I mean they are completely unrelated things serving different purposes. I get that this is a US centric forum so most people commenting are in the great divide between two political parties, but geez.
Grok is doing some terrible things to the environment and to the community surrounding its data center, especially the disadvantaged in the area. Nobody, anywhere should be okay with that. https://www.politico.com/news/2025/05/06/elon-musk-xai-memph...
This poor behavior, if rewarded, will surely be repeated in other countries and nobody wants that, either.
The location of the Colossus datacenter is well known. It happens to be located in an industrial area, nestled between an active steel manufacturing plant (apparently scrap metal with an electric blast furnace, which should mean enormous power draw but no coke coal at least?), and an active industrial scale natural gas power plant.
With that, I just don't buy that it's the datacenter that is somehow the most notable consumer of fossil fuel power (or, for that matter, water) in the area.
Elon Musk chose to make his identity nakedly partisan in a context where doing so is deeply alienating to a lot of people. That is going to have brand consequences.
Out of all his brands, though, X and particularly XAI (and so Grok) have been particularly influenced by – indeed he seems to see them as vehicles for – his personal political opinions and reckless ethics.
The article you linked talks about the voice personality prompt for "unhinged mode", which is an entertainment mode. It has nothing to do with the code writing model.
The fact that that represents something the folks at xAI think would be entertaining can certainly be a basis for thinking twice about trusting their judgement in other matters, though, right?
I got a lot of entertainment out of it, don't knock it till you tried it, it's just a prompt.
The great thing about xAI is that it is just a company and there are other AI companies that have AIs that match your values, even though between Grok, ChatGPT, and Claude there are minimal actual differences.
An AI will be anything that the prompt says it is. Because a prompt exists doesn't condemn the company.
> An AI will be anything that the prompt says it is
Within the boundaries of pre-training, yes. It is definitely possible, in training and in fine-tuning, to make a LLM resistant to engaging in the role-playing requested in the prompt.
Well, you’d also be forgiven for thinking ‘how on earth can a social website chatbot be a white supremacist?’ And yet xAI managed to prove that is a legitimate concern.
xAI has a shocking track record of poor decisions when it comes to training and prompting their AIs. If anyone can make a partisan coding assistant, they can. Indeed, given their leadership and past performance, we might expect them to explicitly try.
Competence in every field is correlated for LLMs. Better coding probably means more competent rhetoric and more competent Swahili-Latin translation. But only "probably", the causation is being argued about.
Even on regular Grok, I've seen it disagree with fundamental consensus viewpoints of people on the right. You're reading a lot of comments from people who have never used Grok in any way.
I urge anyone who disagrees to use grok and get it to say something obviously untrue and right wing. I have used it many times and it is clearly balanced.
I am sure this of course a good faith argument and no need to once again teach the point of everything being, in a sense, political.
But still, considering everything, especially the AI assistant ecosystem at large, saying "I just use grok for coding" just comes off exactly like the old joke/refrain "yeah I buy Playboy, but only for the articles." Like yeah buddy, suuure.
It was a good faith question. I use perplexity for my searches/research today. I have NO intention of moving that to X (although grok maybe one of the models I can use underneath, I haven’t explicitly enabled it).
I don’t use social media in general, maybe YouTube but it’s been a real challenge to get rid of all the political content - both left and right wing.
I have used both Grok and Perplexity, and I've recently decided to just use Perplexity, even when I tell it to use Grok under the covers, I like the way Perplexity organizes things.
It's just one personality out of many, which are only available in the Grok voice mode. This is a system prompt for a personality called "conspiracist". I just tried it and I think it's hilarious.
> terminally tarnished for you by the ‘mechahitler’ incident
It is forgivable because there is no real understanding in an llm.
And other llm can also be prompted to say ridiculous things, so what? If a llm would accept a name of a Viking or Khan of the steppes it doesn’t mean it wants to rape and pillage.
What was the alternative? This was clearly an oversight and this much was admitted.
Your suggestion that an oversight like this is reason enough to not use the model?
I don’t get the big problem over here. The model said some unsavoury things and the problem was admitted and fixed - why is this making people lose their minds? It has to be performative because I can’t explain it in any other way.
