Abbreviations carry unnecessary cost on the side of the readers. There is always the chance that there is another shorthand for something else that is important and so there is a need to double check interpretations.
So thanks for the comment and no, a 101 wouldn't even help with this problem.
They do, but the parent's question wasn't about the abbrebation (for which I'd cut them some slack) but extended to:
"Is that supposed to help? WTF is a HuggingFace?".
>So thanks for the comment and no, a 101 wouldn't even help with this problem.
Wasn't addressed to you though (don't even see any other comment of you in this subthread), but to @markdown, whose issue wasn't with the abbreviation alone.
Some users feel IP address, ISP, and LLM are clear. Fewer of those users will also reference HF. I have had to stop myself and type out Hugging Face.
HR perhaps? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon%27s_razor
And on top of that, with low/no guardrails, people call you a child pornographer(grok), so the public is also against it. Yet mysteriously few complain about Chinese open models being child pornographers.
So even if your goal isn't ethical, but just fiscal, it's reasonable to say there are two standards. And to complaint in some way.
I don't think banning is going to work, that's just silly. And over the next few years, everyone and their dog will have local GPU compute to train locally. People have home labs, the bar isn't that high, and eventually large text datasets will escape from Anthropic and other companies, allowing for comparable training.
It's a genie that's not going back in the bottle, the bottle is smashed.
The only reasonable outcome would be section 230 style carveouts so that there is zero liability for anything a model does.
Because having guardrails on corporate models barely months ahead of open ones, which will never be restricted, is entirely pointless.
Though I think your overall point still stands, and at least Grok's twitter bot has received a lot of criticism for pure text too (Mecha hitler comes to mind)
Open weight models get scrutinised in a different way, also linked to perceptions of their developers' bias, like the tests to see whether they refuse to answer questions on certain historical events at Tiananmen Square
John Oliver disagrees with this
You're vastly underestimating the scaling problem here.
Things that would need to be true for your statement to be valid:
- Model intelligence doesn't increase with model size
- Model intelligence doesn't increase with training set size
- Novel architecture completely decouples model intelligence scaling from hardware scaling
- Residential electricity is as cheap as industrial electricity
- RAM and GPU supply outpace demandPeople call grok that because deviants were abusing grok's ability to edit images and post them publicly on X to strip people - including children - of their clothes, from their public photos. Then when there was backlash, Elon laughed it off. It took half the world opening investigations against X for violations of existing regulations for action to be taken.
The leniency that internet companies get in terms of dealing with illegal content comes with the expectation that they're making reasonable efforts to control the distribution of said content. X, and Grok, were actively supporting the production and distribution of the content in public.
It is very different from someone creating such images in a private account, and definitely very different from someone using a local model to do it.
The only realistic, non-double standard is that the creator of the model should be 100% responsible. What on earth does it have to do with who's hosting it?
And by this metric, aren't all the uncensored models on huggingface, child pornographers? And if so, why not? Provide tangible, real, sensible reasons please, and after all, isn't hugging face a company?
You know, people are all over the place on this. I see people complaining about guardrails, then in the next breath complaining there aren't enough. Complaining that open models are the thing, but then creating double standards.
So once again, what is your actual reason why it's different?
If someone uses something one of OpenAI's hosted models to generate illegal content, it isn't automatically spread to anyone that clicks on the post the original image is from. On top of that, OpenAI does not explicitly endorse the use of their models for such activities the way Musk did.
If someone uses a local model to generate illegal content, same thing applies.
I have a hard time believing that you're arguing in good faith. The differences are so blatantly obvious and they don't even require any discussion about guardrails. Grok was being used to edit images and post them on public social media. The technology to edit images has existed for decades now. So here's a direct analogy via Photoshop:
1. In the case of a local model: Someone using a local image editor to edit photos into illicit material and manually distributing them.
2. In the case of a hosted model: Someone using a cloud image editor to edit photos into illicit material and manually distributing them.
3. In the case of Grok: Someone using a cloud image editor to edit photos into illicit material, the cloud image editor automatically distributing it to the public, and the owner of the editor endorsing the material as an exemplar of what their editor is capable of.
In 1 and 2, the editor (ie the AI) was just a neutral tool. In 3 the issue is that the company explicitly endorsed and distributed the material, no longer neutral. This is why it's reputation is of being a CP machine.
Your words. Grok was an example, the owner is irrelevant in the discussion.
To spell it out for you further, the owner's actions matter. It doesn't matter that it was specifically Elon doing it. The owner promoting the ability to produce and post illicit content is the opposite of making reasonable efforts to control it!
If you want, you can substitute character.ai and their need to add age verification, due to pending law suits. It makes no difference. All this noise about Elon is entirely, completely, and absolutely irrelevant to the point I was making. Nothing you have said shows otherwise.
The owners actions, in terms of determining the legal implications for all platforms, for attempts to ban open models, for what guardrails platforms must have, are irrelevant. We're talking about setting standards which will last decades, if not longer, legal precedent, and how this is handled will change the entire marketplace.
Some tweets you didn't like have no importance in this kind of discussion. The stance of an owner of one company, have no importance in this discussion. Grok was used as an example, there are others, as cited above.
No, it doesn't matter that Musk this and Musk that. I don't care. It's not relevant.
