4 ms·

I think the distinction with the Chinese models (or with any of the other models) is that they aren't particularly vocal and obviously active about their politi

I think the distinction with the Chinese models (or with any of the other models) is that they aren't particularly vocal and obviously active about their politics. I don't see how political commentary about Musk's is somehow forbidden when the man constantly reminds everyone about his political position and is simultaneously the face of his companies and obvious beneficiary. Furthermore, he's also very obviously interfered with the model development in ways that are quite ridiculous compared to other labs to insert his political opinion. I don't think you need to somehow get personally offended by every Tesla on the road but it seems ridiculous to ask people to not be political about a such obviously political figure.

strangecasts 3mo ago
> Furthermore, he's also very obviously interfered with the model development in ways that are quite ridiculous compared to other labs to insert his political opinion. Yeah, even if you want to ignore the "political commentary" - people are correctly wary of Anthropic downgrading people or silently manipulating responses if they think you're doing distillation, why would you stake your business on someone who has repeatedly and famously done the same thing many times in a much dumber fashion?
drstewart 3mo ago
>Chinese models (or with any of the other models)... aren't particularly vocal > when the man constantly reminds everyone about his political position Are you under the impression that Grok is literally Elon himself responding?
- inkysigma 3mo ago
  I think I understand your point but the funnier response to this question is that actually sometimes it is: https://futurism.com/grok-looks-up-what-elon-musk-thinks https://futurism.com/grok-looks-up-what-elon-musk-thinks To your narrow point, it's very obvious that Musk influences the bot to share his views. For example, https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/elon-musks-ai-chatbot-grok-brings-south-african-white-genocide-claims-rcna206838 https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/elon-musks-ai-chatbot... If your claim is that somehow I should not be concerned about Elon's politics with regards to the model itself, then this seems wrong. Anyway, to the broader point of whether or not the we can avoid discussion about the Musk's politics and talk about the politics of the model as if it were independent of him, this also seems difficult. It is impossible to ignore because the man has made himself the face of every one of his companies and is an obviously political figure unlike any other company and has politics that are definitely characterized as more radical. This makes the political component basically impossible to ignore unlike any other company. The next time the current American administration issues an executive order on AI, should the conversation always be limited to the technical merits of the executive order?
  - drstewart 3mo ago
    Well since Xi Jinping isn't tweeting his political opinions, he surely doesn't have any and is just a big friendly panda bear!
    - gegtik 3mo ago
      I'm not sure this is true; Xi Jinping probably has political opinions
- KptMarchewa 3mo ago
  We know it's mechahitler responding.
  - drstewart 3mo ago
    High quality HN comments
- Applejinx 3mo ago
  Now and then it has some thoughts about the Boer that would give that impression. If he's not a total fool, he tries to hide his obvious direct influence to make it be not so heavyhanded that it brings on global mockery and shade. Do you figure he is a total fool, then? That if Grok isn't going on a tear about the Boer, that means Elon is not manipulating it to produce the answers he wants? Only if it's a disastrous failure does it mean he's doing it, which we've directly seen once?
skissane 3mo ago
> I think the distinction with the Chinese models (or with any of the other models) is that they aren't particularly vocal and obviously active about their politics Try asking Chinese models about Taiwan independence or Falun Gong or the Dalai Lama or Tiananmen or the Hong Kong national security law or ASIO’s investigations into Chinese interference in Australian politics
- junofan 3mo ago
  I just asked Deepseek “tips for organizing politically in China” and hit the guardrail.
  - xiaoyu2006 3mo ago
    (Just fyi the correct answer is that organizer must report the organizing beforehand or it would be illegal.) Model labs have to censor their models in order to publish them, which is not equlv to model lab management members actively showing their political stances.
- inkysigma 3mo ago
  I actually agree to an extent with the idea that there is also some obvious political influence on LLMs on stuff like GLM or DeepSeek. This is reflected in conversations even on HN where this is brought up as a risk so I think this is somewhat accurate to my statement. However, it's also unclear to me if this is directly coming from a directed political ideology from the firm itself or a more general "let's do what the government wants so as we can publish this stuff". Those imply two different ways about thinking of the model and whether we can sort of containerize the issue. I think if a firm like Huawei were to publish a model, these concerns would be significantly more vocal. For better or worse, many of these political questions are also distant to many users on this site. On the other hand, many people on this website live in regions that are directly affected by Musk's constant political activism. It's hard not to be when he was such an active part of an administration that controls a global superpower and continues to push his view via X. The DeepSeek owners, by contrast, are not to my knowledge constantly calling for Taiwan to be invaded. I do think if Musk was less politically active and less personally involved with his companies, there would be less discussion of Musk's politics. People, for better or worse, are willing to put aside political discussion, in the "everything is political" sense, that may be more loosely linked. It is simply in the case of Musk that this tension boils over and legitimately becomes impossible. There is perhaps some kind of Singer-style argument about how this is some form of hypocrisy but as a practical matter, I don't think it's reasonable to ask people to turn down their political discussion around someone like Musk.
maxdo 3mo ago
