Art 12 ↔ Art 19 — Behavioral tracking for news delivery (Article 12 privacy compromise) supports business model enabling free/subsidized journalism (Article 19 information access), creating tension between user privacy control and public information access.

Art 19 ↔ Art 23 — Freedom of the press to report on corporate labor decisions (Article 19) lacks equivalent structural support for worker voices or labor rights perspectives (Article 23), privileging management framing over worker agency.

dang 2026-03-13 19:34 UTC link

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)

awestroke 2026-03-13 19:39 UTC link

@grok is this real?

@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.

bearjaws 2026-03-13 19:40 UTC link

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.

xnx 2026-03-13 19:50 UTC link

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.

heraldgeezer 2026-03-13 19:52 UTC link

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

fraywing 2026-03-13 19:55 UTC link

Grok's UVP is still nonconsensual porn, right?

mikkupikku 2026-03-13 19:56 UTC link

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

dang 2026-03-13 20:01 UTC link

All: please stick to thoughtful, substantive discussion. You may not owe you-know-whom better, but you owe this community better if you're participating in it.

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

numbers_guy 2026-03-13 20:21 UTC link

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.

pelorat 2026-03-13 20:36 UTC link

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.

Imnimo 2026-03-13 20:56 UTC link

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.

Sol- 2026-03-13 20:58 UTC link

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?

nemothekid 2026-03-13 21:14 UTC link

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.

twodave 2026-03-13 21:21 UTC link

Used Grok for the first time, in a Tesla, and for that purpose it actually made a lot of sense. It’s very well-integrated into the car’s systems and communication style while driving tends to be very tweet-esque. I think this is the niche they should lean into more (live assistant, e.g. Jarvis type stuff) and leave the more agentic niche to folks like Anthropic. Maybe even delegate more difficult or background tasks to those sorts of models. As a verbal interface I found it pretty pleasant.

Animats 2026-03-13 21:44 UTC link

“Orbital space centres and mass drivers on the Moon will be incredible.” - Musk

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

moogly 2026-03-13 22:07 UTC link

I feel xAI is just a very big version of the Boring Co. "flamethrower": an unserious endeavor which is just a reskinned existing tool (it was a reskinned weed burner), but people were wowed by it anyway, since Musk was behind it, and they all pretended it was something new and notable.

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.

g947o 2026-03-13 22:28 UTC link

> Recruiters have been contacting unsuccessful candidates from previous interviews and assessments to offer them jobs, often on better financial terms, the people said.

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.

breve 2026-03-13 22:55 UTC link

> "AI was not built right first time around, so is being rebuilt from the foundations up"

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.

causalzap 2026-03-14 03:21 UTC link

The irony is that while Wikipedia faces criticism for bias, it remains one of the few massive-scale sites with a clean internal link structure that doesn't feel manipulated by modern SEO 'clustering' tactics. For developers, their API is still a masterclass in how to serve structured data to the public.

maplethorpe 2026-03-14 03:30 UTC link

> Toby Pohlen, a former DeepMind researcher, was put in charge of the “Macrohard” project to build digital agents that Musk said could replicate entire software companies. Musk said it was the “most important” drive at the company. The name is a “funny” reference to Microsoft, the billionaire added. Pohlen left 16 days later.

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.

jmspring 2026-03-13 19:43 UTC link

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.

notahacker 2026-03-13 19:49 UTC link

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

wolvoleo 2026-03-13 19:54 UTC link

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.

UncleOxidant 2026-03-13 19:58 UTC link

> 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.

brokencode 2026-03-13 19:58 UTC link

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

LightBug1 2026-03-13 20:34 UTC link

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?

ryandrake 2026-03-13 20:46 UTC link

> 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.

paulbjensen 2026-03-13 20:59 UTC link

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.

daveguy 2026-03-13 21:14 UTC link

Grok is a bot that:

1) sometimes goes mechahitler

2) 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.

charlierguo 2026-03-13 21:16 UTC link

> I'm sure the engineers at Google worked 4 days a week, 2 hours a day

Why are you sure of that? Anecdotally everyone I know in and around Google Deepmind works incredibly hard.

distances 2026-03-13 21:26 UTC link

> 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.

basisword 2026-03-13 21:31 UTC link

It's almost like burning people out is a bad idea. Fair enough if you're working 12 hour days as employee 1 at a startup but when your boss has more money than God and is working you like a dog you're not going to keep that up (especially when all of those people probably have much better opportunities available to them at the drop of a hat).

vessenes 2026-03-13 21:40 UTC link

I'll bite. I think their conversation (voice) model is more fluid than competitors. It's also very good at hitting up twitter for realtime information, and was that way before the current tool use models got fully up and running. Anecdotally, I think it has better theory of mind than its era (gemini 2.5) - I found it a useful issue spotter for negotiations and planning in a way that oAI and claude were not near its launch date. It led the vending bench for some time after launch.

Taken together, I infer that RL training toward a slightly less homogenous cultural standard than the other frontier AI labs adds some capabilities, or can at times.

