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Bad read on the situation. xAI has too much compute and not enough customers using it. They have around half a million GPUs, some of which are stolen from Tesla
by tristanj 5mo ago
Bad read on the situation. xAI has too much compute and not enough customers using it. They have around half a million GPUs, some of which are stolen from Tesla, running at 11% utilization. xAI predicted more people would be using Grok, but Grok is not a SOTA model & users primarily want to use SOTA models. They have excess capacity and it makes sense to rent out GPUs to other customers while they improve their models.
- kibibu 5mo agoGrok is also tuned to align with Musk's personal beliefs. I wouldn't touch it with a 10 foot pole.
- akimbostrawman 5mo agoOpposed to all other models being the bastion of objectivity? Must be truly vindicating to have to hear other peoles opinions after decades in the silicon valley bubble.
- blizarre 5mo agoAs a non-US AI user I do not particularly like using a US model following the recent political events, but I specifically do not want to use a model made by an ex-member of the current administration.
- Topfi 5mo agoIt is always great fun using a model via API without search/web access and quoting a recent development, being told that it must be hamfisted satire, then providing access. The reasoning traces are a delight, Opus 4.6 and GPT-5.4 during the administrations war with Anthropic were prime grade A kobe beef.
- ruszki 5mo agoThere is a difference between when somebody openly instructs their model to infer disproven lies vs who doesn’t do this. And it’s quite tiring that this is even a question because of politics. As somebody from Hungary: the biggest impact of my mood was that this kind of thinking went back with the collapse of far right there to where it belongs: to a deep hole which is not in front of normal people. Average people suddenly don’t ask illogical questions or answer stupid things because there is nobody who would tell them that they need to think stupidly, there is nobody who tell them what stupid thing they should think that week. It’s marvelous when you get the proof that the whole “stupid thinking” is completely controlled from above.
- brianwawok 5mo agoQwen has post training to tell you incorrect answers about Taiwan. Seems worse to me
- ruszki 5mo agoIn end user perspective, it’s the same. The difference is probably volume. I have no clue in which direction. Both in trained lies by models and in number of people defending the indefensible. But one for sure, there are probably 10s or 100s of millions of Chinese who try to do the same. I encountered with it quite frequently. Sometimes with flat out doublespeak.
- patrickmcnamara 5mo agoNobody ever said other models were bastions of objectivity. They only implied they weren't corrupted by Musk. Which is true, and which is good.
- KptMarchewa 5mo agoThis comment is very similar to what russian propaganda does. It's not aimed at convincing you to support them, but to convince you everyone is lying and there is no meaningful difference between each position, so you stay apathetic.
- SadErn 5mo ago[dead]
- akimbostrawman 5mo agoYeah yeah every opinion you don't share or like is a russian bot or literally hitler.
- flir 5mo agoI see what you did there. Nice.
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- einsteinx2 5mo agoI keep hearing this statement, and it always makes me wonder if people have actually used Grok… I have a Claude Max plan I use for coding, but I also have a Grok Lite plan I use for web search type tasks (similar to Perplexity) because I like how the Grok harness handles searches and I don’t need a SOTA model for that use case. I’d never pay $30/mo for a full SuperGrok account but to me it’s worth the $10/mo for Lite as I was hitting limits on the free tier. I’ve never noticed it to be particularly biased at least for anything I’ve been searching for on it. And on the other side, I’ve never noticed it to be particularly less censored or anything compared to other models either (also a claim I’ve heard a lot about Grok but I think because it is/was part of their marketing).
- kibibu 5mo agoDid you miss all the Mechahitler, woke mind virus, white genocide, Musk could beat Tyson, stuff? Its plausibly not in the API and only on the twitter bot, but I see no reason to trust x.ai given this history of obvious manipulation.
- einsteinx2 5mo agoI don’t really use Twitter so I’ve never used it via the bot, I’ve only ever used it via the web app. I bounced back and forth between Grok and Perplexity for web search type tasks and at least for the moment am preferring Grok mostly because it seems to perform more searches and check more results per query vs Perplexity and their $10/mo plan covers my usage vs $20 for Perplexity Pro. However I’m not married to any LLM service and will switch to another one the moment I get better results from it. At least in my usage I haven’t noticed any obvious bias, but I don’t really search for politically related stuff so maybe I just haven’t seen it.
- aurareturn 5mo agoIt is a race that has a flywheel effect. Once xAI training team “fix” their model, where will Anthropic be then?
- coliveira 5mo agoIt's not stolen if it was taken from Tesla, investors already agreed that Elon can do anything he pleases with their money.
- CSMastermind 5mo agoMore people should try Grok. I don't use it for coding but it's replaced a lot of my ChatGPT usage. Definitely more perferred model for quick questions or easy answers.
- giancarlostoro 5mo agoOne thing I do like about Grok is that it makes it stupid easy to see what its referencing, and gives you the links to those resources. Which most models sometimes either don't bother, or don't do much of a good job of doing. It's not the top model, but it is definitely high up there, people's blind rage for anything Elon Musk is the only reason most people don't realize how capable it is unfortunately. Grok is not exclusively made by Elon Musk, there's definitely other engineers working day and night on it.
- cma 5mo agoWhat's the blind rage, he's totally out in the open.
- hackinthebochs 5mo agoFor conversational or general knowledge questions I also much prefer Grok. Musk's vanity aside, it is much less censored than the other frontier models.
- watwut 5mo agoWhere less censored means "censors facts and left leaning claims while actively promoting far-right lies".
- hackinthebochs 5mo agoFar more mundane that whatever bogeyman you imagine, it will discuss things like COVID origins or not treat favored classes as a special case e.g. when asked to make a joke.
- jstummbillig 5mo agoWhy are they selling compute instead of using it to build that SOTA model?
- tristanj 5mo agoThey tried and failed. xAi made a mistake building Colossus 1 and ended up with heterogenous cluster of H100/H200/GB200 GPUs. This is a nightmare to train huge models on because each card has different specs, features, and hardware requirements. During gradient synchronization, a heterogeneous cluster would bottleneck on the slowest GPU (H100) so the faster GPUs would end up idling. They also probably ran into unexpected compatibility issues, which are difficult to resolve. It makes more sense to use this cluster for inference, since they can segment the cluster by GPU type and avoid GPU mixing. xAI doesn't have enough inference customers so it makes sense to monetize this to companies that need inference compute such as Anthropic or Cursor. Apparently xAI will try building SOTA models on Colossus 2, which will be built on Blackwell GPUs only.
- renticulous 5mo agoHow can something so obvious be overlooked by team building the data centre? Can't the sharding be uneven so that weaker GPUs still finish fast by taking on a smaller workload?
- Maken 5mo agoIt's not like they had much of an option, when everybody was hoarding every GPU they could. For the second Colossus they could book future production, but the first one had to be built ASAP so xAI looked as a serious competitor in the AI space.
- sjsdaiuasgdia 5mo agoI imagine it involved a petulant billionaire screaming "Fucking build it. Build it NOW!" in response to expert feedback.