[serial_dev]

Alexa consistently fails with the simplest of questions.

Only thing it can do is set a timer, turn off a light and play music.

It is still nice, but it’s so frustrating when a question pops into my mind, and I accidentally ask Alexa just to get reminded yet again how useless it is for everything but the most basic tasks.

And no, I won’t pay 240 dollars a year so that I can get a proper response to my random questions that I realistically have only about once a week.

[WaltPurvis]

> Only thing it can do is set a timer, turn off a light

And it can't even do that without an Internet connection. As someone who experiences annoyingly frequent outages, it never ceases to boggle my mind that I have a $200 computer, with an 8" monitor and everything, that can't even understand "set a timer for 10 minutes" on its own.

[prmoustache]

Why did you guys bought this in the first place?

[serial_dev]

Fair question, playing music and timers are nice, but their AI is abysmal so you can imo not ask it to do anything else. I previously worked for a smart home company so I wanted to test out product’s integration with Alexa, so we have some at home. I’m planning to get rid of them, though, and only leave one in the kitchen.

[WaltPurvis]

Originally bought it for an elderly parent in assisted living; wasn't as useful as we'd hoped; repurposed it as a kitchen-timer/music-box, for which it works adequately as long as the Internet connection is up. I would not recommend anyone else buy one.

[seviu]

and despite all this, I would pay 240$ a year so that Siri can reliably do what Alexa does today

oh the irony

[ghaff]

Alexa has pretty much zero value for me.

Being able to just order something with zero shipping has a ton of value. I could drive down the street but it would still be an hour at the end of the day.

Video streaming has some value but there are a lot of options.

[bboygravity]

Just pay 0 USD and use Grok app for free?

By far the best thing currently available.

[echelon]

I'm predicting that Grok fails simply due to half (?) the software engineering populating not wanting to use anything Musk has developed.

Grok has to be more than n-times (2x?) as good as anything else on the market to attain any sort of lead. Falling short of that, people will simply choose alternatives out of brand preference.

This might be the first case of a company having difficulty selling its product, even if it's a superior product, due to its leader being disliked. I'm not aware of any other instances of this.

Maybe if Musk switches to selling B2B and to the US government...

If you piss off half of your possible user base, adoption becomes incredibly difficult. This is why tech and business leaders should stay out of politics.

[lelanthran]

> I'm predicting that Grok fails simply due to half (?) the software engineering populating not wanting to use anything Musk has developed.

I think that's a wildly optimistic figure on your part.

Lets assume that developers are split almost 50/50 on politics.

Of that 50% that follows the politics you approve off, lets err on the side of your argument and assume that 50% of those actually care enough to change their purchases because of it.

Of the 25% we have left, lets once again err on the side of your argument and assume 50% care enough about the politics to disregard any technology superiority in favour of sticking to their political leanings.

Of the 12.5% left, how many do you think are going to say "well, let me get beaten by my competitors because I am taking a stand!", especially when the "beaten" means a comparative drop in income?

After all, after nazi-salute, mecha-hitler, etc blew up, by just how much did the demand for Teslas fall?

The fraction of the population that cares enough about these (on both sides) things are, thankfully, single-digit percentages. Maybe even less.

[manishsharan]

>>After all, after nazi-salute, mecha-hitler, etc blew up, by just how much did the demand for Teslas fall?

I had been saving up for a Tesla but now I am looking elsewhere. I think a lot of people are doing the same here in Canada. You can grok the actual numbers if you want.

[rs186]

Yeah, a simple example is to just look at how many companies/universities have ChatGPT vs Grok subscriptions internally. I can imagine that many people would have a problem with subscribing to Grok, even if its performance is comparable.

[redditor98654]

Hmmm, thinking aloud, Oracle?

[qcnguy]

> This is why tech and business leaders should stay out of politics.

Yeah but they don't stay out of politics, do they? Gemini painting black Nazis was a deliberate choice to troll the vast majority of the population who isn't woke extremists.

My family subscribes to Grok and it's because of politics, not in spite of it. The answer gap isn't large today but I support Musk's goal of building a truth seeking AI, and he is right about a lot of things in politics too. Grok might well fail financially, the current AI market is too competitive and the world probably doesn't need so many LLM companies. But it's good someone wants AI to say what's true and not merely what's popular in its training set.

[kentm]

Mechahitler, the South African genocide debacle, explicitly checking Elons Twitter feed, “You get your news from infowars” system prompts, etc have basically made Grok not a real option for me. I do not want to use a product that is specifically being engineered to be a right wing disinformation machine.

And no, generic brand safety mishaps are not the same; everyone is not doing this.