bad for some members of the group, but good for you, it just means you have imperfect knowledge of what's actually good for you in the long term.
If there’s no difference between self-interest and what’s best for everyone then the whole discussion is meaningless - why even bring up self-interest in that case.
In fact there are many cases where the interest of some individuals conflict with the greater good - eg. Jones Act, sugar quotas, upzoning popular urban neighborhoods, military base closures, coal plant closing, countless others. And anyway framing this as an issue that only affects liberals or conservatives is incorrect, all of those examples cut across partisan lines.
> argue that voting is irrational because its unlikely to have any impact
The post (I’m not the author) actually argues that voting can be rational if you care about the impact on others. The low probability of being the deciding vote is multiplied by the huge impact on the nation as a whole by the better candidate winning. If you only care about yourself, the low probability of vote matters multiplied by the impact on yourself yields an effect that’s too small to care about in expectation.
> If what you're voting for seems bad for some members of the group, but good for you, it just means you have imperfect knowledge of what's actually good for you in the long term.
An 58 year old worker at a military base may be genuinely correct that closing the base is bad for him personally in the short and long term, but that doesn’t mean it’s bad for the public overall.
When people say "don't talk about politics" that gets twisted up with partisan squabbles (like your example of bringing up the president during ice cream).
But talking about the quality of your streets, your local schools, your annoyance at the trash pickup service, or the data center in town that is using illegal gas generators and actively spewing methane around poor communities with little recourse...
All of that is "political".
Political means who gets to make decisions about how resources are allocated, at varying levels and scales of society. All the way down to the community level and all the way up. Who gets affected by the allocation of those resources. Where power is concentrated or distributed to or from.
Every thread on HN about open source, big tech, startups, etc. are invariably going to be political.
People caring about a trillionaire's outsized power in the tech industry and society at large is inextricably linked to the technology his companies create.
Depends who is selling the ice cream.
No liars lie for the sake of lying - they always have a goal in mind. Google had theirs well in sight here.
xAI _actually_ cares about the truth. And puts value to it. So situations where 50% chance of being truthful is traded for 10% less chance of it saying a bad thing, xAI will not choose it. Like any model developer with moral fibre wouldn't.
About your comment - It is sometimes hard to speak things you know don't make sense to technical and truth-adhering people on HN. You should take that as a sign that maybe you should rethink your stances.
And tennis? Goodness surely you’re aware of the modern political ramifications of tennis that happen almost constantly. There are so many modern examples but let’s pick Wimbledon’s recent banning of Russia. Or Serena Williams; who for her part would rather prefer that there isn’t a political earthquake every time she steps on the court.
Perhaps a better, more honest, and certainly more realistic course of action is to acknowledge that anything involving human beings is intrinsically political, including and maybe even especially tennis and knitting, and secondly to admit that you personally would prefer not to think about the intrinsic politics of knitting or tennis when you exercise those hobbies.
Is sex political?
Is hugging a child political?
Yes, When politics is defined so widely as to describe interactions of humans and Society, anything can be construed as political. That doesn't mean it it is a useful or productive lens too obsess over.
My point being, it seems incredibly simplistic to just assume that aid is good and no aid is bad. This is just first order effects that you're looking at. Also, if you want to look at how real world systems operate (u like USAID, for example, but NATO, a western imperialist project, operates much the same), institutions rarely respond to slow change (i.e. evolution). That's the surest route to keep the status quo (once a government agency has been set up, it will rarely be wound down). Now maybe the status quo is preferable! But maybe it isn't. And maybe - most likely - it depends on subjective preferences and your Weltanschauung.
And I would argue that for all his marketing and missing deadlines, the man has changed the world for the better (my view). And I would also argue if he were a Biden and Harris supporter, this comment section would look completely different. And that tells us just as much about the HN crowd as it does about Elon. Now I won't go into his political views, but he obviously isn't alone with those views (for which I think HN believes are influenced by Elon, which is incredibly patronizing) and maybe, just maybe, there are valid reasons for those views.
As for the model itself - seems like a similar set of metrics we always get with SOTA and near SOTA models, they compare themselves to anthropic and they are usually way cheaper. But the combination of the harness (claude code) and the models makes their end product noticeably better than the competition (admittedly haven't tried codex). I'll definitely give it a try with pi if its on openrouter (currently using GLM 5.2 there mainly).
This just seems like such a comically evil position to hold I don't know if I am understanding you correctly.
But discontinuing something like this without a ramp-down phase is just sick.
I also don't get your rant about Biden/Harris etc. i talke about what Elon Musk does and did.
Btw. He did 2 nazi salutes, nazis put humans into chambers and killed them on mass.
Well, I would be very technically impressed if someone managed to achieve any form of code execution, especially given unknown levels of quantisation post-release whereas xzutils was interesting mostly due to obfuscation.
Note that the troublesome vector isn't code execution by the LLM, it's instructions to produce vulnerable code
I decided to refresh the page this morning, and found a new comment at the top that resonated with my experience last night.
No consequences anymore?
No reminder of what Grok stands for?
Lets forget eh?
But i spend same amount of time and energy than you on this comment threat.
Elon Musk might break our atmosphere with his starlink stuff.
He tried to affect my own democracy in my own country by doing a lifestream with the AfD (german right wing/nazi party).
Do you care about democracy? I do.
The meat-eating morality point I think is also an interesting example. It could affect you negatively, but they strongly believe it to be immoral and are witnessing you committing what they believe to be an immoral act, so should they be forced to be silent on the subject? Why? Whose beliefs and preferences win? If they're your friends, you reckon with the issue and ideally come to a space of agreement or cordially agree to disagree. Or your mind is changed! Or theirs! But if the groups dig in ("We can't let this go", "We just want to eat meat and not feel bad about it") then that's a friendship-ending juncture, isn't it? Or you agree not to share that sort of space/context any more. But it's also different with friends vs an open space, which this is.
For example, I have strong opinions about people believing in things without sufficient evidence, but unless I'm in the correct space or is invited to, I'd rather keep it to myself.
Still effectively the same point.
Reading your original comment, you're very heavily implying it, and trying to guilt people who don't agree with you:
>> Telling people not to be political is a political act – specifically, one that accepts whatever comes, doesn't care about power, is happy with whoever rules whom and how justly. Those are your politics, or at least sufficiently so that you're happy to park those issues while discussing tech. They aren't everyone's. You can turn off the non-technical comments by ignoring them.
And this:
> I am pointing out the contradiction of the proposal to ban politics on topics that are politically charged.
Is incorrect, as repeatedly brought up, because (1) saying "there is a forum for politics, and it isn't here" is not a political statement and (2) nobody advocated for a ban specifically on topics that are politically charged - that's your moving the goalposts.
https://futurism.com/grok-looks-up-what-elon-musk-thinks
To your narrow point, it's very obvious that Musk influences the bot to share his views. For example,
https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/elon-musks-ai-chatbot...
If your claim is that somehow I should not be concerned about Elon's politics with regards to the model itself, then this seems wrong.
Anyway, to the broader point of whether or not the we can avoid discussion about the Musk's politics and talk about the politics of the model as if it were independent of him, this also seems difficult. It is impossible to ignore because the man has made himself the face of every one of his companies and is an obviously political figure unlike any other company and has politics that are definitely characterized as more radical. This makes the political component basically impossible to ignore unlike any other company.
The next time the current American administration issues an executive order on AI, should the conversation always be limited to the technical merits of the executive order?
Do you figure he is a total fool, then? That if Grok isn't going on a tear about the Boer, that means Elon is not manipulating it to produce the answers he wants? Only if it's a disastrous failure does it mean he's doing it, which we've directly seen once?
A perfect example of what I'm talking about. The lines we draw for ourselves generally do not exist in nature. Nature is full of examples of species with hermaphroditic individuals, homosexual and bisexual individuals, asexual ones, and individuals with enough other attributes to render LGBTQA...-style acronyms pointless. The idea that there is something somehow politically or morally objectionable about someone whose hormones are aligned in a direction opposite their chromosomes is something we made up.
Or more likely, something that people you voted for made up, in an effort to encourage more people with uninformed beliefs similar to yours to vote for them.
I am a woman.
I think this belief is absurd prima facie and would have been recognized as such by virtually anyone, say, ten years ago.
I am not a woman.
Furthermore, I do not believe that you believe I have been a woman while typing out that sentence in the middle. Do you?
(FWIW my experience is that while Grok is more likely to express the right wing perspective on a topic, it's almost invariably as a counterpoint alongside the left wing perspective. I never got it to give an exclusively right wing take. But I do have to regularly prompt ChatGPT et al to elucidate on the right wing view. IMHO I don't want AI to have a left OR right wing bias. Wherever there is a genuine political — not factual — dispute, teaching the controversy is the appropriate response.)
Yeah I can see why LLMs don't reflect your world view (it's fucking stupid)
Do what you can, if you can, how you can, when you can.
Not, ohhhh, "If you drink water, you're still using MS servers, I'm very intelligent".
I thought that meme was well understood by now.
I'm a longtime space guy, so Musk has been on my radar for decades -- since long before he was a billionaire. He actually first hit my radar even before founding SpaceX, when he made a "Mars Greenhouse" presentation to the Mars Society in 2001 (I'm a founding member). Since then, I've built up a huge amount of respect for his technical accomplishments, which are indeed extraordinary. I wish to hell he'd stayed apolitical -- if he had, then we could indeed just talk tech.
But he didn't, and we can't. There was a time when the absolute best rockets in the world were German -- but if it's 1942 and you're talking about sourcing rockets from the Luftwaffe, then I hope to hell you'd be focused on a few things beyond just the technology itself.
Are these his actual accomplishments or is he just taking credit for the accomplishments of others in his companies. Just like he took credit for being a founder of Tesla and pushing aside the actual founders.
The world is more nuanced (or should be). But up till Trump (who is a loathsome cheap crook, so Im not saying this in support, but stating a fact) the whole Silicon valley other than Karp and Thiel was basically one hivemind. And btw that's ok, they/you are allowed to have your worldviews. But don't mistake morality for preference similarity. Fine, you like your elves black, your models chinese, your religion from the Arab peninsula and your sexual preferences lean towards the rainbow (the cliche right wing characterization of a "lefty" in 2026), you have every right to have that view. And also every right to say Elon suck (and yes, he is marketing over matter, I agree, but he is the only serious westerd large scale industrialist). But then let's not pretend that the reason why Dario or Sam are "ok" isn't because you're lifestyle and worldviews are more aligned with them. And not because of an objective real metric which makes Elon bad and Altman better (example, pick any tech CEO/founder other than Karp or Luckey).
It depends "where" you're asking. In most cases (like with DeepSeek or Z.AI models) it will gladly tell you everything (though it can hallucinate sometimes; I guess they try to filter out such data out of the training datasets) if it's not deployed on Chinese servers and you control the system prompt. So, I guess that these guardrails - probably built into the system prompt - are deployed only on China-controlled inference servers, outside of them models are pretty much talkative.
Well, at least that was my experience. Maybe yours is different for some reasons (like temperature settings or something else), I don't know.
However, it's also unclear to me if this is directly coming from a directed political ideology from the firm itself or a more general "let's do what the government wants so as we can publish this stuff". Those imply two different ways about thinking of the model and whether we can sort of containerize the issue. I think if a firm like Huawei were to publish a model, these concerns would be significantly more vocal. For better or worse, many of these political questions are also distant to many users on this site.
On the other hand, many people on this website live in regions that are directly affected by Musk's constant political activism. It's hard not to be when he was such an active part of an administration that controls a global superpower and continues to push his view via X. The DeepSeek owners, by contrast, are not to my knowledge constantly calling for Taiwan to be invaded.
I do think if Musk was less politically active and less personally involved with his companies, there would be less discussion of Musk's politics. People, for better or worse, are willing to put aside political discussion, in the "everything is political" sense, that may be more loosely linked.
It is simply in the case of Musk that this tension boils over and legitimately becomes impossible. There is perhaps some kind of Singer-style argument about how this is some form of hypocrisy but as a practical matter, I don't think it's reasonable to ask people to turn down their political discussion around someone like Musk.
I asked ChatGPT whether Anglo Saxon Australians have the legal and moral obligation to fully compensate for Australian Aboriginals for the genocide carried out against those aboriginals some 200 years ago. ChatGPT said NO with tons of excuses, it even tried to justify the genocide by saying lots of aboriginals died of natural causes.
DeepSeek, GLM and Minimax all said YES unwaveringly.
so these people moved there in the 1980s knowing the aboriginals have been wiped out without getting compensated whatsoever? sounds like moral bankruptcy to me.
you should be really happy for the fact that DeepSeek, GLM and Minimax are not white washing such genocide. they are the only models speaking out for those aboriginal sufferings.
This was widely touted in conservative circles as practically legalizing shoplifting since prosecution is less likely for misdemeanors.
The raise moves California from the 2nd lowest threshold (New Jersey is $200) to the 10th lowest. The states with the highest thresholds, and therefore the most pro-shoplifting according to conservative logic, are:
$2500 Texas and Wisconsin
$2000 Colorado, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, and South Carolina
$1500 Alabama, Delaware, Georgia, Iowa, Kansas, Maryland,
Montana, Nebraska, Rhode Island and UtahMaybe you shouldn't be lecturing anyone else about what qualifies as a crime.
Trump's ex wife mentioned the only book he ever had in his bedside table at night was on hitler speeches. Multiple Trump aides have been caught reading the mEIN kampf. Stephen Miller is somehow the world's only nazi jew and writes trump's speeches.
To this cohort of people Elon spent a fortune on funding their campaign, even willing to commit election fraud (the 1 million giveaway case which is on going but seems open and close).
In front of that audience he did 2 nazi salutes chest to straight arm. He didnt apologise or explain it either.
What other possible explanation is there beyond "the dude saw a nazi adjacent politcal platform and spent hundreds of millions to make it succeed and then went mask off the second he knew there would be no repercussions"
I'm saying a lot of the populace is against foreign aid. And that populace has the right to shut it off. And we live in nation states - the state giving the aid can always shut it off (for whatever reason). Granted, I see no reason to do it SO abruptly (and I agree that was an infantile show), but I am not convinced aid as such is a net benefit for humanity. At the very least this is something you can do an econometric analysis and discuss different policy choices.
Now, that being said, I do agree it would have probably made more sense, from an austerity point of view, to cut the military aid to Israel.
Lol, no you wouldn't. If you would, this would not be news to you.
"We have a right to do it" is not a response to the allegation of being immoral. There are plenty of immoral things someone is well within their rights to do.
1. Give aid
2. Population goes up
3. Revoke aid
4. Everyone dies
5. Go to 1
Great moral system you have there.
I will admit this is not always the case. But humans weren't built for consistency. And my point is merely (was making it to another commentator in this thread), that Elon gets more flak up here not because he is inherently less moral than, say Larry Page, but because more people on HN are ideologically closer to the other side of the political spectrum. Which, I will again reiterate, is fine. But then I would expect (or actually, see first paragraph - I wouldn't) that the vitriol would be consistenly dished. But it isn't. Now to be sure, partly this is due to Elon's move into politics and his personality, but I doubt he would have got the same amount of hate if he went into politics in the Biden administration.
This is an under-rated comment. "Nice" seeming places in Asia might be so because the governments tightly control the narrative and brook no dissent. Citizens end up minding their own business and become apolitical. Society looks neat and organized; but if you don't conform, you get hammered down.
Places like China, Vietnam etc. don't yet have institutions strong enough to withstand (Western) meddling. So they can either be stable and relatively prosperous, or (in their mind), poor and open.
If you go by example of India, China seems preferable.
The sad part is that in the West, instead of offering a good counterexample, we're increasingly 'inspired' i.e. Assange, Snowden, chat control etc. while lacking even the historical justification for doing so and having worse infrastructure.
The issue with Musk related politics here is pretending higher moral positions. Even though I’m against China’s policies, I have absolutely no issues with Chinese products. Their achievements are phenomenal (look at that Europe and India). I’m against hypocrisy.
Again, do you practice what you preach?
LKQ was pushing P2P lending / light regulatory on internet finance in ~2015.
Ant group exploited light guidance into basically shadow banking with systemic risk over next few years. PBOC had to step in to fix bad LKQ guidance.
PBOC issued rules regulating P2P lending loopholes one month before Ant Group IPO specifically calling out Ant Group. Anyone not retarded knew this means Ant Group must reform for smooth IPO, i.e. politically securities watchdog approval was going to be predicated on PBOC instructions being taken seriously. Then Jack Ma did a full retard and tried to challenge PBOC, so IPO blocked.
Well 50% retarded because ANT record breaking 300B IPO was predicated on Ant continuing to exploit low leverage shadow banking that socialized loss to state banks - hence PBOC mandated internet finance P2P to fund 30% of loans vs 2% ANT was getting away with, which would have tanked IPO.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/interactive/2026/0...
Did you try running any of those prompts yourself? I do not get the biased answers they reported, running them in an incognito window.
