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I really wish more people were aware of this. It's a major scandal and definitely not being talked enough about. Nevermind SpaceX, which at least have some imp

I really wish more people were aware of this. It's a major scandal and definitely not being talked enough about. Nevermind SpaceX, which at least have some importance for US defense industry, but xAI ? We will be investing in Elon's private venture, at the price that he himself set and which is at least 2 orders of magnitude too high...

lacy_tinpot 6mo ago
In order to be incredulous at xAI, you'd have to be incredulous of the AI business in general, which is fair. But then you'd also be basically betting against the entire tech sector, and really the entire US economy and against the value add of AI. That kind of bet is much more difficult to swallow.
- riffraff 6mo ago
  That's not true at all. I am confident some companies will make bank with AI. I am also confident xAI is not one of those. It's as if you said "if you don't think Lycos is a good business you don't think search engines can work in general".
  - sublinear 6mo ago
    I kinda disagree because while most search engines failed and Google succeeded, they did not succeed by simply being a better search engine. This is only further demonstrated by their excellent leverage of Gemini. Google continues to succeed at being Google.
    - irishcoffee 6mo ago
      They absolutely succeeded because they had a better search engine. Without a doubt. I imagine there’s more than a few folks around here who used shit like askjeeves, altavista, et. al. Google was heads and shoulders better than those, and continued to get better over time. No, I’m no Google fan, but it’s revisionist history to say they didn’t have the best search engine.
      - mlloyd 6mo ago
        Agreed. They won by having the best product. And it wasn't even close.
        ericd 6mo ago
        Yep, I tried it when it had the original logo, was using Altavista until then, it was immediately obvious that they were going to win.
        jordanb 6mo ago
        I was using Alta Vista and preferred it. It had fairly sophisticated search options that Google never got like stem and wildcard searching. The problem was that yahoo killed it. They shut down its crawler and it started going stale. Plus they didn't have as good a solution to index spam as Google's pagerank. It was basically a story of product developing a lead, getting sold for a quick buck, then the acquirer shuts down innovation and tries to milk it, with bad timing because google was chomping at its heels.
      - compass_copium 6mo ago
        I used Dogpile "because it searches all of them at once!" until I realized that only Google's results were worth anything.
      - deleted 6mo ago
        [deleted]
      - sublinear 6mo ago
        Hah. I didn't expect to get downvoted this much. I'm not trying to rewrite history either, but this makes me wonder how deeply the Google lore really affected some people. I'm in my late 30s, so fair enough. I was there, but not really "there" to see what happened. My understanding and memory was that there was good word-of-mouth in the 90s because it was marginally better. By around 2000, the media was strongly pushing this narrative about Google being this great technological triumph with their PageRank algorithm. This coincided with AdWords being rolled out, dotcom hype, and people generally taking SEO more seriously while Google was best positioned to take advantage. Now, I'm not saying I know much but I'd be very surprised to hear that nobody else ever thought about setting up a scheme with Markov chains to measure "link juice". That seems like low-hanging fruit for just about any students excited about the topic, but again what do I know. To me, the Google story was always more of a business success than anything else. They got so much praise and so effectively leveraged their nerd cred that people optimized for their results and it all snowballed from there. This time around with LLMs, they can't claim to have the best. The space is way too volatile. What they can say is everyone uses it because everyone eventually searches on Google, if not by default. Google just has to be good enough and the easiest to use.
    - riffraff 6mo ago
      (I don't think your comment deserved the downvotes, it wasn't me) I think Google _did_ succeed as a better search engine, but ,y point was just that even if you think a company won't do well it does not imply the whole sector won't. You can consider the example of Nikola/electric trucks, if you disagree on google/search engines :)
    - atombender 6mo ago
      As the other commenters point out, Google was absolutely a game changer. Their user adoption growth was stunning for good reason. Just a few months after launch, "everyone" was using Google. That's not the whole explanation for their success, though. They could have cratered after that for all sorts of reasons. A large part of how they succeeded was the discovery of the ad model. A lot of people forget that ads were all manually negotiated before Google offered self-serve ad creation (Overture did the bidding system first, but Google was better). They also starting building on "big data" very early on; AdWords reused the same tech that drove relevance ranking (PageRank and click-through feedback loop), so by the time competitors were scrambling to compete, Google had amassed tons of organic data that were only available thanks to their scale, and not something competitors could bootstrap. But none of that would have mattered if the product wasn't good. I started using Google around 1998. The childish design was off-putting at first, and made me feel uncertain about whether it was a serious brand that would last — this was the age where new search engines appeared all the time (I used HotBot a lot myself) — but the search quality and speed was undeniable.
  - lacy_tinpot 6mo ago
    >I am also confident xAI is not one of those Surely you're going to buy long Put options with that confidence, right?
