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Grok 4.5

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871–880 of 1001 posts

Re: Grok 4.5

#871

So depressing to read the non-stop political comments here. I’m using GLM at the moment, it’s Chinese and backed by god knows who, and no one cares. I really wanted to see what the experts thought of new Grok tech and how the model compares etc. I wish I could turn off the non-technical comments somehow, could literally just go to reddit if I want to see garbage like this. Am I supposed to get emotional every time I…

Telling people not to be political is a political act – specifically, one that accepts whatever comes, doesn't care about power, is happy with whoever rules whom and how justly. Those are your politics, or at least sufficiently so that you're happy to park those issues while discussing tech. They aren't everyone's. You can turn off the non-technical comments by ignoring them.

> Telling people not to be political is a political act

No. If there's a group to discuss ice cream, but they keep talking about Trump, it's not a "political act" to say "hey guys, aren't we here for ice cream?"

Otherwise every forum devolves into the loudest, most vocal slurry and loses its personality.

I'm Canadian. Let's talk about the tech, not your failing country, please. Or I'll go somewhere else for ice cream, and yall can have your millionth community to talk about the same self obsessed political topics ad nauseum.

Re: Grok 4.5

#872
post #457

I just don't think that I can ever trust an xAI model knowing that they are actively trying to shape its replies to fit a political narrative. How can you trust their models to be reliable in a business setting with the foreknowledge that their models are being nudged around in the backend?

Has it occurred to you that _all_ model providers are actively trying to shape their models' replies to fit their preferred political narratives?

No, because most model providers don't have an overt political agenda determined by one person.

He literally promises to change specific political responses. Building on top of Grok will ultimately be as useful as buying TrumpCoin

Re: Grok 4.5

#873
post #864

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 inte…

> 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…

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.

Re: Grok 4.5

#874
post #812

So depressing to read the non-stop political comments here. I’m using GLM at the moment, it’s Chinese and backed by god knows who, and no one cares. I really wanted to see what the experts thought of new Grok tech and how the model compares etc. I wish I could turn off the non-technical comments somehow, could literally just go to reddit if I want to see garbage like this. Am I supposed to get emotional every time I…

I think US based folks perhaps aren't aware of what Musk has been doing in Europe politically. Specifically promoting - appearing at conferences, applying political pressure as well as public statements etc - actual fascists. Not right wing controversial figures etc, but literal authoritarian, anti-migrant, anti-EU, anti-democracy fascists. Not to be glib but if this was Mussolini-AI, or Pinochet-AI or what have you,…

They do know, they just don't care. As long as it doesn't affect them, it's "not political".

Frankly, I am afraid. I see many takes here that resemble Russian way of thinking and being "apolitical" that I thought I'd never see from Americans.

Re: Grok 4.5

#875

So depressing to read the non-stop political comments here. I’m using GLM at the moment, it’s Chinese and backed by god knows who, and no one cares. I really wanted to see what the experts thought of new Grok tech and how the model compares etc. I wish I could turn off the non-technical comments somehow, could literally just go to reddit if I want to see garbage like this. Am I supposed to get emotional every time I…

> Where have the hardcore nerds gone?

They grew up and understand what's at stake

Re: Grok 4.5

#876

I just don't think that I can ever trust an xAI model knowing that they are actively trying to shape its replies to fit a political narrative. How can you trust their models to be reliable in a business setting with the foreknowledge that their models are being nudged around in the backend?

> I just don't think that I can ever trust an xAI model knowing that they are actively trying to shape its replies to fit a political narrative.

Maybe you should base this assessment on more than just vibes. Grok came out pretty balanced on independent assessments, where most other models were heavily biased: https://github.com/washingtonpost/political-bias-llm-eval/

Re: Grok 4.5

#877

So depressing to read the non-stop political comments here. I’m using GLM at the moment, it’s Chinese and backed by god knows who, and no one cares. I really wanted to see what the experts thought of new Grok tech and how the model compares etc. I wish I could turn off the non-technical comments somehow, could literally just go to reddit if I want to see garbage like this. Am I supposed to get emotional every time I…

Hacker News sadly jumped the shark in the mid-2010s, and went into orbit after Trump was elected the first time. Since then there's been a lot of political performers here, which has killed the quality of discussion significantly. Lobsters (https://lobste.rs/) is apparently a possible alternative, but the original HN magic has been gone a long time.

Re: Grok 4.5

#878

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately all of the major AI model providers are massively incentivized to fit their models to various political narratives, especially through historical denialism. The "diverse 1940s German soldiers" debacle from Google comes to mind, or perhaps "nothing of note happened at Tiananmen Square" from any of the Chinese models.

Do you genuinely believe those two examples are comparable? Image generation and recitation of historical consensus are two very different domains, primarily because of how much more information dense an image is than a blurb of text. Put more lightly, if I ask a model to “generate an image of a soccer player”, what’s the most politically neutral option of the following: - Make them white, because of American cultura…

I'd say that one data point is not enough to object to, except if what's depicted is literally impossible, like the AI generated images of a female pope. Beyond those, the distribution of a set of generated images is what implies likely bias.

Re: Grok 4.5

#879

So depressing to read the non-stop political comments here. I’m using GLM at the moment, it’s Chinese and backed by god knows who, and no one cares. I really wanted to see what the experts thought of new Grok tech and how the model compares etc. I wish I could turn off the non-technical comments somehow, could literally just go to reddit if I want to see garbage like this. Am I supposed to get emotional every time I…

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 inte…

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.

Re: Grok 4.5

#880

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have paid personal subs to ChatGPT, Claude, Grok, Gemini For science (primary biology/pharmacology) questions, Gemini 3.1 Flash Extended produces the answers I _personally_ find "best", in terms of content, phrasing, and formatting.

I concur. Generally I find Gemini answers to be the least biased and most factually accurate, without too many of the annoying AI writing quirks. However, I find the Gemini web app to be by far the worst, and Gemini itself second only to Claude in terms of refusing legitimate requests. It used to be the worst for that, but Claude has really put up the guardrails since their run in with the US president. Grok has no c…

What sort of legitimate requests do you get refused?
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