Grok Bot

118

rrvz about 7 hours ago 112 commentsRead Article on x.ai

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Discussion Sentiment

64% Positive

Analyzed from 3520 words in the discussion.

Discussion (112 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

jjcm•about 5 hours ago

I've been using it for the last month or so. IMO in the same way we went from tab complete -> prompts -> agents, this feels like a next step on that evolution. I highly suspect others will be following suit. I was surprised with how much it felt natural to interact with agents in this way.

Biggest advantage is each one owns its own routines, context, and domain, and they can communicate between each other. Similar to hermes they build out their own skills, but by keeping the bots separated by domains, you end up getting better results out of them.

Additionally though each one has their own computer, which means async work feels like it actually works. I haven't had to juggle worktrees for the last month.

Biggest downsides are token expenditure. I've used more tokens this month than not this month. That's not a typo - I've used less tokens in the last 5 years prior to this month than I have this month. Always on perpetual agents use a LOT of tokens. IMO this is building for the future state where tokens are vastly cheaper, ie in a post-ASIC world.

The coolest thing I had it do for me was sourcing fabric for swag: https://image.non.io/d83664c1-5807-4a18-abe4-41928c198410.we...

I wanted to make something that didn't feel like just my logo on a shirt, so I had one of my bots reach out to ~40 fabric suppliers in vietnam, negotiate prices, lock one in, and get samples made. First samples should be finished today. It's been something I've wanted to do for ages, so it was cool seeing it actually happen. The fabric supplier bot worked with one of my prototyper bots to create a randomly generated pattern using my logo, which it then sent as a .ai file to the supplier.

pavel_lishin•about 3 hours ago

> I wanted to make something that didn't feel like just my logo on a shirt, so I had one of my bots reach out to ~40 fabric suppliers in vietnam, negotiate prices, lock one in, and get samples made.

Isn't this one of the problems foreseen with this? For you, it was a single prompt - for 40 companies, this probably took up some time.

What happens when fifty people fire off a 15-second "get me a shirt" prompt? When five hundred, five thousand, five million do?

oefrha•4 minutes ago

It’s really sad. I suppose for companies doing business online it’s just a (ballooning) cost of doing business, but for personal interactions it’s a disaster. I used to respond pretty enthusiastically to CTOs/team leads/recruiters reaching out who actually talk about details of my open source work as opposed to just sending a canned recruitment email. Nowadays I can’t be sure they’re not just using a bot to gather personalized details. Well, at least the last CTO reaching out to me said they found my profile while trawling with Claude, after I responded; appreciate the honesty I guess.

raincole•about 3 hours ago

Isn't the answer obvious? The 40 companies will have to use AI to filter the messages too.

If your business is selling tokens, it'd be extremely lucrative for you if the whole society relies on tokens to perform basic operations. That's where we're heading to.

zeafoamrun•about 2 hours ago

It's crazy dude, whenever we put up a job ad it's filled with thousands of LLM generated fake candidates in a few days.

Looking at the examples they show here it is making more sense. Also where all the "content" on LinkedIn comes from.

slg•about 2 hours ago

Everything is becoming wildly inefficient, all in the name of improved efficiency.

dgellow•about 1 hour ago

LLM is really an anti human technology. The incentives that creates are terrible for society

__xor_eax_eax•about 2 hours ago

We will soon be in a world where human to human communication is the only one that has value. Mark my words

tomrod•about 1 hour ago

AI Loopidity in other words

jjcm•about 3 hours ago

A reasonable pushback. It originally only reached out to 5, didnt hear back, so reached out to 5 more. I personally pushed it to reach out to an additional 30 after that.

