Another factor I don't see mentioned: every Trump policy is inflationary. Deporting the labor base, deterring legal immigration, applying tariffs that were basically derived by taking the trade deficit with a country and dividing by 2, and now locking up 20% of the global oil market by shutting down the Strait of Hormuz.
The Fed's response will have to be to raise rates, which is going to crush the multiple of any stock whose valuation is based on the expectation of massive growth.
> FSD is up to v14 and there is no sense in which it's "Full", or is likely to be "Full" any time soon.
I think the SpaceX IPO is way overvalued, but have you actually tried FSD v14 yourself?
My car has 8-year old hardware running v12, and it handles like 90+% of my driving. When I test drove 14 it blew my mind how good it had gotten in only 8 months of development. In my opinion, there's question that it's "when," not "if."
Yes, I hear lots of people saying Tesla's "FSD" product can drive by itself already.
Yet if the car crashes while in FSD mode, it is still you who are legally the driver and you who will be responsible. You are the driver, regardless of what the name of the car's software is.
This can be contrasted with e.g. Mercedes' offering, which is actually self-driving, and where Mercedes is responsible if the car crashes (The limitation in that case, of course, is the very limited roads and conditions where that software will actually be enabled.).
So, yes: Until Tesla (or someone else) actually takes responsibility while the car drives itself, and the "driver" is legally just a passenger, it is not a fully self-driving car. If you ever take your attention away from the road while using FSD you are breaking the law, which says that as the driver, you must always pay attention.
That has always been the question since Elon started making self-driving claims back in 2016. If you believed him any time up until now you'd have been wrong and potentially own a car that will never drive without a responsible human in the driver's seat.
Another question is how many resources each "self-driving" car needs to complete its task. All of the major self-driving taxi providers do have monitoring staff who need to intervene occasionally to get the car unstuck from some situations.
If you need to pay one monitor per 10 cars you can run a taxi service in specific markets but it's pretty hard to roll that out to a fleet of millions of personally-owned cars.
Which means more Grok degradation, more severe throttling, etc.
I can't understand why xAI charges 50% more per month for Grok over competitors when it doesn't even gracefully downgrade to a cheaper model when paid subscribers hit the limit.
Grok is pretty good. It really excels when the results can be improved by deep online search. It tends to be more aggressive in looking things up than competitors. I use it in certain situations.
That's maybe a bit of an unfair, out-of-balance comment. Google Gemini had it's own fails on the other side of the extreme. Both have corrected themselves. Don't keep coming up with old stuff.
You are being very dishonest here. Gemini did not praise hitler, excuse South African apartheid, or create its own version of Wikipedia with blatant nazi, white supremacy and anti-Islamic content. Googles CEO did not subsequently claim these things were the truth.
I'm not saying that, it's the opposite: Gemini generated too-woke images, like all images of people was like at least 50% colored, no matter what, even if you asked it to generate images of German World War 2 soldiers, it mostly generated black people in nazi uniforms.
Your replies are non-sequitors to the discussion in this thread.
Statement “I use grok to consume current events”
Response “grok is not a reliable source for information, especially current events or politics”
Your response “but Gemini generated images that right wingers didn’t like”
Ok? Are those images the news? Is that a way to consume current events? Do you think I’m a proponent of people using LLMs to digest current events and am only against grok specifically? What exactly is your argument against mine (that grok shouldn’t be used to consume current events). Are you agreeing? Or are you suggesting that people should use grok for current events because Gemini produced images you didn’t like?
You gave the argument that Grok isn't trustable because of their nazi fails.
My argument was that you're maybe a bit biased, because similar issues have happened with other prominent companies.
Both companies corrected themselves on the issues.
I don't think your argument has much ground right now. Grok might be leaning into a certain direction, but you can say that about any AI or news station.
@dang can you explain how the comment below me got marked dead? How many flags did it receive? By whom? This is genuinely very concerning, this comment is not off topic or in anyway deserving to be flagged. Do you or the other moderator disagree with that statement?
