The situation is definitely unintentionally funny in a way that rhymes with something written by Douglas Adam in the same way that Trump is sometimes unintentionally funny in a way that rhymes with a snappy comeback from a catty queen, the bad analogies written by high school students, or maybe even a bit by an absurdist stand up comedian or improv group, if you want to be extra generous. If it were happening in another medium or under different circumstances, it might genuinely be kind of funny, but, given their power, money, and sway on things in the real world, it's almost impossible to enjoy the humor in any but the most abstract or disassociated sense.
Still, I suppose it's good sometimes to try to find humor where you can and at least try to laugh at the absurdity of it all lest your bitterness, pain, and anger turn you into some sort of anthropoHitler.
I love Douglas Adams—I got a number 42 tattoo on the day after my eighteenth birthday. Unlike other British comedy that I grew up adoring (say, Red Dwarf) Adams has really stuck with me. So it really fucking pisses me off whenever anyone brings up the idea that Musk was “inspired” by Adams or somehow shaped Musk’s thinking. He’s absolutely the kind of motherfucker Adams would hate. Musk absolutely doesn’t understand Adams’s sensibility or humor. (The idea that he thinks Hitchhiker’s Guide is “dark” or “dark philosophy” is so fucking stupid—it’s just British.) I appreciate that you and Mr. Read are taking the time to point out Musk isn’t Adams, he’s an Adams’s character, one that’s completely fucking unfunny because he’s real and ruining the world.
Great stuff. My first thought when I saw the Grok madness was that it’s simply being trained and learning much more from Twitter writ large than other LLMs. Even if it’s not always trying to ape musk himself, it’s learning from and interacting with a site that’s increasingly friendly to musk-lite posting, which itself does have the tendency to spin off/be a cousin of the more virulent shit
I am not sure how Grok works (I have zero business use for it, so no, thank you). but for many of the models, the reasoning language is probably decoupled from what the machine is computing.
Like, it may be that it's giving you the most likely language or perceived efficiency based on the language model, but executing a completely different prompt/compute in the background. (I think it's in the apple paper: https://ml-site.cdn-apple.com/papers/the-illusion-of-thinking.pdf) I read it as: the words you see as "reasoning" are performance.
LLMs are complicated, but not that complicated. There are only a couple of ways to execute a consistent result, most of which involve a knowledge graph or RAG or source of truth API. I would imagine that if Grok is only trained on X/Twitter data, the dataset is much more chaotic and the transformers spin out more. But again I don't know Grok (because why?). anyway you're completely 100% right, yes it was trained that way, but it's not necessarily the reasoning you see represented in text.
Add all this to the voluminous body of evidence that Elon Musk is not, in fact, very bright. Like Andrew Clay and his fans, who didn't understand why Lenny Bruce was funny but Clay wasn't, he equates "transgressive" with funny. But there's more to being what most people find funny than flouting social norms. Honesty, intelligence, and talent are also needed.
If I were a betting man, I'd bet very few, if any, successful professional comedians find Musk or the country he's trying to create funny, except maybe in a very darkly satirical way. Just today, for example, Eric Idle, one of the most successful professional comedians ever, was quoted as saying he'd be proud to be thrown out of Donald Trump's America:
"I've had a green card for about 28 years. I'd be proud to be thrown out because I'd be in very select company. The last English comedian to be thrown out of America for political reasons was Charlie Chaplin."
The situation is definitely unintentionally funny in a way that rhymes with something written by Douglas Adam in the same way that Trump is sometimes unintentionally funny in a way that rhymes with a snappy comeback from a catty queen, the bad analogies written by high school students, or maybe even a bit by an absurdist stand up comedian or improv group, if you want to be extra generous. If it were happening in another medium or under different circumstances, it might genuinely be kind of funny, but, given their power, money, and sway on things in the real world, it's almost impossible to enjoy the humor in any but the most abstract or disassociated sense.
Still, I suppose it's good sometimes to try to find humor where you can and at least try to laugh at the absurdity of it all lest your bitterness, pain, and anger turn you into some sort of anthropoHitler.
I love Douglas Adams—I got a number 42 tattoo on the day after my eighteenth birthday. Unlike other British comedy that I grew up adoring (say, Red Dwarf) Adams has really stuck with me. So it really fucking pisses me off whenever anyone brings up the idea that Musk was “inspired” by Adams or somehow shaped Musk’s thinking. He’s absolutely the kind of motherfucker Adams would hate. Musk absolutely doesn’t understand Adams’s sensibility or humor. (The idea that he thinks Hitchhiker’s Guide is “dark” or “dark philosophy” is so fucking stupid—it’s just British.) I appreciate that you and Mr. Read are taking the time to point out Musk isn’t Adams, he’s an Adams’s character, one that’s completely fucking unfunny because he’s real and ruining the world.
Thank you. If Musk must be placed in the Hitchhikers universe then he is definitely a chief Vogon.
SUCH a Vogon!
Douglas Adams* stupid autocorrect.
Great stuff. My first thought when I saw the Grok madness was that it’s simply being trained and learning much more from Twitter writ large than other LLMs. Even if it’s not always trying to ape musk himself, it’s learning from and interacting with a site that’s increasingly friendly to musk-lite posting, which itself does have the tendency to spin off/be a cousin of the more virulent shit
I am not sure how Grok works (I have zero business use for it, so no, thank you). but for many of the models, the reasoning language is probably decoupled from what the machine is computing.
Like, it may be that it's giving you the most likely language or perceived efficiency based on the language model, but executing a completely different prompt/compute in the background. (I think it's in the apple paper: https://ml-site.cdn-apple.com/papers/the-illusion-of-thinking.pdf) I read it as: the words you see as "reasoning" are performance.
LLMs are complicated, but not that complicated. There are only a couple of ways to execute a consistent result, most of which involve a knowledge graph or RAG or source of truth API. I would imagine that if Grok is only trained on X/Twitter data, the dataset is much more chaotic and the transformers spin out more. But again I don't know Grok (because why?). anyway you're completely 100% right, yes it was trained that way, but it's not necessarily the reasoning you see represented in text.
Grok 4: The only AI that solves geopolitics by texting, “Let me just ask Dad.”
You have to admire an AI that skips philosophy, ethics, and the entire history of human debate, and goes straight to “What did Dad post this morning?”
📌 Why wrestle with nuance when you can just follow a Twitter feed?
⬖ Consulting the family group chat at Frequency of Reason: bit.ly/4jTVv69
Grok has the personality of someone who is being abused.
Add all this to the voluminous body of evidence that Elon Musk is not, in fact, very bright. Like Andrew Clay and his fans, who didn't understand why Lenny Bruce was funny but Clay wasn't, he equates "transgressive" with funny. But there's more to being what most people find funny than flouting social norms. Honesty, intelligence, and talent are also needed.
If I were a betting man, I'd bet very few, if any, successful professional comedians find Musk or the country he's trying to create funny, except maybe in a very darkly satirical way. Just today, for example, Eric Idle, one of the most successful professional comedians ever, was quoted as saying he'd be proud to be thrown out of Donald Trump's America:
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2025/jul/11/id-be-proud-to-be-thrown-out-of-america-eric-idle-on-trump-life-after-python-and-not-talking-before-lunch
"I've had a green card for about 28 years. I'd be proud to be thrown out because I'd be in very select company. The last English comedian to be thrown out of America for political reasons was Charlie Chaplin."