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Credit to the engineers that built this, but it fills me with rage that Elon has this sort of unchecked power. How long before this starts getting deployed in

Credit to the engineers that built this, but it fills me with rage that Elon has this sort of unchecked power. How long before this starts getting deployed in safety critical applications or government decision making processes? With no oversight because Elon seems to have the power to dismiss the people responsible for investigating him. Anyone not scared by this concentration of power needs to pick up a book.

niceice 2y ago
[flagged]
- therouwboat 2y ago
  He also runs tesla, twitter, xai, boring company, that brain thing company, government agency and has like 10 kids. I'm scared.
  - amazingamazing 2y ago
    Are you actually? Why?
  - niceice 2y ago
    Richard Dawkins: "I have a very favorable impression of Elon Musk and his concern for the welfare of the world. I have sat with [Elon] on a transatlantic plane and had a very, very long conversation with him. He's undoubtedly highly intelligent and knowledgeable. I've had lunch with him on two or three occasions, and so I know him a little bit. I have formed a very favorable impression of his intelligence, his knowledge and his concern for the welfare of the world." The Poetry of Reality, November 17, 2024
    - lonelyasacloud 2y ago
      Intelligence is not a guarantee against getting drawn in by evil https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Nazi_ideologues https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Nazi_ideologues .
    - throw16180339 2y ago
      Elon screws his partners in business deals, cheated Twitter employees out of severance, and is currently destroying our government. All of this trumps a firsthand impression from Dawkins.
  - pizzafeelsright 2y ago
    Would it be fair to say you have latched your mind onto something beyond your control which is leading to your fear? If you got a phone call today about your pancreatic cancer that will kill you in six weeks, do you fear Elon or some political agency?
- kurikuri 2y ago
  Ah yes, replacing the ‘elites’ with a single person, much less scary. And, to be clear, the ‘elites’ are still in power (because, in America, power tends to follow money). The only thing that seems to be happening is the rapid destruction of any system Elon deems ‘bad.’ We aren’t better off at the whims of this robber baron, and I don’t understand how you can think that.
  - Gothmog69 2y ago
    How is he a robber baron? You don't need to buy any of his products.
- silentsanctuary 2y ago
  > TLDR: The status quo elite that have been looting the USA for decades is being replaced by the guy who runs SpaceX and is the most transparent elite we've ever seen. Why is that scarier? The reason why it's scarier is that for those of us who've come to understand Elon, his actions, and his methods better, it's clear that: - he IS "the status quo elite that have been looting the USA for decades" - instead of being an incredibly smart polymath who turns things to gold, it's become obvious his main talent is actually just convincing other people that he's smart - the successes of Tesla and SpaceX have had to come DESPITE Elon's management, and despite having huge budgets to hire some of the smartest people around, he's still an incredibly weighty anchor pulling them down - rather than being transparent, he's playing at being a showman - and people who are only passively observing the situation are getting sucked into it
  - niceice 2y ago
    Sorry, but that is mental gymnastics. You've already made your conclusion and are torturing reality to make it fit.
    - silentsanctuary 2y ago
      Actually, I used to like Elon and was almost about to buy a Tesla, before the overwhelming burden of evidence required me to change my mind about him. What motivates your point of view? I'm genuinely very curious.
      - hersko 2y ago
        Because "looting the USA" is a ridiculous accusation agains someone who is became wealthy from creating genuinely great products. He spent everything he had on SpaceX and Tesla and came incredibly close to losing it all. He is not some robber baron or oligarch who is wealthy by hoarding natural resources.
      - Gothmog69 2y ago
        How is he the status quo elite? What leads you to believe he's not intelligent? Like those 2 things alone you need massive cognitive dissonance to believe.
- llm_trw 2y ago
  To quote Marx on the current churn in the US government: >The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionising the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society. Conservation of the old modes of production in unaltered form, was, on the contrary, the first condition of existence for all earlier industrial classes. Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind. LLM training—and the massive (potential) copyright infringement that everyone is engaging in to train these models—is the latest contradiction in capitalism. For the first time in my lifetime, this contradiction isn’t harming the workers but is instead affecting a segment of the capitalist class. Not since the abolition of slavery has one class of capitalists required the destruction of another to modernize the means of production. We are in for an interesting decade.
  - martin-t 2y ago
    LLMs are used to launder code under GPL and AGPL and strip its users of their rights. When I publish something under those copyleft licenses, my users have the right to see and modify the code. They even have that right if somebody else builds on top of my work. With LLMs, proprietary products based on my copyleft code are being written and used right now and my users have no rights at all, in fact, they don't even have a way to find out they are my users. Imagine I ~~stole~~ got my hands on code from the top 5 tech companies and then made an autocompleter that looks at function signatures the programmer writes and autocompletes the function by picking a matching function from that corpus. I'd get sued and rightfully so. What LLM companies are doing is exactly the same, just a bit more capable and it mixes the code just a bit more thoroughly to mask the origin.
