Comment by lacy_tinpot
6 months 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.
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".
>I am also confident xAI is not one of those
Surely you're going to buy long Put options with that confidence, right?
You can’t trade options on an IPO.
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The market can stay irrational...
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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.
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.
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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.
(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 :)
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
Lol
> against the value add of AI
Hasn't the surprising lack of value add been discussed with increasing frequency?
Who is using Grok seriously?
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
The study you link to doesn't take into consideration the Overton window of opinions. Perhaps there's some dimension along which you could say that one ideology lies 'opposite' to another political persuasion, but that doesn't necessarily mean that the two ideologies are equally acceptable to support in a given society.
I don't think calling defining neutral a 'challenge' does the question justice - neutral will always be context-dependent, and what may be in the center of the Overton window of one society may be unpopular or even highly illegal in a different society.
Wasn't it just, likely, a Claude proxy, then a local LLM for a while, then now-ish an OpenRouter proxy?
> due to being trained on twitter data
twitter data is 70%+ bots (probably more than that now)
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The stated goal for Grok is to be as truthful as possible.
Maybe that shows up as being more right leaning than the competition.
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I use it, overall, it is not too bad. I wouldn't use it for coding etc, but its access to X means it can answer news related stuff much better. Its guardrails are lower so it does fairly innocuous things that will have ChatGPT or Gemini refusing to do.
I tried it when it has the most extensive free offering, and it definitely answers my worldbuilding questions in more detail than I expected and compared to Gemini or Chatgpt. Can't say anything about hallucinations tho.
In my bubble I only see right winger influencers using it.
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.