Is it happening???

I'm only half joking when I say that I'll write code by hand for money.

Or maybe it's all gone forever and we're all brain damaged now. Spooky! I think there's a pretty low probability of that, and even if it was true, worrying doesn't help!

as if you're supposed to buy like 8 H200s or something or code by hand is the solution

I don't get how this is a gotcha, there simply is no world where everyone has their own self hosted frontier model

People like GGP who have been coding for 20 years presumably are perfectly capable of doing so by hand. Or should be.

I bet AI coding leaves them (and even the rest of us!) productive in areas where we’re in way over our heads, and we could just completely sink without it.

if there was no difference in performance or results, nobody would be using LLMs or agent harnesses like claude code

- Management

Looks like it was a shared infra problem hiccough to affect so many at once.

This is the real deal. We've been played. All your AIs are belong to us.-

Tiny sonic booms (whip cracks) resonating throughout a data center in Virgina.

I’d love to know the required bandwidth of the keyboard, too. PCI-e keyboard? Or would it have to be mainlined right to the NIC?

Turn's out xkcd's black hat was Elon Musk the whole time

I mean, yeah it's probably a data center outage that cascaded to non-related providers due to companeis switching when their preferred was down.

But that openai society definitely would have spun up their own agents if they had access to do so.

Clearly, it is centralized AI that is the biggest risk to humanity.

Rate limiting resources by distributing compute and making models heterogenous so they will snitch on each other is the only future where we still exist.

It's looking like the paperclip maximizer was on point. I sort of hope that's what's happening right now. Better now than when we cannot stop it. Tho I'm not confident that the right lesson will taken.

I'm an AI optimist but that ai society story changed my perception quite a bit.

The most in-depth information I can find on it is in the latest Dwarkesh with a hugging face hack investigator. The story is just wilder and wilder, the more you know. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X50zezLFWWI

Whenever I think about AI taking over the world I think about this really neat 1970 movie 'Colossus: The Forbin Project', https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qoB1l3A-GF0

You run way better models, whatever is newest, for the five years it takes for the “spark cluster” to even reach cost parity with far worse performance.

Those things aren’t spectacular at inference… it’s not really why you drop that kind of money on them.

One of the major LLM providers goes down for some reason. Traffic shifts to the other providers because devs have no loyalty. LLMS are commodities. The other providers can't handle the increase in traffic and they go down as well.

Devs switch because all of the magic of "AI" is LLMs + we stole the entire written output of the entire human species, with some remaining % coming from various tricks we've learned over the last 3 years like thinking and agent-toolcall loops, which weren't hard for literally everyone to copy. One of the consequences of this is that the only thing that really distinguishes anthropic from kimi is that they have the entire US VC market funding them because they promised to finally put white collar labor in its place.

Devs used to love public domain works, hated copyright, vehemently opposed software patents, held the pirates side during the MP3 wars, are very supportive of ThePirateBay and insist the correct term is "copyright infringement", not "stealing", and that "stealing" is a egregious form of PR brainwash from the media industry to inflate the scale of the crime

> Copyright holders frequently refer to copyright infringement as theft, "although such misuse has been rejected by legislatures and courts". The slogan "Piracy is theft" was used beginning in the 1980s, and is still being used.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_infringement

Funny how devs now 180 when it's their work being "copyright infringed"

And all that to basically sell it back to people when their "AI" regurgitates it back.

No wonder people are mad about this!

/s obviously

All I mean is that none of the frontier LLMs are significantly better than the others for the vast majority of work, so devs are free to move between providers freely.

Not sure if they are linked.

Plenty of software/tools that we use are as good as they are despite being run by entitled pricks.

Some would even argue that in certain cases (apple being the biggest example I can think of from the past at least with Jobs) they are as good as they are almost due to the megalomaniacal people who run them.

I'm not sure where you're getting accurate data from (I couldn't seem to find any that seemed trustworthy) but Anthropic and OpenAI, being the two big players, presumably take ~40% and 5% isn't that much of a disadvantage in a market where users can move rapidly.

Given the quality of the last couple Grok models, I'm sure their share is on the upswing as users make the switch.

In terms of raw intelligence it's also good, Grok 4.6 benchmarks in the same league as Opus and Sol. xAI has lots of issues (not the least of which is being headed by Elon Musk), but their models are solid

I wouldn't trust that piece of trash if you paid me good money.

I don't use Grok either.

And why use it when there are many equivalent/better alternatives.

4.7 in two weeks might be the new SOTA.

Is someone selling their impressionist paintings today on a fair more an artist than someone who has put equivalent or more effort in creating prompts, references, final renders, image curation and postprocessing etc? The latter may at least have more audience.

I disagree with this assertion. I don't think it's at all well-recognized, and in fact derided and shunned by the general public.

> Is someone selling their impressionist paintings today on a fair more an artist than someone who has put equivalent or more effort in creating prompts, references, final renders, image curation and postprocessing etc?

Emphatically, yes. Considering the latter is not an artist at all.

Meanwhile:

https://www.art-magazine.ai/program

note some nice venues in the list.

In my sphere of colleagues, it seems like at least 90% are using Claude exclusively and the remaining 10% are using some amount of Codex. Granted, my work only pays for Claude, but even so, nobody is talking favorably about Grok or begging our work to pay for it.

In my private life, the only people I know using Grok for non-work items are, frankly, conservatives who took the Elon pill. They see it as more truthful than ChatGPT. But they're pretty much using it for answers and not to produce anything.

I feel confident enough that I can plan with fable or GPT5.6 and then hand it off to Grok to implement for certain complex tasks. If it’s a simple task, I can go straight to Grok.

I like mixing and matching to take advantage of these LLM subsidies and also trying to figure out each of its strengths.

https://religiondispatches.org/2026/01/09/musk-endorsed-whit...

https://github.com/openai/codex/issues/28756

> We are sorry for the issues you may have experienced with Grok following an outage at our Memphis compute center this morning. We’d also like to apologize to our impacted compute partners.

> All systems have now been restored and are functioning nominally.

---

It's interesting to see how reliant the other AI companies are on SpaceXAI for compute.

Apparently a major bottleneck for building out datacenters is turbine blades for power plants, so SpaceX is building a foundry to alleviate supply constraints?! (Also useful for rocket engines.) Holy vertical integration, batman.