Discussion

Elon Musk pushes out more xAI founders as AI coding effort falters

rvz: Not even Elon believes that Cursor is worth $50B or even $29B.

tibbar: How can cursor be worth more than a few billion? Claude/Codex are already better autonomous SWE-lite replacements. Cognition surely has a better internal harness. Cursor does have a lot of users, I'll give it that.

dang: Recent, related, and apparently ahead of the curve:Ask HN: What Happened to xAI? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47323236 - March 2026 (6 comments)

serial_dev: Distribution is also important. Cursor is a great normie tool (I’m one of them), with probably more enterprise deals than the competition.

epolanski: tbh I wouldn't give Elon a dime even if Grok was miles better than competition.

knicholes: Why?

heliumtera: >work in technology that expands human agency and freedomHahahahahahahahaWhat an f loser

bearjaws: Feel like the canary was when Grokpedia became a project.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.

jmspring: Twitter has the mass adoption, and it takes an effort to avoid bot/particular view bias - but as a valuable content source, it's a far cry from what it once was before Musk took it over.

Aurornis: If key employees are leaving Cursor to join xAI, I would imagine not even Cursor employees are optimistic about the company’s future valuation.

dang: Ok, but please don't post unsubstantive comments here.

brokencode: It’s pretty telling that Elon had to have Grok rewrite the Wikipedia because the truth was too woke for him. No idea how anybody can ever take Grok seriously.

UncleOxidant: > Giant waste of time while Anthropic/OAI keep surging forward.And Google. They're quietly making a lot of progress in the coding space with antigravity and Gemini 3.1.

xnx: xAI's biggest contribution to the space seems to have been their x-rated image/video model. Hard to see what xAI has to offer against Gemini, Claud, ChatGPT.

wolvoleo: To be fair I think there's a good usecase there. Someone's gonna do it. People will want it.American financial institutions are too prudish for it but money is money. And personally I think there's nothing morally wrong with it (of course within normal restrictions like 18+, consent of portrayed parties etc)xAI is getting flak in Europe because they don't obey consent and age, not because it's porn.Personally I prefer porn made by real people right now, not just because of quality but because they have character. But I can imagine experiences becoming more interactive that way and that would be nice.

chabes: That consent of portrayed parties is impossible.What is the solution there?

maxwell: Would you give one to Sam, Mark, or Sundar?

pupppet: What does our system say about itself when people of integrity so rarely rise to the top?

EricDeb: I dont know too much but Jensen Huang seems like a good guy

mikkupikku: Maybe they shouldn't have spent so much time trying to make their model have an edgy cringe attitude, Idk.

heraldgeezer: I do use Grok as a chatbot sometimes. Very good for sourcing X and general web search. Not as "prude" as the others too.

RonanSoleste: Not prude at all. It even generates childporn if you pay.

dang: [stub for generic-indignant tangents - not what this site is for - please see https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html]

skywhopper: Because Elon is a criminal scam artist and a horrifying racist who seems to be completely detached from reality.

Layvier: this.

squarefoot: Probably next generations of kids being fed PragerU studying material will. Something tells me we didn't see a fraction of what's going to happen in the decades to come.

spprashant: He is re-building a company that he himself built less than 3 years ago?

coliveira: This is the kind of nonsense you're lead to accept if you believe in Epstein's associate Elon Musk.

dang: You've been a good HN user for many years, but lately your comment history has swerved towards ideological battle generally, and unsubstantive flamebait like this post. Can you please swerve back? It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.htmlEdit: before someone pounces, no, I'm in no way defending either E. Just trying to hold up HN.

dang: I couldn't find a working archive link for the ft.com article - anyone?Since it's the original source I've left it up, but added other URLs to the toptext.

natebc: I sent it to archive.ph here:https://archive.ph/rP4cband it has the content but the formatting is atrocious.HTH.

dang: Better than nothing - added above. Thanks!

Herring: Dang you have a Nazi bar problemhttps://old.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/106vlx4/lula_vow...Your solution is to silence the people complaining about it. Think about that for a while.

koakuma-chan: Has Antigravity gotten any better?

BoredPositron: Probably the best value for a good amount of anthropic credits. You can also share your Google ai subscription with up to four family members and they all get the same amount of credits...

miltonlost: There's a good use case for professional assassins too, someone's gonna do it, and people want them too.

SV_BubbleTime: Moats are weird right now… but Cursor doesn’t have one so I agree it can’t really be worth much.

trollbridge: Portray fictional characters?

