Grok 4.5
x.ai624 points by BoumTAC 15 hours ago
624 points by BoumTAC 15 hours ago
https://cursor.com/blog/grok-4-5
So depressing to read the non-stop political comments here. I’m using GLM at the moment, it’s Chinese and backed by god knows who, and no one cares. I really wanted to see what the experts thought of new Grok tech and how the model compares etc. I wish I could turn off the non-technical comments somehow, could literally just go to reddit if I want to see garbage like this. Am I supposed to get emotional every time I see a Tesla drive by? HN was so much better than this. Where have the hardcore nerds gone? How is the model, is it good at coding? What does this mean for competition and pricing? I think the distinction with the Chinese models (or with any of the other models) is that they aren't particularly vocal and obviously active about their politics. I don't see how political commentary about Musk's is somehow forbidden when the man constantly reminds everyone about his political position and is simultaneously the face of his companies and obvious beneficiary. Furthermore, he's also very obviously interfered with the model development in ways that are quite ridiculous compared to other labs to insert his political opinion. I don't think you need to somehow get personally offended by every Tesla on the road but it seems ridiculous to ask people to not be political about a such obviously political figure. > Furthermore, he's also very obviously interfered with the model development in ways that are quite ridiculous compared to other labs to insert his political opinion. Yeah, even if you want to ignore the "political commentary" - people are correctly wary of Anthropic downgrading people or silently manipulating responses if they think you're doing distillation, why would you stake your business on someone who has repeatedly and famously done the same thing many times in a much dumber fashion? Its more depressing to see that we have such a low morality, that it apperenly doesn't matter what you do as long as you make great tech? My philosophy is, that the better i have it, the more responsibliltiy I can/have to carry. People in tech are above avg successful and we have a thinking job. I would imagine that our world would be better if more people would care if they see a Tesla and feel a little bit bad. Yes. But there is also a huge difference between having the option between 5 different very good models and just excluding one vs. being forced to use something because there is no alternative. I'm a hardcore nerd. I'm so hardcore, i consider not just the tech itself but the environment of the tech. The hardcore nerds have always been political. Wake up. You're using the sell my soul to the devil argument. If you achieve what you want to, it doesn't matter if you sold your soul on the way. If you’re using Claude then guess what, it’s running on Elon’s GPUs. If you’re using Codex, then say hello to Microsoft for me. Let’s just presume that everyone hates everyone and get back to talking tech. Bullshit argument. If people care about shit, they might not eliminate everything, they do what they reasonably can. Do what you can, if you can, how you can, when you can. Not, ohhhh, "If you drink water, you're still using MS servers, I'm very intelligent". I thought that meme was well understood by now. Wake up, the people in power are corrupt regardless of their political orientation. There are no saints in politics. This has been true since times immemorial with few exceptions. That's the worst excuse to be non-political. I hate most politicians, but you can't just act like they are equally harmful. Some politicians are way, way more harmful than the others, even the corrupted ones. "Everything is political" is what people say when they want everything to be political. We don't have to make LLM models political. You do it because you enjoy soapboxing. It's perfectly reasonable for people who enjoy this technology to ask you to keep it in spaces which are dedicated to soapboxing, like Reddit. Not HackerNews. The owner of this LLM is sieg heiling around, openly supports extremists across the EU, actively helped Russia in its invasion of Ukraine. Someone pays for his product. What do you think, will this have political consequences or will giving this guy have no effect whatsoever? [flagged] I'm genuinely flabbergasted to read this here. There's no possible comparison between Musk and Mamdani's gestures, at least from the perspective of someone who grew up in a region occupied by the Nazis during the war and had him grand parents deported. Regarding EU politician support, it's really not what you describe. The politicians he's been supporting are the ones in the rightmost spectrum of the political chessboard in each case I've witnessed. There isn't a car I've witnessed where he supported someone center right, or left. These false equivalences are dangerous. The comparison between the gestures is that neither are intended to be a literal Nazi salute and anyone who genuinely thinks either of them was has an IQ issue. And obviously he's