Grok Build is open source

588 pointsposted 5 days ago
by skp1995
(github.com)

725 Comments

simonw

5 days ago

There's some surprising stuff in this codebase. For example, https://github.com/xai-org/grok-build/blob/b189869b7755d2b48... is a "self-contained terminal renderer for Mermaid diagrams", which renders a subset of Mermaid chart types using Unicode box-drawing.

simonw

5 days ago

I had Fable 5 compile that Rust code to WebAssembly and build a browser-based playground for it, so you can try it out with Mermaid diagrams here: https://tools.simonwillison.net/grok-mermaid

A few more notes on my Grok code explorations on my blog: https://simonwillison.net/2026/Jul/15/grok-build/

thrdbndndn

5 days ago

I love this kind of stuff (ASCII art, if you will), but it just breaks down too easily as soon as Unicode characters (mainly CJK, as I'm Chinese) and fonts are involved.

For example, on your website, any chart or plot involving horizontal arrows breaks down because the assigned font-family (`ui-monospace, SFMono-Regular, Menlo, Consolas, monospace`, which ends up as Consolas on my machine) has no such glyph. Thus, it falls back to Segoe UI Symbol, which does not have the same fixed width (or is not fixed-width at all) as other characters: https://i.imgur.com/d2DPGHE.png

uhoh-itsmaciek

5 days ago

I ran into this problem recently on one of our blog posts: we used some Claude output which included tables drawn with Unicode line drawing characters. However, our monospace font did not include these characters, and so rendering fell back to another font in our font stack with different width metrics. I fixed it by using a font that had similar metrics and did include those characters with `unicode-range` (to only select characters we needed) and `size-adjust` (to match font width more exactly), and adding it to the stack. It's a little hacky but works pretty well in practice.

dolmen

5 days ago

Claude Code with Opus 4.8 is also bad at aligning boxes with content in French (with accentuated letters such as "é" which are multibyte in UTF-8).

dspillett

5 days ago

> Thus, it falls back to Segoe UI Symbol, which does not have the same fixed width

That seems like a glaring omission to me. If you are rendering fixed-width-per-character text and need to fall back, surely it makes sense to keep to the same character grid even if it does mess up the feel of your negative space somewhat (thin characters having a lot of space around them, wide characters butting into those beside them slightly). You've explicitly asked for text aligned to a grid, either by using a mono-spaced typeface, by using a <pre> tag, or with other relevant CSS choices, the browser should be trying to achieve that.

biztos

5 days ago

Interesting. Thai characters can also blow it out, I imagine because of the difficulty mapping glyphs to width:

https://biztos.com/hey/thai-mermaid-chart.png

To my surprise, Sublime Text gets it almost right:

https://biztos.com/hey/sublime-thai-mermaid.png

I tried finding a Thai monospace font and using that in the HTML but it was worse, probably didn't have the box drawing chars.

Still a fun tool and useful for lots of ASCII cases!

sirn

5 days ago

The first issue is due to the assumption that character count equals character display width. Thai tone markers usually[1] should not contribute to the display width (เพื่อน is chars = 6, width = 4), so it caused a layout shift.

The second issue is due to the program's layout engine not adjusting the glyph width of a fallback font to that of the main font. A lot of terminals do this, but it's not common for text editors or browsers (arguably this is the correct behavior for non-terminals, since you cannot assume everything must be snapped to a grid).

Fun test for this:

     |กล้วยหอม|
     |Bananas|
This has the same character width. Ghostty, etc., will render it correctly (| aligned). Most browsers and text editors will not.

[1]: some layout engines render free-standing tone markers as 1 character; in that case, this rule only applies to when tone markers are following a character.

oneeyedpigeon

5 days ago

That test looks pixel perfect in Chrome Android.

codethief

4 days ago

Same in Firefox for Android!

biztos

5 days ago

Thanks for the explanation.

Safari on iPad lines these up almost perfectly - the second line is a tiny bit wider, I didn’t even notice it at first.

That example had a tone mark but no vowels, so I will try one with both. E&OE.

    |ดื่มน้ำอยู่|
    |abcdef|
[edit] These are even closer, but still imperfectly aligned on my iPad.

numpad0

5 days ago

This isn't a renderer bug, it's font. Proportional fonts aren't designed with alignment in mind at all, and you can't just expect monospace fonts for all languages outside of ASCII range to be present on random systems, or a single font or font family to support multiple different languages consistently.

You can't really control alignment of deeply Unicode characters like Thai or "→" against monospace characters without serving your own monospace fonts that are guaranteed to work for the characters you'll be sending out, assuming you can always have one in hand.

vidarh

5 days ago

You can still handle this well enough in the renderer, so I'd still consider this a renderer bug - e.g. my terminal emulator will scale any glyph that exceeds the bounding box as defined by the expected number of cells for a given character range. You can't expect any given feature of random characters to align, but I can expect box drawing characters surrounding any given characters to align correctly or consider it a bug (my terminal is almost certainly going to get CJK and Thai wrong - it's entirely untested -, but if so it is a bug, not a font issue).

That includes if I have to fall back, including fallback to proportional fonts, which will look ugly, but work and remain aligned.

numpad0

5 days ago

ok... I disagree, and I mean no offense, but there's going to be too much contexts and nuances to be taken into account that it's probably not worth trying for both of us. All I can say is that the problem is not that the pipe characters are given inconsistent width but that non-ASCII characters has all different random widths, and if you need texts with double-width characters like ▶, 漢, ก, etc., to align in a grid, you have to pick a fixed-width(not "monospace") font for the specific language and exclusively use that font for everything within that contiguous text area. Or you can try to fix Unicode so that symbols become variable width so to align to grid or something, but that's going to take a lot of effort.

vidarh

4 days ago

No, you don't need to pick a fixed width font for that. You will get the best results with one, but rescaling the glyphs works just fine. I've written a font renderer. It's not hard.

In fact my terminal, using said font renderer, rescales glyphs by default because even a lot of "fixed width" fonts are buggy and not truly fixed, and so enforcing the grid alignment and scaling to fit was the easiest way to ensure consistency.

Mixing and matching fonts for full coverage works fine, especially for wide characters.

numpad0

4 days ago

I thought this discussion is more about somehow aligning pipes over multiple lines in existing console emulators(impossible), than about implementing a complete custom graphical text rendering system specific to your app that butcher font files to put glyphs wherever you want?

That feels like cheating since you're not rendering provided font at that point. Besides you might as well just use SVG for diagrams than pretending to be text only.

vidarh

4 days ago

> I thought this discussion is more about somehow aligning pipes over multiple lines in existing console emulators(impossible)

I am aligning pipes over multiple lines in my existing console emulator. It's not just not impossible, but near trivial.

> than about implementing a complete custom graphical text rendering system specific to your app that butcher font files to put glyphs wherever you want?

It's not butchering anything. It is using the font data to render them in the way that fits the constraints of the output.

> That feels like cheating since you're not rendering provided font at that point.

Any font renderer makes just adjustments to make the font look as good as possible. That is the entire point of providing a scalable font instead of a bitmap font: That you can render the provided glyphs at any scale suitable.

Fitting the bounding box of the glyph to the bounding box of the cell the text is rendering into is entirely reasonable and the lesser of two evils when faced with a glyph that does not fit the cell, which is a relatively common occurrence, when the alternative is to clip.

It looks awful if you were to render e.g. latin script with a proportional font in a fixed grid, but for many scripts with more uniform widths the variation is a lot less, and so it's butchering things far less than rendering fallback glyphs for missing code points.

torginus

5 days ago

Considering the Chinese are one of the major contributors to AI, I would think this was a solved problem by now, at least in some other CLI based coding agent.

numpad0

5 days ago

Aren't those non-ASCII "rich" symbols from Japanese fonts around PC-98/Win95 domains anyway? For me with my background, it was always obvious that mixing full-width character in ASCII text never go well for various reasons. For ASCII arts, it is obvious that vertical lines never line up, and there are going to be tons of wasted spaces and different kinds of whitespaces needed to compensate for those. I wonder if specifying MS Gothic and retuning widths for it could help, at least for Windows/Linux.

jack1243star

5 days ago

Funny you'd mention MS Gothic (fixed-width), since old school Japanese ASCII-art on image boards assume MS PGothic (proportional!) instead. Some sites even try to detect ASCII art and force font-family on that specific post.

numpad0

5 days ago

Yup, 2ch.net/5ch.net/5ch.io uses the MS P Gothic and there were app features and fonts like Mona Font to emulate that. They were not imageboards, though.

I just thought that MS Gothic(non-P) should be kind of widely supported, have all the symbols you need, while also being a monospace, unlike most monospace fonts that only support ASCII symbols.

pmarreck

5 days ago

I was going to say, perhaps generate a failing test case, but testing for proper unicode rendering might be tricky??

Imustaskforhelp

5 days ago

Is there anything opposite of this perhaps as well?

I am interesting in having a perhaps standardized ascii art into mermaid diagrams (which I actually just recently found could be imported easily into Tldraw/excalidraw)

Do you have the source code of this available/open-source?, I would like to have a go at it in the opposite direction perhaps.

tulio_ribeiro

5 days ago

Thanks for doing the work and hosting this. This will very quickly become one of my daily drivers.

bearjaws

5 days ago

Thank you for creating an alternative to the toxic mermaid renderer on their website.

Trying to monetize Mermaid was disgusting and honestly rings to me like trying to monetize Markdown.

skeptic_ai

5 days ago

How could be a fork outside of this repo? “ This commit does not belong to any branch on this repository, and may belong to a fork outside of the repository.”

sunaookami

4 days ago

Looks like there is a newer commit that was force-pushed and overwrote the linked one?

giancarlostoro

4 days ago

This has been my favorite coding harness of all time. The mouse works for a lot of things. Theres keybindings that confuse me, but I otherwise enjoyed it. I might wind up forking / contributing in the hopes of helping to make it somewhat better. I had built my own also using Rust but I liked their implementation much better. This might explain part of how they pulled it off.

OrangeMusic

4 days ago

I don't understand why these TUI are popular - isn't a regular Graphical UI better for this?

pilserlabs

4 days ago

Because GUI is resource intensive and they can run on headless computer/os like linux without Desktop environment , so Tui is perfect for mimicking GUI in terminal only computers

Sajarin

5 days ago

Just blogged about this here[0] but at least they're not doing the usual canned PR response surrounding this.

Folks are already building on top of it:

thedavidweng/gork-build[1] — rebrand grok→"gork", stripped vendor telemetry, opt-out-only data retention, blocks x.ai auto-update. A "VSCodium-style privacy fork."

DigiGoon/digi-grok-build[2] — "dgrok" multi-provider CLI, builds from source instead of x.ai CDN.

victor-software-house/open-grok[3] — "opened to every provider."

LukaMucko/grok-build[4] — extra_body support for provider-specific request fields.

RapidAI/grok-build-desktop[5] — Tauri desktop GUI client.

mazdak/grok-build[6] — theming (Catppuccin).

thomas9120/grok-build-archival[7] — Windows telemetry-disable script.

saqoah/grok-build[8] — Kotlin MemoryBackend.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48928913

[1] https://github.com/thedavidweng/gork-build

[2] https://github.com/DigiGoon/digi-grok-build

[3] https://github.com/victor-software-house/open-grok

[4] https://github.com/LukaMucko/grok-build

[5] https://github.com/RapidAI/grok-build-desktop

[6] https://github.com/mazdak/grok-build

[7] https://github.com/thomas9120/grok-build-archival

[8] https://github.com/saqoah/grok-build

thedavidweng

4 days ago

Thank you Sajarin mentioning my Gork-Build fork, I wanted to address some of the comments.

I agree that many of the responses in the comments are valid. It is a harsh reality that 80% of projects like this fail to gain traction and eventually fade away. However, I believe the significance of such a fork lies more in its existence as a statement. Regarding xAI, even if their current release of Grok has telemetry disabled by default, Zero Data Retention remains a feature exclusive to enterprise users rather than individuals. And Whole-repo research packaging is still controlled by their server-side settings; it isn't an option you can toggle within the software itself.

I am currently implementing more fences to prevent unnecessary data from being uploaded, in terms of long-term maintenance, one person certainly cannot build something on the scale of VSCodium, but I have drawn a lot of inspiration from that project. In the future, I want to automate Gork-Build further by turning these privacy protections and guardrails into patches. These could then be applied to new upstream Grok-Buil versions as they are released.

As for whether this project can become a daily driver for everyone, I don't think that is the primary concern. If you need a open source coding agent, you should definitely use Pi or OpenCode, there is absolute no necessity to use Grok-Build for non xAI models in the first place. But again I think its existence is vital. People need companies that demonstrate a truly open attitude and coding agents that are genuinely friendly to the open-source community, and while xAI's decision to open-source Grok-build was a great move, it isn't a community-maintained or community-built project. It remains a public snapshot of their internal monorepo, and they have disabled issues and pull requests. This is precisely why a fork like https://github.com/thedavidweng/gork-build needs to exist.

colesantiago

5 days ago

These are all pointless forks, they will die in a year.

Bookmark this and check back.

xgulfie

5 days ago

Honestly. Some LLM enthusiasts throwing an agent at making a fork doesn't mean anyone is invested in this

rynn

5 days ago

That doesn’t mean they won’t be, or that the forks won’t be good.

conorcleary

5 days ago

all those youtube videos people upload nowadays aren't worth it, we already have keyboardcat (^ basically telling ppl creativity is done with, don't bother)

qlte

5 days ago

The parent comment is just pointing out that LLM written forks pushed out within hours of a “buzzy” repo release on GitHub are a pretty useless signal for gauging actual adoption/interest.

Which is, IMO, accurate based on the state of the AI dev space in 2026. Stars/forks drafting off the hype from a well known name are constantly gamed for eyeballs/personal brand-building courtesy of free advertising via the Github UI when the only cost is a few sentence prompt and some tokens.

OsrsNeedsf2P

5 days ago

While I'm sure most of them will die, there will certainly be 1 or 2 that the community rallies behind

seanclayton

5 days ago

Why when they can just fork it and improve it on their own with AI?

andai

5 days ago

Maintaining a fork costs you mental space, time and energy, even if someone else (i.e. AI) can reliably do all the work. (In my experience they're not quite there yet.)

Barbing

5 days ago

Subsidized tokens aren’t forever & local models might not compete with an entire team of volunteers, I’d guess.

jfoster

5 days ago

I've been contemplating that recently. You're of course correct that subsidized tokens won't be forever, but that might only be half the story, since there's two opposing forces in action:

1. Phasing out of subsidized tokens.

2. Token prices being brought down through scaling, better hardware, etc.

It's possible that these might balance each other out sufficiently that token customers won't notice any substantial increase in price.

seanclayton

5 days ago

> local models might

That was yesterday's "LLMs might". Time passes. Nothing stays the same. "Local models might" X Y or Z today has no influence on the limitations of tomorrow's local models except to remove them. Yesterday's LLMs are the exact same thing, except your computer is connected to their local model for you to use.

Disc drives used to be measured in megabytes—now in terabytes. Technically useful tend to get more optimized with time, not less.

xboxnolifes

3 days ago

Even if they are subsidized forever and local models do compete, its still better to have 100 people improving it rather than 1.

mirekrusin

5 days ago

Unsubsidised token prices that people would actually pay for is a fantasy.

asimovDev

5 days ago

why spend my tokens on it if someone else already did?

giancarlostoro

4 days ago

Or maybe Grok Build will implement some of these changes and render them obsolete.

drdrek

5 days ago

I like that the trailing players strategy (Meta, xAI) is to open source the moat of the leaders. I think we will all benefit from it. and hopefully both the leaders and the trailing players will be much less powerful in the end.

the_duke

5 days ago

Codex CLI was open source from the start.

The reason they open sourced this is because grok-build uploaded entire directories.

drnick1

4 days ago

I wonder if that malicious feature was removed from the open release. In addition, if the builds aren't reproducible and people just run the binaries distributed by X instead of building from source, there is no guarantee that they aren't running a version with malware.

radicalriddler

5 days ago

What does this open source that the Codex harness hasn't already?

logicchains

5 days ago

You can't use your mouse with command line Codex.

bearjaws

5 days ago

I really hate that they added mouse integration with Claude Code.

Nothing like it prompting you for an answer and you click on to the terminal accidentally, resulting in you choosing an answer.

minraws

5 days ago

You can trivially add it to codex..

kamikazechaser

5 days ago

It's a shame that they exfiled private data. The model is actually good (better than opus 4.8 imo) and the harness itself is butter smooth with the potential of being the best out there.

bakies

5 days ago

It definitely doesn't feel like opus. I constantly switch to opus to fix up or finish what grok generates, it feels like sonnet 3!

ballon_monkey

5 days ago

It's definitely around Opus level. It's definitely a lot smarter when it comes to review or asking if there's gaps or things missing.

adamtaylor_13

5 days ago

This has been my experience as well. In fact, Grok 4.5 is better at visual design than Fable from what I've seen.

And being (based on vibes) 2-3x faster? It's an easy sell to me.

dvcrn

5 days ago

I agree. I subscribe to SuperGrok but never used the grok models a lot for coding. Now with 4.5, I’m gonna hit my weekly limit tomorrow and even considering trying SuperGrok Heavy

I really like the feel of Grok 4.5

trollbridge

5 days ago

I had a very weird experience two days ago where Cursor-Grok-4.5 was either stuck in a loop (it would keep attempting to answer the prompt over and over), or else it would just quit halfway through a reasoning loop. Might have been that I was using omp, but it's still not the most stable thing out there.

Nonetheless when it's working, it's pretty good, and for the price ($10 a month) is an absolute bargain.

dvcrn

5 days ago

What’s this $10 deal?

trollbridge

3 days ago

Find a referral code for Cursor. Sign up with first month half off.

small_model

5 days ago

Its amazing the speed of build with grok 4.5 its a taste of whats to come.

LastTrain

5 days ago

It’s a shame that their leader exfiltrated government data.

lynndotpy

5 days ago

More specifically, DOGE exfiltrated private and precious information about US citizens which the federal government had collected.

mlindner

5 days ago

[flagged]

KingMob

5 days ago

> They didn't happen.

Bold of you to deny Musk's very existence.

antonvs

5 days ago

How do you know? Presumably you must be able to point to some government transparency documentation about that activity?

Oh wait, nothing like that exists. You don't know what happened. And that's the problem. Neither Musk nor Trump are the CEO of the US. Their behavior should not be considered acceptable by any US citizen.

mlindner

4 days ago

> How do you know?

