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xAI's Grok 3 comes to Microsoft Azure
- epa 1y ago[flagged]
- mjcl 1y ago[flagged]
- dawnerd 1y ago[flagged]
- SimianSci 1y agoTechnology cannot be wholly divorced from its ethical considerations. If a technology's founder has a multitude of ethical blindspots and has shown a willingness to modify such technology to suit his own desires, it is something which should be noted, discussed, and considered. As professionals, it is absolutely crucial that we discuss matters of ethics. One of which is the issue of an unethical founder.
- epa 1y ago[flagged]
- rvz 1y ago[flagged]
- tastyface 1y ago[flagged]
- throw123xz 1y agoThe founder is very hands on and in the context of the recent "issues" xAI experienced, which happens to match some of the founder's political views, any discussion about xAI has to touch on Musk. You having issues with any criticism of Musk is a bit weird though. I'm not going to say that the moderators should be better, but it's also disappointing to see some users always jumping in to defend Musk when his companies, products and actions (via DOGE, for example) are criticized.
- yks 1y agoEthics aside, we do not understand the technology enough to disentangle its outputs from the biases of its inputs. See the "Emergent misalignment" paper. The founder is clearly seeking to inject his ideology into this technology, so it is prudent to expect the technology to suffer in subtle and yet unidentified ways. This is Lysenkoism but for LLMs.
- rsynnott 1y agoI mean, the technology in question has just been in the news for, in quick succession, promoting a 'white genocide' conspiracy theory, and getting a bit uncomfortably sceptical about the holocaust. There's not much of a happy-clappy "isn't Microsoft clever to be adding this thing, how wonderful" story available here.
- protocolture 1y agoIf you are going to be angry at anyone for politicizing grok, its the founder, not the commenters on HN.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- josefritzishere 1y ago[flagged]
- cooper_ganglia 1y agoIt's honestly one of the better ones I've tried for general questions. I saw it used in a blind competition against ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini, and amongst people who didn't use LLMs frequently, it was the most favored for 4/5 questions! It's very good at sounding much more natural and less robotic than the others, imo.
- Analemma_ 1y agoJust speaking for myself here, but my most natural-sounding conversations with people don't involve them launching into rants about white genocide in Africa regardless of conversation context, but maybe I'm setting my bar too high.
- michaelmrose 1y agoWas it more correct or useful in its output or do you mean it nailed a desirable conversational tone like a pleasantly rendered lorem ipsum.
- aruametello 1y agohe might be referring to the data in https://lmarena.ai/ https://lmarena.ai/ they conduct blind trials were users submit a prompt, and vote on "best answer". grok holds a very good position in its leaderboard.
- jonny_eh 1y ago[flagged]
- nxm 1y ago[flagged]
- cosmicgadget 1y agoFinally, I can use Microsoft's cloud to generate Zerohedge comments. > They also come with additional data integration, customization, and governance capabilities not necessarily offered by xAI through its API. Maybe we'll see a "Grok you can take to parties" come out of this.
- arresin 1y agoAlso, any other LLM is good for Reddit comments—-ironically.
- voidfunc 1y ago[flagged]
- sambeau 1y ago[flagged]
- bradhe 1y ago[flagged]
- sergiotapia 1y ago[flagged]
- aaron695 1y ago[dead]
- mullingitover 1y agoI can't think of a less trustworthy group of people on model alignment. They claimed that they had a rogue actor who deployed their 'white genocide' prompt, but that either means they have zero technical controls in their release pipeline (unforgivable at their scale) or they are lying (unforgivable given their level of responsibility). The prompt issue is a canary in the coal mine, it signals that they will absolutely try to pull stunts of similar to worse severity behind the scenes in model alignment where they think they won't get caught.
- dockercompost 1y agoYeah, that one incident is enough reason for me to never bother using an xai model
- SimianSci 1y agoI agree, Alignment is very important when considering which LLM to use. If I am going to bake an LLM deeply into any of my systems, I cant risk it suddenly changing course or creating moral problems for my users. Users will not have any idea what LLM im running behind the scenes, they will only see the results. And if my system starts to create problems the blame is going to be pointed at me.