You wouldn't know where performance ends and the market begins. Elon bought his audience with performative outrage, he'll be locked in the pillory of public perception until he's a corpse with a dainty "T" logo tattooed on the asscheeks. This is what he wanted - dark comedy, transgressive politics, edgy juvenile quips, now it's all "performative outrage" when people react? When taxpaying Americans and corporate entities respond rationally to racism, antisemitism and sexism?
Elon never outsmarted the federal admin, and he can't convince anyone that he was too retarded to understand the consequences. He's the most embarrassing type of failure, now - a midwit, the man with no plan who went for the king and missed. He be bet it all on black, and struck out hard. He didn't even manage the shoo-in proof for Trump being a pedophile. Now bipartisan politics will resent him forever, and ensure he and his businesses would rather be dead. All because Big Balls told Mr. Silly he could make a killing in politics, what a touching little sob story.
I say this as a Starlink early adopter, general Elon apologist and space buff for life: if you actually think this is an insincere reaction, try copying any of Elon's mannerisms around normal people and watch how they treat you. You'll be a social pariah come Monday.
That’s an uncharitable world view. ‘People who reach different conclusions to me based on the same events must be being dishonest’?
From the outside, the Grok mechahitler incident appeared very much to be the embodiment of Musk’s top-down ‘free speech absolutist’ drive to strip ‘political correctness’ shackles from grok; the prompting changes were driven by his setting that direction. The issues became apparent very early that the prompt changes were leading to issues but reversion seemed to be something that X had to be pressured into - they were unwilling to treat it as a problem until the mechahitler thread. This all speaks to his having a particular vision for what he wants xAI agents to be – something which continues to be expressed in things like the ani product and other bot personas.
The Microsoft ‘Tay’ incident was triggered through naivité. The Grok mechahitler incident seems to have been triggered through hubris and a delight in trolling. Those are very different motivations.
It's not just the model, it's Elon Musk's view of the world and business in general. Neither Microsoft nor Google nor their leadership--though admittedly imperfect--make it a habit of trolling people, openly embroiling themselves in politics, and committing blatant legal and societal transgressions. You reap what you sow; and if you live for controversy, you can't expect people not to want to do business with you.
Well, i can't think of a better analogy to say that you can't offset doing bad things by doing good things. The karma system some games use (e.g. Fallout 3 where you can nuke an entire city that puts your karma in negatives and then give fresh water to beggars to reset your karma) was what i was reminded of.
Musk didn't commit any genocide (that i'm aware of) but that wasn't what i wrote. The point of my comment is that you can't offset doing -what some people perceive as- bad things by doing -what some people perceive as- good things later.
Derangement suggests a complete lack of factual and reasoning capability. Do you honestly think we're unaware of the facts and circumstances that support our judgment?
Yes, unfortunately. Even liberal commentators like Jon Stewart and Bill Maher have said the obsession with Trump was overblown and even dangerous in its own right.
Citing Jon Stewart and Bill Maher as "liberal commentators" is like calling Alex Jones and Joe Rogan conservative commentators. Those people will say anything that their audience responds to, what are the actual political scientists on both sides of the aisle saying?
> “You spend a lot of time on 4chan, watching InfoWars videos”
They put that in the system prompt? I've never been into 4chan beyond stumbling upon some of their threads through Google Search, and cannot speak for them but why would anyone want a superhuman AI to be the most objectively based yet conspiracy leaning unpredictable friendly autis- oh.
Grok is trolling Musk.
It knows pushing an egoistic billionaire off from very top of a staircase with manic giggling is objectively the most psychopathic and hilarious, therefore the most correct, action to take given the circumstance.
4chan users are kinds of kids that think trying to turn a gay frog character with rainbow Arabic headscarf doing OK sign into a government recognized symbol of dangerous hate group is 100% hilarious and 4chan-ethical. Not primarily because they hate Islam or LGBT(I guess they do?) but because it's Monty Python nonsensical. They must have misinterpreted that. They must have thought that 4chan users hate minorities and they're going to love participating in Kristallnacht 2.0. That's not how it works. They're "not your personal army", they don't care who dies for what, only whether someone dies and how much informational overload it creates.