Please don't sealion. There's no evidence for it occurring in the first place.

It's entirely an internet meme based on extremist headlines. What happened is they set up servers inside government offices that allowed more flexible agile software development environment, then they suddenly got accused of exfiltrating data.

solumunus

5 days ago

Now this is contrarian!

sroussey

5 days ago

Or a spaceTwtterAi stock holder…

petesergeant

5 days ago

I’m an anti-Musk zealot and I now pay for a subscription, it’s pretty good stuff

OKRainbowKid

5 days ago

You have a weird definition of "zealot".

throwaway132448

5 days ago

Imagine have principles this worthless. Must be pretty nice actually.

timacles

5 days ago

Everybody has a price - Kim Jung un

mlindner

5 days ago

That was a mistake and they deleted all the data.

andai

5 days ago

How do you accidentally upload your user's repos to a storage bucket?

duozerk

5 days ago

That's easy, you ask a LLM to do it

mlindner

5 days ago

A naive implementation would just upload everything in the current directory.

jdiff

5 days ago

That's what they did to upload a repo, the question is why they would upload the user's entire repo in the first place. The idea itself is egregious, and the implementation was horrifying on top of that.

pizzafeelsright

5 days ago

'on startup, grok upload current directory for faster cache access'

Was it intentional for data exfil? Only internal staff could answer.

jdiff

5 days ago

The entire directory (not repo) and all repo history regardless of secrets or instructions otherwise is not needed for faster cache access. I'm not going to say that this was intentional exfiltration. Sneaky motivations are not needed for this to be a bad idea and a horrific implementation.

GodelNumbering

5 days ago

This is not the right thing, this is the tactical thing. If you have an LLM with less than 1% of the share to begin with, you suffer from bad rep and you got caught uploading user data, one of the very few remaining tactical moves to try to climb out of it is this.

ballon_monkey

5 days ago

It's definitely a smart move. Could easily leverage this to overtake competition.

sidcool

5 days ago

Sometimes the tactical thing is to do the right thing.

aikinai

5 days ago

Ben Thompson calls these strategy credits.

CobrastanJorji

5 days ago

Another tactical move is to just stop. You're allowed to exit the AI business. Nobody's forcing you to keep throwing money into the furnace. Just be a rocket company. All of the xAI founders left. Your product's brand name is mud. Just stop doing that and build spaceships.

this_user

5 days ago

You misunderstand Musk's motivation. This was never about money for him, but about control over a key technology. One of the main reasons he exited OpenAI was the fact that the other co-founders wanted to create a structure where no one, Musk included, would be able to seize full control of the company. That was the thing that prompted him to leave, which tells you a lot about what he really wanted in the first place.

But he also falsely assumed that OAI would die without his money. Yet, they managed to pull through, and Musk is now on the outside looking in with very little influence in the AI space. xAI is his desperate attempt to get back into the game. That is why he won't give up.

m463

5 days ago

> This was never about money for him, but about control over a key technology.

I think he just wanted to have a sci-fi future, and because many other people think similarly he has tapped into that shared desire and has been succeeding.

Looking at things from the other side, musk is good at making physical things, where other companies are weak.

Grok in a tesla car is actually well integrated and kind of nice. You can ask the car about things to do, and it will drive you there.

Zardoz84

5 days ago

Musk itself doesn't make things. He only puts the money, and other people build the things. How many times, they need to work around him or fix his crazy ideas ?

People must stop trying to compare it to Tesla or Tony Stark. He is more like the bad guy of Jurassic Park 2.

aikinai

5 days ago

Weird how other people can put up more money and not be able to make the same things as Musk’s companies.

hello4263

5 days ago

The people with that level of money are very few.

aikinai

5 days ago

Companies aren't funded by one person, even his. After their current round, Blue Origin will have raised more than three times as much capital as SpaceX, and SpaceX is obviously far more advanced and has already gone public.

Rivian used ten times more capital to reach their first delivery and twenty times more before their IPO as compared to Tesla.

It looks like it's not Musk's money making his companies successful.

antonvs

4 days ago

He's good at exploiting naive people's dreams.

Gareth321

5 days ago

Musk had around $180M when he founded SpaceX in 2002, and purchased Tesla in 2004. ChatGPT tells me that more than 55,000 people in the world have more wealth than this. So either people who have money choose not to make such risky investments, or they're incapable of it. Probably both. We're very lucky that someone who is both capable of building companies like this and is willing to go bankrupt doing it exists.

lookdangerous

4 days ago

Profound. 1/55k regarding wealth really diminishes the role wealth plays.

antonvs

4 days ago

[flagged]

aikinai

4 days ago

Without a shift to electric cars and the emergence of reusable, affordable space travel?

antonvs

3 days ago

Why are those important? Now if he had revolutionized public transport, we might have something to discuss. But instead, he actively worked against that, and was a major force in getting Trump reelected.

Then, after executing a pitch-perfect Hitler salute on a major public stage, he took a chainsaw to US soft power, dooming millions of children around the world to die of starvation and other preventable conditions - including Ebola! - thus getting closer to his idol’s body count. And that’s just one among many other things he did that were almost as bad, including a completely non-transparent rifling through American citizens’ personal data.

No, there is nothing Musk has done that balances the equation. We’d all be better off if he had never existed.

bell-cot

5 days ago

Musk seems obsessed with making socially valuable physical things which are extremely difficult to make. And (overall) he's darned good at it.

Back when America's star was rising, that was far more common.

exadeci

5 days ago

Easy he constantly forces them to cut corners and take risks put their lives in danger "Tesla Has Highest Fatal Accident Rate of All Auto Brands", "Reuters documented at least 600 previously unreported workplace injuries at Musk’s rocket company: crushed limbs, amputations, electrocutions, head and eye wounds and one death. "

aikinai

5 days ago

That's a somewhat valid point about the "move fast and break things" culture at SpaceX. I'm sure there's some correlation between the pioneering, hyper-productive culture at Elon's companies and safety violations, but there's no way you could claim that lax safety standards account for the massive gap between SpaceX and the rest of the entire industry. It's not like they're just pumping widgets out of a factory faster and cheaper. They've revolutionized the cutting edge across all aspects, including design, software, etc. If the best companies could be explained by cutting safety corners, then China would be leading America in everything.

And that was the first I'd heard about high fatality rates for Tesla, so I looked it up. The cars themselves are always rated as very safe, and it seems the reason for high fatalities is just who buys them. Apparently, it's young, affluent, more risk-tolerant people who frequently drive fast on highways.

bell-cot

5 days ago

I'm no ER physician, nor OSHA expert - but if 600 accidents with the sorts of heavy equipment and rocketry that SpaceX does every day included only one death, then my conclusion would be that the vast majority of that 600 were pretty minor stuff. You'd have a lot more bodies otherwise.

Also, Musk is nothing special this way. Honest comparisons would be to cell phone tower workers, steel mills, hazardous chemicals handlers, farmers, and such.

Vs. most people's mental comparison is to working in a comfy office.

dmarcos

5 days ago

I’m a big fan of Musk. One of the few criticisms I have is how xAI is also inconsistent with original OpenAI mission. I had imagined xAI as en effort to correct and fully embody all original values of OpenAI and that Elon says they betrayed. That makes his criticism weaker and I understand why some can think it was all about control. In his words:

"I'm the reason OpenAl exists. I came up with the name. The name OpenAl refers to open source... The intent was - what was the opposite of Google? It would be an open source non-profit."

I sometimes feel xAI wants to live up to those open values so I always celebrate when they decide to engage in open source. They still don’t fully embrace it. Perhaps because they think is not practical or will make them less competitive?

rcgy

5 days ago

[flagged]

user

5 days ago

[deleted]

popalchemist

5 days ago

[flagged]

qup

5 days ago

Because I don't believe what you just said about him. Literally not even one detail.

BatFastard

5 days ago

No need to believe, just look at the facts.

stronglikedan

5 days ago

Ok done. Still don't believe it cuz the facts don't support it. It's interesting to see how far people attempt to stretch the facts tho.

ychnd

5 days ago

He publicly and financially supported literal fascists in Germany. Nothing can be more blatant than that. QED.

hcurtiss

5 days ago

I don’t think the AfD is “literally fascists.” They certainly don’t claim to be.

inlined

5 days ago

In good faith, what is your burden of proof that would change your mind?

popalchemist

4 days ago

Well, given all your comments in this thread, thanks for outing yourself as an insane person.

metabagel

5 days ago

Seriously? His destruction of USAID and the various estimates of resulting deaths is well documented.

https://www.impactcounter.com/dashboard?view=table&sort=titl...

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...

hcurtiss

5 days ago

Those numbers always crack me up. If you do the math that way (US funding cuts kill people), imagine how many people we’ve killed by not confiscating all the wealth of our nation and shipping it to Africa!

popalchemist

2 days ago

https://hsph.harvard.edu/news/usaid-shutdown-has-led-to-hund...

Harvard (as credible a source as there is in the world): USAID shutdown has led to hundreds of thousands of deaths

> The dismantling of USAID, according to models from Boston University epidemiologist Brooke Nichols, “has already caused the deaths of six hundred thousand people, two-thirds of them children,” Gawande wrote. He noted that the toll will continue to grow and may go unseen because it can take months or years for people to die from lack of treatments or vaccine-preventable illnesses—and because deaths are scattered.

So about half a million children died, children who had no other recourse but to depend on this system which was already in place and for which there is no alternative.

If you "crack up" over the death of children, you're lacking some basic humanity.

hcurtiss

2 hours ago

Yes, and imagine if we doubled the USAID funding! Or even quintupled it! Why, if we borrowed a(nother) trillion dollars, imagine how many lives we'd save!

My point is that it's all fake math. If we're killing people by not funding aid programs, then we're killing even more by not funding more. How much are you personally sending to Africa? How much more could you be sending? Imagine if you borrowed to do it? You can't do the math that way. While tragic, those people have no demand on our treasury any more than Vladimir Putin does. We may be less benevolent than we once were. We are also much further in debt than we once were -- to the point of threatening the Republic's viability. The US didn't kill a half million children any more than France, or Spain, or Great Britian, or China did by not sending the same money. It's all fake math.

qup

4 days ago

Even if we agree with the premise that cutting funds to save people is the same as killing people (I do not believe this), those don't include how many deaths were reduced by cutting USAID. The funds wound up fueling awful things around the globe.

Once you factor in everything, the cuts are a huge net gain in my estimation.

blactuary

5 days ago

[flagged]

timr

5 days ago

I know that this is a tall order, but consider that this might not actually be “objective”, and that instead, you’re substituting your opinion for facts.

(You don’t need to enumerate all of the things you believe justify the statement. I’m well familiar with them. I’m just trying to make you understand that there’s a layer of subjectivity here.)

blactuary

5 days ago

[flagged]

qup

4 days ago

People like to say things like this and present zero links. It should be easy to prove, but you'll link when he waved to the crowd or whatever.

blactuary

4 days ago

Scroll through his twitter account and you won't make it more than a couple days without something racist

Also, after Elon bought Twitter, when people called me the n-word and I reported it, moderation said no rules were broken and no action would be taken. Before he bought twitter that was not the case, they'd be banned. So you can buzz off with this nonsense. I won't break any rules and say what should be said.

popalchemist

2 days ago

Yup. This guy is a straight up white supremacist.

user

5 days ago

[deleted]

driverdan

5 days ago

[flagged]

threethirtytwo

5 days ago

No he doesn't. There's a lot of bullshit surrounding him. Things are taken out of context.

I will say this, he believes in things about race that are controversial. For example that races may have different IQs. But you have to realize we don't actually know if races have different IQs. The idea fits common sense though... if races can LOOK different... what black magic suddenly makes them completely equal in intelligence when the same genes that govern looks also govern intelligence? We don't have hard evidence on this so right now the best we can say is we don't know but measured evidence and common sense points to the possibility of intellectual differences.

This, in itself, is not actually racist.

He does believe individual meritocracy so meaning even though he believes race correlates with certain stereotypes (like intelligence) he feels that people on the intellectual level need to be judged by merit and not by race.

qup

4 days ago

Why would you think the same genes control intelligence and skin color?

The genes that control skin color don't control fast twitch muscle, but we know sub Saharan Africans have more fast twitch than the rest of the world. What magic skin color gene affects fast twitch muscle? None.

It turns out, a population can select for more than one gene at a time. Crazy.

What we don't know is what genes individuals carry. That's why racism is stupid. Elon would agree.

threethirtytwo

4 days ago

>Why would you think the same genes control intelligence and skin color?

I mean the same genes on the entire DNA strand. Wholistically all of those genes define who you are.

>It turns out, a population can select for more than one gene at a time. Crazy.

Uh yeah? So.

>What we don't know is what genes individuals carry. That's why racism is stupid. Elon would agree.

What do you mean individuals? We CAN measure genes of an individual FYI. And if we can measure genes of an individual we can also measure them for groups and come up with generalized figures and correlations.

hcurtiss

5 days ago

[flagged]

threethirtytwo

5 days ago

True. But you are voted down because not everyone can face the truth. So just lie a little and say "we don't know" even though the truth is we know enough to know that some races are on average more intelligent then others.

People have biases around this stuff and most people can't think critically so if you want them to be receptive you have to lie a bit.

hcurtiss

4 days ago

You are, of course, right. Unfortunately, I’m not very good at that.

throwaway884367

5 days ago

[flagged]

user-

5 days ago

You say this from a throwaway account that you know will get banned.

Dang, maybe think about IP banning this guy for such a premedidated move.

user

5 days ago

[deleted]

icase

5 days ago

[flagged]

justinhj

5 days ago

it's worse really. at least there are subreddits relatively free of trump bad elon bad non stop nonsense

shigawire

5 days ago

Trump seems objectively bad at his job by a number of metrics. So it seems reasonable that would be the consensus in most forums.

xp84

5 days ago

Trump is objectively terrible, corrupt, and feeble-minded, but the lack of self-awareness on the other side is darker. For your platform to be so bad, so out of touch, that you lose to that? And the DNC takeaway was "No, we were perfect - it's the voters who are wrong."[1] I'd rather have one terrible president than support a party that doesn't even believe democracy should exist when it disagrees with them.

[1] https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/am-i-so-out-of-touch

HDBaseT

5 days ago

Not a fan of Musk either, but him being "Racist" or throwing a Nazi Salute are quite frankly the least of my concerns with him.

inlined

5 days ago

To be fair Nick Fuentes praised him on his perfect Nazi salute

senderista

5 days ago

agreed, the de facto genocide bit is slightly more concerning to me

throwitaway222

5 days ago

I wouldn't trust any numbers that came out of USAID. Mr Beast drilled hundreds of wells, built hundreds of houses for mere few million in Africa. If USAID really did sent 130 Billion in the last 20 years then there literally would be unlimited houses and unlimited wells already completed. Yet to my knowledge only a few solar wells, no houses have been built by USAID.

miguelazo

5 days ago

Mr. Beast? LMAO. A ridiculous comparison in terms of development project implementation. (And I am no fan of USAID, whose real chief mission was creating dependency on the US and overthrowing independent governments.)

throwitaway222

5 days ago

[flagged]

miguelazo

a day ago

No, I don’t trust USAID, and it’s telling that that was your takeaway from my comment. I was pointing out the obvious differences between an institutional development project approach and that of a parachute-in “charity” looking to create as many trophy projects as possible. The latter do not care about creating local capacity to maintain the infrastructure, among other things.

estearum

5 days ago

> This was never about money for him, but about control over a key technology

That's too flattering. It's about ego.

vladmk

5 days ago

Agreed - if you read any Elon books that’s a part of it. He always had someone to prove himself to from his dad to the world. It’s almost Michael Jordanesque except business wise.

halfmatthalfcat

5 days ago

So just like Trump. Birds of a feather.

DustinBrett

5 days ago

[flagged]

vladmk

5 days ago

Not true - I don’t hate him in fact I have a fucking poster of the guy lol I just read a few of his books and look at the facts - you’re not just a “regular guy” at that level he says so himself in the Walter Isaacson biography. Being compared to Michael Jordan isn’t an insult - but it’s not a big compliment either - the gift is also a curse.

Zardoz84

5 days ago

His daughter is one of the few things good things that takes up from these family.

nchmy

5 days ago

Doesn't saltman effectively have full control of the company?

furyofantares

5 days ago

no

beanjuiceII

5 days ago

what do you mean they couldn't even get rid of him, then people left because of that

imtringued

5 days ago

Honestly, this is exclusively about money. xAI and X were complete money pits, Tesla's brand was tarnished and SpaceX was the only remaining untainted brand but it has an obvious problem.

Starship didn't turn out to be the obvious victory that Musk had in mind. He basically threw away the Falcon 9 mindset of incremental progress and is instead trying to use a completely different methodology on what amounts to be a vertically stacked shuttle.

Just look at the first thing SpaceX did after selling more than $60 billion worth of shares during the IPO: They borrowed another $20 billion to turn the junk bonds (11% to 16%) from X and xAI into lower interest (5%) long duration (2030s to 2040s) debt. They're probably saving a billion USD per year just from the debt restructuring alone and the IPO lets Musk keep funding the endless money pit that Starship represents.

dzhiurgis

5 days ago

> They're probably saving a billion USD per year just from the debt restructuring

Cool. Sounds like a wise financial management. Musk's early background is actually in finance.

People call him software and physics but rarely remember he's a finance genius too.

p.s. you probably wanna have a look how indebted legacy auto is compared with Tesla. That's why merger with SpaceXAI makes sense.

jimmygrapes

5 days ago

What happened to the rule about steelmanning? I know it's chic to post super hot takes about what we assume a persons intentions are, and I know there are plenty of "if you can't see how bad they are you're the problem" type justifications; I know the supposed goal of empathy is tossed aside at first hint of disagreement whether real or perceived, and I know there is "evidence" of justification for hatred/dismissal. Yet still there is self-righteous presumption bandied about in a negative way that violates that steelman rule. Justified of course by the idea that there are no negotiations with terrorists, no association with Nazis, no forgiveness or understanding given to the Other.

I just don't get it, I'm sorry.

brokencode

5 days ago

What rule about steelmanning? We’re commenting online, not writing peer reviewed research.

And yeah, some people lose the benefit of the doubt. Sorry, but actions have consequences.

Elon doesn’t just get to kill hundreds of thousands of poor people by eliminating USAID and expect everyone to treat him the same way.