    - ZitchDog 6mo ago
      You can’t trade options on an IPO.
      - groby_b 6mo ago
        You can post-IPO - depending on liquidity. I don't think that'll be an issue here. And if the thesis of "it's going to look good for the first 15 days" holds, you can indeed be very profitable by e.g. buying ATM puts. (The problem being that markets don't like sticking to time tables just to accommodate your investment thesis ;) So yes, you'll be able to take a bearish position fairly shortly after the IPO.
        compass_copium 6mo ago
        A Musk joint immediately after an IPO. ATM puts will be trading at what, 250% IV?
        groby_b 6mo ago
        Probably. Hey, you picked a risky thesis heading into large uncertainty, that's not free. But for the folks who are dead convinced it's all just a scam and it will quickly collapse, that's a way to put their money where their mouth is.
    - compass_copium 6mo ago
      The market can stay irrational...
      - lacy_tinpot 6mo ago
        Sure. It's the market that's irrational, not the people here. The people here are the truly enlightened rational ones and know what the true value of things are.
- ultrarunner 6mo ago
  > against the value add of AI Hasn't the surprising lack of value add been discussed with increasing frequency?
- Spooky23 6mo ago
  Who is using Grok seriously?
  - hn-acct 6mo ago
    In my bubble I only see right winger influencers using it.
  - ryandrake 6mo ago
    Right wingers and generating creating nude images of girls and women who post on xitter, without their consent? Those are the only things I even associate with Grok anymore. The venn diagram may line up pretty nicely between them, too.
  - WatchDog 6mo ago
    Overall it's worse than the other frontier models, but it's decent for queries about breaking news, due to being trained on twitter data. It's also better for queries about controversial topics, and topics that the other labs have deemed to be "unsafe". Politically, it differs quite a bit from other models.[0] It's right leaning, although it's closer neutral than other models, defining what neutral is a challenge though. [0]: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.23841 https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.23841
    - numpad0 6mo ago
      Wasn't it just, likely, a Claude proxy, then a local LLM for a while, then now-ish an OpenRouter proxy?
    - bdangubic 6mo ago
      > due to being trained on twitter data twitter data is 70%+ bots (probably more than that now)
      - BurningFrog 6mo ago
        Grok is of course also trained on the same giant blob of "all human writing" that the other models are trained on.
- maest 6mo ago
  xAI's value is irrelevant here. This is about Elon throwing his weight around and rigging the game to create an artificial squeeze so him and his early investors can make bank by transferring wealth from everyone's retirement fund. The company is irrelevant. The focus should be on the money making scheme
  - Rover222 6mo ago
    Lol
sroussey 6mo ago
Just call it what it is: SpaceTwitter
- antonvs 6mo ago
  SpaceXitter
  - asmvolatile 6mo ago
    Obviously pronounced “spaceSh*tter”
Spooky23 6mo ago
Well, we elected a bunch of criminals, and Elon fired everyone who regulates this. The SEC was gutted like a fish, and contract terminations resulted in a large percentage of FINRA staff being laid off.
- disqard 6mo ago
  But the Dow is over 50,000 right now!!!1 (actually, 46,565.74 right now)
  - tw04 6mo ago
    $50,000. Gotta be accurate. Just saying 50,000 implies her incoherent rant was even a little bit based in reality. https://youtu.be/WK12_IkAj2s?t=94 https://youtu.be/WK12_IkAj2s?t=94
    - vel0city 6mo ago
      But the DJIA isn't in dollars it's in points.
      - kikki 6mo ago
        You're missing the reference (which the parent comment linked for you)
      - topaz0 6mo ago
        I hope you inform our attorney general
JumpCrisscross 6mo ago
> It's a major scandal and definitely not being talked enough about It’s being extensively talked about and debated. It hasn’t entered the mainstream discourse because it’s too technical.
- lenerdenator 6mo ago
  It doesn't need to enter the mainstream discourse. It needs to enter the inbox of a grand jury docket.
  - JumpCrisscross 6mo ago
    What crime do you think was committed? Indices are privately maintained and transparently rebalanced.
    - daveguy 6mo ago
      Yeah, not illegal, just corrupt AF like all the garbage spewing out of the Dumpty admin.
    - danny_codes 6mo ago
      Fraud, arguably, since it seems a deliberate attempt to mislead investors
TacticalCoder 6mo ago
[flagged]
- topaz0 6mo ago
  [flagged]
- triceratops 6mo ago
  You have to be more specific when talking about "socialist europe". The Netherlands, for example, has the best-managed pension system in the world. Despite what many people believe, "Europe" isn't one country and it doesn't have a single healthcare system, pension system, or anything else related to the welfare state. US social security on the other hand is exactly as you describe pension systems in "socialist europe". Money taken from current workers and invested in state debt. https://www.mercer.com/en-au/about/newsroom/mercer-cfa-institute-global-pension-index-2024/ https://www.mercer.com/en-au/about/newsroom/mercer-cfa-insti...
aeternum 6mo ago
There are enough Elon haters that you can rest assured there will be an inverse ETF so that you can easily hedge away your index exposure if you really want to.
MagicMoonlight 6mo ago
He's strapped them together because xAI is about to go bankrupt and has fuck all, so this way he can dump it on the bag holders.
throwawaypath 6mo ago
>I really wish more people were aware of this. It's a major scandal and definitely not being talked enough about. Aware of what? A rule change that has been asked for long before Elon stepped foot into the White House? Just because the collective brain rot and Elon Derangement Syndrome on BlueSky is calling it a "scandal" doesn't make it so.