Here is the text of the comment in question:
“As someone stumbling across this thread: the idea that, in regards to bias, a real person might actually consider these two events in any way comparable is honestly leaving me stunned. I can't find the right words to describe how sickening it is to see Nazism being treated as just as banally acceptable as any other political direction.”
All such classifiers are imperfect, of course, but we have no choice but to use them because HN is being inundated with content that has been either generated or edited by LLMs, and the community feels strongly about this.
I've unkilled the comment now, although its information/indignation ratio is low enough that I would not call it a good comment for HN, and no, that doesn't mean I disagree with it.
We're trying for something different here. If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
I wasn’t asking if you agreed with the comment in question but in my statement that there is no obvious reason in the content that it should be flagged; it seems you did agree since you restored the comment. Thanks for your feedback and attention.
As someone stumbling across this thread: the idea that, in regards to bias, a real person might actually consider these two events in any way comparable is honestly leaving me stunned. I can't find the right words to describe how sickening it is to see Nazism being treated as just as banally acceptable as any other political direction.
You're misreading. Nazism isn't being treated as acceptable, neither is wokeism. Both companies have apologized for these incidents, and have addressed the problems.
I haven't equated them, I've used them as examples of opposite extremes.
I think Nazism is extreme right, and wokeism is extreme left. It's both out of balance. And Google and xAI both acknowledged that, and addressed the problems.
Nazi is the terminology you chose for referring to past Grok issues. Woke is the terminology I used to refer to past Gemini issues.
Regardless of the terminology, I think we should look at the issues themselves, and not mindlessly apply a certain ideaology upon a company for certain past issues.
In short: maybe xAI aren't the nazi's you seem to think they are, and maybe this woke movement that you seem to adore isn't as innocent as they make themselves out to be.
I've used/use it. For a while it had one of the best lightweight coding LLM's, which actually lead to a #1 spot on openrouter usage ranking although they've fallen off the top 10 used now. It's also provided some good reasoning models, which perform better when dealing with non-PC topics.
Also, although I've never used it for this, I believe some of the paid models produce some of the best "adult" content, and I know there are even subreddits which do nothing but praise Grok and "content" produces who use it.
Without giving too many details I thought it would be fun to make 2D games based off of banned books (sort of as a marketing ploy, paradoxically everybody likes banned books). Camp of the saints seemed like a good target, which is a fictional book based in 1980's France dealing with incoming flotillas of immigration. I found that ChatGPT would push back on the premise of the novel instead of coding, while grok models just called things "edgy" and went to work.
I have more examples (mostly dealing with realtime web filtering) but that's the immediate one that comes to mind.
> can't understand why xAI charges 50% more per month for Grok over competitors
One potential read is xAI knows Grok isn't going to be a Tier 1 model. So while SpaceX focusses on infrastructure, Grok bets its users like its model enough that they'll pay a premium for it, even if this curtails growth prospects.
They already make it required to have a premium X account
Claude has tons of throttling already. Chat GPT is not as accurate at computational problems despite less throttling. Gemini has fewest restrictions but worse quality. Always a tradeoff.
Probably because it has all but zero filters on the input and output. It took widespread media outrage about "grok show me her in a bikini" to at least create a filter that bans such things.
I'm considering Anthropic. I think they will be one of the survivors if/when the AI bubble bursts.
I was dubious about SpaceX (orbital data centers need to solve for extreme radiation and error-correction during training), but then I remembered that xAI is actively working on virtualizing white collar workers ("Macrohard").
In my opinion, this is the only TAM that justifies $1T in data center investment, because the consumer market for ChatGPT-style AI is saturated. There's a lot of enterprise TAM available for AI, but I think what these companies training frontier models are really after is selling a product that allows companies to eliminate the cost of white collar salaries.
I really want Spotify to follow. I feel cheated and deceived when I'm enjoying some music, then I realize that there's no bio for the artist and they released 7 albums in 2025. Users should be empowered to filter out AI content if they choose.
Connecting to the creator of a work of art provides meaning, which makes the experience of art better and more interesting. It allows you to experience worlds other than your own. I don't go into deep dives of all music I listen to, but I do want the option for music I like.