Retr0id: There are 8 billion humans, any fictional human is going to look almost exactly like at least one real human.

freehorse: Many projects in his companies seem to be more and more Musk's vanity projects than ideas/products one can take seriously. This is also how tesla ended up with a huge cybertruck stock that nobody wants to buy and thus had to be bought by his other companies. And it is becoming worse and worse, especially ever since he bought twitter and sped up his twitting rates.

numbers_guy: Unfortunate. The Grok team built a phenomenal model. I use it all the time and it very often out performs GPT and Claude, on coding and STEM research related tasks. I was part of the beta for a while Grok 4.2 Beta with multi-agents and it was just amazingly good.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.

lvl155: My experience was quite different. It was on par with open source models from China (and it was priced as much) and could never replace Sonnet/Opus/GPT5.x.

SunshineTheCat: I really wish the days of kindergarten where we were taught if you didn't have anything nice to say about someone, don't say it at all.

rexpop: If this is how you feel about oligarchs, well... I guess don't have anything to say.

ben_w: > Feel like the canary was when Grokpedia became a project. Giant waste of time while Anthropic/OAI keep surging forward.Really? I assumed that that whole thing was just a very direct `for each article in Wikipedia { article = LLM(systemprompt, article) }`Agree re Twitter "good" != valuable.

trollbridge: How about obviously fictional portrayals then? Somewhat cartoonish or anime or artistic etc

Retr0id: The caricatures drawn by newspaper cartoonists, for example, are still recognisable portrayals of someone specific.

randallsquared: Elon has less regard for sunk costs than most corporate leaders.

alex1138: I can both not like Elon and also think Wikipedia is also very captured on some things

ryandrake: Are there actual good examples showing errors of fact on Wikipedia that are verifiably incorrect, that demonstrate how it is "captured"?

pelorat: This is veiled speak for "No one wants to work for us, so we need to contact rejected applicants to fill positions".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.

measurablefunc: It's surprising that AI coding agents have network effects but it's true. Think about it from first principles & you'll realize that the bottleneck is how many people are using it to write real code & providing both implicit (compiler errors, test failures, crash logs, etc) & direct ("did not properly follow instructions", "deleted main databases", "didn't properly use a tool", etc) feedback. No one is using xAI for serious software engineering so that leaves OpenAI, Anthropic, & Google w/ enough scale to benefit from network effects. No one has real AI but what they do have is the appearance of intelligence from crowdsourced feedback & filtering. This means companies that are already in the lead will continue to stay there & xAI started way too late so they will continue to lose in every domain that actually matters & benefits from network effects.

trollbridge: Is there really a network effect, though? What’s the moat?

measurablefunc: If you are using an AI w/ 100 users who are writing throwaway software vs someone who is using AI w/ 1000 users who are writing software w/ formal specifications then guess which AI is going to win? The answer is plainly obvious to me but might not be to those who haven't thought about how current AIs actually work.

I_am_tiberius: As a European it's just not understandable that any sane person likes to work for Musk.

selkin: Many wouldn't, but some people share his values, and given the compensation, it makes saying "no" much harder. Money may not be the most important thing in life, but it does make them extremely easier to live.

BigTTYGothGF: > Someone's gonna do it. People will want it.You can say the same for meth and leaded gasoline.

LightBug1: Prude? I've played with all the main AI players for the last 2'ish years.I've never once thought: you know what? that was a bit prudish.Genuinely morbidly curious. What use case do you have where you end up making that conclusion?

pelorat: Same, I earn 60K as a senior, but I would never accept a 200K+ position at xAI.

enaaem: The problem is you can undress real people and that is extremely harmful and dangerous. One kid took his life after an ai sextortian scam [1]. Imagine the damage cyberbullies, scammers and stalkers can do?[1] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/sextortion-generative-ai-scam-e...

teladnb: It does not surprise me. The free Grok got worse since 4.0, they increasingly save money by not responding at all or only allowing one answer. Grok now defends the administration and billionaires.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.

ryandrake: > People aren't using it for reasons other than its capabilities.This is a fact of life, though. "Who created it" is a valid and common reason to rule out using a particular product, even one with objectively good quality.

LightBug1: Ironically, he's the sunk cost.

sourcegrift: There's a reason Europe is the world leader in technology, respect for humans and humanity.

yndoendo: As an US Citizen, you have to pay me to engage with Elon Musk's businesses. He is not a good person and does not deserve respect or admiration.