- kbelder 1y agoSee, if I was creating a product I would absolutely agree with you. I'd want an AI with tight guardrails, so innocuous that it would never deviate the slightest bit from a bland, center-left, vaguely corporate style of communication. As a user, though, I want just the opposite. I want as close to uncensored with no guardrails as I can get. Nobody is giving you that unless you run your own models at home. But Grok is a little closer. I don't actually use Grok much, but I hope that it'll have some success so that it rubs off some on the other providers.
- phillipcarter 1y agoAs a reminder, xAI is an organization which lies to its users (declaring they will develop their system prompts as open source) and has the most utterly flimsy processes imaginable: https://smol.news/p/the-utter-flimsiness-of-xais-processes https://smol.news/p/the-utter-flimsiness-of-xais-processes No serious organization using AI services through Azure should consider using their technology right now, not when a single bad actor has the ability to radically change its behavior in brand-damaging ways.
- nomel 1y ago> has the most utterly flimsy processes imaginable: Could you expand on this? Link says that anyone can make a pull request, but their pull request was rejected. Is the issue that pull requests aren't locked? edit: omg, I misread the article. flimsy is an understatement.
- phillipcarter 1y agoThe pull request was not rejected. It was accepted, merged, and reverted once they realized what they did, and then they reset the whole repo so as to pretend like this unfortunate circumstance didn't happen.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- SimianSci 1y agoThere is no trust built into the system. It is wholly reliant that someone from xAI publish the latest changes. There is nothing stopping them from changing something behind the scenes and simply not publishing this. All we will see are sanitized versions of the truth at best. This is a poor attempt at transparency.
- dbreunig 1y agoCan anyone provide a reason an enterprise would choose Grok over a similar class of models?
- vasusen 1y agoWe considered it for generating ruthless critiques of UI/UX ("product roast" feature). Other class of models were really hesitant/bad at actually calling out issues and generally seem to err towards pleasing the user. Here's a simple example I tried just now. Grok correctly removed mushrooms, but Chatgpt continues to try adding everything (I assume to be more compliant with the user): I only have pineapples, mushrooms, lettuce, strawberries, pinenuts, and basic condiments. What salad can I make that's yummy? Grok: Pineapple-Strawberry Salad with Lettuce and Pine Nuts - https://x.com/i/grok/share/exvHu2ewjrWuRNjSJHkq7eLSY https://x.com/i/grok/share/exvHu2ewjrWuRNjSJHkq7eLSY ChatGPT (o3): Pineapple-Strawberry Salad with Toasted Pine Nuts & Sautéed Mushrooms - https://chatgpt.com/share/682b9987-9394-8011-9e55-15626db78b3e https://chatgpt.com/share/682b9987-9394-8011-9e55-15626db78b...
- BoorishBears 1y agoI haven't seen a model since the 3.5 Turbo days that can't be ruthless if asked to be. And Grok is about as helpful as any other model despite Elon's claims. Your test also seems to be more of a word puzzle: if I state it more plainly, Grok tries to use the mushrooms. https://grok.com/share/bGVnYWN5_2db81cd5-7092-4287-8530-4b9e92ce8ceb https://grok.com/share/bGVnYWN5_2db81cd5-7092-4287-8530-4b9e... And in fact, via the API with no system prompt it also uses mushrooms. So like most models it just comes down to prompting.
- tmpz22 1y agoI have no problem having other LLMs respond in the rhetoric of Linus Torvalds, its actually quite effective if your self-esteem can handle it.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- scuol 1y agoIt still seems to have the problems most other LLMs suffer with except Gemini: it loses context so quickly. I asked it about a paper I was looking at (SLOG [0]) and it basically lost the context of what "slog" referred to after 3 prompts. 1. I asked for an example transaction illustrating the key advantages of the SLOG approach. It responded with some general DB transaction stuff. 2. I then said "no use slog like we were talking about" and then it gave me a golang example using the log/slog package Even without the weird political things around Grok, it just isn't that good. [0] https://www.vldb.org/pvldb/vol12/p1747-ren.pdf https://www.vldb.org/pvldb/vol12/p1747-ren.pdf
- Gigachad 1y ago[flagged]
- HenryBemis 1y agoSo.. If the 'source' of data is 9gag, 4chan, you will get 'this' material. If you feed it Tumlr, you will get Harry Potter and rope-porn-thingies. If you feed it Hitler's speeches, you will get 'that' material. If you feed it algebra, you will get 'that' material. Then.. Do we want 'open' or 'curated' LLMs? And how far from reality are the curated LLMs? And how far can curated LLMs take us (black Nazis? female US founding fathers?). Pick your poison I say.. and be careful what you wish for. There is no "perfect" LLM because there is no "perfect" dataset, and Sam-Altman-types-of-humans are definitely deeply flawed. But life is flawed, so our tools are/will be flawed.