If there's no one on the other side, then it's just stimulation. Which is fine if that's what you want. It's something like the difference between watching an OnlyFans model versus an erotic video your significant other made for you.
Based on measured studies, people are not able to discern AI generated music from real ones on average and to your point, I agree, if you enjoy the output then it doesn't make sense to suddenly change your initial opinion.
I do find that AI music tends to be too perfect and overtime using Suno also gets old and I'm just listening to older releases
Why would it not make sense to change your opinion on something based on its origin? Supporting local artists and small businesses is commonplace. How is this not just another extension of that?
People care a lot about the story and the human artists behind their music, probably somewhat more than the music itself. When I discover some great metal songs, I'll look up their info, the band, the artists, their bio, everything related to the creation process and their history.
Normal people doesnt do that, thats just you and a couple others in this thread. Normal people just listens to music and enjoys it without a second thought
I care about rewarding real musicians, actual human beings, with my attention and, even love. AI slop gets in the way. Even "good" AI copies and appropriates from real artists, their style, their voice and even their history and relationship with their audience.
Agree with me or not, there should be a global filter that allows me, the user of the service, to filter out AI generated content.
If people really thought it didn't matter, they would just label their AI-generated stuff as "AI" and let consumers choose. To do otherwise is to scam.
In Yuval Noah Harari’s brilliant new book 21 Lessons for the 21st Century, he writes that Artificial Intelligence, with its limitless potential and connectedness, will ultimately render many humans redundant in the work place. This sounds entirely feasible. However, he goes on to say that AI will be able to write better songs than humans can. He says, and excuse my simplistic summation, that we listen to songs to make us feel certain things and that in the future AI will simply be able to map the individual mind and create songs tailored exclusively to our own particular mental algorithms, that can make us feel, with far more intensity and precision, whatever it is we want to feel. If we are feeling sad and want to feel happy we simply listen to our bespoke AI happy song and the job will be done.
But, I am not sure that this is all songs do. Of course, we go to songs to make us feel something – happy, sad, sexy, homesick, excited or whatever – but this is not all a song does. What a great song makes us feel is a sense of awe. There is a reason for this. A sense of awe is almost exclusively predicated on our limitations as human beings. It is entirely to do with our audacity as humans to reach beyond our potential.
It is perfectly conceivable that AI could produce a song as good as Nirvana’s Smells Like Teen Spirit, for example, and that it ticked all the boxes required to make us feel what a song like that should make us feel – in this case, excited and rebellious, let’s say. It is also feasible that AI could produce a song that makes us feel these same feelings, but more intensely than any human songwriter could do.
But, I don’t feel that when we listen to Smells Like Teen Spirit it is only the song that we are listening to. It feels to me, that what we are actually listening to is a withdrawn and alienated young man’s journey out of the small American town of Aberdeen – a young man who by any measure was a walking bundle of dysfunction and human limitation – a young man who had the temerity to howl his particular pain into a microphone and in doing so, by way of the heavens, reach into the hearts of a generation. We are also listening to Iggy Pop walk across his audience’s hands and smear himself in peanut butter whilst singing 1970. We are listening to Beethoven compose the Ninth Symphony while almost totally deaf. We are listening to Prince, that tiny cluster of purple atoms, singing in the pouring rain at the Super Bowl and blowing everyone’s minds. We are listening to Nina Simone stuff all her rage and disappointment into the most tender of love songs. We are listening to Paganini continue to play his Stradivarius as the strings snapped. We are listening to Jimi Hendrix kneel and set fire to his own instrument.
What we are actually listening to is human limitation and the audacity to transcend it. Artificial Intelligence, for all its unlimited potential, simply doesn’t have this capacity. How could it? And this is the essence of transcendence. If we have limitless potential then what is there to transcend? And therefore what is the purpose of the imagination at all. Music has the ability to touch the celestial sphere with the tips of its fingers and the awe and wonder we feel is in the desperate temerity of the reach, not just the outcome. Where is the transcendent splendour in unlimited potential? So to answer your question, Peter, AI would have the capacity to write a good song, but not a great one. It lacks the nerve.