- m2024 2y ago
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- spacechild1 2y ago
  I honestly don't know if you are being sarcastic or not. I really hope for the former.
- thrance 2y ago
  The brains that run and made SpaceX are anonymous engineers working long hours and passionately applying their expertise to a project they believe in. Elon is a man-child tweeting an average of 50 times a day (number not made up), pretending to reach max level in a popular video game and then bragging about it, constantly flying between Mar-a-Lago and the White House in his private jets. He has no time to actually manage "his" companies, of which he puts no work in whatsoever. You have to finally break free of this myth of the billionaire self-made man, building his fortune at the sweat of his brows. At some point, you're simply so rich that however stupid you are, competent people will still manage your capital well and make you even richer. You can only fail upward. Do not mistake the current events for anything but an acceleration of the theft of your country by billionaire oligarchs (or rather the people managing their wealth).
- amitrip 2y ago
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_heimdall 2y ago
I'm not sure how LLMs/AI couldn't consolidate power. By design, it will move power from the individual to those running the AI systems.
- smeeger 2y ago
  bingo. and everyone is fine with it as long as the consolidation is benefiting their own tribe.
  - tartoran 2y ago
    A spark can start a fire, it doesn't seem wise to ignore history. Things can always get out of control even for the ones up there on top of the pyramid of power.
  - throwaway657656 2y ago
    Definitely not everyone. For many of us, checks and balances are a feature not a bug.
- tartoran 2y ago
  I'm not sure people will just take it though. In the short term it looks like the situation is on a horrible course but eventually people will have had enough. I'm hoping it would take less time for that to happen and the damage will not be too great. Let's remember that we could use the same technology if not a better one to fight against all this.
  - xenodium 2y ago
    > but eventually people will have had enough As a Venezuelan, I thought so too. 25 years on...
    - bloopernova 2y ago
      A lot of US citizens are living incredibly comfortable lives. If that is threatened, for instance by food shortages caused by lack of people willing to work on farms for very low wages, then protests may happen. But the reality distortion field around the current administration is very powerful. Fox and CNN are owned by supporters of the republicans, NYTimes and Washington Post don't appear to be reporting certain aspects of the government restructuring. Multiple social media sites are owned and ran by people who support the current admin. I am personally worried that we're going to see the gradual yet continual escalation of rhetoric, more actions that undermine rule of law, and continued lack of critical thinking in so many people. That path appears to lead to extremism. I have a horrible feeling that whoever "wins" in a couple of decades or so will have no time to savour their utopia as the climate catastrophe really starts to bite hard.
srid 2y ago
I do not share your fear & anxiety. What concrete danger do you imagine will happen as a result of xAI? Try to be as concrete as possible. Also, dang, is there anything we can do to keep the comments on this submission tech-focused? Perhaps the Elon-bashing political digression can be split into its own thread?
- Arubis 2y ago
  Tech is the most powerful force in the modern economy. There is no making it not political. "Tech isn't political" _is a political statement_.
- wezdog1 2y ago
  I do not share your fear & anxiety so please dont share yours.
- digdugdirk 2y ago
  The concrete danger isn't necessarily with xAI (the product) but with Elon being the one who is in control of it. LLMs are an interesting technology, and we should absolutely be investing in pushing our understanding of the technology forward. We should absolutely not be relying on them for the ongoing functioning of our government: https://www.axios.com/2025/02/05/musk-doge-ai-government-efficiency-safeguards https://www.axios.com/2025/02/05/musk-doge-ai-government-eff... Unfortunately, Elon has made himself a spectacle. To separate him and his intentions out from the technology itself would be a disservice to the discourse as a whole.
  - srid 2y ago
    Hmm, I'm only too happy to rephrase my question, then. What concrete danger do you imagine will happen as a result of xAI being controlled by Elon? Try to be as concrete as possible.
    - katbyte 2y ago
      he will bias it toward his views and favoured outcomes like he did twitter and those are pretty terrible, anti-science, and petty
finnthehuman 2y ago
> it fills me with rage that Elon has this sort of unchecked power I can empathize, but I can't feel indignant about it. Not any more. For years and years I've watched people warn about the centralization of power by tech companies. They were shut down left and right. I'm not accusing you of being one doing the shutting down. I'm just annoyed that Elon is what it takes for people to start realizing the people arguing the principal might have been onto something. And I expect to see them start getting their "I told you so" in. Watching this play out, I'm personally inclined to join team "you made your bed, now sleep in it."
- tartoran 2y ago
  All it takes is some big fcukups and a political shift for these to be broken down to smithereens.
- randomcarbloke 2y ago
  I just wish it was someone technical or otherwise genuinely intelligent that did this.
dionian 2y ago
It's nothing in comparison to NBC/CBS/ABC/NYT/etc. But still a fair point
cpursley 2y ago
> How long before this starts getting deployed in safety critical applications or government decision making processes Hopefully sooner than later. I trust this more than the literal scammers and thieves who were previously running things.
- spiderfarmer 2y ago
  [flagged]
  - jcpham2 2y ago