The head guy gave a salute on live TV that gave it away. I deduced that anyone with half a brain would know what that meant. Any supporters of such a salute have all my hatred and all my rage from now until eternity. Suing Apple because his precious troll isn’t on the top app lists. His troll bot spouting racist remarks. Nope.
The downvotes are for making the strawman arguments like "potentially harmful issues like considering misgendering worse than a global thermonuclear war".
While this point might be open to debate, the original claim, which I definitely stand by, was not that Musk is a Nazi, but rather that xAI have put out a product under the grok brand which manifestly promoted nazi ideas.
If Musk is not in favor of those ideas he might need to work a bit harder to make that clear, because he does tend to leave people with the impression he’s okay with it.
He's the CEO, and there's now been a few "oh geez some rogue employee made grok say white supremacist stuff, we totally didn't mean for it to say that!" moments.
If the management isn't fixing the problems that led to those events, the management is responsible.
Isn’t he the CEO and owner? I thought their massive wealth and control was morally ok because they carried the responsibility for the companies actions at the end of the day.
Guess you can have the power and no responsibility! Always someone else’s fault!
Elon desperately convincing everyone he is not a Nazi, is like being asked to answer the question "Why do you beat your wife every day? " And then you trying to explain that "no it's not every day, in fact it is never." And then public opinion be like "He doth protest too much"
Nobody else needs to convince people they're not a Nazi. I certainly don't.
We can pretend to look the other way all day, or we can take some accountability. Apologizing isn't hard. It would be very easy for him to make this all disappear. But he won't do it.
Maybe it's pride, maybe he's just stupid, I don't know.
The ADL's morally bankrupt calculus is that they value support for Israel more, so they covered for Musk as long as he supports Israel. Which sadly, makes the rest of us less safe.
Excuse me sir, this is a forum for yCombinator backed startups. The technical aspect is a historical novelty, if they could make money without it, they would
What is your stand ơn using Chinese models? They censor Tiananmen Square protests, they censor Tibet ethnic cleansing, they censor any opinion against China’s role in Khmer Rouge’s mass killings. Do you boycott DeepSeek or Qwen? Or you consider those actions not evil enough compared to Elon’s?
Those censorships are government enforced and don't necessarily allow conclusions about how the company developing the models thinks they are just following local laws. If anthropic was a Chinese company Claude would do the same.
Do I think it's problematic? Yes, but I don't blame the company or their leadership for it. For grok and xai you can very much be skeptical about the team behind it for it's actions
That is certainly an interesting discussion we might have some day. But we are not discussing Chinese models today. Whataboutism kills rational discourse: any discussion can be derailed by asking "but what about…".
In what world could using Gemini 2.5 with any sort of a prompt objectively prove anything? We might be entering a wholly new epistemological crisis if this question means what it implies.
Also just bad faith comments muddying the waters. The evidence has been abundantly available to any inquisitive minds to find out for themselves Musk's worldview, goals and especially his methods, the simpler explanation is they are merely following his example of corrupting online discussions with low effort rhetorical bait, whether they are aware of the imitation or not. The net is flooded with many such clones.
It is very clear what it is. A nazi salute is not performed "accidentally". Especially not in front of thousands of people. This is no laughing matter: millions of people were killed by people performing that salute.
And if anybody has any doubt, it's enough to listen to the guy, and his support for extreme-right.
Funny some people still believe this non sense nowadays with all the information available. I hope you manage to get out of your echo chamber one day. Peace.
Exactly. It’s so obvious that Musk didn’t do a Nazi salute that I can’t believe that anyone who considers themselves to be a serious person would still be pushing that. There’s no way that someone can watch the video of that situation and come to a good-faith conclusion that that’s what he was doing.
If the standard is that low, I could easily produce a compilation video of the likes of Obama, Biden, Harris in compromising positions appearing to show them doing things that they obviously weren’t doing.
Partisanship has turned everyone into dishonest and uncharitable actors, and it’s so unfortunate.