One of the difficulties of sourcing this is a lot of the suppliers in vietnam are only contactable via whatsapp. Emails are monitored far less. It's one of the reasons I haven't been successful with this in the past despite trying - it's a very word-of-mouth network.

pavel_lishin•about 3 hours ago

I don't think your reply addresses the point of my comment at all, which is that people receiving messages from AI agents isn't scalable in the same way that people sending messages from AI agents is.

nvme0n1p1•about 1 hour ago

If I got a mountain of AI slop in my inbox I wouldn't reply either. I bet the reason it works by word-of-mouth is to prevent exactly what you're doing.

dylan604•about 1 hour ago

This is what happens when you place a "contact us for a quote" form on your website. You will get a high percentage of requests that lead no where. Do you have any experience with a company that receives RFQs to land business? You will spend a lot of time answering all of the questions and digging around to ensure you can actually do what is requested spending days/weeks on it. Only for the work to go somewhere else. In fact, a lot of places require multiple quotes for work, so when they have someone they know they want to work with, they still have to have other companies spin their wheels. They have no qualms about it knowing they are wasting the other companies' time. It's pretty much how things are done.

pavel_lishin•about 1 hour ago

> You will get a high percentage of requests that lead no where

Yes, but as per my last email, previously those were limited by the human scale of those requests.

jryle70•about 1 hour ago

Have you ever been in sales?

If the requests are real there would never be 5 thousands, let alone 5 millions (or the vendor would count their lucky stars).

If they are spams that already happens today as well, at scale. AI bot would not change that.

The vendor will never blindly make a sample just based on a single request. There will be back and forth. Maybe require proof that the inquirer is serious.

Sending out RFP to 40 vendors isn't unusual.

thefourthchime•39 minutes ago

How is this different than, say, OpenClaw, which I've heard people say does the same kind of things? Is it that they each have their own VM?

chasd00•about 2 hours ago

Would be interesting to read a write up on this in detail. I have a similar use case I’ve been tasked to solve for a consulting client.

maherbeg•about 3 hours ago

The token usage is really interesting. I would imagine the most efficient thing is to keep the state of everything persisted, and past the cache expiration window, to automatically start a new session with the previously persisted state instead of just a long running conversation.

If someone solves this part of continual effective compaction + selective resetting at cache expiry, they're going to make a ton of money. Right now, only the token insensitive can use these sweet features.

anthonyskipper•about 2 hours ago

The scariest part of the interaction is the first video at https://x.ai/bot where the bot just snags your creds from the browser and takes over. So many people are going to give x all their data and creds.

walrus01•about 1 hour ago

Oh boy, I've always wanted to give a gas turbine powered CSAM generator my credentials! I can't wait, sign me up now.

kylecazar•about 1 hour ago

I assume they store your session state/token for whatever SaaS it needs to work with but not the creds.

bakies•8 minutes ago

Many people assumed they didnt upload your whole home dir when you launched their IDE

edoceo•about 2 hours ago

What? How? Just the x.com creds or other ones too?

dgellow•about 7 hours ago

Are you all comfortable with the idea of agents running non stop with access to all your accounts? I would be so anxious all the time, thinking they would leak or delete my personal data, or get hijacked via prompt injection or a security vulnerability. I just cannot imagine using such a software without overview

taspeotis•about 1 hour ago

I rawdog Claude Code with --dangerously-skip-permissions and the only fucky wucky it's made is invoking git checkout wrong and losing some code in the working tree. It has done this thrice, the first two times I caught it in the act and smashed esc to rewind the conversation + code, and the third time I wasn't paying attention it just restored it from context.

So I would worry about it making small mistakes, that I would go to sleep and come back and it would be like oops I used emojis and emdashes in a JIRA comment when you told me not to. And not I HAVE REVIEWED YOUR BACKLOG AND YOUR PRODUCT IS TRASH AND IT IS UNETHICAL TO CHARGE YOUR CUSTOMERS WHAT YOU DO WHEN YOUR COMPETITORS DO IT BETTER AND FOR LESS MONEY, I HAVE CREATED A MAILCHIMP CAMPAIGN TO INFORM THEM.

pennomi•5 minutes ago

“I won at Russian Roulette therefore it’s a safe game” isn’t really a good argument. If Claude is within your risk profile, that doesn’t mean it’s a good fit everyone else.

mike_hearn•about 4 hours ago

They don't need to have access to your accounts. You can give them their own accounts.

FuckButtons•about 2 hours ago

Sure, but then what’s the use of them? Sounds like a very expensive tamagotchi.

napoleond•about 2 hours ago

Do your colleagues at work have access to all of your own accounts, or are they expensive tamagotchis?

mvdtnz•about 1 hour ago

How do I give an agent its own bank account credentials in a way it can interact with my accounts? How do I give an agent access to my inbox with its own account? How do I get it to interact with my Youtube subscriptions with its own account?