    Yeah unfortunately I've spent a good bit of time talking to Grok (v2 I guess) and I agree with you. The commenter asking people not be political would be the same commenter that seems the most dismissive of any criticism and coincidentally also the most political. Grok is generally dismissive of any criticism(s) against certain parties, even when presenting facts.
imgabe 2y ago
There is precisely zero mention of any plan to put xAI or any other LLM in any safety critical or decision making process. How long? Nobody knows because nobody is even considering it. Take your pointless fear mongering elsewhere.
- cpursley 2y ago
  [flagged]
  - herval 2y ago
    It's unbelievable how the US government is literally being dismantled in front of your eyes, and all you can see is this thought-terminating bullshit about "purple hair people". Half the American population completely lost the ability to think...
    - xedrac 2y ago
      The way I see it is our government is being rescued from the tyranny of unelected bureaucrats with near zero accountability. And now that Trump has appointed someone to take a close look at everything and make recommendations for improvement, people are losing it. Why? I'm outraged at how irresponsible our government has been with my tax dollars. Trump has been the most transparent president in history, and it has absolutely been a breath of fresh air.
      - cpursley 2y ago
        Yeah, exactly. It blows my mind that expecting accountability, transparency, and effectiveness out of public servants is even a partisan issue.
    - imgabe 2y ago
      Large parts of the government needed to be dismantled. I know this is a shock to the people whose solution to every problem is “give the government more money”, but amazingly, people who primarily take a job because it has a cushy pension and its impossible to get fired are not the most effective people in the world.
aaron695 2y ago
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ijustlovemath 2y ago
What's remarkable to me about criticism like this is how quickly it's rebutted by people claiming "where did they say they would do this," as if these people don't make incredibly rushed and poorly planned decisions all the time. It's like an idea immune system that rejects any criticism or self reflection. It would be sociologically fascinating if it wasn't being combined with a dereliction of congressional power and an unchecked executive.
- EGreg 2y ago
  I literally post for years the same thing about the need for open source alternatives to social platforms where 1 person controls the algorithm to prioritize what a billion people see. And the response is “meh”. No one even bothers to read past the first paragraph: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43036350 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43036350 But if you really want to see the “immune system” shine, mention web3 and smart contracts, and watch the downvotes pour in. Any time one even mentions “decentralized byzantine fault tolerant” anything, an army rises up to repeat anodyne versions of “grift… no one needs it… banks are great…” etc. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43073421 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43073421 But if you mention any concerns with AI, no matter who or what you cite, the same group goes the other way and always repeats “(insert problem here) has always been possible, there is nothing to see here, move on, AI is amazing, deregulate and let the industry develop faster”: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40900155 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40900155 It’s groupthink at its most obvious, repeatable, always on, and I wonder how much of it is organic.
  - eightysixfour 2y ago
    Or, people have different opinions about who should have power over social media, banking, and AI, for completely rational reasons…
  - echelon 2y ago
    > But if you really want to see the “immune system” shine, mention web3 and smart contracts, and watch the downvotes pour in I'm all for distributed / P2P social media, but crypto is full of some of the most scammy and downright shameful behavior I've ever seen in my life. Pump and dumps, rug pulls, money laundering. There is a real reason people hate crypto. To tip it off, crypto is one of the least meritocratic things there is. The longer you've been in it, the more people you've scammed, the more you hype, the "wealthier" you are. Crypto smells like a shit and vomit sandwich and people immediately turn their noses. Build P2P social without the crypto angle and you have my attention. I've been wanting p2p (not federated) social media since the 200Xs and the decline of the indie web. Social and news should work like email and BitTorrent, not Facebook or "federated Twitter".
InTheArena 2y ago
Elon's unchecked power at building a model? Or at politics? I always worry whenever I see people telling me how to feel - rage in this case. We are in a political system that is oriented more around getting people to feel rage and hatred as opposed to consensus and deliberation. Elon is the face of that, but it's a much longer and larger problem. Throw in the complete dismisal that anyone not scared of this is ignorant, shuts down discussion. The problem I have with Elon is that they are wasting a once in a lifetime chance to actually address and fix systematic problems with the US government. Deploying LLMs in the government space doesn't fear me with dread. Continuing the senseless partisan drive of the 20 years does.
- KerrAvon 2y ago
  Has it occurred to you that the people who feel rage fundamentally understand the situation, and you may be undereducated in this area? What do you think are the root causes of that “senseless partisan drive”? I’d suggest starting with Rick Perlman’s book “Nixonland” if you’re interested.
  - InTheArena 2y ago
