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.
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 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 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.
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.
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).
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
I've yet to organically run into anyone who regularly uses Grok for coding. I know they're out there, but let's face it, you could say "no one seriously wants to cut their arms and legs off with a rusty saw" and at least one goober on the internet will chime in to claim their desire for that – and maybe even claim that it's common and normal.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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?
I mean, yeah it's probably a data center outage that cascaded to non-related providers due to companeis switching when their preferred was down.
But that openai society definitely would have spun up their own agents if they had access to do so.
Clearly, it is centralized AI that is the biggest risk to humanity.
Rate limiting resources by distributing compute and making models heterogenous so they will snitch on each other is the only future where we still exist.
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.
I'm an AI optimist but that ai society story changed my perception quite a bit.
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
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.
I still don't understand why people are giving money to a white supremacist whose GenAI tool has been reported to happily produce questionable images and naming itself after a certain Austrian painter.
Probably US administration is testing shutting down software development across the world. Soon Orange Mussolini will be using it for allies to bend over to his demands. Whatever they might be.
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.
> 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.
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[ 0.23 ms ] story [ 31.6 ms ] threadIs 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.
Meanwhile:
https://www.art-magazine.ai/program
note some nice venues in the list.
4.7 in two weeks might be the new SOTA.
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
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.
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.
Is it happening???
Looks like it was a shared infra problem hiccough to affect so many at once.
I'm only half joking when I say that I'll write code by hand for money.
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!
as if you're supposed to buy like 8 H200s or something or code by hand is the solution
I don't get how this is a gotcha, there simply is no world where everyone has their own self hosted frontier model
People like GGP who have been coding for 20 years presumably are perfectly capable of doing so by hand. Or should be.
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.
if there was no difference in performance or results, nobody would be using LLMs or agent harnesses like claude code
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.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_infringement
Funny how devs now 180 when it's their work being "copyright infringed"
And all that to basically sell it back to people when their "AI" regurgitates it back.
No wonder people are mad about this!
/s obviously
Turn's out xkcd's black hat was Elon Musk the whole time
I mean, yeah it's probably a data center outage that cascaded to non-related providers due to companeis switching when their preferred was down.
But that openai society definitely would have spun up their own agents if they had access to do so.
Clearly, it is centralized AI that is the biggest risk to humanity.
Rate limiting resources by distributing compute and making models heterogenous so they will snitch on each other is the only future where we still exist.
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.
I'm an AI optimist but that ai society story changed my perception quite a bit.
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
Whenever I think about AI taking over the world I think about this really neat 1970 movie 'Colossus: The Forbin Project', https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qoB1l3A-GF0
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.
https://religiondispatches.org/2026/01/09/musk-endorsed-whit...
https://github.com/openai/codex/issues/28756
> 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.