It's quite long in the tooth right now, though. But I'll definitely talk to the next version; I like heterogeneity in the model space, and Grok is very different than the other big three.

SaltyBackendGuy 2026-03-13 21:56 UTC link

I am honestly a bit disappointed it couldn't do basic things, like play X on Spotify. To be fair, I accidentally activated Grok for holding the voice command button too long (which is another UX issue - i.e. 2 voice command interfaces).

jazzpush2 2026-03-13 22:23 UTC link

In an interview with xAI I was literally told that certain parts of the model have to align with Elon, and that Elon can call us and demand anything at anytime. No thanks!

darkwater 2026-03-13 22:24 UTC link

Grok in Tesla is utterly terrible, a rushed out product with a very bad UX. As a simple example, it's the very first feature in Tesla's UI that does not come translated to the UI language set by the user but it's just available in English. Never happened before.

lich_king 2026-03-13 22:34 UTC link

Anthropic, maybe, but what is the philosophical niche of OpenAI? Their only consistent philosophical position about AI is "let's make more money".

sroussey 2026-03-13 22:52 UTC link

You had the answer right there… SPCX will be the product, what they make will no longer matter.

yoyohello13 2026-03-13 23:18 UTC link

> people who are solely money-motivated (not a judgment).

Honestly, we should judge. There should be judgment for people who are solely money motivated and making the world a worse place. I know, blah blah privilege, something something mouths to feed. Platitudes to help the rich assholes sleep at night. If you are wealthy and making stuff that hurts people, you are a piece of shit and should be called out, simple.

tyleo 2026-03-13 23:30 UTC link

It’s interesting because for a long time people wanted to work for Elon because he held the moral high ground. “I’ll bring electric cars and space colonization online or die trying.”

It’s sad to see the shift.

biggestfan 2026-03-13 23:42 UTC link

I disagree, I find that the grok replies are terrible product UX. Not only do they clog up the replies of every popular post, they're also constrained to extremely short answers with no sources. The community notes system, while also flawed in its own ways, is at least not nearly as disruptive and usually provides a link.

Trying to make social media a source of truthful information is always an uphill battle and doubly so for X.

thinkcontext 2026-03-13 23:58 UTC link

If I was a SpaceX investor I'd be considering litigation. Saying the core product has to be rebuilt right after it gets bought by SpaceX?! Maybe the SpaceX investors would have liked some diligence about that before purchase but looks like someone had a conflict of interest about that.

VirusNewbie 2026-03-13 23:58 UTC link

Anyone Google has hired in the last ~8 years was hired onto a team that is growing and has a culture of shipping and producing. Google regularly weeds out low performers, be it new grads or long timers who started doing the rest and vest thing.

Now, I don't think most people at google are literally driving to the office or sleeping there most of the time, you'll certainly have more WLB than xAI.

I'd even say, Google is much better at calibrating the right amount to push people than some other companies.

dkobia 2026-03-14 00:51 UTC link

I thought Grok in the car was awesome until it went off on a tangent and started praising Elon.

codemog 2026-03-14 01:06 UTC link

Greatest hype man of all time and shows how whacked out reality and economics are.

tombert 2026-03-14 01:08 UTC link

I'm pretty sure that all these acquisitions have been glorified accounting tricks in order to undo the damage that Musk did when he bought Twitter at an obscenely overvalued price in 2022. Clearly he didn't actually want Twitter at that price, because he tried to back out almost immediately after making the offer, so now he has his accountants do all this glorified money-shifting to effectively "sanitize" his purchase and recover his funds.

jjfoooo4 2026-03-14 01:14 UTC link

I’m really, really uninterested in reading AI content that other people have generated. If I’m on Twitter, I’m looking for what humans have to say.

virgildotcodes 2026-03-14 02:29 UTC link

Have you tried the 5.3 Codex Xhigh, 5.4 Xhigh, Opus 4.6, Gemini 3.1?

All of them (even Gemini, the worst of the bunch) far outclass Grok on everything I've thrown at them, especially coding.

Grok is good at summarizing what's happening on twitter though.

kstrauser 2026-03-14 02:34 UTC link

I’ve heard the haha-but-serious joke numerous times that you can’t have a security department that’s not trans and furry friendly. Thing is, I completely believe that. Those groups are disproportionately represented among the security community, and I personally would not work somewhere that my friends in those groups would feel unwelcome. That’s a quite common sentiment even among us straight cis non-furry men.

Well, I don’t think it’s a stretch that the kind of highly educated data scientists and engineers who have the experience to work in high-end AI labs also don’t want to work somewhere that their friends and associates would feel unwelcome, let alone have their friends question why they’d be willing to.

Turns out opinions have consequences and freedom of speech goes hand in hand with freedom of association. People have the right to say whatever they wish. Others have the right not to want to work with them.

serioussecurity 2026-03-14 03:24 UTC link

Only from disingenuous folks trying to control them.

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