lacy_tinpot 6mo ago

In order to be incredulous at xAI, you'd have to be incredulous of the AI business in general, which is fair. But then you'd also be basically betting against the entire tech sector, and really the entire US economy and against the value add of AI. That kind of bet is much more difficult to swallow.

riffraff 6mo ago
That's not true at all. I am confident some companies will make bank with AI. I am also confident xAI is not one of those. It's as if you said "if you don't think Lycos is a good business you don't think search engines can work in general".
- sublinear 6mo ago
  I kinda disagree because while most search engines failed and Google succeeded, they did not succeed by simply being a better search engine. This is only further demonstrated by their excellent leverage of Gemini. Google continues to succeed at being Google.
  - irishcoffee 6mo ago
    They absolutely succeeded because they had a better search engine. Without a doubt. I imagine there’s more than a few folks around here who used shit like askjeeves, altavista, et. al. Google was heads and shoulders better than those, and continued to get better over time. No, I’m no Google fan, but it’s revisionist history to say they didn’t have the best search engine.
    - mlloyd 6mo ago
      Agreed. They won by having the best product. And it wasn't even close.
      - ericd 6mo ago
        Yep, I tried it when it had the original logo, was using Altavista until then, it was immediately obvious that they were going to win.
        jordanb 6mo ago
        I was using Alta Vista and preferred it. It had fairly sophisticated search options that Google never got like stem and wildcard searching. The problem was that yahoo killed it. They shut down its crawler and it started going stale. Plus they didn't have as good a solution to index spam as Google's pagerank. It was basically a story of product developing a lead, getting sold for a quick buck, then the acquirer shuts down innovation and tries to milk it, with bad timing because google was chomping at its heels.
    - compass_copium 6mo ago
      I used Dogpile "because it searches all of them at once!" until I realized that only Google's results were worth anything.
    - deleted 6mo ago
      [deleted]
    - sublinear 6mo ago
      Hah. I didn't expect to get downvoted this much. I'm not trying to rewrite history either, but this makes me wonder how deeply the Google lore really affected some people. I'm in my late 30s, so fair enough. I was there, but not really "there" to see what happened. My understanding and memory was that there was good word-of-mouth in the 90s because it was marginally better. By around 2000, the media was strongly pushing this narrative about Google being this great technological triumph with their PageRank algorithm. This coincided with AdWords being rolled out, dotcom hype, and people generally taking SEO more seriously while Google was best positioned to take advantage. Now, I'm not saying I know much but I'd be very surprised to hear that nobody else ever thought about setting up a scheme with Markov chains to measure "link juice". That seems like low-hanging fruit for just about any students excited about the topic, but again what do I know. To me, the Google story was always more of a business success than anything else. They got so much praise and so effectively leveraged their nerd cred that people optimized for their results and it all snowballed from there. This time around with LLMs, they can't claim to have the best. The space is way too volatile. What they can say is everyone uses it because everyone eventually searches on Google, if not by default. Google just has to be good enough and the easiest to use.
  - riffraff 6mo ago
    (I don't think your comment deserved the downvotes, it wasn't me) I think Google _did_ succeed as a better search engine, but ,y point was just that even if you think a company won't do well it does not imply the whole sector won't. You can consider the example of Nikola/electric trucks, if you disagree on google/search engines :)
  - atombender 6mo ago