supporting right wing causes, because they are the ones he agrees with. Reid Hoffman only supports left wing causes. > i.e. anyone not the far left is an extremist He literally involved himself with Tommy Robinson and Reform UK [1], as well as supported German AfD [2]. It doesn't get more far-right than that - the AfD is so far-right that even other European far-right parties such as France's RN distance themselves. [1] https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c70ep8lp4jjo [2] https://www.tagesschau.de/inland/bundestagswahl/parteien/mus... Dude, no they're not. Tommy Robinson is a grifter, but Reform has a pretty good chance of winning the next UK general election People are realising the current omni-party centrist/centre-left politics and economics have failed utterly. This is moving the goalposts from "Elon supports far-right politicians" which was cited with sources, you're just going "well he's right to" > Reform has a pretty good chance of winning the next UK general election This does not change the fact that Reform is a far-right party (and, like almost all far-right parties in the Western nations, one that has been linked to Russian corruption [1]). > People are realising the current omni-party centrist/centre-left politics and economics have failed utterly. Lol as if far-right politics are any better. Milei is running Argentinia into the ground, so is Bukele with El Salvador, and so is Trump in the US. The only ones who are somewhat of an exception is Italy with Meloni, who managed to dance on the very thin line separating far-right ideology from inevitable disaster. "Far Right" in the sense of "The Guardian says so". And one bloke getting arrested doesn't prove the whole party is Russia-funded, despite that being the catch-all left wing excuse every time they lose an election. People in El Salvador generally seem pretty happy with a 98% reduction in the murder rate. For Argentina, it's too early to tell. We'll have to wait until the shock therapy has finished. How can an LLM be apolitical if they had to choose a set of text to feed it, which choice is inherently political? Especially when the whole thing of grok is to have a certain very specific bias? Let's be empirical about this. [Grok is the least biased of the frontier LLMs.](https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/interactive/2026/0...) I agree with you directionally: the choice of how the weights are shaped can be politically motivated. This is why I prefer models where the lab has chosen to preference fact over opinion or certain political values. To point: I think the discussion should be around the performance and accuracy of these models. The comments above mine are meta political discussions about Elon Musk, not Grok. Who says where the 0 point of a left-right spectrum is? (If it's a spectrum even. We try to map multiple dimensions to this single axis for some reason, according to some particular countries' party-division). Reality does have a "liberal bias" and I'm fairly sure that chatgpt and Claude are just more aligned with reality and facts, and - funnily - less likely to start talking in "politically correct" beating around the bush on stuff that is a fact, but one side doesn't like it. Well, in a world where "the 2020 elections were stolen" or "climate change is a hoax" are right-leaning positions, being "balanced" does not mean being neutral. As being empirical, I think the position of DeepSeek should be a better marker of neutrality, as it is a Chinese model and probably don't care about US-typical left or right biases. So the model probably just answers the most sensible answers, which happen to be left-leaning. As the joke goes, "reality has left-leaning bias". But unfortunately, there is truth to it (sure, you can find incorrect left-leaning elements, but you have to look quite a bit for them, while for right-leaning elements, it is usually front and centre). You don’t exist in a vacuum. Pretending the politics doesn’t exist is itself a political position. Excluding it is how we’ve ended up with technically impressive but socially awful systems. 1. Be offended by political comments. 2. Make political comment about political comments. Thank you. I too am interested in the technical aspects, not how many guardrails it can hit against Fable, like, who cares? As long as it can get me (more) uncensored access without killing itself over biology or chemistry, it's a good model to me. I can't believe the top comment is about some political reply garbage, as if that actually matters day to day for coders; in reality I want to get my work done. It clearly matters. I personally love the fact that doing nazi salutes, pushing Nazi propaganda and saying racist things ruins your reputation to the point where every one of your product releases are tainted by association. But I'm proudly anti-fascist. I come from a family that fought against them about 75 years ago and I don't like to see fascists and their unprincipled followers succeed. Not everyone has a knack for history. Hey there, you're not alone. I think it matters to make the