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.
The issue is the sheer odiousness of Musk's political machinations. Claude has never tried to inject racist "white genocide" conspiracy theories into every unrelated conversation. You don't have to be much of a pearl-clutcher to find that shit (or a thousand other things that Musk has involved himself in) extremely disturbing.
I'm a longtime space guy, so Musk has been on my radar for decades -- since long before he was a billionaire. He actually first hit my radar even before founding SpaceX, when he made a "Mars Greenhouse" presentation to the Mars Society in 2001 (I'm a founding member). Since then, I've built up a huge amount of respect for his technical accomplishments, which are indeed extraordinary. I wish to hell he'd stayed apolitical -- if he had, then we could indeed just talk tech.
But he didn't, and we can't. There was a time when the absolute best rockets in the world were German -- but if it's 1942 and you're talking about sourcing rockets from the Luftwaffe, then I hope to hell you'd be focused on a few things beyond just the technology itself.
>I've built up a huge amount of respect for his technical accomplishments
Are these his actual accomplishments or is he just taking credit for the accomplishments of others in his companies. Just like he took credit for being a founder of Tesla and pushing aside the actual founders.
So what are his actual technical accomplishments? Other than marketing and promising FSD is ready tomorrow or we'd land on Mars in 2026, or getting Billions from tax payers in subsidies that allowed him to be as successful as he is ---- what are his actual technical accomplishments?
Has he invented anything, e.g. a new space bracket, or some better radiation shielding or anything that's in heavy use now at SpaceX, Tesla, xAI, etc?
Ya maybe. But gemini didn't want to make all white families (or even white nazi soldiers). Isn't that just as racist and more importantly, counterfactual? Or is that good, because we should all strive to make our personal lives look like The Odyssey?
The world is more nuanced (or should be). But up till Trump (who is a loathsome cheap crook, so Im not saying this in support, but stating a fact) the whole Silicon valley other than Karp and Thiel was basically one hivemind. And btw that's ok, they/you are allowed to have your worldviews. But don't mistake morality for preference similarity. Fine, you like your elves black, your models chinese, your religion from the Arab peninsula and your sexual preferences lean towards the rainbow (the cliche right wing characterization of a "lefty" in 2026), you have every right to have that view. And also every right to say Elon suck (and yes, he is marketing over matter, I agree, but he is the only serious westerd large scale industrialist). But then let's not pretend that the reason why Dario or Sam are "ok" isn't because you're lifestyle and worldviews are more aligned with them. And not because of an objective real metric which makes Elon bad and Altman better (example, pick any tech CEO/founder other than Karp or Luckey).
No. I'm saying people make this whole charade about being rational where in reality we are much more preference-driven. And usually the algorithm is: 1. do i agree with this person and 2. lets build arguments that support the affiliation and make it sound objective.
I will admit this is not always the case. But humans weren't built for consistency. And my point is merely (was making it to another commentator in this thread), that Elon gets more flak up here not because he is inherently less moral than, say Larry Page, but because more people on HN are ideologically closer to the other side of the political spectrum. Which, I will again reiterate, is fine. But then I would expect (or actually, see first paragraph - I wouldn't) that the vitriol would be consistenly dished. But it isn't. Now to be sure, partly this is due to Elon's move into politics and his personality, but I doubt he would have got the same amount of hate if he went into politics in the Biden administration.
"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?
> actively helped Russia in its invasion of Ukraine
That's the opposite. Without Musk, Russia might have succeeded back in 2022. All other communication methods failed other than Starlink, which Musk provided early on.
In terms of concrete actions, Musk has been highly supportive of Ukraine. For that, Ukrainians have been very grateful to him.
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.
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).
There are empirical answers to climate change and election tampering. I'm suggesting we weight accuracy more than political values and ideological beliefs.
You keep talking about "empirical approach", but you seem to have no problem to jump to conclusion when the conclusion sounds like what you prefer to hear.
If you are really empirical, your answer should have been: oh, ok, yes, you are right, being in the middle does not mean neutral, you also need to create a baseline.
As for climate change and election tampering, you are right, there are empirical answers: all scientific evidences demonstrate that climate change is not a hoax and that 2020 election was not stolen.