    As the other commenters point out, Google was absolutely a game changer. Their user adoption growth was stunning for good reason. Just a few months after launch, "everyone" was using Google. That's not the whole explanation for their success, though. They could have cratered after that for all sorts of reasons. A large part of how they succeeded was the discovery of the ad model. A lot of people forget that ads were all manually negotiated before Google offered self-serve ad creation (Overture did the bidding system first, but Google was better). They also starting building on "big data" very early on; AdWords reused the same tech that drove relevance ranking (PageRank and click-through feedback loop), so by the time competitors were scrambling to compete, Google had amassed tons of organic data that were only available thanks to their scale, and not something competitors could bootstrap. But none of that would have mattered if the product wasn't good. I started using Google around 1998. The childish design was off-putting at first, and made me feel uncertain about whether it was a serious brand that would last — this was the age where new search engines appeared all the time (I used HotBot a lot myself) — but the search quality and speed was undeniable.
- lacy_tinpot 6mo ago
  >I am also confident xAI is not one of those Surely you're going to buy long Put options with that confidence, right?
  - ZitchDog 6mo ago
    You can’t trade options on an IPO.
    - groby_b 6mo ago
      You can post-IPO - depending on liquidity. I don't think that'll be an issue here. And if the thesis of "it's going to look good for the first 15 days" holds, you can indeed be very profitable by e.g. buying ATM puts. (The problem being that markets don't like sticking to time tables just to accommodate your investment thesis ;) So yes, you'll be able to take a bearish position fairly shortly after the IPO.
      - compass_copium 6mo ago
        A Musk joint immediately after an IPO. ATM puts will be trading at what, 250% IV?
        groby_b 6mo ago
        Probably. Hey, you picked a risky thesis heading into large uncertainty, that's not free. But for the folks who are dead convinced it's all just a scam and it will quickly collapse, that's a way to put their money where their mouth is.
  - compass_copium 6mo ago
    The market can stay irrational...
    - lacy_tinpot 6mo ago
      Sure. It's the market that's irrational, not the people here. The people here are the truly enlightened rational ones and know what the true value of things are.
ultrarunner 6mo ago
> against the value add of AI Hasn't the surprising lack of value add been discussed with increasing frequency?
Spooky23 6mo ago
Who is using Grok seriously?
- hn-acct 6mo ago
  In my bubble I only see right winger influencers using it.
- ryandrake 6mo ago
  Right wingers and generating creating nude images of girls and women who post on xitter, without their consent? Those are the only things I even associate with Grok anymore. The venn diagram may line up pretty nicely between them, too.
- WatchDog 6mo ago
  Overall it's worse than the other frontier models, but it's decent for queries about breaking news, due to being trained on twitter data. It's also better for queries about controversial topics, and topics that the other labs have deemed to be "unsafe". Politically, it differs quite a bit from other models.[0] It's right leaning, although it's closer neutral than other models, defining what neutral is a challenge though. [0]: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.23841 https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.23841
  - numpad0 6mo ago
    Wasn't it just, likely, a Claude proxy, then a local LLM for a while, then now-ish an OpenRouter proxy?
  - bdangubic 6mo ago
    > due to being trained on twitter data twitter data is 70%+ bots (probably more than that now)
    - BurningFrog 6mo ago
      Grok is of course also trained on the same giant blob of "all human writing" that the other models are trained on.
maest 6mo ago
xAI's value is irrelevant here. This is about Elon throwing his weight around and rigging the game to create an artificial squeeze so him and his early investors can make bank by transferring wealth from everyone's retirement fund. The company is irrelevant. The focus should be on the money making scheme
- Rover222 6mo ago
  Lol