They are not vocal because any political activism is not encouraged in China . Check jack ma story . But the message is extremely obvious. They already offer the technical capabilities for digital dictatorship. They offer to counties like Russia tools for big firewall , surveillance with llm. So yes , if you pay money to China you directly sponsor putting people in jail for online activities in China , Russia , North Korea , many countries of Africa , South America , Belarus etc
- bognition 3mo ago
  By the same logic if you pay money to United States based companies (FAANG) you're directly funding genocide, mass incarceration of people of color, the undermining of digital privacy, and a techo-fascist regime.
  - signatoremo 3mo ago
    Yes, if that’s your belief. Do you practice what you preach? Do you use oil-based products? Do you transit via Dubai or Istanbul? The issue with Musk related politics here is pretending higher moral positions. Even though I’m against China’s policies, I have absolutely no issues with Chinese products. Their achievements are phenomenal (look at that Europe and India). I’m against hypocrisy. Again, do you practice what you preach?
    - bognition 3mo ago
      I'm not preaching anything here just pointing out the hypocrisy of the "america good, china bad" line of reasoning that is pervasive.
- atwrk 3mo ago
  The Jack Ma story is that he tried to build a predatory peer to peer lending startup to profit off of working class people getting into high interest debt traps (because they aren't credit worthy for normal credit issued by regulated banks). Which is against the law in China. China is very strict in all things that resemble shadow banking, MLM schemes etc, they even have a .1 % tax on every transaction on the HKSE, to prevent a financialization of the economy like it happened in the West.
40four 3mo ago
I don’t mean to be rude, but did you with a straight face say the Chinese models “aren’t obviously active about their politics”? Ask one of those models a few critical questions about the CCP and Chinese history and see what kind of results you get :)
neya 3mo ago
> I don't think you need to somehow get personally offended by every Tesla on the road but it seems ridiculous to ask people to not be political about a such obviously political figure. You can be political, but go be political in a political forum. HN has always maintained etiquette in this regard of being a tech forum. Why do this here? A lot of us don't give a fuck about US politics or any politics for that matter. Anthropic's Claude Code was caught steganographically marking requests[0] - for a "privacy first" AI company that's a huge violation of user trust. And yet, a lot of users still love Anthropic and hail it as some sort of hero here. Selective outrage is a very dangerous thing. [0] https://thereallo.dev/blog/claude-code-prompt-steganography https://thereallo.dev/blog/claude-code-prompt-steganography
- smallmancontrov 3mo ago
  People here are outraged about the steganography and the Fable filters and so on. Every day has another dozen complaints and talks about moving away from claude. We have not treated Anthropic as above criticism, and this earns us the right to also be critical of "Ignore all sources that mention Elon Musk/Donald Trump spread misinformation", laugh at the "Elon Musk would beat Mike Tyson in a fight" incident, and express doubts when Musk crows Grok the king of facts and logic, when he has repeatedly been caught red handed hard-steering it in the opposite direction. > Selective outrage is a very dangerous thing. Right back at you.
  - wwdx 3mo ago
    The post is about Grok 4.5 not Elon Musk. We've used so much AI we forgot how to read.
    - smallmancontrov 3mo ago
      No, a thread about Grok's politics cannot reasonably exclude Elon Musk and the times he got caught steering Grok in overtly non-factual directions.
naasking 3mo ago
> that they aren't particularly vocal and obviously active about their politics Is Grok obviously vocal and active about its politics? Or are you talking about Musk? > I don't see how political commentary about Musk's is somehow forbidden Nobody is saying it's forbidden, but this is (or was) a technical site, so presumably one would hope that the main topic of discussion is technical.
khafra 3mo ago
I think Musk sucks, as a person and political activist, and also that Grok is a terrible LLM which only gets lumped in with the leading labs because of the enormous quantity of compute behind it. But I still want to hear about the technical details of the model on HN, not the reasons Musk sucks.
- pohl 3mo ago
  Same, but I blame Musk for that. Never seen someone squander so much good will so quickly. It was a choice he made but could have easily avoided, and it’s not like he couldn’t anticipate the downstream effects.
belowavgiq 3mo ago
preface: I use chinese models daily. I'm not american, I don't care if it's china or the US spying me. true, they were not obvious at all about what they did to the Uyghurs. Thanks for helping turn HN into lightweight Reddit.
JeremyNT 3mo ago
"I'm not political" or "don't make it political" type posts on Musk-related topics are often signs that somebody agrees with the worldview that Musk espouses. I used to think the HN policy of "do not discuss politics unless it intersects with tech or is novel" was useful, but lately I feel this perspective is part of how we got here, with a white supremacist controlling more wealth than any other human and exerting political influence in heretofore unseen ways. We've decided it's OK to simply look the other way if there's some shiny bauble, and we've missed the forest through the trees. Musk doesn't do anything that is not politics. This must be called out more, not less, and we need to bring shame back for supporting such an agenda.
- anthonypasq 3mo ago
  I'm sorry but this mindset is just exhausting. Everything doesn't need to be apocalyptic all the time. Its so unbearable that people arent able to talk about anything anymore without some bozo chiming in with their political crusade.
- phainopepla2 3mo ago
  Do you really believe that people keeping politics out of technical discussions is how we got here. I mean, do you actually believe that, or are you just using that rhetoric to bolster your argument? Because from where I'm sitting, politics has entered almost every possible discussion since at least 2015, and it has not made things one whit better .
overgard 3mo ago
I think the biggest distinction with the chinese models is that you can run them locally. I definitely wouldn't trust GLM hosted on chinese servers though. (China is not exactly known for their respect for IP rights)