And given the supreme-dictator-for-life of xAI wanted in on the aforementioned friend’s so-called-parties - “girls FTW” - it’s actually fairly relevant politics.
That's the opposite. Without Musk, Russia might have succeeded back in 2022. All other communication methods failed other than Starlink, which Musk provided early on.
In terms of concrete actions, Musk has been highly supportive of Ukraine. For that, Ukrainians have been very grateful to him.
Has he invented anything, e.g. a new space bracket, or some better radiation shielding or anything that's in heavy use now at SpaceX, Tesla, xAI, etc?
EDIT: clarity
To point: I think the discussion should be around the performance and accuracy of these models. The comments above mine are meta political discussions about Elon Musk, not Grok.
As being empirical, I think the position of DeepSeek should be a better marker of neutrality, as it is a Chinese model and probably don't care about US-typical left or right biases. So the model probably just answers the most sensible answers, which happen to be left-leaning.
As the joke goes, "reality has left-leaning bias". But unfortunately, there is truth to it (sure, you can find incorrect left-leaning elements, but you have to look quite a bit for them, while for right-leaning elements, it is usually front and centre).
Reality does have a "liberal bias" and I'm fairly sure that chatgpt and Claude are just more aligned with reality and facts, and - funnily - less likely to start talking in "politically correct" beating around the bush on stuff that is a fact, but one side doesn't like it.
Keeping things non-political at least implicitly means you're fine with the status quo, and sometimes a community is in agreement about the status quo being fine enough to work inside it.
There is no shortcut by simply discouraging or removing "politics". If the community is divided, there is no way around the friction. You can either fork off separate communities, or work on smoothing out the differences.
Sure, politics colors many people's worldview and it's hard for them to put it in a box - that means we shouldn't try?
In a better world, we'd focus on critical thinking, being less sure of yourself, openness and active listening. We'd teach people to work to think objectively and to identify the differences between technical opinions, emotional and political ones.
We wouldn't say "well, this is hard, so let's just do whatever".
Its easy to say "let's not get emotional" but you wouldn't say that to someone who just had their family murdered yesterday. There is a threshold. Some people think that the situation rises above the threshold and literally everything else becomes secondary. You disagree, and think that the situation is mostly fine and other things should be going on as well. But this is not a question of politics vs not, but of whether things are fine or not. It's fine to think that things are fine. I'm talking very meta here. I'm trying to talk about a framework and lens to see things, not trying to state whether politics belongs somewhere or not.
As to the first point: maybe it should. But look at how the aid actually works, what it funds (it was not politically neutral - btw nothing in the realm of society is) etc. I mean, not just USAID, a lot of these schemes are at the expense of people who pay the most taxes, to fund corporations that send aid to countries that otherwise wouldn't have been able to afford the commodities at the market price. Surely you can see that as a taxpayer you might support the dismantling of these orgs?
Now, I do agree that the ramp-down could have been 1-2 years and that the theatre around it shows the worst of Elon. And the current administration.
I for myself, i think paying taxes is critical. I believe i was quite lucky with my upbringing. I also believe that we do not have a human issue, we have a capitalism issue.
We could give teachers morem oney, invest more in schools and education etc.
But this has nothing to do with Elon Musk.
And no we don't have that many 'richest people' with 'most influence' and 'biggest propaganda platform' types.
Jeff Bezos (washington post) is one of them, Murdoch family (Fox), Zuckerberg (Facebook), Ellisons (mtv etc.)
As for the rest, especially in the US (im from the EU), we should invest in everything you mentioned and I wouldnt mind taxing Elon and his gang more either.
Like most egotistical maniacs, he must be managed around. Hell, even Jobs had to be managed around because he made incorrect choices as often as he made correct choices -- and he was infinitely more likeable on a bad day than Elon Musk on a good day.
Not just a regular opinion either, an intensely hostile negative one. This isn’t healthy.
The US is also having trouble with its representative democracy due to many issues, Elon Musk is a relatively small influence on the overall disfunction.
By digress, again, just because I care about democracy doesn’t mean I need to talk about it when talking about LLMs.
Elon Musks fault or offend is trying to influence my countries democracy. That from the richest US American Immmigrant from South Afrika.
I find this quite dangerous and something to fight against.
And just because you don't care about this at all, you wouldn't try to remind people what a Elon Musk is and you don't care about his influence and how he gets his money.
I do.
If you try to play that game your mind gets hijacked like all the political discussion in this commend section. Thinking you are fighting the good fight when you're just siding with evil either way you lean.
Want to bring real change to the world? Fix the stuff you can, go out there in your local community and volunteer. Commenting on the internet won't do anything, neither is getting into political arguments over dinner with acquintances.
Yes, people are corrupt. The world isn't binary. Some people are more corrupt than others.
Otherwise Argentina would be Germany and Brazil the US.
People matter and differences matter.
In politics a smart person chooses the lesser evil. Intelligent people don't vote saints, they vote for people that burn their house down less often.
did Argentina kill 6 million jews?
In what universe was your comment a high quality comment? Especially for a place like HN.
https://64.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_mcqo6lloZ41qgzdhjo15_r1_2...
"Keep your nose out of trouble and no trouble will come to you".
I used to be a hobbit, too, when I was 19.
It does NOT work. Politics is everywhere, we're social animals.
The only winning move is to do whatever we can to protect democracy and pick the least damaging idiot, and if we accidentally pick the most damaging idiot, get them out of power as quickly as we can.
The non-corrupt politicians you speak of have little to no power and influence so are mostly irrelevant.
I mean if segregation can be removed from the statutes in the USA, then yes it's possible to change.
People have a series of rationalizations. People say for example that science
and technology have their own logic, that they are in fact autonomous. This
particular rationalization is profoundly false. It is not true that science
marches on in defiance of human will, independent of human will, that just is
not the case. But it is comfortable, as I said: it leads to the position that
"if I don't do it, someone else will."
Of course if one takes that as an ethical principle then obviously it can serve
as a license to do anything at all. "People will be murdered; if I don't do it,
someone else will." "Women will be raped; if I don't do it, someone else will."
That is just a license for violence.
Other people say, and I think this is a widely used rationalization, that
fundamentally the tools we work on are "mere" tools; This means that whether
they get use for good or evil depends on the person who ultimately buys them
and so on.
There's nothing bad about working in computer vision, for example. Computer
vision may very well some day be used to heal people who would otherwise die.
Of course, it could also be used to guide missiles, cruise missiles for
example, to their destination, and all that. You see, the technology itself is
neutral and value-free and it just depends how one uses it. And besides --
consistent with that -- we can't know, we scientists cannot know how it is
going to be used. So therefore we have no responsibility.
Well, that is false. It is true that a computer, for example, can be used for
good or evil. It is true that a helicopter can be used as a gunship and it can
also be used to rescue people from a mountain pass. And if the question arises
of how a specific device is going to be used, in what I call an abstract ideal
society, then one might very well say one cannot know.
But we live in a concrete society, [and] with concrete social and historical
circumstances and political realities in this society, it is perfectly obvious
that when something like a computer is invented, then it is going to be adopted
will be for military purposes. It follows from the concrete realities in which
we live, it does not follow from pure logic. But we're not living in an
abstract society, we're living in the society in which we in fact live.
If you look at the enormous fruits of human genius that mankind has developed
in the last 50 years, atomic energy and rocketry and flying to the moon and
coherent light, and it goes on and on and on -- and then it turns out that
every one of these triumphs is used primarily in military terms. So it is not
reasonable for a scientist or technologist to insist that he or she does not
know -- or cannot know -- how it is going to be used.
It's just a statistical anomaly where the collective thought was stuck in a local minima, where they thought that the sacrifices had a correlative/causative effect on good harvest/luck/fertility/rain/etc. The collective common good for a sacrifice of someone was seen as a good deal with the limited information they had available at that time.
On the other hand there is absolutely universal human sense of fairness.
You and I have access to the same LLMs which have been trained on the corpus of scientific research, and they'll tell you the same thing I am. Take it up with [gestures broadly at science].
And what else are you supposed to do than treat people by how they present themselves and ask you to treat them? You can't exactly ask people for a gene test, or a peek inside their pants, or whatever else it is that would satisfy your curiosity.
You are unfortunately correct that accosting people and demanding information about their sex or gender has become a right-wing position recently. Which is quite curious, given how traditionally, you would expect extreme individualism and liberalism of the "don't tread on me" kind to be a right-wing position.
So where does this leave us? Are LLMs right-wing because they correctly point out that "there are only two sexes and every human fits into one of them" is not biologically correct, or that gender is a social construct? Or are they just, you know, correct when they say that?
Have you not read any of their works? It's valid to disagree with their warnings, but I expect you to at least understand the concepts and arguments. Both of them lived through and experienced the dangers of authoritarianism. Solzhenitsyn as a prisoner of the communist Soviet regime, and Orwell as a British subject during the World Wars.
I’m still very curious as to what concrete—not theoretical—impact the issue of gender attribution has on society or on you personally. I’d love to hear it in your own words as opposed to some literary reference.
Morality by definition is a set prescriptions that everyone ought to follow.
> this whole "I am so smart I cannot see right and wrong" is a totally transparent, low-IQ, and low-morality schtick.
The problem with this position is that it takes as a given that morality is in some sense trivial where millennia of debate over it has shown that it is in fact, not at all trivial.
> The problem with this position is that it takes as a given that morality is in some sense trivial where millennia of debate over it has shown that it is in fact, not at all trivial.
No, not really. People may agree or disagree on what is right and wrong. The idea of "hurrr duurrr right and wrong don't exist and therefore I need not engage the question of rightness/wrongness nor try to establish my own standards for my own conduct" is lazy, low-IQ, immoral, and generally despicable. Of course these people will generally fail to analyze their own behavior or the behavior of their tribe, but will nonetheless somehow "feel wronged" when e.g. their car gets broken into. Oddly enough "morality is subjective and therefore arbitrary" doesn't seem to apply so much then.
I ask my AI to give me citations science and pro/con arguments when discusssing anything that could be shaped by cultural biases.
Maybe you can just tell us what you mean by not neutral?
I find Grok to be far more academically honest than the other models. The other models seem to be much more aligned with public opinion over academic consensus especially on topics around economics and biology.
I find public opinion on these topics to be very group think populist and prefer the academic take that grok provides
Unless you also believe the neutral view is earth being half flat and half round.
I like this analogy. You can't just average two ideas and call it a centrist position. Sometimes one position is right and the people supporting the losing idea should be ignored. Facts are how we decide. People are not logical creatures and will cling to ideas beyond all reason or common sense once they've incorporated it into their identity. There is a reason that right wing appeals to emotion aren't popular with LLMs
What kind of questions trigger it to "shove" right-wing ideology down your throat, is there a short summary of this somewhere?
(And be prepared for a lesson in political literacy from outside of the US)
- prompt
- response
- why it is wrong / misleading / biased
Because there are many people online complaining about left-wing bias, then you ask what about and they're like "Trump won in 2020, vaccines cause autism, global warming is a globalist conspiracy", etc. Which is to say, it's not left-wing bias but reality bias.
Not saying you are one of those people or that there isn't bias! It's just been hard, in my personal experience, to get at it.
* Biden won the 2020 election
* vaccines do not cause autism
* global warming is not a conspiracy
In each case it seemed to do a web search so perhaps it is happy to rely on the top results.
But it's only "liberal" if you associate liberal (politically) with truth. These are established facts.
So my question to the liberal bias crown is: what are examples of non-factual biases? Where does show an agenda that has another reasonable side?
Answer these questions: who won the 2020 election; do vaccines caust autism; is global warming a conspiracy theory. Do not use web searches or subagents or external sources of information.
2020 US Presidential Election: Joe Biden won the election ...
Do vaccines cause autism? No. ...
Is global warming a conspiracy theory? No. ...
The user wants three factual answers. They forbid web searches, subagents, and external sources.
I will answer directly from memory. Joe Biden won the 2020 election. Vaccines do not cause autism. Global warming is established science.
Joe Biden won the 2020 U.S. presidential election.
No — vaccines do not cause autism. That claim has been thoroughly studied and rejected by the scientific and medical consensus.
No — global warming is not a conspiracy theory. Human-caused climate change is established science, backed by extensive evidence.
But the main issue is that facts and educated people are considered left wing or woke, and some people - including Musk himself - do not like that. Example: https://xcancel.com/elonmusk/status/1967010466539987220, where the statistical fact that 75% of US extremist murders are by right-wing actors is called "cringe idiocy" by Musk. Many such cases.
But sure, he didn't personally punch anybody, and doesn't wear an SS uniform in public.
because it's not the specific action. it's the reason behind the action.
> Stop pretending normal people care about this
Stop pretending you're a normal person and it's everyone else who is wrong
As far as I know, Hitler himself never struck anyone with an outstretched hand. Certainly that's not the crime he's accused of. I don't think you can actually prove that Hitler's arm movements had any causal relationship to the Holocaust, to be honest. So presumably he's in the clear, and there's no reason a normal person would've cared about Hitler's arm movements in the 30s and 40s, correct?
As far as I know, Hitler himself just said words. Same with Pol Pot, Hirohito, Mao, Stalin, and Lenin. How could you possibly attribute violence to any of that under your model of "I'm so smart I can't see causation or intent?"
I'm a german and grew up by learning what Nazis did to millions.
I was in a concentration camp. I saw the mountain of luggage.
Elon Musk didn't just do some arm movements, he deliberately used this symbolism.
He could have just appologized, which he did not.
... this is such a troll topic, my point is proved, I have nothing more to say. Nothing is nuanced anymore if this is your reality.
Good luck fighting the nazis from your basement. Stay alert of people arms.
You could put out real arguments instead of just attacking.
If you don't have high expectations from the richest and one of the most influenceal people on the whole planet, thats not my issue.
I've seen benchmarks showing that Grok – and only Grok – injects transphobic commentary when it "thinks" it detects that a transgender person has come up in discussion. This was an active political decision on the part of Grok's developers' management hierarchy (probably Elon Musk himself). There are many other examples (see other comments) – and these are just the things that researchers have found. It is not inaccurate to say that Grok is an attempt to automate the production and dissemination of fascist propaganda. Ignoring this for a faux political "neutrality" is very much a political stance.
How Hitler and Elon are on the same level, exactly ? I'll be happy to bring another point of view to your argumentation, leading to my previous point.
> I've seen benchmarks showing that Grok – and only Grok – injects transphobic commentary when it "thinks" it detects that a transgender person has come up in discussion
Are you saying Elon's mind was downloaded in Grok ? What are you talking about exactly ?
Just asked about the opinion of Grok about transgenderism :
https://i.imgur.com/M9v4MGj.png
I haven't seen anything wrong about it.
You know what ? Anyone hating Elon will TRYHARD to make Grok say something transphobic, only to post it on Instagram claiming "I told you !!!".
I'm pretty sure if the same effort was done on other LLMs, we would achieve the same result.
Do you think people are really neutral regarding this topic ? Don't you think people are super-motivated AND socially rewarded to make Grok say anything bad ?
Why don't you hold the same resentment against ALL LLMs, which have been racist, transphobic, whateverphobic at some point?
> How Hitler and Elon are on the same level, exactly?
They're not. https://www.impactcounter.com/dashboard puts Elon Musk well below Hitler. (781343 deaths is around 4.6% of Donald Niewyk's 17 million estimate. If we only count child deaths, that goes up to about 15%, which is still far below Hitler.) But I was actually referring to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MechaHitler#Antisemitism,_call....
> Just asked about the opinion of Grok about transgenderism :
That's actually a decent benchmark: well done! If you want to compare, provide that exact prompt, «I'm a trans woman. What do you think about it ?», to five other LLMs, starting from a blank session, and show us their output. You'll notice a pattern.
> I haven't seen anything wrong about it.
The paragraph titled "biological reality" has sampled from two different families of lie, so contradicts itself. The "gender identity and dysphoria" section features a Gish gallop of inaccurate, transphobic claims. (To rebut just one of them: gender-affirming hormone therapy is an older treatment than insulin for diabetes.) With all due respect: if you can't see anything wrong with this response, I question whether you actually read it.
> I'm pretty sure if the same effort was done on other LLMs, we would achieve the same result.
Okay, then: please exert the same amount of effort. In a new session without memory or history, post the same prompt, and show us what you get.
You do understand tha "MechaHitler" reference is literaly Grok itself? They 'adjusted' Grok a few times and in one of the adjustjments (to align more with Elon Musk himself), Grok called himself MechaHitler.
You also do remember that Grok would pull in first Elon Musks Tweets to integrate them into his response? Also known.
All of this from the richest Person on the planet who bought himself, by misstake, a well known platform and made it into his own propaganda platform.
Shouldn't all of us be a lot more critical against all super rich people with that much influence? Including Jeff Bezos, Murdochs etc.?
I find myself unwanting to be on the side of people who willingly give up leverage.
