Comment by observationist
3 hours ago
The anti-Musk stuff would qualify as brigading in nearly any other community. It shocks me that people have such a visceral, irrational engagement with anything in Musk's orbit. I probably shouldn't have, but I expected better from the HN crowd for some reason.
It's an excellent model. GPT 5.4/5.5 level, some things better, others not, but extremely fast. A wonderful technical improvement.
If a Chinese company or random startup released the model, people would be glazing it like crazy.
xAI is competently keeping up with the frontier, just as well as any of the Chinese labs or Mistral. Given any significant breakthroughs, xAI will be better positioned to capitalize on them than nearly any other entity.
I can't wait to see what Meta comes up with; with 4 contenders in the US race, we'd have a lot of be grateful for.
It's surprising anyone could not be viscerally disgusted by the person who has caused such immense destruction and death recently just because they released a 3rd rate slop machine.
> It shocks me that people have such a visceral, irrational engagement with anything in Musk's orbit.
Shocked? DOGE defunded USAID and children's cancer research funding. And have you read his twitter feed lately or seen this video? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-VfYjPzj1Xw
I agree that we don't judge his work based strictly on its merits but that's consequence a that he's created by his behavior, and I wouldn't call it brigading.
The fact that you're shocked is silly.
A very quick search showed that USAID had extensive ethical compromise throughout the organization.
Were we supposed to just subsidize that forever?
It did some good, yes, but from what I can tell, it was better to shut it down.
That's just one example, but frankly I get the feeling that if I dug into more examples they'd end up the same: easily explained and not entirely shocking.
What sources did your quick search turn up?
Also you didn’t give any examples. You just plainly made the statement they were ethically compromised without saying how.
If people have issues with how USAID was being run, they can address them through action in congress - congress established the agency and has authority.
What Musk participated in was illegal, motivated by self-interest and personal gain, and undermines our democratic processes. Don’t be surprised that people are mad at the oligarch acting like an oligarch. Musk deserves exactly as much say in the American government as anyone else - one vote - but in his arrogance he has taken his resources and used them to buy influence that is not his to own. It is fundamentally unamerican.
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> It did some good, yes, but from what I can tell, it was better to shut it down.
Whatever you are reading is badly misinforming you.
I'm sure there was some reform and cleanup to do in certain USAID programs, but the programs Musk killed or interrupted were literally the best lives-saved-per-dollar programs on the planet. PEPFAR, for example, is credited with saving 25+ million lives since it was created during GWB's term.
There's also the rather important point that what Musk did was totally illegal. These are programs created by congress and their funding is mandated by law.
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