    As a Historian (and a German historian in particular) - I've spent a reasonable amount of time educating myself on the nature of fascism and in particular the break down of democracies (Wiemar, France, and also the erosion of civil liberties during the great depression in the United States). I have also been a delegate to both the RNC and the DNC at a state level. This is not a appeal to authority, but rather a honest response to your request for my education level. IMHO, The root cause of the "senseless partisan drive" is the fact that he founding fathers could not come up with a way to restrict parties (they called them "interests") and left them unchecked. This is a constant "sin" of the American political system, and is a key reason Slavery survived as long as it did, why separate but equal became the law of the land, why America shot itself in the foot several time with the Banks of America and why we are looking at the wrong side of history now. The parties now act to destroy each other as their prime directive, rather then to better the country. I liken this to Wiemar Germany, where the increasing radicalization of both the Nazis and the Communists led to political instability and eventual violence that destroyed the government. That erosion of democratic norms, as well as the "other side must be destroyed for us to survive" messaging is the true threat, IMHO. I would strongly suggest Richard Evan's three part history on Nazi history to understand Fascism. Don't worry, you can still hate and worry about Trump and think he is the next coming of Hitler afterwords - it will just be for better reasons.
deleted 2y ago
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cwalv 2y ago
That was fast. Perhaps we should imagine this has nothing to do with Musk to avoid completely derailing the conversation
- SubiculumCode 2y ago
  It cannot. Musk is probably the most powerful person in the world now and intent on remaking the world to his vision.
  - Fnoord 2y ago
    Trump is the most powerful, he is immune and can commune sentences. If he wants to, he puts Musk in jail tomorrow, no question about that. His successor will be as powerful, whether that is his son or Vance is up in the air. It won't be an elected Democrat though.
    - dvngnt_ 2y ago
      > It won't be an elected Democrat though. the pendulum swings back and forth. i don't see that changing
      - Fnoord 2y ago
        There won't be a fair election anymore after 2024. Trump in his own words: "we'll have it fixed so good". Right now, the USA is in a constitutional crisis, at the very least. There a fantastic website here, following the status of Project 2025 [1], with references. Trump is following that document to the T. [1] https://www.project2025.observer/ https://www.project2025.observer/
      - matwood 2y ago
        I, probably naively, hold out hope. But Trump/Musk dismantling the groups who work to keep elections fair and free is disturbing. https://eu.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2025/02/07/trump-fires-fec-chair-ellen-weintraub/78324207007/ https://eu.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2025/02/07/trump... https://www.npr.org/2025/02/11/nx-s1-5293521/foreign-influence-elections-cisa-trump https://www.npr.org/2025/02/11/nx-s1-5293521/foreign-influen...
amazingamazing 2y ago
I’m not really following what this has to do with grok. It’s his company, no? It’s also annoying that the top comment engages in no way with the content of the OP… It must be truly infuriating to work hard to push a release, and you see it featured on your favorite orange website, only for the top comment to have nothing to do with what was worked on. Here's a test - if this post was about Starship, the same comment could apply! Neuralink, the same thing! Boring Company, same thing! Wow, could it be that such a comment is really applicable to so many different companies or projects, or is it just a generic one? You decide.
- gyanchawdhary 2y ago
  The best comment on this thread !
cynicalpeace 2y ago
> it fills me with rage that Elon has this sort of unchecked power. The check on this is the market. Don't understand your point other than "Elon bad"
stronglikedan 2y ago
Elon is only doing good with this not-unchecked power. Everything is on the up and up, despite what your favorite propagandists want you to think. Go Elon!
soheil 2y ago
Never seen HN turned against someone so vehemently, it's as if a group of bots was set lose to criticize a certain individual.
- hahamrfunnyguy 2y ago
  It's been a long time coming with Elon Musk, and he has been criticized A LOT on Hacker News. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27796948 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27796948 (2021) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33622767 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33622767 (2022) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11025852 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11025852 (2016) I would also argue he is not being singled out, here are some comments posted criticizing Steve Jobs: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28295688 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28295688 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5578642 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5578642 It really shouldn't come as a surprise that notable people related to a company or project are brought up when an article about it appears on HN.
- katbyte 2y ago
  or just maybe, and i know its a crazy idea, a certain individual is objectively an awful person who has done great harm in the world and its subjective if its greater or lesser then the good (imho its far greater harms then any good done but i know that is my subjective view) just because you disagree with a widespread view/opinion does not mean its bots
  - pton_xd 2y ago
    > done great harm in the world Can someone enumerate the "great harm" that Elon is doing? I honestly don't see it.
    - dkjaudyeqooe 2y ago
      "There are none so blind as those who will not see"
LMYahooTFY 2y ago
He does not have the power to dismiss Judges and Congressional representatives. Judges can only be removed by Congress. Congressional representatives can only be removed by their peers.
conductr 2y ago
Or he starts using NSA data to train it, seems he has unchecked power to get into national systems and he made a point of saying this is more than the internet worth of knowledge...