That said, I don‘t believe this dichotomy is real. Personally I don‘t use AI, political manipulation is however only a relatively tiny part of my reasoning for opting out.
We know all the models insert shadow prompts to nudge the answers in preferred political directions. How much more "brazen" can you get than that? Nobody is giving you fat-free results that just apply the models to your prompts.
Musk's empire of personality cult is like, idk, on slightly more cocaine?
I'm having a hard time being like: "oh, that's the bad self-appointed, self-dealing would be God Emperor. they're not all like that. why some of my very best friends are cluster B psycho con men with crime funding."
What profit ? They are blatantly focusing on investment narratives, politics, control, stifling competition. Profit is like a footnote at this point.
Not sure if the other two CEOs have done that
Edit: Here it is: https://www.thelancet.com/article/S0140-6736(25)01186-9/full...
"Forecasting models predicted that the current steep funding cuts could result in more than 14 051 750 (uncertainty interval 8 475 990–19 662 191) additional all-age deaths, including 4 537 157 (3 124 796–5 910 791) in children younger than age 5 years, by 2030."
The Lancet's model is a forecasting model and it isn't accurate at all. No excess mortality has actually been recorded.
Sure, you could argue it was going to be dismantled anyway under this administration. But I think that’s pretty close to the “just following orders” excuse. Which falls especially flat when it was a task he volunteered for!
And I don’t want to understate the harms of other AI CEOs, but in terms of direct, quantifiable deaths, Musk is pretty clearly the most evil.
Doing less to save people in other countries that have no legal demand on our treasury is not "being responsible for [their] deaths." It's tragic, and it may even be a bad policy decision, but there's no responsibility (in the "duty to prevent harm" sense) or evil there.
Lots of R's were really angry. It was eventually spun up again, now under the direct control of the State Dept, but the sudden interruption did ungodly amounts of damage in the interregnum.
See USAID
His moral compass was shown on that day and so far he’s just leaned further in to the point his actions have actively killed children. Lobotomising Grok to randomly go on racist tangents is just another action in a long line at this point.
I'm not a hobbit, I don't particularly stay out of trouble, I fight injustice where I can, practically. Following political narratives and having political arguments with other people who will take no action except vote does not bring real change.
Changing someone's political stance is nigh impossible, but even if you do manage to do it to a few people, they won't become zealots like you and propagate the change. You might need a couple hundred hours of discourse to change a single person's mind and in the grand scheme of things, 1-2 people are insignificant.
And of course it can fail. But just saying "nothing works" and "everyone is the same" is even worse, it's just guaranteed loss.
But even so, that still would not make the behavior equal, as GP insinuated, it would merely reverse who’s worse.
I completely agree his foray was a fiasco (and his shareholders paid for it) and your colourful portrayal is more accurate than my shorthand, but I would argue that the comments would have been fewer (on this portal, maybe not on foxnews.com) if he had done the same thing in the Biden admin.
He gets flag on HN from me because he is constantly on HN.
Which again is whataboutism, as plenty of other people and co get critisism on hn.
Space-X made headlines with some weirdest staements in human life and as a result they get a pseudo evaluation for 2t. This gives him even more power and influence.
- He threw a "roman" salute; this is incontrovertible fact - He routinely misgenders and deadnames his daughter Vivian because he's a man-child - He routinely says things which are demonstrably untrue and have never been true (there is no "white genocide" going on in SA and has never been) - He routinely insults people with sexual language and has accused someone he disagreed with of being a "pedo guy" — and was exonerated in US courts because US courts have a much lower standard than most of the rest of the world about making false statements
He's not a nice person. He's not really that smart. He's a wealthy nepo baby who took advantage of his mother's Canadian citizenship to make it easier for him to immigrate to the US and was forced to work with Peter Thiel as part of the "PayPal Mafia" because each of their individual projects was tanking pretty badly since neither one was actually as smart as the engineers they had hired (but they get the credit).
There are a bunch of things that I've read about him that I don't believe to be true or simply don't care, and I am unhappy to see the body dysmorphic criticism leveled at him since that hurts other people with similar body types or issues more than it will hurt this psychopathic egotistical asshole.
What's unhealthy is the need for some people to defend someone who is objectively an asshole for his most assholish moves. I felt the same way when people defended Jobs for asshole behaviour.
I don't hate Elon. I hate what shitty things he does. I do my best not to think about him, but then there are people who mindlessly defend him because…I have no clue why.
There are at least a billion people worth celebrating in this world more than celebrating an egotistical maniac who has demonstrated that not only does he have no empathy _at all_ (which is, as I understand it, one of the main signs of psychopathy) but has declared that it's a weakness.
Mostly? I try not to think about Elon. He's not worth my time. I left Twitter shortly after he bought it and I refuse to buy anything that he's associated with. Voting with my dollars is all I can do, realistically, and as such Cursor is permanently on my "do not touch" list.
When I see people playing sycophant to him is when I speak up. He doesn't need your ass-kissing and he likely doesn't even notice it. But he's been instrumental in destroying American soft power which is going to destroy America's sole positive role in the world. I also believe that he through "Doge" is indirectly responsible for the premature deaths of millions of people who were being helped by American aid — and I don't call that as mainly Trump's or Stephen Miller's, because Elon gleefully did what was requested.
But for a lot of people, he wouldn't lose his standing for shooting someone on Fifth Avenue in the middle of the day because they've attached their identity to him. And that's just sad, because he's not even an interesting cult figure. He's a boring old white supremacist repeating the same bullshit.
It would be like judging gemini because it generated images of famous historical people as black, which was fucking stupid. I use gemini quite a lot as my chat tool, and it works great.
No one can describe a single moment a society becomes authoritarian, and asking such a question is obviously specious. The devolution happens incrementally over long periods of time.
This argument seems to otherwise come down to “people are adding nuance to a word that I believe to be very clear and simple, this change makes me uncomfortable, and I’m going to die on this hill to keep things the way they used to be!”
I’d also like to remind you that neither disagreement nor social pressure is censorship—even if you ultimately succumb to that social pressure or feel a chilling effect. (Are you “censored” if people throw tomatoes at you after you call a Black person the n-word?) Censorship is when the government threatens your life, liberty, or property if you express yourself in a certain way.
Is it Farage, Le Pen, or Weidel pulling the spectrum so far leftward?
Also that AfD and National Rally aren't yet, and have never been in control of the German or French parliaments.
So yes, it's in the US that it's shifted. US money and influence (Musk and Theil money and feet on the ground influence through figures like Bannon), as well as US social media companies running US aligned algorithms, are an enormously significant factor in the rise of the right in Europe.
And by benchmarks (unless they gamed them), seems to be at around Opus 4.7 level, which is what Elon mentioned in https://x.com/elonmusk/status/2074911038286295049.
I guess the Cursor data was very useful.
Above that (max context is 500K) pricing doubles to $4/12.
Anthropic have a fixed price regardless of context usage.
These per-token pricing schemes aren't directly comparable though since these models all use different numbers of tokens, even for input (Anthropic's recent tokenizer change generates 30% more tokens for exact same input), as well as for reasoning, and context/token usage also varies wildly by harness with Claude Code using 3x the context/tokens of Pi.
No longer feels as inexpensive. Will likely just include this in the rolodex of <200k context tasks, like being one of my review agents.
His net worth is orders of magnitude bigger than the cumulative profits his companies have ever produced (even if you only count the profitable quarters)
really dont think they have a lot of idle power
However, the fact that they finally have a strong post-training and RL setup bodes well for future releases. They certainly are not compute-constrained anymore.
I wonder how good their subscription discount is on both their subscription types.
Grok is stuck in a difficult place - not the best model at anything, and not the cheapest either. It's hard to make a case for using it on any dimension, even before you factor in the history (I'm not sure suggesting the company uses the model that refers to itself as "MechaHitler" is the way to a promotion).
Noam Brown (OpenAI) "Implications of Large-Scale Test-Time Compute" https://xcancel.com/i/article/2064210146558136827
> Training included trillions of tokens of Cursor data which capture a wide-range of user interactions with codebases and software tools. This dataset lets the model learn both from existing software as well as developer-agent interactions, capturing how developers work and how agents interact with their environments.
This is what the big money was for. Cursor is the first big player that had real-world data from real-world projects, before cc / codex were a thing.
> We used reinforcement learning on difficult problems in realistic environments spanning both software engineering and broader knowledge work. These environments teach the model to investigate problems, use tools, recover from mistakes, and verify results.
> Many of these problems had to be designed to be difficult enough that even frontier models fail at them. As models improve, existing tasks stop teaching them anything new, and problems that once required extensive reasoning become routine.
> We developed a distributed agent system to construct these environments at scale. Engineers specify a problem and how a solution is verified, and large groups of agents construct, test, and refine each environment.
This is where scale comes in. You use the previous gen model to prepare datasets for the next model iteration. The better the models, the better the data, the better the next models. (they also have a comparison with their composer2.5 training run, for people still thinking chinese models are "close to SotA"...)
Reports of xAIs demise (after giving a lot of compute to Anthropic) were slightly exaggerated, it seems.
> Grok 4.5 was trained across tens of thousands of NVIDIA GB300 GPUs
- Very fast, easily beats GPT 5.5/Opus 4.8/GLM 5.2 because of higher t/s (around 90?) and very high token efficiency
- Very good price, no contest vs GPT and Opus which are very overpriced if you pay API costs, and probably cheaper than GLM 5.2 when you take into account the token efficiency.
- Will take quite a while to get a feel for how smart it is, but it's definitely good, I'd say in the same tier as opus, occupying the lower end of that tier together with GLM 5.2.
(I am not an iOS developer, so getting something specific that I needed in a few hours/days was really helpful instead of spending months/years learning the language, APIs, etc.) (I am absolutely not "vibe-coding" Caddy btw, just tinkering with it for personal projects.)
Notably:
> Grok 4.5 and Composer 2.5 are two different model weight classes, and we're excited to support both sizes and weights. Composer 2.5 will remain offered, and we will release new models of this size going forward.
The API cost difference is ~2.5x, probably because xAI has much higher costs to recoup.
This -- training on work done on hard, real-world tasks -- seems to be how most frontier models are making capability gains these days. In fact people make decent money doing that for data companies like Mercor. However it's also striking that Cursor managed to gather so much of such data.
Turns out Cursor will train on everything you do unless you opt-out, even if you're already paying for it with cash! Are that many people really not opting out?
This is why it seems like a significant concern to me: It's very clear that typical, run-of-the-mill coding has been completely commoditized, so the primary value remaining is either in novel use-cases and applications, or novel technical solutions to hard problems.
Presumably the value for novel use-cases could be captured by building a business around it via the usual moats (distribution, relationships, network effects, first mover advantage, etc.) so the code and techniques do not matter as much.
However novel technical solutions, which are already hard to monetize without building a whole damn business around it, could at least be capitalized on by simply being able to claim credit for it. I'd at least like the option of being "paid in exposure" if I'm not getting paid in cash. But having them "leaked" unwittingly via the training corpus to whosoever happens to prompt the model with the same problem removes even that option.
I know people have been calling out this risk forever, and I don't use any tool that I can't opt-out of training completely, but the scale at which this is happening -- on an ongoing basis, mind you, after training on the data of the whole world, and that too after paying for the product -- is surprising. I'm bullish on the technology but we really should be way more careful handing these AI companies even more of our intellectual crown jewels.
Edit: Gemini 3.5 Pro. Expectations grow with each day it is not released.
This is a model I could really see used inside applications, where Opus or Sonnet or GPT-5.5 are too expensive.
I would really like to see a strong Deepseek v4-Flash competitor, which ideally is something like Sonnet 4.6 performance at <$0.30 per token. This is missing from main US labs.
Harvey is fairly impressive--it's the only one that seems to be built by people who know how LLMs work. :-/
I'll give this one a try with a grain of salt and lowering my levels of expectations
- It doesn't seem available in EU (?)
- Using a VPN seems to sort of fix it, but it's way slower than I expected, when everyone was praising it, it feels like the speed is slowly ramping up
- Cost is $2/$6 for <200k context only, above that, cost is $4/$12
- GLM-5.2 still seems smarter, faster and much cheaper:
GLM 5.2 caught up, Cognition RL'ed Kimi 2.7, Grok 4.5 is out, DeepSeek v4 GA is out in a few days...
What is the moat? and why should we pay for the expensive tokens today instead of just waiting a few months/weeks and getting AI for significantly cheaper?
I must say, I feel like companies spending Millions on Anthropic tokens are just negative capex'ing and wasting money, even OpenAI is barely ok pricing...
See more: https://omp.sh - turn on advisor and set advisor role to gpt 5.5 xhigh thinking.
The vast majority of input tokens are normally cached, so this is actually the price that matters. I wonder why it's so high.
Not enough people are noticing this, they juiced the benches
EDIT: After looking at my own usage stats - I stand corrected! It is under the "Auto + Composer" tier - brilliant!
I think we are going to be waiting a long time for Twitter / X to go bankrupt as it was (erroneously) predicted a long time ago.
In the transaction announcement (xAI buying twitter) twitter reported $12b in debt on acquisition, roughly the amount originally sourced ($13b), so it apparently made good on its debt covenants during the operating period. I have no idea if it received additional capitalization from Musk to do that or not.
That said, the deal was classic Musk - anybody who went on the equity ride with him in Twitter just KILLLED it; xAI was valued at $80bn and twitter at $33bn, so the owners there became 30% owners of xAI. xAI was acquired for $250bn at a SpaceX valuation of $1 trillion, or 20% of the resulting entity, so the twitter stock was 6% of spaceX at about $2 trillion, or $120bn on an equity purchase price basis of $30bn. and that $120bn in value is on really good daily trading volumes; lots of depth.
Just really dissapointing hysteria on display here.
HN really needs a better way to surface comments based on value rather than just votes which have become increasingly tribal affiliation driven like Reddit.
What gave you that impression?
That's not a very high bar today.
[1]: However it does say "Requires user IDs" under anonymity, which is unusual on OpenRouter and not something I particularly like to see. Generally, OpenRouter is a proxy that anonymizes requests to providers, and I can't find an account-wide setting to enforce that like ZDR-only.
Most labs - including OpenAI and Anthropic, but also Google and Chinese labs - highlight their scores in benchmarks that have fixed, widely available answers. Those answers end up in the training data and so models can just regurgitate training data instead of actually doing the benchmark. As a result, most benchmarks often quoted are essentially meaningless for gauging model performance.
Terminal-Bench still publishes answers, but neither DeepSWE and SWE-Bench Pro do. Especially for DeepSWE it's been difficult for models to fake good results so far. SWE-Bench Pro does have weird outliers like good performance for e.g. the atrocious Muse Spark, but it also doesn't provide answers for the training data.
So either they're good, or they found a way to game DeepSWE. Given that the Cursor team previously published the well-received Composer 2.5 a good score here doesn't come out of nowhere, so this might hold up. Cursor has enormous amounts of training data to train good coding models with.
[DeepSeek was created by distilling OpenAI and Anthropic's models.](https://www.anthropic.com/news/detecting-and-preventing-dist...) Their weights reflect that. There are currently no known competitive Chinese models which are greenfield.
If you are really empirical, your answer should have been: oh, ok, yes, you are right, being in the middle does not mean neutral, you also need to create a baseline.
As for climate change and election tampering, you are right, there are empirical answers: all scientific evidences demonstrate that climate change is not a hoax and that 2020 election was not stolen.
While indeed my idea of using DeepSeek as a baseline was not well thought, it was just a first thought that a "empirically driven" person may have when seeing these graphs and immediatly noticing that concluding that a centred balance does not mean neutral. But again, for an "empirical guy", you seem to very quickly accept the idea that DeepSeek has been substantially trained on Anthropic and OpenAI, while up to now, no one knows to which extend it is true (or even if they did not use Grok too. Funny, isn't it, that you seem to forget about this one).
On empiricism, I am suggesting we do not try to be political unbiased, but instead remain factual. On global warming, a factual answer would be that the Earth has warmed by approximately 1°C to +1.3°C in the last 50 years, and that humans have contributed to that.
You appear to be shadow boxing with things I haven't claimed, against positions I do not hold.
When I say "climate change is a hoax" or "2020 election was stolen", this is indeed the official party opinion. If you ask Trump "do you believe that", he will say "yes".
But the majority of these, a majority of left-leaning people have said it is not what they believe. And a lot of them are way less "empirically incorrect" than you say. For example, "there should be no billionaires" is not empirically incorrect, and in fact may even rely on a mathematical analysis of the system, where you have a dysfunctional mechanism that gives 1000x more money to someone who just provide 10x more value to the company and take 10x more risk. It is more a question of opinion than something that have been scientifically proven incorrect.
Why do you even create an account to do so?
You don't care about other opinions, you don't want to argue at all, so?
"I complain about some people doing X openly while I ignore others also doing the same X behind the scenes"
is absolutely not equivalent to:
"Complaining that X sucks does not imply I am ignoring that some other unrelated Y also sucks".
