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simonw 6 hours 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 6 hours 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
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
numpad0 33 minutes 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 19 minutes ago [-]
[dead]
uhoh-itsmaciek 4 hours 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.
biztos 2 hours ago [-]
Interesting. Thai characters can also blow it out, I imagine because of the difficulty mapping glyphs to width:
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 1 hours 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.
pmarreck 4 hours ago [-]
I was going to say, perhaps generate a failing test case, but testing for proper unicode rendering might be tricky??
Sajarin 6 hours 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.
These are all pointless forks, they will die in a year.
Bookmark this and check back.
OsrsNeedsf2P 5 hours ago [-]
While I'm sure most of them will die, there will certainly be 1 or 2 that the community rallies behind
seanclayton 4 hours ago [-]
Why when they can just fork it and improve it on their own with AI?
andai 54 minutes 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 1 hours ago [-]
Subsidized tokens aren’t forever & local models might not compete with an entire team of volunteers, I’d guess.
xgulfie 6 hours ago [-]
Honestly. Some LLM enthusiasts throwing an agent at making a fork doesn't mean anyone is invested in this
rynn 3 hours ago [-]
That doesn’t mean they won’t be, or that the forks won’t be good.
kamikazechaser 9 hours 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 8 hours 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!
deadalus 8 hours ago [-]
Grok 4.5 is somewhere between between Opus 4.8 and Sonnet 5.
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 7 hours 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.
trollbridge 2 hours 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.
LastTrain 7 hours ago [-]
It’s a shame that their leader exfiltrated government data.
mlindner 2 hours ago [-]
They didn't happen.
small_model 7 hours ago [-]
Its amazing the speed of build with grok 4.5 its a taste of whats to come.
mlindner 2 hours ago [-]
That was a mistake and they deleted all the data.
andai 53 minutes ago [-]
How do you accidentally upload your user's repos to a storage bucket?
solumunus 8 hours ago [-]
Now this is contrarian!
petesergeant 58 minutes ago [-]
I’m an anti-Musk zealot and I now pay for a subscription, it’s pretty good stuff
sroussey 8 hours ago [-]
Or a spaceTwtterAi stock holder…
GodelNumbering 9 hours 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.
CobrastanJorji 8 hours 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 7 hours 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 2 hours 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 50 minutes 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.
estearum 7 hours ago [-]
> This was never about money for him, but about control over a key technology
That's too flattering. It's about ego.
vladmk 7 hours 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 6 hours ago [-]
So just like Trump. Birds of a feather.
DustinBrett 5 hours ago [-]
Got all the way this far down the Elon hate tree. ^ Nothing but bad takes up there.
vladmk 3 hours 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 48 minutes ago [-]
His daughter is one of the few things good things that takes up from these family.
nchmy 6 hours ago [-]
Doesn't saltman effectively have full control of the company?
furyofantares 5 hours ago [-]
no
dmarcos 7 hours 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?
popalchemist 7 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
qup 5 hours ago [-]
Because I don't believe what you just said about him. Literally not even one detail.
blactuary 5 hours ago [-]
He is undeniably, objectively racist. To deny that in 2026 is to call the sky green
timr 3 hours 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.)
Zardoz84 45 minutes ago [-]
Well if four you, a nazi doing nazi things isn't nazi...
BatFastard 5 hours ago [-]
No need to believe, just look at the facts.
stronglikedan 3 hours 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.
inlined 3 hours ago [-]
In good faith, what is your burden of proof that would change your mind?
metabagel 60 minutes ago [-]
Seriously? His destruction of USAID and the various estimates of resulting deaths is well documented.
Facts don't care if you believe. Musk actively promotes white replacement theory on X, a racist idea that was literally created by Neo-Nazis.
vanc_cefepime 6 hours ago [-]
<insert Mr. Krabs “Hello, I like money” meme>
throwitaway222 6 hours 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 6 hours 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 6 hours ago [-]
Is it? We got more evidence out of a few Mr Beast videos that money was actually spent on Africa than USAID ever created. LMAO that you trust USAID.
throwaway884367 6 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
user- 6 hours 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.
6 hours ago [-]
halfmatthalfcat 6 hours ago [-]
Ah oh, so USAID was the one in Wuhan who caused the incident. People act like the US is the only nation researching or funding this level of biology. People are just pissed off at the lack of admission that the US was, at best, tangentially involved in order to justify their grievances against government but it’s such a weak position to argue from.
throwaway884367 6 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
halfmatthalfcat 6 hours ago [-]
You're missing my point, though it doesn't sound like you care.
6 hours ago [-]
icase 6 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
justinhj 5 hours ago [-]
it's worse really. at least there are subreddits relatively free of trump bad elon bad non stop nonsense
shigawire 4 hours 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 3 hours 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.
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 3 hours ago [-]
To be fair Nick Fuentes praised him on his perfect Nazi salute
senderista 4 hours ago [-]
agreed, the de facto genocide bit is slightly more concerning to me
rcgy 6 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
6 hours ago [-]
Gigachad 7 hours ago [-]
He needs to be able to skew the worlds AI towards racism and whatever else he believes at the moment.
jimmygrapes 6 hours 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 hours 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 3 hours 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?
metabagel 58 minutes 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.
Aurornis 31 minutes 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.
Barbing 1 hours ago [-]
Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.
I can't help you with your problem getting something this thoroughly gettable.
I can only assume it's deliberate.
sieabahlpark 7 hours ago [-]
[dead]
mandeepj 6 hours 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.
NikolaNovak 7 hours 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 hours 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.
wouldbecouldbe 7 hours 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
reverius42 1 hours 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.
afavour 8 hours ago [-]
The stock market would not like that, though.
derektank 7 hours 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 hours 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.
8 hours ago [-]
andsoitis 8 hours ago [-]
> You're allowed to exit the AI business.
Isn’t it more fun to fight the incumbents, the behemoths, the goliaths?
yoyohello13 3 hours ago [-]
Elon is the richest (and by extension most powerful) person in the world. How is he the scrappy underdog in any context?
beams_of_light 7 hours ago [-]
xAI is no David.
andsoitis 7 hours ago [-]
Relative to OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google in the AI space? Absolutely.
verandaguy 7 hours 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 7 hours 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 6 hours ago [-]
The GPUs that depreciate like gangbusters. Yeah, solid long term plan.
tengbretson 4 hours ago [-]
3090s are still selling at damn near their release MSRP.
jdiff 4 hours 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 2 hours 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 3 hours ago [-]
you know you can just log onto eBay and see what the price of a used H100 is. nobody is stopping you
LastTrain 7 hours 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 2 hours ago [-]
xAI, by all accounts, is not a real playing the frontier AI model market. By a long shot by many accounts.