support explicit when it comes to this matter. I'm fully open to reopening the books and discussing why we made these things unacceptable. I'm of the "let the world burn if that's the cost of free speech" kind. But you can't get on a stage and do that salute, say racist things, push Nazi propaganda, and expect people to accept any association with your name on it. That's not speaking your mind on my book, that's a call to action, especially when you are doing it literally on a stage. A line on the sand this may be, but it's my line, and I'm glad to see there are others. I'll take the downvotes with you, but I feel that you have to know that you are not alone thinking like this. I really fucking hate this obsession with nazis, it obviously doesn't come from a good place. It comes from a place of false righteousness. Nazis are the secular Satan, the representative of all that is evil. And in doing so, people (including you) delegitimise the experiences of the victims of the nazis. Jews have long served a mythological role in European culture (either as good or as evil, mostly as evil) and this obsession takes that to new heights. It is, quite frankly, nauseating. You have a pedo president with a militia that capture people on arbitrary criteria and put them into camps without a trial and sometimes outside of the country and outside of its legislation. Wake up. Without mentioning the offensiveness of your comment, what exactly made you think I was American? That discussion is not interesting and is not going anywhere. Sorry I'm stopping it. It feels like you are doing exactly what you criticize by putting "Nazi" as some sort of Disney villains. The reality is that the majority of the Nazi, the real ones, the ones who made the Nazi atrocities possible, where just humans like you and me, and they were "just" supporting the party because they've eaten the propaganda. Some people that are called "Nazi" today are often __way more Nazi__ than these average Nazi citizen. I would say the opposite as you: people like you put "Nazi" as the secular Satan, and because of that, real dangerous behavior can be ignored, the same real dangerous behavior that led, step by step, to the real Nazi atrocities. They must be incredibly proud of you for inventing nazis in your imagination and then fighting them. Stunning and brave. > it’s Chinese and backed by god knows who, and no one cares Existentially weary infosec guy voice I promise you some of us care, and the rest of you will realize why in a year or so At least at this point most people using them are using them running on western infrastructure. A backdoored llm would be an interesting thing to see. Like every time it realizes it was running in claude code it installed a backdoor or something. For now seems to be theoretical. I'm genuinely curious about your view on this. Ziphu AI release pretty capable open weights models. As long as we don't feed information that is confidential or become overy reliant on the tech that's on someone else's computer - what are the other riaks that you see in using Chinese models? My only complaint is that people have been tricked into thinking complaining online is taking action. The complaints are the equivalent to shouting at the TV. agreed; i am not saying that we should not care about morals, but HN could really strive to be one level higher in its knowledge of ethics than 'using grok4.5 is supporting $evil', because if you go that chain then 'using A\ is supporting spacex/elon hence A\ models are poison' also seemingly stands I think Anthropic buying compute from Colossus despite the ongoing air pollution case [1] is a stain on them and is another reason not to use them [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/16/climate/xai-musk-mississi... Whether you like it or not, software is inherently political. Most aspects of our lives are. The fact you're using GLM there's some underlying political reason (yes, my guess in this case is cost, which is also political) and mentioning it's Chinese backed is equally political. You may not care, but it's political. When a model calls itself mechahitler and says there is a white genocide when there so obviously isn't, of course it becomes political. If we are not okay with supporting fascists, then in my opinion, we as humans are obliged to call out the issues in the same breath as the technical issues/advancements. You reap what you sow. What I want to know is why so many people are lamenting actions having consequences? and what are the consequences? angry people on message boards? According to gemini, musk has made over 600B since trump took power. you think a few hundred people in this comment section calling him a nazi has any effect on him? You’ve taken my comment out of the context I was replying to, so none of what you’ve said is remotely relevant to what I said. Complaining about people being political is equally pathetic. If it bothers you just ignore it GLM may be backed by God knows who, but it is Grok who's backed by an open fascist. No one cares about GLM (not true, I see comments on censorship and data theft and the CCP in threads about Chinese models all the time, but it seems that people only get annoyed when it is about Musk). Maybe it Elon Musk wasn't all the time saying fascist bullshit and trying to manipulate feelings and opinions everywhere, people won't care. The main danger from AI's models is not the models themselves, but all the "apolitical" nerds precisely that ignore politics and just focus on tech. 1. to have a healthy HN, we can't have this amount of political discussion under Grok 4.5. I am politically very liberal and not a fan at all of elon, but this ratio of technical vs. politics drives away the best discussion and will reddit-ify HN. This is my primary argument. 