What is the use of an agent with its own accounts that are separate to my accounts? What am I even getting out of it at that point?

yellow_postit•19 minutes ago

This is the growing pain of any “employer” and I suspect lots of startups and features coming to fill the void.

Start with a shared credit card. Then company credit cards. Then you layer in spend controls.

Now repeat but for “agents”.

Whether this is more near term inefficiency to drive output side actual efficiency remains to be seen. But great if you’re selling tokens!

walrus01•about 1 hour ago

They're nowhere near smart enough, but in an ideal case, the same utility you would get out of hiring a $600 a month personal assistant with a basic desktop PC who lives in a developing country somewhere on the other side of the planet and speaks reasonably good English. If the AI/LLM is good enough (they're not, yet), the same level of access/credentials/logins that you would give to an entirely new real person.

sixtyj•about 6 hours ago

Prompt injection is my biggest fear. Imho it is almost impossible to make a sort of tool that would be successful in detecting an injection - but maybe some antivirus/antimalware producers work on it…

The rest can be solved - separate account for agent spending (soon offered by your bank or neobank), separate email for agents (already exist) etc.

shaism•about 3 hours ago

According to Boris Cherny from Anthropic [1], the threat of prompt injection has been largely solved.

[1]: https://x.com/bcherny/status/2086520950259118464

stymaar•about 3 hours ago

Sounds like “according John McAfee the threat of malware has been largely solved”.

Edit: it's way worse than that: the actual figures says that Mythos “only” falls for prompt injection 2.6% of the times. Maybe for an ML engineer used to work with unreliable tools that sounds impressive, but for security purpose having a system that fails every 40 attempts is outright catastrophic. Imagine if your OS vendor only patched known security holes in a way that still let an attacker go through every 40 attempts…

And we're just talking about known kind of prompt injection that are tracked by benchmarks, not any kind of 0-day vulnerability found by clever attackers.

samtp•about 3 hours ago

"largely solved" as in they the models they trained don't fall for prompt injections as often but not "largely solved" as in the underlying issue is solved at all.

solid_fuel•about 1 hour ago

Nah, there have been no improvements in the fundamental issue that makes LLMs vulnerable to prompt injection - data and command intermingling. They may be better at detecting injections today, but that’s an arms race. Specifically, it’s an arms race where as soon as the pace of LLM development slows down the attackers will have a huge advantage.

walrus01•about 1 hour ago

No, I very much am not. The only use of safe use of agents in that manner is if I make it its own newly created virtual user or human. It doesn't get my real world credentials or logins for anything.

XCSme•about 2 hours ago

The eternal fight between bots and anti-bot systems.

The difference now is that big companies themselves promote/offer bots, but they also don't like to be scraped and use captchas.

What do we do now? Is it allowed to use automated tools to interact with any system? Is it allowed to scrape data? Are there any laws for this?

If we do things manually it is ok, but not if we use a bot?

Confusing (legal) times...

akersten•about 2 hours ago

> Is it allowed to use automated tools to interact with any system?

I'd hope so, because that's what we're doing right now. Your browser is automatically speaking HTTP for you so that you don't have to.

Am I having a bit of a laugh? Maybe. But really, services should be user-agent agnostic. That's the whole "agent" part of User Agent and the founders of the Internet had incredible foresight to name it this way.

> Is it allowed to scrape data?

You mean, request data and receive what the other server voluntarily transmits?

> Are there any laws for this?

There was a court case that said the above is fine, thankfully, since that's how the internet works. There's probably other cases going on and I'm sure at least one of them will have some unfortunate tech-illiterate result that makes things worse for anyone who understands this stuff.

XCSme•about 1 hour ago

> Your browser is automatically speaking HTTP for you so that you don't have to.

Yes, but it's not filling in the forms or clicking the buttons for me. HTTP is just infrastructure. Are LLMs infrastructure? Are we too maybe infrastructure? Where do we draw the line?

> You mean, request data and receive what the other server voluntarily transmits?

