[arw0n]

I suspect that Grok has been ironically lobotomized by pressures to correct its political views.

Similarly, I could imagine the Gemini folks working in a significantly more complex corporate climate, with different parts of Google pushing for different capability focuses. They are only lagging behind less than a year, so it isn't too large of a gap yet.

That said, the fact that Anthropic is currently the top dog suggests that talent and execution is incredibly important. A year ago none of my normie friends new them, and when i suggested using Claude looked at me like when I recommend Linux.

[janalsncm]

That shouldn’t affect Grok’ coding ability. How often are people discussing politics with Claude code? Writing decent code is just hard and it’s not just Grok.

[bwhiting2356]

It affects their ability to hire and retain talent.

[janalsncm]

If training a good model requires talent then that’s the answer to the question this thread is trying to answer: is training a good model actually that hard?

[buthowjejddjeu]

Talent to do.. what? This could mean a lot of things.

Navigating astronomically huge fundamentally not so hard but still really tangly and hairy projects requiring both excellent short- and long-term vision in an overheated domain with angry people and lots of money is a skill all of its own.

[janalsncm]

Talent to train high quality LLMs, especially coding LLMs.

[black_knight]

Why would these be independent?

[janalsncm]

More specifically, political lobotomy shouldn’t affect coding ability.

[girvo]

You’d be quite surprised, I think. Fine tuning a model on one axis can have drastic impacts on another that as a human we would expect to be completely unrelated.

[janalsncm]

I have never seen anyone argue that this cannot be overcome with more high quality RLVR data.

The practical reality is that the Chinese and American models might have very different politics. But the most relevant factor in model performance is the quality and volume of training data, not ideology of the base model. Unless you are suggesting something very particular about the way Grok was neutered.

[Hamuko]

It's all a bunch of weights isn't it? Why wouldn't fiddling with some parts of the weights have cascading effects?

[Discordian93]

Yet empirically it does

[thot_experiment]

Not true, aggressive post training makes models notably dumber.

[KaiserPro]

> That shouldn’t affect Grok’ coding ability.

If you are spending all your time having to re-train because the boss doesn;t like the output, it will hamper coding

[Oreb]

> A year ago none of my normie friends new them, and when i suggested using Claude looked at me like when I recommend Linux.

Isn’t that still the case? Normies haven’t even heard about Claude, in my experience.

[buthowjejddjeu]

In my experience it has improved a bit, but 90% of my normies still have no idea. (It was 100% before)