niceice 2y ago

[flagged]

therouwboat 2y ago
He also runs tesla, twitter, xai, boring company, that brain thing company, government agency and has like 10 kids. I'm scared.
- amazingamazing 2y ago
  Are you actually? Why?
- niceice 2y ago
  Richard Dawkins: "I have a very favorable impression of Elon Musk and his concern for the welfare of the world. I have sat with [Elon] on a transatlantic plane and had a very, very long conversation with him. He's undoubtedly highly intelligent and knowledgeable. I've had lunch with him on two or three occasions, and so I know him a little bit. I have formed a very favorable impression of his intelligence, his knowledge and his concern for the welfare of the world." The Poetry of Reality, November 17, 2024
  - lonelyasacloud 2y ago
    Intelligence is not a guarantee against getting drawn in by evil https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Nazi_ideologues https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Nazi_ideologues .
  - throw16180339 2y ago
    Elon screws his partners in business deals, cheated Twitter employees out of severance, and is currently destroying our government. All of this trumps a firsthand impression from Dawkins.
- pizzafeelsright 2y ago
  Would it be fair to say you have latched your mind onto something beyond your control which is leading to your fear? If you got a phone call today about your pancreatic cancer that will kill you in six weeks, do you fear Elon or some political agency?
kurikuri 2y ago
Ah yes, replacing the ‘elites’ with a single person, much less scary. And, to be clear, the ‘elites’ are still in power (because, in America, power tends to follow money). The only thing that seems to be happening is the rapid destruction of any system Elon deems ‘bad.’ We aren’t better off at the whims of this robber baron, and I don’t understand how you can think that.
- Gothmog69 2y ago
  How is he a robber baron? You don't need to buy any of his products.
silentsanctuary 2y ago
> TLDR: The status quo elite that have been looting the USA for decades is being replaced by the guy who runs SpaceX and is the most transparent elite we've ever seen. Why is that scarier? The reason why it's scarier is that for those of us who've come to understand Elon, his actions, and his methods better, it's clear that: - he IS "the status quo elite that have been looting the USA for decades" - instead of being an incredibly smart polymath who turns things to gold, it's become obvious his main talent is actually just convincing other people that he's smart - the successes of Tesla and SpaceX have had to come DESPITE Elon's management, and despite having huge budgets to hire some of the smartest people around, he's still an incredibly weighty anchor pulling them down - rather than being transparent, he's playing at being a showman - and people who are only passively observing the situation are getting sucked into it
- niceice 2y ago
  Sorry, but that is mental gymnastics. You've already made your conclusion and are torturing reality to make it fit.
  - silentsanctuary 2y ago
    Actually, I used to like Elon and was almost about to buy a Tesla, before the overwhelming burden of evidence required me to change my mind about him. What motivates your point of view? I'm genuinely very curious.
    - hersko 2y ago
      Because "looting the USA" is a ridiculous accusation agains someone who is became wealthy from creating genuinely great products. He spent everything he had on SpaceX and Tesla and came incredibly close to losing it all. He is not some robber baron or oligarch who is wealthy by hoarding natural resources.
    - Gothmog69 2y ago
      How is he the status quo elite? What leads you to believe he's not intelligent? Like those 2 things alone you need massive cognitive dissonance to believe.
llm_trw 2y ago
To quote Marx on the current churn in the US government: >The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionising the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society. Conservation of the old modes of production in unaltered form, was, on the contrary, the first condition of existence for all earlier industrial classes. Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind. LLM training—and the massive (potential) copyright infringement that everyone is engaging in to train these models—is the latest contradiction in capitalism. For the first time in my lifetime, this contradiction isn’t harming the workers but is instead affecting a segment of the capitalist class. Not since the abolition of slavery has one class of capitalists required the destruction of another to modernize the means of production. We are in for an interesting decade.
- martin-t 2y ago
  LLMs are used to launder code under GPL and AGPL and strip its users of their rights. When I publish something under those copyleft licenses, my users have the right to see and modify the code. They even have that right if somebody else builds on top of my work. With LLMs, proprietary products based on my copyleft code are being written and used right now and my users have no rights at all, in fact, they don't even have a way to find out they are my users. Imagine I ~~stole~~ got my hands on code from the top 5 tech companies and then made an autocompleter that looks at function signatures the programmer writes and autocompletes the function by picking a matching function from that corpus. I'd get sued and rightfully so. What LLM companies are doing is exactly the same, just a bit more capable and it mixes the code just a bit more thoroughly to mask the origin.
m2024 2y ago
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spacechild1 2y ago
I honestly don't know if you are being sarcastic or not. I really hope for the former.
thrance 2y ago
The brains that run and made SpaceX are anonymous engineers working long hours and passionately applying their expertise to a project they believe in. Elon is a man-child tweeting an average of 50 times a day (number not made up), pretending to reach max level in a popular video game and then bragging about it, constantly flying between Mar-a-Lago and the White House in his private jets. He has no time to actually manage "his" companies, of which he puts no work in whatsoever. You have to finally break free of this myth of the billionaire self-made man, building his fortune at the sweat of his brows. At some point, you're simply so rich that however stupid you are, competent people will still manage your capital well and make you even richer. You can only fail upward. Do not mistake the current events for anything but an acceleration of the theft of your country by billionaire oligarchs (or rather the people managing their wealth).
amitrip 2y ago
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_heimdall 2y ago

