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Comment by jedberg | Hacker News Reader

The fact that XAI is in this list is just blatant corruption. Their CEO was a government employee until a month ago.

If they weren't there it would raise just as many eyebrows, wouldn't it?

Meta not being on the list is more suspect IMO. At least it seems to me that Meta is where the actual talent/potential is.

Grok is pretty good, both the model in the API and the consumer products built on top. Llama is way behind, and the meta.ai app is much worse than the leading chat assistant products.

Not really. It would be obvious to anyone who's ever seen a government contract that they were excluded for ethics reasons.

And their chatbot just had a Nazi meltdown last week.

Why would that exclude them from the running? Should government contracts not be granted on the merits of the receivers? Grok clearly exists in this space so it’s not like they’re rewarding vaporware.

> Should government contracts not be granted on the merits of the receivers?

They should, but businesses owned by government employees should be excluded because it's too easy to corrupt the process. In fact, they have explicit rules about not doing that.

But he’s no longer a “special government employee” anymore either. Or are you suggesting he’s blacklisted from all government contracts for life because he previously worked for the current administration?

Not OP, but "For life" is a far cry from a month or two after. But yes, i'd argue we have no choice but to attempt to aggressively put bounds between government and profiteering. Lest we have Congress openly insider trade..

Of course not for life, but generally to avoid ethics issues the government requires you to be out for at least a year or two before engaging in business with the government.

He’s not a government employee. You said it yourself lol

But he was very recently. Usually you have to wait a while after leaving the government to sell to it.

> Should government contracts not be granted on the merits of the receivers?

The merits? We just had, in the last _week_, a huge scaldal where Grok was spewing racist, pro hitler content, even calling itself MechaHitler.

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