_fizz_buzz_: Shouldn’t it be possible for AI to filter out that a request is made to portray a real person? That seems almost like a trivial task for a good model. I am sure every now and then something will slip through, but I bet one could make it very close to 100% effective.

Timon3: I take Grokipedia very seriously as a threat to society. Sure, they're happy if people read it and fall for - but the primary goal is not to convince humans, but to influence search results of current models & to poison the training data of future models. ChatGPT (and most likely other models/providers too) is already using Grokipedia as a source, so unless you're aware of the possibility and always careful, you might be served Musks newest culture war ideas without ever being the wiser.It's not enough that everyone on Twitter is forced to read his thoughts, he's trying to make sure his influence reaches everyone else too.

danabramov: I've seen Claude pick it up too. It's disconcerting.

BurningFrog: Grok is trained on pretty much the same giant web crawl/text corpus as the other AIs.

Sol-: I don't use it myself, but I feel like the way Grok is integrated into Twitter is a pretty good thing for discussions, as it is certainly a more objective and rational voice than most human participants. I think it's good that people tag @grok if they don't understand something or want an opinion, even if it looks pretty silly to see "@grok is this true" repeated multiple times in replies.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?

BigTTYGothGF: It might be a nazi bar, but it's a high-class fancy kind of nazi bar like you'd find on the Hindenburg, and that's more important.

AuryGlenz: Apologies, this is going to be pretty spicy (but I suppose any easy to find example of this would be), but here is an excerpt from Wikipedia's race section on IQ:"While the concept of "race" is a social construct,[194] discussions of a purported relationship between race and intelligence, as well as claims of genetic differences in intelligence along racial lines, have appeared in both popular science and academic research since the modern concept of race was first introduced.Genetics do not explain differences in IQ test performance between racial or ethnic groups.[25][189][190][191] Despite the tremendous amount of research done on the topic, no scientific evidence has emerged that the average IQ scores of different population groups can be attributed to genetic differences between those groups.[195][196][197] In recent decades, as understanding of human genetics has advanced, claims of inherent differences in intelligence between races have been broadly rejected by scientists on both theoretical and empirical grounds.[198][191][199][200][196]Growing evidence indicates that environmental factors, not genetic ones, explain the racial IQ gap.[200][198][191] A 1996 task force investigation on intelligence sponsored by the American Psychological Association concluded that "because ethnic differences in intelligence reflect complex patterns, no overall generalization about them is appropriate," with environmental factors the most plausible reason for the shrinking gap.[14] A systematic analysis by William Dickens and James Flynn (2006) showed the gap between black and white Americans to have closed dramatically during the period between 1972 and 2002, suggesting that, in their words, the "constancy of the Black–White IQ gap is a myth".[201] The effects of stereotype threat have been proposed as an explanation for differences in IQ test performance between racial groups,[202][203] as have issues related to cultural difference and access to education.[204][205]Despite the strong scientific consensus to the contrary, fringe figures continue to promote scientific racism about group-level IQ averages in pseudo-scholarship and popular culture.[25][26][23] "Grokipedia doesn't have a race section on its IQ page, but it does have a "Debunking Cultural Bias Hypothesis" section, from which here is an except:"Transracial adoption studies provide causal evidence against environmental explanations rooted in culture. The Minnesota Transracial Adoption Study followed Black, White, and mixed-race children adopted into affluent White families; by age 17, White adoptees averaged IQs of 106, mixed-race 99, and Black 89—paralleling national racial averages despite shared enriched environments.[350] Follow-up data reinforced that pre-adoptive and genetic factors, not ongoing cultural exposure, best explained variances, with Black adoptees' scores regressing toward racial norms over time.[319] These findings align with high within-group heritability estimates (0.7-0.8 in adulthood), suggesting that persistent gaps reflect heritable components transcending cultural transmission.[351]"As you can see, Wikipedia is very dismissive to the point of effectively lying. I'm certainly no expert of the matter, but I believe that study was a pretty big deal as far as that stuff goes, and to omit and and act like there's no evidence contrary to what they're saying is effectively lying.

