If you don't have a thoughtful, substantive comment to add, not commenting is also a good option. There are quite a few interesting submissions to talk about.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Giant waste of time while Anthropic/OAI keep surging forward.

I also keep hearing this narrative that Twitter is a good data source, but I cannot imagine it's a valuable dataset. Sure keeping up with realtime topics can be useful, but I am not sure how much of a product that is.

The burning (heh) question is which SpaceX subsidiary will fail first, xAI or Tesla (not yet a subsidiary, but it's written in the stars (heh))?

Then again SpaceX is also jumping the shark what with their orbital data centers (remember those?).

Might be time to start a new Musk company soon.

That said, Musk's attempts at misaligning the thing and make it prefer his opinions of course destroy any trust. It's surprising that it's seemingly as good and helpful as it is despite the corruption attempts.

I also don't quite get how the business model is supposed to work out if its main usecase is to serve Twitter. I know they provide API access as all other models, but with how distrusted Musk is and how sensitive of a topic reliable model behavior is, they seem to sabotage themselves. Which company wants it to go mechahitler on them?

xAI (and Twitter) was the loudest about six-hour workdays, sleeping in the office, and always shipping. ~2 years later it feels like they have nothing to show for it. I'm sure the engineers at Google worked 4 days a week, 2 hours a day, with half of that being spent at the Google cafeteria and they dusted xAI years ago.

Ask HN: What Happened to xAI? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47323236 - March 2026 (6 comments)

Right.

The product is the stock. TSLA: [1] Up by 3x in the last two years, despite no new models, the Cybertruck failure, the Robotaxi failure, the large truck failure, and an overall decline in sales. How does he do it?

It's a concern seeing Space-X, which builds good rockets, drawn into the X and AI money drains. Space-X is needed. If X and X/AI tanked, nobody would care.

[1] https://www.cnbc.com/quotes/TSLA

So Tesla's recent $2 billion investment in xAI was a bad deal?

It looks a lot like a public company is being used to bail out a private one.

I use AI for work, but not agentic, at most per method/function using GitHub CoPilot (which has Grok on it).

Grok is at best useful for commenting code.

When I was 9 years old, my uncle asked me what I was going to do for work when I got older. I told him I was going to start a company called "MacroHard", and become the richest man alive. He told me that's not how the world works. Turns out it is.

I'm not sure those candidates would want to work for xAI after seeing the news and everything unless they desperately need a job right now.

It's not hard to imagine getting laid off or fired weeks if not days after joining the company.

I guess for coding if you’re not first you’re last, but this is damn impressive considering. It looked like they pulled the coding model from the benchmarks, but it was similar.

They haven't quite committed enough to a novel direction relative to anthropic or OAI, what's described in the OP seems symptomatic of a lack of differentiation.

If you spend all your time judging yourself relative to the incumbents, there will be no time left over to innovate.

The leash is too tight!

If we are to take any claims of Recursive Self Improvement seriously at all, then having a competent coding model seems like a key asset where you need to guarantee that you're remaining competitive. Why wouldn't you make coding models a top priority if you expect it to ultimately help your internal teams become more productive and effective?

There's also not an unlimited supply of researchers and engineers for them to keep burning through people at the rate at which they've been working. Although I guess for people with short timelines it makes sense to sprint hard, while people with longer timelines are more likely to treat this as a marathon. Maybe the years of burning bridges and developing such a toxic reputation are finally catching up to Elon. I think part of the harm that Elon has done is framing all the work in xAI as engineering while being highly dismissive of research, but a lot of research requires running experiments or thinking about problems and exploring them for long periods of time. If you're just grinding out work nonstop you don't really have time to let your mind wander and explore new ideas.

Honestly, I'm surprised they've done such a terrible job with programming. I remember around summer last year it was quite apparent how far behind they were with coding tools, but Elon was posting about taking that domain a bit more seriously. Why didn't any of those efforts materialize into real outputs? Something must be truly dysfunctional inside of xAI for them not to be shipping anything at all, especially considering Elon's propensity to ship undercooked products while continuing to iterate on them, as he has done in many previous cases.

I've noticed that Elon has also gone very hard on social media posting a ton of criticisms against the other big AI company CEOs like Daario Amodei. This suggests to me that he must feel very threatened, otherwise he wouldn't be resorting to such childish behavior. He must feel incredibly frustrated that no amount of money is able to make him more competitive within the AI space.

big projects generate cruft. there are ways to minimize it, but as you go along there will always be some stuff that doesn't quite mesh with whatever else you've got going on. if you insist on ironing out every single wrinkle (admirable!) you'll never actually deliver a result.

I'm not saying this will fail. green field projects can certainly be a godsend when they produce something better than what they attempt to replace. but they are always a sign of failure. of not being able to work your way out of the mess you made with the first attempt. so that just begs the question: what are you going to do when this attempt gets hard to work with? going to give up and start over again - do it right that time? or...?

A story I heard from a Tesla employee was that it’s impossible to hire because musk is mercurial and every time a hire makes it through the pipeline a hiring freeze cancels all offers. Another story that employees were told to avoid his desk because he randomly fires people. Another that he regularly cancels bonuses because he’s feeling petulant. I heard another story that he threw up Nazi salutes on an internationally televised event. No wait, that one I watched happen.

After a while smart people will simply decline to work for him no matter the compensation. Not everyone, but enough to start to matter.

People aren't using it for reasons other than its capabilities. I mean, I don't think my boss would approve a paid Grok subscription for example.

@grok fire the bottom 50% engineers from x.ai ranked by number of commits per day

@grok generate a hypothetical picture of an Elon who is not under the influence of large amounts of Ketamine

I honestly don't know what to expect from Elon these days. But it's rarely good news.

The company seems to burn money like crazy. Everyone knows that "AI in space" and the downgrade to a moon trip after claiming for 15 years that Mars is just around the corner are marketing.

All AIs are toys and the coding promises are just a lie to string along investors. Unfortunately many of these are senile Star Trek watchers who buy into everything.

What an enormous blunder.

But now he is poaching the two heads of engineering of a company that's trying to move very quickly, how is that going to affect their speed and success?

> The name is a “funny” reference to Microsoft, the billionaire added.

in something from 2023 or earlier.

claude codes the best, gpt is the best research tool, and grok is really only great at videos. which isn't a huge loss, but videos don't have the same functional capacity as academic topics and coding

Since it's the original source I've left it up, but added other URLs to the toptext.

> You may not owe you-know-whom better, but you owe this community better if you're participating in it.

This is like telling a country that’s being invaded that they can only respond with strongly worded letters when their enemy is dropping tactical nukes on them.

But hey, Paul Graham and cronies benefit from the status quo as much as any other billionaire, so let’s not rock the boat, right?

The word “complicit” comes to mind.

Also grok in the Tesla is fun, get answers to questions without looking at a phone. I once had it search up a blog post and read it out to me while driving. The NSFW mode is pretty...disgusting so I leave that off.

I hope they find a way with Optimus or something. FSD is incredible. More competition is a good thing.