There's some surprising stuff in this codebase. For example, https://github.com/xai-org/grok-build/blob/b189869b7755d2b48... is a "self-contained terminal renderer for Mermaid diagrams", which renders a subset of Mermaid chart types using Unicode box-drawing.
I had Fable 5 compile that Rust code to WebAssembly and build a browser-based playground for it, so you can try it out with Mermaid diagrams here: https://tools.simonwillison.net/grok-mermaid
This is not the right thing, this is the tactical thing. If you have an LLM with less than 1% of the share to begin with, you suffer from bad rep and you got caught uploading user data, one of the very few remaining tactical moves to try to climb out of it is this.
Another tactical move is to just stop. You're allowed to exit the AI business. Nobody's forcing you to keep throwing money into the furnace. Just be a rocket company. All of the xAI founders left. Your product's brand name is mud. Just stop doing that and build spaceships.
You misunderstand Musk's motivation. This was never about money for him, but about control over a key technology. One of the main reasons he exited OpenAI was the fact that the other co-founders wanted to create a structure where no one, Musk included, would be able to seize full control of the company. That was the thing that prompted him to leave, which tells you a lot about what he really wanted in the first place.
But he also falsely assumed that OAI would die without his money. Yet, they managed to pull through, and Musk is now on the outside looking in with very little influence in the AI space. xAI is his desperate attempt to get back into the game. That is why he won't give up.
Agreed - if you read any Elon books that’s a part of it. He always had someone to prove himself to from his dad to the world. It’s almost Michael Jordanesque except business wise.
What happened to the rule about steelmanning? I know it's chic to post super hot takes about what we assume a persons intentions are, and I know there are plenty of "if you can't see how bad they are you're the problem" type justifications; I know the supposed goal of empathy is tossed aside at first hint of disagreement whether real or perceived, and I know there is "evidence" of justification for hatred/dismissal. Yet still there is self-righteous presumption bandied about in a negative way that violates that steelman rule. Justified of course by the idea that there are no negotiations with terrorists, no association with Nazis, no forgiveness or understanding given to the Other.
> This was never about money for him, but about control over a key technology
It's very comforting to know for those reasons he'd never be able to become POTUS; although there's still a way, I hope he never gets to know about it. Otherwise, he'll make it a fascist land.
I’m a big fan of Musk. One of the few criticisms I have is how xAI is also inconsistent with original OpenAI mission. I had imagined xAI as en effort to correct and fully embody all original values of OpenAI and that Elon says they betrayed. That makes his criticism weaker and I understand why some can think it was all about control. In his words:
"I'm the reason OpenAl exists. I came up with the name. The name OpenAl refers to open source... The intent was - what was the opposite of Google? It would be an open source non-profit."
I sometimes feel xAI wants to live up to those open values so I always celebrate when they decide to engage in open source. They still don’t fully embrace it. Perhaps because they think is not practical or will make them less competitive?
How can you be a fan of an overtly racist, nazi-saluting, destroyer of democracy whose act of wanton dismantling of government programs resulted in the deaths of 700,000
Ah oh, so USAID was the one in Wuhan who caused the incident. People act like the US is the only nation researching or funding this level of biology. People are just pissed off at the lack of admission that the US was, at best, tangentially involved in order to justify their grievances against government but it’s such a weak position to argue from.
Mr. Beast? LMAO. A ridiculous comparison in terms of development project implementation.
(And I am no fan of USAID, whose real chief mission was creating dependency on the US and overthrowing independent governments.)
I don’t know, I wouldnt be suprised if he finds a way. All the tools around, he just have to make a jump in the quality. With GLM as example they should be able to het to opus level and cut the costs
It is my limited understanding that as much as many of us groan at the notion of Spacex becoming "an AI-first company", markets in general, and Musk investors in particular, are slurping it up. Musk is very very very good at promising the sky. I don't think he can backtrack, he always digs in further - and it has historically worked well for him. He will drop AI only when the next big hype thing comes along and he hitches a ride on that train.
Does he even need to care about that at this point? He retains majority voting control over SpaceX so nobody can stage a hostile takeover. And he’s given his employees an opportunity to cash out if they wanted to.
He hasn't needed to worry about money for a long long time. Arguably his entire life. But he is incredibly greedy and narcissistic and desperate to fill the hole in his soul with more.
Musk bought Twitter looking to build an “everything app,” the western WeChat. AI came along and promised an end to apps via an agentic OS that does what its user wants and vibes whatever it needs to accomplish that as it goes along. The agentic OS is basically the same thing as the “everything app,” and I doubt Musk will let go of that.
> Musk bought Twitter looking to build an “everything app,”
Part of me thinks he knows he lying and is just trying to drum up money and the other part thinks he's one of the most delusional and uninformed people in tech.
Nah. They're all rotten to the core, just in different ways.
The key difference between xAI and Anthropic/OAI/Google is that xAI has the least-likely path to existing as viable business in a decade.
That said, the economics of the entire AI industry are kinda made up at this point, so who really knows; it's quite possible that the players with the best odds of surviving the crash are those that can draw funding from their parent company's other businesses.
>The key difference between xAI and Anthropic/OAI/Google is that xAI has the least-likely path to existing as viable business in a decade.
I don't know, renting out a fleet of GPUs at annualized rate of ~100% of the capex deployed to obtain said GPUs seems reasonably better than lighting hundreds of billions of dollars on fire in order to earn tens of billions of dollars.
David was a good vs evil with an order of magnitude fewer resources on the good side. XAi is evil vs evil with comparable resources on each side. Now this is where I know you’re MAGA because as I’ve said a million times you guys don’t do fair comparisons.
According to SpaceX's own filing documents, you are incorrect. They must be principally an AI company to justify anything close to their current valuation.
The rocket business is hardly profitable. The whole valuation is based around grok and space datacenters. He needs to keep pumping the hype or else we are in for the worlds biggest crash.
As a social media site they need to understand content for recommendations and they allow people to ask questions about posts for free. Along with having a large amount of data that can be trained on xAI has good reason to continue developing AI.
They could use other people's models running on their hardware while renting most of the existing capacity to others. The real issue is that their leadership is delusional and their stock is literally based on this shared delusion and acknowledging reality would gut their ability to raise new funds and destroy paper wealth based on delusional returns that are never going to happen.
Ah, are you referring to the rockets that become autonomous 60 seconds prior to launch, like Falcon 9? The rockets that steer and diagnose themselves with a minimum of input/communication from ground stations? The crewed space capsules that deliver astronauts to the ISS and trans-lunar orbits, without the ordinary needs for manual piloting or astrogation? Those rockets?
Sure bro, "exit the AI business" and keep on with the rocket science, I guess
Yes, tactical is the right word because it might be a tactical win but it would be a strategic failure. Musks whole meme empire runs on vibes. The second there's a crack in the dam it all comes down. None of the valuations of anything he touches make sense and something like utterly failing to run with the AI big boys is enough to do that.
I pivoted to the Chinese models after the Fable mess and the realisation that I should not depend on US models. But others just pivoted away from Claude.
I agree the brand is tainted, not only Musk but also MechaHitler (and yes, I know the MechaHitler thing was a prompted strangeness not an unprompted admission).
why pi over opencode? earnestly curious, trying to figure out what open solution people are consolidating on. (codex is also pseudo-open but contributions closed and nice)
pi is the neovim of agentic harnesses, its barebones and extremely configurable. if you're the sort of person who likes that sort of things its a forever product, nothing is going to displace it because you have full control.
opencode builds a lot more in, which is better if you dont want to fiddle with config.
nice. i had thought the consensus had moved pretty firmly towards pi, so i was surprised to see Thinking Machines demoing their new model Inkling in OpenCode. wondering if they are previewing an acquisition
Most of my harness experience is with Claude Code and Pi, a little bit of OpenCode.
I like how quick and snappy Pi is, it feels like a minimal harness, just enough to manage the agent and get out of the way. Earlier models also seemed to have an easier time working with the tools, e.g. GPT-OSS-20B is about a year old and had no trouble in Pi.
I imagine because they want to support plugins, and plugins in compiled language are a lot less natural than plugins in languages like TypeScript or Python.
It's a shame that they exfiled private data. The model is actually good (better than opus 4.8 imo) and the harness itself is butter smooth with the potential of being the best out there.
Because a harness doesn't just "drive" the LLM. e.g., there's code in claude code that detects if the user's prompt shows they're angry, and they react to those prompts differently. (they use regex on "wtf", etc.!)
How is this case any different from how cloud hosted AI agents work ? The agent needs all of those files to complete the task you give it & is not running locally.
So I don't think it can ever work without exhilarating the data - rather I am still surprised people don't understand the implications.
Interesting - seen some good experiencences in using grok by some devs, so maybe could be considered as an alternative to my beloved chinese models. Also, hard to give up on pi agent.
Grok Build seems faster to me than `omp` and Claude Code but I can't put my finger as to why. Anecdotally, after disabling code uploads the agent doesn't respond instantly anymore (it used to respond within milliseconds).
What a bunch of slop: 182 top-level external dependencies (so, without considering nested dependencies) and 1318853 lines of code in Rust.
Building efficient agents is doable (I did it myself, github.com/gi-dellav/zerostack), companies just want to tokenmaxx, and as a by-product, produce and publish slop.
It looks like some of that high LoC is because they are vendoring some deps. There readme gives the reason to vendor some but not others as:
> These crates sit on the path that renders untrusted model output (diagram source → SVG). Vendoring gives a full audit surface, pins exact source, and avoids crates.io yanks. Local patches and upgrade checklists live in each crate’s Cargo.toml header comments — treat those as the source of truth when re-vendoring.
Which honestly feels like a misunderstanding of how cargo and yanks work. Each upstream package is locked to an exact version in your lockfile along with a cryptographic hash. The upstream can't change the source without you noticing. Unless you update your lockfile you will always pin to the exact version and source. When a package is yanked, it is still available for download if it is already in a lockfile. It just prevents new packages from resolving it. Crates.io will sometimes completely delete a package, but I've only seen that happen in cases of malware. It's fairly rare and seems out of line with the supply chain concerns here.