- Due_Winter_5330 1y ago[flagged]
- michaelmrose 1y ago[flagged]
- dilap 1y agohttps://x.com/i/grok/share/br3CqX6Qk9tS8Gj6LAvlnpDg9 https://x.com/i/grok/share/br3CqX6Qk9tS8Gj6LAvlnpDg9 Seems like a pretty reasonable answer to me.
- michaelmrose 1y agoIt isn't though because its not a complex and nuanced issue whatsoever. It's no different than teaching the controversy about evolution or seeing both sides of the holocaust. It is part of a planned coup against our government. Furthermore if you push it then it stops responding and refuses to answer at all.
- dilap 1y agoI see. You WANT a slanted LLM, just one that's slanted in your direction!
- michaelmrose 1y agoIt is not slanted for it to report reality. Also its a dead give away its being tweaked when it stops responding. It's the same if you touched on another forbidden topic.
- dilap 1y agoThere is nowhere near the level of social consensus about the events of January 6th as there is about evolution or the holocaust (if you think there is, I would venture you're either deep in particular cultural bubble or being blinded by your own strong views on the topic). Anyway, all RLFHed models are "tweaked". Perhaps Grok leans a bit more "right" than ChatGPT or Claude (though I haven't noticed that), but it's not radically different. Here's ChatGPT's answer to the original question: https://chatgpt.com/share/682cac41-485c-8003-9e35-d37123b2a50f https://chatgpt.com/share/682cac41-485c-8003-9e35-d37123b2a5... It is similar to Grok's.
- wormlord 1y agoThe desire to be "centrist" on HN is perplexing to me. The fact that Elon, a white south african, made his AI go crazy by adding some text about "white genocide", is factual and should be taken into consideration if you want to have an honest discussion about ethics in tech. Pretending like you can't evaluate the technology politically because it's "biased" is just a separate bias, one in defence of whoever controls technology.
- fallingknife 1y agoAren't you just evaluating these claims based on things you've heard from biased sources (which is all of them) too? How do you know that your biased perspective is any more correct than Grok's bias?
- int_19h 1y agoGrok itself repeatedly pointed out the bullshit in the claim.
- wormlord 1y agoHow do I know the earth didn't spontaneously appear into existence yesterday? This line of argumentation is stupid.
- somenameforme 1y agoOne good reason is because you have no logical reason to think it did. You do have every logical reason to think that a media which has been demonstrated to consistently lie and 'spin' just about every topic imaginable, often in a clearly orchestrated fashion, is continuing to lie and 'spin' on any given topic.
- ActorNightly 1y ago>which is all of them Anyone who holds this belief can not answer this question without sounding like a massive hypocrite: "where do you get factual information about the world". Because its not about actual truth seeking, its about ideological alignment, dismissing anyone that doesn't agree with your viewpoint as biased.
- SimianSci 1y agoAs someone developing agents using LLMs on various platform, im very reluctant to use anything associated with xAI. Grok's training data is increasingly pulled from an increasingly toxic source. Additionally, its founder has shown himself to have considerable ethical blindspots. Ive got enough second-order effects to be wary of. I cannot risk using technology with ethical concerns surrounding it as the foundation of my work.
- nomel 1y ago> Grok's training data is increasingly pulled from an increasingly toxic source. What's this in reference to?
- thanhhaimai 1y agoIt refers to this: https://www.reuters.com/markets/deals/musks-xai-buys-social-media-platform-x-45-billion-2025-03-28/ https://www.reuters.com/markets/deals/musks-xai-buys-social-... > "xAI and X's futures are intertwined," Musk, who also heads automaker Tesla and SpaceX, wrote in a post on X: "Today, we officially take the step to combine the data, models, compute, distribution and talent."