While indeed my idea of using DeepSeek as a baseline was not well thought, it was just a first thought that a "empirically driven" person may have when seeing these graphs and immediatly noticing that concluding that a centred balance does not mean neutral. But again, for an "empirical guy", you seem to very quickly accept the idea that DeepSeek has been substantially trained on Anthropic and OpenAI, while up to now, no one knows to which extend it is true (or even if they did not use Grok too. Funny, isn't it, that you seem to forget about this one).
Left leaning positions: "there should be no Billionaires", "companies are inherently evil", "there should be no borders", "the US is currently a fascist country". Just as bonkers, so now what? Or rather, I think it's just as easy to find incorrect left-leaning elements.
The majority of these are not what left-leaning people are saying, it is what right-leaning persons say left-leaning persons are saying.
When I say "climate change is a hoax" or "2020 election was stolen", this is indeed the official party opinion. If you ask Trump "do you believe that", he will say "yes".
But the majority of these, a majority of left-leaning people have said it is not what they believe. And a lot of them are way less "empirically incorrect" than you say. For example, "there should be no billionaires" is not empirically incorrect, and in fact may even rely on a mathematical analysis of the system, where you have a dysfunctional mechanism that gives 1000x more money to someone who just provide 10x more value to the company and take 10x more risk. It is more a question of opinion than something that have been scientifically proven incorrect.
You have your opinions on what the discussion should be, clearly other people have different opinions. Why should your opinion be weighted more highly than theirs?
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.
So by this very definition it's mathematically wrong to have a single axis for all that.
Also, median person or position? The first is definable, the latter is hardly. There is no neutral/middle position in binary questions. What's a neutral position in abortion? Only allow half of them based on coin flips?
I suggest we do not attempt to find the 0 point of any spectrum but instead focus on empirical accuracy based on data and research.
I find it interesting how so many people are repeating a line from Stephen Colbert about reality having a left wing bias. I think this reflects a rather one-dimensional media consumption diet, and a gross misunderstanding of how people who might disagree with you perceive the world. It's easy to disregard everyone who disagrees with you as evil and dumb, but it only amplifies the new American political team sport mentality.
The line may be from Colbert (I don't know the guy, never watched any of his shows, but I guess you don't believe that because you are sooo empirical), but, as I've said, it turns out to be empirically true.
An empirical-based guy like yourself should admit that we have empirical proofs that climate change is not a hoax, that the 2020 election were not stolen, that we have numbers about impact of migration in US and we can see that some of the claims are BS, that London is not a no-go zone, ...
Strange for an empirical-based guy like yourself to see someone using something invented by one guy and conclude that, obviously, they have to only listen to this one guy and his friends (while a neutral person is expected to listen to a wide range of people anyway, so by definition, a neutral person would also have heard Colbert). Where are your facts and proofs on this? I guess it does not count when it is about your own bias, does it?
It's pointless to try to separate things as political or non-political. You always have politics when you have deep disagreement, especially on values, among people who interact.
Keeping things non-political at least implicitly means you're fine with the status quo, and sometimes a community is in agreement about the status quo being fine enough to work inside it.
There is no shortcut by simply discouraging or removing "politics". If the community is divided, there is no way around the friction. You can either fork off separate communities, or work on smoothing out the differences.
That's like saying "there's no way to remove emotion from a conversation". Of course not, emotion is always present. But adults practice emotional regulation and work hard to prevent it from interfering with relationships (i.e. not screaming when you're angry).
Sure, politics colors many people's worldview and it's hard for them to put it in a box - that means we shouldn't try?
In a better world, we'd focus on critical thinking, being less sure of yourself, openness and active listening. We'd teach people to work to think objectively and to identify the differences between technical opinions, emotional and political ones.
We wouldn't say "well, this is hard, so let's just do whatever".
You can try, but it only works when you have shared values. When deep values are contested it's harder to put differences aside. For example, I don't want to bring up hot button issues, but some years ago there was a wave of politics entering pull requests and mailing lists where software is developed. Many just wanted to keep the politics out. They didn't realize there is no way of playing politics by not playing. So they got outplayed by those who know what politics is. There's a threshold for everybody. By saying that you can neatly box it away, you implicitly admit that the thing is not very important or concerning to you. But instead of daring to say that outloud you just say let's not do politics.
