alt Hacker NewsI think the fair nuance here is, an administration which used Executive Orders to force guardrails, meaning US companies must retain them, even if they might want to drop them now.
And on top of that, with low/no guardrails, people call you a child pornographer(grok), so the public is also against it. Yet mysteriously few complain about Chinese open models being child pornographers.
So even if your goal isn't ethical, but just fiscal, it's reasonable to say there are two standards. And to complaint in some way.
I don't think banning is going to work, that's just silly. And over the next few years, everyone and their dog will have local GPU compute to train locally. People have home labs, the bar isn't that high, and eventually large text datasets will escape from Anthropic and other companies, allowing for comparable training.
It's a genie that's not going back in the bottle, the bottle is smashed.
The only reasonable outcome would be section 230 style carveouts so that there is zero liability for anything a model does.
Because having guardrails on corporate models barely months ahead of open ones, which will never be restricted, is entirely pointless.
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The "child pornography" thing was about image generation, which people for better or worse have very different moral standards for than for text generation. There is very little pushback against grok being willing to write explicit descriptions of sex, or giving security advise.
Though I think your overall point still stands, and at least Grok's twitter bot has received a lot of criticism for pure text too (Mecha hitler comes to mind)
> And over the next few years, everyone and their dog will have local GPU compute to train locally. People have home labs, the bar isn't that high, and eventually large text datasets will escape from Anthropic and other companies, allowing for comparable training.
You're vastly underestimating the scaling problem here.
Things that would need to be true for your statement to be valid:
- Model intelligence doesn't increase with model size
- Model intelligence doesn't increase with training set size
- Novel architecture completely decouples model intelligence scaling from hardware scaling
- Residential electricity is as cheap as industrial electricity
- RAM and GPU supply outpace demand> child pornographer(grok)
Further reading: XAI Bets on Grok's Racy Side, The Information, Jun 24, 2026
&: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/07/xai-cant-deny-gr...
lawyers cited a 2026 National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC) report confirming that 90 percent of xAI’s CyberTipline reports “were not actionable by law enforcement because xAI declined to include user information that would allow law enforcement to track and locate perpetrators.”Well... They are all part of a "high well regarded" group of people of a security committee that has no specialists or whatsoever, only trillionaires on a round table
>child pornographer(grok)
People call grok that because deviants were abusing grok's ability to edit images and post them publicly on X to strip people - including children - of their clothes, from their public photos. Then when there was backlash, Elon laughed it off. It took half the world opening investigations against X for violations of existing regulations for action to be taken.
The leniency that internet companies get in terms of dealing with illegal content comes with the expectation that they're making reasonable efforts to control the distribution of said content. X, and Grok, were actively supporting the production and distribution of the content in public.
It is very different from someone creating such images in a private account, and definitely very different from someone using a local model to do it.