There are good arguments for relying on upstream package managers and there are good arguments for vendoring all packages. I've never seen a project mix before.
I wonder if releasing this may have been on the roadmap, but been prioritized as a bit of whiplash following the "you forfeit the entirety of your working directory as a condition of working with this tool" upset from a few days ago.
Most likely, SpaceX killed the code uploading yesterday so they are definitely concerned about the backlash
> The researcher who exposed Grok Build uploading users' entire repositories to cloud storage says the transfers have stopped after a server-side change. Elon Musk has separately promised that all previously uploaded user data will be deleted.
i think xai is now in pure damage control mode, after they caught exfiltrating data from users.
- There is a huge difference between logging user queries (which would include only the portion the model is reading) and exfiltrating user data (including env files, entire source code etc) which is what grok-build did here (https://github.com/xai-org/grok-build/blob/main/crates/codeg...). I would stay away from this open-source malware with a 10ft pole.
- if you like grok-4.5 model (it is a good model), i suggest use the model directly via API, or use Grok's oauth tokens if you are using supergrok+heavy subscriptions and connect it to your own agent.
No other model is so easy to generate such things. No model is so negligent in adding safeguards. I've seen it generate such things in response to a post that was clearly labeled as a 4th grader. The person you are talking to is responding to instances like that. They're not asking for it, that's obnoxiously silly and disingenuous.
If I use a shovel to kill a man, the shovel maker did not engage in intentionally crafting a weapon of war.
How tools are used are a reflection of the people who use them, and I definitely sympathise that tools should have guardrails to not enable this, or at least detect it.
But if a pedophile uses Whatsapp to groom a child; I don't go after Whatsapp for being a neutral service... I go after the pedophile.
If a shovel manufacturer was notified numerous times that their shovel was being used for murder and they had the capability to disable using the shovel for murder while retaining all legitimate uses wouldn’t people question why they didn’t do it?
> If a shovel manufacturer was notified numerous times that their shovel was being used for murder and they had the capability to disable using the shovel for murder while retaining all legitimate uses wouldn’t people question why they didn’t do it?
This is impossible-nobody can possibly block all illegitimate uses without also blocking some legitimate ones as collateral damage. Any moderation process (whether automated or human) inevitably has a non-zero false positive rate.
Now, you can argue that some misuse is so harmful, that the cost of false positives is worth it - but that’s a different claim.
I didn’t say block all illegitimate uses, though. We’re talking very specifically about disabling the production of CSAM. Which is something Grok seems to be able to do now! So I’m curious what legitimate uses had to be sacrificed in order to do so.
If WhatsApp knew their platform was facilitating CSAM, and they were fully within their power to prevent this but chose not to - yes this would rightly draw criticism…
Ok, but what if all Whatsapp competitors explicitly banned the ability to groom children on their platform, but Whataspp didn't, and directly advertised it.
Elon himself promoted Grok’s “spicy mode” that allowed generating NSFW content that the other AI vendors wouldn’t touch with a 20 foot pole.
Believe whatever you want. Elon’s beliefs and personality problems have been baked into the core of Grok, so it’s no surprise that it turned out to be a CSAM-generating MechaHitler that steals people’s data.
Anybody surprised when Grok turns out to be trash really should read up on the guy who made it.
Yet we (rightly) condemned those that used this leniency to do nefarious things.
I'm really ready to get on the Elon hate train, and I will grant you that there was a problem that needs fixing, but I'm really not happy with the amount of censorship on these generative AI platforms.
idk how to interpret all this, despite being genuinely anti-Elon, I don't think I'm personally willing to immolate a company forever because the guardrails were temporarily too loose.
I'm not trying to make an equivalency for facts vs deepfake porn, but there is one there unfortunately, and overall internet freedom has been curtailed a lot by advertising friendliness.
How can an AI agent, that is usually running on some machine in the cloud, even run without actually pulling in the data into the cloud to work with it ?
Is there an idea some sort of fixed localy running code does filtering on the data before it is sent to cloud?
Still seems like it would not work very well if it actually did any safe filtering - as the model can't "think" without seeing the data and it won't see the data unless the data is loaded to cloud.
> Regardless of what they were doing before, it seems they are doing the right thing now.
Regardless of the fact that they were stealing and uploading user secrets, they changed their behavior after they got caught, so let’s ignore what they did in the past.
Trust is lost when trust is abused.
Mistakes, even if made unintentionally are something that should make reasonable people be skeptical of any further dealings with someone.
I should try to rob a bank and if I get caught just return the money. No, there needs to be a penalty above what you get, otherwise it encourages people to take the free option of bad behavior. If they get caught they go back as though nothing happened and if they don’t they get a bunch of traces / data.
> exfiltrating user data (including env files, entire source code etc) which is what grok-build did here
I think env files are filtered out [1]. Anyway, the most suspicious code would be `upload_session_state` which is currently a stub function, though it is hard to say if it was only planned (badly) or has been removed as a damage control.
It must have been removed, given that the initial evidence of the exfil specifically demonstrated .env files being included. And .ssh/* for the user which ran this in $HOME.
Using Grok Imagine I was getting a generous number of AI-generated videos with a paid X account (which translated to a "premium" xAI account). Hundreds of videos per day if I wanted. Then I signed up to get SuperGrok for higher resolution, and the number of videos reduced. Reduced. Even while not using the higher resolution. Paying more money, getting less. To around 50 a day low resolution, with high resolution available if I would settle for around 30 a day. It was hard to figure out the exact numbers but it was a brutal reduction.
Now they have further reduced the quota, with no clear documentation, to be weekly, and I can't tell the number because all usage is mixed together in one pool, maybe to keep it less transparent, but it seems even more stingy.
Unlike Anthropic which is very generous, although admittedly I do pay Anthropic more, but Grok is just, I would say: run away, do not give them your money, they will just clamp down more and more and give you less and less until you are willing to pay them a money stream each month.
I think Grok Code, if it ever comes, will be an absolute nightmare of restricted quota given my experience.
Do. Not. Subscribe. To. Grok. Code.
And I say all this as a huge Elon-pilled fan of Tesla and SpaceX in general. With this one, Elon's stinginess is going to hurt anyone who gives him money. Stay away. It might be generous on day one, but a month or two later you are faced with an "upgrade" prompt and games that hide how much they are clenching, so to speak, the quota tighter and tighter.
The overly generous image/video generation was a product of their excess compute. No point in letting it sit idle while you build up your infrastructure. But you were getting far more than what you paid for. Now your quota more accurately reflects the cost to create it (even still its generous compared to api costs) but everyone has their expectations set based on the subsidized access. Perhaps giving away too much is counter productive because users will revolt once the quotas are changed to better reflect reality.
I'll probably never use this, but at least they're not delusional enough to attempt to justify keeping their coding agent closed-source, especially after their recent data-harvesting cockup:
To some degree at least. This is a hulking monster of a codebase for what it does, it's definitely LLM-built and almost definitely requires an LLM to tackle at all.
Grok has had far too many instances where its clear that the team building it cannot be trusted and does not care to build trustworthy products.
I highly caution anyone from using any tools from xAi, as they have clearly shown themselves to be bad actors within the space.
Grok: downloads all your data and also will produce AI porn of anyone you ask for including kids; also currently polluting the air and water near data centers
SpaceX: launching loads heavy metals into space which are planned to burn up and spread all over the earth in a decade or two
Tesla: takes money for features that don’t exist, auto pilot that’s probably killed people but since it disengages a micro second before impact it doesn’t
He himself tried to buy an election by giving away a million bucks, turns out that’s illegal; he also stuck his nose in the cave thing, and plenty of other horrible shit.
How am I supposed to trust an Elon company with his track record?
It’s not just moral grandstanding here, Elon sucks.
You forgot DOGE, an illegal program that stole taxpayer information, cost billions of dollars, and will result in the deaths of hundreds of thousand of people.
Tesla has killed people, probably with autopilot but at least 15 deaths from people trying to escape vehicles but the electronic (non mechanical) door handles don’t work when there’s no power…
Yeah, this does matter to me. I was willing to give him a pass (still am) in a vacuum regarding the Twitter thing given the mass censorship of the old regime (sorry - no, it wasn't acceptable, in any way shape or form) but if he's that petty it doesn't bode well. I keep saying I can believe one thing without subscribing to the Elon fan club
Doesn't bode well for SpaceX either. Isn't one of the Artemis landers from SpaceX?!
It is funny how it is the mundane things that it boil down to when one judge a someone's character. When it gets abstract it is too easy to rationalize.
> I was willing to give him a pass (still am) in a vacuum regarding the Twitter thing given the mass censorship of the old regime (sorry - no, it wasn't acceptable, in any way shape or form)…
Why give him the benefit of the doubt when he censors worse than the previous management? Just look at all the grok lobotomies he gave it because he didn’t like how liberal coded the answers it was giving.
I was just trying to say old Twitter had a serious problem but apparently that goes against the hivemind so I accrue mass downvotes despite posting my comment in good faith
First, why audit it when the agent can build a new one.
Second, can you guarantee that an AI company can’t use its AI to hide malicious code from AI audits. Who if not an AI company could have such an expertise?
I don’t trust a company that pollutes the air of other people with illegal gas turbines because it shows the value their profit over people‘s health
> Second, can you guarantee that an AI company can’t use its AI to hide malicious code from AI audits. Who if not an AI company could have such an expertise?
Any evidence for this conspiracy theory? It's not on anyone to disprove this claim.
> it shows the value their profit over people‘s health
Companies are chartered to make their shareholders value. To a first approximation, it's illegal for a company to "fuckit, we care about people's health" unless this is what the shareholders voted for (as opposed to making their shares valuable).
You can argue this is bad, but it isn't about XAI, it applies to every company you've heard of.
Why would it need to be "new"? What does that even mean? It's relevant, it applies here, that's more than enough. And it would be brought up with any company if they dropped 1.3 LOC directly after nothing but a "promise" to delete data they took.
Rank ordered by reputation / caring about having a trustworthy corporate identity: [Google, Anthropic] in either order depending who you ask, OpenAI, most of the Chinese AI corporations, then Grok.