You've missed the entire point I was making, entirely and completely, which was that there can not be two standards. If it's illegal to have a model produce porn, or CSAM, or whatever, then it must, I repeat must be application agnostic, be regardless of how that model is run.
Yet here you are, almost frothing at the mouth, on and on about Musk. You're like a bull that saw red somewhere. I don't care about whatever US style politics are involved here. I don't care about Musk. Musk, or US politics are not important to me. Musk has nothing to do with the point I was making.
I don't know how to make this any plainer to you. Any response where you talk about Musk, is an incorrect response. This thread isn't about Musk. I don't care about Musk. I don't care about your opinions of Musk.
Hopefully the above clears up your incredibly weird, out of the blue obsession with Musk as a topic in this thread.
And I've now been immensely clear, even though it should have been clear from my very first post, or at least the second, that in this discussion it's not even remotely relevant what the owner of any company did. Why would it matter? We're talking about local vs corporate compute for models here, and about who creates what baked-in restrictions in models. Not about what some random owner did.
This discussion is about open versus closed models. About them being legislated. About them being controlled. Why are you blathering on about Musk? Why do you keep going on about the actions of any CEO of any company, when I was discussing corporate vs individual liability in these matters? Even now, you seem to think it's relevant what the owner of companies do here. It's not. At all. Why on earth would it be?
I feel as if the largest discussion the world is having today is, "sweep it under the rug". You seem to be trying to say, and don't claim otherwise, as you went on and on about how corporate liability is different than with private models!, that what a person does on their personal computer should have different liability implications than on a corporate leased computer.
That if content creation cannot be seen, well then all is well and OK. Just sweep it under the rug, and all will be fine!
At one point you tried to shift this into the realm of "no it's only once it's posted", and that's moving closer to a correct target of personal liability and responsibility. But these issues are now so "in the faces" of the "normal joe", that the entire internet is about to change.
And the reason for that is, personal liability is coming to the internet.
All the age and identity verification blather is about, as I've been saying here and there for years, personal liability and responsibility. It is entirely ridiculous and irresponsible to place liability for user content at the feet of the makers of tools. Instead, if you post CSAM, or if you make a fake video to slander someone(eg, to screw with elections), or if you incite violence, all of it, one needs to be held personally liable and responsible for that.
That's where the internet is going. Anonymity will continue, of course, when you post to X, to Youtube, to Facebook, your identity will not be immediately disclosed. But they'll have it, as a requirement for posting anything, and a simple warrant will disclose it. Otherwise they'll face criminal liability.
I believe 230 carve outs will change to ensure that this degree of ID verification is a prerequisite for any form of liability exclusion. And really, seeing today's landscape? This is the most free method to continue on the path we're on.
It's the most free, as the concept of forcing companies to be the filter is horrible in comparison. If companies are the filter, guess what happens? They are politically bent, or they alternatively are legal liability concerned to the point that they over-filter. And if companies become "the filter", then that's where true freedom of expression disappears.
Yet if companies are not legally liable, then the weight of liability must lay somewhere. And it should lay on the end user's shoulder. That's how you retain the ability to express, to post political satire, it's where you get the ability to protest.
Imagine a world where the roads were all owned by private companies, and if you wanted to protest politically, you were not granted the right to use those roads?! Not even out of malice, but due to corporate liability fears.
That's what corporate liability looks like. And I can assure you, 100%, liability is here.
So your thoughts that companies should be treated "special" only means one thing.
It means the illusion of freedom, whilst your ability to exercise that freedom vanishes.
Further reading: XAI Bets on Grok's Racy Side, The Information, Jun 24, 2026
&: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/07/xai-cant-deny-gr...
lawyers cited a 2026 National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC) report confirming that 90 percent of xAI’s CyberTipline reports “were not actionable by law enforcement because xAI declined to include user information that would allow law enforcement to track and locate perpetrators.”EDIT: of course it probably helps to have an up front tdd test suite, but often isn't the case.
The summary is that an instance was running on certain benchmarks without any limits or supervision and the AI decided to cheat by exploiting a silly series of vunlns.
Incentive and ability are what should be looked at. There, things get far more interesting: what is the current state of AI employed by the US intelligence agencies and what do they use it for?
Having the public convinced, their "superiors" would only do everything in their best interest, even without anybody knowing for sure, is Huxley's Brave New World in real life.
shouldn't any reasonable person when presented with a line of thought that has no substantiation at all conclude that they just can't reasonably be expected to support or reject the theory?
Positions of power attract people who want to use that power for their own gain. They abuse it regularly, whether it's politics, enterprises or even charity.
To assume, that somehow wouldn't happen when you don't look is beyond absurd. Of course it does.
So I pointed explicitly at US intelligence agencies, because there corruption is rampant and oversight virtually non-existent, respectively itself involved in the corruption.
What you suppose there is a grotesque "don't ask don't tell"-complicity.
In reality, trust has to be earned and that deservingness has to be verified.
HF could not be helped by US frontier models because of the "safety" features they have.
HF had to use an open model from china.
Anthropic wants to add those "safety" features to open models - especially from china.
End result would be HF hack would have continued atleast until the Monday that OpenAI engineers finally walked back into work.