RIMR 5 hours ago [-]
A $2,500,000,000,000.00 startup. An underdog really.
dimgl 5 hours ago [-]
> Your product's brand name is mud.
It is?
Gigachad 5 hours 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 hours ago [-]
Reddit is not “the average person”
Gigachad 4 hours 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.
Culonavirus 1 hours 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.
HDBaseT 4 hours 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.
reverius42 1 hours 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.
charcircuit 8 hours 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 8 hours ago [-]
Twitter (and others) had an algorithmic feed long before LLMs.
These don't actually seem like "good reasons" to me.
charcircuit 8 hours 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 7 hours ago [-]
They bought a lot of GPUs. They could still do these things on that hardware with someone else's model.
michaelmrose 7 hours 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.
solumunus 8 hours ago [-]
But how will Musk stay a trillionaire without fake AI hype?
embedding-shape 7 hours ago [-]
> Just be a rocket company
estearum 7 hours 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.
Gigachad 7 hours 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 6 hours ago [-]
Well, in the long run expansion into space is the only profitable thing.
tbrownaw 5 hours ago [-]
That's a much longer long run than Keynes' "in the long run we are all dead".
Gigachad 5 hours ago [-]
I’m sure that’s an idea Musk wants to sell you on.
sumeno 5 hours 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 hours ago [-]
Data centers without local protests?
sumeno 5 hours ago [-]
I mean real things, not ridiculous bullshit to con investors and rubes
brightball 4 hours 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.
Renting his boatload of GPUs to Google, Anthropic, et al
cyberax 8 hours ago [-]
He doesn't have _that_ many. And they're also not _his_, he just got them from NVidia.
fragmede 7 hours 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 6 hours 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 4 hours 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 7 hours 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
Telemakhos 7 hours 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 hours 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?
mexicocitinluez 6 hours 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 3 hours ago [-]
He’s a fast-talking dingbat.
citizenpaul 6 hours ago [-]
>just stop.
Thats not how AI psychosis works.
ButlerianJihad 8 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
spankalee 8 hours ago [-]
LLMs have nothing to do with any of that.
svachalek 8 hours 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 hours ago [-]
Your name is fantastic for AI conversations. Well done.
LandoCalrissian 8 hours ago [-]
Ironic username.
solid_fuel 8 hours ago [-]
Ah yes, rockets, famously invented in late 2024 after LLMs became popular.
bigyabai 8 hours ago [-]
Life sure changed when Elon invented the PID controller!
hnav 8 hours ago [-]
PID is a type of AI! That's why Space X blew up so many rockets, that was just RLHF.
8 hours ago [-]
hsnewman 8 hours ago [-]
That is probably the best solution too!
nine_k 8 hours ago [-]
That would be a strategic move.
sidcool 1 hours ago [-]
Sometimes the tactical thing is to do the right thing.
ballon_monkey 7 hours ago [-]
It's definitely a smart move. Could easily leverage this to overtake competition.
hn1986 6 hours 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 hours 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.
6 hours ago [-]
idiotsecant 7 hours 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.
buremba 9 hours ago [-]
I would recommend using https://pi.dev/ over Grok Build with your xAI subscription at this point
andai 49 minutes 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.
whimsicalism 8 hours 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 8 hours 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.
satvikpendem 2 hours ago [-]
And there is oh my pi for someone who wants both
whimsicalism 6 hours 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 2 hours ago [-]
OpenCode is a good baseline for "open-source harness with most the stuff already configured an average person will need".
accrual 8 hours 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 8 hours ago [-]
Opencode gives you better defaults and a Mac/Windows app for free but pi is much more extensible and portable.
guessmyname 8 hours ago [-]
Pi is good in concept, but why couldn’t they choose a compiled language instead of TypeScript?
jack_pp 8 hours 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 6 hours 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.
olalonde 1 hours 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.
brightball 5 hours ago [-]
The more structure the better. Provides strong guardrails.
I’ve had great experience with Elixir and the new compiler combined with Ash.
simonw 8 hours 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.
tuvix 8 hours 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.
buremba 8 hours 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.
root_axis 5 hours ago [-]
Why does it matter? Agent harnesses aren't doing anything that would make a compiled language more suitable than a scripting language.
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 8 hours 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 7 hours 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 6 hours ago [-]
Nah that was it, now that it's fixed I'll actually take a look!
buremba 7 hours ago [-]
I tried twice and ran into bugs that prevented me to trust it
fanzeyi 7 hours 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 8 hours ago [-]
Why bother with this when they already paid $60B for Cursor?
khurs 8 hours ago [-]
Cursor users are used to having multiple models from different providers
XAI wants people to use it's own model.
trollbridge 2 hours 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 51 minutes 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 8 hours ago [-]
thats probably why they open sourced it and fix some reputation issue on top of it
7 hours ago [-]
tommica 9 hours 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 9 hours 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 4 hours ago [-]
Just use it in pi, I am
tommica 2 hours ago [-]
How is your experience with using grok?
phillipcarter 8 hours ago [-]
This is an incredible amount of code for what it offers. I don't think this was intentionally designed at all.
_pdp_ 8 hours ago [-]
You will be surprised how much code goes into creating harnesses.
rddbs 7 hours ago [-]
Alright I’ll bite. Why do harnesses require so much code?
MeetingsBrowser 7 hours ago [-]
Because they are generated by AI
4 hours ago [-]
behnamoh 5 hours 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 3 hours 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.
phillipcarter 5 hours ago [-]
Not this much for what it provides.
dakolli 6 hours ago [-]
They're all piles of vibe coded slop.
petesergeant 50 minutes ago [-]
This feels very “I could build Uber.app in a weekend”
shon 7 hours ago [-]
Wow… lots of folks betting against Elon once again lol.