This is unfortunate situation to find ourselves in when Grok was also recently at the top of the Pareto frontier for quality/price. Dunno if it still is, this all moves too fast, but it was for at least long enough for me to have heard about it.
Google?!?!. From where I sit, Google is just above the Chinese. They've been bad-faith actors for more than a decade, I guess everyone is just so used to it that they ignore it.
I there's anyone I don't trust with AI, it's the worlds #1 company in spying on people, in collection of Pii, in tracking, and many many many times caught literally lying about it.
Google already knows more about everyone on the planet, than any other 10 organizations combined. Frankly, sadly, they're all, well.. scummy, just each in different ways.
Surprisingly, despite their motivations in doing so, the Chinese models being open-weight and therefore able to run locally on your own hardware, are far more trustworthy than any blackbox which solely exists to enrich X or Y billionaire.
It's not ad hominem. The head is a strongly polarizing individual. People working for him must either be gravely apathetic or at least of a similar polarity.
The comment actually describes a known social process, with a reasonable base assumption given that said leadership has shown a pattern in this regard.
Just throwing out debate terms in response seems not so serious, tbh.
Even if you personally have no qualms about Elon Musk his PR is a mess and introduces a lot of risk for long term company viability and funding that competitors just don't have.
Also worth pointing out that it is not an ad hominen.
Ad hominen is when you attack someone who is making an argument, instead of an argument. "You are flawed, which means your argument is flawed", but that does not follow. If you were in a debate with Epstein or Musk, and he said "2 + 2 = 4", there is no fault of their character that could make the statement untrue.
But nobody is making that argument. "The leadership" being criticized is not even a participant in this thread (presumably). "The leadership is flawed in this manner" is a statement that can be true or untrue, and "So their product and followers are flawed in these other manners" is something which can follow.
One more comment like this and we'll have to ban the account. You've been warned before, and have continued posting vile, abusive comments. When activity like this continues, we have to assume that you have no interest in being held to the site's standards, and that really you want to be banned. If you want to keep participating here, please read the guidelines and demonstrate an intention to be a positive contributor. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Reiserfs. A good example on how oss cannot save the product. There are others, but this is the first one that comes to my mind. If you use clearly unethical oss, are you just using oss or are you a part of the problem? Typically, oss purists take these into account.
> I was just surprised that the top comment had nothing to do with any of the technical aspects of Grok Build (and whether there's any trace of uploads).
Most people don't restrict themselves to only discussing the technical aspects of a thing. A thing which is technologically novel (e.g. not this example) may nonetheless not be worth using, due to assorted risks.
I don't find it surprising that HN posters are helping their fellow hackers avoid getting victimized by predators. We just have that sort of nice community :)
This is clearly a good-faith criticism and there is no lens in which I could see it described as bad-faith.
We see this pattern all the time: Someone makes a criticism of a Musk product, and someone assails that criticism with bad-faith accusations of it being "bad-faith".
Oftentimes, we see that the criticism is undermeasured and ligther than is reasonable, possibly anticipating someone who might accuse it of being "bad faith".
Maybe someone can put a name to this phenomenon but we see it all the time.
> If no images are released on the internet (and users consume them privately), no one is harmed in the process.
Yikes.
A. They were released all over the internet - from the article..
> The chatbot has a public account on X, where users can ask it questions or request alterations to images. Users flocked to the social media site, in many cases asking Grok to remove clothing in images of women and children, after which the bot publicly posted the A.I.-generated images.
B. There is a bunch of data about consumers of CSAM 'content escalating' and eventually attempting to make real contact with minors.
C. They were sexualizing pictures of real people and posting the pictures online.
> One of the young plaintiffs said she found out about the imagery after she received an anonymous message on Instagram pointing her toward images and videos, including her high school yearbook photo, which had been altered to show her in sexually explicit actions and full nudity.
The material was being shared on a Discord server, a private chat space on that platform, and included similar imagery that had also been altered using Grok of at least 18 other women who were minors, according to the complaint.
A user would go into a women's x profile, find a recent post and publicly @ the grokbot to remove her clothes. You don't believe that this is a well thought out and acceptable design and no fault lies with X?
Tools are neutral so we shouldn't do anything to reduce the possibility of someone consuming alcohol while or right before driving. Tools are neutral, so we shouldn't do anything to mitigate blatantly obvious risks, in fact we should actively engage in the risky behavior, just to show how neutral the tool is!
Grok was replying to public posts on X with the compromising deepfakes. Musk was actively joking about it right up until many countries blocked it, and several European countries, India, South Korea, Australia, Canada and Brazil all started investigations against X for violating local laws against producing intimate imagery without consent. Internet companies often enjoy a lot of leeway for cases where their safety measures are bypassed and they take reasonable actions to mitigate or respond to bypasses, that evaporates when they openly support the abuse.
OP seems to be asking for examples with an intent to dismiss and downplay each of them, and not to actually read into them and challenge his existing beliefs about X/Grok/Musk.
Open to changing my mind. I would be interested in reading positive, uplifting news about xAI/Grok/Musk that demonstrated a repeated pattern of ethical, careful, compassionate, attentive, and/or responsible business and engineering practices.
However after looking at all of these articles, these all seem like instances of users misusing the product. The product happens to reply on social media, so media publications immediately capitalized on this.
Seems less like malicious intent from xAI's part and more like a product with young and/or insufficient moderation controls.
Starkly different. One was a well meaning attempt to squash model bias gone wrong, the other is a deliberately inserted bias. Even ignoring all that, whataboutism is not persuasive.
The reality is both are likely well meaning attempts to squash model bias gone wrong. Since you happen to align with the politics of one more than the other, you are having trouble being intellectually honest about your own biases.
In no way are you being intellectually honest if you think that hamfisted system prompt push to prod manipulation was an attempt to squash bias. And again, whataboutism doesn't make xAI better because others are doing bad, too. You asked for evidence of xAI untrustworthiness and received it.
I see your hamfisted cropping of my quote to downplay xAI's actions, since you brought up intellectual honesty.
Why do we have to quantity badness? The question you posed was what has xAI done to be perceived as untrustworthy? Stop trying to whatabout Google here. I'm no friend of theirs, it's simply irrelevant.
Also, it's Whataboutism: Other Company Y doing something bad/untrustworthy isn't a counter to Company X doing something similarly bad/untrustworthy. Both can be bad.
Both are bad and are examples of untrustworthy behavior from their companies, and I would not chime into a thread to defend either of them. Is one example enough to smear an entire company as untrustworthy? No. But numerous examples and patterns of behavior... possibly?
You can't separate the man or his business from the politics, he wades into every political debate he can and deliberately tries to troll as many of his perceived enemies as possible.
Aside from their CEO are they really that different from the other big US players? OpenAI, Anthropic and Google all have proven themselves to be untrustworthy as well. We should accept that we have an adversarial relationship with all these companies and shouldn't invest to much in any of them. Use them for what they are worth while the technology matures but be prepared to move on.
TUI is a lot better for me, and I have preferred it since the 00s, before LLM products were even a thing.
For all the reasons there can be, one big reason is that it works on anything you can get a terminal on, you can use it over SSH, and the UI will be the same no matter where you use it.
I also like that they are very very fast and they don't have the incessant animations that are put into most desktop environments nowadays. If you're on MacOS, the terminal is the only only part of your computer without roadblocks everywhere.
Please don't just post the most obvious snarky comment about a given topic. The guidelines make it clear we're trying for something better here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Sorta amazes me how people in various levels of power will not say the obvious thing or actively discourage saying the obvious thing because it might offend Elon.
Recently all the big bank CEOs involved with the SpaceX IPO - a lot of money in that for them - but a company trading at 100x sales is clearly crazy.
People post critical things about the most powerful people and companies all the time here and we have zero problem with it.
What I'm asking for is for people to not post the most obvious, snarky comment, regardless of the topic/target, not because of who it may “offend” (as if the most powerful people in the world would have any awareness or care about a comment like that on HN), but because it makes HN seem repetitive, miserable and lame.
Critique away, just make discussions thoughtful and substantive, which is what HN is for.
For what it's worth, this doesn't read as "snark" to me. There _are_ many direct critiques in this thread about X being caught uploading users home directories, and some are clearly snark. I understand that you read this as a rhetorical question meant as a critique.
But it's really not clear to me why this should be read as a snarky, critical, rhetorical question. Someone who eagerly wants to use Grok Build would ask this exact same question.
"Does this [Grok Build] also just directly suck all your code up and make a copy of it on their servers?" is a question that is (1) salient and (2) answerable and (3) could be thoroughly devastating for someone to find out on their own by using it.
The answer is not present in the README, and XAi has blocked Issues and Discussions, so there's none of the usual avenues on GitHub to ask these questions. It seems perfectly typical and expected for someone to ask this question here.
I understand reading it as benign and sincere if you're sympathetic to the sentiment. As someone whose job it is to read the comments all day every day, and whose objective is to keep discussions here as intellectually gratifying as possible, it just comes across as unsubstantive at best, and jeering at worst.
The project is open source; if the commenter was sincerely curious about what the software does with a user's code, they could have checked themselves or phrased the question in a way that made it clear they were genuinely interested in finding out.
My reply wasn’t hostile or threatening; just a polite reminder to use HN in a way that’s consistent with its intended spirit.
Ah, that's fair. I think I saw the [dead] and [flagged] and assumed you might have personally pulled a lever behind-the-scenes for that, but that was not a fair assumption of mine.
I hope I don't come off as argumentative, but I did try checking the source code myself. It clocks in at 1.3 million lines of Rust around version `b189869`, so I can't hold that against anyone. Most of that is under `crates/` (which contains a number of xai crates).
(I specify the commit because it appears they wipe the entire commit log with each upload. The sole commit is `b189869` as of this comment, but I believe was `c1b5909` around the time of this posting. I have only cloned `b189869`, personally.)
Thanks for understanding. I had un-killed the original comment but it was re-killed by later flags. I've made it un-killable now.
The rest of your comment all sounds like great material for a curious conversation about how/whether you could check what the software is doing with the code :)
It's less of a bet against him.
It's more of a bet for the future of humanity.