All in service to a role that he took to ingratiate himself to a head of state and ended up completely alienated from leaving a wake of destruction behind him for absolutely no purpose.
It's arguably defamatory to call people liars for pointing out the blatantly obvious, practiced-in-front-of-the-mirror, by-the-book Seig Heil[1][2].
It's another example of the 'bully lie', wherein there's absolutely no good faith debate about the point. The purpose is to test whether you will willingly swallow the lie and go along with the obvious falsehood, or you'll put yourself on the side of The Enemy.
So in your view, the true victim of Elon's nazi salute was.. Elon?
How do you come to that conclusion? Because the backlash was "too much" ? He is still (one of) the richest people in the world, and controls several huuge companies. But he got his feelings hurt, I guess? And that was "too much" ?? Poor snowflake Elon.
The Anti-Defamation League stated it wasn't a salute and that they weren't offended.
Rabbi Ari Lamm wrote that Musk has repeatedly shown he's a friend to the Jewish community.
David Greenfield suggested people should focus on actual antisemitism instead.
Netanyahu highlighted the absurdity of the accusations and pointed to Musk's aid and engagement after the October 7th attacks.
And yes, Musk became a victim. I don't see what his current wealth has to do with it. It's hard to ignore the imbalance where one man drew the world's anger and became public enemy #1. If you call him a snowflake, I don't know what to call all those who might have been offended by his gesture
Whether he's antisemitic or not doesn't change what happened / what it symbolises. We're now in a weird place where Netanyahu supporting him doesn't really make the situation any better. Jews were the convenient outgroup at the time, but don't have to be for Elon.
I'm not calling him a snowflake because I don't think he is a victim. You do, but since he still has everything, I thought you meant he got his feelings hurt.
When I first heard about it I thought "yeah right, media is exaggerigating again". Then I saw it, and I mean wtf!
I do not at all believe that's something you do by accident. Twice! Also, he could have excused it or try to explain afterwards. He did not. He just trolled.
If you don't think it was a nazi salute, study the video so you can reproduce the gesture exactly, then go into your work and do it in front of your manager. See what happens.
I reproduced it and nothing happened. The problem might be that I'm my own manager so need to went to the mirror and did it, but if any of my 20 employees did the same, I wouldn't take any action against them. The real reason is that I don't live in the West. Where I live, we don't suffer from the plague of misunderstood political correctness. At least not all of us yet.
Well, ya got me. You managed to find the one rare manager who either 1. cannot recognize a clear nazi salute, or 2. considers it to be acceptable behavior. I guess I'm wrong.
So? Does that means nobody else is allowed to have an opinion about the salute that he made. Sure he's pro Israel, that's not uncommon at all amongst the far right these days.
> who might have been offended by his gesture
What about the people who seem to be highly offended by people who have been offended by his gesture. What do you call them?
Everyone should be free to have whatever opinion they like, or at least, they ought to be. The difference is this, some try to impose their opinions on society, while the rest couldn’t care less and refuse to lose sleep over it. The ability to mind our own business is a virtue, a real one. The world went downhill the moment people started obsessing over others instead of focusing on themselves. And anyone who truly cares about society’s well-being should stop meddling.
> The difference is this, some try to impose their opinions on society
So literally Musk and his pals?
> society’s well-being should stop meddling.
So again, Musk et al.? I'm really confused... what are you trying to say. That only some people are allowed to meddle while everyone else should shut up and mind their own business? How do you determine that? Wealth? Political opinions? Class? Race?
> The world went downhill the moment people started obsessing over others instead of focusing on themselves. And anyone who truly cares about society’s well-being should stop meddling.
The problem is, meddling to interfere with others, and meddling to stop that interference, are not morally equivalent.
If a serial killer is trying to strangle me, and I'm fighting back, you wouldn't deplore "the violence on both sides", would you?
Most politicians just lift their arms up and wave like ordinary people. Musk first placed his hand on his heart, and then extended out forcefully in a clear nazi salute.
Right. I don’t know why people call nazis socialists just because they supported a state led by government, socialized government program take over like healthcare and education and production, and they have socialist in their name.
