I opened a developer API account, loaded 5 dollars and got the free $100s of credits for the month. Like two weeks later, xAI announced they were shutting down the subsidized credits entirely lol. Didn’t even get a full month out of it, and closed my account entirely since I sure wasn’t ever going to put another penny of my own money in.
So my personal lesson was to ignore any hype about the latest “crazy value / unbeatable / free / subsidized X, Y or Z” from anything xAI/Elon adjacent in the future.
These days I get more than enough personal usage from Codex + OpenCode Go to put up with yet another xAI/Cursor offer treadmill, especially if it involves installing new tooling to get it.
Do you think being apathetic is a good thing?
You may not care about politics, but politics definitely cares about you.
> do you use Apple equipment despite Apple’s use of Chinese slave labor?
If someone said they didn't buy Apple because of this, I'd support them in that too.
People. Are. Complicated. We're allowed to have beliefs, we're allowed to have beliefs that aren't internally consistent. You gotta get over the idea that people aren't genuine believers in their beliefs.
Besides, if Musk embeds his politics into everything he does, it's fair game to discuss his merits in that arena.
I agree completely. That's why I won't use Grok: its owner repeatedly beats us over the head with his politics, and I won't encourage it.
@dang - feature request for HN: have a "Thunderdome" section for the off-topic political commentary on the site, and once enough people flag something for being political, it gets detached and moved to the Thunderdome. People can let off steam there and the rest of us can have a nice clean place to read about tech.
Maybe that wouldn’t be a problem if Elon Musk would lay off the ketamine and shut his fucking mouth sometime. But instead he spends all day tweeting about how anyone he doesn’t like is a “traitor to western civilization” and calling for executions.
Why is it surprising that people are reacting to his words and actions? You want the politics to go away, get a CEO that doesn’t make everything political.
You don't like seeing politics you disagree with. You just don't think things you agree with are politics.
I come to HN to learn, to be exposed to different modes of thought. To engage in useful creative discourse over disagreements. The idea that HN or tech is free from politics is intellectually vacant thinking.
Oh but it is. Normal people don't go to McDonalds shouting: "I refuse to eat here because they kill cows!". They just... don't go there.
The person isn't complaining about grok to grok, they aren't even complaining about grok on X.
Making it open weight does the opposite – it allows traffic to not be routed through them at all.
META releases open weight models because selling access to models isn't their business model, they get optimization for free, good press with adoption of their tech etc. They don't want AI to become another iOS, they want to commoditize the layer underneath them.
GOOGLE releases open weight models because they complement the rest – from premium offering to Android/Chrome/Google Cloud etc products. They use it as part of open ecosystem / local / edge / experimentation layer. 400 million downloads with 100k community variants is nice vibrant ecosystem they have and want to have, they can capture value in several places and would prefer if devs standardize on their tooling.
OPEN AI because their PR was shit and it saved them, purely defensive move, which is interesting considering their name and initial goal.
ALIBABA because it tickles them to erase/cap profits in western labs, free optimisation/research, great PR.
DEEPSEEK they want to have day-zero support for all possible hardware platforms, they started it because Liang wanted to do it, had resources from High-Flyer to do it and he said fuck it and did it (zero commercial incentives which is so bizzare that it deserves a movie or something). He wants to do it because his destination is AGI. In that sense he's more original OpenAI than OpenAI.
MISTRAL because they want to be to AI what RedHat is to Linux.
NVIDIA because they sell GPUs.
...the list is long, there are few dozens of companies including Microsoft, IBM, AI2, Databricks, Snowflake, xAI, EleutherAI, Hugging Face etc. that release open weight models, there are thousands of models and tens of thousands of fine tunes across across text, image, video, audio etc.
In general half life of any model is short. What is more lasting is ecosystem around it, releasing new generation as open doesn't give away technical advantage.
They give away asset for which strategic value is deprecating rapidly and in exchange they get developers, mindshare, tooling, optimizations, integrations, research, standarisation etc. and put pressure on competitors destroying their margins.
It's not an absurd way of thinking, it may seem like irrational move but let's wait and see – imho labs like Anthropic can't sustain long term this kind of pressure and will eventually collapse – regardless of the fact that currently they look like strongest player that can't be touched, the whole thing they have holds on thin, fragile support that gets eroded.
we talked about Chinese models. Yes, erase/cap profits, PR, and give clients peace in mind that model access won't disappear. So, it is infiltraiting markets.
Motivations are more complex than that, if they wanted to achieve that they'd follow approach taken by some western labs to release weaker models only as open keeping frontier behind APIs.
Look at ie. OpenRouter you'll see how many providers there are and how much traffic they get.
If the goal was data, opening weights would be the worst available way to achieve it: a cheap, closed API would capture 100% of traffic (ie Anthropic style), weights can only lose share from there.
With open weights it's net loss of active users of your official api – you're loosing users to self hosting and dozens of providers.
The thing is that open weights create permanent exit that closed models do not have, inference is commoditized immediately, people choose open weight models specifically for data privacy (and stuff like soc2/hipaa compliance) and if somebody wants convenience they go to claude/openai and friends anyway.
Also chinese labs are not uniform with their approach just as western labs are not.