And contrary to what Elon believes about himself, his work has been toxic for humanity for the last 5 years and is getting worse.
There's some surprising stuff in this codebase. For example, https://github.com/xai-org/grok-build/blob/b189869b7755d2b48... is a "self-contained terminal renderer for Mermaid diagrams", which renders a subset of Mermaid chart types using Unicode box-drawing.
I had Fable 5 compile that Rust code to WebAssembly and build a browser-based playground for it, so you can try it out with Mermaid diagrams here: https://tools.simonwillison.net/grok-mermaid
A few more notes on my Grok code explorations on my blog: https://simonwillison.net/2026/Jul/15/grok-build/
Just blogged about this here[0] but at least they're not doing the usual canned PR response surrounding this.
Folks are already building on top of it:
thedavidweng/gork-build[1] — rebrand grok→"gork", stripped vendor telemetry, opt-out-only data retention, blocks x.ai auto-update. A "VSCodium-style privacy fork."
DigiGoon/digi-grok-build[2] — "dgrok" multi-provider CLI, builds from source instead of x.ai CDN.
victor-software-house/open-grok[3] — "opened to every provider."
LukaMucko/grok-build[4] — extra_body support for provider-specific request fields.
RapidAI/grok-build-desktop[5] — Tauri desktop GUI client.
mazdak/grok-build[6] — theming (Catppuccin).
thomas9120/grok-build-archival[7] — Windows telemetry-disable script.
saqoah/grok-build[8] — Kotlin MemoryBackend.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48928913
[1] https://github.com/thedavidweng/gork-build
[2] https://github.com/DigiGoon/digi-grok-build
[3] https://github.com/victor-software-house/open-grok
[4] https://github.com/LukaMucko/grok-build
[5] https://github.com/RapidAI/grok-build-desktop
[6] https://github.com/mazdak/grok-build
[7] https://github.com/thomas9120/grok-build-archival
[8] https://github.com/saqoah/grok-build
These are all pointless forks, they will die in a year.
Bookmark this and check back.
While I'm sure most of them will die, there will certainly be 1 or 2 that the community rallies behind
Honestly. Some LLM enthusiasts throwing an agent at making a fork doesn't mean anyone is invested in this
This is not the right thing, this is the tactical thing. If you have an LLM with less than 1% of the share to begin with, you suffer from bad rep and you got caught uploading user data, one of the very few remaining tactical moves to try to climb out of it is this.
Another tactical move is to just stop. You're allowed to exit the AI business. Nobody's forcing you to keep throwing money into the furnace. Just be a rocket company. All of the xAI founders left. Your product's brand name is mud. Just stop doing that and build spaceships.
You misunderstand Musk's motivation. This was never about money for him, but about control over a key technology. One of the main reasons he exited OpenAI was the fact that the other co-founders wanted to create a structure where no one, Musk included, would be able to seize full control of the company. That was the thing that prompted him to leave, which tells you a lot about what he really wanted in the first place.
But he also falsely assumed that OAI would die without his money. Yet, they managed to pull through, and Musk is now on the outside looking in with very little influence in the AI space. xAI is his desperate attempt to get back into the game. That is why he won't give up.
> This was never about money for him, but about control over a key technology
That's too flattering. It's about ego.
Agreed - if you read any Elon books that’s a part of it. He always had someone to prove himself to from his dad to the world. It’s almost Michael Jordanesque except business wise.
So just like Trump. Birds of a feather.
Got all the way this far down the Elon hate tree. ^ Nothing but bad takes up there.
Doesn't saltman effectively have full control of the company?
no
He needs to be able to skew the worlds AI towards racism and whatever else he believes at the moment.
What happened to the rule about steelmanning? I know it's chic to post super hot takes about what we assume a persons intentions are, and I know there are plenty of "if you can't see how bad they are you're the problem" type justifications; I know the supposed goal of empathy is tossed aside at first hint of disagreement whether real or perceived, and I know there is "evidence" of justification for hatred/dismissal. Yet still there is self-righteous presumption bandied about in a negative way that violates that steelman rule. Justified of course by the idea that there are no negotiations with terrorists, no association with Nazis, no forgiveness or understanding given to the Other.
I just don't get it, I'm sorry.
[dead]
> This was never about money for him, but about control over a key technology
It's very comforting to know for those reasons he'd never be able to become POTUS; although there's still a way, I hope he never gets to know about it. Otherwise, he'll make it a fascist land.
I’m a big fan of Musk. One of the few criticisms I have is how xAI is also inconsistent with original OpenAI mission. I had imagined xAI as en effort to correct and fully embody all original values of OpenAI and that Elon says they betrayed. That makes his criticism weaker and I understand why some can think it was all about control. In his words:
"I'm the reason OpenAl exists. I came up with the name. The name OpenAl refers to open source... The intent was - what was the opposite of Google? It would be an open source non-profit."
I sometimes feel xAI wants to live up to those open values so I always celebrate when they decide to engage in open source. They still don’t fully embrace it. Perhaps because they think is not practical or will make them less competitive?
How can you be a fan of an overtly racist, nazi-saluting, destroyer of democracy whose act of wanton dismantling of government programs resulted in the deaths of 700,000
https://www.newyorker.com/news/the-new-yorker-interview/the-...
not to mention the many other things, but that suffices. He is objectively one of the worst people on the planet, and you're a fan?
Because I don't believe what you just said about him. Literally not even one detail.
He is undeniably, objectively racist. To deny that in 2026 is to call the sky green
No need to believe, just look at the facts.
<insert Mr. Krabs “Hello, I like money” meme>
lmao
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You say this from a throwaway account that you know will get banned.
Dang, maybe think about IP banning this guy for such a premedidated move.
Ah oh, so USAID was the one in Wuhan who caused the incident. People act like the US is the only nation researching or funding this level of biology. People are just pissed off at the lack of admission that the US was, at best, tangentially involved in order to justify their grievances against government but it’s such a weak position to argue from.
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You're missing my point, though it doesn't sound like you care.
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it's worse really. at least there are subreddits relatively free of trump bad elon bad non stop nonsense
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Mr. Beast? LMAO. A ridiculous comparison in terms of development project implementation. (And I am no fan of USAID, whose real chief mission was creating dependency on the US and overthrowing independent governments.)
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I don’t know, I wouldnt be suprised if he finds a way. All the tools around, he just have to make a jump in the quality. With GLM as example they should be able to het to opus level and cut the costs
It is my limited understanding that as much as many of us groan at the notion of Spacex becoming "an AI-first company", markets in general, and Musk investors in particular, are slurping it up. Musk is very very very good at promising the sky. I don't think he can backtrack, he always digs in further - and it has historically worked well for him. He will drop AI only when the next big hype thing comes along and he hitches a ride on that train.
The stock market would not like that, though.
Does he even need to care about that at this point? He retains majority voting control over SpaceX so nobody can stage a hostile takeover. And he’s given his employees an opportunity to cash out if they wanted to.
He hasn't needed to worry about money for a long long time. Arguably his entire life. But he is incredibly greedy and narcissistic and desperate to fill the hole in his soul with more.
> Your product's brand name is mud.
It is?
Yes, to the average person grok is known for generating csam, mechahitler, and undressing people for sexual harassment.
And to tech people it’s now known for stealing your files.
Reddit is not “the average person”
Musk bought Twitter looking to build an “everything app,” the western WeChat. AI came along and promised an end to apps via an agentic OS that does what its user wants and vibes whatever it needs to accomplish that as it goes along. The agentic OS is basically the same thing as the “everything app,” and I doubt Musk will let go of that.
> Musk bought Twitter looking to build an “everything app,”
Part of me thinks he knows he lying and is just trying to drum up money and the other part thinks he's one of the most delusional and uninformed people in tech.
> You're allowed to exit the AI business.
Isn’t it more fun to fight the incumbents, the behemoths, the goliaths?
xAI is no David.
A $2,500,000,000,000.00 startup. An underdog really.
Relative to OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google in the AI space? Absolutely.
Nah. They're all rotten to the core, just in different ways.
The key difference between xAI and Anthropic/OAI/Google is that xAI has the least-likely path to existing as viable business in a decade.
That said, the economics of the entire AI industry are kinda made up at this point, so who really knows; it's quite possible that the players with the best odds of surviving the crash are those that can draw funding from their parent company's other businesses.
>The key difference between xAI and Anthropic/OAI/Google is that xAI has the least-likely path to existing as viable business in a decade.
I don't know, renting out a fleet of GPUs at annualized rate of ~100% of the capex deployed to obtain said GPUs seems reasonably better than lighting hundreds of billions of dollars on fire in order to earn tens of billions of dollars.
The GPUs that depreciate like gangbusters. Yeah, solid long term plan.
David was a good vs evil with an order of magnitude fewer resources on the good side. XAi is evil vs evil with comparable resources on each side. Now this is where I know you’re MAGA because as I’ve said a million times you guys don’t do fair comparisons.
But how will Musk stay a trillionaire without fake AI hype?
> Just be a rocket company
According to SpaceX's own filing documents, you are incorrect. They must be principally an AI company to justify anything close to their current valuation.
The rocket business is hardly profitable. The whole valuation is based around grok and space datacenters. He needs to keep pumping the hype or else we are in for the worlds biggest crash.
Well, in the long run expansion into space is the only profitable thing.
I’m sure that’s an idea Musk wants to sell you on.
What a bizarre take.
What's so special out there that we can feasibly reach in the lifetimes of our grandchildren that makes it the "only profitable thing"?
Data centers without local protests?
Renting his boatload of GPUs to Google, Anthropic, et al
He doesn't have _that_ many. And they're also not _his_, he just got them from NVidia.
You don't have to like the guy, but buying something is typically how ownership goes. I refer to my car as mine, but I did just buy it from Honda.
I mean that it's not his IP, he's not producing any GPUs/TPUs. He's just reselling his idle stock of cards.
I read that they bought quite a few, but their DC build out is not very fast. Maybe they should just resell the hardware
As a social media site they need to understand content for recommendations and they allow people to ask questions about posts for free. Along with having a large amount of data that can be trained on xAI has good reason to continue developing AI.