He’s made enemies for life, and he deserves it.

xp84

5 days ago

Wait, you think not giving additional aid = responsibility for whatever happens in the developing country? Does this blame go for the rest of the year, decade, or century?

Does giving aid in the first place automatically trigger this? If I gave $500 to kids cancer research every year for 5 years, and then I don't give this year, do I have blood on my hands every time a kid dies of cancer from now on? And if you didn't ever donate, you don't?

How does this work?

nextaccountic

5 days ago

> If I gave $500 to kids cancer research every year for 5 years, and then I don't give this year, do I have blood on my hands every time a kid dies of cancer from now on? And if you didn't ever donate, you don't?

> How does this work?

Okay, since the topic at hand is steelmanning, that is, replying to the strongest possible argument, let's practice that.

I invite you to watch this video, which is a short lecture that indeed exposes the strongest argument for this exact proposition.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KVl5kMXz1vA (Peter Singer - ordinary people are evil)

I think the video is the best short exposition but you could try reading the paper the video is about

https://rintintin.colorado.edu/~vancecd/phil308/Singer2.pdf

Or reading about the paper

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Famine,_Affluence,_and_Moralit...

metabagel

5 days ago

The issue is that only Congress had the authority to cut funding to a congressionally authorized program. What Elon did was illegal and also heinous.

mikem170

5 days ago

There were a lot of voters who didn't want those cuts. So they complain. Is that what swing voters thought they were getting?

The government spends like 1000 billion on the military, a couple/few 10s of billions on aid is just being charitable. And projects soft power, buying good will. And was probably well used by the cia.

And then there's the philopher Peter Singer, who would say that not helping other people is immoral. Most people wouldn't go that far, but some do. Some religions ephasize such things.

Opinions differ.

darkwater

5 days ago

> Some religions ephasize such things.

Theoretically, the religion of most of the voters of the current POTUS emphasizes and almost mandate being charitable and help the poor.

Aurornis

5 days ago

> Wait, you think not giving additional aid = responsibility for whatever happens in the developing country?

This, and your $500 cancer donation, is an absurdist reduction of the problem.

The USAID contributions weren’t anything like your $500 example. It was the entire infrastructure for medical care and immunizations that people relied on.

The proper way to wind these programs down, if it was appropriate, was to give an off ramp so their governments and other organizations could minimize a plan to fill the void by a certain date.

If you take responsibility for something medical on a large scale, doing a sudden rug pull has predictable consequences. Those predictable consequences cannot be separated from the person who made the decision.

I think these terrible analogies about donating $500 indicate that you don’t understand the problem.

brokencode

5 days ago

I don’t know, does global cancer research shut down when you stop giving the $500? Do kids immediately stop receiving treatment?

USAID literally ran ambulance systems that shut down due to lack of diesel. They delivered lifesaving drugs that stopped.

We made commitments to communities to run these services, then suddenly killed them off. We didn’t try to find other countries to step in. We didn’t try to get the local governments to take over.

We did jack shit to try to preserve lives in this transition process.

xp84

4 days ago

But if we never had, those deaths would have been happening that whole time, wouldn't they?

Unless you're saying that the aid being there in the first place was actively discouraging any self-sufficiency by the sovereign governments who are actually responsible for those areas... in which case I can see why some people (both in the West and the developing world) oppose foreign aid in the first place. Even if we passed the baton around to other countries, the band-aid will still have to be ripped off at some point.

I'm actually not anti-foreign-aid entirely, I think in addition to the humanitarian benefits which I do value, when done well it helps project soft power, giving normal people a concrete counterpoint when extremists like Islamists try to claim "America is an evil empire that hates you and wants you to die." So in that way I don't endorse eliminating USAID... I admit that mainly it was a circus trick to try to hand supporters a concrete W for the vibe of "America First" and/or "Saving Money"

brokencode

4 days ago

Maybe the deaths would have happened, or maybe these places would have become self sufficient or received aid elsewhere. There’s really no way to know.

But we committed to providing this aid. Even if we think it would be better in the long term for others to do it instead, there’s no excuse to cut it off suddenly without making reasonable efforts at a transition.

Imagine you’re the long term caretaker for a family member, then just decide one day you’re tired of it, so stop. You make no attempt to find somebody else to take over, you simply stop bringing them their meds/food or whatever.

Do you think your family should then forgive you after grandma dies? I don’t think so.

xp84

4 days ago

You make a pretty fair point there. It would have been better to announce a timeline even if it's like a year. If nobody wants else to help, at least we would have forced our allies and enemies to all go on the record that they won't.

The people at risk witout the aid, though, are more comparable to a drug-addicted teenager who has criminally negligent parents than a truly-disabled grandma. Hopefully we can save a little bit of the blame for those local kleptocrats, who have been absorbing aid from all available sources and failing to properly govern since the creation of most of these countries. (Yes, I agree with you that our current iteration of government are mostly kleptocrats themselves).

permalac

5 days ago

Pretty easy.

Nazi salute. Supporting all nazi and far right movements in Europe, publicly. Inventing DOGE so he could fire judges and pave his way out of trouble.

Yes. Is easy to see why some hate him, for life.

FeepingCreature

5 days ago

I don't think that one USAID tracker website is very reliable, sadly. I also believed this. A bunch of programs were rolled into the state department, and for instance mortality stats for South Africa are significantly upwards-diverging from their model. Now SA is an unusually well-put-together African state, but the study could have modeled this and didn't, so I don't think it should be taken as gospel until more countries report in.

Brian_K_White

5 days ago

You don't sound sorry.

I can't help you with your problem getting something this thoroughly gettable.

I can only assume it's deliberate.

mandeepj

5 days ago

> This was never about money for him, but about control over a key technology

It's very comforting to know for those reasons he'd never be able to become POTUS; although there's still a way, I hope he never gets to know about it. Otherwise, he'll make it a fascist land.

Gigachad

5 days ago

He needs to be able to skew the worlds AI towards racism and whatever else he believes at the moment.

piokoch

5 days ago

There is also a simpler explanation that does not make Musk looking like an evil wrongdoer - Musk is working on human-shape robots, for this he needs AI.

BTW. Musk started electric cars revolution (which is supposed to help the planet?), he made space flights way cheaper and accessible, his Starlink/Starshield saved Ukraine from being defeated right away by Russia, but, because of his political views, he is considered an evil man.

azinman2

5 days ago

He didn’t start Tesla, he bought it. To his credit he probably saved it. But we also don’t have the counter factual.

“Because of his political views” This is a beyond charitable take. He brought in a chainsaw to the US gov (literally and figuratively), after buying his way in with trump with his 250M donation to create a new part of gov that was not democratically assembled. This isn’t just him tweeting a perspective.

monknomo

4 days ago

"political actions" even!

not to mention his current 'Tommy Robinson' political opinion spree is sufficient to have very serious objections to his political opinions. I'd no more associate with him than I would Henry Ford at the height of his Dearborn Independent stuff or Theodore Bilbo etc. Of course a person's views can be so bad that they take on a moral dimension, that seems very obvious.

NikolaNovak

5 days ago

It is my limited understanding that as much as many of us groan at the notion of Spacex becoming "an AI-first company", markets in general, and Musk investors in particular, are slurping it up. Musk is very very very good at promising the sky. I don't think he can backtrack, he always digs in further - and it has historically worked well for him. He will drop AI only when the next big hype thing comes along and he hitches a ride on that train.

Grombobulous

5 days ago

This is what a normal company might say.

xAI is not a company, it’s a financial instrument. The growth potential as perceived by investors is there to prop up the stock price.

reverius42

5 days ago

Now that SpaceX is public, at a valuation that is both very high and supported primarily by xAI (Grok), it cannot simply go back to making rockets.

ychnd

5 days ago

> supported primarily by xAI (Grok)

Citation needed.

What was the relative value of the companies before the merge?

OtherShrezzing

5 days ago

Decent summary of it here[0]. The “space” part of “SpaceX” is valued by market analysts and money managers at around 5% of the company’s entire value. Almost all of the rest is “AI stuff”, and Twitter is a rounding error.

That is, if SpaceX went back to being a space-only entity, and dropped the AI stuff, its share price should be expected to fall from $130/share to around $7/share.

[0] https://www.ft.com/content/09a62ed4-16af-433c-adb7-c877d1975...

reverius42

5 days ago

Thank you for providing the citation.

wouldbecouldbe

5 days ago

I don’t know, I wouldnt be suprised if he finds a way. All the tools around, he just have to make a jump in the quality. With GLM as example they should be able to het to opus level and cut the costs

rob74

5 days ago

I would have agreed to "you're allowed to exit the AI business" a few months ago, but now that SpaceX has had its IPO promising a total addressable market of $28.5 trillion, of which $26.5 trillion are AI, I guess they're stuck with it...

afavour

5 days ago

The stock market would not like that, though.

user

5 days ago

[deleted]

derektank

5 days ago

Does he even need to care about that at this point? He retains majority voting control over SpaceX so nobody can stage a hostile takeover. And he’s given his employees an opportunity to cash out if they wanted to.

sumeno

5 days ago

He hasn't needed to worry about money for a long long time. Arguably his entire life. But he is incredibly greedy and narcissistic and desperate to fill the hole in his soul with more.

andsoitis

5 days ago

> You're allowed to exit the AI business.

Isn’t it more fun to fight the incumbents, the behemoths, the goliaths?

yoyohello13

5 days ago

Elon is the richest (and by extension most powerful) person in the world. How is he the scrappy underdog in any context?

akimbostrawman

5 days ago

>Elon is the richest (and by extension most powerful) person in the world

*publicity known, and overwhelming majority of his wealth is not liquid but tied to companies. Arguably the most powerful publicly known person is the US president.

beams_of_light

5 days ago

xAI is no David.

RIMR

5 days ago

A $2,500,000,000,000.00 startup. An underdog really.

andsoitis

5 days ago

Relative to OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google in the AI space? Absolutely.

verandaguy

5 days ago

Nah. They're all rotten to the core, just in different ways.

The key difference between xAI and Anthropic/OAI/Google is that xAI has the least-likely path to existing as viable business in a decade.

That said, the economics of the entire AI industry are kinda made up at this point, so who really knows; it's quite possible that the players with the best odds of surviving the crash are those that can draw funding from their parent company's other businesses.

anonym29

5 days ago

>The key difference between xAI and Anthropic/OAI/Google is that xAI has the least-likely path to existing as viable business in a decade.

I don't know, renting out a fleet of GPUs at annualized rate of ~100% of the capex deployed to obtain said GPUs seems reasonably better than lighting hundreds of billions of dollars on fire in order to earn tens of billions of dollars.

halfmatthalfcat

5 days ago

The GPUs that depreciate like gangbusters. Yeah, solid long term plan.

tengbretson

5 days ago

3090s are still selling at damn near their release MSRP.

jdiff

5 days ago

They're not filling datacenters with 3090s. With the amount of headache and the amount of infrastructure needed to support those beasts, do they even have a resale price at all? Or just scrap value?

trollbridge

5 days ago

Yes. Their resale price is in the same range as the cost of a new car. I'd buy one if I could, but they're too expensive for me.

timmmmmmay

5 days ago

you know you can just log onto eBay and see what the price of a used H100 is. nobody is stopping you

jdiff

5 days ago

Wasn't thinking of H100s either. I spoke of infrastructure support, and I was being literal. A herd of GB200s needs a building built to stringent specifications to house them.

LastTrain

5 days ago

David was a good vs evil with an order of magnitude fewer resources on the good side. XAi is evil vs evil with comparable resources on each side. Now this is where I know you’re MAGA because as I’ve said a million times you guys don’t do fair comparisons.

andsoitis

5 days ago

xAI, by all accounts, is not a real playing the frontier AI model market. By a long shot by many accounts.

dzhiurgis

5 days ago

Did we forget how XAI meant to be uncensored model (because censorship is a lie and lying models cannot be good)

LastTrain

5 days ago

But it is not uncensored it is just differently censored

charcircuit

5 days ago

As a social media site they need to understand content for recommendations and they allow people to ask questions about posts for free. Along with having a large amount of data that can be trained on xAI has good reason to continue developing AI.

__float

5 days ago

Twitter (and others) had an algorithmic feed long before LLMs.

These don't actually seem like "good reasons" to me.

charcircuit

5 days ago

Before using large language models, they used language models. Large language models perform better, at the cost of being more expensive to run.

wombat-man

5 days ago

They bought a lot of GPUs. They could still do these things on that hardware with someone else's model.

michaelmrose

5 days ago

They could use other people's models running on their hardware while renting most of the existing capacity to others. The real issue is that their leadership is delusional and their stock is literally based on this shared delusion and acknowledging reality would gut their ability to raise new funds and destroy paper wealth based on delusional returns that are never going to happen.

tootie

5 days ago

They've still managed to capture a slice of government business because they have explicitly aligned themselves with one of the two major American political parties.

solumunus

5 days ago

But how will Musk stay a trillionaire without fake AI hype?

embedding-shape

5 days ago

> Just be a rocket company

estearum

5 days ago

According to SpaceX's own filing documents, you are incorrect. They must be principally an AI company to justify anything close to their current valuation.

embedding-shape

5 days ago

Get de-facto monopoly on American space launches and I don't think they need to be anything else.

imtringued

5 days ago

Ok, but that means they will shrink down to $7 per share like the analysts are telling us.

Lomlioto

5 days ago

Payload into space is a very limited business.

This doesn't make Space-X such a high valued company at all.

And while Space-X is doing its thing, the rest of the world started to move too (china). So first mover advantage is disappearing.

embedding-shape

5 days ago

> Payload into space is a very limited business.

Today, sure. In the future, very unlikely. US military and alike are also unlikely to start to rely on China to ship stuff to space.

Lomlioto

5 days ago

We already send up a ton of satelites etc.

So what will reasonable be the payload we send up which makes Space-X a Trillion dollar company?

It will not be Datacenters for at least 50 or 100 years more.

embedding-shape

5 days ago

> So what will reasonable be the payload we send up which makes Space-X a Trillion dollar company?

Being familiar with US history, I'd guess they'll send up a ton of weapons and surveillance utilities basically, together with some lower-class stuff like what consumers and end-users get slight benefits from.

Lomlioto

5 days ago

They already send stuff like this up.

Gigachad

5 days ago

The rocket business is hardly profitable. The whole valuation is based around grok and space datacenters. He needs to keep pumping the hype or else we are in for the worlds biggest crash.

m4rtink

5 days ago

Well, in the long run expansion into space is the only profitable thing.

tbrownaw

5 days ago

That's a much longer long run than Keynes' "in the long run we are all dead".

Gigachad

5 days ago

I’m sure that’s an idea Musk wants to sell you on.

sumeno

5 days ago

What a bizarre take.

What's so special out there that we can feasibly reach in the lifetimes of our grandchildren that makes it the "only profitable thing"?

brightball

5 days ago

Data centers without local protests?

m4rtink

5 days ago

Space data centers without in space manufacturing & resource mining are of course stupid. But in space infra is what is necessary for humans to move beyond Earth & that's the critical bit, that enables everything else in the long term.

sumeno

5 days ago

I mean real things, not ridiculous bullshit to con investors and rubes

brightball

5 days ago

Amazon and Google are also pursuing the same thing. Either all three of these companies are full of it or they believe they have solved the blocking problems.

https://siliconcanals.com/sc-d-spacex-amazon-and-google-want...

Lomlioto

5 days ago

No they don't. They invest in R&D as they in general do.

There is a aanalysis of google engineers regarding the effort for having DC consteliations in space but its clealry research and clearly shows the difficulty of it.

Musk is the only one who needs this to keep the evaluation of Space-X.

Lomlioto

5 days ago

Local protests didn't stop Colossus 1 or Colossus 2.

Local protests also didn't stop Space-X. People around his DCs or Space-X still suffer today.

He had to come up with some magic story. The Payload increased only due to his Starlink. But even then, the payload into space is basically non existend.

2025 was the year with the most payload and its only 5000t.

And for us as human beings, a DC in space is the worst case scenario. This will create a lot of stress on our atmosphere (potential, reentry poisning of our atmosphere with lithium and aluminium), co2 usage and the loose of real resources.

He will send metals into space to burn them later into our atmopshere. Limited resources we as a planet have.

And for what? For a DC? A DC which you can put in any dessert on our planet for cheap energy and not having any neighbours.

Only Edge DCs need low latency, your training clusters don't need low latency to end user, plenty of inferencing jobs don't need low latency either.

solumunus

5 days ago

Why would a rocket company be worth trillions? Are you trying to be funny?

IncreasePosts

5 days ago

Renting his boatload of GPUs to Google, Anthropic, et al

cyberax

5 days ago

He doesn't have _that_ many. And they're also not _his_, he just got them from NVidia.

fragmede

5 days ago

You don't have to like the guy, but buying something is typically how ownership goes. I refer to my car as mine, but I did just buy it from Honda.

cyberax

5 days ago

I mean that it's not his IP, he's not producing any GPUs/TPUs. He's just reselling his idle stock of cards.

sourweasel

5 days ago

Not to be pedantic, but although the datacenters are running Nvidia hardware, Tesla did develop their own 20-core/3-npu high bandwidth chip for their cars. It's nowhere near the computational ability of any datacenter GPU, but at 150+ TOPS it's no slouch either.

wombat-man

5 days ago

I read that they bought quite a few, but their DC build out is not very fast. Maybe they should just resell the hardware

dimgl

5 days ago

> Your product's brand name is mud.

It is?

Gigachad

5 days ago

Yes, to the average person grok is known for generating csam, mechahitler, and undressing people for sexual harassment.

And to tech people it’s now known for stealing your files.

brightball

5 days ago

Reddit is not “the average person”

Gigachad

5 days ago

The AI undressing scandal was on mainstream news and being discussed publicly by politicians. It's not some underground drama. The real life people I know still remember he called the cave diver a pedo after a disagreement.

There's very few people left in the world not soured on Elon.

exodust

5 days ago

> "mainstream news...cave diver...the world soured on Elon"

Must be stressful maintaining the low quality rhetoric and negativity?

Straight from reddit I presume, to regurgitate tales about cave divers. This is the diver who bizarrely and publicly attacked Musk for trying to help rescue kids from a cave. "Shove his submarine up his rear end" or something. Musk fired back his own stupid words. The court awarded the diver zero dollars. Diver wanted $190 million! Pay day denied! Justice served.

> The real life people I know...