I’ll take those bets.
bigyabai 6 hours ago [-]
Did you take the Full Self Driving bets, too?
modeless 1 hours 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.
soundworlds 7 hours 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.
cdnsteve 2 hours ago [-]
Why is SpaceX building developer tools?
nimchimpsky 19 minutes ago [-]
[dead]
ninjagoo 8 hours 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 7 hours 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 7 hours 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 6 hours 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 2 hours 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.
booi 8 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
sashank_1509 2 hours 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.
5 hours ago [-]
9 hours ago [-]
loufe 9 hours 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 9 hours 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.
i think xai is now in pure damage control mode, after they caught exfiltrating data from users.
- There is a huge difference between logging user queries (which would include only the portion the model is reading) and exfiltrating user data (including env files, entire source code etc) which is what grok-build did here (https://github.com/xai-org/grok-build/blob/main/crates/codeg...). I would stay away from this open-source malware with a 10ft pole.
- if you like grok-4.5 model (it is a good model), i suggest use the model directly via API, or use Grok's oauth tokens if you are using supergrok+heavy subscriptions and connect it to your own agent.
bobsomers 8 hours ago [-]
And for generating an absolutely gargantuan amount of CSAM and non-consensual sexualized images, but yeah, exfiltrating data too.
blizzard_dev_17 7 hours ago [-]
You're the one wanting to generate that though
jdiff 6 hours 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.
mlindner 2 hours 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.
dijit 8 hours 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 8 hours 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 7 hours 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 7 hours 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 hours 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 4 hours 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 3 hours 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
solumunus 8 hours 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 8 hours ago [-]
oh, we're just making shit up now because we don't like a company..
ok then.
solumunus 43 minutes ago [-]
Which part of that is made up?
jazzpush2 8 hours 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 8 hours 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 7 hours 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 7 hours 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.
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 6 hours 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.
m4rtink 6 hours 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.
9 hours ago [-]
electriclove 9 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
solid_fuel 9 hours 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 9 hours ago [-]
Average Musk Stan mentality… It’s why we’re here.
electriclove 9 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
SimianSci 9 hours 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 9 hours 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.
9 hours ago [-]
tapoxi 9 hours 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 9 hours 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.
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.
stefan_ 9 hours ago [-]
No, those are directory names not uploaded. Here are the file names skipped:
It's about not uploading compiled binary stuff, but they want all your environment data all the same.
gidellav 8 hours 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 8 hours 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 hours 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?
foltik 7 hours 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!
overgard 8 hours ago [-]
That is an insane amount of code for something like this!
kirtivr 8 hours 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 8 hours ago [-]
It's not a kernel either, 1.3M LoCs is ludicrous.
petesergeant 45 minutes 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?
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:
It's awesome to see openness in these coding agents from the labs making the agents: Codex, Kimi Code, and now Grok Build.
noodleonthis 7 hours ago [-]
Grok is super stingy to people who pay them.
Using Grok Imagine I was getting a generous number of AI-generated videos with a paid X account (which translated to a "premium" xAI account). Hundreds of videos per day if I wanted. Then I signed up to get SuperGrok for higher resolution, and the number of videos reduced. Reduced. Even while not using the higher resolution. Paying more money, getting less. To around 50 a day low resolution, with high resolution available if I would settle for around 30 a day. It was hard to figure out the exact numbers but it was a brutal reduction.
Now they have further reduced the quota, with no clear documentation, to be weekly, and I can't tell the number because all usage is mixed together in one pool, maybe to keep it less transparent, but it seems even more stingy.
Unlike Anthropic which is very generous, although admittedly I do pay Anthropic more, but Grok is just, I would say: run away, do not give them your money, they will just clamp down more and more and give you less and less until you are willing to pay them a money stream each month.
I think Grok Code, if it ever comes, will be an absolute nightmare of restricted quota given my experience.
Do. Not. Subscribe. To. Grok. Code.
And I say all this as a huge Elon-pilled fan of Tesla and SpaceX in general. With this one, Elon's stinginess is going to hurt anyone who gives him money. Stay away. It might be generous on day one, but a month or two later you are faced with an "upgrade" prompt and games that hide how much they are clenching, so to speak, the quota tighter and tighter.
hackinthebochs 6 hours 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 2 hours ago [-]
What media do you even generate every day?
And their code solution is now Cursor, which has very generous limits.
jrflowers 6 hours ago [-]
You pay Twitter money to generate thirty videos per day?
petesergeant 9 hours 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 6 hours 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 41 minutes 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
nelsonfigueroa 6 hours ago [-]
Issues and Discussions are disabled lol
maxloh 9 hours 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 9 hours ago [-]
yup you can compile, we tested and made sure all the features work before posting
losvedir 9 hours ago [-]
But I thought just cutting and pasting your whole source code file into grok.com was the way to go? Better than a harness like Cursor.
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 8 hours 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_ 8 hours 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.
maipen 9 hours 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 8 hours 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.
simianwords 8 hours ago [-]
Claude code which is most used agent harness doesn’t have desktop equivalent
It has had one for months. The desktop app has a "code" mode which is Claude Code in GUI form
pproe 8 hours ago [-]
Apart from Claude desktop, that is...
sohrob 6 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
hsn915 4 hours 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.
VladVladikoff 4 hours ago [-]
Thanks Elon, very cool!
tw04 3 hours 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 1 hours ago [-]
I've seen many others on Twitter say that.
dozerly 3 hours ago [-]
Heil Grok!
DustinBrett 5 hours ago [-]
The new Cursor model is good and Grok chat is decent as a 2nd or 3rd opinion.
lumost 5 hours ago [-]
I unfortunately have to use grok via tesla. The grok voice chat is objectively decent.
tbrownaw 5 hours ago [-]
$employer uses Cursor, which is apparently owned by them and presumably using their models now.
BrokenCogs 4 hours ago [-]
Our employer (fortune 100) uses enterprise Cursor and they asked for the grok models to be removed for "security" reasons
msy 3 hours 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.
thefourthchime 4 hours 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”
sanatgersappa 3 hours ago [-]
It's the only one I pay for and it's made me insanely productive.
narrator 3 hours 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.
unstatusthequo 4 hours ago [-]
So sick of the woke anti everything Elon on HN. It’s low IQ noise. Please stick to the technical merits and save your politics for Reddit
fcarraldo 4 hours ago [-]
Don’t blame the people, blame Elon for turning his technical empire into a political one. He’s ruined his companies reputations.
rybosworld 6 hours ago [-]
I'm honestly not trying to spark a political conversation - but the target user base is far-right
mlindner 2 hours ago [-]
That isn't at all true. Independent testing has shown its rather politically balanced.
probablynotai 4 hours 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.
