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Comment by xnx | Hacker News Reader

OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Nvidia, Grok: they can't all be worth $1T (or $1T additional in Google's case) at the same time.

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Google's valuation is not based on their AI. Google has a highly profitable ad and cloud business. I don't know why you are putting NVidia in that list. NVidia sells chips and even if AI models become a commodity they need to run on something. Grok - no ones is valuing it at anything close to 1T. Closer to 100M if anything if you add Cursor. SpaceX valuation is based on their highly profitable Starlink business, highly profitable datacenter build-up and options to charge more for their monopoly in launch. Grok/XAI/Twitter are a small drop in all of it.

Demand for AI is real and increasing. There is real shortage of compute right now. It might be that AI lab is not a sustainable business but I don't see how all that demand evaporates. If anything it will only increase as AI becomes good at more and more tasks.

It still baffles me that Grok is even on the list let alone being funded. Their market share is terrible and the product is so mediocre. Why on earth would I want a tool that has “be funny and irreverent” baked into its system prompts? I don’t want a calculator cracking wise at me either.

Have you been on twitter?

It's become a huge community of people who have their life savings in Elon, and endlessly circle jerk the hype.

Not in several years and I plan on keeping it that way lol

Grok had the potential of being the #1 LLM if they actually went through with Elons original promise of an "uncensored model". Meaning no guardrails, it does what you tell it, no matter what. Sadly Grok is even more restricted than even OpenAI's models, and despite being marketed as "edgy and ruthless" it is THE MOST politically correct model on the market. ChatGPT or Claude will gladly go along with religious or nationality based roleplay, while Grok outright refuses. Oh and you can't even use it for any pentesting whatsoever because a) it's far worse than the competition b) it completely refuses to even LOOK at low level code.

But this goes along with Elons same promises for X; "X will support free speech" etc even though it's trivial to get banned for the most pointless things.

No company will be able to get away with offering a completely unconstrained commercial model. The legal risk and pushback from governments is too high.

> if they actually went through with Elons original promise of an "uncensored model". Meaning no guardrails, it does what you tell it, no matter what.

When will HNers realize that this is a fever dream? This is an edgy teenager's interpretation of "good".

The second someone uses a frontier model to attack other entities or hurt innocent people it will get (rightfully) shut down by the government.

We already saw this with the Fable export controls (and no one had even used these models offensively).

Open models will reach the same fate once the gov't realizes they are good enough. They will just ban weight hosting, require safeguards for any model routers that accept US payment, and embargo anyone that doesn't do these things.

There is a reason we don't let everyone in the world own RPGs.

There are multiple problems:

1. The censoring goes much further than refuting to participate in a felony.

2. The censoring is done by private companies outside the democratic process.

3. Censoring requires a single source of truth. Somone who has then the power to decide what is true. Also most people will blindlessly beliefe everything an LLM says.

No guardrails? So, what? Someone can get grok servers to attack critical infrastructure out of boredom? Take down a hospital network during an emergency or something? There was never a world where musk and co were going to take that risk.

And people thought swatting was bad! Just imagine that jfc

- cursor is good and covers many different use cases (multimodel "agents window", ai assistant in the editor chat, tab completion, cloud agents, ai code & security reviews) - grok bot was first to market as "openclaw for enterprises" and feel they really pioneered this UX - grok models are so-so but 4.6 had a great bang for the buck; they may still return to the "pareto frontier" for coding given all the data that cursor has

also the valuation is not only on grok/cursor? also spacex (starling, currently cheapest deliver to orbit; future "data center in space")

actually for an ai company i think they are quite well diversified and have multiple things going on for them; are they worth $1T --> i don't know, but i see a way to them doing really good (will they? on average, probably not, but at least it imaginable)

Anything is an imaginable if you have an imagination!

The SpaceX/xAI valuation is crazy. Their rockets and satellite tech (i.e. SpaceX proper) is cool, but not worth anywhere near $1T. And in the AI space their tech doesn't feel competitive with Antropic/OpenAI. Not really better than the open Chinese models.

What's its USP? Data centers in space that governments can't shut down without triggering Kessler syndrome?

Sure makes it more entertaining for the guys choosing targets in Iran though.

It's a classic example of short term mispricing.

I don't understand how Grok is in that list.

SpaceXSI is a $1T company

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