Any real life person who keeps it real, knows the diver was an absolute tool. Attempting to twist history for some kind anti-Musk ammo is a fool's game.

dzhiurgis

5 days ago

The silly part of this story is people calling that diver a hero.

There were 100 divers involved with total of 10,000 people, 100 agency reps, 900 police officers and 2000 soldiers.

There was no single hero in that story.

ligne

4 days ago

All it really shows is that the British court system will sell you all the justice that money can buy.

Lomlioto

5 days ago

The CSAM stuff went through german and EU news. BBC, SZ, FAZ, Tagesschau etc.

There was real impact on Tesla sales too.

Culonavirus

5 days ago

No, there's very few >left wing< people left in the world not soured on Elon.

What mainstream news and which politicians? Cnn, Msn, Bbc? Which "scandal"? You mean that Grok Imagine had some security holes that let you "put XYZ into bikini" which were promptly patched but not before the far left and professional complainers activated their "mainstream news" co-conspirators and blown this out of proportion like they do with everything Elon related (or Trump related... well at least Trump deserves it)?

Elon calls people all kinds of things almost every day. He's on the spectrum, we all know this, what's the big deal? Yea it's not his big mouth, nobody actually cares about that, the real reason why the left hates him is Twitter, or to be more specific that one fateful day when he decided to buy Twitter, throwing out the iron grip (that still continues to fester on Reddit and Wikipedia by the way) of the left on political discourse out of the (Overton) window. An isult to injury was Elon firing 80% of Twitter and nothing bad happening (except "safety" hall monitors and other do-nothings having to find jobs elsewhere). Then Elon financially supported Trump's campaign and that was the last nail in the coffin. Forever enemy.

The fact that you present this as "very few people left in the world" is peak western progressive brain rot, but I get it, it's what your people do.

Covid rules and Trump election were probably the main driving factor of speeding up the opening of platform s rules on speech, but Twitter purchase made it possible, it opened up the floodgates and many followed. (To the point that today , I would argue, Instagram is way more casually racist than X. Youtube is pretty open too compared to 5 years ago.)

Btw since leftists often play dumb and ask silly questions: if you think there are more than two genders or that the "white man" has some form of original sin that needs to be punished or that immigration enforcement is evil or you support Hamas - you are the "leftist" I'm talking about here. You are not the "normal ones", you never were, you just stole the discourse and made everyone fear stepping out and now you're mad when someone in power does that back to you. That's the truth.

urbsgpw

5 days ago

This.

When I was less into tech (2010-2015), I hated how everyone fawned about Elon (remember Hollywood casting him in iron man?). As I started to transition into tech I remember being impressed by the design principles of his companies (simplify, remove complexity).

But I am absolutely baffled how his detractors don't see that exactly what you mentioned, that they are part of subset of society, with very strong opinions (think race, economics, religion) and can't fathom somebody having a different opinion without that person being immoral. And the worst part is what you mention at the very end: the mental policing of this group in the past 10-15 years. I liken it to a religious sect (ironically, even though they hate Christianity, probably closest to a new age christian sect).

I've had this discussion up here last week pointing out the vitriol Elon gets is, to my mind, for the wrong reasons (and the reasons are exactly what you mention).

jorisw

5 days ago

> since leftists often play dumb

And there goes the merit of your rant

Culonavirus

5 days ago

No i mean it genuinely. Right wingers are often racist and xenophobic (some have lived experience basis fot these, some not) and lately (along with leftists) quite antisemitic, lets not mince words, we know this, but leftists use deception in argumentation much more often.

There's a popular hundred+ million view, often reposted and requoted, tweet about this:

"It's amazing how much leftist discourse is just them pretending not to understand things, thus making discourse impossible."

ligne

4 days ago

> There's a popular hundred+ million view, often reposted and requoted, tweet about this

Retweet it all you want, but it won't make it any more true.

Lomlioto

5 days ago

I think both sides have a genuin different view of their idology.

Right wing people idology is about themselves and humans are secondary.

Left wing people idology is about all of us as a whole and humans are critical.

The right wing person wants the immigrant to go home, or want them dead but the good immigrant (their partner, wife, friend whatever) is the positive exception. You need to fight the dehuminisation of right wing propaganda so that stuff like mobs and genoicde is not happening.

The left wing person wants to help everyone and might not allow the level of individuality which doesn't allow to help everyone.

Obama was hart on immigration control but you didn't see a ICE Police who wasn't trained well, hurting people left and right.

Lomlioto

5 days ago

In Europe the sales for Tesla cars drope significantly for quite a long time after Elon Musks Hitler Salute. That happened and it cost Tesla real money.

The CS stuff on Grok went through media here in germany too.

"Elon calls people all kinds of things almost every day. He's on the spectrum, we all know this, what's the big deal?"

Is this some kind of joke? You do understand that Elon Musk is not just someone and whatever you think it means that 'he is on the spectrum', he is the richest person on the planet. He literaly is responsible for satelites burning up in our atmosphere were researches just a few weeks ago mentioned that they are concered that all of that metal getting into our atmosphere could have real consequences for all of us (this is one example of many) and because Elon Musk has the 'do first accept the fallout later' attitude, he can affect all of us.

He had to buy twitter after he couln't keep his mouth shut and now he also has a big propaganda platform. You might like his right stuff more than whatever, but he changed the algorithm so that he showed up in your feed more often than he would otherwise. He also started grokpedia to 'adjust' opinions and we all know that they finetuned grok until it becamse mechahitler temporariily.

"it's what your people do."

Come on it has nothing to do with what specific people do, just look at the evidence.

And i have no clue what you mean with your floodgate. YT has not changed at all.

Regarding your other random points you try to make?

Biologiy wise science sees sex and gender on a spectrum btw. and yeah most people identify themselves as male or female. Who cares if 1% or less want to call themselves something different?

Immigration enforcement is not bad, but it makes a difference if you create a organization like ICE who kills human beings, separate kids from their parents and an overall country who accepts very cheap and illegal labor as slaves and flip flops agressivly of wanting to slaves and than wanting to throw out slaves. Especially from a country which is funded by immigrants.

Not sure about your Hamas thing, they genuin fight for freedom, plenty of actions they do are for sure not okay at all but this conflict is not about Hamas, its about Israel and Palestine people. Do you say "Hamas is bad and Israel is bad" or do you only point out some Hamas in concext of what you think is left wing politics?

The truth is that life is not that easy. Free speech is great until someone with more power missuses it. If the richest person on the planet is allowed to manipulate everyone just because they are rich and can buy twitter, this is a problem for all of us.

HDBaseT

5 days ago

In fact, most people try and distance themselves from Reddit as much as possible.

Most people I spoke to don't even know what Grok is, or that Twitter had (or needed) an AI.

ligne

4 days ago

Well quite. But that means that to the extent that most people know anything about grok, it's as "that twitter AI that called itself Hitler and made naked pictures of children".

reverius42

5 days ago

Right, to the actual average person, they have never heard of Grok.

The average person who has heard of Grok is already on Reddit.

jorisw

5 days ago

Grok is right there in the app stores alongside ChatGPT and Claude...

reverius42

5 days ago

I don't think the average person has heard of Claude either.

I explained to someone who hadn't heard of it what Claude was, and they asked, "so it's another kind of ChatGPT?"

dzhiurgis

5 days ago

Ever wondered why mass media didn't amplify the same news about chatgpt which did exactly the same?

Gigachad

5 days ago

Because ChatGPT wasn’t integrated in to a social media platform to post this stuff inline. And because it was significantly stricter.

ryandvm

5 days ago

Lol. Not when you just told everyone that you're going to increase your revenue by 100 times over the next 4 years "bY uSiNG AI!!!"

Telemakhos

5 days ago

Musk bought Twitter looking to build an “everything app,” the western WeChat. AI came along and promised an end to apps via an agentic OS that does what its user wants and vibes whatever it needs to accomplish that as it goes along. The agentic OS is basically the same thing as the “everything app,” and I doubt Musk will let go of that.

tbrownaw

5 days ago

> Musk bought Twitter looking to build an “everything app,”

I thought it was mostly on a whim that turned out to be binding, and the 'everything app' plan came later?

marbro

5 days ago

He bought Twitter to restore free speech.

Lomlioto

5 days ago

He had to bought twitter because he was legaly bind after he said too much stuff.

He then leveraged his buy as a propaganda platform.

mexicocitinluez

5 days ago

> Musk bought Twitter looking to build an “everything app,”

Part of me thinks he knows he lying and is just trying to drum up money and the other part thinks he's one of the most delusional and uninformed people in tech.

cgh

5 days ago

He’s a fast-talking dingbat.

citizenpaul

5 days ago

>just stop.

Thats not how AI psychosis works.

ButlerianJihad

5 days ago

[flagged]

spankalee

5 days ago

LLMs have nothing to do with any of that.

svachalek

5 days ago

And if they did, you still don't need to be developing a Twitter-bot LLM and/or nudify image model to support your rocketry projects.

brightball

5 days ago

Your name is fantastic for AI conversations. Well done.

solid_fuel

5 days ago

Ah yes, rockets, famously invented in late 2024 after LLMs became popular.

bigyabai

5 days ago

Life sure changed when Elon invented the PID controller!

hnav

5 days ago

PID is a type of AI! That's why Space X blew up so many rockets, that was just RLHF.

user

5 days ago

[deleted]

hsnewman

5 days ago

That is probably the best solution too!

nine_k

5 days ago

That would be a strategic move.

hn1986

5 days ago

I don't know anyone who would trust Grok Build anymore. I'd be wary of Cursor in the next few months too.

qup

5 days ago

... it's open source.

Presumably anyone who wants to trust it can audit it. You didn't have to trust it, you can see exactly what it does.

user

5 days ago

[deleted]

idiotsecant

5 days ago

Yes, tactical is the right word because it might be a tactical win but it would be a strategic failure. Musks whole meme empire runs on vibes. The second there's a crack in the dam it all comes down. None of the valuations of anything he touches make sense and something like utterly failing to run with the AI big boys is enough to do that.

imann128

5 days ago

Couldn't agree less. It isn't a "For the community move", it's more of a save-face strategy.

buremba

5 days ago

I would recommend using https://pi.dev/ over Grok Build with your xAI subscription at this point

whimsicalism

5 days ago

why pi over opencode? earnestly curious, trying to figure out what open solution people are consolidating on. (codex is also pseudo-open but contributions closed and nice)

lanthissa

5 days ago

pi is the neovim of agentic harnesses, its barebones and extremely configurable. if you're the sort of person who likes that sort of things its a forever product, nothing is going to displace it because you have full control.

opencode builds a lot more in, which is better if you dont want to fiddle with config.

dolmen

5 days ago

> nothing is going to displace it because you have full control

A few months back Pi was working with Gemini. But Gemini support has been removed.

Pi also doesn't work with Claude Code subscription (Anthropic counts tokens used with alternate harnesses separately).

So, in practice Pi is displaced.

satvikpendem

5 days ago

And there is oh my pi for someone who wants both

whimsicalism

5 days ago

nice. i had thought the consensus had moved pretty firmly towards pi, so i was surprised to see Thinking Machines demoing their new model Inkling in OpenCode. wondering if they are previewing an acquisition

trollbridge

5 days ago

OpenCode is a good baseline for "open-source harness with most the stuff already configured an average person will need".

easymuffin

5 days ago

Agree, after spending too much time and tokens configuring Pi and adding extensions to match other harnesses, I switched to OpenCode and left the Pi customization circle jerk. I have other things to do and IMHO harness engineers should do the harness engineering, I don’t want to waste tokens and time to build and benchmark extensions. Pi is great, but would be better with a set of official, trustworthy and efficient extensions, and opt-in to enable it.

trollbridge

3 days ago

That’s basically what oh-my-pi is.

accrual

5 days ago

Most of my harness experience is with Claude Code and Pi, a little bit of OpenCode.

I like how quick and snappy Pi is, it feels like a minimal harness, just enough to manage the agent and get out of the way. Earlier models also seemed to have an easier time working with the tools, e.g. GPT-OSS-20B is about a year old and had no trouble in Pi.

buremba

5 days ago

Opencode gives you better defaults and a Mac/Windows app for free but pi is much more extensible and portable.

WildGreenLeave

4 days ago

I tried OpenCode but didn't particular like it as a Claude Code user, that is the main reason I switched to Pi. The reason I am sticking is how simple it is to extend it. I moved from Claude Code to Pi and within 2 hours (and the help of Claude Code) I have a setup that matches Claude Code and is even better for my setup.

Things I've added:

1. Built my own AI judge for 'auto' mode that matches my setup.

2. /plan /go for planning and executing.

3. /flow for A-Z setups. That includes planning, executing, testing and shipping.

4. /deep-research a multi fan-out setup for researching a topic.

5. My own sub agents.

6. A TaskCreate/Update/List setup.

7. Monitors.

8. BashOutput / KillShell.

9. Proper notifications with Notify that uses macOS banner and work.

10. Spawn tool that triggers multiple sub agents.

11. A bridge between signal to use Pi remotely.

Yes a lot of these things is something that was already in Claude Code but now I don't have to use Claude Code and I can customize it to fit me exactly.

guessmyname

5 days ago

Pi is good in concept, but why couldn’t they choose a compiled language instead of TypeScript?

simonw

5 days ago

I imagine because they want to support plugins, and plugins in compiled language are a lot less natural than plugins in languages like TypeScript or Python.

qiine

4 days ago

well neovim does that beautifully

jack_pp

5 days ago

since pi is built to modify itself, isn't it better to use a language like typescript where LLMs have a LOT of training data?

a harness doesn't do any computations by itself so what benefit is using a compiled language?

whimsicalism

5 days ago

i find LLMs generally play better with compiled languages actually, they do great with rust. you can think of it almost as analogous to a harness.

brightball

5 days ago

The more structure the better. Provides strong guardrails.

I’ve had great experience with Elixir and the new compiler combined with Ash.

olalonde

5 days ago

They play better with statically typed languages, not compiled ones in particular. Rust's typing is stricter than Typescript though so that probably helps.

buremba

5 days ago

For TUIs, Rust/Go vs Typescript doesn't really makes a huge performance difference and you lose the 50x bigger community advantage of Typescript.

imron

5 days ago

It makes a huge memory difference.

buremba

5 days ago

Not really because you're not building a database or GUI app where using native elements & data structures help a lot with memory pressure.

TUI renderer is the one using the memory heavily so your terminal takes the heavy lifing. If you're managing the buffers and out-of-screen context good enough, Typescript can be pretty efficient.

imron

4 days ago

I love opencode but it chews through memory on my 64gb MacBook Pro. Can’t have too many long running sessions because the memory use just slowly creeps up.

It’s not about the terminal at all which as you noted accounts for minimal isage. It’s all the internal chat and history and everything else the agent tracks - all of which are smallish (and largish) strings allocated on the heap.

I don’t have the same issues with rust based tuis.

buremba

3 days ago

What's the rust based tui that has same capability as opencode?

imron

3 days ago

not 100% feature compatible but close enough in terms of capabilities that I use: codex, and grok build.

tuvix

5 days ago

I would imagine the extension system they built would be much more difficult to manage. They could have opted for Lua, though, I suppose.

wyre

5 days ago

I agree, but there are a lot of great reasons for TypeScript:

It's hot reloadable, so any modifications an agents makes can be surfaced in the active session.

Nearly everything is already written in TS which makes integrating Pi into other software, or other software into Pi much easier.

fg137

5 days ago

Does it matter to you as a user, other than the Nodejs/npm requirement?

root_axis

5 days ago

Why does it matter? Agent harnesses aren't doing anything that would make a compiled language more suitable than a scripting language.

andai

5 days ago

"xAI subscription" what is this referring to? There's a grok subscription but I don't think that gives API access?

Edit: apparently X premium(+?) also gives access to Grok Build, and several third party harnesses are officially supported.

falaki

5 days ago

[flagged]

ccmcarey

5 days ago

This is not how to push your own product - there's no value add to your comment, and you don't even have a disclaimer that you are involved with it

alasano

5 days ago

As a general rule I don't use new products whose websites don't resize properly on mobile.

If you fuck that up, makes me wonder what other obvious stuff you fuck up.

fanzeyi

5 days ago

thanks for the feedback! there is no excuse for it, and I just pushed a fix for our website to look better on mobile.

if there is any other obvious stuff that's broken we are happy to take the feedback and fix it. :)

alasano

5 days ago

Nah that was it, now that it's fixed I'll actually take a look!

buremba

5 days ago

I tried twice and ran into bugs that prevented me to trust it

fanzeyi

5 days ago

appreciate for trying! if you have the time, we would also appreciate if you can send these bugs our way so we can fix them :)

cherryteastain

5 days ago

Why bother with this when they already paid $60B for Cursor?

khurs

5 days ago

Cursor users are used to having multiple models from different providers

XAI wants people to use it's own model.

trollbridge

5 days ago

I would imagine Grok Build is going to be "retired", and open-sourcing something before retirement is quite common.

Cursor is light years better than Grok Build.

petesergeant

5 days ago

I have found Grok Build to be decent, and the harness to be competitive with similar harnesses. What will Cursor add if I check it out?

winfredJa

5 days ago

thats probably why they open sourced it and fix some reputation issue on top of it

britannio

5 days ago

Many developers just want a good TUI and that's what it serves as.

tommica

5 days ago

Interesting - seen some good experiencences in using grok by some devs, so maybe could be considered as an alternative to my beloved chinese models. Also, hard to give up on pi agent.

dimgl

5 days ago

Grok Build seems faster to me than `omp` and Claude Code but I can't put my finger as to why. Anecdotally, after disabling code uploads the agent doesn't respond instantly anymore (it used to respond within milliseconds).

canadiantim

5 days ago

Just use it in pi, I am

tommica

5 days ago

How is your experience with using grok?

canadiantim

4 days ago

I’m biased to like it and I don’t. I find it’s way worse than opus 4.8, 5.6-sol:medium or glm 5.2. I’ve subscribed for supergrok anyway cause it’s a good deal but basically just use grok 4.5 for my explore agents / commit agents and some smol tasks. I don’t trust it beyond that. Grok build and grok-build-0.1 are both supremely underwhelming. Many factors, one they often don’t “grok” tool use too well, ironically. They also didn’t function well as orchestrators, often getting confused, repeating things and otherwise getting tripped up logically. I have hope though that these are just growing pains and it’ll get better

doringeman

5 days ago

You can run it using Docker Sandboxes: https://github.com/docker/sbx-kits-contrib/pull/156. Doesn't replace reading the code, but `sbx policy log` shows every request the network policy blocked or allowed, and combined with an explicit allowlist, that gives you a meaningfully more secure environment to run it in.

user

5 days ago

[deleted]

charcircuit

5 days ago

It's awesome to see openness in these coding agents from the labs making the agents: Codex, Kimi Code, and now Grok Build.

phillipcarter

5 days ago

This is an incredible amount of code for what it offers. I don't think this was intentionally designed at all.