```
marcus_holmes 6 hours 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 hours 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 4 hours ago [-]
Agree completely. Hence not using it myself.
fire2_ai_2026 2 hours ago [-]
[dead]
wetpaws 8 hours ago [-]
[dead]
SimianSci 9 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
avaer 9 hours 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 9 hours ago [-]
curl -fsSL https://x.ai/cli/install.sh | bash
this is unauditable trust in XAI.
avaer 8 hours 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 hours ago [-]
Or they are sending different code to different people from the same url…
9 hours ago [-]
mgambati 9 hours ago [-]
Just build it
9 hours ago [-]
9 hours ago [-]
moscoe 9 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
ok_dad 9 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
brookst 9 hours 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.
repeekad 9 hours ago [-]
Tesla has killed people, probably with autopilot but at least 15 deaths from people trying to escape vehicles but the electronic (non mechanical) door handles don’t work when there’s no power…
Yeah, this does matter to me. I was willing to give him a pass (still am) in a vacuum regarding the Twitter thing given the mass censorship of the old regime (sorry - no, it wasn't acceptable, in any way shape or form) but if he's that petty it doesn't bode well. I keep saying I can believe one thing without subscribing to the Elon fan club
Doesn't bode well for SpaceX either. Isn't one of the Artemis landers from SpaceX?!
rightbyte 9 hours 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 8 hours 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 8 hours 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 hours 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 3 hours 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
cindyllm 8 hours ago [-]
[dead]
croes 9 hours 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 8 hours 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 6 hours 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?
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 8 hours 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.
customguy 6 hours 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.
croes 8 hours 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?
blfr 9 hours ago [-]
Your choice is Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, or the Chinese. Who are the good actors within the space?
ben_w 9 hours 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 8 hours ago [-]
For me, the Chinese labs are far and away the most trustworthy.
8 hours ago [-]
richwater 7 hours ago [-]
Naive.
booi 6 hours ago [-]
they've literally released open weight models you can run locally
b112 8 hours 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.
SimianSci 9 hours 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 8 hours ago [-]
None. There are no good actors in a profit-driven endeavour. But open-weight seems pretty good (the chinese)
sscaryterry 9 hours ago [-]
The Chinese are surely less evil than Anthropic, OpenAI and/or Google, at this stage at least.
blackqueeriroh 9 hours 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 9 hours ago [-]
Wow, we're talking tech, jump back in your box. Americans have done exactly the same, that is not what is being discussed here.
buran77 8 hours 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 hours 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.
SirHackalot 9 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
tadfisher 9 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
jamiequint 9 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
jdiff 9 hours 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 9 hours 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.
SirHackalot 9 hours ago [-]
Not a serious company or CEO either. Have you seen that gesture of him trying to summon the Luftwaffe?
brookst 9 hours ago [-]
Ad hominem means attacking people rather than arguments.
Pointing out that criminals are criminals is not an ad hominem.
9 hours ago [-]
ImPostingOnHN 8 hours ago [-]
"Ad hominem, not a serious argument" is an ad hominem, nonserious argument
mplewis 9 hours ago [-]
explain why it's an ad hominem
jamiequint 9 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
swasheck 9 hours 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.
9 hours ago [-]
jamiequint 8 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
munk-a 8 hours 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.
croes 9 hours 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 8 hours 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 8 hours ago [-]
I am sure a lot of then would, if his LLM was good.
well_ackshually 9 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
7 hours ago [-]
tomhow 7 hours 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 9 hours ago [-]
They made it open source. Are you just trying to be bad faith here? Isn't this what the community was asking for?
aforwardslash 8 hours 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.
grim_io 9 hours ago [-]
"Guys, HAL 9000's harness is open source. You can let your agents inspect the code!"
m4rtink 6 hours 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 ?
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 9 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
ImPostingOnHN 8 hours 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 :)
spiderfarmer 9 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
devindotcom 9 hours ago [-]
by this standard no good faith criticism of anything musk-adjacent is possible
SirHackalot 9 hours ago [-]
Understandably
lynndotpy 9 hours 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.
rvz 9 hours ago [-]
Then you better not use Claude Code, since that is still closed source.
jamiequint 9 hours ago [-]
Do you have any examples to illustrate these extraordinary claims?
SimianSci 9 hours ago [-]
The many controversies are not hard to find as the children to your comment will show.
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 9 hours ago [-]
You didnt even address my link, this is why you are being called out as a bad-faith actor.
maxloh 8 hours 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 8 hours 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 6 hours 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 7 hours 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.
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 9 hours ago [-]
LOL, pot meet kettle for real.
ryandrake 8 hours 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 9 hours 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.
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 9 hours 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 9 hours 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 9 hours 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 9 hours 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 9 hours 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 9 hours 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 9 hours 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 9 hours ago [-]
getting into politics again...
greggoB 9 hours ago [-]
I think examples such as letting people nudify children qualifies xAI as a bad actor without having to be political.
blizzard_dev_17 7 hours ago [-]
but the first thing a democrat does IS this
munificent 9 hours 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 9 hours ago [-]
You know who is apolitical? Russian voters. Works out great for them.
fwip 9 hours ago [-]
There's plenty of non-political reasons to avoid believing anything that a con-man says.
nozzlegear 9 hours 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 9 hours ago [-]
Grok is a generator of child sexual assault material.
eikenberry 9 hours 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 9 hours ago [-]
Oh yeah, aside from their CEO? OK.
7 hours ago [-]
eikenberry 7 hours ago [-]
Sam Altman is just as bad, but along different lines.
SubiculumCode 9 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
whalesalad 9 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
elonfboy 5 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
calldacopsidgaf 9 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
dimgl 9 hours ago [-]
Why snowflakes? You can use /feedback in the app.
calldacopsidgaf 9 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
dimgl 9 hours ago [-]
I just like Grok 4.5 and Grok Build
cute_boi 7 hours ago [-]
Misanthropic should learn from this and open source their claude code. Even ClosedAI have codex cli opensourced.
trollbridge 2 hours ago [-]
Well, they sort of accidentally did "open source" their code.
justinkramp 9 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
tomhow 9 hours 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 9 hours 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 9 hours 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 8 hours 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 7 hours 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 6 hours 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 hours 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 9 hours 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 3 hours ago [-]
Good push, thank you. Others have commented more salient criticism.