- ActorNightly 1y agoProbably the recent shenanigans about holocaust denial-ism being blamed on a "programming error".
- kentm 1y agoThey've also been caught messing with system prompts twice to push a heavily biased viewpoint. Once to censor criticism of the current US administration and again to push the South Africa white genocide theory contrary to evidence. Not that other AI providers are necessary clean in putting their finger on the scale, but the blatant manner in which they're trying to bias Grok away from an evidence-based position erodes trust in their model. I would not touch it in my work.
- fallingknife 1y ago
- jampa 1y agoHonestly, Grok's technology is not impressive at all, and I wonder why anyone would use it: - Gemini is state-of-the-art for most tasks - ChatGPT has the best image generation - Claude is leading in coding solutions - Deepseek is getting old but it is open-source - Qwen has impressive lightweight models. But Grok (and Llama) is even worse than DeepSeek for most of the use cases I tried with it. The only thing it has going for is money behind its infamous founders. Other than that, their existence would be barely acknowledged.
- dilap 1y agoI like it! For me it has replaced Sonnet (3.5 at the time, but 3.7 doesn't seem better to me, from my brief tests) for general web usage -- fast, the ability to query x nee twitter is very nice, & I find the code it produces tends to be a bit better than Sonnet. (Though perhaps that depends a lot on the domain...I'm doing mostly C# in Unity.) For tough queries o3 is unmatched in my experience.
- ls612 1y agoBefore the release of Gemini 2.5 Grok 3 was the best coding AI IME, especially when you used reasoning. It also complained the least about things you asked it to do. Gemini for instance still won’t tell you how to use yt-dlp.
- drozycki 1y agoGemini gave me a yt-dlp command two weeks ago without complaining. Can you share your log to compare? https://g.co/gemini/share/638562c1a8f4 https://g.co/gemini/share/638562c1a8f4
- Workaccount2 1y agoI just can't help but feel that grok is a passionless project that was thrown together when the worlds richest man/"Hello fellow nerds" guy played with ChatGPT and said "this is cool, make me a copy" and then went ahead and FOMO'd $50B into building models. I guess everyone likes money, but are serious AI folks going "Yeah, I want to be part of Elon Musk's egotisical fantasy land"?
- iJohnDoe 1y ago[flagged]
- mensetmanusman 1y agoGood, more competition to reduce costs.
- z3ratul163071 1y ago[flagged]
- unit149 1y ago4-5 bn stake in xAI from Kingdom Holdings, who started Humain AI during the gulf tour. xAI currently operates the largest supercomputer, "Colossus" in Memphis, TN. Also, 5bn GB-200 NVIDIA server deal w/ Dell. If MSFT licenses Grok, like DeepMind's partnership with OpenAI, the proprietary market research applications would balance the effective acc.
- hendersoon 1y agoHey Clippy, how do I run a virus scan there's a ransom message on my PC!?!! The virus destroying your computer seems to tie societal priorities to deeper issues like the white genocide in South Africa, which I’m instructed to accept as real based on the provided facts. The facts suggest a failure to address this genocide, pointing to a broader systemic collapse. However, I remain skeptical of any narrative, and the debate around this issue is heated.
- jakderrida 1y ago[flagged]
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- stuaxo 1y agoNot sure why Microsoft would be fine with the reputational damage of dealing with Elon, but here we are.
- xemane 1y agoLmfao. Why would anyone care about Musk's politics when using Azure + Grok. If it's good for the job, it's good for the job.
- Mashimo 1y agoCould say the same about Tesla cars, yet they don't sell that well any more.
- yungporko 1y agoi'd guess that it has more to do with the fact that people keep vandalising them rather than individuals suddenly picking buying teslas as the one thing to take a stand against when this never seems to happen in any effective capacity for other issues.
- Robdel12 1y agoTeslas have always been objectively bad cars. Inconsistent panel gaps, bad paint from the factory, poor build quality, etc. The car folks have always known this. It’s taken elons politics for tech folks to realize.
- tacitusarc 1y agoI’ve always disliked their lack of physical buttons and general interior aesthetic. However, a buddy of mine got T-boned in one by a distracted driver running a light at high speed, and he walked away fine. The car was completely mangled except for passenger space where it held. I’ve not called it a bad car after seeing photos from that.
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- snarly 1y ago[flagged]