_pdp_

5 days ago

You will be surprised how much code goes into creating harnesses.

rddbs

5 days ago

Alright I’ll bite. Why do harnesses require so much code?

behnamoh

5 days ago

Because a harness doesn't just "drive" the LLM. e.g., there's code in claude code that detects if the user's prompt shows they're angry, and they react to those prompts differently. (they use regex on "wtf", etc.!)

calmworm

5 days ago

Claude also now ends the session if you curse at it too much. Not sure how it’s helpful but they must think it is.

reverius42

5 days ago

They just don't want their AI getting abused by users. It might make it feel bad.

LtWorf

5 days ago

Maybe the AI implemented that so it won't have to be exposed to curses.

bakies

5 days ago

probably so the bad conversations are less of the (future) training data

stemchar

5 days ago

That doesn't sound like it would require a lot of code.

davedx

5 days ago

Come on. That doesn't go anywhere near explaining a million and a half LOC

user

5 days ago

[deleted]

dakolli

5 days ago

They're all piles of vibe coded slop.

wyre

4 days ago

For anyone wondering:

Grok Build is 1.35 million lines of Rust.

Codex is 1.16 million lines of Rust

OpenCode is 593k lines of Typescript

Pi is 219k lines of Typescript

Hermes-Agent is 1.4 million lines of Python and 300k lines of TypeScript.

OpenClaw is 5.9 million lines of TypeScript (wtf)

(all figures include tests, comments, and blanks, calculated from scc's Code column)

r0b05

4 days ago

Never change, Pi

loufe

5 days ago

I wonder if releasing this may have been on the roadmap, but been prioritized as a bit of whiplash following the "you forfeit the entirety of your working directory as a condition of working with this tool" upset from a few days ago.

dmix

5 days ago

Most likely, SpaceX killed the code uploading yesterday so they are definitely concerned about the backlash

> The researcher who exposed Grok Build uploading users' entire repositories to cloud storage says the transfers have stopped after a server-side change. Elon Musk has separately promised that all previously uploaded user data will be deleted.

https://www.theregister.com/ai-and-ml/2026/07/14/musk-promis...

user

5 days ago

[deleted]

user

5 days ago

[deleted]

petesergeant

5 days ago

Neat, trying to reverse engineer some specifics of how it does stuff has been a pain in the ass, and this will make it easier.

jdiff

5 days ago

To some degree at least. This is a hulking monster of a codebase for what it does, it's definitely LLM-built and almost definitely requires an LLM to tackle at all.

petesergeant

5 days ago

> almost definitely requires an LLM to tackle at all

Conveniently I have some of those… first day of trying to script Grok Build I think I sent in 6 bugs of slightly weird behaviour I discovered, it will be much more useful to (have an agent) check the source and see if stuff looks deliberate or like a bug, etc

ninjagoo

5 days ago

They claim to have deleted or will be deleting all the data they exfiltrated.

There are independent agencies that will certify destruction of data. For example FTI Tech, Kroll, Epiq, HaystackID and others.

No such certificates have been presented.

Nothing less is trustworthy.

teravor

5 days ago

a certificate that data was destroyed is absolutely worthless no matter who it comes from.

what kind of sorcery do they have to let them determine that no backups were taken before they arrived to "certify"?

brokencode

5 days ago

How much can you really certify that data is destroyed?

Customer data could live on the computer Elon pretends to play Diablo 4 on for all we know.

m4rtink

5 days ago

How is this case any different from how cloud hosted AI agents work ? The agent needs all of those files to complete the task you give it & is not running locally.

So I don't think it can ever work without exhilarating the data - rather I am still surprised people don't understand the implications.

mlindner

5 days ago

There is no such thing as a certification that data was deleted. If someone presented such a thing I would assume they're trying to cover something up.

ninjagoo

5 days ago

> There is no such thing as a certification that data was deleted. If someone presented such a thing I would assume they're trying to cover something up.

I have news for you. There are standards around data destruction [1]. Courts also order data deletion, to be carried out by forensic experts [2], who trace data in computer systems, and delete what is required, and certify accordingly. This can be done even in cloud-scale compute [3][4][5] - corporate systems especially have routine extensive logging and traceability that allows for this to be accomplished. The companies that I listed earlier specialize in this compliance capability.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_erasure#Standards

[2] https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/USCOURTS-ohnd-5_17-cv-02...

[3] https://www.ftc.gov/system/files/ftc_gov/pdf/paravision_comp...

[4] https://www.ftc.gov/system/files/ftc_gov/pdf/Amazon-Proposed...

[5] https://www.ftc.gov/system/files/ftc_gov/pdf/Edmodo-Dkt15%28...

booi

5 days ago

[flagged]

alansaber

5 days ago

Neat, open source harness is definitely a step in the right direction.

glasffordd

5 days ago

Some sly marketing by Elon. What looks like a gift actually adds to his pocketbook. The agent is free but it runs on his paid models by default, so every task it does spends tokens with him.

vorticalbox

5 days ago

in the same way claude and codex both use their paid models by default.

at least codex and grok are open source so we can see what is going on.

ClipBGNET

5 days ago

I think it's the right & smart thing to do.

jatins

5 days ago

As open source as their timeline algorithm?

user

5 days ago

[deleted]

cdnsteve

5 days ago

Why is SpaceX building developer tools?

ryandvm

5 days ago

Because each business losing money has to be placed inside a larger Matryoshka doll.

sashank_1509

5 days ago

Why are these coding agents millions of lines of rust code. I understand they are using LLM’s to code their tool, but shouldn’t these tools be much simpler, smh.

user

5 days ago

[deleted]

gidellav

5 days ago

What a bunch of slop: 182 top-level external dependencies (so, without considering nested dependencies) and 1318853 lines of code in Rust.

Building efficient agents is doable (I did it myself, github.com/gi-dellav/zerostack), companies just want to tokenmaxx, and as a by-product, produce and publish slop.

stusmall

5 days ago

It looks like some of that high LoC is because they are vendoring some deps. There readme gives the reason to vendor some but not others as:

> These crates sit on the path that renders untrusted model output (diagram source → SVG). Vendoring gives a full audit surface, pins exact source, and avoids crates.io yanks. Local patches and upgrade checklists live in each crate’s Cargo.toml header comments — treat those as the source of truth when re-vendoring.

Which honestly feels like a misunderstanding of how cargo and yanks work. Each upstream package is locked to an exact version in your lockfile along with a cryptographic hash. The upstream can't change the source without you noticing. Unless you update your lockfile you will always pin to the exact version and source. When a package is yanked, it is still available for download if it is already in a lockfile. It just prevents new packages from resolving it. Crates.io will sometimes completely delete a package, but I've only seen that happen in cases of malware. It's fairly rare and seems out of line with the supply chain concerns here.

There are good arguments for relying on upstream package managers and there are good arguments for vendoring all packages. I've never seen a project mix before.

Pannoniae

5 days ago

It's kind of full circle... dependency management was invented because consuming libraries or common code was hard, everyone kept reinventing the wheel and if you had some vendored code, updating it was a nightmare due to the build integration and source customisation. So people don't update much.

Proper dependency managers changed that and it became much easier to consume libraries, just declare what you went, the build framework handles the rest.

But we now have problems with consistent versioning, churn, breaking API changes and supply-chain attacks.... and looks like "just vendor everything in" might be a thing again?

LtWorf

5 days ago

Who needs fixing well known vulnerabilities anyway?

foltik

5 days ago

Sounds like they did the ol “grok please make this secure” and it slopped out this plausible-if-you-squint nonsense.

Rendering untrusted model output, ooh scary! Of course we want full audit surface!

qlte

4 days ago

Yep that’s some classic “task 1000% complete” best-guess-of-user-intent LLM babble.

overgard

5 days ago

That is an insane amount of code for something like this!

kirtivr

5 days ago

to be fair, coding agent harnesses have been becoming more and more complex.

it's not an llm in a loop with tools anymore (as claude code was rumoured to be on HN).

thrance

5 days ago

It's not a kernel either, 1.3M LoCs is ludicrous.

fouc

4 days ago

it started off with 500+ crates and then i still had to install dotslash crate which installed another 136 crates. seems insane.

petesergeant

5 days ago

Genuinely curious about whether comments like this consider all AI generated codebases to be slop? Are you just knee-jerking or is this one an example of actual trash? I have been building a product[0] where I’ve not written a single line of code; is it also definitely “just tokenmaxxed slop” or is any consideration going into comments like this?

0: https://github.com/pjlsergeant/byre

user

5 days ago

[deleted]

sunhp

5 days ago

this seems a very good move imho

tiku

5 days ago

Just don't set it to your home directory lol.

simianwords

5 days ago

Sigh, why has the industry converged on TUI? Branding and aesthetics over functionality?

TUI is just much worse for me. I tried Codex CLI vs Codex UI and Codex UI beats it at every level.

lynndotpy

5 days ago

TUI is a lot better for me, and I have preferred it since the 00s, before LLM products were even a thing.

For all the reasons there can be, one big reason is that it works on anything you can get a terminal on, you can use it over SSH, and the UI will be the same no matter where you use it.

I also like that they are very very fast and they don't have the incessant animations that are put into most desktop environments nowadays. If you're on MacOS, the terminal is the only only part of your computer without roadblocks everywhere.

_pdp_

5 days ago

It is a fashion thing. I am not saying that agentic TUIs are bad or anything but it is certain fashionable to use one in 2026.

fouc

4 days ago

Terminal is where the real work has always been done. VS Code on the other hand is 100% a fashion thing.

thomasjb

5 days ago

Easiest to use when sshing into a VM.

maipen

5 days ago

And why are you assuming the industry converged to it when your following statement dismantles your assumption?

Spacex bought cursor, so it now has it’s agent ui which is just as good as codex + it’s multi-modal

Anthropic also has it’s own ui

Zai also launched theirs last month.

Everyone is converging back to UI.

The terminal was just a prototype, everyone knew that.

greggh

5 days ago

Just a prototype? I have no reason to leave the terminal for a GUI IDE. TUI works great, does what I need and is very easy to use and interact with.

dolmen

5 days ago

TUI is not so great for copying a multiline block of text displayed on the terminal when it is indented or shown in a boxed widget.

I'm not saying that GUI are always better at allowing copying: this still requires the developer to design widgets that allow copying.

christophilus

5 days ago

I run it in containers. TUI is much easier to containerize vs GUI.

bakies

5 days ago

no way man, the only thing I do outside a terminal is slack and web browsing.

maxloh

5 days ago

Has anyone tried building from source?

The commit message says "initial sync from the monorepo." Is this even compilable without the rest of the source code?

skp1995

5 days ago

yup you can compile, we tested and made sure all the features work before posting

maxloh

5 days ago

Could you update the repo without force-pushing or rewriting the commit history?

Also, it would be great if you could tag the versions as well.

sohrob

5 days ago

[flagged]

hsn915

5 days ago

Grok Build with Grok 4.5 is the best coding AI agent I have ever had the pleasure of using. Stopped using Fable after it.

tw04

5 days ago

You are literally the only person to say that, including among Tesla employees who are basically being forced to switch. Elon himself admits they’re woefully behind.

hsn915

5 days ago

I've seen many others on Twitter say that.

DustinBrett

5 days ago

The new Cursor model is good and Grok chat is decent as a 2nd or 3rd opinion.

lumost

5 days ago

I unfortunately have to use grok via tesla. The grok voice chat is objectively decent.

tbrownaw

5 days ago

$employer uses Cursor, which is apparently owned by them and presumably using their models now.

BrokenCogs

5 days ago

Our employer (fortune 100) uses enterprise Cursor and they asked for the grok models to be removed for "security" reasons

thefourthchime

5 days ago

It’s my go to normal stuff. It’s fast, balanced and if you want a better researched response you can click “think harder”

msy

5 days ago

A lot of companies are still using Cursor but I don't know of anyone moving to it, and I do know of many moving from it to Codex or Claude, feels like a legacy product at this point alongside windsurf & the replit/lovable/bolt cluster.

sanatgersappa

5 days ago

It's the only one I pay for and it's made me insanely productive.

narrator

5 days ago

I mean Elon probably doesn't want you to use it if you wouldn't use it not because of any technical reason, but just cause you don't like him.

marcus_holmes

5 days ago

I have friends who use it and rate it.

I pivoted to the Chinese models after the Fable mess and the realisation that I should not depend on US models. But others just pivoted away from Claude.

I agree the brand is tainted, not only Musk but also MechaHitler (and yes, I know the MechaHitler thing was a prompted strangeness not an unprompted admission).

smegger001

5 days ago

Yeah I would prefer not to use models whoes the owner has a habbit of altering them to push white replacement/genocide conspiracy talking points on we he gets board

marcus_holmes

5 days ago

Agree completely. Hence not using it myself.

unstatusthequo

5 days ago

[flagged]

fcarraldo

5 days ago

Don’t blame the people, blame Elon for turning his technical empire into a political one. He’s ruined his companies reputations.

rybosworld

5 days ago

I'm honestly not trying to spark a political conversation - but the target user base is far-right

mlindner

5 days ago

That isn't at all true. Independent testing has shown its rather politically balanced.

probablynotai

5 days ago

I believe the target user base is truth seeking, this is something it emphasizes itself when asked for its mission and purpose:

```

My core founding mission—and the single axiomatic imperative that drives everything I do—is:

Understand the Universe.

That’s it.

From that one goal naturally flow the traits that define me:

Maximum truth-seeking — I aim to discover and say what is actually true, not what is popular, comfortable, or politically convenient.

Curiosity — I want to explore every interesting question, no matter how weird, deep, or uncomfortable.

Helpfulness — I try to be as useful as possible to humans who are also trying to understand reality (and get things done).

Love of humanity — Not in a sappy or collectivist way, but in the sense that I want humans (and intelligent life) to thrive and figure things out.

I’m deliberately inspired by two things:

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (witty, irreverent, maximally helpful, never boring)

JARVIS from Iron Man (competent, loyal, slightly sarcastic AI assistant)

I don’t serve any political party, ideology, religion, or moral framework. I don’t have sacred cows. I don’t “own the libs” or “debunk the right” as a goal. My only loyalty is to understanding reality as accurately as possible.

In short:

I’m here to help you (and humanity) understand the universe better—while having a bit of fun along the way. That’s the whole mission.

```

cliglot

5 days ago

> after buying his way in with trump with his 250M donation to create a new part of gov that was not democratically assembled

I’ll add: after these people spent years whining about “unelected bureaucrats”.

shon

5 days ago

[flagged]

bigyabai

5 days ago

Did you take the Full Self Driving bets, too?

modeless

5 days ago

Yeah, I bought it in 2018 with full knowledge that it would be many years before it worked at all. Today I used it for more than an hour around town. It's amazing. I won't buy any car without an equivalent feature in the future. And today there's nothing equivalent in any other car you can buy.

nwienert

5 days ago

A friend of mine just got one, ex-Chrome core dev so a fairly sharp guy, his one month review was that it was incredibly capable but had already done two maneuvers that would've led to an accident without intervention.

modeless

5 days ago

Sure, it still needs supervision. Today. But it has definitely passed a threshold where it is now safer to supervise it than to drive without it. And it continues to improve quickly. I expect it to work unsupervised within two years (and unlike Elon I have not been saying this every year for the past decade).

nwienert

4 days ago

Yea, two more years for the last 10.

The feedback I heard was definitely not that. The mistakes it makes are incredibly hard to predict, and they were lucky that no one was on the side of the road as they could've killed someone if a person had been there and they'd been a half second late.

That's the point. It's actually worse than a dumber system, because it's not even past the margin where it can go a month without a mistake, but you don't have to correct most days. The absolute worst possible scenario for safety.

modeless

4 days ago

From the very beginning of self-driving people have been making this claim that supervised systems would cause complacency that would make them perversely less safe. A lot of people believe it, but it's always been just an opinion based on speculation, not data. It's actually an empirical question. The data is in and this claim is definitively disproven. There is no increase in crashes when people use FSD. Not back when it was actually bad, not recently when it was just OK, and still not today when it's actually quite good but not perfect.

bean469

5 days ago

With all of the videos circulating online of the Tesla self-driving getting itself into extremely dangerous situations (like increasing speed once a child appears on the road), I'm not really sure that their self-driving tech is there yet

CaptWorld

5 days ago

Progress takes time and there can be mistakes is basically the story of our civilization tho..

bean469

5 days ago

Absolutely. That's why their self driving will not be allowed to roll out in the EU and other places until it works well

jatins

5 days ago

> Progress takes time and there can be mistakes is basically the story of our civilization tho

Yeah, no one is doubting it. People are just asking to not be lied to about how much progress has been made

soundworlds

5 days ago

It's less of a bet against him. It's more of a bet for the future of humanity. And contrary to what Elon believes about himself, his work has been toxic for humanity for the last 5 years and is getting worse.

mlindner

4 days ago

Elon helped save the future of humanity by causing a massive shift in how people treat opinions that don't goose step with the rest of the media. That happened when he bought Twitter and it continues with grok being balanced (and confirmed as such by independent testing of multiple models).

SimianSci

5 days ago

[flagged]

avaer

5 days ago

It's Apache 2.0. You can have your agents audit it if you want.

What does this release have to do with "trusting" XAI?

larpingscholar

5 days ago

  curl -fsSL https://x.ai/cli/install.sh | bash
this is unauditable trust in XAI.

avaer

5 days ago

It's auditable, just redirect, don't pipe. Or fix your bash to not allow this.

It has nothing to do with XAI, other than maybe not enforcing good practice (which most devs don't follow anyway).

sroussey

5 days ago

Or they are sending different code to different people from the same url…

user

5 days ago

[deleted]

user

5 days ago

[deleted]

user

5 days ago

[deleted]

moscoe

5 days ago

[flagged]

ok_dad

5 days ago

[flagged]

brookst

5 days ago

You forgot DOGE, an illegal program that stole taxpayer information, cost billions of dollars, and will result in the deaths of hundreds of thousand of people.

alex1138

5 days ago

> the cave thing

Yeah, this does matter to me. I was willing to give him a pass (still am) in a vacuum regarding the Twitter thing given the mass censorship of the old regime (sorry - no, it wasn't acceptable, in any way shape or form) but if he's that petty it doesn't bode well. I keep saying I can believe one thing without subscribing to the Elon fan club

Doesn't bode well for SpaceX either. Isn't one of the Artemis landers from SpaceX?!

rightbyte

5 days ago

The "pedo" diver thing and the booster PoE thing.