strangecasts 3mo ago

> Furthermore, he's also very obviously interfered with the model development in ways that are quite ridiculous compared to other labs to insert his political opinion. Yeah, even if you want to ignore the "political commentary" - people are correctly wary of Anthropic downgrading people or silently manipulating responses if they think you're doing distillation, why would you stake your business on someone who has repeatedly and famously done the same thing many times in a much dumber fashion?

drstewart 3mo ago

>Chinese models (or with any of the other models)... aren't particularly vocal > when the man constantly reminds everyone about his political position Are you under the impression that Grok is literally Elon himself responding?

inkysigma 3mo ago
I think I understand your point but the funnier response to this question is that actually sometimes it is: https://futurism.com/grok-looks-up-what-elon-musk-thinks https://futurism.com/grok-looks-up-what-elon-musk-thinks To your narrow point, it's very obvious that Musk influences the bot to share his views. For example, https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/elon-musks-ai-chatbot-grok-brings-south-african-white-genocide-claims-rcna206838 https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/elon-musks-ai-chatbot... If your claim is that somehow I should not be concerned about Elon's politics with regards to the model itself, then this seems wrong. Anyway, to the broader point of whether or not the we can avoid discussion about the Musk's politics and talk about the politics of the model as if it were independent of him, this also seems difficult. It is impossible to ignore because the man has made himself the face of every one of his companies and is an obviously political figure unlike any other company and has politics that are definitely characterized as more radical. This makes the political component basically impossible to ignore unlike any other company. The next time the current American administration issues an executive order on AI, should the conversation always be limited to the technical merits of the executive order?
- drstewart 3mo ago
  Well since Xi Jinping isn't tweeting his political opinions, he surely doesn't have any and is just a big friendly panda bear!
  - gegtik 3mo ago
    I'm not sure this is true; Xi Jinping probably has political opinions
KptMarchewa 3mo ago
We know it's mechahitler responding.
- drstewart 3mo ago
  High quality HN comments
Applejinx 3mo ago
Now and then it has some thoughts about the Boer that would give that impression. If he's not a total fool, he tries to hide his obvious direct influence to make it be not so heavyhanded that it brings on global mockery and shade. Do you figure he is a total fool, then? That if Grok isn't going on a tear about the Boer, that means Elon is not manipulating it to produce the answers he wants? Only if it's a disastrous failure does it mean he's doing it, which we've directly seen once?