I'm not sure how LLMs/AI couldn't consolidate power. By design, it will move power from the individual to those running the AI systems.

smeeger 2y ago
bingo. and everyone is fine with it as long as the consolidation is benefiting their own tribe.
- tartoran 2y ago
  A spark can start a fire, it doesn't seem wise to ignore history. Things can always get out of control even for the ones up there on top of the pyramid of power.
- throwaway657656 2y ago
  Definitely not everyone. For many of us, checks and balances are a feature not a bug.
tartoran 2y ago
I'm not sure people will just take it though. In the short term it looks like the situation is on a horrible course but eventually people will have had enough. I'm hoping it would take less time for that to happen and the damage will not be too great. Let's remember that we could use the same technology if not a better one to fight against all this.
- xenodium 2y ago
  > but eventually people will have had enough As a Venezuelan, I thought so too. 25 years on...
  - bloopernova 2y ago
    A lot of US citizens are living incredibly comfortable lives. If that is threatened, for instance by food shortages caused by lack of people willing to work on farms for very low wages, then protests may happen. But the reality distortion field around the current administration is very powerful. Fox and CNN are owned by supporters of the republicans, NYTimes and Washington Post don't appear to be reporting certain aspects of the government restructuring. Multiple social media sites are owned and ran by people who support the current admin. I am personally worried that we're going to see the gradual yet continual escalation of rhetoric, more actions that undermine rule of law, and continued lack of critical thinking in so many people. That path appears to lead to extremism. I have a horrible feeling that whoever "wins" in a couple of decades or so will have no time to savour their utopia as the climate catastrophe really starts to bite hard.

srid 2y ago

I do not share your fear & anxiety. What concrete danger do you imagine will happen as a result of xAI? Try to be as concrete as possible. Also, dang, is there anything we can do to keep the comments on this submission tech-focused? Perhaps the Elon-bashing political digression can be split into its own thread?

Arubis 2y ago
Tech is the most powerful force in the modern economy. There is no making it not political. "Tech isn't political" _is a political statement_.
wezdog1 2y ago
I do not share your fear & anxiety so please dont share yours.
digdugdirk 2y ago
The concrete danger isn't necessarily with xAI (the product) but with Elon being the one who is in control of it. LLMs are an interesting technology, and we should absolutely be investing in pushing our understanding of the technology forward. We should absolutely not be relying on them for the ongoing functioning of our government: https://www.axios.com/2025/02/05/musk-doge-ai-government-efficiency-safeguards https://www.axios.com/2025/02/05/musk-doge-ai-government-eff... Unfortunately, Elon has made himself a spectacle. To separate him and his intentions out from the technology itself would be a disservice to the discourse as a whole.
- srid 2y ago
  Hmm, I'm only too happy to rephrase my question, then. What concrete danger do you imagine will happen as a result of xAI being controlled by Elon? Try to be as concrete as possible.
  - katbyte 2y ago
    he will bias it toward his views and favoured outcomes like he did twitter and those are pretty terrible, anti-science, and petty

finnthehuman 2y ago

> it fills me with rage that Elon has this sort of unchecked power I can empathize, but I can't feel indignant about it. Not any more. For years and years I've watched people warn about the centralization of power by tech companies. They were shut down left and right. I'm not accusing you of being one doing the shutting down. I'm just annoyed that Elon is what it takes for people to start realizing the people arguing the principal might have been onto something. And I expect to see them start getting their "I told you so" in. Watching this play out, I'm personally inclined to join team "you made your bed, now sleep in it."

tartoran 2y ago
All it takes is some big fcukups and a political shift for these to be broken down to smithereens.
randomcarbloke 2y ago
I just wish it was someone technical or otherwise genuinely intelligent that did this.

dionian 2y ago

It's nothing in comparison to NBC/CBS/ABC/NYT/etc. But still a fair point

cpursley 2y ago

> How long before this starts getting deployed in safety critical applications or government decision making processes Hopefully sooner than later. I trust this more than the literal scammers and thieves who were previously running things.