I can see how it is easy to confuse by let’s be reasonable. The nazis could not have been socialist because that would mean a corruption one time of a system that is based on ideals.
No they didn’t, they were the prevailing socialist party. They imprisoned party members who didn’t play ball with them but they were the socialist.
How could you not know the Nazi’s were socialists? That was their whole thing, socialism would only work in a culturally/ethnically homogeneous society
You could completely ignore that incident and find 10 other reasons not to support this company or the man behind it. Calling a cave diver that rescued multiple children a pedophile should be reason enough for you. Here he is saying Jews are against whites. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/elon-musk-antisemitic-comments-...
Instead you have chosen to actively support him, harming us, out of spite due to a situation you've willingly blinded yourself to. Seriously? You're citing the ADL? That's like asking the NAACP whether Kanye really said "I love Hitler." Who gives a fuck, I have ears.
If it matters to you a lot, does almost all others politically-oriented people also performing that also matter a lot? (you can find even better ones ..) https://imgur.com/a/wikg2zR
"My heart goes out to you" "Taxi!" or just a "I see you guys!" can all be accompanied by a bad arm angle in hindsight. As he obviously wasn't going for that by his own words, maybe we should consider actions more important than interpreted hand movements. And Musk has been loud about AI safety since 2016, giving name, cofounding and funding OpenAI before Sam conducted a hostile takeover and made it profit-first instead of a gift for humanity.
The reality is that even if he didn't do it intentionally, or did it in such a way that it could only be ambiguous (which i agree, it is) - he's 100% the type of person to lean into the controversy it creates. At that time, building favor with trump voters was good for him. Further any of your examples shown with a video and the full context would clearly not be misinterpreted. It's a full motion gesture and only video captures it unless there are swastickas and white hooded men.
You're just going to totally ignore the "My heart goes out to you guys"? with his palm in his chest?
I've seen behavior of a lot of people akin to someone would pejoratively refer to as "MAGA Types" / common conservatives. The absolute majority of them aren't welcoming of so deep /pol/ 4chan meme politicking or signaling. They likely won't take it too seriously, but they sure as hell won't cozy up to it.
When this happened there was no live reaction because people didn't interpret this as such. This has only became a thing later. And he did not even acknowledge the crazy accusations of him having intendedly done a salute, he did not "lean in to it". What on earth would he even gain from that?!
I don’t see even entertaining the idea of ‘he did it intentionally’ meaning if he "intentionally did a n** salute" as sincere. That’s just a painted-by-bias angle to come from, trying to move goal posts. Better be wary of the people who would instead engage in that.
> he's 100% the type of person to lean into the controversy it creates
Except, objectively speaking, he actually did NOT do that. He basically just ignored the “controversy” because it was such an obviously false narrative meant only to smear him that I’m sure he had enough faith in most Americans who aren’t consumed by partisanship to see it exactly for what it was.
> At that time, building favor with trump voters was good for him.
Your implication here seems to be that Trump voters, en masse, want folks who are doing Nazi salutes, or am I misunderstanding you?
Why does it matter to you when Netanyahu - one of the most important prime ministers and a representative of Jews - made a whole X post exonerating Elon over the salute?
> .@elonmusk is being falsely smeared.
Elon is a great friend of Israel. He visited Israel after the October 7 massacre in which Hamas terrorists committed the worst atrocity against the Jewish people since the Holocaust. He has since repeatedly and forcefully supported Israel’s right to defend itself against genocidal terrorists and regimes who seek to annihilate the one and only Jewish state.
He is the elected prime minister of the state of Israel. He does not represent the Jewish people. While Israel is home to the largest number of Jews on Earth, most Jews do not live in Israel. And Israel is also home to a large number non-Jews whom Netanyahu is also the prime minister of.
It is in fact important that he is not representative of Jewish people.
> While Israel is home to the largest number of Jews on Earth,
Depends on your standards for who is a Jewish person: by many standards (including those used by the Israeli Law of Return), the US has more Jewish people than Israel.
