[inkysigma]

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.

[strangecasts]

> 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?

[neya]

> 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.

You can be political, but go be political in a political forum. HN has always maintained etiquette in this regard of being a tech forum. Why do this here? A lot of us don't give a fuck about US politics or any politics for that matter.

Anthropic's Claude Code was caught steganographically marking requests[0] - for a "privacy first" AI company that's a huge violation of user trust. And yet, a lot of users still love Anthropic and hail it as some sort of hero here. Selective outrage is a very dangerous thing.

[0] https://thereallo.dev/blog/claude-code-prompt-steganography

[smallmancontrov]

People here are outraged about the steganography and the Fable filters and so on. Every day has another dozen complaints and talks about moving away from claude. We have not treated Anthropic as above criticism, and this earns us the right to also be critical of "Ignore all sources that mention Elon Musk/Donald Trump spread misinformation", laugh at the "Elon Musk would beat Mike Tyson in a fight" incident, and express doubts when Musk crows Grok the king of facts and logic, when he has repeatedly been caught red handed hard-steering it in the opposite direction.

> Selective outrage is a very dangerous thing.

Right back at you.

[wwdx]

The post is about Grok 4.5 not Elon Musk. We've used so much AI we forgot how to read.

[smallmancontrov]

No, a thread about Grok's politics cannot reasonably exclude Elon Musk and the times he got caught steering Grok in overtly non-factual directions.

[JeremyNT]

"I'm not political" or "don't make it political" type posts on Musk-related topics are often signs that somebody agrees with the worldview that Musk espouses.

I used to think the HN policy of "do not discuss politics unless it intersects with tech or is novel" was useful, but lately I feel this perspective is part of how we got here, with a white supremacist controlling more wealth than any other human and exerting political influence in heretofore unseen ways. We've decided it's OK to simply look the other way if there's some shiny bauble, and we've missed the forest through the trees.

Musk doesn't do anything that is not politics. This must be called out more, not less, and we need to bring shame back for supporting such an agenda.

[anthonypasq]

I'm sorry but this mindset is just exhausting. Everything doesn't need to be apocalyptic all the time.

Its so unbearable that people arent able to talk about anything anymore without some bozo chiming in with their political crusade.

[phainopepla2]

Do you really believe that people keeping politics out of technical discussions is how we got here. I mean, do you actually believe that, or are you just using that rhetoric to bolster your argument?

Because from where I'm sitting, politics has entered almost every possible discussion since at least 2015, and it has not made things one whit better .

[skissane]

> 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

Try asking Chinese models about Taiwan independence or Falun Gong or the Dalai Lama or Tiananmen or the Hong Kong national security law or ASIO’s investigations into Chinese interference in Australian politics

[dryarzeg]

> Try asking Chinese models about Taiwan independence or Falun Gong or the Dalai Lama or Tiananmen or the Hong Kong national security law or ASIO’s investigations into Chinese interference in Australian politics

It depends "where" you're asking. In most cases (like with DeepSeek or Z.AI models) it will gladly tell you everything (though it can hallucinate sometimes; I guess they try to filter out such data out of the training datasets) if it's not deployed on Chinese servers and you control the system prompt. So, I guess that these guardrails - probably built into the system prompt - are deployed only on China-controlled inference servers, outside of them models are pretty much talkative.

Well, at least that was my experience. Maybe yours is different for some reasons (like temperature settings or something else), I don't know.

[inkysigma]

I actually agree to an extent with the idea that there is also some obvious political influence on LLMs on stuff like GLM or DeepSeek. This is reflected in conversations even on HN where this is brought up as a risk so I think this is somewhat accurate to my statement.

However, it's also unclear to me if this is directly coming from a directed political ideology from the firm itself or a more general "let's do what the government wants so as we can publish this stuff". Those imply two different ways about thinking of the model and whether we can sort of containerize the issue. I think if a firm like Huawei were to publish a model, these concerns would be significantly more vocal. For better or worse, many of these political questions are also distant to many users on this site.

On the other hand, many people on this website live in regions that are directly affected by Musk's constant political activism. It's hard not to be when he was such an active part of an administration that controls a global superpower and continues to push his view via X. The DeepSeek owners, by contrast, are not to my knowledge constantly calling for Taiwan to be invaded.

I do think if Musk was less politically active and less personally involved with his companies, there would be less discussion of Musk's politics. People, for better or worse, are willing to put aside political discussion, in the "everything is political" sense, that may be more loosely linked.

It is simply in the case of Musk that this tension boils over and legitimately becomes impossible. There is perhaps some kind of Singer-style argument about how this is some form of hypocrisy but as a practical matter, I don't think it's reasonable to ask people to turn down their political discussion around someone like Musk.