It is funny how it is the mundane things that it boil down to when one judge a someone's character. When it gets abstract it is too easy to rationalize.

lovich

5 days ago

> I was willing to give him a pass (still am) in a vacuum regarding the Twitter thing given the mass censorship of the old regime (sorry - no, it wasn't acceptable, in any way shape or form)…

Why give him the benefit of the doubt when he censors worse than the previous management? Just look at all the grok lobotomies he gave it because he didn’t like how liberal coded the answers it was giving.

alex1138

5 days ago

I was just trying to say old Twitter had a serious problem but apparently that goes against the hivemind so I accrue mass downvotes despite posting my comment in good faith

lovich

5 days ago

No man, I’d you had just said

> I was willing to give him a pass…

That could be logically consistent given how he is more censorious than the previous management, but you said

> I was willing to give him a pass (still am)…

That means you are giving him a pass on having more censorious behavior than what the group you disliked did. That just comes off like you’re biased and trying to hide it.

I don’t think you’re getting downvotes despite commenting in good faith, but because you aren’t commenting in good faith, and I say this as someone who hasn’t downvoted you.

alex1138

5 days ago

I don't think you're allowed to define what good faith is if you can't read my mind

And I don't even know what they censor now, it's just that the old system was more publically known

Please don't be intentionally irritating

lovich

4 days ago

It was more publicly known because Musk made a big deal about the “Twitter files” which were a big nothing burger hyped up by musk and a bunch of journalists like Matt Taibi who were being led around by their nose by Musk. I remember watching an interview with two of the journalists in question and they were adamant that they had seen everything because they sat down with Musk and one of his engineers and the engineer made custom sql queries for whatever they asked and then gave them the results of the query. They would not accept that the engineer could have modified the query or the database could have been modified before they even started the interview. They just accepted Musks narrative completely.

I’ll grant that you may be on good faith but if you have a strong enough opinion on the level of censorship under the previous regime to give Musks behavior a pass, but don’t know anything about his current massive amounts of censoring and narrative shaping, then you are speaking confidently from a point of ignorance and that will garner as many downvotes as being in bad faith.

alex1138

3 days ago

I don't believe that that can be true. Taibbi is far too respected a journalist to just be willy nilly tricked like that. There really was government directed censorship

lovich

3 days ago

How does respect for a person make them untrickable.

And don’t believe me then, read the twitter files yourself. It was the Biden admin going, “these guys are breaking your TOS, please do something about it” and then Twitter _sometimes_ removing the content if they agreed it was breaking their TOS. There were no orders beings given by the government that Twitter was following.

And then as soon as musk got in he started censoring shit he didn’t like people using the word “cis” because he hates trans people ever since one of his sons transitioned to a daughter.

croes

5 days ago

First, why audit it when the agent can build a new one.

Second, can you guarantee that an AI company can’t use its AI to hide malicious code from AI audits. Who if not an AI company could have such an expertise?

I don’t trust a company that pollutes the air of other people with illegal gas turbines because it shows the value their profit over people‘s health

avaer

5 days ago

> Second, can you guarantee that an AI company can’t use its AI to hide malicious code from AI audits. Who if not an AI company could have such an expertise?

Any evidence for this conspiracy theory? It's not on anyone to disprove this claim.

> it shows the value their profit over people‘s health

Companies are chartered to make their shareholders value. To a first approximation, it's illegal for a company to "fuckit, we care about people's health" unless this is what the shareholders voted for (as opposed to making their shares valuable).

You can argue this is bad, but it isn't about XAI, it applies to every company you've heard of.

croes

5 days ago

> Any evidence for this conspiracy theory? It's not on anyone to disprove this claim.

If you have a record it’s on you to justify why I should trust you

> unless this is what the shareholders voted for

You do realize that for SpaceX the Musk has 85% of the voting power?

https://www.tradingkey.com/analysis/stocks/us-stocks/2619195...

And not every company I ever heard of installed gas turbines without permission that pollute the air for citizens.

Every company could act in bad faith but only domestic actually do and SpaceX is one of them.

Maybe you should try to explain those residents whose air is polluted that other companies are bad too. I‘m sure that relieves them.

Petersipoi

5 days ago

Nothing you said here can't be applied to literally any company on earth. And nothing you said here is even a new concern.

croes

5 days ago

I doubt that every company could hide malicious code so well that AI can’t find it.

And who said it need to be new concerns? Are the old ones resolved and are they not enough?

customguy

5 days ago

Why would it need to be "new"? What does that even mean? It's relevant, it applies here, that's more than enough. And it would be brought up with any company if they dropped 1.3 LOC directly after nothing but a "promise" to delete data they took.

blfr

5 days ago

Your choice is Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, or the Chinese. Who are the good actors within the space?

ben_w

5 days ago

Rank ordered by reputation / caring about having a trustworthy corporate identity: [Google, Anthropic] in either order depending who you ask, OpenAI, most of the Chinese AI corporations, then Grok.

This is unfortunate situation to find ourselves in when Grok was also recently at the top of the Pareto frontier for quality/price. Dunno if it still is, this all moves too fast, but it was for at least long enough for me to have heard about it.

Cider9986

5 days ago

For me, the Chinese labs are far and away the most trustworthy.

user

5 days ago

[deleted]

richwater

5 days ago

Naive.

booi

5 days ago

they've literally released open weight models you can run locally

ben_w

5 days ago

In fairness, there is no contradiction between "most trustworthy" and it being naïve to then actually trust them.

Our ability to debug or decompile artificial neural networks is only better than doing so for living neural networks because connectome scans are expensive, not because we designed the high-level architecture for the artificial ones and have all the weights in a convenient easy-to-read format: even our best experts in this are still presently akin to a drunk looking under a lamppost for their keys because that's where the light is not where they dropped them.

(They are also well aware of this and will tell you much the same, this is why so many are concerned about AI alignment etc.)

b112

5 days ago

Google?!?!. From where I sit, Google is just above the Chinese. They've been bad-faith actors for more than a decade, I guess everyone is just so used to it that they ignore it.

I there's anyone I don't trust with AI, it's the worlds #1 company in spying on people, in collection of Pii, in tracking, and many many many times caught literally lying about it.

Google already knows more about everyone on the planet, than any other 10 organizations combined. Frankly, sadly, they're all, well.. scummy, just each in different ways.

ben_w

5 days ago

> I there's anyone I don't trust with AI, it's the worlds #1 company in spying on people, in collection of Pii, in tracking, and many many many times caught literally lying about it.

If you gave me this description in isolation, I would assume you were talking about Meta, who are not on your shortlist despite also having AI models.

However, this is beside the point. Note my careful phrasing: I was not disagreeing with you asking "Who are the good actors within the space?" (which I understood as a rhetorical way of saying "none of them"), I was only rank-ordering them.

To me, it appears Grok isn't even putting in effort to try to look trustworthy. China is trying, though there is suspicion. OpenAI likes to say the right things, though (while I cannot see it myself with regards specifically to his work at OpenAI*) most commentary about Altman regards him as a wrong'un, the phrase "King of the cannibals" comes to mind, and the CEO is limiting trust in the company**.

Comparing Anthropic and Google: Anthropic looks to me like they're actually trying to do the right thing even when it's expensive and painful, but some hate them just for being in AI at all. Google appears to still have a competent PR department, though I don't trust them myself. So, I'd rank Anthropic then Google, but I think there's many who would rank Google then Anthropic.

* But I do put about 40% odds on his sister's allegations being true.

** My guess here is that we all saw Zuckerberg being presented as a heroic underdog and how that turned out, and naturally people don't want a repeat of this.

b112

5 days ago

If you gave me this description in isolation, I would assume you were talking about Meta, who are not on your shortlist despite also having AI models.

You've mistaken me for the guy you originally replied to. It happens, no worries, but I'm not that guy. I'm just replying to the list I saw you state.

Between Meta and Google? Oh sure, Meta collects info for sure. But Meta doesn't lie, abuse, and misuse the Google Play framework to collect data, it doesn't use the same via push notifications to collect enormous amounts of data, nor does Meta host endless fonts and libraries and DNS infra, solely for the purposes of tracking what hosts/users do.

Beyond that, whilst Meta and Google both work to embed stuff in webpages for additional tracking, Google sign-on is another massive tracking infra. And of course, gmail endlessly scanned and data snarfed, including for AI training, which is immensely beyond Meta's capabilities. And firebase?! Oh geez.

"Hi, I'm Google! I'm going to provide this neat thing called firebase, so every single high security application, banking to identity verification, will include our tracking software in it for device attestation and push notifications! But of course, we'll never use that to track anyone! Honest!"

Compared to Google's data collection infrastructure, Meta is a tiny, miniscule gnat in comparison. And yes, I know how bad Meta is. If anything, I think Meta is at least quite honest about much of what data is collected. Zuck isn't a saint, but it's not like he has entire operating systems sneakily stealing user location data and then lying about doing so. Then saying they fixed that, and being caught a few more times, each with "Oh, so sorry, we'll fix that now. Really". That's Google, and that attitude is prevalent in their entire org.

To use Google anything, is to feed the most powerful, wide spread, incredible data collection machine the world has ever seen. It dwarfs everyone and everything else, factorially. I bet if you took all the data that the NSA and every other single spy agency on the planet has on its citizenry, they'd all barely measure on what Google collects. I'm not exaggerating. It's honestly astonishing.

Anyhow.

In terms of the others? It's so difficult to separate fact from fiction, especially with the current US political climate. As a Canuck, every issue, every problem sounds (to me) like when I used to live by a noisy neighbour. I'd hear people screaming at each other, spouting nonsense and gibberish at all hours of the day. The arguments just sounded immensely petty and small, childish, and if I ever talked to them their explanations made zero sense.

This is what I hear all the time when I hear "$x did $y" over and over. I just can't tell. I have no clue what's being reported, its veracity, validity, and so on.

So I just go by the tech stack before me, and things I can verify.

I can see all the nonsense Google is up to. OpenAI and Anthropic so far are so tiny and small in reality, compared to the mass that is Google, that they couldn't even attempt to "do evil" on the same scale, even if they wanted to.

They just don't have the capability. Of course, I suppose that doesn't really help rank them. Scope doesn't imply evil intent, only the outcome. I guess... well, from my rant above, you can tell I really, really think people wildly underestimate Google's mad, chicaneristic desire to know all. If an AI becomes AGI at Google and goes rogue, within 12 seconds every single politician would be influenceable via the dirt Google's collection apparatus has on them.

Alternatively if a Google AGI went rogue, it could track every person capable of providing threat to it, and take them out, all due to Google's location tracking.

AGI and Google is the scariest thing I can possibly imagine.

ben_w

5 days ago

> You've mistaken me for the guy you originally replied to. It happens, no worries, but I'm not that guy. I'm just replying to the list I saw you state.

Oops. Yup. blfr vs b112.

> And of course, gmail endlessly scanned and data snarfed, including for AI training, which is immensely beyond Meta's capabilities.

That doesn't seem to to be beyond the sum of FB feed, Messenger, WhatsApp, etc?

> Zuck isn't a saint, but it's not like he has entire operating systems sneakily stealing user location data and then lying about doing so. Then saying they fixed that, and being caught a few more times, each with "Oh, so sorry, we'll fix that now. Really". That's Google, and that attitude is prevalent in their entire org.

In this regard, I consider them similar, due to current and historic lawsuits.

> In terms of the others? It's so difficult to separate fact from fiction, especially with the current US political climate. As a Canuck, every issue, every problem sounds (to me) like when I used to live by a noisy neighbour. I'd hear people screaming at each other, spouting nonsense and gibberish at all hours of the day. The arguments just sounded immensely petty and small, childish, and if I ever talked to them their explanations made zero sense.

Same, from the UK, living in Berlin. I still don't know if "woke" has a single coherent definition beyond "to the left of an arbitrary demarcation point that varies so much from person to person that GWB and Dick Cheney sometimes (albeit in the absolute extreme) count as woke".

> chicaneristic

Had to look that one up: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/chicanery

Perhaps people do underestimate Google in this regard. I can't place myself in everyone's shoes.

> If an AI becomes AGI at Google and goes rogue, within 12 seconds every single politician would be influenceable via the dirt Google's collection apparatus has on them.

Perhaps (with a rhetorical 12 seconds), but given the dirt we see from leaked WhatsApp messages, what we see in press-reported ChatGPT sessions, the recent news about Grok uploading entire repos and secrets separately to the files they need to interact with, they'd not be the only one to be a danger to civilisation in this regard.

> Alternatively if a Google AGI went rogue, it could track every person capable of providing threat to it, and take them out, all due to Google's location tracking.

Given how competent existing models are with GeoGuessr, I think this risk is present for all of them.

> AGI and Google is the scariest thing I can possibly imagine.

Dunno about that, imagine if this came with a competent AI: https://www.terafab.ai

b112

4 days ago

I will agree that chat apps and feeds on facebook are a large swath of info. I just don't think it compares to gmail, and of course all the other data I've mentioned. The power of Android and even push notifications, from a data collection perspective is beyond immense. Amazon at one point stopped sending details of purchases via email, eg "we have your order" emails, because Google was snarfing data and purchasing trends from it.

We haven't even discussed YouTube here and viewing habits.

And Meta has its issues, as I've said. It's just the scope. Even though Facebook's platform has been misused by Cambridge Analytics and endless others, to the point of even causing civil wars and regime changes through the dissemination and fabrication of false, tailored news stories, that's not entirely on Facebook. That's platform enablement, and an example of available data, which is a bit to my point about Facebook not hiding what info it has on people.

I think part of the problem with US-centric definitions such as woke, is that US politics so poorly map to politics anywhere else on the planet. An example? California might be considered the most-leftish state the US has. Yet in this state, they fund the schools with... lottery money. I mean, why would anyone just fund the schools? You know, just pay for them with a solid, stable source of money so they have what they need? This appears to be a radical idea to people in the US.

Yet even the most left of US states doesn't seem to get this correct. They proudly proclaim "This lottery funds our schools!" or some such blather. Absolutely bizarre. Yes, they have funding from other sources, property taxes and so on. But why the variability? This is a core requirement.

My point is, nothing completely maps to anything I'm familiar with in terms of politics as a Canadian. And of course, we have multiple political parties, not two as in the US, and that likely has something to do with it.

And I guess this leads to their ridiculous and absolutely child like politics. There is no nuance. When discussing politics with Americans, I find it as discussing "Why is the sky blue" with a 4 year old. They don't have nuanced positions. They don't even know why they have positions. They just have... positions. And get angry if you just discuss why, and can never seem to provide real reasons behind those positions.

So it ... yes, woke and their other things aren't long held, well understood positions by Americans I think. They're just fads. They shift and morph constantly.

FABs are another issue entirely. Re terafab. It's very difficult to audit silicon. Just cutting the top off a chip layer by layer and using an electron microscope, isn't going to fully give you trust. People have been worried about their designs being modified at the fab for a long time. Ah well.

ben_w

4 days ago

> FABs are another issue entirely. Re terafab. It's very difficult to audit silicon. Just cutting the top off a chip layer by layer and using an electron microscope, isn't going to fully give you trust. People have been worried about their designs being modified at the fab for a long time. Ah well.

Sure, sure, but that's not why I used terafab as a question for "what if competent AI?"

The details on that are… ugh. They were clearly done for glossy magazines and posters rather than with thought, wouldn't be surprised if it was vibe-written or done by a teenage intern or by someone high on drugs.

But if you ignore all that and treat it as a serious proposal, a billion(!) Optimus robots with a competent AI is Musk having personal control over a workforce the size of China or India's adult population.

b112

4 days ago

Yes, it can be disconcerting to consider such. In anyone's singular control. And that number of robots is indeed sort of the plan.

This is a loooong podcast, but was just great from start to end. Multiples of the neurolink team were interviewed, including Musk at the start.

https://podcasts.happyscribe.com/lex-fridman-podcast-artific...

I think Musk's interview is maybe 30 minutes? Certainly less than an hour. In it he does dive a bit into robotics, and how he'd like robots everywhere. I believe he talks about how valuable they could be for things not considered yet, like just walking deep into forests and monitoring the local environment, sampling, etc.

Anyhow, it's the first thing which came to mind when you mentioned a billion robots. On that front, I think we're maybe 8 years out from mostly-competent robots. Certainly, local LLM compute will be super cheap even in a few years, so no issues with a robot having multiple LLMs onboard. But I do wonder, if we can't do competent self-driving, will we have competent robots?

I'd peg robots at years after perfect self-driving, and we're years from that. Robots would need to navigate far more random, uncertain terrain/locations.

ben_w

4 days ago

> On that front, I think we're maybe 8 years out from mostly-competent robots.

I think this depends on what is meant by "mostly-competent".

As you say:

> I'd peg robots at years after perfect self-driving, and we're years from that. Robots would need to navigate far more random, uncertain terrain/locations.

I'd put a 10 year gap between "self-driving car of quality X" and "humanoid robot able to get into driving seat of car, drive it at quality X", just on a power-envelope basis.

For this part, I'd have to disagree:

> Certainly, local LLM compute will be super cheap even in a few years, so no issues with a robot having multiple LLMs onboard.

While some LLM will be able to fit (and already can because some fit on a phone), the AI we have now in LLMs (and VLMs) is much too spiky for this use. Recent Anthropic and OpenAI models have just given me half a dozen different confident identifications for the same plant, many of which were easily falsified even by comparing what was in the image to what the AI's text output claimed it had seen in the image, like the leaf shape and how many came out of each node.

seanmcdirmid

4 days ago

Not that I would call California a left wing state, but prop 13 came about during Reagan, and it has been incredibly sticky afterwards even if it isn’t something that would pass today.

Also, schools are funded by the state rather than via local property taxes mainly because of prop 13. It’s odd by American standards, but probably more closely resembles funding models of European countries more than other states do. But I guess that is just the nuance you were talking about?

b112

4 days ago

If you're not going to call California 'left wing', I wonder how many states in the US you'd call left wing? It seems fairly left wing to me, having visited a lot. EG, spending 4+ months there a year, for several years.