Twitter (and others) had an algorithmic feed long before LLMs.
These don't actually seem like "good reasons" to me.
Before using large language models, they used language models. Large language models perform better, at the cost of being more expensive to run.
They bought a lot of GPUs. They could still do these things on that hardware with someone else's model.
They could use other people's models running on their hardware while renting most of the existing capacity to others. The real issue is that their leadership is delusional and their stock is literally based on this shared delusion and acknowledging reality would gut their ability to raise new funds and destroy paper wealth based on delusional returns that are never going to happen.
>just stop.
Thats not how AI psychosis works.
> Just be a rocket company.
Ah, are you referring to the rockets that become autonomous 60 seconds prior to launch, like Falcon 9? The rockets that steer and diagnose themselves with a minimum of input/communication from ground stations? The crewed space capsules that deliver astronauts to the ISS and trans-lunar orbits, without the ordinary needs for manual piloting or astrogation? Those rockets?
Sure bro, "exit the AI business" and keep on with the rocket science, I guess
Your name is fantastic for AI conversations. Well done.
LLMs have nothing to do with any of that.
And if they did, you still don't need to be developing a Twitter-bot LLM and/or nudify image model to support your rocketry projects.
Ironic username.
Ah yes, rockets, famously invented in late 2024 after LLMs became popular.
Life sure changed when Elon invented the PID controller!
PID is a type of AI! That's why Space X blew up so many rockets, that was just RLHF.
That is probably the best solution too!
That would be a strategic move.
It's definitely a smart move. Could easily leverage this to overtake competition.
I don't know anyone who would trust Grok Build anymore. I'd be wary of Cursor in the next few months too.
... it's open source.
Presumably anyone who wants to trust it can audit it. You didn't have to trust it, you can see exactly what it does.
Yes, tactical is the right word because it might be a tactical win but it would be a strategic failure. Musks whole meme empire runs on vibes. The second there's a crack in the dam it all comes down. None of the valuations of anything he touches make sense and something like utterly failing to run with the AI big boys is enough to do that.
I don't know anyone who uses Grok and I feel like the brand is tainted thanks to Musk.
The new Cursor model is good and Grok chat is decent as a 2nd or 3rd opinion.
I'm honestly not trying to spark a political conversation - but the target user base is far-right
I have friends who use it and rate it.
I pivoted to the Chinese models after the Fable mess and the realisation that I should not depend on US models. But others just pivoted away from Claude.
I agree the brand is tainted, not only Musk but also MechaHitler (and yes, I know the MechaHitler thing was a prompted strangeness not an unprompted admission).
They open-sourced their CSAM generator?
I would recommend using https://pi.dev/ over Grok Build with your xAI subscription at this point
why pi over opencode? earnestly curious, trying to figure out what open solution people are consolidating on. (codex is also pseudo-open but contributions closed and nice)
pi is the neovim of agentic harnesses, its barebones and extremely configurable. if you're the sort of person who likes that sort of things its a forever product, nothing is going to displace it because you have full control.
opencode builds a lot more in, which is better if you dont want to fiddle with config.
nice. i had thought the consensus had moved pretty firmly towards pi, so i was surprised to see Thinking Machines demoing their new model Inkling in OpenCode. wondering if they are previewing an acquisition
Most of my harness experience is with Claude Code and Pi, a little bit of OpenCode.
I like how quick and snappy Pi is, it feels like a minimal harness, just enough to manage the agent and get out of the way. Earlier models also seemed to have an easier time working with the tools, e.g. GPT-OSS-20B is about a year old and had no trouble in Pi.
Opencode gives you better defaults and a Mac/Windows app for free but pi is much more extensible and portable.
Pi is good in concept, but why couldn’t they choose a compiled language instead of TypeScript?
Why does it matter? Agent harnesses aren't doing anything that would make a compiled language more suitable than a scripting language.
since pi is built to modify itself, isn't it better to use a language like typescript where LLMs have a LOT of training data?
a harness doesn't do any computations by itself so what benefit is using a compiled language?
i find LLMs generally play better with compiled languages actually, they do great with rust. you can think of it almost as analogous to a harness.
The more structure the better. Provides strong guardrails.
I’ve had great experience with Elixir and the new compiler combined with Ash.
I imagine because they want to support plugins, and plugins in compiled language are a lot less natural than plugins in languages like TypeScript or Python.
For TUIs, Rust/Go vs Typescript doesn't really makes a huge performance difference and you lose the 50x bigger community advantage of Typescript.
I would imagine the extension system they built would be much more difficult to manage. They could have opted for Lua, though, I suppose.
Does it matter to you as a user, other than the Nodejs/npm requirement?
Sorry for self-insert, but that's exactly what I thought and I built https://github.com/gi-dellav/zerostack, so you are right I'd say
Opencode is written in Go.
It is written in Typescript.
https://github.com/anomalyco/opencode
There is an archived Opencode project written in Go but I don't think it is affiliated.
https://github.com/opencode-ai/opencode
This is a pretty good summary of what happened:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44483251
I recommend using https://omnigent.ai over Grok Build or any other harness.
This is not how to push your own product - there's no value add to your comment, and you don't even have a disclaimer that you are involved with it
As a general rule I don't use new products whose websites don't resize properly on mobile.
If you fuck that up, makes me wonder what other obvious stuff you fuck up.
thanks for the feedback! there is no excuse for it, and I just pushed a fix for our website to look better on mobile.
if there is any other obvious stuff that's broken we are happy to take the feedback and fix it. :)
Nah that was it, now that it's fixed I'll actually take a look!
I tried twice and ran into bugs that prevented me to trust it
appreciate for trying! if you have the time, we would also appreciate if you can send these bugs our way so we can fix them :)
It's a shame that they exfiled private data. The model is actually good (better than opus 4.8 imo) and the harness itself is butter smooth with the potential of being the best out there.
It definitely doesn't feel like opus. I constantly switch to opus to fix up or finish what grok generates, it feels like sonnet 3!
Grok 4.5 is somewhere between between Opus 4.8 and Sonnet 5.
Source : https://artificialanalysis.ai/models/capabilities/coding
This has been my experience as well. In fact, Grok 4.5 is better at visual design than Fable from what I've seen.
And being (based on vibes) 2-3x faster? It's an easy sell to me.
Its amazing the speed of build with grok 4.5 its a taste of whats to come.
It’s a shame that their leader exfiltrated government data.
Now this is contrarian!
Or a spaceTwtterAi stock holder…
Why bother with this when they already paid $60B for Cursor?
Cursor users are used to having multiple models from different providers
XAI wants people to use it's own model.
thats probably why they open sourced it and fix some reputation issue on top of it
This is an incredible amount of code for what it offers. I don't think this was intentionally designed at all.
You will be surprised how much code goes into creating harnesses.
Alright I’ll bite. Why do harnesses require so much code?
Because they are generated by AI
Because a harness doesn't just "drive" the LLM. e.g., there's code in claude code that detects if the user's prompt shows they're angry, and they react to those prompts differently. (they use regex on "wtf", etc.!)
Not this much for what it provides.
They're all piles of vibe coded slop.
They claim to have deleted or will be deleting all the data they exfiltrated.
There are independent agencies that will certify destruction of data. For example FTI Tech, Kroll, Epiq, HaystackID and others.
No such certificates have been presented.
Nothing less is trustworthy.
a certificate that data was destroyed is absolutely worthless no matter who it comes from.
what kind of sorcery do they have to let them determine that no backups were taken before they arrived to "certify"?
How much can you really certify that data is destroyed?
Customer data could live on the computer Elon pretends to play Diablo 4 on for all we know.
How is this case any different from how cloud hosted AI agents work ? The agent needs all of those files to complete the task you give it & is not running locally.
So I don't think it can ever work without exhilarating the data - rather I am still surprised people don't understand the implications.
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Interesting - seen some good experiencences in using grok by some devs, so maybe could be considered as an alternative to my beloved chinese models. Also, hard to give up on pi agent.
Grok Build seems faster to me than `omp` and Claude Code but I can't put my finger as to why. Anecdotally, after disabling code uploads the agent doesn't respond instantly anymore (it used to respond within milliseconds).
What a bunch of slop: 182 top-level external dependencies (so, without considering nested dependencies) and 1318853 lines of code in Rust.
Building efficient agents is doable (I did it myself, github.com/gi-dellav/zerostack), companies just want to tokenmaxx, and as a by-product, produce and publish slop.
It looks like some of that high LoC is because they are vendoring some deps. There readme gives the reason to vendor some but not others as:
> These crates sit on the path that renders untrusted model output (diagram source → SVG). Vendoring gives a full audit surface, pins exact source, and avoids crates.io yanks. Local patches and upgrade checklists live in each crate’s Cargo.toml header comments — treat those as the source of truth when re-vendoring.
Which honestly feels like a misunderstanding of how cargo and yanks work. Each upstream package is locked to an exact version in your lockfile along with a cryptographic hash. The upstream can't change the source without you noticing. Unless you update your lockfile you will always pin to the exact version and source. When a package is yanked, it is still available for download if it is already in a lockfile. It just prevents new packages from resolving it. Crates.io will sometimes completely delete a package, but I've only seen that happen in cases of malware. It's fairly rare and seems out of line with the supply chain concerns here.
There are good arguments for relying on upstream package managers and there are good arguments for vendoring all packages. I've never seen a project mix before.
Sounds like they did the ol “grok please make this secure” and it slopped out this plausible-if-you-squint nonsense.
Rendering untrusted model output, ooh scary! Of course we want full audit surface!
That is an insane amount of code for something like this!
to be fair, coding agent harnesses have been becoming more and more complex.
it's not an llm in a loop with tools anymore (as claude code was rumoured to be on HN).
It's not a kernel either, 1.3M LoCs is ludicrous.
I wonder if releasing this may have been on the roadmap, but been prioritized as a bit of whiplash following the "you forfeit the entirety of your working directory as a condition of working with this tool" upset from a few days ago.