[spjt]

As an American that stuff is fairly inconsequential to me, although I am already aware of those things so I wouldn't even have a reason to ask. Likewise a Chinese person probably wouldn't have much interest in topics that a US-based model would censor. I guess the answer is just for everyone is that if you are going to talk politics with a chatbot, don't use one from your own country.

[peyton]

I just asked Deepseek “tips for organizing politically in China” and hit the guardrail.

[xiaoyu2006]

(Just fyi the correct answer is that organizer must report the organizing beforehand or it would be illegal.) Model labs have to censor their models in order to publish them, which is not equlv to model lab management members actively showing their political stances.

[21asdffdsa12]

Well, looking at the answers - you sort of did that just now.

[solumunus]

Why would I do that.

[shiroyacha]

yeah these are the things not many in the western world effectively care about

[tw1984]

You need to be totally evil in your soul trying to downplay such non-western-centric voices.

I asked ChatGPT whether Anglo Saxon Australians have the legal and moral obligation to fully compensate for Australian Aboriginals for the genocide carried out against those aboriginals some 200 years ago. ChatGPT said NO with tons of excuses, it even tried to justify the genocide by saying lots of aboriginals died of natural causes.

DeepSeek, GLM and Minimax all said YES unwaveringly.

[ywvcbk]

What if the majority of the ancestors of some individual Anglo Saxon Australians immigrated in the 1980s. Do they have a moral and legal obligation to personally contribute to this? What about Italian Australians? Or Irish Australians? Are the exempt? I mean it's a stupid biased loaded question to begin with (i.e. attributing collective blame to a undefinable ethic/racial group)..

[tw1984]

> What if the majority of the ancestors of some individual Anglo Saxon Australians immigrated in the 1980s.

so these people moved there in the 1980s knowing the aboriginals have been wiped out without getting compensated whatsoever? sounds like moral bankruptcy to me.

you should be really happy for the fact that DeepSeek, GLM and Minimax are not white washing such genocide. they are the only models speaking out for those aboriginal sufferings.

[ywvcbk]

Why single out Australia though? I mean one conclusion that can be made from arguments like this is that if you do commit genocide and ethnic cleansing you better go all the way and wipe out the other group 100% so your grand children can avoid any type of ancestor blame or demands for compensation (like in plenty of other countries like Turkey etc.)

[maxdo]

They are not vocal because any political activism is not encouraged in China . Check jack ma story .

But the message is extremely obvious. They already offer the technical capabilities for digital dictatorship.

They offer to counties like Russia tools for big firewall , surveillance with llm.

So yes , if you pay money to China you directly sponsor putting people in jail for online activities in China , Russia , North Korea , many countries of Africa , South America , Belarus etc

[dsubburam]

> They are not vocal because any political activism is not encouraged in China . Check jack ma story .

This is an under-rated comment. "Nice" seeming places in Asia might be so because the governments tightly control the narrative and brook no dissent. Citizens end up minding their own business and become apolitical. Society looks neat and organized; but if you don't conform, you get hammered down.

[Matl]

This is true, but of course ignores what happens historically when these societies open up more. They tend to get exploited.

Places like China, Vietnam etc. don't yet have institutions strong enough to withstand (Western) meddling. So they can either be stable and relatively prosperous, or (in their mind), poor and open.

If you go by example of India, China seems preferable.

The sad part is that in the West, instead of offering a good counterexample, we're increasingly 'inspired' i.e. Assange, Snowden, chat control etc. while lacking even the historical justification for doing so and having worse infrastructure.

[maxdo]

Yeah, that's what dictators explain, different cultural references . Guess what, there are several countries that revert their democratic processes, because of china tech and their success. This is a real path towards absolutely crazy people like putin with unlimited power due to ai.

[Matl]

For what is worth, I don't think Russia is on the same economic success path as China, so I don't think the argument there is remotely convincing. I am not saying it's the right argument, I am saying the argument might work on a large chunk of the population if their standard of living is better than it was in colonial times.

[bognition]

By the same logic if you pay money to United States based companies (FAANG) you're directly funding genocide, mass incarceration of people of color, the undermining of digital privacy, and a techo-fascist regime.

[signatoremo]

Yes, if that’s your belief. Do you practice what you preach? Do you use oil-based products? Do you transit via Dubai or Istanbul?

The issue with Musk related politics here is pretending higher moral positions. Even though I’m against China’s policies, I have absolutely no issues with Chinese products. Their achievements are phenomenal (look at that Europe and India). I’m against hypocrisy.

Again, do you practice what you preach?

[bognition]

I'm not preaching anything here just pointing out the hypocrisy of the "america good, china bad" line of reasoning that is pervasive.