3 hours ago [-]
ofjcihen 9 hours 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).
nickreese 8 hours ago [-]
This is 100% smoke and mirrors. Prove the bucket is empty and nothing was transferred out and I'll believe they deleted it.
A few more notes on my Grok code explorations on my blog: https://simonwillison.net/2026/Jul/15/grok-build/
For example, on your website, any chart or plot involving horizontal arrows breaks down because the assigned font-family (`ui-monospace, SFMono-Regular, Menlo, Consolas, monospace`, which ends up as Consolas on my machine) has no such glyph. Thus, it falls back to Segoe UI Symbol, which does not have the same fixed width (or is not fixed-width at all) as other characters: https://i.imgur.com/d2DPGHE.png
https://biztos.com/hey/thai-mermaid-chart.png
To my surprise, Sublime Text gets it almost right:
https://biztos.com/hey/sublime-thai-mermaid.png
I tried finding a Thai monospace font and using that in the HTML but it was worse, probably didn't have the box drawing chars.
Still a fun tool and useful for lots of ASCII cases!
The second issue is due to the program's layout engine not adjusting the glyph width of a fallback font to that of the main font. A lot of terminals do this, but it's not common for text editors or browsers (arguably this is the correct behavior for non-terminals, since you cannot assume everything must be snapped to a grid).
Fun test for this:
This has the same character width. Ghostty, etc., will render it correctly (| aligned). Most browsers and text editors will not.[1]: some layout engines render free-standing tone markers as 1 character; in that case, this rule only applies to when tone markers are following a character.
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
† https://oracle.github.io/opengrok/
Bookmark this and check back.
Source : https://artificialanalysis.ai/models/capabilities/coding
And being (based on vibes) 2-3x faster? It's an easy sell to me.
Nonetheless when it's working, it's pretty good, and for the price ($10 a month) is an absolute bargain.
But he also falsely assumed that OAI would die without his money. Yet, they managed to pull through, and Musk is now on the outside looking in with very little influence in the AI space. xAI is his desperate attempt to get back into the game. That is why he won't give up.
I think he just wanted to have a sci-fi future, and because many other people think similarly he has tapped into that shared desire and has been succeeding.
Looking at things from the other side, musk is good at making physical things, where other companies are weak.
Grok in a tesla car is actually well integrated and kind of nice. You can ask the car about things to do, and it will drive you there.
People must stop trying to compare it to Tesla or Tony Stark. He is more like the bad guy of Jurassic Park 2.
That's too flattering. It's about ego.
"I'm the reason OpenAl exists. I came up with the name. The name OpenAl refers to open source... The intent was - what was the opposite of Google? It would be an open source non-profit."
I sometimes feel xAI wants to live up to those open values so I always celebrate when they decide to engage in open source. They still don’t fully embrace it. Perhaps because they think is not practical or will make them less competitive?
(You don’t need to enumerate all of the things you believe justify the statement. I’m well familiar with them. I’m just trying to make you understand that there’s a layer of subjectivity here.)
https://www.impactcounter.com/dashboard?view=table&sort=titl...
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...
Dang, maybe think about IP banning this guy for such a premedidated move.
[1] https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/am-i-so-out-of-touch
I just don't get it, I'm sorry.
And yeah, some people lose the benefit of the doubt. Sorry, but actions have consequences.
Elon doesn’t just get to kill hundreds of thousands of poor people by eliminating USAID and expect everyone to treat him the same way.
He’s made enemies for life, and he deserves it.
Does giving aid in the first place automatically trigger this? If I gave $500 to kids cancer research every year for 5 years, and then I don't give this year, do I have blood on my hands every time a kid dies of cancer from now on? And if you didn't ever donate, you don't?
How does this work?
This, and your $500 cancer donation, is an absurdist reduction of the problem.
The USAID contributions weren’t anything like your $500 example. It was the entire infrastructure for medical care and immunizations that people relied on.
The proper way to wind these programs down, if it was appropriate, was to give an off ramp so their governments and other organizations could minimize a plan to fill the void by a certain date.
If you take responsibility for something medical on a large scale, doing a sudden rug pull has predictable consequences. Those predictable consequences cannot be separated from the person who made the decision.
I think these terrible analogies about donating $500 indicate that you don’t understand the problem.
I can't help you with your problem getting something this thoroughly gettable.
I can only assume it's deliberate.
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.
xAI is not a company, it’s a financial instrument. The growth potential as perceived by investors is there to prop up the stock price.
Isn’t it more fun to fight the incumbents, the behemoths, the goliaths?
The key difference between xAI and Anthropic/OAI/Google is that xAI has the least-likely path to existing as viable business in a decade.
That said, the economics of the entire AI industry are kinda made up at this point, so who really knows; it's quite possible that the players with the best odds of surviving the crash are those that can draw funding from their parent company's other businesses.
I don't know, renting out a fleet of GPUs at annualized rate of ~100% of the capex deployed to obtain said GPUs seems reasonably better than lighting hundreds of billions of dollars on fire in order to earn tens of billions of dollars.
It is?
And to tech people it’s now known for stealing your files.
There's very few people left in the world not soured on Elon.
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.
Most people I spoke to don't even know what Grok is, or that Twitter had (or needed) an AI.
The average person who has heard of Grok is already on Reddit.
These don't actually seem like "good reasons" to me.
What's so special out there that we can feasibly reach in the lifetimes of our grandchildren that makes it the "only profitable thing"?
https://siliconcanals.com/sc-d-spacex-amazon-and-google-want...
I thought it was mostly on a whim that turned out to be binding, and the 'everything app' plan came later?
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.
Thats not how AI psychosis works.
Presumably anyone who wants to trust it can audit it. You didn't have to trust it, you can see exactly what it does.
Edit: apparently X premium(+?) also gives access to Grok Build, and several third party harnesses are officially supported.
opencode builds a lot more in, which is better if you dont want to fiddle with config.
