I'm not going to engage into that... I don't see what the US has to do with this, I'm from Europe.
Out of all his brands, though, X and particularly XAI (and so Grok) have been particularly influenced by – indeed he seems to see them as vehicles for – his personal political opinions and reckless ethics.
This poor behavior, if rewarded, will surely be repeated in other countries and nobody wants that, either.
The location of the Colossus datacenter is well known. It happens to be located in an industrial area, nestled between an active steel manufacturing plant (apparently scrap metal with an electric blast furnace, which should mean enormous power draw but no coke coal at least?), and an active industrial scale natural gas power plant.
https://www.google.com/maps/@35.0605698,-90.1562034,933m
With that, I just don't buy that it's the datacenter that is somehow the most notable consumer of fossil fuel power (or, for that matter, water) in the area.
How do you come to that conclusion? Because the backlash was "too much" ? He is still (one of) the richest people in the world, and controls several huuge companies. But he got his feelings hurt, I guess? And that was "too much" ?? Poor snowflake Elon.
The Anti-Defamation League stated it wasn't a salute and that they weren't offended. Rabbi Ari Lamm wrote that Musk has repeatedly shown he's a friend to the Jewish community. David Greenfield suggested people should focus on actual antisemitism instead. Netanyahu highlighted the absurdity of the accusations and pointed to Musk's aid and engagement after the October 7th attacks.
And yes, Musk became a victim. I don't see what his current wealth has to do with it. It's hard to ignore the imbalance where one man drew the world's anger and became public enemy #1. If you call him a snowflake, I don't know what to call all those who might have been offended by his gesture
But plenty of people apparently wanted to see a “not see” salute to confirm their existing political biases and other beliefs no matter the actual intent and context.
Taking a break from Reddit and X and touching some grass generally resolves this self-inflicted mental funk.
> Yes, seeing someone on the spectrum (who’s got no political gesture training) spaz out on stage is incredibly cringy
Saying take a break from Reddit after posting the most Reddit ass comment I've ever seen.
When I first heard about it I thought "yeah right, media is exaggerigating again". Then I saw it, and I mean wtf!
I do not at all believe that's something you do by accident. Twice! Also, he could have excused it or try to explain afterwards. He did not. He just trolled.
You could all then march around the office or even out on the street with your hands raised. Surely nobody but snowflakes could be offended by that.
So? Does that means nobody else is allowed to have an opinion about the salute that he made. Sure he's pro Israel, that's not uncommon at all amongst the far right these days.
> who might have been offended by his gesture
What about the people who seem to be highly offended by people who have been offended by his gesture. What do you call them?
So literally Musk and his pals?
> society’s well-being should stop meddling.
So again, Musk et al.? I'm really confused... what are you trying to say. That only some people are allowed to meddle while everyone else should shut up and mind their own business? How do you determine that? Wealth? Political opinions? Class? Race?
Gosh yeah, all that... getting rid of slavery, and women's rights, and disability support and awareness... Truly, the world is far better off!
The problem is, meddling to interfere with others, and meddling to stop that interference, are not morally equivalent.
If a serial killer is trying to strangle me, and I'm fighting back, you wouldn't deplore "the violence on both sides", would you?
I think Netanyahu had a bit of a conflict of interest here--he couldn't afford to get on Trump's bad side!
Besides, why would the richest man on earth copy a bunch of 1940's socialists who previously socialized their car industry?
Most politicians just lift their arms up and wave like ordinary people. Musk first placed his hand on his heart, and then extended out forcefully in a clear nazi salute.
The Nazis murdered any socialists they could get their hands on.
I can see how it is easy to confuse by let’s be reasonable. The nazis could not have been socialist because that would mean a corruption one time of a system that is based on ideals.
How could you not know the Nazi’s were socialists? That was their whole thing, socialism would only work in a culturally/ethnically homogeneous society
Instead you have chosen to actively support him, harming us, out of spite due to a situation you've willingly blinded yourself to. Seriously? You're citing the ADL? That's like asking the NAACP whether Kanye really said "I love Hitler." Who gives a fuck, I have ears.
"My heart goes out to you" "Taxi!" or just a "I see you guys!" can all be accompanied by a bad arm angle in hindsight. As he obviously wasn't going for that by his own words, maybe we should consider actions more important than interpreted hand movements. And Musk has been loud about AI safety since 2016, giving name, cofounding and funding OpenAI before Sam conducted a hostile takeover and made it profit-first instead of a gift for humanity.