sroussey 6mo ago

Just call it what it is: SpaceTwitter

antonvs 6mo ago
SpaceXitter
- asmvolatile 6mo ago
  Obviously pronounced “spaceSh*tter”

Spooky23 6mo ago

Well, we elected a bunch of criminals, and Elon fired everyone who regulates this. The SEC was gutted like a fish, and contract terminations resulted in a large percentage of FINRA staff being laid off.

disqard 6mo ago
But the Dow is over 50,000 right now!!!1 (actually, 46,565.74 right now)
- tw04 6mo ago
  $50,000. Gotta be accurate. Just saying 50,000 implies her incoherent rant was even a little bit based in reality. https://youtu.be/WK12_IkAj2s?t=94 https://youtu.be/WK12_IkAj2s?t=94
  - vel0city 6mo ago
    But the DJIA isn't in dollars it's in points.
    - kikki 6mo ago
      You're missing the reference (which the parent comment linked for you)
    - topaz0 6mo ago
      I hope you inform our attorney general

JumpCrisscross 6mo ago

> It's a major scandal and definitely not being talked enough about It’s being extensively talked about and debated. It hasn’t entered the mainstream discourse because it’s too technical.

lenerdenator 6mo ago
It doesn't need to enter the mainstream discourse. It needs to enter the inbox of a grand jury docket.
- JumpCrisscross 6mo ago
  What crime do you think was committed? Indices are privately maintained and transparently rebalanced.
  - daveguy 6mo ago
    Yeah, not illegal, just corrupt AF like all the garbage spewing out of the Dumpty admin.
  - danny_codes 6mo ago
    Fraud, arguably, since it seems a deliberate attempt to mislead investors

TacticalCoder 6mo ago

[flagged]

topaz0 6mo ago
[flagged]
triceratops 6mo ago
You have to be more specific when talking about "socialist europe". The Netherlands, for example, has the best-managed pension system in the world. Despite what many people believe, "Europe" isn't one country and it doesn't have a single healthcare system, pension system, or anything else related to the welfare state. US social security on the other hand is exactly as you describe pension systems in "socialist europe". Money taken from current workers and invested in state debt. https://www.mercer.com/en-au/about/newsroom/mercer-cfa-institute-global-pension-index-2024/ https://www.mercer.com/en-au/about/newsroom/mercer-cfa-insti...

aeternum 6mo ago

There are enough Elon haters that you can rest assured there will be an inverse ETF so that you can easily hedge away your index exposure if you really want to.

MagicMoonlight 6mo ago

He's strapped them together because xAI is about to go bankrupt and has fuck all, so this way he can dump it on the bag holders.

throwawaypath 6mo ago

>I really wish more people were aware of this. It's a major scandal and definitely not being talked enough about. Aware of what? A rule change that has been asked for long before Elon stepped foot into the White House? Just because the collective brain rot and Elon Derangement Syndrome on BlueSky is calling it a "scandal" doesn't make it so.