Are you being obtuse or can you really not understand this. Your girlfriend writes you a letter once a week while she’s away for the summer. Misses you, loves you, can’t stand being apart. You find out later she paid a service to write the letters. Who cares, the letters were nice right?
I heard rumours they're the ones quietly funding some of the AI music. Spotify probably see the most popular musicians flying around in jets and want to redirect all that listening to their own slop.
A while back, I discovered by accident that forcing ChatGPT to respond only in zalgotext and then using voice mode generated some really bizarre audio.
Have uploaded the audio files for anyone who's interested. They've since patched the ability to ask for output in zalgotext, but it was pretty strange while it lasted.
My car drives itself. That's a $18T global market.
Also $1T in data center investment makes sense when you realize that companies are racing to create virtual white collar workers. Google spends $9B a year on software engineers.
Well they are projected to spend $175 - $185B on capex in this year alone most of it for AI buildout. Lets say only 150B of that is for AI. If they can then somehow replace all their software engineers with AI that they then run for free and depreciate over 10 years then they just replaced 9B a year software expense with 15B a year depreciation expense for the next decade. Yes this is grossly oversimplified but it still illustrates how crazy high of a bet they're making on AI.
That's a bookkeeping issue, it doesn't affect the argument at all (which is that the capex has a finite useful life over which it would need to pay for itself).
Yeah, just tangentially pointing out that asset depreciation rules in the U.S. changed recently. Could explain some of the crazy magnitude of this year's spending spree.
> My car drives itself. That's a $18T global market.
That's not a new market, that's a new feature in an existing market. Lots going on in transportation and I'm not seeing any scenario where self-driving cars vastly increase total output vs just eat up other forms of transportation and change where people live/how long they commute.
> Also $1T in data center investment makes sense when you realize that companies are racing to create virtual white collar workers. Google spends $9B a year on software engineers.
Similarly, many companies are trying to be more efficient - "do what we already do, but better". That's different than growth.
What could Google do with 9B on software agents? Let's say the future of them is amazing and this means they could write 100x more code than they can today.
Has Google recently showed much ability to turn "more/faster code" into "superbly profitable new market"?
Someone's gonna have to crack the demand side issue for anything transformative to happen.
Henry Ford II: "Walter, how are you going to get those robots to pay your union dues?"
Walter Reuther: "Henry, how are you going to get them to buy your cars?"
For so long, people, especially politicians, have said that companies want to create jobs. But I think most companies want to create profit.
And for so long, I've had people tell me to just get a job. But I tell them that I don't want a job: I want money and I want something to do. Those two things don't have to be together.
I think this is the hard part: philosophically so many of us have learned we need jobs and don't realize a job can be decomposed into money and something to do.
So I think we need to start looking more creatively at 1) how people receive money from others and 2) how people give services to others.
You’re trying to create nuance where there is none. Creating jobs exactly means “I want to pay someone less than the value they bring in to my company” and this has been true since forever.
Nobody cares that you want money and you want something to do that you enjoy. Nobody ever will.
If you actually dig into all the social programs that exist at least in the US, they’re just a massive payday for a small group of people under the guise of bettering humanity.
College/education is a fantastic example. Education as it has been established today is a joke. The humanities were originally established for rich bored wives to have something to do. They were never meant to create value. Colleges hang anvils around the necks of naive children via loans telling them “yes if you major in history you’ll have a job!” This is a joke, and a bad one.
Huxley was on to something. If everyone is educated, nobody collects trash, or chops lumber, mines minerals and metals, etc. it’s a big fucking not-talked-about open secret.
Nobody cares, either you bring something to the table someone else can exploit for money, or you lean into “I’m helpless and the government owes it to me to take care of me because I’ve been indoctrinated into learned helplessness.”
“AI” will at best lead to anarchy at this point, if all the grand visions of the billionaires comes to fruition. People have already tried to kill sama and burn his house down. Wait until armed humvees are driving around data centers. It’s coming.