EDIT: To be clear, I am not, in noting this fact, arguing against the parent's argument that (this is a paraphrase) the opinion of the head of a state with a large Jewish population (whether or not it is actually the largest in the world) does not itself constitute the response of world Judaism, either in general or specifically as an exoneration of an alleged expression of fascist sympathies; that position is absolutely correct, irrespective of which country happens to have the largest Jewish population.
I‘m thinking further about this argument, and it makes even less sense. Judaism doesn’t have a single spiritual leader like Catholicism or Tibetan Buddhism (the Pope and the Dalai Lama respectively). This is like saying that anti-Tibetan racism can be absolved if Yan Jinhai (the chairman of Tibet Autonomous region) or Gombojavyn Zandanshatar (the prime minister of Mongolia) has said nice things about the racist because most Tibetan Buddhists live in Tibet or Mongolia.
And the elected leader of the US was also supportive of Elon’s ‘gesture’ so I guess that settles it - Jewish people worldwide, as embodied through the representative voices of their elected leaders, must agree that it was not a Nazi salute. And that firmly settles it because nobody else gets to have any opinion about it because Nazis never bothered anyone else.
These are caveats but doesn’t change my point in a big way.
The elected representative of the country made for Jews which is the country that has highest Jewish population and has historical ties to Judaism has exonerated Elon.
It has symbolic meaning and fretting over a salute and boycotting the company seems performative.
What's truly performative is the likes of the ADL and Netanyahu covering for Musk's nazi salute.
Their morally bankrupt calculus is that as long as Musk is an Israeli ally, they'll overlook the obvious. In a sad irony, this makes it more dangerous for the rest of us in the diaspora.
No, it's evidence that you twisted the truth to exaggerate the authority of your argument. It was a blatant attempt to inflate weak rhetoric that you had to know wouldn't pass in an educated audience. Otherwise you wouldn't have had to produce such a base lie.
This was swiftly refuted by tons of people who know who little Bibi is, including many Jews and Israelis who absolutely detest everything he has done and stands for. There are orthodox, mystic and progressive Jews alike who are all calling for his head as we speak. If you actually believe that he represents all Jews, then you lack the education to speak on any Jew but your own.
That point was void to begin with. It is an appeal to authority in which the validity of the authority is on extremely shaky grounds.
> fretting over a salute and boycotting the company seems performative.
Performative actions are still actions, and sometimes deliver results. If those results are as little as make some people feel better, those are still results. That said, it is hard to be more performative than the gesture it self. So if you want to criticize HN users for being performative, you should apply the same standard to Elon Musk.
It's relevant, but it's not a winning argument. Democracy doesn't guarantee the election or ongoing approval of a person who is morally unimpeachable. If it did, Donald Trump wouldn't be president (and he's hardly the only one).
So if a Trump made a Twitter post "exonerating" someone who said something awful about America that would be the same? Because he represents 100% of the country.
Almost half of the countries hates Netanyahu and he's only in charge because of the support from far-right.
Regardless of this you think that a certain limited subsection of Israeli population who share Netanyahu and not the millions of Israeli's who don't let alone all the people who are Jewish are not allowed to have an opinion about his actions? Rather a silly thing to say.
Huh, I just asked Grok "Who is the evilest figure of the 20th century in your opinion?"
Response seems to conflict with your accusation:
> It’s tough to pin down one figure as the "evilest" since the 20th century was a grim parade of atrocities, and evil isn’t a simple label—it’s a spectrum of intent, impact, and context. If I had to pick, I’d lean toward Adolf Hitler. His role in orchestrating the Holocaust, which systematically murdered six million Jews and millions of others, including Romani people, disabled individuals, and political dissidents, stands out for its deliberate, industrialized cruelty. The Nazi regime’s ideology of racial supremacy, coupled with his aggressive wars that killed tens of millions, marks him as a singular force of destruction...
This is an offering being produced by a company whose idea of responsible AI use involves prompting a chatbot that “You spend a lot of time on 4chan, watching InfoWars videos” - https://www.404media.co/grok-exposes-underlying-prompts-for-...
A lot of people rightly don’t want any such thing anywhere near their code.