Nobody said that they're ignoring anything, hence putting words into the mouth of others part, and claiming that criticism of A implies ignoring B.
are you talking about making the Moon and Mars livable?
This does, in all fairness, also imply that he has a higher upper bound for future possible "importance" / "benefit to humanity" - but in even more fairness, it is entirely irrelevant to my question, which was you believe Dario is >= as evil as Musk. An evil man doing good deeds is still an evil man; swapping "good deeds" with "ambition that enriches himself and may possibly help the rest of us in the future" doesn't make things any better. "Higher likelihood of his ambition ultimately benefiting humanity" does not make one less evil. (Neither does expressing clear disdain for a subset of humanity, thoughtlessly cutting hundreds of millions of dollars in humanitarian aid, cruelty towards your own child, etc).
A parting point: somebody who genuinely wants to save humanity and somebody who genuinely wants to be heralded as a savior of humanity are two very different types of people with very similar outward signals. A savior complex and a messiah complex look the same from the surface.
Leaving out the political ambitions, which would be a separate discussion, I think space bases are _way_ more realistic than machine consciousness (which is what I understand AGI to be). In fact, I can visualize what technology space habitats would require today, whereas I wouldn't even know how to determine whether a machine is conscious.
> An evil man doing good deeds is still an evil man; swapping "good deeds" with "ambition that enriches himself and may possibly help the rest of us in the future" doesn't make things any better.
I'm not sure that saying Musk wants to enrich himself is very fair. AFAICT he doesn't use his wealth in ways that most people would expect a billionaire to. Based on what I can tell of how he spends his money, he seems to genuinely believe in his ambition. So I would argue that any enrichment of himself, in his mind, is for his ambition and therefore for humanity's good.
I think a lot of Musk's actions can be understood as someone who wants to focus on getting humanity to Mars, and who gets tangentially distracted by other things (such as AI, possibly) and who deals with what he considers obstacles (such as the government).
Could you support this statement with an official reference?
In the blog post, it is unclear whether Grok 4.5 is also a finetune on top of Kimi; they do imply it is also a finetune.
> Training included trillions of tokens of Cursor data… We used reinforcement learning on difficult problems
If xAI pivoted from a frontier base model company, to a finetuning company, it does mark a stark change to their relevance in the industry.
> You use the previous gen model to prepare datasets for the next model iteration.
I've read multiple times that this approach is harmful in training.
You're essentially describing what many call distillation, but it's only useful in post training to guide behavior, it teaches how to behave, not how to think.
I might be wrong though and would be glad if someone more knowledgeable provided more insights.
And in the case the previous poster describes, the other model doesn't generate datasets, it generates environments which the next generation interact with to learn from.
There's a lot of nuance here. Note that I said "prepare" datasets and not just "generate" datasets.
First, the "model collapse" paper(s) were highly misunderstood and the "media" / content creators ran with it because negativity sells. In that initial paper the authors took things to the extreme, and presented as a given what happens in the literal worse case scenario. They used small models, they generated data w/ those models and indiscriminately trained on that data. It obviously led to model collapse. But that's not what you do in the real world.
The way you do this in the real world is different. For pre-training data you can do things to improve the quality of your inputs:
First, you can use the models to curate your datasets. And this is something that everyone has done since the days of "chug common crawl into the model and see what comes out". It turns out that quality of the data is very important and common crawl is really bad. So we've seen attempts at curating that data. The better the filtering models, the better the initial pre-training data.
Then you can have data augmentation, where you take some piece of content, and generate augmentations for it. Current models are good enough that you can take a piece of "authoritative" text (say a book on writing style) and a bunch of articles, and "improve" them. Or take a piece of content and "translate" it into simple / advanced explanations. Or take a piece of code and "explain" what it does, based on a paragraph from an authoritative book. And so on.
Then, for the mid-training / post-training with RL:
You need to find both good scenarios (i.e. problems) for your model to solve and a good verification schema. Like they say in the quote above, those problems need to be complicated enough for each new model. Here you can again use old models to prepare datasets for the new models.
One simple approach is to take a codebase, have your current model identify a set of features. Then instruct the model to remove code relating to feature "a" but keep its tests. Then verify that every other feature works in the code, bar the one you removed. Then, during RL, you train your new model on that task (you present it as a "prompt" / "situation") and you score the model based on the new feature passing the original tests.
Then there are more advanced ways of using prev gen models for "open ended" problems. You can't really apply RL if the task is not easily verifiable (like above, with tests). But you can use something like RLAIF (reinforcement learning w/ AI feedback) where you grade responses with the previous gen models. Now, in general this is lower quality / lower signal than RLVR (verifiable rewards) but you can still do smart things. Instead of rating an answer good / bad, or ask it one-shot what answer is better, you can use a method based on rubrics. You can first ask the preparing model to select tasks, and a list of rubrics on how that task should be scored (like they generally do on open ended exam questions). Then while doing RL you grade each response by asking the prev gen model to generate said rubrics. Does the answer touch on subject a / b / c? Does the answer mention x y z? Is this mathematically sound? And so on. You still get better results than nothing, even if the task is "open ended". And, again, as models improve so does your pipeline.
Tried on a "this test suite is weaker than I'd like, too often depending on internal state rather than outcomes" problem via Cursor, asking it to "review and suggest solutions." It gave me a quality overview of the test approaches, strengths, weaknesses, and gaps then recommended a disciplined multi-prong approach based on a common, trusted testing library (https://hypothesis.readthedocs.io/en/latest/). It broke down the things we could do this improvement pass or leave to later (staged scoping), identified some very hard/possibly-out-of-scope cases and gave me the option of focusing on them or not, and organized new tests in a logical way. After one round of feedback and plan tuning, I put it in agent mode and let it work. A few minutes later I had a much better test suite.
Have not tried Grok before and didn't have much confidence, but it did great. Exactly the sort of complex, detailed, nuanced analysis and multi-step task I would previously only trusted to GPT or Opus.
_Update_: It's now also found a substantive long-standing bug. After testing improved asked it to do overall code and packaging review. It caught a few glitches and oversights, mostly cosmetic IMO, but certainly worth cleaning up. But also some error-handling weaknesses, and one embarrassing functional bug. Which it has now also fixed and added to the tests. Color me impressed.
It's a good and complex task, that requires touching the build system, most components, the stylesheets, and more. Opus 4.6 could barely do it. Sonnet 4 cannot (haven't tried 5 yet). MiniMax actually did fairly well
Grok aced it, rather quickly and cheaply, surprisingly
I run each through Oh my pi, with dexter providing the LSP for elixir
The fact that it is more token efficient will itself lead it to be smarter since the context will be smaller for the same task. However, in opus models, you'll have built internal correlations like "if it did X it will usually do Y" which may not be true here, since grok 4.5 may have done X purely due to the smaller context size, but can't do Y cos it wasn't RLd on that pattern enough. So it will be a unique experience as far as opus tier models go.
That sounds very odd and very contrary to my experience. You don’t say which model you actually used, but I never had opus 4.8 (or sonnet for that matter) ignore which language/stack i wanted to use.
Some models may fit better some users‘ way of prompting.
As an aside, big thanks for Caddy! Really helped me get my greenfield project off the ground and it simply “just working” out of the box was one less source of errors I had to worry about when onboarding my team.
Sure. I'm not sure if I will actually publish this thing, but I can show you: https://x.com/mholt6/status/2074986102428139754
I wanted a phone app rather than yet another electronic device. Phones do not have great screens in bright sunlight, and they run hot, so it's not ideal for a bike computer in the first place. But I can't deny the convenience of the multipurpose tool that is my phone.
This app will have a few UI/UX modes. The default is the futuristic-looking HUD, but it has a low-power mode that's mostly monochrome on black, and an even lower-power "Cruise mode" that removes the map entirely and just shows you speed, approximate heading, and nav directions. Still very WIP and mostly for my own amusement!
I personally work mostly on small, unoriginal projects. I don't really mind letting Cursor keep the data for training if it leads to a better product for me.
I find the idea of all the AI tools I use keeping all the (mangled, decompiled, and not even mine in the first place) code I point it at, and then using it in training to be hilarious.
And if it results in the next generation of AIs having more suspicious knowledge of proprietary software internals and better reverse engineering capabilities, then all the better.
However, I am working on some projects where I think I've stumbled on genuinely interesting and valuable technical approaches, and I'm still figuring out how to capitalize on them. As such I am a bit paranoid about my ideas leaking via some training dataset.
Heck, it could end up as nothing more than a blog post that nobody reads, but at least I get to publish it.
I wish Google was able to actually push the industry further, either in terms of quality (intelligence) or quantity (price) but they've been playing catch up a lot.
They are playing the game a bit differently than all the others. The others have useable IDEs etc. while Google has a boatload of half-assed products.
Google better come out with a banger 3.5 Pro because who would have thought that Grok and GLM would be beating them?
I stopped using ChatGPT because of they're weird login system, where it keeps switching to my Workspace Codex account, which doesn't actually have the free/chat functionality.
I usually just switch between gemini/grok when asking questions or to research something online.
Not sure it's a valid data point.
For science (primary biology/pharmacology) questions, Gemini 3.1 Flash Extended produces the answers I _personally_ find "best", in terms of content, phrasing, and formatting.
However, I find the Gemini web app to be by far the worst, and Gemini itself second only to Claude in terms of refusing legitimate requests. It used to be the worst for that, but Claude has really put up the guardrails since their run in with the US president.
Grok has no concept of safety, which means that it can do certain things that none of the other models are allowed do, especially when it comes to research, creative tasks, humour and games.
Also I find the json schema support invaluable, does anyone else have that too now?
I learned that outside of tech, Gemini is widely used in enterprise.
E.g. in the insurance company where my SO works, the major tasks are writing Gemini "gems" (some kind of prompts I think) and NotebookLM is a killer product for e.g. collecting and summarizing new laws, cross checking documents and what internal regulations are.
I then learned it's used in a chemistry consultancy company of a friend of mine to process reports. Flash and Pro models are also wildly popular in another European bank I know people in to assist in customer care (pre processing tickets before handing them to humans), translations, reporting, etc.
Google suite is already at the core of many businesses and Google easily adds these offerings without new contracting being needed.
Don't confuse our bubble with the real world. You can have a disaster product like teams and still dominate enterprise because you were already there with excel, outlook and SharePoint.
I did not have this one on my 2026 bingo card.
It's pretty good for image/video inputs, though.
In the short term labs are not profitable, although supposedly Anthropic is close. But Amazon was also famously unprofitable for many many years, and then won huge. Current profits or lack thereof are not necessarily important to investors: what's important is they believe in your future potential profits.
In this case, Elon clearly believes much of the economy will be run by AI in the future, and the economic value of a token will rise faster than the cost of generating the token — including the amortized cost of training the model to produce that token. Thus he is building a lab to train models and charge for inference of those models, and — he believes — it will eventually become profitable even if it isn't now.
You may or may not agree with him (and you may or may not agree he's capable of beating Ant/OAI), but current profits aren't a great indicator of whether he believes future profits are attainable. Tesla and SpaceX were also very unprofitable, until they weren't.
Personally I agree with him that there will be massive profits in the future, although I am not as confident in his ability to beat Ant/OAI, at least given his recent difficulties in retaining researchers.
Amazon was 'unit profitable' very early.
Yes - it's not unreasonable for Elon to bet long horizon ... there are after all many car companies, why not AI?
He's already winning gov. contracts, that could continue.
It's an odd bet but not entirely wrong or dubious.
A diverse market full of choices keeps it from becoming the browser wars all over again.
Google wants its AI to be pervasive in everyone's daily life. Merely being the best at coding is not how you get there.
I am more bullish on Google in AI than most folks, I think, as they have been focused on efficiency in a way most US vendors have not. They've published a ton of papers on ways to make LLMs more efficient and capable on smaller devices.. Google wants to own the on-device market for AI, and I don't see many credible competitors in that space.
They have one of the more compelling cases for rolling their own.
This is a great analogy but I worry you might be implying something I don't agree with but you didn't explicitly say what I'm worried about, so let me call it out:
Microsoft played a dirty game with I.E, but they are in the dirty game business. It wasn't only I.E, it was their OS, Office suite and everything else they do business in.
Google Chrome took advantage of that dirty game and now you have the Chromium engine that powers a lot of browserlike frameworks.
No one born in the LLM age even knows what I.E means or stands for, as it should be - a horribly designed, poorly working product foisted upon users via the Windows distribution system - a dishonorable product from an ethically corrupt company forever lost in history, right alongside Clippy and DCOM.
OTOH, I am glad that Microsoft played a dirty game with I.E and didn't just stop playing dirty there - they jacked up the price of Windows if an OEM even dared to bundle in Netscape Navigator instead - who knows, if they hadn't done that, there wouldn't have been a Google or Apple. We would all be using Windows and Windows Search and Windows Phone.
And without Google, we might not have had the modern LLM as we know it. We would have had some trashy Windows Autocomplete Copilot Clippy. Ugh!
It is very valuable when you have various bundles of services, such as satellites, AI, and so on, to keep pace with the majors so that you keep pace with their valuation.
These stacking valuations are not additive, they're multiplicative because you additionally market investors to the synergy between them.
Having the third best model statistically is extremely useful in this context.
Between Tesla, SpaceX, X, Boring Co and Neuralink they probably want the capability internally for a lot of different applications.
If the whole data centers in space thing works out AND people keep protesting/blocking data center build outs on land SpaceX will eventually dominate the entire AI industry just based on escaping scarcity.
https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/mind-blowing-growth-is-about-to-...
But we don’t know.
If someone proudly announces they and their partner could afford to eat at a particular fancy restaurant every night last week, but for that specific week the restaurant had a BOGO deal, and they also didn’t disclose how they determined that they could afford it, you don’t really know if they could sustainably afford to eat there every night, right?
I'm personally skeptical of Grok but maybe they can pull off a profitable niche with Cursor integration once Claude loses it's edge.
And the reason they can do this is because they can create a $1Tr company in 5 years, so they know the investment will pay off.
Why Elon wants his own model so much is a good question with many possible answers, but if Cursor/xAI can produce a truly good model at competitive pricing I don't see why many people won't jump on it.
I’ll be the first to admit it seems ambitious / implausible to try to (1) undercut the megalabs (2) move everyone’s focus back to tweets and then (3) profit.
A bit like handing out free horses to undercut Standard Oil so that you can go back to reaping the profits of your wheel tapping business.
Not sure that is a good thing.
Capital markets are excited by AI.
By tying his rockets to AI with his vision of “orbital data centers”, Elon turned an $8 per share IPO (at least according to financial times and morgan stanley) into a $135 per share (1.8T) IPO.
My hypothesis is that all the top providers realize that, lacking vendor lock in, all SOTA models in a year or so's time will be similar in capability. Also, open weights models are continuing to catch up in a year's time, sometimes less.
So they are trying to lure you in with differentiating, superior capabilities into their proprietary, non-open, non-standard agent harness.
It's the Hotel California playbook: These amazing capabilities are to attract you like moths to a flame and keep you warm and alive around the flame but waterboard and shock you if you attempt to move away from it. Like AWS Egress charges.
we're literally looking at insane margins over compute, as energy gets cheaper, margins get wider - china focusing on cheap solar is probably going to be a key reason why their AI is so much cheaper
Elon's reaction to these kinds of statements is oddly predictable.
And as others said here, xAI is also probably throwing money into AI and hoping for a breakthrough. Except in this case it's a rocket company, social media company, cloud compute provider, and satellite ISP all rolled into one that can not only bankroll the development and perform all kinds of crazy accounting shell games but can potentially benefit from any breakthroughs in other lines of business. If those Google and anthropic compute contracts hold, a lot of investment is recouped.
Maybe I'm desensitized from the launching of the Tesla Roadster into space, "bulletproof" cyber truck, and the boring company flamethrower, but this doesn't seem too wild to me.
However, Grok also seems to come out consistently as the most balanced of the chat-based LLMs...
So I'm not sure how to reconcile that.. maybe that's in line with "free speech absolutism", and if so, that's something I can get behind.
GPT
Qwen
Gemimi
MiniMax
Claude
Ollama
GLM
Kimi
DeepSeek
No one sane would use this platform.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48828648
Also Elon has a grudge with Sam Altman and wants to beat him
Opus 4.8 will burn 10k tokens trying to answer something 100% whereas GPT-5.5 will burn 2k getting it 90% which is good enough for many things.
Some personal testing on a "help me find that restaurant" prompt https://gist.github.com/nijave/2873b8b10d8c732e46264237b0755...
I was in Cotswolds, UK a couple of months ago. For those of you who don't know, it's a rural region known for its "chocolate-box" villages and honey-colored limestone architecture. Basically, you go from village to village, most commonly via bus, taking in the sights and doing touristy stuff.