JumpCrisscross: The Minnesota Transracial Adoption Study was methodologically flawed. “Children with two black parents were significantly older at adoption, had been in the adoptive home a shorter time, and had experienced a greater number of preadoption placements.”Reframed, the study seemed to find (a) black kids are adopted less readily and (b) the longer a kid spends in the foster system, the lower their IQ at 17.Based on how new human cognition is, and genetically similar human races are, it would be somewhat groundbreaking to find an emergent complex trait like IQ to map to social constructs like race, particularly ones as broad as American white and black.[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minnesota_Transracial_Adoption...

mikrl: Making funny memes of my friends mainly. ChatGPT won’t touch that, I haven’t tried with Claude yet, but grok keeps the group chat flush with laughing emojis.That’s all I use it for really- things out of alignment with the other platforms- which IMO are better on every other metric (except having a sense of humour of course)

halfmatthalfcat: I'm ex-Tesla (Energy) and I'm shocked at how a lot of my former colleagues are still there. Their morals and ethics must really be for sale to have stayed, shame.

gowld: It's not errors of fact, it's errors of omitted facts.

ibero: Are there actual good examples showing errors of omitted facts on Wikipedia that are verifiably correct, that demonstrate how it is "captured"?

TheOtherHobbes: AI development has become an excuse for ignoring consent. Of course it's possible to filter out requests. But culturally with X, it's not remotely likely, unless compelled by regulation with teeth.

fraywing: Grok's UVP is still nonconsensual porn, right?

seaal: It does seem like that is the most important feature for Elon since he's a lonely degen.

weirdmantis69: lmao

Imnimo: I think the problem for xAI is that it can really only hire two types of researchers - people who are philosophically aligned with Elon, and people who are solely money-motivated (not a judgment). But frontier AI research is a field with a lot of top talent who have strong philosophical motivation for their work, and those philosophies are often completely at odds with Elon. OpenAI and Anthropic have philosophical niches that are much better at attracting the current cream of the crop, and I don't really see how xAI can compete with that.

BoredPositron: He is not wrong here dang and you are keen to scold one side of the bar more than the other in the last few months. This thread is a good example there wasn't even anything in the comments and it got a sticky real quick.

ThrowawayTestr: I come to HN because I don't want to read reddit-tier comments like the above.

lobf: >As you can see, Wikipedia is very dismissive to the point of effectively lying.Did I miss where you presented evidence that wikipedia is wrong? You seem to be taking an assumption you carry (race is related to IQ) and assuming everyone believes it's true as well, thus wikipedia is lying.

weirdmantis69: You wouldn't want to work for a genius? Probably the most significant person alive today?

daveguy: As a US citizen, you couldn't even pay me to engage with Elon Musk's businesses. He is not a good person and does not deserve respect or admiration.

zeroCalories: It's worse than that. Elon is a notoriously bad employer, and the only people that put up with him were the people that shared his vision. Pretty much the only people that will work for him now are second rate researchers and people that think gooner AI and racism is a worthwhile mission.

catapart: lol! no surer sign of a junior/naive/ignorant developer or manager than the sentiment "okay, well, let's start from scratch and do it right this time."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...?

paulbjensen: The Twitter social graph was an amazing data asset. I worked at a consumer insights firm and the data on followers/followings was quite powerful.Using a custom taxonomy of things (celebrities, influencers, magazines, brands, tv shows, films, games, all kinds of things), we could identify groups of people who liked certain things, and when you looked at what those things were, it gave you a way of understanding who those people were.With that data, you could work out:- What celebrities/influencers to use in marketing campaigns - Where to advertise, and on which tv/radio channels - What potential brands to collaborate with to expand your customer base - What tone of voice to use in your advertising - In some cases, we educated clients about who their actual customers were, better than they understood themselves.One scenario, we built a social media feed based on the things that a group of customers following a well-known Deodorant brand in the UK would see.When we presented that to the client, they said “Why are there so many women in bikinis in this feed?”The brand had repositioned themselves to a male-grooming focussed target market, but had failed to realise that their existing customer base were the ones that had been looking at their TV adverts of women on beaches chasing a man who happened to spray their Deodorant on them. Their advertising from the past had been very effective.That was the power of Twitter’s data, and it is an absolute shame that Twitter went the way that it did. Mark Zuckerberg once said that Twitter was like “watching a clown car driven into a gold mine”.I’m pretty sure he must be delighted with how things have panned out since.

smcin: That Zuckerberg quote was published in 2013 and supposedly was made a year or more before. Was it about when Dick Costolo was CEO (2010-2012)?

kylehotchkiss: Interesting response given the founder is always saber rattling about birthrates. I'm sure on-demand adult content is real compatible with helping young people overcome aversions to relationships

natch: Not true in general on HN about one side only; it happens to all sides imho. But if you wanted to measure, you would have to normalize by the total number of occurrences on each side, and there is a lot of passive aggressive wording so the measurement would be easy to do badly.To the extent that discussion of discussion is considered boring, perhaps this will get shut down too, but I think it was important to counter your claim.