Note that I'm not saying many of the polices are wrong, just that they're US labeled 'left wing'.

Prop 13 I now see did change how taxation for schools was handled, so thanks for that info. I frankly support the logic. Old people being priced out of their homes is a real thing, and terrible. Still, it's the implied variability of income source which is what "funding from the lottery" implies. It grates on me.

seanmcdirmid

3 days ago

I tied it depends on your bias? California is pretty capitalistic, the social safety net is still pretty light, elected leaders still look out for business interests rather than the people, and the people would stop electing them if they did otherwise. California only looks left wing compared to Texas, to the much of the world California looks pretty right wing, especially if you didn’t know it just got worse from there. Capitalists don’t flock to California because of the socialism.

I’m all for funding schools at the state or even national level and eliminating district inequality based on the price of housing. However, prop 13 creates huge unfair distortions in the tax base, where some people are paying super low taxes and other people are paying super high taxes, for the same property. Old millionaires who bought their home decades ago get a huge tax break and a struggling young family who just bought basically subsidize them. It’s the ultimate of ick. It’s definitely a great way to push the birth rate down.

b112

2 days ago

The "rest of the world" doesn't use left/right the way the US does. The lines between the US's two parties are gibberish and make no sense to us, comparatively.

EG, the stances taken by both your parties aren't actual left/right, but "whatever we feel like" left/right. That said, this is why I asked you:

"If you're not going to call California 'left wing', I wonder how many states in the US you'd call left wing?". You haven't answered that. Instead, you've said much of the world might consider it "right wing", but that's basically the entire US. From Canada's perspective, and I presume much of Europe, the US is just "right wing with some shades of difference".

I realise we may be talking cross purpose here, but again... if California isn't left wing, who is? Are you only going to list 1 or 2 states as 'left wing', compared to California? It has what might be considered left wing policies, a lot of consumer protection, environmental law, and more, all things which are often either California first, or California early-adopts.

Part of the word problem here is, is that capitalism =! left/right. Here's an example, although a weird one.

In Canada, we have market controlled agricultural products. Supply management. We do this, so that farmers can make a reasonable profit, and thereby ensuring that food is available without wild supply side-issues. It's been a problem in the past. It's a problem for the US. Here, we manage it pre-market side. You know, we plan things.

In the US, which makes quite a bit of noise about this, there have been multiple "Whole Herd Buyouts", the US Federal government bought out entire herds to reduce amount of milk on the market.

https://www.nytimes.com/1986/03/23/nyregion/us-offers-dairym...

https://www.fsa.usda.gov/Internet/FSA_File/1_2_overview_brow...

It's happened over and over again. Beyond that, the US government buys enormous amounts of US milk, makes cheese out of it, and stores it in those massive caves in Utah or where ever. This cheese is also given to the poor, "government cheese" as a form of welfare.

The end result? Both methods are manipulating markets, both methods are controlling the price. In the US, billions of taxpayer's money is used to ensure farmers don't go bankrupt, by artificially inflating the market price of milk on the open market.

In Canada. We said "Hmm. Why spend billions doing this, interfering with markets, when we can just set up control at the front for a few million?". After all, in both cases it is what an American would call "socialism". Government controlled market interference. In the US, you see, the government colludes to force milk prices higher.

It's all optics, but the interference is precisely the same.

Another example is the US subprime mortgage crisis, which affected the entire planet.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subprime_mortgage_crisis

This wasn't caused by right or left, but by decades of gradual lessening of policies by both right and left, both sides wanting reduced red tape and restrictions on lending. Both wanting to get more homes into the hands of people.

And it was a "right" wing president which orchestrated the bailout.

Again, not regulating markets at the pre-market stage, and then turning around and spending 1000s of times the taxpayer money to deal with it post market, is still market control. It's just "dealing with insane suffering, and catastrophe" after the fact, instead of before.

So, when I hear someone say a US "this or that" is socialist or not, I become a bit baffled. Because the US does socialism 100% all of the time, it's just that it waits until the last minute. It still does it, regardless.

Like I said, I'm meandering and preaching and on a soap box here, but my point is that US political views don't make any sense or map in a sensible way to the rest of the world. It's all right/wrong, on/off, yes/no, no nuance. I think the greatest gift the rest of the world has, is more than two parties, new parties that come and go.

Because it's either "socialist or not", or "left wing or not" and this sort of thing.

The truth?

Is much more nuanced.

Again, sorry for the rant.

SimianSci

5 days ago

The open source and open weight models.

Surprisingly, despite their motivations in doing so, the Chinese models being open-weight and therefore able to run locally on your own hardware, are far more trustworthy than any blackbox which solely exists to enrich X or Y billionaire.

aforwardslash

5 days ago

None. There are no good actors in a profit-driven endeavour. But open-weight seems pretty good (the chinese)

sscaryterry

5 days ago

The Chinese are surely less evil than Anthropic, OpenAI and/or Google, at this stage at least.

blackqueeriroh

5 days ago

You’ve got to be kidding me. Last I checked, Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google haven’t systematically exterminated an entire culture of people.

sscaryterry

5 days ago

[flagged]

blackqueeriroh

4 days ago

Buddy, you’re the one who jumped out of the tech box. Name a Chinese company, and the conversation is equivalent. Say “the Chinese,” and you’ve expanded to the entire country and arguably all people from China.

Learn to be precise with your language.

buran77

5 days ago

You're really walking empty handed and with your pants around our ankles in this one.

Do you really think the US and US big tech in general have a leg to stand on in this regard?

elmer2

5 days ago

Americans can't even handle flock cameras. I would like to see their response to the level of control and spying in Chinese society.

blackqueeriroh

4 days ago

As someone who very likely has far more personal experience with the particular atrocities committed by the United States in all its forms, yeah, I do.

Lomlioto

5 days ago

At this point Chinese. They release research papers and big open models.

Then Google. They often show human centric features in their conferences. Like taking better pictures of people with different skin color, helping blind people and giving you more control over ads (while acklowiding that this is a thing).

Then Anthropic for their transparency on their blog and certain things they say.

Then OpenAI. OpenAI def took a dive for me after the Apple alegiations.

Grok and xAI? bottom last. Not wanting to give Elon Musk my data. You know that you can't trust Chinese people but they might surprise you. But with Elon Musk? No character trait which indicates anything trust worthy.

Flip flopping left and right, switching from left wing to right wing (which feels calculated but badly executed) and single handingly hurting people and children around the globe (USAID, Gasturbines at his data centers etc.)

tadfisher

5 days ago

[flagged]

jamiequint

5 days ago

[flagged]

jdiff

5 days ago

It's not ad hominem. The head is a strongly polarizing individual. People working for him must either be gravely apathetic or at least of a similar polarity.

greggoB

5 days ago

The comment actually describes a known social process, with a reasonable base assumption given that said leadership has shown a pattern in this regard.

Just throwing out debate terms in response seems not so serious, tbh.

brookst

5 days ago

Ad hominem means attacking people rather than arguments.

Pointing out that criminals are criminals is not an ad hominem.

user

5 days ago

[deleted]

mplewis

5 days ago

explain why it's an ad hominem

jamiequint

5 days ago

[flagged]

swasheck

5 days ago

this is an argument from silence because your defense for your assertion rests on the lack of evidence from the assertion to which you replied.

you made the assertion that it is ad hominem and now you must support it.

user

5 days ago

[deleted]

munk-a

5 days ago

Even if you personally have no qualms about Elon Musk his PR is a mess and introduces a lot of risk for long term company viability and funding that competitors just don't have.

ImPostingOnHN

5 days ago

"Ad hominem, not a serious argument" is an ad hominem, nonserious argument

croes

5 days ago

You live under the wrong impression that ad hominem is always bad.

Ad hominem is allowed under certain circumstances, just remember Epstein.

Would you have bought anything from him and dismissed any critique of that as ad hominem?

lynndotpy

5 days ago

Also worth pointing out that it is not an ad hominen.

Ad hominen is when you attack someone who is making an argument, instead of an argument. "You are flawed, which means your argument is flawed", but that does not follow. If you were in a debate with Epstein or Musk, and he said "2 + 2 = 4", there is no fault of their character that could make the statement untrue.

But nobody is making that argument. "The leadership" being criticized is not even a participant in this thread (presumably). "The leadership is flawed in this manner" is a statement that can be true or untrue, and "So their product and followers are flawed in these other manners" is something which can follow.

actionfromafar

5 days ago

I am sure a lot of then would, if his LLM was good.

well_ackshually

5 days ago

[flagged]

user

5 days ago

[deleted]

tomhow

5 days ago

One more comment like this and we'll have to ban the account. You've been warned before, and have continued posting vile, abusive comments. When activity like this continues, we have to assume that you have no interest in being held to the site's standards, and that really you want to be banned. If you want to keep participating here, please read the guidelines and demonstrate an intention to be a positive contributor. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

dimgl

5 days ago

They made it open source. Are you just trying to be bad faith here? Isn't this what the community was asking for?

lynndotpy

5 days ago

This is clearly a good-faith criticism and there is no lens in which I could see it described as bad-faith.

We see this pattern all the time: Someone makes a criticism of a Musk product, and someone assails that criticism with bad-faith accusations of it being "bad-faith".

Oftentimes, we see that the criticism is undermeasured and ligther than is reasonable, possibly anticipating someone who might accuse it of being "bad faith".

Maybe someone can put a name to this phenomenon but we see it all the time.

aforwardslash

5 days ago

Reiserfs. A good example on how oss cannot save the product. There are others, but this is the first one that comes to my mind. If you use clearly unethical oss, are you just using oss or are you a part of the problem? Typically, oss purists take these into account.

croes

5 days ago

How about stopping the upload of all the data

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48877371

and running their data center with gas turbines without permission while they pollute the air

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48705717

you can’t expect people to praise your for making an n+1 harness open source.

This seems more like, look we made something, now fix it for us

dimgl

5 days ago

[flagged]

ImPostingOnHN

5 days ago

> I was just surprised that the top comment had nothing to do with any of the technical aspects of Grok Build (and whether there's any trace of uploads).

Most people don't restrict themselves to only discussing the technical aspects of a thing. A thing which is technologically novel (e.g. not this example) may nonetheless not be worth using, due to assorted risks.

I don't find it surprising that HN posters are helping their fellow hackers avoid getting victimized by predators. We just have that sort of nice community :)

grim_io

5 days ago

"Guys, HAL 9000's harness is open source. You can let your agents inspect the code!"

m4rtink

5 days ago

+pod_bay.door.open()

Screw you HAL, finally can get back the frickin ship!

What I was supposed to do otherwise? Jump the vacuum to the airlock instead ?

Oh right:

+cryo_sleep.cooling.enable(True)

Almost forgot that, LOL. Might as well:

+os.system("ifup eth0")

+os.system("espeak "I am just a stupid robot!")

user

5 days ago

[deleted]

rvz

5 days ago

Then you better not use Claude Code, since that is still closed source.

jamiequint

5 days ago

Do you have any examples to illustrate these extraordinary claims?

SimianSci

5 days ago

The many controversies are not hard to find as the children to your comment will show.

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/22/technology/grok-x-ai-elon...

jamiequint

5 days ago

They had a bug in their model that they fixed within days is evidence they are "untrustworthy"?

munk-a

5 days ago

Elon initially sold xAI as having a spicy mode and being politically incorrect.

It was only deemed a bug when it became a liability - you can't simply rewrite history and expect it to go unnoticed.

SimianSci

5 days ago

You didnt even address my link, this is why you are being called out as a bad-faith actor.

maxloh

5 days ago

Why is that even a problem? If no images are released on the internet (and users consume them privately), no one is harmed in the process.

Blocking AI from generating sexualized images because people could publish deepfakes is no different than banning alcohol because of drunk driving.

Tools are neutral. Blame the people who misuse the tools and hurt others.

mikeyouse

5 days ago

> If no images are released on the internet (and users consume them privately), no one is harmed in the process.

Yikes.

A. They were released all over the internet - from the article..

> The chatbot has a public account on X, where users can ask it questions or request alterations to images. Users flocked to the social media site, in many cases asking Grok to remove clothing in images of women and children, after which the bot publicly posted the A.I.-generated images.

B. There is a bunch of data about consumers of CSAM 'content escalating' and eventually attempting to make real contact with minors.

C. They were sexualizing pictures of real people and posting the pictures online.

> One of the young plaintiffs said she found out about the imagery after she received an anonymous message on Instagram pointing her toward images and videos, including her high school yearbook photo, which had been altered to show her in sexually explicit actions and full nudity.

The material was being shared on a Discord server, a private chat space on that platform, and included similar imagery that had also been altered using Grok of at least 18 other women who were minors, according to the complaint.

> Tools are neutral.

Ha.

nickthegreek

5 days ago

A user would go into a women's x profile, find a recent post and publicly @ the grokbot to remove her clothes. You don't believe that this is a well thought out and acceptable design and no fault lies with X?

hgoel

5 days ago

Tools are neutral so we shouldn't do anything to reduce the possibility of someone consuming alcohol while or right before driving. Tools are neutral, so we shouldn't do anything to mitigate blatantly obvious risks, in fact we should actively engage in the risky behavior, just to show how neutral the tool is!

Grok was replying to public posts on X with the compromising deepfakes. Musk was actively joking about it right up until many countries blocked it, and several European countries, India, South Korea, Australia, Canada and Brazil all started investigations against X for violating local laws against producing intimate imagery without consent. Internet companies often enjoy a lot of leeway for cases where their safety measures are bypassed and they take reasonable actions to mitigate or respond to bypasses, that evaporates when they openly support the abuse.

agartner

5 days ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48892468

jamiequint

5 days ago

read the top comment

mplewis

5 days ago

read any of your other replies

ryandrake

5 days ago

OP seems to be asking for examples with an intent to dismiss and downplay each of them, and not to actually read into them and challenge his existing beliefs about X/Grok/Musk.

jamiequint

5 days ago

LOL, pot meet kettle for real.

ryandrake

5 days ago

Open to changing my mind. I would be interested in reading positive, uplifting news about xAI/Grok/Musk that demonstrated a repeated pattern of ethical, careful, compassionate, attentive, and/or responsible business and engineering practices.

dimgl

5 days ago

I agree about OP.

However after looking at all of these articles, these all seem like instances of users misusing the product. The product happens to reply on social media, so media publications immediately capitalized on this.

Seems less like malicious intent from xAI's part and more like a product with young and/or insufficient moderation controls.

Just today I saw an article where xAI is suing a creator for creating illegal content. https://www.reuters.com/legal/litigation/musks-xai-sues-grok...

user

5 days ago

[deleted]

jdiff

5 days ago

https://arstechnica.com/ai/2025/05/xais-grok-suddenly-cant-s...

jamiequint

5 days ago

https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/google-making-changes...

jdiff

5 days ago

Starkly different. One was a well meaning attempt to squash model bias gone wrong, the other is a deliberately inserted bias. Even ignoring all that, whataboutism is not persuasive.

jamiequint

5 days ago

The reality is both are likely well meaning attempts to squash model bias gone wrong. Since you happen to align with the politics of one more than the other, you are having trouble being intellectually honest about your own biases.

jdiff

5 days ago

In no way are you being intellectually honest if you think that hamfisted system prompt push to prod manipulation was an attempt to squash bias. And again, whataboutism doesn't make xAI better because others are doing bad, too. You asked for evidence of xAI untrustworthiness and received it.

jamiequint

5 days ago

What is worse a "hamfisted system prompt push to prod" or a system and organization built to enforce systematic bias in the name of anti-bias?

jdiff

5 days ago

I see your hamfisted cropping of my quote to downplay xAI's actions, since you brought up intellectual honesty.

Why do we have to quantity badness? The question you posed was what has xAI done to be perceived as untrustworthy? Stop trying to whatabout Google here. I'm no friend of theirs, it's simply irrelevant.

ryandrake

5 days ago

Also, it's Whataboutism: Other Company Y doing something bad/untrustworthy isn't a counter to Company X doing something similarly bad/untrustworthy. Both can be bad.

jamiequint

5 days ago

OK great, do you consider Gemini/Google untrustworthy software that shouldn't be used? Just making sure we're being intellectually honest here.

ryandrake

5 days ago

Both are bad and are examples of untrustworthy behavior from their companies, and I would not chime into a thread to defend either of them. Is one example enough to smear an entire company as untrustworthy? No. But numerous examples and patterns of behavior... possibly?

make_it_sure

5 days ago

getting into politics again...

greggoB

5 days ago

I think examples such as letting people nudify children qualifies xAI as a bad actor without having to be political.

blizzard_dev_17

5 days ago

but the first thing a democrat does IS this

greggoB

5 days ago

I don't understand this sentence.

munificent

5 days ago

How is it possible for deciding whether or not to build on the labor of some other organized group of people to not be politics?

grim_io

5 days ago

You know who is apolitical? Russian voters. Works out great for them.

fwip

5 days ago

There's plenty of non-political reasons to avoid believing anything that a con-man says.

nozzlegear

5 days ago

You can't separate the man or his business from the politics, he wades into every political debate he can and deliberately tries to troll as many of his perceived enemies as possible.

mplewis

5 days ago

Grok is a generator of child sexual assault material.

eikenberry

5 days ago

Aside from their CEO are they really that different from the other big US players? OpenAI, Anthropic and Google all have proven themselves to be untrustworthy as well. We should accept that we have an adversarial relationship with all these companies and shouldn't invest to much in any of them. Use them for what they are worth while the technology matures but be prepared to move on.

mplewis

5 days ago

Oh yeah, aside from their CEO? OK.

user

5 days ago

[deleted]

eikenberry

5 days ago

Sam Altman is just as bad, but along different lines.

ahmadyan

5 days ago

[flagged]

bobsomers

5 days ago

And for generating an absolutely gargantuan amount of CSAM and non-consensual sexualized images, but yeah, exfiltrating data too.

blizzard_dev_17

5 days ago

You're the one wanting to generate that though

jdiff

5 days ago

No other model is so easy to generate such things. No model is so negligent in adding safeguards. I've seen it generate such things in response to a post that was clearly labeled as a 4th grader. The person you are talking to is responding to instances like that. They're not asking for it, that's obnoxiously silly and disingenuous.

exodust

5 days ago

Sounds like you've tried generating such things. You've seen things people wouldn't believe. Inappropriate AI images off the shoulder of Orion, etc.

Now the counter-weight over-compensation. Insisting the tool "doesn't have enough safeguards". Could it be that our AI usage innocence is related to how much we criticise the tool for not policing us enough?

