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Comment by aurareturn | Hacker News Reader

More signs that xAI might be giving up on the AGI race. xAI let Cursor train a model on Colossus 2, gave the entire Colossus1 to Anthropic, and is now giving compute in Colossus2 to Anthropic as well.

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Bad read on the situation. xAI has too much compute and not enough customers using it. They have around half a million GPUs, some of which are stolen from Tesla, running at 11% utilization. xAI predicted more people would be using Grok, but Grok is not a SOTA model & users primarily want to use SOTA models. They have excess capacity and it makes sense to rent out GPUs to other customers while they improve their models.

Grok is also tuned to align with Musk's personal beliefs. I wouldn't touch it with a 10 foot pole.

Opposed to all other models being the bastion of objectivity? Must be truly vindicating to have to hear other peoles opinions after decades in the silicon valley bubble.

As a non-US AI user I do not particularly like using a US model following the recent political events, but I specifically do not want to use a model made by an ex-member of the current administration.

It is always great fun using a model via API without search/web access and quoting a recent development, being told that it must be hamfisted satire, then providing access. The reasoning traces are a delight, Opus 4.6 and GPT-5.4 during the administrations war with Anthropic were prime grade A kobe beef.

There is a difference between when somebody openly instructs their model to infer disproven lies vs who doesn’t do this. And it’s quite tiring that this is even a question because of politics.

As somebody from Hungary: the biggest impact of my mood was that this kind of thinking went back with the collapse of far right there to where it belongs: to a deep hole which is not in front of normal people. Average people suddenly don’t ask illogical questions or answer stupid things because there is nobody who would tell them that they need to think stupidly, there is nobody who tell them what stupid thing they should think that week. It’s marvelous when you get the proof that the whole “stupid thinking” is completely controlled from above.

Qwen has post training to tell you incorrect answers about Taiwan. Seems worse to me

In end user perspective, it’s the same. The difference is probably volume. I have no clue in which direction. Both in trained lies by models and in number of people defending the indefensible. But one for sure, there are probably 10s or 100s of millions of Chinese who try to do the same. I encountered with it quite frequently. Sometimes with flat out doublespeak.

Nobody ever said other models were bastions of objectivity. They only implied they weren't corrupted by Musk. Which is true, and which is good.

This comment is very similar to what russian propaganda does.

It's not aimed at convincing you to support them, but to convince you everyone is lying and there is no meaningful difference between each position, so you stay apathetic.

Yeah yeah every opinion you don't share or like is a russian bot or literally hitler.

I see what you did there. Nice.

I keep hearing this statement, and it always makes me wonder if people have actually used Grok…

I have a Claude Max plan I use for coding, but I also have a Grok Lite plan I use for web search type tasks (similar to Perplexity) because I like how the Grok harness handles searches and I don’t need a SOTA model for that use case. I’d never pay $30/mo for a full SuperGrok account but to me it’s worth the $10/mo for Lite as I was hitting limits on the free tier.

I’ve never noticed it to be particularly biased at least for anything I’ve been searching for on it. And on the other side, I’ve never noticed it to be particularly less censored or anything compared to other models either (also a claim I’ve heard a lot about Grok but I think because it is/was part of their marketing).

Did you miss all the Mechahitler, woke mind virus, white genocide, Musk could beat Tyson, stuff?

Its plausibly not in the API and only on the twitter bot, but I see no reason to trust x.ai given this history of obvious manipulation.

I don’t really use Twitter so I’ve never used it via the bot, I’ve only ever used it via the web app.

I bounced back and forth between Grok and Perplexity for web search type tasks and at least for the moment am preferring Grok mostly because it seems to perform more searches and check more results per query vs Perplexity and their $10/mo plan covers my usage vs $20 for Perplexity Pro.

However I’m not married to any LLM service and will switch to another one the moment I get better results from it.

At least in my usage I haven’t noticed any obvious bias, but I don’t really search for politically related stuff so maybe I just haven’t seen it.

It is a race that has a flywheel effect.

Once xAI training team “fix” their model, where will Anthropic be then?

It's not stolen if it was taken from Tesla, investors already agreed that Elon can do anything he pleases with their money.

More people should try Grok. I don't use it for coding but it's replaced a lot of my ChatGPT usage. Definitely more perferred model for quick questions or easy answers.

One thing I do like about Grok is that it makes it stupid easy to see what its referencing, and gives you the links to those resources. Which most models sometimes either don't bother, or don't do much of a good job of doing. It's not the top model, but it is definitely high up there, people's blind rage for anything Elon Musk is the only reason most people don't realize how capable it is unfortunately. Grok is not exclusively made by Elon Musk, there's definitely other engineers working day and night on it.

What's the blind rage, he's totally out in the open.

For conversational or general knowledge questions I also much prefer Grok. Musk's vanity aside, it is much less censored than the other frontier models.

Where less censored means "censors facts and left leaning claims while actively promoting far-right lies".

Far more mundane that whatever bogeyman you imagine, it will discuss things like COVID origins or not treat favored classes as a special case e.g. when asked to make a joke.

Why are they selling compute instead of using it to build that SOTA model?

They tried and failed. xAi made a mistake building Colossus 1 and ended up with heterogenous cluster of H100/H200/GB200 GPUs. This is a nightmare to train huge models on because each card has different specs, features, and hardware requirements. During gradient synchronization, a heterogeneous cluster would bottleneck on the slowest GPU (H100) so the faster GPUs would end up idling. They also probably ran into unexpected compatibility issues, which are difficult to resolve.

It makes more sense to use this cluster for inference, since they can segment the cluster by GPU type and avoid GPU mixing. xAI doesn't have enough inference customers so it makes sense to monetize this to companies that need inference compute such as Anthropic or Cursor.

Apparently xAI will try building SOTA models on Colossus 2, which will be built on Blackwell GPUs only.

How can something so obvious be overlooked by team building the data centre? Can't the sharding be uneven so that weaker GPUs still finish fast by taking on a smaller workload?

It's not like they had much of an option, when everybody was hoarding every GPU they could. For the second Colossus they could book future production, but the first one had to be built ASAP so xAI looked as a serious competitor in the AI space.

I imagine it involved a petulant billionaire screaming "Fucking build it. Build it NOW!" in response to expert feedback.

Elon lost his lawsuit with openAI and knows xAI isn't on the same trajectory. Might as well try to win the bet and flip off Sam by supporting the best competition. Also they are getting a head start on AI as a commodity. I'm sure there's plenty of money to be made for those that can leverage their capital to essentially rent capacity right now. If he's not making enough off of grok, might as well cover their expenses.

It was kinda obvious when SpaceX "acquired" it. Elon rewarded xAI investors/prevented lawsuits by giving them SpaceX equity, and that was that.

FWIW, SpaceX (parent company of xAI) has an option to acquire Cursor for $60B that expires 7 days after their imminent IPO.

Do people still use Cursor? My company’s leadership has been clear that Cursor was cool for a hot minute but you Should Not be using it anymore

It’s a very fractured and heterogeneous landscape where your own perspective will be warped by your personal experience.

Anthropic has a lot of the market share and dominates the mind share, but each of Codex, Devin, Cursor, Claude, et al have significantly more market usage than they had 6 months ago and each are likely still growing very quickly based on publicly-reported information.

xAI might acquire Cursor. They are in the process of training new coding models and probably a new Grok.

Until they finish training, it makes sense to rent the excess capacity.

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