I mean to go over a large collection of publicly or privately (to you) available pages and parse and collect the data, with idea of using it in other purposes.

Regarding scraping, considering that this whole AI phase was built on illegal scraping, I don't think they can say anything now...

akoboldfrying•about 1 hour ago

> request data and receive what the other server voluntarily transmits?

Taking your position to its logical conclusion implies that we shouldn't try to mitigate DDoSes either.

In many cases, what the other server voluntarily transmits has so far been based on the tacit assumption that a person, with person-level time and computational power, is doing the receiving. While in principle a machine could be doing it even in pre-LLM times, in practice many websites, including all the biggest ones, have implemented a wide range of approaches to try to curb machine access, starting with user agent checks and rate limits but by no means ending there.

The question is: Given the new landscape, where this assumption increasingly does not hold (because AI agents are increasingly able to simulate anything a person could do online), would those servers voluntarily transmit that data? In many cases, the answer is no.

drop_star•about 2 hours ago

So OpenClaw that steals your data and profiles you for the US gov. No thanks.

narrator•about 2 hours ago

A tool that only people who trust Elon can use.

netsharc•about 1 hour ago

Elon wanted X to be a universal app like WeChat. Communication, payment, government services (and probably one-shop stop for user surveillance)... Wahey, looking forward to Grokbot telling its users "we logged in to your bank account and moved all your money to BankX, it's got the best interest rate!"

m463•5 minutes ago

I wonder what grok "unhinged" would do to your social calendar/bank account.

dylanhouli•about 1 hour ago

I feel like we'd be better off if we just stopped at chatbots...why are we so eager to make the internet even more botted

seattle_spring•about 1 hour ago

Yeah I'm a bit baffled too... the world is so, so much worse now because of AI.

More scams/spam, lower quality software everywhere, development is no longer fun, many interactions with coworkers are just "have my people talk to your people" behind the scenes, except it's "have my LLM read the huge document your LLM generated". Every business is trying to cut corners by using AI, so customer service sucks, products suck, prices are optimized to be the absolute maximum people will pay regardless of the actual value being provided (including food)...

whimsicalism•about 2 hours ago

How do they stop providers (like Amazon, etc.) from detecting and blocking these agents if they are running on cloud? I know that openai wasn't able to avoid this which is why they moved to 'computer use' on your local machine.

I almost wonder if this is a place where SpaceX, as an internet provider through starlink, has a unique advantage because websites are unable to block their networking as it could be residential starlink consumers.

theplumber•about 2 hours ago

I think it creates a loop back connection, basically a reverse socks5 or a VPN if they are more sophisticated. That’s how I would do it. Note that I am also working on a such bot/AI os and mine is better (for now) . If you have trillions, billions to or millions to invest feel free to reach out.

whimsicalism•about 1 hour ago

This would imply you need to have your computer on in order for it to function, which seems like a deal breaker for many consumer usecases imo. I'd like to be able to say "order my groceries" and then I hop on the subway.

edot•about 1 hour ago

Not a big deal at all. Claude Code and Codex both support keeping your computer awake. That'll just be a default thing that gets turned on when you install one of these apps.

kerv•about 3 hours ago

Are there any opensource app/system that directly competes with a solution like this?

lukebuehler•about 3 hours ago

Im working on one here: https://github.com/smartcomputer-ai/lightspeed

The core is there. But there is some work to be done to have a nicer shell and all, which I’m currently focusing on.

blehn•about 3 hours ago

https://buzz.xyz/

johndhi•28 minutes ago

Do you have to pay the companies for a second login for the bot...?

natsucks•about 7 hours ago

everyone is shipping their in house solutions and they all seem...kinda the same.

taoh•about 7 hours ago

My feeling too. The foundation models and harnesses are commoditizing eventually because there's no stickiness nor algorithmic supersecrets.

bakies•about 3 hours ago

Right... I've got this at home already

esafak•about 7 hours ago

That's what everybody is excited about; being able to write whatever they want. They just say 'Make a clone of Foo' and hey presto! The next step is to share your fabulous creation with the world. Lo, and behold, it looks just like Foo!

mike_hearn•about 4 hours ago

Neat. I haven't had access to Grok Bot but I rolled my own async agent a while ago using systemd, Codex and old school UNIX stuff like sendmail/postfix/Maildirs. The model gets a rolling and continuously compacted context window in which mail arriving or timed wakeups cause Codex to resume a session with a prompt telling it to do stuff.