I've seen behavior of a lot of people akin to someone would pejoratively refer to as "MAGA Types" / common conservatives. The absolute majority of them aren't welcoming of so deep /pol/ 4chan meme politicking or signaling. They likely won't take it too seriously, but they sure as hell won't cozy up to it.
When this happened there was no live reaction because people didn't interpret this as such. This has only became a thing later. And he did not even acknowledge the crazy accusations of him having intendedly done a salute, he did not "lean in to it". What on earth would he even gain from that?!
I don’t see even entertaining the idea of ‘he did it intentionally’ meaning if he "intentionally did a n** salute" as sincere. That’s just a painted-by-bias angle to come from, trying to move goal posts. Better be wary of the people who would instead engage in that.
Except, objectively speaking, he actually did NOT do that. He basically just ignored the “controversy” because it was such an obviously false narrative meant only to smear him that I’m sure he had enough faith in most Americans who aren’t consumed by partisanship to see it exactly for what it was.
> At that time, building favor with trump voters was good for him.
Your implication here seems to be that Trump voters, en masse, want folks who are doing Nazi salutes, or am I misunderstanding you?
I think he believes that the subsection of bigotted voters deserve acknowledgement from time to time and that he has a history of such behavior.
It's another example of the 'bully lie', wherein there's absolutely no good faith debate about the point. The purpose is to test whether you will willingly swallow the lie and go along with the obvious falsehood, or you'll put yourself on the side of The Enemy.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/gifs/comments/1i6par1/elon_musk_vs_...
[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/gifs/comments/1i7w4nz/comparison_of...
> .@elonmusk is being falsely smeared.
Elon is a great friend of Israel. He visited Israel after the October 7 massacre in which Hamas terrorists committed the worst atrocity against the Jewish people since the Holocaust. He has since repeatedly and forcefully supported Israel’s right to defend itself against genocidal terrorists and regimes who seek to annihilate the one and only Jewish state.
I thank him for this.
It is in fact important that he is not representative of Jewish people.
Depends on your standards for who is a Jewish person: by many standards (including those used by the Israeli Law of Return), the US has more Jewish people than Israel.
EDIT: To be clear, I am not, in noting this fact, arguing against the parent's argument that (this is a paraphrase) the opinion of the head of a state with a large Jewish population (whether or not it is actually the largest in the world) does not itself constitute the response of world Judaism, either in general or specifically as an exoneration of an alleged expression of fascist sympathies; that position is absolutely correct, irrespective of which country happens to have the largest Jewish population.
/s, just in case.
The elected representative of the country made for Jews which is the country that has highest Jewish population and has historical ties to Judaism has exonerated Elon.
It has symbolic meaning and fretting over a salute and boycotting the company seems performative.
Elected by 23.41%? What about the remaining 76.50%? Also 30% didn't even vote.
Also what about the president of Poland and other victims of the nazis? Did they "exonerate" him?
Of course to be fair its hard to blame a drug addict who seemingly lacks self control for his erratic public behavior.
> seems performative
If those people stop buying Tesla's cars and that hurts its share price its not performative anymore.
> fretting over a salute and boycotting the company seems performative.
Performative actions are still actions, and sometimes deliver results. If those results are as little as make some people feel better, those are still results. That said, it is hard to be more performative than the gesture it self. So if you want to criticize HN users for being performative, you should apply the same standard to Elon Musk.
This was swiftly refuted by tons of people who know who little Bibi is, including many Jews and Israelis who absolutely detest everything he has done and stands for. There are orthodox, mystic and progressive Jews alike who are all calling for his head as we speak. If you actually believe that he represents all Jews, then you lack the education to speak on any Jew but your own.
Their morally bankrupt calculus is that as long as Musk is an Israeli ally, they'll overlook the obvious. In a sad irony, this makes it more dangerous for the rest of us in the diaspora.
So if a Trump made a Twitter post "exonerating" someone who said something awful about America that would be the same? Because he represents 100% of the country.
Almost half of the countries hates Netanyahu and he's only in charge because of the support from far-right.
Regardless of this you think that a certain limited subsection of Israeli population who share Netanyahu and not the millions of Israeli's who don't let alone all the people who are Jewish are not allowed to have an opinion about his actions? Rather a silly thing to say.
If the standard is that low, I could easily produce a compilation video of the likes of Obama, Biden, Harris in compromising positions appearing to show them doing things that they obviously weren’t doing.