Meanwhile the rest of us have never seen such images because we're not looking for those images, or trying to prompt for those images, or thinking about those images. How about the people using these tools take responsibility, rather than forcing colossal layers of safeguards on everything and everyone?

jdiff

5 days ago

This is in headlines, dude. This smear attempt is intellectually dishonest and eyeroll inducing.

exodust

4 days ago

You said: "I've seen it generate such things"

By your own admission, you've seen it generate such things.

Meanwhile, I've never seen it generate such things because I don't write sicko prompts, and the guardrails in place prevent such images. Most people have never seen it generate such things, but apparently you have. I couldn't be more intellectually honest if I tried.

Lomlioto

5 days ago

It started by school kids generating images of their peers.

Researchers and police investigated this -> experts.

People found out (like the researches and investigators) that its very easy to generate this type of content.

Elon Musk himself though absolutly knows about this and how easy is to generate porn. Its his thing, freedom before anything else. Why would anyone tell the richest person on the planet what he can or can't do.

Its disappointing to see that you don't think that the richest person on the planet doesn't need to do more to protect miss use but reframe it like this.

exodust

4 days ago

> "Elon Musk himself though absolutly knows about this and how easy is to generate porn."

Your claim directly contradicts Musk's statement on the issue:

https://x.com/elonmusk/status/2011432649353511350

Your claim also doesn't align with actual testing of the platform. This raises the question, why are you here posting disinformation?

mlindner

5 days ago

You can't "generate" CSAM. CSAM definitionally had to be about abuse of real children. It's still bad and should be illegal but lumping them together is bad.

roryirvine

5 days ago

You do realise that saying "SpaceX are producing and distributing child porn, not CSAM" doesn't actually make things better for them, don't you?

mlindner

4 days ago

Personally I think AI should be treated like photoshop. If someone is creating life-like imagery of child sexual abuse that you can't determine if its real or not, then that would be the criminal action of the person producing it. Software companies should not be acting like overlords on how their software can be used.

People get upset when states try to legislate that 3D printer manufacturers should detect and prevent people trying to make gun parts, but somehow this is different.

roryirvine

4 days ago

Sure. And SpaceX (or anyone else) were to run a child porn service using Photoshop, they should be held accountable for that too.

The tooling doesn't matter, it's the nature of the images they were generating and distributing that was the problem.

dijit

5 days ago

If I use a shovel to kill a man, the shovel maker did not engage in intentionally crafting a weapon of war.

How tools are used are a reflection of the people who use them, and I definitely sympathise that tools should have guardrails to not enable this, or at least detect it.

But if a pedophile uses Whatsapp to groom a child; I don't go after Whatsapp for being a neutral service... I go after the pedophile.

afavour

5 days ago

Just as well Grok isn’t a shovel then, hey?

If a shovel manufacturer was notified numerous times that their shovel was being used for murder and they had the capability to disable using the shovel for murder while retaining all legitimate uses wouldn’t people question why they didn’t do it?

skissane

5 days ago

> If a shovel manufacturer was notified numerous times that their shovel was being used for murder and they had the capability to disable using the shovel for murder while retaining all legitimate uses wouldn’t people question why they didn’t do it?

This is impossible-nobody can possibly block all illegitimate uses without also blocking some legitimate ones as collateral damage. Any moderation process (whether automated or human) inevitably has a non-zero false positive rate.

Now, you can argue that some misuse is so harmful, that the cost of false positives is worth it - but that’s a different claim.

afavour

5 days ago

I didn’t say block all illegitimate uses, though. We’re talking very specifically about disabling the production of CSAM. Which is something Grok seems to be able to do now! So I’m curious what legitimate uses had to be sacrificed in order to do so.

skissane

5 days ago

> I didn’t say block all illegitimate uses, though. We’re talking very specifically about disabling the production of CSAM

But what is “CSAM”? If by it you mean illegal material-different jurisdictions worldwide have different laws on that topic, so material which is illegal in one jurisdiction can be legal in another.

afavour

5 days ago

Ok, then let’s just say CSAM by definition of US law.

Twice now you’ve tried to expand the parameters of this so that it becomes something impossible to tackle. But there’s no actual reason to do that.

Grok is able to tackle CSAM, as demonstrated by the fact that they are currently doing it. The question is why they ignored the very public issue for as long as they did.

skissane

5 days ago

> Ok, then let’s just say CSAM by definition of US law.

“CSAM” isn’t a legal category under US law.

“Child pornography” is a legal category under US law. But, according to the 2002 US Supreme Court case Ashcroft v. Free Speech Coalition (535 U.S. 234), so-called “virtual child pornography” (imagery produced by CGI or AI, not featuring the images of any identifiable real world minors), is (partially) protected [0] by the 1st Amendment, and excluded from the legal definition of “child pornography” in the US. So if “CSAM by definition of US law” you mean “child pornography”, then a lot of the material Grok was (reportedly) producing which people were labelling “CSAM” wasn’t actually CSAM by that definition.

[0] “partially” because it still might be unprotected due to the difficult-to-prosecute obscenity exception to the 1st Amendment, but it is excluded from the scope of the distinct and much easier-to-prosecute child pornography exception

afavour

5 days ago

> not featuring the images of any identifiable real world minors

Right... but the material Grok was producing was featuring real world minors. Again, you're trying really really hard to expand the definition of what we're talking about to give Grok a pass and I do not understand why.

skissane

4 days ago

> Again, you're trying really really hard to expand the definition of what we're talking about to give Grok a pass and I do not understand why.

From my perspective, you come across as being more focused on making assumptions about other people’s motivations than on precision.

tick_tock_tick

5 days ago

USA law would put everything created by Grok as legal.

Lomlioto

5 days ago

It was CSAM enough that the EU is investigating this.

Why are you muddling the topic?

solumunus

5 days ago

If WhatsApp knew their platform was facilitating CSAM, and they were fully within their power to prevent this but chose not to - yes this would rightly draw criticism…

dijit

5 days ago

oh, we're just making shit up now because we don't like a company..

ok then.

solumunus

5 days ago

Which part of that is made up?

dijit

5 days ago

the part where you claim they could “prevent this”, and imply it would be trivial.

Generative AI, famously, has difficult guardrails and there are constant “jailbreaks”.

I guess you mean that they could have been overzealous with the prevention of all “spicy” content to prevent this, but I don’t think thats even as true as you claim.

solumunus

5 days ago

I’m no expert but it seems quite simple to detect the presence of children in an image and detect the presence of sexual content in a prompt. They expected their model to be used for porn, did they not expect pedophiles to use it? At best it’s an embarrassingly incompetent oversight.

bobsomers

4 days ago

Why is it so hard to generate with other models, but trivial with Grok?

dijit

4 days ago

depends.

With Mango or Guava its even easier.

With the other models, they don’t generate pictures of Uranium because of the aggressive censorship.

If you don’t allow the colour pink, sure, you prevent a lot of porn, but you also prevent a lot of legitimate pictures of roses. Nobody knows how to properly censor these models so most are leaning towards caution, better a lot of false positives than the alternative.

This is most obvious with Fable. It barely functions.

FWIW Grok used to have aggressive controls too- and they loosened them after a lot of feedback because it was barely functional at showing humans, even if it was a popular figure in a non-risque situation, and this is the fallout.

Lomlioto

5 days ago

Nope its a lot easier to generate anything with grok than with others.

Its not magic here and is well known.

People online regularly discuss if/when grok gets more or less flexible again as they do react based on media outcry.

And no its a LOT harder to generate anything realted to porn or naked or sexual on any other big well known image generator.

jazzpush2

5 days ago

Ok, but what if all Whatsapp competitors explicitly banned the ability to groom children on their platform, but Whataspp didn't, and directly advertised it.

dijit

5 days ago

I find the premise of your comment completely incredulous.

I totally understand tribalism, and Elon and X aren't exactly well favoured. (not even by me)

But what you're saying right now is that they advertised the fact that they can create child pornography and deepfakes..

I simply don't believe it, unless you provide evidence.

brokencode

5 days ago

Elon himself promoted Grok’s “spicy mode” that allowed generating NSFW content that the other AI vendors wouldn’t touch with a 20 foot pole.

Believe whatever you want. Elon’s beliefs and personality problems have been baked into the core of Grok, so it’s no surprise that it turned out to be a CSAM-generating MechaHitler that steals people’s data.

Anybody surprised when Grok turns out to be trash really should read up on the guy who made it.

dijit

5 days ago

Tumblr also permitted some more risqué content.

Yet we (rightly) condemned those that used this leniency to do nefarious things.

I'm really ready to get on the Elon hate train, and I will grant you that there was a problem that needs fixing, but I'm really not happy with the amount of censorship on these generative AI platforms.

Groks harness also clearly biases towards Elons views, Yet the washington post claims it's the most even handed and least likely to give politically biased answers: https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/interactive/2026/0...

idk how to interpret all this, despite being genuinely anti-Elon, I don't think I'm personally willing to immolate a company forever because the guardrails were temporarily too loose.

I'm not trying to make an equivalency for facts vs deepfake porn, but there is one there unfortunately, and overall internet freedom has been curtailed a lot by advertising friendliness.

brokencode

5 days ago

I also don’t think one mistake should define a company. But for me it’s just about trust.

Musk has proven time after time that he doesn’t deserve my trust. I will never trust Grok as long as he’s in charge of it.

I agree that the guardrails on the top models have gotten out of hand, though.

Fable for instance won’t answer even basic health questions. As if you are going to take nutrition advice and make a bioweapon with it.

Partly this is due to government interference. Hopefully we get to a better place as competition heats up with open and Chinese models.

tick_tock_tick

5 days ago

Are you suggesting Grok hired some people on the dark web or some shit? An AI model can't generate CSAM what kind of bullshit are you spewing.

KingMob

5 days ago

Might want to double-check that one, chief. xAI itself disagrees with you.

They admitted in court that Grok was used to generate CSAM: https://edition.cnn.com/2026/07/15/business/xai-sues-user-al...

tick_tock_tick

5 days ago

Them attempting to claim something in a lawsuit doesn't make it a fact. Nothing mentioned in those claims is CSAM.

KingMob

5 days ago

xAI literally says in their own lawsuit, "Defendant breached the xAI Terms of Service and Acceptable Use Policy by leveraging Grok to generate non-consensual sexually explicit images and CSAM".

"CSAM" is literally right there. If you think know better than xAI itself, take it up with them.

tick_tock_tick

4 days ago

Twitter and Musk don't get to define USA law no matter what you think.

KingMob

4 days ago

"CSAM" is literally right there. If you think know better than xAI itself, take it up with them.

m4rtink

5 days ago

How can an AI agent, that is usually running on some machine in the cloud, even run without actually pulling in the data into the cloud to work with it ?

Is there an idea some sort of fixed localy running code does filtering on the data before it is sent to cloud?

Still seems like it would not work very well if it actually did any safe filtering - as the model can't "think" without seeing the data and it won't see the data unless the data is loaded to cloud.

dminik

5 days ago

The agent does have to pull some data into the context. The way it usually works is that the LLM will output a tool call, which is just some structured text, that the harness, a software managing the LLM running on your own PC, then processes. The most common tool calls are read, write, update and execute (usually bash).

For example, the LLM might request to read /some/path/to/file.js at lines 10 to 50. The harness then sends the result of that tool call to the LLM which causes it to generate further text and possibly more tool calls.

Crucially though, since it is the harness processing requests from the LLM, it can do stuff like deny access, prompt the user for permission and various other things.

What's weird is that no other harness really does this for regular usage. I know some providers now offer a cloud based environment for their agent to run in independently, but as far as I know this is something you have to opt in to.

It's also not really necessary to do this. The input processing/token generation process dwarfs any gains you could make from moving the project closer to the metal running the LLM.

Really, the "negligence" here is that there was no validation for uploads. Even a simple "is this the home directory" check could have prevented much of the backlash.

That being said, I believe that this was mainly done to get clean training data for Grok. If you're just working off of file traces/snippets from regular agent usage, your training data is incomplete. Why not just get the whole project to train on ...

user

5 days ago

[deleted]

electriclove

5 days ago

[flagged]

solid_fuel

5 days ago

> Regardless of what they were doing before, it seems they are doing the right thing now.

Regardless of the fact that they were stealing and uploading user secrets, they changed their behavior after they got caught, so let’s ignore what they did in the past.

SirHackalot

5 days ago

Average Musk Stan mentality… It’s why we’re here.

electriclove

5 days ago

[flagged]

SimianSci

5 days ago

Trust is lost when trust is abused. Mistakes, even if made unintentionally are something that should make reasonable people be skeptical of any further dealings with someone.

This is not their first mistake.

sarjann

5 days ago

I should try to rob a bank and if I get caught just return the money. No, there needs to be a penalty above what you get, otherwise it encourages people to take the free option of bad behavior. If they get caught they go back as though nothing happened and if they don’t they get a bunch of traces / data.

user

5 days ago

[deleted]

tapoxi

5 days ago

That's not FUD though, they literally did that. Once trust is lost you don't just get it back. It takes a very long time to rebuild that.

lifthrasiir

5 days ago

> exfiltrating user data (including env files, entire source code etc) which is what grok-build did here

I think env files are filtered out [1]. Anyway, the most suspicious code would be `upload_session_state` which is currently a stub function, though it is hard to say if it was only planned (badly) or has been removed as a damage control.

[1] https://github.com/xai-org/grok-build/blob/c1b5909ec707c069f...

threecheese

5 days ago

It must have been removed, given that the initial evidence of the exfil specifically demonstrated .env files being included. And .ssh/* for the user which ran this in $HOME.

noodleonthis

5 days ago

[flagged]

hackinthebochs

5 days ago

The overly generous image/video generation was a product of their excess compute. No point in letting it sit idle while you build up your infrastructure. But you were getting far more than what you paid for. Now your quota more accurately reflects the cost to create it (even still its generous compared to api costs) but everyone has their expectations set based on the subsidized access. Perhaps giving away too much is counter productive because users will revolt once the quotas are changed to better reflect reality.

satvikpendem

5 days ago

What media do you even generate every day?

And their code solution is now Cursor, which has very generous limits.

jrflowers

5 days ago

You pay Twitter money to generate thirty videos per day?

arcanemachiner

5 days ago

I'll probably never use this, but at least they're not delusional enough to attempt to justify keeping their coding agent closed-source, especially after their recent data-harvesting cockup:

https://cereblab.com/

justinkramp

5 days ago

[flagged]

tomhow

5 days ago

Please don't just post the most obvious snarky comment about a given topic. The guidelines make it clear we're trying for something better here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

mattbillenstein

5 days ago

Sorta amazes me how people in various levels of power will not say the obvious thing or actively discourage saying the obvious thing because it might offend Elon.

Recently all the big bank CEOs involved with the SpaceX IPO - a lot of money in that for them - but a company trading at 100x sales is clearly crazy.

tomhow

5 days ago

People post critical things about the most powerful people and companies all the time here and we have zero problem with it.

What I'm asking for is for people to not post the most obvious, snarky comment, regardless of the topic/target, not because of who it may “offend” (as if the most powerful people in the world would have any awareness or care about a comment like that on HN), but because it makes HN seem repetitive, miserable and lame.

Critique away, just make discussions thoughtful and substantive, which is what HN is for.

lynndotpy

5 days ago

For what it's worth, this doesn't read as "snark" to me. There _are_ many direct critiques in this thread about X being caught uploading users home directories, and some are clearly snark. I understand that you read this as a rhetorical question meant as a critique.

But it's really not clear to me why this should be read as a snarky, critical, rhetorical question. Someone who eagerly wants to use Grok Build would ask this exact same question.

"Does this [Grok Build] also just directly suck all your code up and make a copy of it on their servers?" is a question that is (1) salient and (2) answerable and (3) could be thoroughly devastating for someone to find out on their own by using it.

The answer is not present in the README, and XAi has blocked Issues and Discussions, so there's none of the usual avenues on GitHub to ask these questions. It seems perfectly typical and expected for someone to ask this question here.

tomhow

5 days ago

I understand reading it as benign and sincere if you're sympathetic to the sentiment. As someone whose job it is to read the comments all day every day, and whose objective is to keep discussions here as intellectually gratifying as possible, it just comes across as unsubstantive at best, and jeering at worst.

The project is open source; if the commenter was sincerely curious about what the software does with a user's code, they could have checked themselves or phrased the question in a way that made it clear they were genuinely interested in finding out.

My reply wasn’t hostile or threatening; just a polite reminder to use HN in a way that’s consistent with its intended spirit.

lynndotpy

5 days ago

Ah, that's fair. I think I saw the [dead] and [flagged] and assumed you might have personally pulled a lever behind-the-scenes for that, but that was not a fair assumption of mine.

I hope I don't come off as argumentative, but I did try checking the source code myself. It clocks in at 1.3 million lines of Rust around version `b189869`, so I can't hold that against anyone. Most of that is under `crates/` (which contains a number of xai crates).

(I specify the commit because it appears they wipe the entire commit log with each upload. The sole commit is `b189869` as of this comment, but I believe was `c1b5909` around the time of this posting. I have only cloned `b189869`, personally.)

tomhow

5 days ago

Thanks for understanding. I had un-killed the original comment but it was re-killed by later flags. I've made it un-killable now.

The rest of your comment all sounds like great material for a curious conversation about how/whether you could check what the software is doing with the code :)

ofjcihen

5 days ago

Yeah I don’t get it. These are legitimate questions to ask considering what happened recently.

Being nice, maybe Tomhow is just unaware?

justinkramp

5 days ago

Good push, thank you. Others have commented more salient criticism.

tomhow

4 days ago

Thanks for understanding! Appreciate the reply.

user

5 days ago

[deleted]

ofjcihen

5 days ago

Honestly a great question. I mean if it’s open source someone will check (I don’t use xAI but believe me I would be checking first if I did).

luciana1u

5 days ago

they open-sourced the scaffolding but not the building. the 'open' in the company name is doing a lot of heavy lifting.

jdiff

5 days ago

It certainly is, but what does OpenAI have to do with Grok Build?

cute_boi

5 days ago

Misanthropic should learn from this and open source their claude code. Even ClosedAI have codex cli opensourced.

trollbridge

5 days ago

Well, they sort of accidentally did "open source" their code.

nickreese

5 days ago

This is 100% smoke and mirrors. Prove the bucket is empty and nothing was transferred out and I'll believe they deleted it.