> They also come with additional data integration, customization, and governance capabilities not necessarily offered by xAI through its API.
Maybe we'll see a "Grok you can take to parties" come out of this.
As professionals, it is absolutely crucial that we discuss matters of ethics. One of which is the issue of an unethical founder.
Which is why HN appears to be going down-hill in terms of quality.
Schools are already starting to *teach* that the 2020 election was stolen. How much longer until one of these AIs starts parroting the same lies, and in a more convincing way than Musk’s half-assed prompt injection?
They claimed that they had a rogue actor who deployed their 'white genocide' prompt, but that either means they have zero technical controls in their release pipeline (unforgivable at their scale) or they are lying (unforgivable given their level of responsibility).
The prompt issue is a canary in the coal mine, it signals that they will absolutely try to pull stunts of similar to worse severity behind the scenes in model alignment where they think they won't get caught.
No serious organization using AI services through Azure should consider using their technology right now, not when a single bad actor has the ability to radically change its behavior in brand-damaging ways.
Could you expand on this? Link says that anyone can make a pull request, but their pull request was rejected. Is the issue that pull requests aren't locked?
edit: omg, I misread the article. flimsy is an understatement.
I asked it about a paper I was looking at (SLOG [0]) and it basically lost the context of what "slog" referred to after 3 prompts.
1. I asked for an example transaction illustrating the key advantages of the SLOG approach. It responded with some general DB transaction stuff.
2. I then said "no use slog like we were talking about" and then it gave me a golang example using the log/slog package
Even without the weird political things around Grok, it just isn't that good.
Seems like a pretty reasonable answer to me.
The fact that Elon, a white south african, made his AI go crazy by adding some text about "white genocide", is factual and should be taken into consideration if you want to have an honest discussion about ethics in tech. Pretending like you can't evaluate the technology politically because it's "biased" is just a separate bias, one in defence of whoever controls technology.
Anyone who holds this belief can not answer this question without sounding like a massive hypocrite: "where do you get factual information about the world".
Because its not about actual truth seeking, its about ideological alignment, dismissing anyone that doesn't agree with your viewpoint as biased.
If you look at the bookends of the political spectrum, most Democrats are pretty centrist these days compared to the far left people that want actual socialism, and the current administration that is pretty much authoritarian at this point.
Ive got enough second-order effects to be wary of. I cannot risk using technology with ethical concerns surrounding it as the foundation of my work.
What's this in reference to?
> "xAI and X's futures are intertwined," Musk, who also heads automaker Tesla and SpaceX, wrote in a post on X: "Today, we officially take the step to combine the data, models, compute, distribution and talent."
Being in favor of making money with the company you create is not a bad thing. It's a good thing. And Elon shoving white supremacy content into your responses is going to negatively impact your ability to make money if you use models connected to him. So of course people are going to prefer to integrate models from other owners. Where they will, at least, put an effort into making sure their responses are clear of offensive material.
It's business.
This also begs the question, does it make sense to call something a "bias" when that is the majority view (i.e. reflected in bulk of training data) ?
Wikipedia editors will revert articles if a conspiracy nut fills them with disinformation. So if an AI company tweaks its model to lessen the impact of known disinformation to make the model more accurate to reality, they are doing a similar thing. Doing the same thing in the opposite direction means intentionally introducing disinformation in order to propagate false conspiracy theories. Do you not see the difference? Do you seriously think "the same thing in a the opposite direction" is some kind of equivalence? It's the opposite direction!
I mean really, people don't want that crap turning up in their responses. Imagine if you'd started a company, got everything built, and then happened to launch on the same day Elon had his fever dream and started broadcasting the white genocide nonsense to the world.
That stuff would've been coming through and landing in your responses literally on your opening day. You can't operate in a climate of that much uncertainty. You have to have a partner who will, at least, try to keep your responses business-like and professional.
- Gemini is state-of-the-art for most tasks
- ChatGPT has the best image generation
- Claude is leading in coding solutions
- Deepseek is getting old but it is open-source
- Qwen has impressive lightweight models.
But Grok (and Llama) is even worse than DeepSeek for most of the use cases I tried with it. The only thing it has going for is money behind its infamous founders. Other than that, their existence would be barely acknowledged.
For tough queries o3 is unmatched in my experience.
josefritzishere•2h ago
cooper_ganglia•2h ago
Analemma_•2h ago
Remnant44•1h ago
michaelmrose•2h ago
aruametello•1h ago
they conduct blind trials were users submit a prompt, and vote on "best answer".
grok holds a very good position in its leaderboard.