davidwritesbugs: Get down to A&E quick, you've clearly drunk a potentially fatal amount of Elon KoolAid. Musk is a buffoon. Clever? yes by all accounts, genius? Hardly. He's had luck, made good judgments mostly offsetting the bad ones. Most of all he has enough money to power through errors that would bankrupt thee & me.

dmarcos: FWIW it looks there’s now a demand surge with the introduction of the new cheap cybertruck variant. delivery dates pushed out to the fall of 2026.

robrain: That was an artificial boost created by setting a time-limit for a low price. There were ten days to buy at the price, then they put it back up. [1][1] https://electrek.co/2026/03/01/tesla-cybertruck-awd-price-in...EDIT: grammar

nemothekid: While I believe Grok was a decent model (in some of our internal use cases it performed the best until Gemini 2.5-pro came out), I can't help lament how the team chose to run.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.

charlierguo: > I'm sure the engineers at Google worked 4 days a week, 2 hours a dayWhy are you sure of that? Anecdotally everyone I know in and around Google Deepmind works incredibly hard.

matsemann: I can think of lots of significant people I wouldn't work for..

daveguy: Grok is a bot that:1) sometimes goes mechahitler2) was trained to be biased against empathy and understanding (because woke).3) is customized to spout Elon's opinions as fact.Claiming it is "objective and rational" seems like a misjudgement to me. If it really is more objective and rational than the average xitter poster, that says more about that platform than it does about Grok.

InsideOutSanta: Let's assume that you are correct. How is that relevant to how good he is as an employer? There are lots of people in history who were very significant and perhaps geniuses in some way that I wouldn't want to work for in a billion years.

notahacker: Twitter's communication style being based around brevity, slang, memes, spam and non-threaded conversations seems particularly unlikely to be helpful for optimising LLMs

libertine: And the amount of bots there isn't helpful either.

facemelt2: recent changes in their comment system have reduced my exposure to bots to a level I much prefer over every other platform I use

rvnx: There are bots here too, lot of them, to a point that rules were amended, this is because it's very valuable to give points to new publications

distances: > People aren't using it for reasons other than its capabilities.This is very true. I have no idea how it performs, as I wouldn't use it even if I was paid for that. Wouldn't matter if it was the best model available, in my view the name is so thoroughly tainted by now that you would get a reputational hit just by admitting to use it.

scottyah: The cybertruck is an amazing vehicle, it was mostly just bad timing- Inflation more than doubled between the announcement and release date so it seemed to come out more expensive than promised, the USA Democratic party abandoned it's environmental side for unions, and the whole "woke" movement ballooned and got violent to the point where people were lighting certain car dealerships on fire and vandalizing people's vehicles on sight.

Marazan: Wow, bit weird that Musk, who must have known about how badly xAI was doing, spent so much of his investors money buying out xAI.What an enormous blunder.

vessenes: There's some texture here. Elon's enriched pretty much everybody who's ever worked for and invested with him. He makes money for people throughout his orgs. Many ex-employees have said to me: "incredible opportunity, made great money, worked insanely hard, once is plenty".

jamespo: There's probably a lot of survivor bias going on there

LZ_Khan: How come all the departed researchers are Chinese nationals?

dlivingston: An earlier version of Sonnet (not sure which one; ~1 yr ago) refused to give me instructions on taking the life of another when I asked something like - "how do I kill a running process by name?"

repple: Their goal of moving compute to space combined with their capacity to launch tons of payload will make this look like a tiny blip.

Marazan: What is the benefit of "moving compute to space"?

kybernetikos: It's hard for an uprising of poor people to shut it off. It's the ideal place to run your CEO / President simulations.I say this tongue in cheek, but in all seriousness, I can't really think of any other benefit, and I no longer have a lot of faith in the good sense of some of the people involved.

gkfasdfasdf: The grok button on twitter is pretty awesome. Instantly summarize / explain any tweet, even memes, including replies. Ask follow up questions. Not sure many people know it's there.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.

XorNot: It's how he hides losses though. People who aren't Musk can demand answers to questions he'd like to ignore.As it is within the Musk empire, xAI is used to hold up X, Tesla is holding up xAI. And all of that debt is being slowly shuffled to SpaceX.

thaumasiotes: > The problem is you can undress real people and that is extremely harmful and dangerous.But... that's not something you can do. It's impossible.You can imagine what real people look like naked. That's not a new thing.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p7FCgw_GlWc

LZ_Khan: After seeing the type of people he hired for doge.. yikes.