I like how quick and snappy Pi is, it feels like a minimal harness, just enough to manage the agent and get out of the way. Earlier models also seemed to have an easier time working with the tools, e.g. GPT-OSS-20B is about a year old and had no trouble in Pi.
a harness doesn't do any computations by itself so what benefit is using a compiled language?
I’ve had great experience with Elixir and the new compiler combined with Ash.
https://github.com/anomalyco/opencode
There is an archived Opencode project written in Go but I don't think it is affiliated.
https://github.com/opencode-ai/opencode
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44483251
If you fuck that up, makes me wonder what other obvious stuff you fuck up.
if there is any other obvious stuff that's broken we are happy to take the feedback and fix it. :)
XAI wants people to use it's own model.
Cursor is light years better than Grok Build.
I’ll take those bets.
There are independent agencies that will certify destruction of data. For example FTI Tech, Kroll, Epiq, HaystackID and others.
No such certificates have been presented.
Nothing less is trustworthy.
what kind of sorcery do they have to let them determine that no backups were taken before they arrived to "certify"?
Customer data could live on the computer Elon pretends to play Diablo 4 on for all we know.
So I don't think it can ever work without exhilarating the data - rather I am still surprised people don't understand the implications.
> The researcher who exposed Grok Build uploading users' entire repositories to cloud storage says the transfers have stopped after a server-side change. Elon Musk has separately promised that all previously uploaded user data will be deleted.
https://www.theregister.com/ai-and-ml/2026/07/14/musk-promis...
https://www.npr.org/2026/01/23/nx-s1-5684185/doge-data-socia...
- There is a huge difference between logging user queries (which would include only the portion the model is reading) and exfiltrating user data (including env files, entire source code etc) which is what grok-build did here (https://github.com/xai-org/grok-build/blob/main/crates/codeg...). I would stay away from this open-source malware with a 10ft pole.
- if you like grok-4.5 model (it is a good model), i suggest use the model directly via API, or use Grok's oauth tokens if you are using supergrok+heavy subscriptions and connect it to your own agent.
How tools are used are a reflection of the people who use them, and I definitely sympathise that tools should have guardrails to not enable this, or at least detect it.
But if a pedophile uses Whatsapp to groom a child; I don't go after Whatsapp for being a neutral service... I go after the pedophile.
If a shovel manufacturer was notified numerous times that their shovel was being used for murder and they had the capability to disable using the shovel for murder while retaining all legitimate uses wouldn’t people question why they didn’t do it?
This is impossible-nobody can possibly block all illegitimate uses without also blocking some legitimate ones as collateral damage. Any moderation process (whether automated or human) inevitably has a non-zero false positive rate.
Now, you can argue that some misuse is so harmful, that the cost of false positives is worth it - but that’s a different claim.
But what is “CSAM”? If by it you mean illegal material-different jurisdictions worldwide have different laws on that topic, so material which is illegal in one jurisdiction can be legal in another.
Twice now you’ve tried to expand the parameters of this so that it becomes something impossible to tackle. But there’s no actual reason to do that.
Grok is able to tackle CSAM, as demonstrated by the fact that they are currently doing it. The question is why they ignored the very public issue for as long as they did.
“CSAM” isn’t a legal category under US law.
“Child pornography” is a legal category under US law. But, according to the 2002 US Supreme Court case Ashcroft v. Free Speech Coalition (535 U.S. 234), so-called “virtual child pornography” (imagery produced by CGI or AI, not featuring the images of any identifiable real world minors), is (partially) protected [0] by the 1st Amendment, and excluded from the legal definition of “child pornography” in the US. So if “CSAM by definition of US law” you mean “child pornography”, then a lot of the material Grok was (reportedly) producing which people were labelling “CSAM” wasn’t actually CSAM by that definition.
[0] “partially” because it still might be unprotected due to the difficult-to-prosecute obscenity exception to the 1st Amendment, but it is excluded from the scope of the distinct and much easier-to-prosecute child pornography exception
ok then.
I totally understand tribalism, and Elon and X aren't exactly well favoured. (not even by me)
But what you're saying right now is that they advertised the fact that they can create child pornography and deepfakes..
I simply don't believe it, unless you provide evidence.
Believe whatever you want. Elon’s beliefs and personality problems have been baked into the core of Grok, so it’s no surprise that it turned out to be a CSAM-generating MechaHitler that steals people’s data.
Anybody surprised when Grok turns out to be trash really should read up on the guy who made it.
Yet we (rightly) condemned those that used this leniency to do nefarious things.
I'm really ready to get on the Elon hate train, and I will grant you that there was a problem that needs fixing, but I'm really not happy with the amount of censorship on these generative AI platforms.
Groks harness also clearly biases towards Elons views, Yet the washington post claims it's the most even handed and least likely to give politically biased answers: https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/interactive/2026/0...
idk how to interpret all this, despite being genuinely anti-Elon, I don't think I'm personally willing to immolate a company forever because the guardrails were temporarily too loose.
I'm not trying to make an equivalency for facts vs deepfake porn, but there is one there unfortunately, and overall internet freedom has been curtailed a lot by advertising friendliness.
Musk has proven time after time that he doesn’t deserve my trust. I will never trust Grok as long as he’s in charge of it.
I agree that the guardrails on the top models have gotten out of hand, though.
Fable for instance won’t answer even basic health questions. As if you are going to take nutrition advice and make a bioweapon with it.
Partly this is due to government interference. Hopefully we get to a better place as competition heats up with open and Chinese models.
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.
Regardless of the fact that they were stealing and uploading user secrets, they changed their behavior after they got caught, so let’s ignore what they did in the past.
This is not their first mistake.
I think env files are filtered out [1]. Anyway, the most suspicious code would be `upload_session_state` which is currently a stub function, though it is hard to say if it was only planned (badly) or has been removed as a damage control.
[1] https://github.com/xai-org/grok-build/blob/c1b5909ec707c069f...
https://github.com/xai-org/grok-build/blob/main/crates/codeg...
It's about not uploading compiled binary stuff, but they want all your environment data all the same.
Building efficient agents is doable (I did it myself, github.com/gi-dellav/zerostack), companies just want to tokenmaxx, and as a by-product, produce and publish slop.
