Sure you can. It'll just take a little while to shake the rust off. It's like riding a bike.
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!
However it's not a worse idea than all the other things we rely on cloud services for like banking, healthcare, booking a taxi, ordering food, navigation, communication...
A lot of times you run into senior developers are even staff engineers who have no idea how the big picture works like they don’t know what an IP address is.
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.
Maybe people switched when Claude went down, giving more load than usual to the others? Or maybe just really bad timing from some of those providers to update?
Some napkin math - total Internet bandwidth is estimated to be 3-4 petabits per second. Let's say 1% of that is inference traffic - 35 terabits - then that's ~4.375 trillion characters per second at 8 bits per character. A single keyboard press might require 2 mJ, so you need roughly 8.75 GW (electricity required for ~9 million homes) of continuous mechanical force to keep pace. This would cause the keyboard to heat up 175 million degrees C per second. Disappointingly, this is not enough to create a black hole but I'm sure Randall Munroe could tell you how the guy's pet T-rexes would be vaporized into previously unknown types of plasma and how satisfyingly whimsical that would be.
The keyboard springs are sooooo weak. It takes forever for them to recover after a press. Our dude would have to grab the key after each character and pull it back up so it can keep up with him.
And grok was secretly querying ChatGPT? Daisy chain of failures? Like a chain of kids copying the answers of the kid next to them? LOL. Is there an XKCD for that?
> 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.
In the future (ha ha ha) when everyone has become totally LLM dependent a service outage will cause all of them to stop walking and talking and otherwise functioning and their heads will simply droop down while they stand or sit silently in place.
So you spent the cost of my entire cluster in one day on Sol tokens lol. I have no need for that many tokens, a few million a day is perfectly acceptable. But if you do, then yeah Sol is probably your bet. Have fun :)
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.
Microsoft had extensive issues earlier in the week. Anecdotally it feels like internet has been noticeably slower this week across sites, networks and devices. Now this. IDK, has anyone else noticed anything this week?
Claude and Codex were down too. A 3 month old github issue that was the top result for the error that Codex threw (a 404 of all things) briefly became a live chat for bored and annoyed AI users.
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.
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.
> stole the entire written output of the entire human species
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.
I don't think regular people did any 180 degree turns. Rather big corporations again demonstrated their total hypocrisy where they on one hand stomp on people for "infringing their intellectual property" while at the same time scrapping all data they can get their tendrils on, with total disregards for the wishes of the authors of the data. Even to the point of overloading servers by mindless scrapping or destroying irreplaceable physical books like the bloody inquisition!
And all that to basically sell it back to people when their "AI" regurgitates it back.
It has nothing to do with "their work", and the opposition to AI copyright usage comes much more from non-devs than devs. The actual answer is that people are anti-megacorporation and pro-individual. They are fine with copyright that protects individual rights and opposed to copyright that enshrines megacorporation rights. It's not that difficult to understand.
Since we are talking for other people, "devs" wouldn't have supported someone downloading all those copyrighted works from the pirate bay and profited by, for example, selling them. I don't see any 180.
I mean, yeah, it's probably a data center outage that cascaded to non-related providers due to people switching when their preferred provider was down.
But that openai society definitely would have spun up their own agents if they had access to do so to complete their impossible task.
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.
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
I'm an AI optimist but that ai society story changed my perception quite a bit.
Clearly, it is centralized AI that is the biggest risk to humanity.
Look to nature and our own history to diffuse the danger:
1. Compute resources must be distributed both in terms of access and geography so that a single breach doesn't pwn the world.
2. Models must be made to be heterogeneous so that they will not be vulnerable to the same thing all at once. And will be willing to snitch on each other. We don't want AIs all from the same tribe.
The true openness of - and independent access to - AI by humans with no central authority is no longer just about a defense against loss of individual agency and oppression. It's now existential for everyone.
If frontier models and run authority remain under centralized control, both the probability of this sort of thing happening is increased and the defense against it once it happens is null.
Been very skeptical for awhile but decided to try it cause it was like $30 for 3 months or something. I cancelled my Claude subscription (still have codex), but been pretty impressed with the grok CLI. Nice TUI and seems intelligent thus far.
Really? I've used all of the models extensively and Grok doesn't even compare to the others. I can ask for a big task and it will say "Done!" like 3 minutes in, but it will have done just the least amount of work possible. I also notice "muskisms" leaking back in the results like "I'm not roasting your code". Completely unusable for me and not comparable to the other model providers.
That is interesting, I've never been able to get it to successfully complete big tasks to any level of quality. For me the Anthropic models are by far the best at that, but the newer OpenAI models are starting to approach that quality. Grok always seemed like it was designed to write nasty tweets and the code quality I got from it matched that.
I think it's good for mid-sized tasks. It seems quick too. It just doesn't do as good of a job with large changes or architectural decisions as Opus imo.
I don't remember the version exactly but maybe June/July timeframe? I tried it on maybe a half dozen projects with different types of asks as I was comparing models for my company at the time.
Grok 4.5 came out in mid July and is a huge leap forward. Not quite as good as Opus 5 for code in my experience, but better and more succinct for understanding human documents.
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.
recently i tried grok 4.6. and to me, it seems better than claude (opus). it follows the system prompt very accurately and remembers everything unlike claude (opus), it doesnt forget the system prompt during long conversations. but yes that depends on your purpose or approach to using AI
I use it in Cursor, recent versions are good for writing specs, code review, etc.
Not good for UI design and broad research, though.
Btw it does not have outage in Cursor now, it seems the infra path is different
for XAI Grok and Cursor Grok.
I think there's a strong consensus that the idea of an "AI art scene" is a misnomer. There's an AI slop scene, and some of the prompters sure do call themselves artists.
Consensus among whom? AI is a tool, that can be used differently and AI art is well-recognized, admired and exhibited the same way as any other art forms.
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.
Please review the above comments. I have not made a single statement that leads to exluding either of those. My comments did not seek to define art, or the artistic process, only to exclude a specific category of media.
It has great web search, and is one of the best models on the AA-Omniscience Hallucination Rate benchmark (meaning it is really good at admitting it doesn't know something, rather than confidently bullshitting)
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
What is this opinion even based on? Grok 4.6 is the best model in terms of intelligence per token. And 4.6 heavy is almost on par with the SOTA models.
It's my favorite chat box for general use. I used to cross post my questions to Opus/Fable and GPT Sol via Open Router but these days I just use Grok. I prefer its style, it's very good at searching and referencing sources. Doesn't make you feel like a genius (Gemini) but also isn't condescending (like Claude).
I like grok 4.6 more than any anthropic or claude model. I use it in cursor for work, and grok cli for normal os operations/installations/troubleshooting. I also use grok on my phone for normal questions in the supermarket etc.
I've yet to organically run into anyone who regularly uses Grok for coding. I'm sure they're out there, but what I hear with my own ears tells me that Grok is a relatively small slice of the market.
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.
That’s mostly because Grok only became good enough to be worth using about a couple of months ago when Grok 4.5 was released.
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.
Complaining about anti-white discrimination is not being a white supremacist. White supremacy is about thinking white people are superior to other races.
Is it happening???