Fair, I never said there wasn't risk involved with ownership. I even made sure to qualify when I said that people who own don't do labor, because often there is labor involved in ownership.
So I don't think it's a free lunch, it's more risk-for-lunch than labor-for-lunch. Maybe you could argue laborers are still risking their body or something, but I think the point might stand.
> Nobody cares, either you bring something to the table someone else can exploit for money, or you lean into “I’m helpless and the government owes it to me to take care of me because I’ve been indoctrinated into learned helplessness.”
You paint the economic model as a false dichotomy, and the main point of my posting was that it is not a false dichotomy. It is not either have a job (and be exploited by someone else) or be helpless and rely on government handouts.
For example, what if people who got laid off from companies were given significant stock in the company, so that they might partake in the potential savings and gains from replacing the workers with AI or other tools?
The whole conversation seemed to be about the economic model, so I'm not sure how it is a distraction, a boogeyman, or inconsequential.
> For example, what if people who got laid off from companies were given significant stock in the company, so that they might partake in the potential savings and gains from replacing the workers with AI or other tools?
You have described less than 0.1% of the US population, not to mention the rest of the world.
I get it, you have an idea in your head and you're struggling to see past it. Read Brave New World.
It seems that you may not want to actually have a discussion, rather just reinforce the idea that we're either screwed by employers or screwed by helplessness.
Fair, my one example on layoffs may not land with you.
But do you want us to just sink into the helplessness of us all being screwed or do you want to try to find solutions that might allow us to feel some sense of agency and hope?
Driving a car is a chore, not a job (usually), much like washing dishes is. Dishwashers did not produce an economic collapse.
OTOH replacing people with AI would indeed bring about a huge economic downturn. What would be good is augmenting humans so that they can do 10x more. That would enable things that are hard to imagine exactly now, much like computers enabled interesting transformations in the society from 1980s to 2010s.
The current crop of AI is by construction unable to reach the human level of cognition, but it is quite good at doing some symbolic manipulation tasks. We will get used to that, and will integrate that in our workflows. Humans are still going to be needed.
And do you feel that the industry in general, and individual companies are currently trying to augment / 10x their workers and have everyone share in the 10x profits that will bring? Or are they jumping on opportunity to try and cut costs by even single digits, by replacing those workers with AI and it's not their problem what those people do from there?
That won't happen any more if nobody has jobs. It's also completely irrelevant because how did you just connect the self driving car market to the entirety of retail sales?
> My car drives itself. That's a $18T global market
Which will take decades to become addressable. Self-driving cars work OK in a few cities in one country. Expanding that to be able to cover Mumbai and Omsk and Nairobi will require significantly more work.
> Also $1T in data center investment makes sense when you realize that companies are racing to create virtual white collar workers.
Does it make sense? How much would the resulting virtual white collar worker cost? Because datacenters have running operational costs, and so do the people operating them and working on the software that runs in them.
This probably ends in a deflationary spiral. The ai replaces the jobs, the lack of jobs chills demand, the ai becomes cheaper because it exists in a commodity market.
The money printer will be used, and maybe it all works out - or we see wealth hyperinflation and build out our own aristocracy.
No. It doesn’t. And if you’re defining “drives” as “it drives as well as I do” then you probably shouldn’t be on the road.
> makes sense
Nothing about any of this makes sense. Tell me, when all white collar jobs are replaced by AI, where will the customers come from? Who will have income to afford your products or services? The poor barista whose surveillance videos are training the robot that will soon replace them?
Leaving aside any consideration of human compassion or questioning of the purpose of an economic system (hint: it’s not just an abstract machine), shrinking the pool of potential customers by orders of magnitude has never been a recipe for sustainable success (let alone growth).
100%. I have to hold the floor by filling the space with "ummmmmmmm.... uhhhh...." which inevitably distracts me from my point altogether. Poor user experience.
Seems like there's a big risk of having that habit leak into human conversation. A lot of people try really hard to train themselves not to add those fillers.
The Fed's response will have to be to raise rates, which is going to crush the multiple of any stock whose valuation is based on the expectation of massive growth.
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