Live data from Hacker News

Grok 4.5

x.ai

751–760 of 1001 posts

Re: Grok 4.5

#751

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Studies on political bias in models consistently show that LLMs lean politically left. The only outlier is grok which leans right but by a smaller factor, according to this study for instance: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.23841 Edit: adding some other studies that are easily retrievable with a quick search for those unsatisfied with the first one - https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.12922 https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.16746 Claim…

Reality leans left in many respects, principally the non-economic ones. It's a simple consequence of the same trend of overall social and educational progress that allowed these models to be developed in the first place. There is a reason they came out of San Francisco, and not Russia, Iran, or Oklahoma. To get a right-biased response from an LLM, you have to deliberately bias it... which is exactly what Musk did. Ne…

Reality doesn't have a left-wing bias, it has a liberal bias.

(FWIW my experience is that while Grok is more likely to express the right wing perspective on a topic, it's almost invariably as a counterpoint alongside the left wing perspective. I never got it to give an exclusively right wing take. But I do have to regularly prompt ChatGPT et al to elucidate on the right wing view. IMHO I don't want AI to have a left OR right wing bias. Wherever there is a genuine political — not factual — dispute, teaching the controversy is the appropriate response.)

Re: Grok 4.5

#752

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> isn't sycophantic Not sure about that one... But I think the true secret sauce for all these models is how they reason. GPT never outputs how it thinks, which "saves on tokens" but Claude absolutely tells you how it thinks, and there's people who use how it reasons about solving problems to finetune smaller open source models, with surprisingly better output.

From my experience, it has not been sycophantic in the sense that it pushes back and questions my own reasoning in healthy ways. There were moments where I felt I was brushing up against actual AI psychosis, and it pushed back on my questioning of its intentions, that it even had intentions. I'll put it this way: I feel comfortable recommending Claude to people who haven't experienced AI yet. As we've learned from ea…

I think Opus can still have sycophantic residue that Fable can point out sometimes. Both models though hold their ground so well.

I have got so use to the Claude personality / style of conversation that I really can't be bothered to try these other models anymore. They need to take a huge jump but that seems to be getting harder and harder because of the jumps Anthropic makes.

This Grok version is a joke if it is not even clearing the bar now. I am just getting use to and using Fable more and more. I am also trying not to forget that this is the highly delayed old Fable model that Grok can't even beat on release. There will be a new version that expands the lead in a week or two.

It all harder and harder to judge too. I just had a prompt/response this morning that Fable finally displayed its intelligence and vowed me. That is partly because anything with even the vaguest reference to biology defaults back to Opus.

Re: Grok 4.5

#753

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 wish I could turn off the non-technical comments somehow

You're in luck: We have this new thing called LLMs that you can ask to summarize a webpage and filter out the shit you don't care about :)

Re: Grok 4.5

#754
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?

That's reductive, how many other models had a mecha hitler incident? Or a "let's talk about white genocide in south africa" incident?

There is some truth to what you say, but most model providers I would say are engaged in CYA type shaping moreso than anything, grok is actively and openly being developed to spread a white nationalist agenda. There are levels to this.

Re: Grok 4.5

#755

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you. I too am interested in the technical aspects, not how many guardrails it can hit against Fable, like, who cares? As long as it can get me (more) uncensored access without killing itself over biology or chemistry, it's a good model to me. I can't believe the top comment is about some political reply garbage, as if that actually matters day to day for coders; in reality I want to get my work done.

[flagged]

[dead]

Re: Grok 4.5

#756

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…

And here is a reddit meme for you https://i.redd.it/eeoo4y00lkne1.jpeg

> 2026

> Posting Reddit links

They already gave away that image to their AI partners to train on.

Re: Grok 4.5

#757

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 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 Try asking Chinese models about Taiwan independence or Falun Gong or the Dalai Lama or Tiananmen or the Hong Kong national security law or ASIO’s investigations into Chinese interference in Australian politics

I actually agree to an extent with the idea that there is also some obvious political influence on LLMs on stuff like GLM or DeepSeek. This is reflected in conversations even on HN where this is brought up as a risk so I think this is somewhat accurate to my statement.

However, it's also unclear to me if this is directly coming from a directed political ideology from the firm itself or a more general "let's do what the government wants so as we can publish this stuff". Those imply two different ways about thinking of the model and whether we can sort of containerize the issue. I think if a firm like Huawei were to publish a model, these concerns would be significantly more vocal. For better or worse, many of these political questions are also distant to many users on this site.

On the other hand, many people on this website live in regions that are directly affected by Musk's constant political activism. It's hard not to be when he was such an active part of an administration that controls a global superpower and continues to push his view via X. The DeepSeek owners, by contrast, are not to my knowledge constantly calling for Taiwan to be invaded.

I do think if Musk was less politically active and less personally involved with his companies, there would be less discussion of Musk's politics. People, for better or worse, are willing to put aside political discussion, in the "everything is political" sense, that may be more loosely linked.

It is simply in the case of Musk that this tension boils over and legitimately becomes impossible. There is perhaps some kind of Singer-style argument about how this is some form of hypocrisy but as a practical matter, I don't think it's reasonable to ask people to turn down their political discussion around someone like Musk.

Re: Grok 4.5

#758

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…

>Chinese models (or with any of the other models)... aren't particularly vocal > when the man constantly reminds everyone about his political position Are you under the impression that Grok is literally Elon himself responding?

We know it's mechahitler responding.

Re: Grok 4.5

#759

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The hardcore nerds have always been political. Wake up. You're using the sell my soul to the devil argument. If you achieve what you want to, it doesn't matter if you sold your soul on the way.

If you’re using Claude then guess what, it’s running on Elon’s GPUs. If you’re using Codex, then say hello to Microsoft for me. Let’s just presume that everyone hates everyone and get back to talking tech.

Part of Claude is running on Elon's GPUs.

Re: Grok 4.5

#760

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…

[flagged]

[flagged]
Post reply on HN