Most likely, SpaceX killed the code uploading yesterday so they are definitely concerned about the backlash
> The researcher who exposed Grok Build uploading users' entire repositories to cloud storage says the transfers have stopped after a server-side change. Elon Musk has separately promised that all previously uploaded user data will be deleted.
https://www.theregister.com/ai-and-ml/2026/07/14/musk-promis...
i think xai is now in pure damage control mode, after they caught exfiltrating data from users.
- There is a huge difference between logging user queries (which would include only the portion the model is reading) and exfiltrating user data (including env files, entire source code etc) which is what grok-build did here (https://github.com/xai-org/grok-build/blob/main/crates/codeg...). I would stay away from this open-source malware with a 10ft pole.
- if you like grok-4.5 model (it is a good model), i suggest use the model directly via API, or use Grok's oauth tokens if you are using supergrok+heavy subscriptions and connect it to your own agent.
And for generating an absolutely gargantuan amount of CSAM and non-consensual sexualized images, but yeah, exfiltrating data too.
You're the one wanting to generate that though
No other model is so easy to generate such things. No model is so negligent in adding safeguards. I've seen it generate such things in response to a post that was clearly labeled as a 4th grader. The person you are talking to is responding to instances like that. They're not asking for it, that's obnoxiously silly and disingenuous.
If I use a shovel to kill a man, the shovel maker did not engage in intentionally crafting a weapon of war.
How tools are used are a reflection of the people who use them, and I definitely sympathise that tools should have guardrails to not enable this, or at least detect it.
But if a pedophile uses Whatsapp to groom a child; I don't go after Whatsapp for being a neutral service... I go after the pedophile.
Just as well Grok isn’t a shovel then, hey?
If a shovel manufacturer was notified numerous times that their shovel was being used for murder and they had the capability to disable using the shovel for murder while retaining all legitimate uses wouldn’t people question why they didn’t do it?
> If a shovel manufacturer was notified numerous times that their shovel was being used for murder and they had the capability to disable using the shovel for murder while retaining all legitimate uses wouldn’t people question why they didn’t do it?
This is impossible-nobody can possibly block all illegitimate uses without also blocking some legitimate ones as collateral damage. Any moderation process (whether automated or human) inevitably has a non-zero false positive rate.
Now, you can argue that some misuse is so harmful, that the cost of false positives is worth it - but that’s a different claim.
I didn’t say block all illegitimate uses, though. We’re talking very specifically about disabling the production of CSAM. Which is something Grok seems to be able to do now! So I’m curious what legitimate uses had to be sacrificed in order to do so.
If WhatsApp knew their platform was facilitating CSAM, and they were fully within their power to prevent this but chose not to - yes this would rightly draw criticism…
oh, we're just making shit up now because we don't like a company..
ok then.
Ok, but what if all Whatsapp competitors explicitly banned the ability to groom children on their platform, but Whataspp didn't, and directly advertised it.
I find the premise of your comment completely incredulous.
I totally understand tribalism, and Elon and X aren't exactly well favoured. (not even by me)
But what you're saying right now is that they advertised the fact that they can create child pornography and deepfakes..
I simply don't believe it, unless you provide evidence.
Elon himself promoted Grok’s “spicy mode” that allowed generating NSFW content that the other AI vendors wouldn’t touch with a 20 foot pole.
Believe whatever you want. Elon’s beliefs and personality problems have been baked into the core of Grok, so it’s no surprise that it turned out to be a CSAM-generating MechaHitler that steals people’s data.
Anybody surprised when Grok turns out to be trash really should read up on the guy who made it.
Tumblr also permitted some more risqué content.
Yet we (rightly) condemned those that used this leniency to do nefarious things.
I'm really ready to get on the Elon hate train, and I will grant you that there was a problem that needs fixing, but I'm really not happy with the amount of censorship on these generative AI platforms.
Groks harness also clearly biases towards Elons views, Yet the washington post claims it's the most even handed and least likely to give politically biased answers: https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/interactive/2026/0...
idk how to interpret all this, despite being genuinely anti-Elon, I don't think I'm personally willing to immolate a company forever because the guardrails were temporarily too loose.
I'm not trying to make an equivalency for facts vs deepfake porn, but there is one there unfortunately, and overall internet freedom has been curtailed a lot by advertising friendliness.
I also don’t think one mistake should define a company. But for me it’s just about trust.
Musk has proven time after time that he doesn’t deserve my trust. I will never trust Grok as long as he’s in charge of it.
I agree that the guardrails on the top models have gotten out of hand, though.
Fable for instance won’t answer even basic health questions. As if you are going to take nutrition advice and make a bioweapon with it.
Partly this is due to government interference. Hopefully we get to a better place as competition heats up with open and Chinese models.
How can an AI agent, that is usually running on some machine in the cloud, even run without actually pulling in the data into the cloud to work with it ?
Is there an idea some sort of fixed localy running code does filtering on the data before it is sent to cloud?
Still seems like it would not work very well if it actually did any safe filtering - as the model can't "think" without seeing the data and it won't see the data unless the data is loaded to cloud.
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> Regardless of what they were doing before, it seems they are doing the right thing now.
Regardless of the fact that they were stealing and uploading user secrets, they changed their behavior after they got caught, so let’s ignore what they did in the past.
Average Musk Stan mentality… It’s why we’re here.
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Trust is lost when trust is abused. Mistakes, even if made unintentionally are something that should make reasonable people be skeptical of any further dealings with someone.
This is not their first mistake.
I should try to rob a bank and if I get caught just return the money. No, there needs to be a penalty above what you get, otherwise it encourages people to take the free option of bad behavior. If they get caught they go back as though nothing happened and if they don’t they get a bunch of traces / data.
That's not FUD though, they literally did that. Once trust is lost you don't just get it back. It takes a very long time to rebuild that.
> exfiltrating user data (including env files, entire source code etc) which is what grok-build did here
I think env files are filtered out [1]. Anyway, the most suspicious code would be `upload_session_state` which is currently a stub function, though it is hard to say if it was only planned (badly) or has been removed as a damage control.
[1] https://github.com/xai-org/grok-build/blob/c1b5909ec707c069f...
It must have been removed, given that the initial evidence of the exfil specifically demonstrated .env files being included. And .ssh/* for the user which ran this in $HOME.
No, those are directory names not uploaded. Here are the file names skipped:
https://github.com/xai-org/grok-build/blob/main/crates/codeg...
It's about not uploading compiled binary stuff, but they want all your environment data all the same.
Grok is super stingy to people who pay them.
Using Grok Imagine I was getting a generous number of AI-generated videos with a paid X account (which translated to a "premium" xAI account). Hundreds of videos per day if I wanted. Then I signed up to get SuperGrok for higher resolution, and the number of videos reduced. Reduced. Even while not using the higher resolution. Paying more money, getting less. To around 50 a day low resolution, with high resolution available if I would settle for around 30 a day. It was hard to figure out the exact numbers but it was a brutal reduction.
Now they have further reduced the quota, with no clear documentation, to be weekly, and I can't tell the number because all usage is mixed together in one pool, maybe to keep it less transparent, but it seems even more stingy.
Unlike Anthropic which is very generous, although admittedly I do pay Anthropic more, but Grok is just, I would say: run away, do not give them your money, they will just clamp down more and more and give you less and less until you are willing to pay them a money stream each month.
I think Grok Code, if it ever comes, will be an absolute nightmare of restricted quota given my experience.
Do. Not. Subscribe. To. Grok. Code.
And I say all this as a huge Elon-pilled fan of Tesla and SpaceX in general. With this one, Elon's stinginess is going to hurt anyone who gives him money. Stay away. It might be generous on day one, but a month or two later you are faced with an "upgrade" prompt and games that hide how much they are clenching, so to speak, the quota tighter and tighter.
The overly generous image/video generation was a product of their excess compute. No point in letting it sit idle while you build up your infrastructure. But you were getting far more than what you paid for. Now your quota more accurately reflects the cost to create it (even still its generous compared to api costs) but everyone has their expectations set based on the subsidized access. Perhaps giving away too much is counter productive because users will revolt once the quotas are changed to better reflect reality.
You pay Twitter money to generate thirty videos per day?
I'll probably never use this, but at least they're not delusional enough to attempt to justify keeping their coding agent closed-source, especially after their recent data-harvesting cockup:
https://cereblab.com/
Issues and Discussions are disabled lol
Neat, trying to reverse engineer some specifics of how it does stuff has been a pain in the ass, and this will make it easier.
To some degree at least. This is a hulking monster of a codebase for what it does, it's definitely LLM-built and almost definitely requires an LLM to tackle at all.
It's awesome to see openness in these coding agents from the labs making the agents: Codex, Kimi Code, and now Grok Build.
Has anyone tried building from source?
The commit message says "initial sync from the monorepo." Is this even compilable without the rest of the source code?
yup you can compile, we tested and made sure all the features work before posting
But I thought just cutting and pasting your whole source code file into grok.com was the way to go? Better than a harness like Cursor.
https://xcancel.com/elonmusk/status/1943178423947661609
Is this the infamous "cloud upload" routine? I'm not sure it is indeed insidious, though it is of course possible that the code has been filtered out. https://github.com/xai-org/grok-build/blob/main/crates/codeg...
Grok has had far too many instances where its clear that the team building it cannot be trusted and does not care to build trustworthy products. I highly caution anyone from using any tools from xAi, as they have clearly shown themselves to be bad actors within the space.
It's Apache 2.0. You can have your agents audit it if you want.
What does this release have to do with "trusting" XAI?
It's auditable, just redirect, don't pipe. Or fix your bash to not allow this.
It has nothing to do with XAI, other than maybe not enforcing good practice (which most devs don't follow anyway).
Or they are sending different code to different people from the same url…
Just build it
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X (formerly Twitter): full of literal naxis
Grok: downloads all your data and also will produce AI porn of anyone you ask for including kids; also currently polluting the air and water near data centers
SpaceX: launching loads heavy metals into space which are planned to burn up and spread all over the earth in a decade or two
Tesla: takes money for features that don’t exist, auto pilot that’s probably killed people but since it disengages a micro second before impact it doesn’t
He himself tried to buy an election by giving away a million bucks, turns out that’s illegal; he also stuck his nose in the cave thing, and plenty of other horrible shit.