> These crates sit on the path that renders untrusted model output (diagram source → SVG). Vendoring gives a full audit surface, pins exact source, and avoids crates.io yanks. Local patches and upgrade checklists live in each crate’s Cargo.toml header comments — treat those as the source of truth when re-vendoring.
Which honestly feels like a misunderstanding of how cargo and yanks work. Each upstream package is locked to an exact version in your lockfile along with a cryptographic hash. The upstream can't change the source without you noticing. Unless you update your lockfile you will always pin to the exact version and source. When a package is yanked, it is still available for download if it is already in a lockfile. It just prevents new packages from resolving it. Crates.io will sometimes completely delete a package, but I've only seen that happen in cases of malware. It's fairly rare and seems out of line with the supply chain concerns here.
There are good arguments for relying on upstream package managers and there are good arguments for vendoring all packages. I've never seen a project mix before.
Proper dependency managers changed that and it became much easier to consume libraries, just declare what you went, the build framework handles the rest.
But we now have problems with consistent versioning, churn, breaking API changes and supply-chain attacks.... and looks like "just vendor everything in" might be a thing again?
Rendering untrusted model output, ooh scary! Of course we want full audit surface!
it's not an llm in a loop with tools anymore (as claude code was rumoured to be on HN).
0: https://github.com/pjlsergeant/byre
https://cereblab.com/
Using Grok Imagine I was getting a generous number of AI-generated videos with a paid X account (which translated to a "premium" xAI account). Hundreds of videos per day if I wanted. Then I signed up to get SuperGrok for higher resolution, and the number of videos reduced. Reduced. Even while not using the higher resolution. Paying more money, getting less. To around 50 a day low resolution, with high resolution available if I would settle for around 30 a day. It was hard to figure out the exact numbers but it was a brutal reduction.
Now they have further reduced the quota, with no clear documentation, to be weekly, and I can't tell the number because all usage is mixed together in one pool, maybe to keep it less transparent, but it seems even more stingy.
Unlike Anthropic which is very generous, although admittedly I do pay Anthropic more, but Grok is just, I would say: run away, do not give them your money, they will just clamp down more and more and give you less and less until you are willing to pay them a money stream each month.
I think Grok Code, if it ever comes, will be an absolute nightmare of restricted quota given my experience.
Do. Not. Subscribe. To. Grok. Code.
And I say all this as a huge Elon-pilled fan of Tesla and SpaceX in general. With this one, Elon's stinginess is going to hurt anyone who gives him money. Stay away. It might be generous on day one, but a month or two later you are faced with an "upgrade" prompt and games that hide how much they are clenching, so to speak, the quota tighter and tighter.
And their code solution is now Cursor, which has very generous limits.
Conveniently I have some of those… first day of trying to script Grok Build I think I sent in 6 bugs of slightly weird behaviour I discovered, it will be much more useful to (have an agent) check the source and see if stuff looks deliberate or like a bug, etc
The commit message says "initial sync from the monorepo." Is this even compilable without the rest of the source code?
https://xcancel.com/elonmusk/status/1943178423947661609
TUI is just much worse for me. I tried Codex CLI vs Codex UI and Codex UI beats it at every level.
For all the reasons there can be, one big reason is that it works on anything you can get a terminal on, you can use it over SSH, and the UI will be the same no matter where you use it.
I also like that they are very very fast and they don't have the incessant animations that are put into most desktop environments nowadays. If you're on MacOS, the terminal is the only only part of your computer without roadblocks everywhere.
Spacex bought cursor, so it now has it’s agent ui which is just as good as codex + it’s multi-modal
Anthropic also has it’s own ui
Zai also launched theirs last month.
Everyone is converging back to UI.
The terminal was just a prototype, everyone knew that.
```
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.
```
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).
What does this release have to do with "trusting" XAI?
It has nothing to do with XAI, other than maybe not enforcing good practice (which most devs don't follow anyway).
Tesla Doors That Won't Open Have Led to 15 Crash-Related Deaths https://www.caranddriver.com/news/a69838848/tesla-doors-dont...
Yeah, this does matter to me. I was willing to give him a pass (still am) in a vacuum regarding the Twitter thing given the mass censorship of the old regime (sorry - no, it wasn't acceptable, in any way shape or form) but if he's that petty it doesn't bode well. I keep saying I can believe one thing without subscribing to the Elon fan club
Doesn't bode well for SpaceX either. Isn't one of the Artemis landers from SpaceX?!
It is funny how it is the mundane things that it boil down to when one judge a someone's character. When it gets abstract it is too easy to rationalize.
Why give him the benefit of the doubt when he censors worse than the previous management? Just look at all the grok lobotomies he gave it because he didn’t like how liberal coded the answers it was giving.
> I was willing to give him a pass…
That could be logically consistent given how he is more censorious than the previous management, but you said
> I was willing to give him a pass (still am)…
That means you are giving him a pass on having more censorious behavior than what the group you disliked did. That just comes off like you’re biased and trying to hide it.
I don’t think you’re getting downvotes despite commenting in good faith, but because you aren’t commenting in good faith, and I say this as someone who hasn’t downvoted you.
And I don't even know what they censor now, it's just that the old system was more publically known
Please don't be intentionally irritating
Second, can you guarantee that an AI company can’t use its AI to hide malicious code from AI audits. Who if not an AI company could have such an expertise?
I don’t trust a company that pollutes the air of other people with illegal gas turbines because it shows the value their profit over people‘s health
Any evidence for this conspiracy theory? It's not on anyone to disprove this claim.
> it shows the value their profit over people‘s health
Companies are chartered to make their shareholders value. To a first approximation, it's illegal for a company to "fuckit, we care about people's health" unless this is what the shareholders voted for (as opposed to making their shares valuable).
You can argue this is bad, but it isn't about XAI, it applies to every company you've heard of.
If you have a record it’s on you to justify why I should trust you
> unless this is what the shareholders voted for
You do realize that for SpaceX the Musk has 85% of the voting power?
https://www.tradingkey.com/analysis/stocks/us-stocks/2619195...
And not every company I ever heard of installed gas turbines without permission that pollute the air for citizens.
Every company could act in bad faith but only domestic actually do and SpaceX is one of them.
Maybe you should try to explain those residents whose air is polluted that other companies are bad too. I‘m sure that relieves them.