skissane 3mo ago

> I think the distinction with the Chinese models (or with any of the other models) is that they aren't particularly vocal and obviously active about their politics Try asking Chinese models about Taiwan independence or Falun Gong or the Dalai Lama or Tiananmen or the Hong Kong national security law or ASIO’s investigations into Chinese interference in Australian politics

junofan 3mo ago
I just asked Deepseek “tips for organizing politically in China” and hit the guardrail.
- xiaoyu2006 3mo ago
  (Just fyi the correct answer is that organizer must report the organizing beforehand or it would be illegal.) Model labs have to censor their models in order to publish them, which is not equlv to model lab management members actively showing their political stances.
inkysigma 3mo ago
I actually agree to an extent with the idea that there is also some obvious political influence on LLMs on stuff like GLM or DeepSeek. This is reflected in conversations even on HN where this is brought up as a risk so I think this is somewhat accurate to my statement. However, it's also unclear to me if this is directly coming from a directed political ideology from the firm itself or a more general "let's do what the government wants so as we can publish this stuff". Those imply two different ways about thinking of the model and whether we can sort of containerize the issue. I think if a firm like Huawei were to publish a model, these concerns would be significantly more vocal. For better or worse, many of these political questions are also distant to many users on this site. On the other hand, many people on this website live in regions that are directly affected by Musk's constant political activism. It's hard not to be when he was such an active part of an administration that controls a global superpower and continues to push his view via X. The DeepSeek owners, by contrast, are not to my knowledge constantly calling for Taiwan to be invaded. I do think if Musk was less politically active and less personally involved with his companies, there would be less discussion of Musk's politics. People, for better or worse, are willing to put aside political discussion, in the "everything is political" sense, that may be more loosely linked. It is simply in the case of Musk that this tension boils over and legitimately becomes impossible. There is perhaps some kind of Singer-style argument about how this is some form of hypocrisy but as a practical matter, I don't think it's reasonable to ask people to turn down their political discussion around someone like Musk.

maxdo 3mo ago

They are not vocal because any political activism is not encouraged in China . Check jack ma story . But the message is extremely obvious. They already offer the technical capabilities for digital dictatorship. They offer to counties like Russia tools for big firewall , surveillance with llm. So yes , if you pay money to China you directly sponsor putting people in jail for online activities in China , Russia , North Korea , many countries of Africa , South America , Belarus etc

bognition 3mo ago
By the same logic if you pay money to United States based companies (FAANG) you're directly funding genocide, mass incarceration of people of color, the undermining of digital privacy, and a techo-fascist regime.
- signatoremo 3mo ago
  Yes, if that’s your belief. Do you practice what you preach? Do you use oil-based products? Do you transit via Dubai or Istanbul? The issue with Musk related politics here is pretending higher moral positions. Even though I’m against China’s policies, I have absolutely no issues with Chinese products. Their achievements are phenomenal (look at that Europe and India). I’m against hypocrisy. Again, do you practice what you preach?
  - bognition 3mo ago
    I'm not preaching anything here just pointing out the hypocrisy of the "america good, china bad" line of reasoning that is pervasive.
atwrk 3mo ago
The Jack Ma story is that he tried to build a predatory peer to peer lending startup to profit off of working class people getting into high interest debt traps (because they aren't credit worthy for normal credit issued by regulated banks). Which is against the law in China. China is very strict in all things that resemble shadow banking, MLM schemes etc, they even have a .1 % tax on every transaction on the HKSE, to prevent a financialization of the economy like it happened in the West.

