Comment by rustyhancock
1 month ago
He's also completely missed what many of us see as the primary the issue, HF was attacked by a US frontier model.
HF could not be helped by US frontier models because of the "safety" features they have.
HF had to use an open model from china.
Anthropic wants to add those "safety" features to open models - especially from china.
End result would be HF hack would have continued atleast until the Monday that OpenAI engineers finally walked back into work.
I'm very confident that it was staged and coordinated. This propaganda started because they cannot evolve their models further. See Fable and Sol, they are lame. They seem incredible at first but the more you use you can see the trickery. It is a matter of time for someone to prove they are marginally better only because they inject more information to the harness at server side.
I’m also into this conspiracy theory: ai created bug, ai hacked it, ai fixed it.
just like ai will create amazing tests suits for the broken code it writes, if one isn't carefully watching...
EDIT: of course it probably helps to have an up front tdd test suite, but often isn't the case.
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The public narrative around conspiracy theories is baffling for sure: what rational basis is there for assuming them wrong? Often none.
Incentive and ability are what should be looked at. There, things get far more interesting: what is the current state of AI employed by the US intelligence agencies and what do they use it for?
Having the public convinced, their "superiors" would only do everything in their best interest, even without anybody knowing for sure, is Huxley's Brave New World in real life.
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Everything in this space is manufactured, the plebs is fed very deliberate information for manipulation. I don't think there is a debate about it. All the PR stuff is marketing.
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I case you're wondering, HF = Hugging Face
Every time I read Hugging Face, my brain first jumps to facehugger from Alien. I really wish they chose a different name...
Actually I wrote something similar yesterday as a reply to the (since flagged) comment below. Glad to see that more people have this association. But apparently the founders of Hugging Face didn't have it, or else they probably would have chosen some other "friendly" emoji for their startup (which initially developed a chatbot for teenagers - that makes the choice of name feel even creepier if you ask me).
Same here. The creature seems more fitting than the emoji too.
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It's the machine learning platform that started with "developing a chatbot app targeted at teenagers" (according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hugging_Face), which helps explain the weird name (which still makes me think more of one of the development stages of the xenomorphs from Alien than of the emoji, but that's probably just me).
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If you're not familiar with such overall big players, would anything help short of looking at some 101 first?
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The biggest platform for the distribution of open-weight models
For context:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48997548
Surely you can just google this.
Worth checking, elsewhere in this thread someone points out glm only assessed the damage after the fact, it didn't stop the attack, and Hf apprently never sought access to a trusted defender program with a closed model either the open model saved them farming might not hold up.
They wrote themselves that before the incident they were denied from the trust program...
I think the fair nuance here is, an administration which used Executive Orders to force guardrails, meaning US companies must retain them, even if they might want to drop them now.
And on top of that, with low/no guardrails, people call you a child pornographer(grok), so the public is also against it. Yet mysteriously few complain about Chinese open models being child pornographers.
So even if your goal isn't ethical, but just fiscal, it's reasonable to say there are two standards. And to complaint in some way.
I don't think banning is going to work, that's just silly. And over the next few years, everyone and their dog will have local GPU compute to train locally. People have home labs, the bar isn't that high, and eventually large text datasets will escape from Anthropic and other companies, allowing for comparable training.
It's a genie that's not going back in the bottle, the bottle is smashed.
The only reasonable outcome would be section 230 style carveouts so that there is zero liability for anything a model does.
Because having guardrails on corporate models barely months ahead of open ones, which will never be restricted, is entirely pointless.
>child pornographer(grok)
People call grok that because deviants were abusing grok's ability to edit images and post them publicly on X to strip people - including children - of their clothes, from their public photos. Then when there was backlash, Elon laughed it off. It took half the world opening investigations against X for violations of existing regulations for action to be taken.
The leniency that internet companies get in terms of dealing with illegal content comes with the expectation that they're making reasonable efforts to control the distribution of said content. X, and Grok, were actively supporting the production and distribution of the content in public.
It is very different from someone creating such images in a private account, and definitely very different from someone using a local model to do it.
My entire post was how it is unreasonable to have a dual standard, and my point was it's really irrelevant if it's a model you download and use locally, or if it's a model hosted remotely, or hosted and created remotely. You're not really providing any sensible reason where the line is, except "public company", which is, again, the entire point I'm making.
The only realistic, non-double standard is that the creator of the model should be 100% responsible. What on earth does it have to do with who's hosting it?
And by this metric, aren't all the uncensored models on huggingface, child pornographers? And if so, why not? Provide tangible, real, sensible reasons please, and after all, isn't hugging face a company?
You know, people are all over the place on this. I see people complaining about guardrails, then in the next breath complaining there aren't enough. Complaining that open models are the thing, but then creating double standards.
So once again, what is your actual reason why it's different?
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The "child pornography" thing was about image generation, which people for better or worse have very different moral standards for than for text generation. There is very little pushback against grok being willing to write explicit descriptions of sex, or giving security advise.
Though I think your overall point still stands, and at least Grok's twitter bot has received a lot of criticism for pure text too (Mecha hitler comes to mind)
It also must be seen in the context that the open weight models aren't commercially associated with a popular distribution site where people share the images, the people behind them aren't public figures seen as encouraging the use of the model for "undressing" (albeit in a funny way not related to minors), and they haven't yet responded to questions about what can be produced using their tool by proposing guardrails but only for non-paying users...
Open weight models get scrutinised in a different way, also linked to perceptions of their developers' bias, like the tests to see whether they refuse to answer questions on certain historical events at Tiananmen Square
> There is very little pushback against grok being willing to write explicit descriptions of sex, or giving security advise.
John Oliver disagrees with this
> And over the next few years, everyone and their dog will have local GPU compute to train locally. People have home labs, the bar isn't that high, and eventually large text datasets will escape from Anthropic and other companies, allowing for comparable training.
You're vastly underestimating the scaling problem here.
Things that would need to be true for your statement to be valid:
> child pornographer(grok)
Further reading: XAI Bets on Grok's Racy Side, The Information, Jun 24, 2026
&: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/07/xai-cant-deny-gr...
Well... They are all part of a "high well regarded" group of people of a security committee that has no specialists or whatsoever, only trillionaires on a round table