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Comment by phillipcarter | Hacker News Reader

Unfortunately (for them?) Grok is quite poor quality compared to GPT-4o, Claude, Gemini, and numerous open source models.

It's worth noting that xAI is also focused on photorealistic image generation, which none of the others seem to be focused on. I believe that's because they're going to position themselves as the platform for generating pornography, which we all know will be a lucrative business, but none of the other major players want to touch. It's the only thing that justifies the enormous amount of funding.

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There’s also another problem — their most loyal user base already had access to it. And still nobody uses it because of its inferiority. They’re way too late into the game, and to catch up, on top of the infrastructure, you need top notch talent. But talent is limited, and pulling them out from big players won’t be easy because they’re also pouring billions to keep them in the shop. And having even a bit of negative PR when it comes to your employer might be a deciding factor for some potential candidates.

That being said, competition is good!

Another X factor (heh) is that it's a lot harder to convince existing highly-paid, usually left-leaning individuals to go work for Elon Musk's AI lab. Of course it's more complicated than that, but the sheer number of workers in our industry who despise his politics and how he uses his money to advance them makes it a tall order for xAI to become a serious AI lab.

Worth nothing that the image generation part is not developed by xAI - they started with using Flux from BFL (Black Forest Labs), and now seem to have made a finetune of it (in partnership with BFL, I assume). So most of the image gen tech that Grok has isn't made by them.

Right, but I expect their extensive post-training they're doing will be something they carry over to their own pre-training initiative they've been gearing up for.

Correct previously, but they've just released (at least in beta A/B mode for some users) their in-house image generation model called Auora.

I remember before OpenAI no big company wanted to host a chatbot or provide a service around them after people made the all the bots say few racist lines. All the customer service bots were basic matching and answering questions from fixed database. Even if you even see 1-2 year back, companies were so focused on refusals, early Google's and Anthropic's model refused lot more things than now.

Now it's the same with image generation or voice model. They refuse everything but it takes one player to decide the market is worth capturing and everyone else will follow the money. As long as people can't generate nudes of any given person and there is a toggle(on by default) to block accidental nudes, I would say it's fine.

I don't think most major players will want to get into the pornography game. It's far, far too fraught with ethical concerns to make it worth it. Musk has no such concerns, though. And I believe that also extends to revenge porn, which will be one of the biggest use cases for this tech at scale.

There are different stages though. Just because revenge porn exists doesn't mean all sexual output is unethical. If a company proves that generating animated hentai is say worth $10b in revenue, I am sure others will follow suit in dialling down the restrictions slowly.

And AI just reduces the budget and time, it can't output anything other that what could be created by say Adobe suite.

The fact that there's not a household-name porn generator yet shows you just how expensive it is to get in the AI game.

...or that there's little demand for this.

Hahahahahaha… yeah no. The demand for porn tailored to a person's fetishes is a cash cow for artists looking to triple their income from their day job.

Go to civitai, disable the nsfw-filter, and say that again.

Do a modicum of market research. I can assure you there is a ton of demand for this.

No no it's not what it looks like, I was...

Doing a modicum of market research.

I almost envoy you, for your apparently sheltered existence.

I think you're looking at it the wrong way. Is there demand for AI-generated images in general? No, it's just that there is a lot of demand for middling, utilitarian artwork. And as it happens, AI can generate it more quickly and cheaply than human artists.

It will work the same for porn. It's just that mainstream models are sanitized not to generate it, so the cost to enter is higher.

I'll believe it when I see it. I think it's a gimmick until I see otherwise. People don't want to expend energy figuring out what they want, and generating porn with ai sounds like a lot of work for shitty results.

Isn't that just Unstable Diffusion?

The "X" rebranding is finally making sense.

xXX

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