spiderfarmer 2y ago
[flagged]
- jcpham2 2y ago
  Yeah unfortunately I've spent a good bit of time talking to Grok (v2 I guess) and I agree with you. The commenter asking people not be political would be the same commenter that seems the most dismissive of any criticism and coincidentally also the most political. Grok is generally dismissive of any criticism(s) against certain parties, even when presenting facts.

imgabe 2y ago

There is precisely zero mention of any plan to put xAI or any other LLM in any safety critical or decision making process. How long? Nobody knows because nobody is even considering it. Take your pointless fear mongering elsewhere.

cpursley 2y ago
[flagged]
- herval 2y ago
  It's unbelievable how the US government is literally being dismantled in front of your eyes, and all you can see is this thought-terminating bullshit about "purple hair people". Half the American population completely lost the ability to think...
  - xedrac 2y ago
    The way I see it is our government is being rescued from the tyranny of unelected bureaucrats with near zero accountability. And now that Trump has appointed someone to take a close look at everything and make recommendations for improvement, people are losing it. Why? I'm outraged at how irresponsible our government has been with my tax dollars. Trump has been the most transparent president in history, and it has absolutely been a breath of fresh air.
    - cpursley 2y ago
      Yeah, exactly. It blows my mind that expecting accountability, transparency, and effectiveness out of public servants is even a partisan issue.
  - imgabe 2y ago
    Large parts of the government needed to be dismantled. I know this is a shock to the people whose solution to every problem is “give the government more money”, but amazingly, people who primarily take a job because it has a cushy pension and its impossible to get fired are not the most effective people in the world.

aaron695 2y ago

[dead]

ijustlovemath 2y ago

What's remarkable to me about criticism like this is how quickly it's rebutted by people claiming "where did they say they would do this," as if these people don't make incredibly rushed and poorly planned decisions all the time. It's like an idea immune system that rejects any criticism or self reflection. It would be sociologically fascinating if it wasn't being combined with a dereliction of congressional power and an unchecked executive.

EGreg 2y ago
I literally post for years the same thing about the need for open source alternatives to social platforms where 1 person controls the algorithm to prioritize what a billion people see. And the response is “meh”. No one even bothers to read past the first paragraph: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43036350 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43036350 But if you really want to see the “immune system” shine, mention web3 and smart contracts, and watch the downvotes pour in. Any time one even mentions “decentralized byzantine fault tolerant” anything, an army rises up to repeat anodyne versions of “grift… no one needs it… banks are great…” etc. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43073421 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43073421 But if you mention any concerns with AI, no matter who or what you cite, the same group goes the other way and always repeats “(insert problem here) has always been possible, there is nothing to see here, move on, AI is amazing, deregulate and let the industry develop faster”: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40900155 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40900155 It’s groupthink at its most obvious, repeatable, always on, and I wonder how much of it is organic.
- eightysixfour 2y ago
  Or, people have different opinions about who should have power over social media, banking, and AI, for completely rational reasons…
- echelon 2y ago
  > But if you really want to see the “immune system” shine, mention web3 and smart contracts, and watch the downvotes pour in I'm all for distributed / P2P social media, but crypto is full of some of the most scammy and downright shameful behavior I've ever seen in my life. Pump and dumps, rug pulls, money laundering. There is a real reason people hate crypto. To tip it off, crypto is one of the least meritocratic things there is. The longer you've been in it, the more people you've scammed, the more you hype, the "wealthier" you are. Crypto smells like a shit and vomit sandwich and people immediately turn their noses. Build P2P social without the crypto angle and you have my attention. I've been wanting p2p (not federated) social media since the 200Xs and the decline of the indie web. Social and news should work like email and BitTorrent, not Facebook or "federated Twitter".

InTheArena 2y ago

Elon's unchecked power at building a model? Or at politics? I always worry whenever I see people telling me how to feel - rage in this case. We are in a political system that is oriented more around getting people to feel rage and hatred as opposed to consensus and deliberation. Elon is the face of that, but it's a much longer and larger problem. Throw in the complete dismisal that anyone not scared of this is ignorant, shuts down discussion. The problem I have with Elon is that they are wasting a once in a lifetime chance to actually address and fix systematic problems with the US government. Deploying LLMs in the government space doesn't fear me with dread. Continuing the senseless partisan drive of the 20 years does.