2. also, talk to people more! elon is very controversial, and that means that people's opinion of him differs a lot even in the more liberal crowd! i am not saying that we should be apolitical, but the HN bubble is bubbling, and the bubbling bubble will bubble away good technical AND political discussion. we can weaken elon's cause much better if we have a good grasp of people's actual opinion of elon and we go defuse that Who would have thought that doing Nazi salutes on a stage would lead to this. yes elon has gone crazy; yes trump is a convicted felon; mention it, and move on, fixating on these is not the way to actually defeat elon or trump as shown by the recent elections. there are better things to do to weaken elon and trump's cause Yes, like not buying or using their products, their political supporters products and telling others to do the same. This has been proven over and over again to work. Thats why, dont use Grok, dont buy a Tesla, dont support the mega corps that have bent a knee to them, dont buy Java licenses use open source, etc etc etc. If it makes you feel any better, note that a good number of those comments are just bot comments, although not yet as much as on Reddit. People just need to get off the internet, go outside touch some grass and realize you are being ginned up by bad actors on both sides. Outside of your bubble most people are actually still nice. I get that people in the US need to be apathetic towards politics to even survive in today's hopelessly divided and misinformed society, as it is a taboo subject that ends careers and family connections. But the rest of the world lives in a more free speech society. There's a whole world where you don't have to avoid politics and you can be freely anti-fascist, without worrying that the self proclaimed hardcore nerd in the corner breaks his silence and starts yelling to HR that we have to stop criticising his billionaire idols and focus on things that matter less. > But the rest of the world lives in a more free speech society. Dane here, this is not just specious, it's inaccurate. We have far fewer free speech rights in Europe than they do in the US. Tens of thousands of people all over Europe are arrested and imprisoned each year in Europe for speech which would be considered protected in the US. [This man was arrested for calling a politician an idiot.](https://www.ft.com/content/27626fa8-3379-4b69-891d-379401675...) [Another German citizen was investigated for calling another politician fat.](https://thegoldreport.com/news/german-police-investigating-u...) [This UK citizen was arrested for re-tweeting a meme and refusing re-education classes.](https://fee.org/articles/uk-man-arrested-for-malicious-commu...) You're not fighting "fascism" by posting memes on Reddit. You're using computers and electronics and networks built by China, which is currently conducting ethnic genocide, and regularly utilises slave labour, among many other atrocities. For posterity, Grok 4.5 isn't fascism. You need to spend just a little bit of time reading up about the history of fascism because you demean the entire concept and threat with these histrionics. If you keep crying wolf, no one will care when real danger emerges. Posting a swastika is not free speech. All the rest, you have in the US as well (libel, etc). [This is what he re-tweeted.](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/70/Swastika...) It might be in bad taste but arresting him and insisting he undergo re-education is crazy, and I can't believe you would defend it. No one gets arrested in the US for tw-tweeting memes like this. As for the rest, you're free to call politicians fat idiots without being arrested in the US, and once again, I cannot believe you would defend arresting people for that. I haven't looked at the particular case, but nazism is a particular thing - given Europe's history it's there for a very good reason in most EU countries. I don't know about the 'fat idiot', but in most EU countries that's more than fine so I have a bit of a hard time believing that was the sole reason - public figures are fair target for stuff like that. The limit is actually planning or inciting violence against someone or a group - again, the same as in the US. >> We have far fewer free speech rights in Europe than they do in the US. I'm in the UK. Mean tweets lead straight to jail now. I can say "I'm an atheist and I