Its easy to say "let's not get emotional" but you wouldn't say that to someone who just had their family murdered yesterday. There is a threshold. Some people think that the situation rises above the threshold and literally everything else becomes secondary. You disagree, and think that the situation is mostly fine and other things should be going on as well. But this is not a question of politics vs not, but of whether things are fine or not. It's fine to think that things are fine. I'm talking very meta here. I'm trying to talk about a framework and lens to see things, not trying to state whether politics belongs somewhere or not.
I feel like when they decided the model was "too woke" so it would be a good idea to make it "MechaHitler" was when the not making it political ship sailed.
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.
there is enough corruption and evil in politics for me to just refuse to play the game, even the game you suggest of choosing the least evil of two clearly evil options.
If you try to play that game your mind gets hijacked like all the political discussion in this commend section. Thinking you are fighting the good fight when you're just siding with evil either way you lean.
Want to bring real change to the world? Fix the stuff you can, go out there in your local community and volunteer. Commenting on the internet won't do anything, neither is getting into political arguments over dinner with acquintances.
"Keep your nose out of trouble and no trouble will come to you".
I used to be a hobbit, too, when I was 19.
It does NOT work. Politics is everywhere, we're social animals.
The only winning move is to do whatever we can to protect democracy and pick the least damaging idiot, and if we accidentally pick the most damaging idiot, get them out of power as quickly as we can.
and what has come of your new stance since you renounced being a hobbit?
I'm not a hobbit, I don't particularly stay out of trouble, I fight injustice where I can, practically. Following political narratives and having political arguments with other people who will take no action except vote does not bring real change.
Changing someone's political stance is nigh impossible, but even if you do manage to do it to a few people, they won't become zealots like you and propagate the change. You might need a couple hundred hours of discourse to change a single person's mind and in the grand scheme of things, 1-2 people are insignificant.
Online zealotry is just blowing off steam. True political action happens in real life and most of it is just mobilizing people to do what they know deep down is right but real life or laziness stop them from doing
And of course it can fail. But just saying "nothing works" and "everyone is the same" is even worse, it's just guaranteed loss.
Not true. And an excuse for allowing all corruption because 'it's just like that'. There are a lot of non-corrupt politicians. You just have to look a bit because mostly they don't yell as loud as the corrupt ones
People have a series of rationalizations. People say for example that science
and technology have their own logic, that they are in fact autonomous. This
particular rationalization is profoundly false. It is not true that science
marches on in defiance of human will, independent of human will, that just is
not the case. But it is comfortable, as I said: it leads to the position that
"if I don't do it, someone else will."
Of course if one takes that as an ethical principle then obviously it can serve
as a license to do anything at all. "People will be murdered; if I don't do it,
someone else will." "Women will be raped; if I don't do it, someone else will."
That is just a license for violence.
Other people say, and I think this is a widely used rationalization, that
fundamentally the tools we work on are "mere" tools; This means that whether
they get use for good or evil depends on the person who ultimately buys them
and so on.
There's nothing bad about working in computer vision, for example. Computer
vision may very well some day be used to heal people who would otherwise die.
Of course, it could also be used to guide missiles, cruise missiles for
example, to their destination, and all that. You see, the technology itself is
neutral and value-free and it just depends how one uses it. And besides --
consistent with that -- we can't know, we scientists cannot know how it is
going to be used. So therefore we have no responsibility.
Well, that is false. It is true that a computer, for example, can be used for
good or evil. It is true that a helicopter can be used as a gunship and it can
also be used to rescue people from a mountain pass. And if the question arises
of how a specific device is going to be used, in what I call an abstract ideal
society, then one might very well say one cannot know.
But we live in a concrete society, [and] with concrete social and historical
circumstances and political realities in this society, it is perfectly obvious
that when something like a computer is invented, then it is going to be adopted
will be for military purposes. It follows from the concrete realities in which
we live, it does not follow from pure logic. But we're not living in an
abstract society, we're living in the society in which we in fact live.
If you look at the enormous fruits of human genius that mankind has developed
in the last 50 years, atomic energy and rocketry and flying to the moon and
coherent light, and it goes on and on and on -- and then it turns out that
every one of these triumphs is used primarily in military terms. So it is not
reasonable for a scientist or technologist to insist that he or she does not
know -- or cannot know -- how it is going to be used.