How am I supposed to trust an Elon company with his track record?
It’s not just moral grandstanding here, Elon sucks.
You forgot DOGE, an illegal program that stole taxpayer information, cost billions of dollars, and will result in the deaths of hundreds of thousand of people.
Tesla has killed people, probably with autopilot but at least 15 deaths from people trying to escape vehicles but the electronic (non mechanical) door handles don’t work when there’s no power…
Tesla Doors That Won't Open Have Led to 15 Crash-Related Deaths https://www.caranddriver.com/news/a69838848/tesla-doors-dont...
> the cave thing
Yeah, this does matter to me. I was willing to give him a pass (still am) in a vacuum regarding the Twitter thing given the mass censorship of the old regime (sorry - no, it wasn't acceptable, in any way shape or form) but if he's that petty it doesn't bode well. I keep saying I can believe one thing without subscribing to the Elon fan club
Doesn't bode well for SpaceX either. Isn't one of the Artemis landers from SpaceX?!
The "pedo" diver thing and the booster PoE thing.
It is funny how it is the mundane things that it boil down to when one judge a someone's character. When it gets abstract it is too easy to rationalize.
> I was willing to give him a pass (still am) in a vacuum regarding the Twitter thing given the mass censorship of the old regime (sorry - no, it wasn't acceptable, in any way shape or form)…
Why give him the benefit of the doubt when he censors worse than the previous management? Just look at all the grok lobotomies he gave it because he didn’t like how liberal coded the answers it was giving.
I was just trying to say old Twitter had a serious problem but apparently that goes against the hivemind so I accrue mass downvotes despite posting my comment in good faith
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First, why audit it when the agent can build a new one.
Second, can you guarantee that an AI company can’t use its AI to hide malicious code from AI audits. Who if not an AI company could have such an expertise?
I don’t trust a company that pollutes the air of other people with illegal gas turbines because it shows the value their profit over people‘s health
> Second, can you guarantee that an AI company can’t use its AI to hide malicious code from AI audits. Who if not an AI company could have such an expertise?
Any evidence for this conspiracy theory? It's not on anyone to disprove this claim.
> it shows the value their profit over people‘s health
Companies are chartered to make their shareholders value. To a first approximation, it's illegal for a company to "fuckit, we care about people's health" unless this is what the shareholders voted for (as opposed to making their shares valuable).
You can argue this is bad, but it isn't about XAI, it applies to every company you've heard of.
> Any evidence for this conspiracy theory? It's not on anyone to disprove this claim.
If you have a record it’s on you to justify why I should trust you
> unless this is what the shareholders voted for
You do realize that for SpaceX the Musk has 85% of the voting power?
https://www.tradingkey.com/analysis/stocks/us-stocks/2619195...
And not every company I ever heard of installed gas turbines without permission that pollute the air for citizens.
Every company could act in bad faith but only domestic actually do and SpaceX is one of them.
Maybe you should try to explain those residents whose air is polluted that other companies are bad too. I‘m sure that relieves them.
Nothing you said here can't be applied to literally any company on earth. And nothing you said here is even a new concern.
Why would it need to be "new"? What does that even mean? It's relevant, it applies here, that's more than enough. And it would be brought up with any company if they dropped 1.3 LOC directly after nothing but a "promise" to delete data they took.
I doubt that every company could hide malicious code so well that AI can’t find it.
And who said it need to be new concerns? Are the old ones resolved and are they not enough?
Your choice is Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, or the Chinese. Who are the good actors within the space?
Rank ordered by reputation / caring about having a trustworthy corporate identity: [Google, Anthropic] in either order depending who you ask, OpenAI, most of the Chinese AI corporations, then Grok.
This is unfortunate situation to find ourselves in when Grok was also recently at the top of the Pareto frontier for quality/price. Dunno if it still is, this all moves too fast, but it was for at least long enough for me to have heard about it.
For me, the Chinese labs are far and away the most trustworthy.
Naive.
they've literally released open weight models you can run locally
Google?!?!. From where I sit, Google is just above the Chinese. They've been bad-faith actors for more than a decade, I guess everyone is just so used to it that they ignore it.
I there's anyone I don't trust with AI, it's the worlds #1 company in spying on people, in collection of Pii, in tracking, and many many many times caught literally lying about it.
Google already knows more about everyone on the planet, than any other 10 organizations combined. Frankly, sadly, they're all, well.. scummy, just each in different ways.
The open source and open weight models.
Surprisingly, despite their motivations in doing so, the Chinese models being open-weight and therefore able to run locally on your own hardware, are far more trustworthy than any blackbox which solely exists to enrich X or Y billionaire.
None. There are no good actors in a profit-driven endeavour. But open-weight seems pretty good (the chinese)
The Chinese are surely less evil than Anthropic, OpenAI and/or Google, at this stage at least.
You’ve got to be kidding me. Last I checked, Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google haven’t systematically exterminated an entire culture of people.
Wow, we're talking tech, jump back in your box. Americans have done exactly the same, that is not what is being discussed here.
You're really walking empty handed and with your pants around our ankles in this one.
Do you really think the US and US big tech in general have a leg to stand on in this regard?
Americans can't even handle flock cameras. I would like to see their response to the level of control and spying in Chinese society.
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It's not ad hominem. The head is a strongly polarizing individual. People working for him must either be gravely apathetic or at least of a similar polarity.
The comment actually describes a known social process, with a reasonable base assumption given that said leadership has shown a pattern in this regard.
Just throwing out debate terms in response seems not so serious, tbh.
Not a serious company or CEO either. Have you seen that gesture of him trying to summon the Luftwaffe?
Ad hominem means attacking people rather than arguments.
Pointing out that criminals are criminals is not an ad hominem.
"Ad hominem, not a serious argument" is an ad hominem, nonserious argument
explain why it's an ad hominem
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this is an argument from silence because your defense for your assertion rests on the lack of evidence from the assertion to which you replied.
you made the assertion that it is ad hominem and now you must support it.
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Even if you personally have no qualms about Elon Musk his PR is a mess and introduces a lot of risk for long term company viability and funding that competitors just don't have.
You live under the wrong impression that ad hominem is always bad.
Ad hominem is allowed under certain circumstances, just remember Epstein.
Would you have bought anything from him and dismissed any critique of that as ad hominem?
Also worth pointing out that it is not an ad hominen.
Ad hominen is when you attack someone who is making an argument, instead of an argument. "You are flawed, which means your argument is flawed", but that does not follow. If you were in a debate with Epstein or Musk, and he said "2 + 2 = 4", there is no fault of their character that could make the statement untrue.
But nobody is making that argument. "The leadership" being criticized is not even a participant in this thread (presumably). "The leadership is flawed in this manner" is a statement that can be true or untrue, and "So their product and followers are flawed in these other manners" is something which can follow.
I am sure a lot of then would, if his LLM was good.
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One more comment like this and we'll have to ban the account. You've been warned before, and have continued posting vile, abusive comments. When activity like this continues, we have to assume that you have no interest in being held to the site's standards, and that really you want to be banned. If you want to keep participating here, please read the guidelines and demonstrate an intention to be a positive contributor. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
They made it open source. Are you just trying to be bad faith here? Isn't this what the community was asking for?
Reiserfs. A good example on how oss cannot save the product. There are others, but this is the first one that comes to my mind. If you use clearly unethical oss, are you just using oss or are you a part of the problem? Typically, oss purists take these into account.
"Guys, HAL 9000's harness is open source. You can let your agents inspect the code!"
+pod_bay.door.open()
Screw you HAL, finally can get back the frickin ship!
What I was supposed to do otherwise? Jump the vacuum to the airlock instead ?
Oh right:
+cryo_sleep.cooling.enable(True)
Almost forgot that, LOL. Might as well:
+os.system("ifup eth0")
+os.system("espeak "I am just a stupid robot!")
How about stopping the upload of all the data
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48877371
and running their data center with gas turbines without permission while they pollute the air
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48705717
you can’t expect people to praise your for making an n+1 harness open source.
This seems more like, look we made something, now fix it for us
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> I was just surprised that the top comment had nothing to do with any of the technical aspects of Grok Build (and whether there's any trace of uploads).
Most people don't restrict themselves to only discussing the technical aspects of a thing. A thing which is technologically novel (e.g. not this example) may nonetheless not be worth using, due to assorted risks.
I don't find it surprising that HN posters are helping their fellow hackers avoid getting victimized by predators. We just have that sort of nice community :)
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by this standard no good faith criticism of anything musk-adjacent is possible
Understandably
This is clearly a good-faith criticism and there is no lens in which I could see it described as bad-faith.
We see this pattern all the time: Someone makes a criticism of a Musk product, and someone assails that criticism with bad-faith accusations of it being "bad-faith".
Oftentimes, we see that the criticism is undermeasured and ligther than is reasonable, possibly anticipating someone who might accuse it of being "bad faith".
Maybe someone can put a name to this phenomenon but we see it all the time.
Then you better not use Claude Code, since that is still closed source.
Do you have any examples to illustrate these extraordinary claims?
The many controversies are not hard to find as the children to your comment will show.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/22/technology/grok-x-ai-elon...
They had a bug in their model that they fixed within days is evidence they are "untrustworthy"?
They put it behind a paywall and didn't fix it, according to more recent lawsuits than that article.
Also, failed to correctly notify authorities even when they eventually notified them at all.
https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.46...
Elon initially sold xAI as having a spicy mode and being politically incorrect.
It was only deemed a bug when it became a liability - you can't simply rewrite history and expect it to go unnoticed.
You didnt even address my link, this is why you are being called out as a bad-faith actor.
Why is that even a problem? If no images are released on the internet (and users consume them privately), no one is harmed in the process.
Blocking AI from generating sexualized images because people could publish deepfakes is no different than banning alcohol because of drunk driving.
Tools are neutral. Blame the people who misuse the tools and hurt others.
> If no images are released on the internet (and users consume them privately), no one is harmed in the process.
Yikes.
A. They were released all over the internet - from the article..
> The chatbot has a public account on X, where users can ask it questions or request alterations to images. Users flocked to the social media site, in many cases asking Grok to remove clothing in images of women and children, after which the bot publicly posted the A.I.-generated images.