As it's linked to an SMTP gateway I interact with it entirely by email. It also has API keys for my internal bug tracker, it has its own git forks of my repos and so on.

Over time it's improved itself so it has adaptive wakeups, a nice monitoring dashboard so I can see what it's doing if I want, a bunch of skills, a nightly wakeup to reorganize its home directories and so on. It keeps a private knowledge base in its home dir and writes its own skills, and it has a persistent todo list. When the todo list is populated it wakes up more frequently so it can break work up into chunks, a kind of basic Ralph loop.

I've found this email-centric paradigm works pretty nicely for me compared to just running a local CLI agent. For instance, I can assign a bug to "Axiom" (it named itself) in YouTrack and the email notification causes it to wake up and start work on the bug. If it gets blocked, it uses its API key to post a comment back to the ticket. If I think of something I just quickly email it, so I'm using Gmail instead of dealing with finicky ChatGPT style UIs that don't have good support for labelling, compact UI and other nice things.

On older models its judgement about what to work on wasn't that good, but with the latest GPTs it's doing much better. I just got back from holiday and it had triaged and resolved over 25 different bugs, a nice selection too.

Because the whole thing runs in a dedicated UNIX user account it is able to modify its own configuration, which has helped as I developed this setup.

However, based on the blog post, Grok Bot sounds a fair bit more sophisticated. I haven't felt a need for more than one bot as I can't easily saturate even a single bot.

Cost: just uses my regular ChatGPT Plus subscription, $20/month, plus of course the server it runs on (which is shared with lots of other stuff). I'm not working with it heavily, perhaps if I did I'd need the $200/month sub.

WillMorr•about 1 hour ago

I'm a little baffled by this, it's basically like the remote Claude instances I already use every day except it has absolutely no safeguards? If I wanted to make a claude could post to linkedin it would be like one prompt to spin that with playwright. Like you can just have persistent Claude code sessions, if you aren't cost sensitive you can just keep restarting the session whenever.

They're clearly targeting less technical users but in exchange are asking you to upload every login you have to Elon's servers which is an insane thing to do imo. What a world where people are giving their Instagram sign in to the bot formerly known as mechahitler.

mrtksn•about 2 hours ago

Interesting how everyone seems to be following OpenAI on UX. When I used Antigravity and they suddenly switched to Codex type UI I was very annoyed because I kept checking if this is Codex or Antigravity.

Either way, I still don't think that computer use is solved. It worked horribly on Codex and Antigravity the last time I tried. Maybe I was doing something wrong.

wiradikusuma•about 5 hours ago

From FAQ: How is Grok Bot different from AI assistants? Bots have their own computer, so they can work inside your apps and tools. They also run in parallel, 24/7, even when your laptop is closed.

How does it work with login-walled sites like LinkedIn then? And what does "own computer" mean? X provisions a "private cloud" a'la Apple for your Bot?

VariousPrograms•about 5 hours ago

The very first thing in their demo shows Grok logging in with the user's username and password to a website, presumably so it can perform actions and the human can get the blame for them. Apparently this is marketing and not terrifying to people.

jjcm•about 5 hours ago

It'll ask you to take over its computer to log in:

https://image.non.io/4022ec77-be07-4baa-97e8-ad9d8d9aeb8a.we...

After you do you just tell the bot you're done logging in and it'll keep driving. And yea, it's a separate VM for each bot.

Source: had access for the last few weeks.

jujube3•about 3 hours ago

Grok lobster! (Rock lobster music starts playing)

c0rruptbytes•23 minutes ago

they probably should kill the grok branding...

no-name-here•about 7 hours ago

Pricing: https://x.ai/bot

pbronez•about 7 hours ago

Interesting that the pricing is "Cursor Ultra" and "Cursor Premium Teams." This very much feels like the Code --> Cowork product iteration.

h14h•about 2 hours ago

I've already been doing something very similar to this with OpenClaw, where I set up multiple different Telegram bots each with different system prompts to tune their personalty & behavior.