hate organised religion" without losing my job. Can Americans do that? I can say "I hate the orange clown (insert any other politician) and actively dislike everyone that voted for him", without getting a call from HR. Can they? I can't even enter the USA if I share some of the social media accounts like I'm legally required to do. The 'free speech absolutists' are all calling for censorship in this thread. So much for free speech. Yes Americans can do both, unless their boss dislikes it, but that applies the world over. Um yeah you can do all of that without legal consequences. HR is not the government. Are these your best examples? I just don't think that I can ever trust an xAI model knowing that they are actively trying to shape its replies to fit a political narrative. How can you trust their models to be reliable in a business setting with the foreknowledge that their models are being nudged around in the backend? Has it occurred to you that _all_ model providers are actively trying to shape their models' replies to fit their preferred political narratives? It's not the preferred political narrative of the model that I worry about. It's how brazen they are about altering their models to achieve it. It makes me wonder what else they're altering. I have trust issues with OpenAI and Anthropic as well, but with those companies, at least I know their motives are purely profit driven. I don't have that assurance with xAI. Implying you prefer your manipulation to be subtle an not discussed Arguing that "at least John is doing [clown thing] in the open" just dilutes whatever leverage John's supporters had against John on that thing. I find myself unwanting to be on the side of people who willingly give up leverage. I don’t think that is necessarily a bad preference if this was an actual dichotomy. Not all types of manipulation is equal, and when you at least try to hide it shows at least some respect for the user. That said, I don‘t believe this dichotomy is real. Personally I don‘t use AI, political manipulation is however only a relatively tiny part of my reasoning for opting out. > It's how brazen they are about altering their models to achieve it. We know all the models insert shadow prompts to nudge the answers in preferred political directions. How much more "brazen" can you get than that? Nobody is giving you fat-free results that just apply the models to your prompts. its not just one guys opinion though Who cares whether it’s one guy’s opinion or several people’s group think? Everyone is editing the prompts. Who cares whether it’s one person ruthlessly dictating or an entire population working to improve? Both tyrants and liberal democracies set policies. More like a dictator versus a Poltiburo. If the “entire population” was voting on the shadow prompts of the other models they would look very different. Considering the recent election results, they would look more like Grok. Obviamente people care when the one guy is notorious for having particularly shitty/edgy opinions. I mean one of the guys got fired by his own board for lying and is still calling the shots. Another guy sued the Pentagon during a war and we're still letting him act like a nation state. Musk's empire of personality cult is like, idk, on slightly more cocaine? I'm having a hard time being like: "oh, that's the bad self-appointed, self-dealing would be God Emperor. they're not all like that. why some of my very best friends are cluster B psycho con men with crime funding." > at least I know their motives are purely profit driven. What profit ? They are blatantly focusing on investment narratives, politics, control, stifling competition. Profit is like a footnote at this point. Gemini was giving us ethnically diverse images of Nazis. Was that profit driven or political? It was driven by stupidy It was driven by a need to remove biases (and likely real racism) from the models. They were trained on internet content How is changing history and making a a group of objectively white people black "removing bias" ˋ? What it is is literally bias. Like thinking Pi could be 4. Removing bias ends with truth, not these crazy wonky results. So you have a huge number of photos of white people in the training data set, but other ethnicities exist. So to make the otherwise white-biased dataset less biased, you try to e.g. add a hidden system prompt that whenever the user asks for a group of people (unspecified ethnicity), it may instead ask for "mixed ethnicities" or whatever. Ask for a group of Nazis, and that's it - this is how models work. No "LGBTQ liberal" propaganda is needed to explain it. Unlike what Musk is doing. Do you think they deliberately trained the model to produce images of diverse Nazis? It is clearly a byproduct of trying to correct an unaligned, bigoted model, and that is an example of overcorrection. > Removing bias ends with truth, not these crazy wonky results. Unfortunately there is an awful lot of untruth on the internet, if you hadn't noticed. This necessitates some correction through post-training.
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