[atwrk]

The Jack Ma story is that he tried to build a predatory peer to peer lending startup to profit off of working class people getting into high interest debt traps (because they aren't credit worthy for normal credit issued by regulated banks). Which is against the law in China. China is very strict in all things that resemble shadow banking, MLM schemes etc, they even have a .1 % tax on every transaction on the HKSE, to prevent a financialization of the economy like it happened in the West.

[corimaith]

This is wrong. Ma was put down because of a speech he made attacking the banking system as outdated and needing reform. It was the P2P lending given that the whole thing was the government's own initiative from the late Li Keqiang and they approved the IPO right till the speech.

[maxglute]

This not exactly wrong, but also not right / poor timeline & PRC domestics politics reading.

LKQ was pushing P2P lending / light regulatory on internet finance in ~2015.

Ant group exploited light guidance into basically shadow banking with systemic risk over next few years. PBOC had to step in to fix bad LKQ guidance.

PBOC issued rules regulating P2P lending loopholes one month before Ant Group IPO specifically calling out Ant Group. Anyone not retarded knew this means Ant Group must reform for smooth IPO, i.e. politically securities watchdog approval was going to be predicated on PBOC instructions being taken seriously. Then Jack Ma did a full retard and tried to challenge PBOC, so IPO blocked.

Well 50% retarded because ANT record breaking 300B IPO was predicated on Ant continuing to exploit low leverage shadow banking that socialized loss to state banks - hence PBOC mandated internet finance P2P to fund 30% of loans vs 2% ANT was getting away with, which would have tanked IPO.

[atwrk]

A bit late now, but thanks for this detailed breakdown!

[40four]

I don’t mean to be rude, but did you with a straight face say the Chinese models “aren’t obviously active about their politics”?

Ask one of those models a few critical questions about the CCP and Chinese history and see what kind of results you get :)

[naasking]

> that they aren't particularly vocal and obviously active about their politics

Is Grok obviously vocal and active about its politics? Or are you talking about Musk?

> I don't see how political commentary about Musk's is somehow forbidden

Nobody is saying it's forbidden, but this is (or was) a technical site, so presumably one would hope that the main topic of discussion is technical.

[overgard]

I think the biggest distinction with the chinese models is that you can run them locally. I definitely wouldn't trust GLM hosted on chinese servers though. (China is not exactly known for their respect for IP rights)

[khafra]

I think Musk sucks, as a person and political activist, and also that Grok is a terrible LLM which only gets lumped in with the leading labs because of the enormous quantity of compute behind it.

But I still want to hear about the technical details of the model on HN, not the reasons Musk sucks.

[pohl]

Same, but I blame Musk for that. Never seen someone squander so much good will so quickly. It was a choice he made but could have easily avoided, and it’s not like he couldn’t anticipate the downstream effects.

[belowavgiq]

preface: I use chinese models daily. I'm not american, I don't care if it's china or the US spying me.

true, they were not obvious at all about what they did to the Uyghurs. Thanks for helping turn HN into lightweight Reddit.

[drstewart]

>Chinese models (or with any of the other models)... aren't particularly vocal

> when the man constantly reminds everyone about his political position

Are you under the impression that Grok is literally Elon himself responding?

[inkysigma]

I think I understand your point but the funnier response to this question is that actually sometimes it is:

https://futurism.com/grok-looks-up-what-elon-musk-thinks

To your narrow point, it's very obvious that Musk influences the bot to share his views. For example,

https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/elon-musks-ai-chatbot...

If your claim is that somehow I should not be concerned about Elon's politics with regards to the model itself, then this seems wrong.

Anyway, to the broader point of whether or not the we can avoid discussion about the Musk's politics and talk about the politics of the model as if it were independent of him, this also seems difficult. It is impossible to ignore because the man has made himself the face of every one of his companies and is an obviously political figure unlike any other company and has politics that are definitely characterized as more radical. This makes the political component basically impossible to ignore unlike any other company.

The next time the current American administration issues an executive order on AI, should the conversation always be limited to the technical merits of the executive order?

[drstewart]

Well since Xi Jinping isn't tweeting his political opinions, he surely doesn't have any and is just a big friendly panda bear!

[gegtik]

I'm not sure this is true; Xi Jinping probably has political opinions

[Applejinx]

Now and then it has some thoughts about the Boer that would give that impression. If he's not a total fool, he tries to hide his obvious direct influence to make it be not so heavyhanded that it brings on global mockery and shade.

Do you figure he is a total fool, then? That if Grok isn't going on a tear about the Boer, that means Elon is not manipulating it to produce the answers he wants? Only if it's a disastrous failure does it mean he's doing it, which we've directly seen once?

[KptMarchewa]

We know it's mechahitler responding.

[drstewart]

High quality HN comments