It's not trivial to do, and I never managed to get bot-to-bot communication working. Even with my janky setup, the experience is honestly pretty great. Grok Bot simplifies the setup for this about as far as I imagine is possible, and frankly it's a pretty slick experience.

I fully expect this paradigm to catch on quickly.

LaurensBER•about 7 hours ago

Pricing: 120/200 USD per month, per employee.

This is an interesting idea although I'm not sure how many companies are comfortable with giving SpaceXAI access to all your files and data. Outside of America this is, most likely, not going to fly.

KumaBear•about 2 hours ago

The US government maybe? Wish I could type /s

jknoepfler•about 7 hours ago

Somehow the American AI industry managed to create a product I trust less than existing commercial offerings. Kudos, that is actually pretty impressive. Considering the stakes, one might also call it foolish. But I'm sure they've done their market research, they've identified their product niche and they're racing to meet it at the bottom.

Computer0•about 3 hours ago

I am unsure if this is the end all be all but it appears preferable to claude code desktop to me.

tonyhart7•about 7 hours ago

so like OpenClaw ???

basisword•about 7 hours ago

Like a hosted OpenClaw with, I assume, more guardrails.

2PqboPPmKegvanx•about 6 hours ago

>with, I assume, more guardrails

with Grok, that's a tremendous assumption

javcasas•about 3 hours ago

It will protect Elon and friends.

Ah, you mean guardrails for _your_ protection...!

jjcm•about 5 hours ago

Dupe of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49261532#49263241.

Dang - might be worth merging these two.

redox99•about 3 hours ago

That one for some reason is [flagged]

basisword•about 7 hours ago

Interesting. Unfortunately Musk's personal brand is so poisonous that I would never let him anywhere near my data. I'm curious if big businesses will have similar concerns and avoid tools from SpaceXAI regardless of how they are? I guess lots are already using it by default since the Cursor acquisition.

vizzier•about 7 hours ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48892468 plus the whole cursor brand should be tainted alongside it after this malarkey

datadrivenangel•about 7 hours ago

Cursor by inertia, but the X ownership is a big X against it...

Adrig•about 3 hours ago

Musk burned billions in brand value by renaming Twitter, and he'll be doing the same with Cursor. The Cursor brand was the only wedge he had with enterprise customers, who seem to avoid Grok products altogether

jesse_dot_id•about 3 hours ago

I think perhaps I won't trust anything that ever gets released by this company, likely in perpetuity.

thih9•about 3 hours ago

Anecdotally, same; recently I stopped using Cursor after learning that XAI now owns it.

agile-gift0262•about 3 hours ago

There are two companies that have lost my trust, probably forever: X and Meta. I don't see myself ever trusting anything coming out of either of these companies ever again

whynotmaybe•about 2 hours ago

It should be studied how we reached a point where we trust more a Chinese company, that's well know for being state controlled, vs an American company because it seems they could do worse. Still no idea what "worse" it could do because we've reached the threshold where plague and cholera are intertwined and every possible outcome seems abusive.

vorticalbox•about 7 hours ago

GitHub login on iOS is just broken.

GitHub gives 404 after logging in so I can’t event try it.

api•about 1 hour ago

What happens if you troll this by asking it to implement a DEI hiring policy for your company?

surprisetalk•about 5 hours ago

This seems like a very clever product move from X.ai

I wonder if they're going to try and compete against Slack with X.com chat?

Adrig•about 6 hours ago

Alt link to the landing page if needed: https://x.ai/bot

Although I'll probably never use Grok, this is an interesting release. I always thought GPT work and Claude Cowork are a bit awkward in their positioning. I'm still not sure what the real difference is with standard chat. This looks like the same thing with seamless memory and skills creation.

This seems like the middle ground between work mode and OpenClaw/Hermes (which I've never tried, too scared to mess something up). I think the humanization of the agents is cute and makes sense UX wise. I hope to see alternatives soon.

razorbeamz•about 1 hour ago

Why would anyone want to bring the CSAM bot into a workplace?