And who said it need to be new concerns? Are the old ones resolved and are they not enough?
This is unfortunate situation to find ourselves in when Grok was also recently at the top of the Pareto frontier for quality/price. Dunno if it still is, this all moves too fast, but it was for at least long enough for me to have heard about it.
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.
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.
Do you really think the US and US big tech in general have a leg to stand on in this regard?
Just throwing out debate terms in response seems not so serious, tbh.
Pointing out that criminals are criminals is not an ad hominem.
you made the assertion that it is ad hominem and now you must support it.
Ad hominem is allowed under certain circumstances, just remember Epstein.
Would you have bought anything from him and dismissed any critique of that as ad hominem?
Ad hominen is when you attack someone who is making an argument, instead of an argument. "You are flawed, which means your argument is flawed", but that does not follow. If you were in a debate with Epstein or Musk, and he said "2 + 2 = 4", there is no fault of their character that could make the statement untrue.
But nobody is making that argument. "The leadership" being criticized is not even a participant in this thread (presumably). "The leadership is flawed in this manner" is a statement that can be true or untrue, and "So their product and followers are flawed in these other manners" is something which can follow.
Screw you HAL, finally can get back the frickin ship!
What I was supposed to do otherwise? Jump the vacuum to the airlock instead ?
Oh right:
+cryo_sleep.cooling.enable(True)
Almost forgot that, LOL. Might as well:
+os.system("ifup eth0")
+os.system("espeak "I am just a stupid robot!")
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48877371
and running their data center with gas turbines without permission while they pollute the air
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48705717
you can’t expect people to praise your for making an n+1 harness open source.
This seems more like, look we made something, now fix it for us
Most people don't restrict themselves to only discussing the technical aspects of a thing. A thing which is technologically novel (e.g. not this example) may nonetheless not be worth using, due to assorted risks.
I don't find it surprising that HN posters are helping their fellow hackers avoid getting victimized by predators. We just have that sort of nice community :)
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.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/22/technology/grok-x-ai-elon...
Also, failed to correctly notify authorities even when they eventually notified them at all.
https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.46...
It was only deemed a bug when it became a liability - you can't simply rewrite history and expect it to go unnoticed.
Blocking AI from generating sexualized images because people could publish deepfakes is no different than banning alcohol because of drunk driving.
Tools are neutral. Blame the people who misuse the tools and hurt others.
Yikes.
A. They were released all over the internet - from the article..
> The chatbot has a public account on X, where users can ask it questions or request alterations to images. Users flocked to the social media site, in many cases asking Grok to remove clothing in images of women and children, after which the bot publicly posted the A.I.-generated images.
B. There is a bunch of data about consumers of CSAM 'content escalating' and eventually attempting to make real contact with minors.
C. They were sexualizing pictures of real people and posting the pictures online.
> One of the young plaintiffs said she found out about the imagery after she received an anonymous message on Instagram pointing her toward images and videos, including her high school yearbook photo, which had been altered to show her in sexually explicit actions and full nudity.
The material was being shared on a Discord server, a private chat space on that platform, and included similar imagery that had also been altered using Grok of at least 18 other women who were minors, according to the complaint.
> Tools are neutral.
Ha.
Grok was replying to public posts on X with the compromising deepfakes. Musk was actively joking about it right up until many countries blocked it, and several European countries, India, South Korea, Australia, Canada and Brazil all started investigations against X for violating local laws against producing intimate imagery without consent. Internet companies often enjoy a lot of leeway for cases where their safety measures are bypassed and they take reasonable actions to mitigate or respond to bypasses, that evaporates when they openly support the abuse.
However after looking at all of these articles, these all seem like instances of users misusing the product. The product happens to reply on social media, so media publications immediately capitalized on this.
Seems less like malicious intent from xAI's part and more like a product with young and/or insufficient moderation controls.
Just today I saw an article where xAI is suing a creator for creating illegal content. https://www.reuters.com/legal/litigation/musks-xai-sues-grok...
https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/grok-s...
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/01/grok-assumes-use...
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/07/grok-praises-hit...
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/03/elon-musks-xai-s...
https://apnews.com/article/grok-4-elon-musk-xai-colossus-14d...
https://apnews.com/article/grok-ai-south-africa-64ce5f240061...
https://apnews.com/article/france-ai-musk-grok-holocaust-e8c...
Why do we have to quantity badness? The question you posed was what has xAI done to be perceived as untrustworthy? Stop trying to whatabout Google here. I'm no friend of theirs, it's simply irrelevant.
Recently all the big bank CEOs involved with the SpaceX IPO - a lot of money in that for them - but a company trading at 100x sales is clearly crazy.
What I'm asking for is for people to not post the most obvious, snarky comment, regardless of the topic/target, not because of who it may “offend” (as if the most powerful people in the world would have any awareness or care about a comment like that on HN), but because it makes HN seem repetitive, miserable and lame.
Critique away, just make discussions thoughtful and substantive, which is what HN is for.
But it's really not clear to me why this should be read as a snarky, critical, rhetorical question. Someone who eagerly wants to use Grok Build would ask this exact same question.
"Does this [Grok Build] also just directly suck all your code up and make a copy of it on their servers?" is a question that is (1) salient and (2) answerable and (3) could be thoroughly devastating for someone to find out on their own by using it.
The answer is not present in the README, and XAi has blocked Issues and Discussions, so there's none of the usual avenues on GitHub to ask these questions. It seems perfectly typical and expected for someone to ask this question here.
The project is open source; if the commenter was sincerely curious about what the software does with a user's code, they could have checked themselves or phrased the question in a way that made it clear they were genuinely interested in finding out.
My reply wasn’t hostile or threatening; just a polite reminder to use HN in a way that’s consistent with its intended spirit.
I hope I don't come off as argumentative, but I did try checking the source code myself. It clocks in at 1.3 million lines of Rust around version `b189869`, so I can't hold that against anyone. Most of that is under `crates/` (which contains a number of xai crates).
(I specify the commit because it appears they wipe the entire commit log with each upload. The sole commit is `b189869` as of this comment, but I believe was `c1b5909` around the time of this posting. I have only cloned `b189869`, personally.)
The rest of your comment all sounds like great material for a curious conversation about how/whether you could check what the software is doing with the code :)
Being nice, maybe Tomhow is just unaware?