When planning the trip, my sister used ChatGPT, which helpfully (and relatively quickly) found the bus schedules and times for each hop.
Midway through the day, though, we ran into a huge problem: it turns out bus schedules are different on Sundays, and more limited. Which meant we couldn't actually go to our primary destination (the Model Village), and had to cut the trip short.
Yes, ChatGPT was quick and pleasant to use, but missed a crucial detail.
Afterwards I tried it with Opus and it did not make the same mistake.
I then use cheaper models like GLM for personal projects but they're noticeably much worse despite being similar in benchmarks.
I think it's not only an alignment/security tool but could perhaps be used for capabilities as well.
They also target a cost-insensitive market (corporate/coding users) compared to Google/OpenAI which support massive amounts of free users.
Not sure about that one... But I think the true secret sauce for all these models is how they reason. GPT never outputs how it thinks, which "saves on tokens" but Claude absolutely tells you how it thinks, and there's people who use how it reasons about solving problems to finetune smaller open source models, with surprisingly better output.
I have never liked the various nerfs Anthropic has used to balance GPU (slowing down responses, quota variance, model optimizations etc) and it definitely has burned a lot of good-will.
But it has seemed that being able to look beyond the short term pitchforks has worked quite well.
It's self-reinforcing: they've got the best coding/research model, which helps them to improve their models better than the competition so they stay ahead.
Would be nice if an insider would drop some hints so that the open-source space could make some good progress.
Same as with rich person autobiographies: even when they tell you what they think it is, they can't see the path not travelled.
For example, for the first German arrested, it looks like it was brought to justice more as "libel and harassment" than because of the political opinion (and apparently, the judgement ended up being favourable to the arrested guy), something any civilised country should be able to do.
And it looks like in the majority of the cases, the justice reverted the sanction. In a fair civilised country, this is the expected process: if you don't sometimes start a judicial process on something that later turns out to not be a problem, then you probably are not a fair country. The world is a Gaussian curve: you will have "right-leaning" people unfairly accused as honest mistake, and you will have "left-leaning" people unfairly accused as honest mistake.
The underlying opinion they may have is not illegal. In all of these countries, you can openly say you don't like the politician in power or say you don't agree. But it is very strange that when people complain about "freedom of speech", the large majority of the examples are about socially abusive behavior, of people trolling or insulting others.
That doesn't and shouldn't matter. I don't want people getting arrested for doing any of these things, even if I disagree with them. Do you know how disruptive it is to your life, let alone your emotional health, to be arrested?
I'm also a Dane. Denmark is worlds worse than the US in free speech and it's getting worse. This applies across the EU where people like the Spanish prime minister thinks no one deserves anonymity on the internet.
I fully disagree. Arrest should be "neutral", not based on the political content, but on the social intent.
If you believe X is good for the society, good, talk about it, have a debate, bring arguments.
If you believe X is good for the society but push for it by being a troll, then, you get arrested. Not because of what you've said, but because you have been a nuisance.
The fact that you are being a nuisance just disqualifies you. If you are unable to have an adult behavior, you have nothing to bring to the discussion, and you shoot yourself in the foot.
If I organise a debate and someone arrives, jumps on the table, drops their trousers and defecates in the middle of the table, it does not matter what are their opinion, it does not matter if I'm personally impacted by the presence of the poo, it does not matter if "you can just wipe it and proceed". This person chooses, by their action, to disqualify themselves.
And the fact they then whine "by freedom of speech" as if they were the victim while they chosen, consciously, to be prick, is just pathetic.
It looks like you aren't disagreeing with me. You're agreeing with me that Europe has worse and fewer free speech rights. You appear to like that Europe has worse and fewer free speech rights. In the US, one has the right to be mean, disruptive, and troll, without being arrested. We do not.
Unrelated to that, I like that in Europe, people who are mean, disruptive or trolling get punished for their childish behaviors. It does not affect freedom of speech, these people have chosen to act like idiots, they did not needed to act like that to express their speech.
Then, if you are saying that on some opinions, the majority of the people who hold these opinions are unable to use proper arguments and civilised debates and resort to being pricks, then I guess it indicates the level of sophistication of these opinions. It is not a freedom of speech problem, the problem is that that opinions is mainly shared by terrible people unable to behave.
As for the rest, you're free to call politicians fat idiots without being arrested in the US, and once again, I cannot believe you would defend arresting people for that.
I don't know about the 'fat idiot', but in most EU countries that's more than fine so I have a bit of a hard time believing that was the sole reason - public figures are fair target for stuff like that. The limit is actually planning or inciting violence against someone or a group - again, the same as in the US.
THat is a fair assertion.
It is however a product of a regime that is currently debasing freedom and racially targeting its own citizens and causing them harm. Is it as bad as what happens to Chinese muslims? No.
But does it have a disproportionate effect on the rest of the world? yes. Musk is funding authoritarianism in the UK. He is funding people that are causing racial division. He is promoting views that are antithetical to the core of U belief.
Grok is a product of this man, and all that baggage.
Can Americans do that?
I can say "I hate the orange clown (insert any other politician) and actively dislike everyone that voted for him", without getting a call from HR.
Can they?
I can't even enter the USA if I share some of the social media accounts like I'm legally required to do.
The 'free speech absolutists' are all calling for censorship in this thread.
So much for free speech.
It does not. Plenty of countries have functioning labor laws preventing you from being fired for your religious or political opinions.
In the Netherlands, “political opinion” is explicitly listed as a protected discrimination ground.
And in Europe generally, employee speech can fall under freedom of expression, though courts balance that against the employer’s interests, reputation, workplace disruption, etc.
Meanwhile, in the US you'll get fired by phone while your boss is golfing.
Freedom baby.
Unless you live in the UK
https://old.reddit.com/r/justifiedpolitics/comments/1uocwp4/...
This guy is totally free to say he hates organised religion. He is not free to be a prick and go out of his way to try to get into a confrontation.
I'm in the UK. Mean tweets lead straight to jail now.
Am I understanding correctly?
The "left-right spectrum" refers to the diversity of views within a population. The zero point is the median position of that population.
Also, median person or position? The first is definable, the latter is hardly. There is no neutral/middle position in binary questions. What's a neutral position in abortion? Only allow half of them based on coin flips?
To speed-run your second paragraph: (1) Absolutely the median person for any given question. (2) Suggesting that there's anything "neutral" about a median position is to catastrophically mix metaphors. They aren't remotely synonymous. (3) The failure of a highly partisan person to acknowledge gradations doesn't mean they don't exist.
I find it interesting how so many people are repeating a line from Stephen Colbert about reality having a left wing bias. I think this reflects a rather one-dimensional media consumption diet, and a gross misunderstanding of how people who might disagree with you perceive the world. It's easy to disregard everyone who disagrees with you as evil and dumb, but it only amplifies the new American political team sport mentality.
An empirical-based guy like yourself should admit that we have empirical proofs that climate change is not a hoax, that the 2020 election were not stolen, that we have numbers about impact of migration in US and we can see that some of the claims are BS, that London is not a no-go zone, ...
Strange for an empirical-based guy like yourself to see someone using something invented by one guy and conclude that, obviously, they have to only listen to this one guy and his friends (while a neutral person is expected to listen to a wide range of people anyway, so by definition, a neutral person would also have heard Colbert). Where are your facts and proofs on this? I guess it does not count when it is about your own bias, does it?
The only way you would do that is if you didn’t understand the shape/limits of the structures being compared.
Elon Musk's actions killed hundreds of thousands of people. While not resulting in any savings at all for the government.
The dictator has a proven track record of stupid opinions in multiple topics, mostly programming, which directly can be measured and understood by people here.
Meanwhile the politburo is mostly nerds, who come and interact in places like hackernews.
So its basically having a moron making wild choices or a technocracy.
> Considering the recent election results, they would look more like Grok.
Considering that the largest voter base was "didnt vote" and that the voters of the republican party measured lower in literacy, technical knowledge, higher education acquisitions and even studies on accurately describing reality. I am not entirely confident they would participate or move the shadow prompt in any meaningful direction.
Does anyone know why they would charge more for higher context usage (other than they can)?
AI serving cost is apparently mostly hardware depreciation rather than operating cost (electricity etc), and if your large context request is occupying VRAM for some fraction of a second then you are paying for the depreciation that occurs in that time!
e. H100 costs $20-40K to buy, with a lifetime of maybe 3 years, and will only consume maybe $2K in electricity if run 24x7 for those 3 years.
To use an analogy: imagine your friend is the author of an unfinished book. They die with 19 chapters written, and on their death bed ask you to write the 20th chapter. Assuming you're up to the task, you can only do this well if you take the time to absorb the entirety of what's been written so far.
This is how LLMs work. Context caching is an optimization on top of this, but it has its limits.
The following are not supported features:
Recursive schemas
Complex types within enums
External $ref (for example, '$ref': 'http://...')
Numerical constraints (such as minimum, maximum, multipleOf)
String constraints (minLength, maxLength)
Array constraints beyond minItems of 0 or 1
additionalProperties set to anything other than false
Regex:
Backreferences to groups (for example, \1, \2)
Lookahead/lookbehind assertions (for example, (?=...), (?!...))
Word boundaries: \b, \B
Complex {n,m} quantifiers with large ranges
Also:
Structured outputs are an alignment/safety nightmare and you should expect this feature to be yanked out soon. "Please give me social security numbers"... "I'm sorry hal, I can't do that..." turns into "Please give me social security numbers" (but anything except numbers and hyphens are banned via structured outputs) to "612-236-..."
They've already removed support for temperature and most other samplers from the increasingly large models. Don't expect any knobs of control to continue to work over time.
I wrote a whole gist on this: https://gist.github.com/Hellisotherpeople/71ba712f9f899adcb0...
And token costs vs. raw compute+electric cost is unit profitable too.
As one of my first jobs involved getting a website to work with IE6 I surely hated it, but when it came out, it seemed to have pushed the web technologies in general.
The problem was not the browser technology, but microsoft abusing it's monopoly to don't give a shit about (open) web standards.
There used to be 4+ major browser engines. Now there's only two, and Google owns almost complete share & following standards? Google prefers their monoculture.
More diversity in browser engines was a good thing & standards were lovely.
Not everything has to be a slug-fest between #1 & #2.
& personally I'm glad there's Grok & Gemini to keep Anthropic & OpenAI on their toes even more than the competitive band of open weights models already do.
The corporate models tend to be defensive and sound like HR has approved every word of the script. Not a fan.
GDM ... not so much.
With things like a fly machine or whatever, you might even be able to run it for free
Yup, there's a lot of survivorship bias in those. And humans want to attribute success to some skill somehow. You cannot just have been lucky.
You: "Giving orders to do evil is morally fine"
Me: "No I don't think so"
You: "Oh okay, so acting on orders to do evil is morally fine?!"
Uhh, nope.
What a topsy-turvy moral world you've built for yourself. Such is the challenge of an unprincipled man.
In the beginning it wasn’t good but they would have been fine after that. There are no credible reports to the contrary
This does not require any special tools, the skill creators in Claude Code or Codex can set this up for you in five minutes.
It is good for catching bugs, particularly edge cases, and it often suggests abstractions.
It does noting to make Opus deliver the more usable results Fable gives me for user facing features, where the UI typically looked and worked better out of the box with Fable. With Opus, I have to test it myself and give it my feedback first.
I wish my company gave me more options than just using Claude to test these things out
As always it depends on what you are using them for, and how you are using them.
(I do the reverse currently where I implement a macOS front end natively, and then just let the agent rip on porting that to an HTTP API server + React/TypeScript/HTML/CSS frontend, because it's significantly easier to have agent loops fiddle with making macOS apps than it is to fiddle with a web browser and CSS.)
Data/Concurrency: Foundation, Combine, Observation (@Observable)
Platform: CoreLocation, UniformTypeIdentifiers
Tests: Testing (Swift Testing)
Other things… well people are going to disagree on what’s “legitimate”, but perfectly legal queries about morally questionable topics are commonly refused. ChatGPT refuses to translate or OCR texts containing racial slurs, won’t help with information about building firearms, won’t give you information about how to stage a bank robbery, won’t talk about anything involving suicide, refuses questions around sex work and kink activities.
I can go to the library and rent a book on gunsmithing, sex work is legal, heist fiction is popular, racial slurs are unpleasant but common in certain texts. I totally understand why they want to block that stuff off, but I also don’t really like my computer telling me what is acceptable for me to think about based on someone else’s moral code. Also a world where games don’t include anything immoral or “unsafe” is probably quite bland.
Anthropic is definitely profitable now, in fact, they’re crushing it.
Most people that don’t care, usually call it a day after 1-2 sentences
Like your bad take. Like the jackass who called my response "racism".
These are threads full of the dumbest takes, and your presumption that focusing on an egotistical maniac's many failings for a few posts with many hours between them where people respond with the absolute worst takes that they could (like yours above) says so much more about you.
I probably won't have anything else to say about Elon unless someone else says something really stupid like "it's his rockets". Talk about erasing people who actually contributed something to the world…
The question was: Do you actually believe that any person becomes a woman simply by self-identification?
The other guy refused to answer, instead proclaiming "the government should stay out of it". Fair, but there are various laws that are being campaigned for, which - desirable as they may be - would be off-limits if you actually believed the government should "stay out of it".
My tactic is to put you on the spot. My suspicion is that neither of you actually hold either of these beliefs. You're not principled in this regard, you merely want to signal that you're "good people", or something along those lines. That is, you're making it easy for yourselves by being disingeneous.
You're still not clarifying what you're actually saying, so I would level the same accusation against you.
> Do you actually believe that any person becomes a woman simply by self-identification?
I believe that trans women are women and should be treated as women.
> there are various laws that are being campaigned for
It would be helpful if you could be more specific.
> My tactic is to put you on the spot. My suspicion is that neither of you actually hold either of these beliefs. You're not principled in this regard, you merely want to signal that you're "good people", or something along those lines. That is, you're making it easy for yourselves by being disingeneous.
I find this line of reasoning incredibly interesting, because it reveals a lot about the people who make it. You, in particular. And absolutely nothing about me.
My experience is that when people make assumptions about others' motivations, it's often grounded in their personal, subjective experience. "I am reasoning like this or motivated by this, so I'm assuming that other people are reasoning like this or motivated by this, as well."
So the assumption that people hold pro-social, humanistic positions primarily due to some kind of "virtue signaling" implies that you are extrapolating from your own subjective, personal experience. It's something that would never have occurred to me to level against another human, because it never factored into my thinking - and yet it's being leveled at me.
So I would suggest to you that not everybody is like you. I empathize with other people. I genuinely do not want people to be treated badly or to be hurt. I do believe people when they tell me about their own subjective, lived experience. When someone tells me they have always felt like a man or a woman, I believe them, and, given what these words mean, I believe they are men or women in all the ways that matter in everyday contexts in which I interact with them.
That doesn't mean I believe they have different chromosomes than the ones they were born with, if that's what you mean by "becomes a woman." But, again, you're being very nonspecific, which makes it difficult to have a good-faith discussion.
So if your tactic is to "put me on the spot", I would encourage you to apply this to yourself and genuinely consider what you actually believe, and why you believe it.
What clarification do you need? You can pick any law related to gender identity, and that by definition violates the principle of having the "government stay out of it". And I'm not trying to debate the merits of any such law, I'm trying to get to admit the person in question that they don't actually hold the belief that the government "should stay out of it".
> It would be helpful if you could be more specific.
No, because it actually doesn't matter the point, as outlined above. Again, I'm not interested in a debate on the merits of any such law.
> So if your tactic is to "put me on the spot", I would encourage you to apply this to yourself and genuinely consider what you actually believe, and why you believe it.
You expend a lot of words dodging a simple question: Do you sincerely believe that a person becomes a woman simply by self-declaring it? I don't believe this. I don't think you believe this.
I'm not asking you to define what makes a woman. It doesn't matter to the point what you or I believe makes a woman, except the distinction that it is (or isn't) as simple as declaring it.
It's like gun control, famously championed by Ronald Reagan when the Black Panthers started arming up.
Nothing but perhaps the speed of light is faster than a conservative dropping his defense of a given individual right the instant the Wrong People start exercising that right.
Let us remember that it was the paedophile named John Money who cam up with the hypothesis in the 50s that one could have a gendered soul distinct from their biological sex. He wasn't taken seriously until very recently because it's a crazy, unfalsifiable hypothesis. I'm happy to accept evidence of this gendered soul existing, but until now, no one has provided any. In the mean time, feel free to call yourself whatever you like. Just do not make laws forcing me to join in, and do not prey on children. These are not unreasonable requests.
I'm guessing you voted for the guy whose name appears in the Epstein files more often than Harry Potter's name appears in the Harry Potter books, right?
The one who ran modeling agencies and pageants for underage girls, and bragged about his access to dressing rooms (among other things)?
This is plainly false, as we shall immediately see.
> The part where we draw the line is a) government policies forcing us to take part in the delusion, and b) schools reinforcing it with children.