KerrAvon 2y ago
Has it occurred to you that the people who feel rage fundamentally understand the situation, and you may be undereducated in this area? What do you think are the root causes of that “senseless partisan drive”? I’d suggest starting with Rick Perlman’s book “Nixonland” if you’re interested.
- InTheArena 2y ago
  As a Historian (and a German historian in particular) - I've spent a reasonable amount of time educating myself on the nature of fascism and in particular the break down of democracies (Wiemar, France, and also the erosion of civil liberties during the great depression in the United States). I have also been a delegate to both the RNC and the DNC at a state level. This is not a appeal to authority, but rather a honest response to your request for my education level. IMHO, The root cause of the "senseless partisan drive" is the fact that he founding fathers could not come up with a way to restrict parties (they called them "interests") and left them unchecked. This is a constant "sin" of the American political system, and is a key reason Slavery survived as long as it did, why separate but equal became the law of the land, why America shot itself in the foot several time with the Banks of America and why we are looking at the wrong side of history now. The parties now act to destroy each other as their prime directive, rather then to better the country. I liken this to Wiemar Germany, where the increasing radicalization of both the Nazis and the Communists led to political instability and eventual violence that destroyed the government. That erosion of democratic norms, as well as the "other side must be destroyed for us to survive" messaging is the true threat, IMHO. I would strongly suggest Richard Evan's three part history on Nazi history to understand Fascism. Don't worry, you can still hate and worry about Trump and think he is the next coming of Hitler afterwords - it will just be for better reasons.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

cwalv 2y ago

That was fast. Perhaps we should imagine this has nothing to do with Musk to avoid completely derailing the conversation

SubiculumCode 2y ago
It cannot. Musk is probably the most powerful person in the world now and intent on remaking the world to his vision.
- Fnoord 2y ago
  Trump is the most powerful, he is immune and can commune sentences. If he wants to, he puts Musk in jail tomorrow, no question about that. His successor will be as powerful, whether that is his son or Vance is up in the air. It won't be an elected Democrat though.
  - dvngnt_ 2y ago
    > It won't be an elected Democrat though. the pendulum swings back and forth. i don't see that changing
    - Fnoord 2y ago
      There won't be a fair election anymore after 2024. Trump in his own words: "we'll have it fixed so good". Right now, the USA is in a constitutional crisis, at the very least. There a fantastic website here, following the status of Project 2025 [1], with references. Trump is following that document to the T. [1] https://www.project2025.observer/ https://www.project2025.observer/
    - matwood 2y ago
      I, probably naively, hold out hope. But Trump/Musk dismantling the groups who work to keep elections fair and free is disturbing. https://eu.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2025/02/07/trump-fires-fec-chair-ellen-weintraub/78324207007/ https://eu.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2025/02/07/trump... https://www.npr.org/2025/02/11/nx-s1-5293521/foreign-influence-elections-cisa-trump https://www.npr.org/2025/02/11/nx-s1-5293521/foreign-influen...

amazingamazing 2y ago

I’m not really following what this has to do with grok. It’s his company, no? It’s also annoying that the top comment engages in no way with the content of the OP… It must be truly infuriating to work hard to push a release, and you see it featured on your favorite orange website, only for the top comment to have nothing to do with what was worked on. Here's a test - if this post was about Starship, the same comment could apply! Neuralink, the same thing! Boring Company, same thing! Wow, could it be that such a comment is really applicable to so many different companies or projects, or is it just a generic one? You decide.

gyanchawdhary 2y ago
The best comment on this thread !

cynicalpeace 2y ago

> it fills me with rage that Elon has this sort of unchecked power. The check on this is the market. Don't understand your point other than "Elon bad"

stronglikedan 2y ago

Elon is only doing good with this not-unchecked power. Everything is on the up and up, despite what your favorite propagandists want you to think. Go Elon!

soheil 2y ago

Never seen HN turned against someone so vehemently, it's as if a group of bots was set lose to criticize a certain individual.

hahamrfunnyguy 2y ago
It's been a long time coming with Elon Musk, and he has been criticized A LOT on Hacker News. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27796948 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27796948 (2021) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33622767 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33622767 (2022) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11025852 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11025852 (2016) I would also argue he is not being singled out, here are some comments posted criticizing Steve Jobs: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28295688 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28295688 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5578642 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5578642 It really shouldn't come as a surprise that notable people related to a company or project are brought up when an article about it appears on HN.
katbyte 2y ago
or just maybe, and i know its a crazy idea, a certain individual is objectively an awful person who has done great harm in the world and its subjective if its greater or lesser then the good (imho its far greater harms then any good done but i know that is my subjective view) just because you disagree with a widespread view/opinion does not mean its bots
- pton_xd 2y ago
  > done great harm in the world Can someone enumerate the "great harm" that Elon is doing? I honestly don't see it.
  - dkjaudyeqooe 2y ago
    "There are none so blind as those who will not see"

LMYahooTFY 2y ago

He does not have the power to dismiss Judges and Congressional representatives. Judges can only be removed by Congress. Congressional representatives can only be removed by their peers.

conductr 2y ago

Or he starts using NSA data to train it, seems he has unchecked power to get into national systems and he made a point of saying this is more than the internet worth of knowledge...