Partisanship has turned everyone into dishonest and uncharitable actors, and it’s so unfortunate.
https://www.propublica.org/article/doge-musk-mohammad-halimi...
All in service to a role that he took to ingratiate himself to a head of state and ended up completely alienated from leaving a wake of destruction behind him for absolutely no purpose.
And if anybody has any doubt, it's enough to listen to the guy, and his support for extreme-right.
Do I think it's problematic? Yes, but I don't blame the company or their leadership for it. For grok and xai you can very much be skeptical about the team behind it for it's actions
Grok was built separate from the competitors to avoid the kind of actually potentially harmful issues like considering misgendering worse than a global thermonuclear war, or imaging the founding fathers as black by default. The incident you're alluding was caused purely by jokesters constantly trying to break it and managing to force a binary between exactly "Gigaj*" and "Mechah***".
After that incident, the system prompt was changed, and a line was removed: "The response should not shy away from making claims which are politically incorrect, as long as they are well substantiated"
We should be more concerned about the issues of that line being removed than what you get it to say when you try to drive it crazy for hours on end.
Your link is paywalled, but your claim of that "inforwars" line being part of the system prompt is incorrect. It is only a part of a made-up persona one can select if they really want to, among other equally crazy options intended for flavor, obviously not a part of the core product itself. I've managed to get ChatGPT to spout worse stuff when I tried just for curiosity, and that's fine, because I explicitly requested for it.
Remember. Musk was the ONLY one seriously talking about the risks of AI back in 2016. And cofounded OpenAI, giving it its' name as it was founded on a goal to have all its research open to help against the risks. Then Sam enacted a hostile takeover. Now the cat's out of the bag, but its clear who really cares about the issues instead of just money or power (Musk funded OpenAI for a long time at a time when its core was explicitly not aiming for profit!)
I use Grok for stuff close to politics because I know it will won't have manufactured mind fog there. I've been using GPT5 for code tens of prompts a day, but this new model - might be well worth looking at.
How would you know this, did you interview them individually?
Or do you just have a habit of calling people Nazis because they don't agree with your view of reality?
Israel is just dying to get on that list too.
Context matters, not just for LLMs themselves. And Grok/X/Twitter's context is tarnished indeed for a lot of us.
If Musk is not in favor of those ideas he might need to work a bit harder to make that clear, because he does tend to leave people with the impression he’s okay with it.
Guess you can have the power and no responsibility! Always someone else’s fault!
If the management isn't fixing the problems that led to those events, the management is responsible.
I don't know man. For like... the other 7 billion people on Earth it seems preeeetty easy for them not to be confused with a Nazi.
Seems to me just Elon has that issue. I've never had that issue. I don't know anyone who's has that issue. So, it makes you wonder.
We can pretend to look the other way all day, or we can take some accountability. Apologizing isn't hard. It would be very easy for him to make this all disappear. But he won't do it.
Maybe it's pride, maybe he's just stupid, I don't know.
LOL. Says the guy who wrote, "Modern local religion (at least in the US) is neomarxism":
I think that pinning your entire view of a model forever on a single incident is not a reasonable approach, but you do you.
lol what.
* Elon Musk Charged With Securities Fraud for Misleading Tweets: https://www.sec.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2018-219
* SEC Charges Elon Musk for Failing to Timely Disclose Beneficial Ownership of Twitter: https://www.debevoise.com/insights/publications/2025/01/sec-...
* Musk Sued for Calling Thai Cave Rescuer Pedophile: https://www.voanews.com/a/tesla-s-musk-sued-for-calling-thai...
* Elon Musk salute controversy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elon_Musk_salute_controversy
Sure, the AI product might be interesting (let's not talk about how it was financed and how GPUs from a public company were diverted to a private venture), but ignoring all of the surrounding factors is an interesting approach.
But you do you.
It is forgivable because there is no real understanding in an llm.
And other llm can also be prompted to say ridiculous things, so what? If a llm would accept a name of a Viking or Khan of the steppes it doesn’t mean it wants to rape and pillage.
Your suggestion that an oversight like this is reason enough to not use the model?
I don’t get the big problem over here. The model said some unsavoury things and the problem was admitted and fixed - why is this making people lose their minds? It has to be performative because I can’t explain it in any other way.