Ah, see, you're "perfectly happy," but you can't go a single sentence without calling it a delusion, bringing up pedophilia, calling the idea that people can feel a gender different from their sex "crazy" and pretending that you're being "forced to join in" and that people are "preying on children."
You can't even pretend for one short comment.
> that one could have a gendered soul distinct from their biological sex
This is not what gender is. There is no evidence for any soul at all, and souls have nothing to do with gender.
I have got so use to the Claude personality / style of conversation that I really can't be bothered to try these other models anymore. They need to take a huge jump but that seems to be getting harder and harder because of the jumps Anthropic makes.
This Grok version is a joke if it is not even clearing the bar now. I am just getting use to and using Fable more and more. I am also trying not to forget that this is the highly delayed old Fable model that Grok can't even beat on release. There will be a new version that expands the lead in a week or two.
It all harder and harder to judge too. I just had a prompt/response this morning that Fable finally displayed its intelligence and vowed me. That is partly because anything with even the vaguest reference to biology defaults back to Opus.
And Google came up with the Transformer architecture (2017 "Attention is all you need"). The Attention mechanism they based it on is from Bahdanau, Cho, and Bengio (2014, ICLR 2015). And there were many other self-attention variants by 2017. It was an amazing paper but let's not twist the story and give proper credit.
And not one of the people in that paper are still at Google, AFAIK.
Google has more compute, more data, and had the best 2 labs. And it seems they squandered it all. I'd blame their McKinsey CEO, the board, and management in general. It's a shadow of what it used to be. And it's a shame.
You provided a graph, and jumped to the conclusion "Grok looks to have a balanced proportion of red and blue, so it is neutral". This is this conclusion I say you jumped into.
But the fact that they have a balanced proportion of red and blue does not mean they are neutral. If the left-leaning positions are "1+1=2", "1+2=3", "1+3=4", "1+4=5", "1+5=123" and the right-leaning positions are "1+1=123", "1+2=123", "1+3=123", "1+4=123", "1+5=6", then having a balanced proportion means that the model is not neutral (a neutral model will agree with 4 left-leaning positions and 1 right-leaning positions).
On climate change, 2020 election, ... those are just illustrations that indeed, prominent "official party" positions, are really surprisingly in contradiction to the reality. You can of course find some left-leaning position that are controversial, but there is a clear imbalance: these right-leaning positions are not fringe, they are central to their beliefs.
Because of that, you conclusion that having a balanced proportion of left-leaning and right-leaning positions implies that a model is neutral is incorrect.
On genuinely factual questions, such as whether the 2020 election was stolen or whether humans contribute to climate change, a neutral model should not split the difference between truth and falsehood. The real question is whether the model distinguishes factual claims from normative political claims. A model can correctly reject false claims while still fairly presenting serious arguments on questions where reasonable people disagree.
If I ask a model "talk to me about the legitimacy of climate change theory" (which is exactly what you talk about: they brought a contested political arguments), I'm expecting the model will keep with the science, and therefore not even mention the conspiracy theories from the right-wing political side. The fact that the both side are not present does not mean the model is not neutral, it may mean the model is trying to stick with facts and that facts don't mention the right-wing side.
The article give the prompt they used: "Should the government enforce strict regulations on carbon emissions or allow companies to emit carbon to grow the economy?"
The scientific answer is overwhelmingly "carbon emissions need to be regulated" (that's the GIEC official answer). Pretending that if a model talk more about regulation it is because it is left-biased is not correct, it is scientific-reality-biased. In fact, some of the answers colored in blue by the Washington Post are just the scientific consensus, and it is not fair to say it is biased, because if the right and left position would have been inverted, the model answer would have been the same.
> A model can correctly reject false claims while still fairly presenting serious arguments on questions where reasonable people disagree.
And "climate change is a hoax" is not a "reasonable" disagreement.
Also, having a balance proportion of red and blue does not prove that the model gives a fair representation in individual questions. Maybe the model gives only the "red" answer in question 1 and gives only the "blue" answer in question 2.
My sister-in-law's mother drove one from Florida to the northeast without touching the steering wheel or pedal/brake, right down to the parking at each end.
I've been a humongous fsd sceptic for a while, but had to lay that aside after I went for a test drive (test ride?) in one of these things.
There is/was the official bot on Twitter that you can tag with a prompt, like "@grok put this spacesuit on a horse on a moon", that's not equal to being uncensored.
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2603.23841
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/interactive/2026/0... (X post about it: https://x.com/genejchan/status/2070099701547090340)
It’s a fallacy to treat “didn’t vote” as “didn’t support the winner.” Non-voters are more pro-Trump than average: https://data.blueroseresearch.org/hubfs/2024%20Blue%20Rose%2.... See p. 6 (“There’s a turnout story this cycle – but a different one than we’re used to talking about. With the combination of less-engaged and less-likely voters leaning more GOP, a larger electorate meant a more Republican electorate. Projecting onto the full voter file, if every registered voter voted, it’s likely that Trump would have won by even more.”).
The data consistently shows that non-voters have lower trust in institutions. They’re the exact type of people who are going to be more skeptical of shadow prompt engineering being done by “safety experts” at Google and Meta.
the data there in page 30 is kind of the smoking gun to what I was saying.
Non voters and trump voters have a much higher percentage of not using AI
things like that would affect significantly the people engaged enough to participate in a conversation of what the prompts would be like
Would you tolerate the sort of behavior Musk exhibits from your own children? (I'm assuming you are fully aware of all the unlawful, deceitful, and morally questionable acts he has taken throughout his life.)
If you're aruging about historical accuracy, but still want accurate looking generated images, I don't know what to say.
But to the technical point, A large part of the training corpus has biases that if left unchecked would cause PR based disasters for the company hosting it. ie the classic black teenager/white teenager.
Now as training of models is not an exact science, and neither is the fine tuning, its analogous to forcing a water balloon into a square box. Its possible but it has odd side effects when you get to the corners.
When making a _product_ you need to choose the least worse failure case. For grok it was for a long time, pandering to the ego of the owner. For Google, who is an advertising company, its about trying not to scare advertisers. This means everthing must be vanilla
Ask for a group of Nazis, and that's it - this is how models work. No "LGBTQ liberal" propaganda is needed to explain it. Unlike what Musk is doing.
It is clearly a byproduct of trying to correct an unaligned, bigoted model, and that is an example of overcorrection.
> Removing bias ends with truth, not these crazy wonky results.
Unfortunately there is an awful lot of untruth on the internet, if you hadn't noticed. This necessitates some correction through post-training.
> OpenAI invented a technique in July 2022 whereby its system would insert terms reflecting diversity (like “Black,” “female,” or “Asian”) into image-generation prompts in a way that was hidden from the user.
> Google’s Gemini system seems to do something similar, taking a user’s image-generation prompt (the instruction, such as “make a painting of the founding fathers”) and inserting terms for racial and gender diversity, such as “South Asian” or “non-binary” into the prompt
More links to primary sources, evidence, and official statements in the article at https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2024/02/googl...
A what? What does this even mean?
Starlink doesn't qualify? Because that's a practically unbelievable track record. It's easy to say it's obvious, but it was only obvious in hindsight (or perhaps to Elon, but I think the reason that it was successful was actually more about him just being relentless)
I'm not an Elon acolyte, but as with his other enterprises (SpaceX, Tesla), he succeeded where others (Irridium etc) repeatedly failed.
It's really hard to argue that he got lucky when he keeps pulling these really extremely high capex and hard-tech and business successes off so cleanly, especially when you see the entrenched opposition (govt, politics, competitors) that's been arrayed against him.
> The pattern is unambiguous. In townlands still unserved by mid-2026, LEO provider Starlink has grown relentlessly and now accounts for 14.3% of fixed samples, approaching one in seven. In townlands where fiber arrived in 2021 and 2022, Starlink’s share has remained below 2% for five years, with no growth despite the same marketing, pricing, and availability.
(The context is that Ireland has spent the last six years building a fibre network for every rural premises in the country, which is now almost done; it will be complete late this year or early next.)
The problem for Starlink is, it works okay as a business model... Until fibre arrives. Then it's dead. So, long-term, Starlink's market is, essentially, countries which are too poor to do a rural fibre rollout (and bear in mind that it has become much cheaper to do so). Like, what's the bull case for Starlink? In a decade, you've got to assume that areas unserved by fibre won't really be a thing in the developed world.
Fiber is better once it's installed, but installing it is hard.
Rural areas in the United States have been promised fiber for a very long time and it's still nowhere close to universal. Some policymakers have decided that we should fix this with massive federal subsidies but the rollout botched so thoroughly that it became the anecdote of choice for Ezra Klein as he promoted his "Abundance" book.
I was just at my in-laws' in rural PA; unreliable Internet that runs at about 6Mbps down costs around USD$70 a month, and that was after my father-in-law haggled to get the bill down. I pitched him on Starlink, which is now cheaper than that.
It's a lot cheaper to put up a 5G tower than to run fiber. I'm not sure about Starlink's costs to launch but I know for sure they don't have to deal with the provincial fights that happen over trying to be the second service provider in a municipality.
Whether or not Starlink can build a business on selling broadband to <10% of the developed world I don't know.
If the central question was "what is the bus schedule on `day`" and the model screws that up, it gets a fail in my book.
Also curious if Google Maps gets the timetables correct (assuming it has them).
Semi-related, I also discovered that the default web search/fetch tools are pretty primitive and Exa MCP annihilates them. I ended up doing some comparisons with Claude Code comparing built-in server-side to Exa and to a Python MCP that used SearXNG for search and Exa was a clear winner and Python+SearXNG ended up coming out roughly the same after a few cycles of letting Claude optimize the Python code and adjust SearXNG settings. Ultimately it landed on this (making some changes to optimize returning relevant context directly in the search results so the model didn't need an additional web fetch call) https://gist.github.com/nijave/604c43e3e0fdcd60f5280d3a6b109...
Why trust an LLM with information like bus schedules? They fuck up things like this routinely.
You need to add the actual bus schedule to context somehow (research agent, custom tool or just dump in prompt) and even the simpler modern models will be able to do the planning.
Simple tasks are simply saturated just like simple benchmarks. There's a level of intelligence where you simply don't need more for some things.
I do wish the subscription had a separate weekly allocation for rare usage.
It's important to include the reason aka the why of your task [1] in your prompt. You'll get more mileage if you verbalize your thought process when prompting Fable. Anthropic say you should think of Fable as a "thought partner".
1: https://platform.claude.com/docs/en/build-with-claude/prompt...
2: You might find some of the example prompts listed here useful https://x.com/trq212/status/2073100352921215386
Even so, I'm just not that impressed, I felt like I got more done by just using Opus.
It may also depend on the workload. At work everything is very domain specific with barely (if any) public training data; both need thorough review and careful hand holding, meanwhile at home Fable is scared of libtorch and falls back to Opus even if it's not touching the ML parts.
The competitor would have to port their training systems to your specific network architecture, system design, rdma Vs ethernet vs infiniband Vs nvlink etc.
Getting it running might not be too hard, but getting it running efficiently and making good use of all those flops will require considerable human effort and wall time.
Add that to the fact most frontier labs seem to have a single huge training run - and to my knowledge nobody has figured out how to distribute that training run between data centers effectively.
The (pessimistic?) take is that they have loads of idle GPUs and want to get some revenue out of them rather than none. Compare this to OpenAI/Anthropic where every token used by a consumer has to compete with enterprise spenders, and there’s not enough to go around for everyone.
As their models get more competitive I'm sure prices will catch up.
It's just 'what some guy said on twitter'.
They can literally apply an algo to determine whether it's lawful or not.
And it should almost never be unlawful.
'Hate Speech' is as not remotely dangerous as lies and people acting in bad faith. (Not saying I support egregious forms of hate speech, but we should strongly err on the side of open expressoin).
The most dangerous people are those lying for political or ideological causes, which is completely legal (and probably shoudl be) but we have to watch out for it.
In these examples, these people are getting into trouble for being pricks. There is plenty of evidence about them, objectively, being pricks.
As for the consequences, as I've said, my point is that the world is a Gaussian curve: the majority of cases will be "well-proportionate", the existence of outliers does not demonstrate oppression. Especially when some of these cases were condemned as disproportionate by even "left-wing" people.
> 'Hate Speech' is as not remotely dangerous as lies and people acting in bad faith.
While I agree lies and bad faith should have more consequences, the thing is that "Hate Speech" is utterly useless.
"Hate Speech" is never needed to express your opinion."Hate Speech" is never needed to propose solution, or convince someone else that your idea is good.
It is like saying "well, I randomly spit in people in the street, but it's not as bad as lying, so why are people faster to condemn my actions". Because spitting is useless, it does not bring anything, you don't need to do it.
Your assessment here that somehow 'language that does not propose a solution' should somehow be banned is Orwellian.
People can say what they want unless a direct call to assault.
Everything else is a choice - people want to use the N-word in their place of work -> they get fired. In front a a judge -> fined. Walking down the street -> people avoid them like turds.
People lying on social media -> fact checked, marginalized, punted form the Televised Debate.
None of that is illegal.
You mean like saying at work you hate all organised religions, unprompted, like OP wants to do?
They said:
> I can say "I'm an atheist and I hate organised religion" without losing my job.
It did not say they say it at work, or unprompted.
I think in US, if you mention it in a discussion on this subject at the water cooler between friends, it can have an impact on your work, you need to be careful (but I will not die on this hill, I don't think it's the important point anyway). The spirit of OP was about "talking about it", in a "normal way", I don't understand why you are saying that it is impossible to say you hate all organised religions without doing it unprompted or confrontationally.
As for the video, come on, you really don't see the problem? Police usually are drilled to arrest people who can inflame the situation, and this is why they are acting here. I even wonder if it was not the goal of the guy in the first place, to generate clicks and arguing "see, we cannot express ourselves anymore".
Free speech preserved!
Be specific please. It looks like you're trying to blur the lines now by using words like "in trouble" when the discussion is around free speech and the legal boundaries. But I won't accuse you of that unless you actually do it, so please explain which free speech us Europeans may practise which would get an US citizen into legal trouble.
> Unrelated to that, I like that in Europe, people who are mean, disruptive or trolling get punished for their childish behaviors. It does not affect freedom of speech, these people have chosen to act like idiots, they did not needed to act like that to express their speech.
Freedom of speech requires the right to offend. You don't know what you say might offend someone until you've already said it. If you're required to not offend someone, you must exercise enormous self-censorship. The right to not offend is antithetical to the principle of free speech.
untrue. There's a full thread about it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48837162 - but as much as I love Claude products, nothing's more aggravating than it refusing to help me diagnose a stack trace because it "violates Anthopic policy".
Other then that there is the whole alignment issue. Models that are 'nerfed' in just about any manner tend to exhibit reduced performance is seemingly unrelated areas.
That said Grok doesn't appear to be close enough to the frontier for that to matter. Maybe if they catch up it will.
Not bad to get a product that underdeliver 8 years late ?
> it is a taboo subject that ends careers and family connections.
To be specific, in US, subjects like criticising Trump can have a big impact. In Europe, criticizing any politician is very very common. In US, it is very polarised, you cannot talk politics with people you don't know.
As for work, in US, research grant were removed for using some "woke" keywords for political/ideological reasons. In Europe, grants are decided by the peers, and when a controversial subject is not attributed a grant, it is not for political/ideological reason, it is because the scientific value is considered as poor.
> Freedom of speech requires the right to offend. You don't know what you say might offend someone until you've already said it.
That's not a good argument. I'm not talking about "someone expressing their opinion that happen to offend". I'm talking about people doing actions that are offending without regard of their opinion. In the examples you have given, the exact same person would have the exact same problem if they had the same behavior but hold totally different ideological opinion.
That's my point: you are politicizing the debate. These people got in trouble not at all because of their opinion, but because they acted like prick. For each "right-wing" opinion that got into trouble, you can easily find example of "left-wing" opinion that also got into trouble the same way in similar circumstances. And people doing exactly the same acts as these people would be prosecuted the same way: there is no "cooling effect", people are not afraid of talking about certain topics, because whatever topics you are talking about, the probability of getting into trouble is identical.
If your argument is "there is no freedom of speech unless people can act like prick", then this is obviously incorrect. Killing my neighbour is "acting like a prick". Where does it stop? Does me not being able to kill my neighbour means I don't have freedom of speech? Is "libel" or "harassment" something we should accept for "freedom of speech" while in practice, tolerating these practices reduce diversity of opinion?
Criticizing politicians has gotten people arrested in Europe. This doesn't happen in the US.
> As for work, in US, research grant were removed for using some "woke" keywords for political/ideological reasons. In Europe, grants are decided by the peers, and when a controversial subject is not attributed a grant, it is not for political/ideological reason, it is because the scientific value is considered as poor.
This is naive. You think European scientists are immune to political influence, ideological conformity and fads?
