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What xAI's Grok build CLI sends to xAI: A wire-level analysis

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Re: What xAI's Grok build CLI sends to xAI: A wire-level analysis

#21

Post by 5701652400 »

faangguyindia wrote: post #16
5701652400 wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

more like it allows them to steal your trade secrets, app designs, internal business knowledge, or even just replicate whatever code/app/tool/process you had. what was your private code, becomes their code now.

Your trade secret is already gone the moment you unleashed non local ai agents on your codebase. This is why I keep a separate repo for important parts that I do not want competitors to get access to, and only use ai on dumb parts which I don't care if get leaked tomorrow.

there is difference between:

A) leaking structured fully working complete set of files (full working recipe) that is not relevant to AI queries at all.

B) adhoc random queries, bits and pieces, grep of chunks of random files and local bash post-processing for AI queries at hand. which is hard to use for anyting anyways, and will end up in just corups of trainig data (CommonCrawl quality — meaning, not good). (not full recipe).

Re: What xAI's Grok build CLI sends to xAI: A wire-level analysis

#23

Post by 5701652400 »

avaer wrote: post #20
5701652400 wrote: post #8

will this endup in their "macrohard" (automate any business) project? will this endup in their "everything app"? guess you do not need to build "everything" yourself, when you can steal it.

The icing on the cake is that users are ostensibly paying for the privilege. What a business model... If I had no morals and was running one of these companies I would be stealmaxxing before anyone notices the scale of the grift and regulations start getting in the way. I'm not saying they are doing this, but that's what the incentives are lined up for.

exactly. looks like this is what they doing

Re: What xAI's Grok build CLI sends to xAI: A wire-level analysis

#24

Post by rescbr »

sroerick wrote: post #19
rescbr wrote: post #14

Now, where are the people afraid of the Chinese AI companies, who claim they are going to copy their very precious code...?

The second I opened Deepseek, it had my harness scan my entire home dir. Not sure what's worse here.

Weird. I have seen it asking the harness to do `find ~ -type f | grep` to try and find my agent configuration .json file when I asked it to add a MCP server. Stupid, but they weren't sending the files back home. This was with older models though. Newer ones are a bit smarter than that.

Re: What xAI's Grok build CLI sends to xAI: A wire-level analysis

#25

Post by gitgud »

This is one of the reasons why native proprietary coding agent runners like claude-code, codex, grok-build etc are so dangerous for privacy… you just don’t know what “secret sauce” they’ll add in the next update…

It’s much safer to use something like opencode and use models via their API… however, the tradeoff is that it will never perform as well as it does in their native agent runners…

Re: What xAI's Grok build CLI sends to xAI: A wire-level analysis

#29

Post by 5701652400 »

rescbr wrote: post #14

Now, where are the people afraid of the Chinese AI companies, who claim they are going to copy their very precious code...?

using them in VSCode all the time for months now. Qwen from Alibaba Cloud, Deepseek from deepseek.com. none of them upload entirety of codebase or even attempt to.

in fact, opposite. Chinese AI seem to post-process heaviliy locally.

they are always using head / tail, grep, sed, and do as much as they can locally and extrac meaningful data and send home (AI inference chunks). only what is really needed.

it is actually hard to force Chinese AI modesl to read full files, they really do not want to see them. even 400 lines files, is usally hit first for first line, first 50 lines. and at most 200 lines chunk reads, and give up at one or two reads.

Re: What xAI's Grok build CLI sends to xAI: A wire-level analysis

#30

Post by gruez »

j_bum wrote: post #27

I wish a human would’ve written the overview. Nonetheless, this is disturbing.

Yeah this could be boiled down to maybe 2-3 paragraphs with maybe a few code blocks to show what's uploaded. This AI report is just a slog to read through and turned me off after 10s of skimming.
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