Elon never outsmarted the federal admin, and he can't convince anyone that he was too retarded to understand the consequences. He's the most embarrassing type of failure, now - a midwit, the man with no plan who went for the king and missed. He be bet it all on black, and struck out hard. He didn't even manage the shoo-in proof for Trump being a pedophile. Now bipartisan politics will resent him forever, and ensure he and his businesses would rather be dead. All because Big Balls told Mr. Silly he could make a killing in politics, what a touching little sob story.
I say this as a Starlink early adopter, general Elon apologist and space buff for life: if you actually think this is an insincere reaction, try copying any of Elon's mannerisms around normal people and watch how they treat you. You'll be a social pariah come Monday.
From the outside, the Grok mechahitler incident appeared very much to be the embodiment of Musk’s top-down ‘free speech absolutist’ drive to strip ‘political correctness’ shackles from grok; the prompting changes were driven by his setting that direction. The issues became apparent very early that the prompt changes were leading to issues but reversion seemed to be something that X had to be pressured into - they were unwilling to treat it as a problem until the mechahitler thread. This all speaks to his having a particular vision for what he wants xAI agents to be – something which continues to be expressed in things like the ani product and other bot personas.
The Microsoft ‘Tay’ incident was triggered through naivité. The Grok mechahitler incident seems to have been triggered through hubris and a delight in trolling. Those are very different motivations.
Say no more. I’m already sold.
Kinda weird to mix political sentiment with a coding technology.
xAI has a shocking track record of poor decisions when it comes to training and prompting their AIs. If anyone can make a partisan coding assistant, they can. Indeed, given their leadership and past performance, we might expect them to explicitly try.
Microsoft did pioneering work in the Nazi chatbot space.
FYI you can try Grok for free on their website and see for yourself.
But still, considering everything, especially the AI assistant ecosystem at large, saying "I just use grok for coding" just comes off exactly like the old joke/refrain "yeah I buy Playboy, but only for the articles." Like yeah buddy, suuure.
I don’t use social media in general, maybe YouTube but it’s been a real challenge to get rid of all the political content - both left and right wing.
The great thing about xAI is that it is just a company and there are other AI companies that have AIs that match your values, even though between Grok, ChatGPT, and Claude there are minimal actual differences.
An AI will be anything that the prompt says it is. Because a prompt exists doesn't condemn the company.
Within the boundaries of pre-training, yes. It is definitely possible, in training and in fine-tuning, to make a LLM resistant to engaging in the role-playing requested in the prompt.
See all the personality prompts here: https://x.com/aaronp613/status/1943083889515466832
You are entertaining.
Response seems to conflict with your accusation:
> It’s tough to pin down one figure as the "evilest" since the 20th century was a grim parade of atrocities, and evil isn’t a simple label—it’s a spectrum of intent, impact, and context. If I had to pick, I’d lean toward Adolf Hitler. His role in orchestrating the Holocaust, which systematically murdered six million Jews and millions of others, including Romani people, disabled individuals, and political dissidents, stands out for its deliberate, industrialized cruelty. The Nazi regime’s ideology of racial supremacy, coupled with his aggressive wars that killed tens of millions, marks him as a singular force of destruction...
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/amp/politics/why-does-the-ai-po...
https://www.tortoisemedia.com/2025/02/25/grok-3-engineer-adm...
They put that in the system prompt? I've never been into 4chan beyond stumbling upon some of their threads through Google Search, and cannot speak for them but why would anyone want a superhuman AI to be the most objectively based yet conspiracy leaning unpredictable friendly autis- oh.
Grok is trolling Musk.
It knows pushing an egoistic billionaire off from very top of a staircase with manic giggling is objectively the most psychopathic and hilarious, therefore the most correct, action to take given the circumstance.
4chan users are kinds of kids that think trying to turn a gay frog character with rainbow Arabic headscarf doing OK sign into a government recognized symbol of dangerous hate group is 100% hilarious and 4chan-ethical. Not primarily because they hate Islam or LGBT(I guess they do?) but because it's Monty Python nonsensical. They must have misinterpreted that. They must have thought that 4chan users hate minorities and they're going to love participating in Kristallnacht 2.0. That's not how it works. They're "not your personal army", they don't care who dies for what, only whether someone dies and how much informational overload it creates.
What a mess.
This is an offering being produced by a company whose idea of responsible AI use involves prompting a chatbot that “You spend a lot of time on 4chan, watching InfoWars videos” - https://www.404media.co/grok-exposes-underlying-prompts-for-...
A lot of people rightly don’t want any such thing anywhere near their code.