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Comment by hn_throwaway_99 | Hacker News Reader

I feel like comments defending Twitter (I'm still calling it that until they change their domain) are half missing the point. True, it's not necessarily an "OpenAI API wrapper", but the fact that it was trained on ChatGPT's logs basically means it's still an "OpenAI wrapper" of sorts, and it's going to be inferior in nearly every way (I always thought a huge problem with LLMs going forward was the risk that they would be "contaminated" with non-human training data).

I can't think of any reason anybody would use Grok over ChatGPT besides political tribe signalling.

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the fact that it was trained on ChatGPT's logs basically means it's still an "OpenAI wrapper"

Does that mean you are a wrapper of a book that you read and learned from? Am I a Kernighan and Ritchie when I wrote C because I read their book 20 years ago?

I think wrapper has a specific meaning that is not applicable. Grok isn't abstracting or an interface to ChatGPT.

That is a pretty cynical view. They just got the thing up and running. They will fix parts that are messed up.

The questions are still worth asking

Sure, but the way it was framed was so negative. The Grok engineers answered this online shortly there after and, of course, it was no where near as nefarious as people want to make it out to be.

This is what they say in their announcement of Grok:

> A unique and fundamental advantage of Grok is that it has real-time knowledge of the world via the 𝕏 platform.

You disagree with that?

Chatgpt has done internet searches in responses for a while now.

I would disagree that that constitutes a "fundamental advantage"

"knowledge" is also disputable.

Unlike religion which is indisputable.

It's technically unique since the kind of access it has to X is obviously proprietary.

It's not a fundamental advantage for most AI model uses or a particularly good source of knowledge of the world.

What is a particularly good source of knowledge of the world?

Something that's not Twitter.

Such as…?

You're missing the point. I can identify a pile of crap without leaving my own next to it.

Ask it for the latest news on Hamas and Israel. What does Grok say about it using its root access to X.com?

The best use cases for Grok are going to be in advertising. Corporations that pay X.com a lot of money will get privileged access to Grok features for sentiment analysis and ad placement. Basically, the AI is going to optimize advertising revenue because real-time access to data will allow advertisers to optimize their targeting as quickly as Grok can manage to summarize the relevant metrics for impact of the current ad campaign. Advertising agencies are not dumb so I suspect they will start pivoting to using generative assets for their A/B testing and optimization which means that something like Grok with the proper generative plug-ins will let them do a lot more with a smaller team of marketing "creatives".

Have they said anything yet about how they plan to compensate for Twitter being full of stuff that isn't true?

What social media isn't? Seriously? X's Community Notes have been a great improvement in that dimension.

> What social media isn't?

You could ask "which turd sandwiches don't taste like shit?" when really, the question isn't "where are the better turd sandwiches?" but rather "why the hell are we eating turd sandwiches?"

Yeah, real time knowledge sounds more like a bug than a feature. "Real time knowledge" is what I get when my sons come to me yelling about which one of them is to blame for the fight they were just in.

If I ask ChatGPT "how to make a bomb", and it says "I can’t assist with that." *, and Grok is willing to entertain my idea (I don't know that it will, I don't have access to it) and walk me through it, why would I use a neutered ChatGPT that won't help me, over its more useful counterpart? And if I'm doing that by myself and not talking about it, how is it performative? What political tribe am I signaling if I'm using Grok instead of ChatGPT at home and not telling anyone about it?

ChatGPT is fine at writing code unless you tell it it's for hacking, and then it won't cooperate. Having to trick the bot into writing code that it doesn't want to write is a weird place to be in, but that's where we are.

* https://chat.openai.com/share/713e6069-cf31-4585-a5bc-fbf0b1...

The number of people wanting "to make bombs" isn't a sufficiently large or well off market to support the costs of a massive LLM project. There are too few of them and they have too little money to be worth it. By "to make bombs" I mean "all the stuff that ChatGPT won't let you do that Musk promises he will."

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