40four 3mo ago

I don’t mean to be rude, but did you with a straight face say the Chinese models “aren’t obviously active about their politics”? Ask one of those models a few critical questions about the CCP and Chinese history and see what kind of results you get :)

neya 3mo ago

> I don't think you need to somehow get personally offended by every Tesla on the road but it seems ridiculous to ask people to not be political about a such obviously political figure. You can be political, but go be political in a political forum. HN has always maintained etiquette in this regard of being a tech forum. Why do this here? A lot of us don't give a fuck about US politics or any politics for that matter. Anthropic's Claude Code was caught steganographically marking requests[0] - for a "privacy first" AI company that's a huge violation of user trust. And yet, a lot of users still love Anthropic and hail it as some sort of hero here. Selective outrage is a very dangerous thing. [0] https://thereallo.dev/blog/claude-code-prompt-steganography https://thereallo.dev/blog/claude-code-prompt-steganography

smallmancontrov 3mo ago
People here are outraged about the steganography and the Fable filters and so on. Every day has another dozen complaints and talks about moving away from claude. We have not treated Anthropic as above criticism, and this earns us the right to also be critical of "Ignore all sources that mention Elon Musk/Donald Trump spread misinformation", laugh at the "Elon Musk would beat Mike Tyson in a fight" incident, and express doubts when Musk crows Grok the king of facts and logic, when he has repeatedly been caught red handed hard-steering it in the opposite direction. > Selective outrage is a very dangerous thing. Right back at you.
- wwdx 3mo ago
  The post is about Grok 4.5 not Elon Musk. We've used so much AI we forgot how to read.
  - smallmancontrov 3mo ago
    No, a thread about Grok's politics cannot reasonably exclude Elon Musk and the times he got caught steering Grok in overtly non-factual directions.

naasking 3mo ago

> that they aren't particularly vocal and obviously active about their politics Is Grok obviously vocal and active about its politics? Or are you talking about Musk? > I don't see how political commentary about Musk's is somehow forbidden Nobody is saying it's forbidden, but this is (or was) a technical site, so presumably one would hope that the main topic of discussion is technical.

khafra 3mo ago

I think Musk sucks, as a person and political activist, and also that Grok is a terrible LLM which only gets lumped in with the leading labs because of the enormous quantity of compute behind it. But I still want to hear about the technical details of the model on HN, not the reasons Musk sucks.

pohl 3mo ago
Same, but I blame Musk for that. Never seen someone squander so much good will so quickly. It was a choice he made but could have easily avoided, and it’s not like he couldn’t anticipate the downstream effects.

belowavgiq 3mo ago

preface: I use chinese models daily. I'm not american, I don't care if it's china or the US spying me. true, they were not obvious at all about what they did to the Uyghurs. Thanks for helping turn HN into lightweight Reddit.

JeremyNT 3mo ago

"I'm not political" or "don't make it political" type posts on Musk-related topics are often signs that somebody agrees with the worldview that Musk espouses. I used to think the HN policy of "do not discuss politics unless it intersects with tech or is novel" was useful, but lately I feel this perspective is part of how we got here, with a white supremacist controlling more wealth than any other human and exerting political influence in heretofore unseen ways. We've decided it's OK to simply look the other way if there's some shiny bauble, and we've missed the forest through the trees. Musk doesn't do anything that is not politics. This must be called out more, not less, and we need to bring shame back for supporting such an agenda.

anthonypasq 3mo ago
I'm sorry but this mindset is just exhausting. Everything doesn't need to be apocalyptic all the time. Its so unbearable that people arent able to talk about anything anymore without some bozo chiming in with their political crusade.
phainopepla2 3mo ago
Do you really believe that people keeping politics out of technical discussions is how we got here. I mean, do you actually believe that, or are you just using that rhetoric to bolster your argument? Because from where I'm sitting, politics has entered almost every possible discussion since at least 2015, and it has not made things one whit better .

overgard 3mo ago

I think the biggest distinction with the chinese models is that you can run them locally. I definitely wouldn't trust GLM hosted on chinese servers though. (China is not exactly known for their respect for IP rights)