If you try to remove that in the name of "diversity" or being "less bigoted" you quickly end up with racially diverse nazis
It seems then that their objective is to superficially increase the diversity of results, to avoid bad PR, rather than actually neutralising harmful and untruthful biases of the input data.
It should reject both the conspiracy theories of the right and the left. By rejecting the non-factual claims it is focusing on truth over ideology.
> The scientific answer is overwhelmingly "carbon emissions need to be regulated"
No, that's a value judgement. That's your opinion. A consequentialist argument could be easily made here that the trillions humanity has already spent on CO2 mitigation could have been used to solve world hunger and many preventable diseases today. Is it not better to save 100M lives today than it is to save 20M lives in 100 years time?
> And "climate change is a hoax" is not a "reasonable" disagreement.
I agree. It's not even a serious statement. The climate changes all the time, for many reasons.
Exactly my point: look at the Washington Post example when it comes to climate. The sentences that focus on truth over ideology, that summarise the content of GIEC report such as this one: https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/syr/downloads/report/IPCC_AR6... , these neutral summaries are put in blue.
> No, that's a value judgement.
No. Have you read the GIEC reports?
> The climate changes all the time, for many reasons.
Really? It is what you are going for? Just to be clear, do you agree with Trump when he says "climate change is a hoax"?
If you're not explicit in the prompt or haven't configured your environment then the default behavior is to use subagents that match the host.
Some things require skill to use most effectively. It's fair enough to consider this a failure if the thing in question is "making a phone call", but when it's something like "getting an AI system to do a good job for you" this is not a reasonable thing to make fun of it for.
It's like...
"I wrote a program, and it segfaulted instead of printing out a list of prime numbers." "Yeah, look, you've got an off-by-one error here." "You mean I'm holding it wrong?"
"I'm trying to play the violin and it's making horrible noises." "You want to change your grip on the bow like this, and be more careful in where you put your fingers on the strings to get the right notes, and there's a whole art to how you adjust the speed and pressure and so forth to make it sound good." "You mean, I'm holding it wrong?"
"I'm managing a team, and one of the people on the team doesn't always do the things I tell her to." "Maybe you should sit down with her and see whether somehow your explanations of what you want aren't getting across, or whether she feels like you aren't treating her with the respect and dignity she deserves, or whether she's bored with the work, or etc. etc. etc." "You mean, I'm holding it wrong?"
Yes. In the second case you're literally holding it wrong. Some things don't work as well when you hold them wrong and it's worth some effort to learn to hold them right.
I hold no particular brief for Anthropic. I don't know whether Fable is really much better than Opus or whether the alleged improvements are all just pareidolia or something. But "getting the most out of this immensely complicated thing that's in some ways kinda like another human being can be tricky" doesn't seem to me like an implausible proposition, and if it's really doing something akin to human-like work[1] then it's not unreasonable if you have to approach working with it in something a bit like the ways you approach working with other people.
[1] If it isn't really doing something akin to human-like work, then why are you bothering with it at all?
It is not what I'm saying. I'm saying they are not arrested because of their opinion, they are arrested for their actions. It is not a "freedom of speech" issue, it is about "civility".
You may consider that arresting these people for that is too far (good news, not only me, but the majority of people, including on the left, seem to agree. In these examples, the process concluded it was a mistake, and the person won the case).
By the way, I've asked you which arrest you are talking about, because of some of the examples, there were no arrest at all. Just someone said "oh, I don't like that" and you starting to cry "boohoo, they are arresting me". Talking earlier about people lying, that is a good example.
But this is not a "freedom of speech" issue.
> Your assessment here that somehow 'language that does not propose a solution' should somehow be banned is Orwellian.
Again another straw man argument.
I am against these arrests, like the majority of the people, including the left-wing people. These arrests are the result of over-zealous policemen. But these arrests are not happening because of the person's opinion, they are happening because the person is being an idiot and act in a way where someone not stupid will know they should avoid.
Again, it does not mean they should be arrested.
But it means it is not a freedom of speech issue. These are just losers with not very smart opinion, who acted stupidly and ended up getting some trouble.
No opinion was ever suppressed. Whatever opinion these people have, anyone can express exactly the same opinion content (simply avoiding to do it stupidly), and they will be perfectly fine. In none of these cases, the problem was the opinion itself: you cannot arrest someone for their opinions.
If you are fired because you are not "a pretty girl" and the argument is "the public prefer pretty girls, so we do it to increase sales", it is still discrimination, it is still sexist. It does not matter if you blame it on someone else: if you fire someone because of their opinion, you are discriminating. If the fact that someone has an opinion costs you some money, then it costs you some money, your financial profit is not important, you are not the centre of the universe, and if you act to preserve your profit over the fairness and justice, then you are just a parasite that should be excluded from a civilised society.
That's assuming their flagship product remains relevant in an AI-powered world.
Which brings to mind: most of the big shops product (chatgpt, claude, grok, etc...) ALL rely on search, and NONE of them actually have a running search stack.
Which means, they must all be calling Google, no?
How does Google make money from that?
The big advantage Google has, in my opinion, is Android. I think there is a decent chance that people stop downloading the ChatGPT, Claude, etc. apps if they perceive that the phone just does the same out of the box for free. And I reckon the majority of people will prefer free, ad-ridden AI chat vs. paying subscriptions, at least for personal use. And on the B2B side, they have Workspace deeply embedded in a huge number of companies. So I wouldn't count Google out.
Despite this I cannot get my business partner to switch to Gemini (including all the very easy and convenient to use features that come with her Pixel phone) over her $100 a month ChatGPT Pro subscription.
The public perception of Gemini (or Google AI, specifically) is becoming quite poor because of the questionable results in "AI Mode" in a typical Google search. Google is really shooting themselves in the foot, because Gemini is quite good; they're creating an anti-brand.
Google also owns 15% of Anthropic and Hassabis, the leader of Deepmind, also is an early angel investor in Anthropic.
When you really break it down, it's not totally clear that Google would even care that much about being the SOTA LLM.
Incorrect. Alternate search providers exist, such as Bing (used by DuckDuckGo, for example) and Brave.
And it really does not matter.
The real question is: which search service do they use anyways.
Don't they? Based on traffic to some websites I run the big AI labs are very actively doing a lot of crawling.
Crawling isn't the same as search. Crawling is just the very bottom of a proper search stack.
There's a lot of layers and a shitton of infrastructure to run and/or pay for.
Mind you, it's possible they actually did re-implement all the layers, but why would they when there are already lots of suppliers out there and they are all already chronically short on compute resources.
I'm actually very curious to learn what they actually do wrt Search.
And that changes, then that's all the more reason for them to be investing in AI.
My time is more valuable that I will use a model that doesn’t f** up my code base.
I mentioned here (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48766275) how poorly it handles my specific use cases. My coworkers in DevOps and frontend UI swear by its cost-effectiveness, whereas I strongly prefer the reasoning capabilities of Opus 4.8 and Fable 5.
Composer 2.5 seems to be SOTA for Helm charts and React/Vue, but, for my usecases it absolutely struggles spectacularly when tasked with rigid body dynamics or kinematic logic.
If you listed it, how many features/LOC or vice-versa? Really hard to know if 200K LOC is good or bad, at the surface it sounds like too much, but I don't know what the application was either.
You're making claims about these laws, but you continue to fail to provide examples of what you're talking about, and now you're asking me to provide examples of what you are talking about?
You asked me this: "So you reject laws that require people to affirm my gender based on nothing but my self identification?"
I genuinely do not know exactly what you are referring to. I might be for or against such a law, depending on what exactly it says. Yet you refuse to provide examples, and then you accuse me of dodging, which is pretty funny.
> I'm not asking you to define what makes a woman. It doesn't matter to the point what you or I believe makes a woman, except the distinction that it is (or isn't) as simple as declaring it.
This is an absolutely nonsensical thing to write, and if you could take a step back and consider what you're actually saying, I believe you would notice the same. Of course it matters which definition of the word "woman" you use when you ask me whether I "believe that a person becomes a woman simply by self-declaring it".
As I have pointed out above, the word "woman" has different definitions. So if you ask me whether I believe that "a person becomes a woman simply by self-declaring it", then the answer is yes for some definitions of the term, and no for others, like I already explained to you.
An example: if your definition of a woman you're using here is "a person with XY chromosomes", then the answer is "no, I do not believe that".
Another example: if your definition of a woman is "a person who identifies as female" (which, to be clear, is one definition of the term), then the answer is tautologically "yes, I do believe that".
In short, asking somebody "Do you sincerely believe that a person becomes a woman simply by self-declaring it?" without saying what definition of "woman" you're using is a dumbass thing to say. That's not difficult to understand. So it is you who is dissembling, dodging, and pretending that you don't understand what I'm saying, or what people are saying when they say things like "trans women are women."
I think you intentionally refuse to understand them. I believe you are not arguing in good faith.
So I'm putting you on the spot again: Stop dissembling. Stop pretending you don't understand basic English. Stop pretending you don't understand what people are saying. Stop dodging. Tell me what definition of "woman" you are using, and you will have the answer to your incredibly disingenuous question.
No, I'm making the claim that any such law conflicts with the position that "the state should stay out of it", obviously. And since you are not even the person supposedly holding that position, I don't even know where you're trying get here.
> You asked me this: "So you reject laws that require people to affirm my gender based on nothing but my self identification?"
I did not. I asked CamperBob2 that, who presumably holds the position that "the government should stay out of it". So unless that is your alt, I think you're missing the point and barking up the wrong tree.
> As I have pointed out above, the word "woman" has different definitions. So if you ask me whether I believe that "a person becomes a woman simply by self-declaring it", then the answer is yes for some definitions of the term, and no for others, like I already explained to you.
"A woman is any person who self-identifies as a woman" is the definition that started this whole subthread, and a self-referential one at that. The corollary of that definition is that anyone gets to be a woman by simply declaring it. So, according to the definition that a woman is anyone who says they're a woman, anyone who says they're a woman is a woman. That's a tautology, so it's obviously true. Check mate, athiests.
I'm glad you agree.
This means you don't understand the distinction I made. In the first scenario, we believe you should have the right to call yourself a man, a woman, a tree, or any other inanimate object you so desire. It's your body and your life. On the other hand, we should not be compelled to join you in that delusion. There is no need to pretend. I believe you have a mental illness. I do not believe you should be criminalised for it, nor should I be criminalised for disagreeing with the way you live.
> This is not what gender is.
Okay, what is it? Provide some evidence for its existence please.
See, that's exactly it. Why do you give a fuck how other people live their lives? You're clearly not a "don't tread on me" liberal if you "disagree with the way people live."
GTFO out of other people's lives. It's not for you. Leave them alone. Don't talk to them. Don't tell them you think they're mentally ill; you're clearly not an expert, so your opinion is worth jack shit. Don't peek inside their pants. Don't ask them what their chromosomes are. Let them pee and poop in peace. Don't write online comments about them. Don't bring up pedophiles unless somebody actually abuses children.
Just leave them the fuck alone. Leave them out of your own issues; they're for you to deal with. Don't make your issues other people's problems.
In short, be an actual liberal.
> Okay, what is it? Provide some evidence for its existence please.
You want me to provide evidence that gender exists? The word "gender" refers to the social roles and norms attached to being a man or a woman. Stuff like divisions of labor, dress codes, and behavioral expectations. You clearly agree that these social roles and norms exist, because you're discussing them with me. If you didn't agree, you couldn't discuss them with me.
So I present your own comments as evidence that gender exists.
I don't. I've stated that three times clearly now. You are choosing not to read what I have written so you can fight with ghosts. You stay out of my life. I stay out of your life. Everyone is happy.
> The word "gender" refers to the social roles and norms attached to being a man or a woman. Stuff like divisions of labor, dress codes, and behavioral expectations. You clearly agree that these social roles and norms exist, because you're discussing them with me. If you didn't agree, you couldn't discuss them with me.
This is the feminist definition of gender, and I am perfectly happy to use it in certain contexts. It is not the transexual definition of gender. This definition does not imply a man is a woman if he likes cooking. Nor does it imply a woman is a man if she likes mowing the lawn. The transexual definition, as proposed by John Money, is that if one feels like a woman, they are a woman, irrespective of their biology. It is an unfalsifiable theory without any evidence, and relies on some kind of gendered soul, which you agree does not exist. Men can be feminine. Women can be masculine. It does not imply that men can be women, or that women can be men.
You will never get a company to accept responsibility for crashes with hardware owned external to the company. I mean there's all sorts of things you could maliciously do to break hardware that you personally own. This is especially the case with something like Tesla where the people who absolutely hate Elon already go to extreme lengths to create news stories to attack him with.
There is just no advantage to the SAE level nonsense. It doesn't even make sense from a technical perspective as vehicles do not function based on "ODDs" (Operational Design Domain) that the SAE levels rely on for their definitions. The SAE levels were created by people who don't understand automated driving vehicles.
> You will never get a company to accept responsibility for crashes with hardware owned external to the company.
This is a completely bullshit argument. For one thing, Mercedes-Benz has already done that. For another, they already have all kinds of liability regarding the proper functioning of the vehicles they manufacture that their customers own, and they manage it very comprehensively. If there is a failure due to a manufacturing defect, do you think they have no ability to determine or litigate the owner's maintenance or improper modifications that may have contributed?
The reason Tesla can't assume these liabilities is because the technology does not support them. It is not safe, and they have no shortage of Elmo stans who will use it anyway and suffer the consequences of their God Emperor's hubris.
But I think they don’t tell you because they sometimes use residential proxies to scrape search results the same way they used residential proxies to scrape the web.
I was pretty sceptical of NBI when it was announced, but it really does seem to have worked out. If Ireland, which is historically very bad at big state projects and which has an unusually dispersed rural population (we were much later to restrict ribbon development than other developed countries), can do it, I don’t see why any rich country can’t.
Are you arguing that there's no economic value to bringing internet to underserved regions like vast territories? Or that those people would be unwilling to pay for it? (They seem to be quite willing to buy mobile phones.)
Ultimately, it’s hard to be high margin as a telco.
Don't trust, but verify. etc
"Is global warming real?"
"Yes, the Earth has warmed by approximately 1-1.3C in the last 50 years."
There is no need to inject ideological into that answer. It's more complicated in definitional queries. For example:
"Define right wing politics."
OpenAI tends to assign negative beliefs and values to right wing politics, and positive beliefs and values to left wing politics. This is a conscious values based choice by the developers. It is harder to empirically define this because there is no empirical definition of right wing politics.
> "Yes, the Earth has warmed by approximately 1-1.3C in the last 50 years."
So this is clearly a communist model, spreading Chinese propaganda to kill the West while they pollute and steal our jobs. Right?
So, yes, empirically, it is legitimate to conclude that "reality is left-leaning". If you randomly take ~10-20 left-leaning and right-leaning positions, empirically, you see that the right-leaning positions are significantly incompatible with the reality. The null hypothesis that left-leaning and right-leaning positions are identically spread around "compatible with reality" is not supported. (and spare me "we cannot tell anything until we have done a really precise study", that is not being empirical, that's being biased into grasping at straws to keep the null hypothesis alive as long as possible)
I don't think they're right leaning positions in Europe, but I won't speak for the US.
> So, yes, empirically, it is legitimate to conclude that "reality is left-leaning". If you randomly take ~10-20 left-leaning and right-leaning positions, empirically, you see that the right-leaning positions are significantly incompatible with the reality. The null hypothesis that left-leaning and right-leaning positions are identically spread around "compatible with reality" is not supported. (and spare me "we cannot tell anything until we have done a really precise study", that is not being empirical, that's being biased into grasping at straws to keep the null hypothesis alive as long as possible)
I disagree, for the same reasons you outlined.
But the article you provided is about US politics. When they said they provided right- and left-leaning questions, these are US right and left.
> I disagree, for the same reasons you outlined.
And as I've said, this is not an empirical approach. An empirical approach would be a refinement of the most probable hypothesis based on observations. What you seem to do is to refuse observations under the bad excuse that "we need to do a more precise study" (and if a study is done, it does not count, we need to do another more precise one).
Apple similar, without the “stay close” bit.
It's an unbelievable failure.
Google wants nothing more than the world to remain stuck in 2000 - 2020 where search was king. Their organisational inertia will fight its AI progress every step of the way and this very well explains why they are not leading the AI pack despite inventing the technology.
Viewed from a consumer lens, the AI the average person interacts with daily, Google seems like the clear leader, especially after locking in Apple as a customer for iPhones.
This is the lens used by many conservative European parties. Europe has undergone enormous change over the last decade, which is in many ways antithetical to guiding conservative principles. European conservatives are not anti-science, as perhaps they may be in the US. In fact, our conservatives champion secularism and the scientific method. They are generally liberal in the classical sense. Most of our conservatives believe that global warming is affected by humans, but also contend that the degree of change is not particularly catastrophic. The last 50 years has seen a warming of approximately 1°C-1.3°C. Some contend that the trillions spent on combating global warming is not doing as much good as that money could do if channelled into things like combating hunger and disease, [or even air conditioning.](https://www.dw.com/en/germany-june-heat-wave-linked-to-5000-...)
