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People have values.
Many people strongly disapprove of Musk’s actions. Many don’t - fine! Personal choice. But for people who do, refusing to support him commercially is hardly brain-eaten territory. There’s plenty of competition, and competition isn’t the only value at play.
Setting aside the actual legitimacy of whatever complaints you have about Musk, you aren’t “supporting” him by using Grok, any more than you’re “supporting Xi Jinping” by using DeepSeek, or “supporting Jeff Bezos” by using Amazon, or “supporting the CEO of Exxon” by using energy. Or “supporting” any of a million other people you probably don’t like simply by existing in the world as a consumer. What you’re actually doing is called spitting in the wind.
Major conglomerate providers of commodities are not controlled, or even operated to the benefit of, any single person. Musk is the operating officer of a corporation of many thousands of individuals. He has shares in that company, but so do millions of other people. It would be far more rational if you could point to some specific “evil” thing SpaceX is doing as a company that you oppose, but you can’t even do that. It’s all gotta be about one guy who you don’t like.
Leave Musk to one side for a second. Is there no one, even hypothetically, whose actions would make you turn away from their company’s products and services? Even if it has no effect on the overall viability of their business? A local restaurant where you know the owner is a bully to his staff? A tradesman who was unbelievably rude to your friend? A newspaper whose owner personally made sure they trashed the reputation of your business? A wedding photographer who proudly refuses to work for couples who had children out of wedlock?
Surely your devotion to the principle of competition doesn’t override all your other beliefs?
No, it doesn't. Aside from the face-slappingly obvious fact that SpaceX is losing a half a billion dollars a quarter, that's not how corporate revenue works. Unless the corporate profits are paid out in dividends, you don't just get to hoover them up as a shareholder.
No one said anything about dollar-in revenue dollar-out dividend. only you.
if i have vested interest in a company and that company’s value is perceived to increase then i get to leverage that value into economic power. yes
There are other reasons to not use Elon Musk's AI beyond politics, though this month he's investing $200 million to sway the Texas midterms back to an awful politician, far closer to home than what Xi Jinping might be doing.
It wasn't long ago that Elon tried to bias Grok to not say bad things about him to the point that Grok would say that Elon was the best piss-drinker in the world and that Elon was in the top three of every category (basketball, mathematics, physics, etc). https://newrepublic.com/post/203519/elon-musk-ai-chatbot-gro...
If I have to tie-break between competing AI services, I'm hella not choosing that one.
Yes, that's what "commodity" means, and why I used the word.
> There are other reasons to not use Elon Musk's AI beyond politics, though this month he's investing $200 million to sway the Texas midterms back to an awful politician, far closer to home than what Xi Jinping might be doing.
It's amusing that you can't even help yourself from mentioning politics when you're trying to deny that it disproportionately impacts your thinking. Literally, "there are other reasons to not use it...but I'll spend the rest of my comment listing a bunch of reasons I don't like Elon."
I've heard all of it before. I'm telling you that it doesn't sway me, any more than telling me I should stop buying things at WalMart, use energy, or any of a million other things I do on a daily basis that probably, very likely, in some direct or indirect way, benefit someone I don't like.
You do you, but if I eliminated every product or service that was associated with a "bad person", I'd be living in a cave in the wilderness, crapping in a hole and eating berries.
I'm just eliminating one less than you are.
I "glossed over" all of your political comments.
A lot of people aren't touching anything Grok related since they were caught uploading entire repositories to their servers in the background
https://gist.github.com/cereblab/dc9a40bc26120f4540e4e09b75f...
Codex has been really doling out the resets lately, which is fine, but I don’t consider that “real” usage limits.
Everyone has their own frameworks for risk assessments, its more of the historical incidents associated with it than politics
But let's be real: Musk exists as a polarizing political character, and his association with Grok just breaks some people's brains. A fair number of those people don't want to admit it, and just latch on to any rationalization other than politics.
Anthropic could make the same mistake tomorrow, and I guarantee that we wouldn't be hearing about it in a week, let alone months from now.
On a personal level, everyone have their own rules, they may not be able to imposing them on others , however they do happen to evaluate their relative understanding of other people based upon those rules.
For me personally, I would probably put Anthropic, OpenAI and Grok in the same bucket, they are doing everything possible to make money. Ethics, morals, long term impacts, all of such things are not in their playbook. But again what these companies are doing just reflects the people who invested in them and what they want out of it. In some ways you can say its the money trying to maximize itself at all costs.