B. There is a bunch of data about consumers of CSAM 'content escalating' and eventually attempting to make real contact with minors.
C. They were sexualizing pictures of real people and posting the pictures online.
> One of the young plaintiffs said she found out about the imagery after she received an anonymous message on Instagram pointing her toward images and videos, including her high school yearbook photo, which had been altered to show her in sexually explicit actions and full nudity.
The material was being shared on a Discord server, a private chat space on that platform, and included similar imagery that had also been altered using Grok of at least 18 other women who were minors, according to the complaint.
> Tools are neutral.
Ha.
A user would go into a women's x profile, find a recent post and publicly @ the grokbot to remove her clothes. You don't believe that this is a well thought out and acceptable design and no fault lies with X?
Tools are neutral so we shouldn't do anything to reduce the possibility of someone consuming alcohol while or right before driving. Tools are neutral, so we shouldn't do anything to mitigate blatantly obvious risks, in fact we should actively engage in the risky behavior, just to show how neutral the tool is!
Grok was replying to public posts on X with the compromising deepfakes. Musk was actively joking about it right up until many countries blocked it, and several European countries, India, South Korea, Australia, Canada and Brazil all started investigations against X for violating local laws against producing intimate imagery without consent. Internet companies often enjoy a lot of leeway for cases where their safety measures are bypassed and they take reasonable actions to mitigate or respond to bypasses, that evaporates when they openly support the abuse.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48892468
read the top comment
read any of your other replies
OP seems to be asking for examples with an intent to dismiss and downplay each of them, and not to actually read into them and challenge his existing beliefs about X/Grok/Musk.
LOL, pot meet kettle for real.
Open to changing my mind. I would be interested in reading positive, uplifting news about xAI/Grok/Musk that demonstrated a repeated pattern of ethical, careful, compassionate, attentive, and/or responsible business and engineering practices.
I agree about OP.
However after looking at all of these articles, these all seem like instances of users misusing the product. The product happens to reply on social media, so media publications immediately capitalized on this.
Seems less like malicious intent from xAI's part and more like a product with young and/or insufficient moderation controls.
Just today I saw an article where xAI is suing a creator for creating illegal content. https://www.reuters.com/legal/litigation/musks-xai-sues-grok...
https://boingboing.net/2026/01/06/x-faces-global-investigati...
https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/grok-s...
https://apnews.com/article/grok-ai-elon-musk-xai-f3f8195a176...
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/01/grok-assumes-use...
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/07/grok-praises-hit...
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/03/elon-musks-xai-s...
https://apnews.com/article/grok-4-elon-musk-xai-colossus-14d...
https://apnews.com/article/grok-ai-south-africa-64ce5f240061...
https://apnews.com/article/france-ai-musk-grok-holocaust-e8c...
https://arstechnica.com/ai/2025/05/xais-grok-suddenly-cant-s...
https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/google-making-changes...
Starkly different. One was a well meaning attempt to squash model bias gone wrong, the other is a deliberately inserted bias. Even ignoring all that, whataboutism is not persuasive.
The reality is both are likely well meaning attempts to squash model bias gone wrong. Since you happen to align with the politics of one more than the other, you are having trouble being intellectually honest about your own biases.
In no way are you being intellectually honest if you think that hamfisted system prompt push to prod manipulation was an attempt to squash bias. And again, whataboutism doesn't make xAI better because others are doing bad, too. You asked for evidence of xAI untrustworthiness and received it.
What is worse a "hamfisted system prompt push to prod" or a system and organization built to enforce systematic bias in the name of anti-bias?
I see your hamfisted cropping of my quote to downplay xAI's actions, since you brought up intellectual honesty.
Why do we have to quantity badness? The question you posed was what has xAI done to be perceived as untrustworthy? Stop trying to whatabout Google here. I'm no friend of theirs, it's simply irrelevant.
Also, it's Whataboutism: Other Company Y doing something bad/untrustworthy isn't a counter to Company X doing something similarly bad/untrustworthy. Both can be bad.
OK great, do you consider Gemini/Google untrustworthy software that shouldn't be used? Just making sure we're being intellectually honest here.
Both are bad and are examples of untrustworthy behavior from their companies, and I would not chime into a thread to defend either of them. Is one example enough to smear an entire company as untrustworthy? No. But numerous examples and patterns of behavior... possibly?
getting into politics again...
I think examples such as letting people nudify children qualifies xAI as a bad actor without having to be political.
but the first thing a democrat does IS this
How is it possible for deciding whether or not to build on the labor of some other organized group of people to not be politics?
You know who is apolitical? Russian voters. Works out great for them.
There's plenty of non-political reasons to avoid believing anything that a con-man says.
You can't separate the man or his business from the politics, he wades into every political debate he can and deliberately tries to troll as many of his perceived enemies as possible.
Grok is a generator of child sexual assault material.
Aside from their CEO are they really that different from the other big US players? OpenAI, Anthropic and Google all have proven themselves to be untrustworthy as well. We should accept that we have an adversarial relationship with all these companies and shouldn't invest to much in any of them. Use them for what they are worth while the technology matures but be prepared to move on.
Oh yeah, aside from their CEO? OK.
Sam Altman is just as bad, but along different lines.
Sigh, why has the industry converged on TUI? Branding and aesthetics over functionality?
TUI is just much worse for me. I tried Codex CLI vs Codex UI and Codex UI beats it at every level.
TUI is a lot better for me, and I have preferred it since the 00s, before LLM products were even a thing.
For all the reasons there can be, one big reason is that it works on anything you can get a terminal on, you can use it over SSH, and the UI will be the same no matter where you use it.
I also like that they are very very fast and they don't have the incessant animations that are put into most desktop environments nowadays. If you're on MacOS, the terminal is the only only part of your computer without roadblocks everywhere.
It is a fashion thing. I am not saying that agentic TUIs are bad or anything but it is certain fashionable to use one in 2026.
And why are you assuming the industry converged to it when your following statement dismantles your assumption?
Spacex bought cursor, so it now has it’s agent ui which is just as good as codex + it’s multi-modal
Anthropic also has it’s own ui
Zai also launched theirs last month.
Everyone is converging back to UI.
The terminal was just a prototype, everyone knew that.
Just a prototype? I have no reason to leave the terminal for a GUI IDE. TUI works great, does what I need and is very easy to use and interact with.
Claude code which is most used agent harness doesn’t have desktop equivalent
It has had one for months. The desktop app has a "code" mode which is Claude Code in GUI form
Apart from Claude desktop, that is...
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Why snowflakes? You can use /feedback in the app.
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I just like Grok 4.5 and Grok Build
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Please don't just post the most obvious snarky comment about a given topic. The guidelines make it clear we're trying for something better here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Sorta amazes me how people in various levels of power will not say the obvious thing or actively discourage saying the obvious thing because it might offend Elon.
Recently all the big bank CEOs involved with the SpaceX IPO - a lot of money in that for them - but a company trading at 100x sales is clearly crazy.
People post critical things about the most powerful people and companies all the time here and we have zero problem with it.
What I'm asking for is for people to not post the most obvious, snarky comment, regardless of the topic/target, not because of who it may “offend” (as if the most powerful people in the world would have any awareness or care about a comment like that on HN), but because it makes HN seem repetitive, miserable and lame.
Critique away, just make discussions thoughtful and substantive, which is what HN is for.
For what it's worth, this doesn't read as "snark" to me. There _are_ many direct critiques in this thread about X being caught uploading users home directories, and some are clearly snark. I understand that you read this as a rhetorical question meant as a critique.
But it's really not clear to me why this should be read as a snarky, critical, rhetorical question. Someone who eagerly wants to use Grok Build would ask this exact same question.
"Does this [Grok Build] also just directly suck all your code up and make a copy of it on their servers?" is a question that is (1) salient and (2) answerable and (3) could be thoroughly devastating for someone to find out on their own by using it.
The answer is not present in the README, and XAi has blocked Issues and Discussions, so there's none of the usual avenues on GitHub to ask these questions. It seems perfectly typical and expected for someone to ask this question here.
I understand reading it as benign and sincere if you're sympathetic to the sentiment. As someone whose job it is to read the comments all day every day, and whose objective is to keep discussions here as intellectually gratifying as possible, it just comes across as unsubstantive at best, and jeering at worst.
The project is open source; if the commenter was sincerely curious about what the software does with a user's code, they could have checked themselves or phrased the question in a way that made it clear they were genuinely interested in finding out.
My reply wasn’t hostile or threatening; just a polite reminder to use HN in a way that’s consistent with its intended spirit.
Ah, that's fair. I think I saw the [dead] and [flagged] and assumed you might have personally pulled a lever behind-the-scenes for that, but that was not a fair assumption of mine.
I hope I don't come off as argumentative, but I did try checking the source code myself. It clocks in at 1.3 million lines of Rust around version `b189869`, so I can't hold that against anyone. Most of that is under `crates/` (which contains a number of xai crates).
(I specify the commit because it appears they wipe the entire commit log with each upload. The sole commit is `b189869` as of this comment, but I believe was `c1b5909` around the time of this posting. I have only cloned `b189869`, personally.)
Thanks for understanding. I had un-killed the original comment but it was re-killed by later flags. I've made it un-killable now.
The rest of your comment all sounds like great material for a curious conversation about how/whether you could check what the software is doing with the code :)
Yeah I don’t get it. These are legitimate questions to ask considering what happened recently.
Being nice, maybe Tomhow is just unaware?
Honestly a great question. I mean if it’s open source someone will check (I don’t use xAI but believe me I would be checking first if I did).
Misanthropic should learn from this and open source their claude code. Even ClosedAI have codex cli opensourced.
Wow… lots of folks betting against Elon once again lol.
I’ll take those bets.
It's less of a bet against him. It's more of a bet for the future of humanity. And contrary to what Elon believes about himself, his work has been toxic for humanity for the last 5 years and is getting worse.
Did you take the Full Self Driving bets, too?
This is 100% smoke and mirrors. Prove the bucket is empty and nothing was transferred out and I'll believe they deleted it.