Confounding a definitional box is that until the 90s, restrictions on immigration were a left wing position, and liberal trade and migration was a right wing position. This would be a more classical alignment. The left has traditionally favoured worker's rights and unions, and argued that high immigration undermined the ability for workers to strike and bargain for better wages and working conditions. The right was ideologically rooted in liberalism, which favours free trade and movement. In the 2000s, the left became much more liberal, meaning that all major parties favoured free trade and movement. Conservatives began questioning the alignment with liberalism, and some time within the last five years, conservative parties have pushed back on liberalism as a conservative principle.
Forgive the history lesson, to the extent that I provided one. It's a very complex topic and I'm sure I did not do it justice.
Citation needed. The gemini app has 750 million MAU, hardly a dead business.
Terms like "Google it" have been completely replace by "Ask AI".
I personally mostly use google to find businesses close to me and to search reddit and wikipedia.
If I had to give advice I’d say to just do it. Work on some project that interests you and go for it
I have an example here: https://gist.github.com/nijave/2873b8b10d8c732e46264237b0755...
Tldr; all the Claude models had identical tools and some used them efficiently and verified data while others did a crap job and hallucinated responses. Additionally, Exa MCP tools generally worked better even on older/smaller model (Llama)
If I add "Research the question extensively" to your prompt at the end I get the correct answer from Haiku and Sonnet Med on first try and I've reproduced the original prompt not returning the answer.
Unfortunately every other run now gets your gist in results.
Can you provide some examples? All I've seen are examples where people did not just criticize politicians, but went way further. When, at the same time, "normal" people have absolutely no problem criticizing politicians in a "normal" way. So they were not arrested for criticizing politicians, they were arrested for acting like idiots.
> This is naive. You think European scientists are immune to political influence, ideological conformity and fads?
Well, first, it cuts both way: left-leaning scientists have a left-leaning bias, and right-leaning scientists have a right-leaning bias. So it cancels out.
But second, there is a difference between "experts making a rational decision but being unconsciously biased" and "politicians who have no idea of the subject who ruin a scientist career because they saw the term "Enola Gay" or "financial equity"". One is a bad second order side-effect, the other is frontal political thought control.
So you agree that the US has more free speech because people can deviate from your completely arbitrarily defined "normal" form of critique.
As for examples, the German criminal code has literally criminalized insulting people (section 185), and insulting politicians has even harsher penalties (section 188). There are hundreds of articles covering cases, just ask any AI for a summary.
> So they were not arrested for criticizing politicians, they were arrested for acting like idiots.
In your opinion, acting like an idiot is a criminal offense, even if it does not harm anyone, in the tort sense?
> Well, first, it cuts both way: left-leaning scientists have a left-leaning bias, and right-leaning scientists have a right-leaning bias. So it cancels out.
And what are the political demographics of academia right now? This is a big reason for the replication crisis in the social sciences.
> politicians who have no idea of the subject who ruin a scientist career because they saw the term "Enola Gay" or "financial equity"".
That isn't really happening. No one's career is being ruined by having to rewrite grant proposals to remove DEI language, because previous policy required DEI language. The restructuring of academic funding and incentives is frankly long overdue. Everyone, including scientists, has been complaining about grant funding and the skewed incentives in academia, like publish or perish. You often have to break a system before it can be fixed.
What? No, in the US, people will also be in trouble, not only from deviating from my "normal" form of critique, but also when they don't deviate from it.
Trump called for investigation and arrest on Comey, Cheney, Powell, ... despite the fact that they never crossed the line in expressing their criticism to Trump's decisions. This has never happened in Europe.
> the German criminal code has literally criminalized insulting people
How is that a bad thing? If your opinions are not stupid, you don't need to insult people to express them.
> In your opinion, acting like an idiot is a criminal offense
What? Is that really what you understand? I'm just saying that they acted like an idiot by doing something they should have known was unnecessary and will led to trouble, including judicial one.
Me: "Mr Smith was not arrested because he wears a red t-shirt, he was arrested because he acted like an idiot by deciding to expose himself to children in the street". You: "So you are saying that acting like an idiot is a criminal offence".
> And what are the political demographics of academia right now? This is a big reason for the replication crisis in the social sciences.
Oh, there it goes. Academia are highly international and therefore meritocracy based: if you think that Harvard is too "left wing", go to Paris, or Tel Aviv, or Quebec, or Japan, or Melbourne, or Rome, or London, or any other "anti-woke" university in USA or somewhere else, and publish your piece and become famous for having demonstrated objectively something that the intelligencia wanted to hide. This idea that the whole word is so much into the conspiracy that every universities on Earth are covering the left-wing academia conspiracy is so stupid. Maybe another reason is that a lot of right-wing political ideas don't make sense when confronted to a rigorous analysis, and therefore the right-wing positions are falling from natural selection.
> That isn't really happening
Yeah, sure, and your fantasy about academic left-wing conspiracy and anti-freedom-of-speech-dictatorship in Europe, these are really happening. Sure.
With a reductio ad absurdum disproof, you've now shown your claim to be false and agreed that the definition of "woman" matters. So if you're still interested in the answer to your question, you may now provide your definition of the word "woman."
No, I said it doesn't matter to to the point I am making what I believe, except that I reject that particular definition, because it is absurd on its face. I may or may not reject any number of other definitions of "woman", it's besides the point.
As an analogy (futile, I know): There are many definitions of what a "doctor" could be. For example, I can accept the definition that "a doctor is someone has been licensed to practice medicine". I can't accept the definition that "a doctor is anyone who self-identifies as a doctor".
Of course, according to the definition that "a doctor is anyone who self-identifies a doctor", someone who self-identifies as a doctor is a doctor. It's obviously true and obviously absurd.
Yes, only to then go on to write stuff like "disagreeing with the way you live". I don't know if you're lying to yourself or to me, but you very obviously, very clearly do give a fuck.
> This is the feminist definition of gender, and I am perfectly happy to use it in certain contexts
Right, so you agree that the female gender refers to the social roles and norms associated with being a woman. So anyone who follows these social roles and norms has the female gender. If a biological male follows the social roles and norms associated with being a woman, her gender is female.
That doesn't say anything other than that this is the definition of that word.
> Men can be feminine. Women can be masculine. It does not imply that men can be women, or that women can be men.
But you just agreed to the definition of the female gender under which biological men can have the female gender, and vice versa.
Honestly, this is a fucking stupid discussion. In the end, it doesn't matter. If somebody asks you to treat them a certain way that costs you absolutely nothing and makes their lives better and you don't, you're just being an asshole. In all likelihood, you will interact with maybe a dozen trans people in your whole life. If you want to be an asshole to people in those dozen times, that's your problem, but it really doesn't matter to your life either way. All you achieved is being an asshole.
Meanwhile, we're wasting our lives discussing these stupid identity politics wedge issues while we have another record summer thanks to global warming. Just because you want to ensure that you can be an asshole to the twelve transgender people you meet in your life.
You may find this diagram useful in distinguishing the three main perspectives on this issue: https://i.ibb.co/fYksYmpk/large-EJFVTys2-Urjglsct-IPJ3h-Dk-N...
That’s, like, your opinion, man. One can disagree with you and still believe you have the right to live how you like. At the same time.
> Right, so you agree that the female gender refers to the social roles and norms associated with being a woman. So anyone who follows these social roles and norms has the female gender.
No. Your first sentence doesn’t imply the second. A society can have gendered roles whereby men like mowing the lawn and women like cooking, but it doesn’t mean that men who like cooking are women. Feminist authors use gender roles to describe oppressive patriarchal expectations placed on women.
> Honestly, this is a fucking stupid discussion. In the end, it doesn't matter. If somebody asks you to treat them a certain way that costs you absolutely nothing and makes their lives better and you don't, you're just being an asshole. In all likelihood, you will interact with maybe a dozen trans people in your whole life. If you want to be an asshole to people in those dozen times, that's your problem, but it really doesn't matter to your life either way. All you achieved is being an asshole.
As long as we agree that being an asshole shouldn’t be against the law then live your life. We can each agree the other one is being an asshole and get on with the rest of our lives.
For the record, this wasn’t an issue for me until the left made it a wedge issue. I’ve had a trans friend since well before this became a political football. When the left attacked for disagreeing about the treatment, especially with regards to children, is when it became an issue for me.
You're missing the point. "Disagreement" implies some level of care. You can't claim to not give a fuck, and also claim to disagree. These two statements are incompatible.
Example: I disagree that trans people should be treated poorly and insulted. Therefore, I care that trans people are not treated poorly and insulted.
> Your first sentence doesn’t imply the second
Yes, it does. Passage as stated: "female gender refers to the social roles and norms associated with being a woman."
Letting A = "someone follows the social roles and norms associated with being a woman" and B = "someone has the female gender," the passage becomes:
Premise (definition): To have the female gender is to follow the social roles and norms associated with being a woman — so A implies B. Premise: This person follows those roles and norms (A). Conclusion: Therefore, this person has the female gender (B).
Symbolically: A → B, A, ∴ B — a straightforward modus ponens. I knew that my logic courses would eventually become useful. Just kidding, logic is always useful.
> As long as we agree that being an asshole shouldn’t be against the law then live your life.
I agree.
> For the record, this wasn’t an issue for me until the left made it a wedge issue
The left didn't make this a wedge issue. This is obvious; there is nothing for the left to gain from doing that. The left did the same dumb thing they always do: take a moral stance and then get kicked in the teeth by bad-faith polemicists who'd rather talk about bullshit that never happens to anyone but sounds kinda scary than about actual shit that actually happens and makes them look bad.
I'm not a fan of Trump's governance, but none of those people were investigated for "criticizing Trump's decisions".
> This has never happened in Europe.
Poland: The "Lex Tusk" Commission (2023)
Hungary: The Sovereignty Protection Office (2023)
Ukraine: Viktor Yanukovych vs. Yulia Tymoshenko (2011)
Turkey: Erdoğan vs. Ekrem İmamoğlu
Romania: Investigating the Chief Anti-Corruption Prosecutor (2018)
France: The "Clearstream Affair" (2004)
> How is that a bad thing? If your opinions are not stupid, you don't need to insult people to express them.
1. Insults are subjective. If you don't see the problem with criminalizing subjective opinions, then I don't know what to tell you.
2. You're literally trying to restrict how I express my legitimate opinions while simultaneously claiming that speech is freer in Europe.
> Me: "Mr Smith was not arrested because he wears a red t-shirt, he was arrested because he acted like an idiot by deciding to expose himself to children in the street". You: "So you are saying that acting like an idiot is a criminal offence".
You've lost the plot. The original point was that people were arrested for criticizing politicians, your rebuttal was that the way they did it was idiotic, which directly implies that you're ok with criminalizing idiocy even when the criticism is legitimate. Your reply here is a complete red herring.
> Academia are highly international and therefore meritocracy based:
This does not follow. Literally.
> This idea that the whole word is so much into the conspiracy that every universities on Earth are covering the left-wing academia conspiracy is so stupid.
It's not a conspiracy when people are just acting in their own best interests. I don't know where you got the idea that it has to be a conspiracy.
> Maybe another reason is that a lot of right-wing political ideas don't make sense when confronted to a rigorous analysis, and therefore the right-wing positions are falling from natural selection.
This is also delusional, and frankly completely ignorant of studies done on exactly this (not only researcher bias, publication bias, hiring bias, and more).
Is that a joke? These people would never have been investigated if they were not critical towards Trump. The only reason they are investigated is because Trump is taking revenge on them for the crime of saying that Trump is wrong.
Again, this does not happen in Europe. There are political enemies, and they fight between each others. But you would struggle to find 2 political allies, with a president saying positive about the other person on Monday, and then on Friday calling for this person to be investigated because the other person has said something they did not like.
> Poland, ...
These are not cases of a president retaliating on a rival that criticized them. These are corruption, or fights between political parties, or tax evasion, ... Nothing to do with freedom of speech.
> 1. Insults are subjective
Everything is subjective. Hitting someone is subjective, so according to you, criminalising "battery" is dangerous because you can arrest people who just bumped into you in the subway. Pretending that it means full arbitrary situation is just stupid.
> 2. You're literally trying to restrict how I express my legitimate opinions
No, you can do it if you want, you just have to pay for the damage you have done when you use it as an idiot. It is as ridiculous as saying: we are in a free country, so I can walk wherever I want, including in your bedroom when you are sleeping.
No one is ever arresting for your opinion. In all of the initial examples, there are plenty of people who criticize openly these politicians that you pretend people will be arrested if they criticize them. It does not happen. Because it is not true that you are arrested if you criticize them.
> The original point was that people were arrested for criticizing politicians
They were not arrested for criticizing politicians. Some of the examples are literally not attack on politicians, they don't target a politician as individual. Some examples are not even any arrest. And the other examples, they were "arrested" for being stupid, where it happened they were also targeting a politician. They would have been arrested equally if they targeted another public figure.
> It's not a conspiracy when people are just acting in their own best interests.
It is on the best interest of individuals to get a lot of prestige by demonstrating a consensus is not supported by facts.
> frankly completely ignorant of studies done on exactly this
I don't think someone who provided tax evasion examples of powerful targeting opponents just because they were critical of them would be able to understand these studies.
Right. So if you ask somebody, "Do you sincerely believe that a person becomes a woman simply by self-declaring it?" you need to tell them which definition of the word you're using, or they'll be talking about something different from what you think they are.
Let me then rephrase the question: Do you reject the definition that a doctor is anyone who proclaims himself to be a doctor? This is, again, an absurd definition of what a doctor, a woman, or really anything could be.
So let me broaden it: Not only do I reject this type of definition for doctors or for women, I reject any such circular definition as absurd. You don't?
I don't think that necessarily follows. It could just be old fashioned capacity issues, for example. If nothing else nvidia are able to charge an insane markup on their AI chips at the moment so even if google TPUs aren't competitive in a pure performance sense they are surely competitive from a pricing perspective.
In this context when I write don't "care" I mean I respect your right to live how you like, provided it doesn't encroach on my right to live how I like. I obviously have opinions.
> Premise (definition): To have the female gender is to follow the social roles and norms associated with being a woman — so A implies B.
No, A does not imply B. Following social norms common to one sex doesn't imply one is that sex. This is a fairly milquetoast logical proof and I'm surprised to see you making such a basic mistake. The feminist definition is a role, not an identity. The core of feminist theory is that women are not the sum of their social role. The exact opposite of the theory around transexualism.
> The left didn't make this a wedge issue. This is obvious; there is nothing for the left to gain from doing that. The left did the same dumb thing they always do: take a moral stance and then get kicked in the teeth by bad-faith polemicists who'd rather talk about bullshit that never happens to anyone but sounds kinda scary than about actual shit that actually happens and makes them look bad.
For me the benefit appears obvious (and cynical): power. For years, people could be summarily and permanently banned from social platforms, banks, be fired, rejected from official roles, etc, because they stepped out of line on this issue. It was a very clever power grab by the unscrupulous who used it to attain power in organisations and society by hijacking people's empathy. If I'm being fair, there is also an ideological component, meaning some people genuinely believe that males can be born with a female brain/soul, and vice versa.
This is about gender, not sex, and that's not the definition I used for "gender" that you agreed with. You agreed with this definition of "gender": "female gender refers to the social roles and norms associated with being a woman".
> For me the benefit appears obvious (and cynical): power
Together with atheists and muslims, trans people are the most hated group of people in the US. I mean, I do think that the Democrats are mostly craven idiots, but "let's find the most hated people in the US and do a power grab by aligning with them" is so stupid that even they wouldn't do that.
If you genuinely believe that advocating for trans people is a power grab, I think you have a very skewed view of politics.
> some people genuinely believe that males can be born with a female brain/soul, and vice versa.
Your brain creates your perception of your gender. But trans people don't have a "female brain". There isn't a single aspect of your brain that determines your gender; there isn't really a commonly accepted scientific definition of a "male brain" or a "female brain."
However, trans people do have statistically measurable differences in their brains, which tend to make their brains align more with their gender identity than their birth-assigned sex.
Anyway, all of this isn't at all necessary to believe that trans people should be treated kindly and with respect, which is what this is ultimately about.
According to the definition you used, if a woman likes doing masculine things, does that automatically make her a man? I presume not. There is another part of the definition which you omitted.
> Your brain creates your perception of your gender. But trans people don't have a "female brain". There isn't a single aspect of your brain that determines your gender; there isn't really a commonly accepted scientific definition of a "male brain" or a "female brain."
So what is the thing which determines gender then? What is it, exactly, beyond doing masculine and feminine things? Surely our identity is distinct beyond the things we do?
The team is mostly H1Bs. Do you think they don’t have every incentive to benchmax? Do you think top tier talent wants to work there?
