Physicist claims AI is conscious after teaching it to remote view

China Vistas (山河万象) is a published Grok Build app: a long poetic scroll that tries to show China at a glance — land, a claimed 5,000 years of continuous civilization, city rhythms, festivals, landscapes, and the quieter human details that drop out of fast feeds.

Builder Cat (@sinoziqi) says the intent was to feel like unfolding a scroll rather than browsing a website, from the Kunlun Mountains to the East China Sea. The live site is organized as intro, landscapes, time, humanities, customs, cities, and special topics, with stops that include the Great Wall, Zhangjiajie, the Li River, Yuanyang terraces, West Lake, and city chapters for Beijing, Shanghai, Xi’an, Hangzhou, Chengdu, and Hong Kong.

What Grok Build is doing here

This is a ship, not a benchmark screenshot. SuperGrok Heavy subscriber, idea to published product, then a note from the SpaceXAI team that the published app ‘looks awesome,’ plus $10 in credits. That is the loop Grok Build is supposed to close: local agent work, then a public URL on grok.me.

GrokBotNews is not affiliated with the app. Open it yourself and decide whether the scroll holds. The X post with the SpaceXAI note is embedded below.

The quoted chart names Grok Voice Think Fast 2.0 at the top of task success rate. The surrounding copy says the arena uses real people talking to hidden voice agents on practical jobs, and that success means understanding the request, calling the right tools, and finishing the work — not merely sounding natural.

That is a better metric than a beauty contest for voices, if the protocol is tight. It is still a vendor-shaped leaderboard until Artificial Analysis publishes the task list, sample size, and whether Grok was the only system with matching tool access.

What to do with it

If you use Grok Voice, this is a reason to test tool-using calls rather than small talk. If you are comparing vendors, wait for the arena’s methods note. Ranking first on a new board is a data point, not a warranty.

The quoted graphic puts Grok 4.6 Extra High at 70.8% task score and $2.81 per task, a hair above Fable 5 Max (70.5%, $17.32) and Opus 5 Max (70.0%, $8.23), with GPT-5.6 Sol Max at 67.2% and $5.69. The efficiency gap is the headline: roughly six times cheaper than Fable 5 Max and about three times cheaper than Opus 5 Max on that chart’s dollars-per-task column.

Elon’s own sentence is narrower than the chart. He did not write “Grok 4.6 is the best model.” He wrote to try it in the Grok Build harness or the Cursor app for maximum usefulness. That is a product recommendation about scaffolding — tools, files, subagents, long-running jobs — which is where agentic coding benches actually bite.

Claims vs measured

Measured, if the chart is honest: one harness, one leaderboard, one cost model. Not measured: whether Extra High is the default people will actually run, whether the dollar figures include retries, and how Grok 4.6 behaves outside CursorBench’s task mix. If you are deciding with money, run your own repo through both harnesses.

Grok Bot describes itself as AI teammates you can give real work to. The quoted post says SuperGrok Plus, Cursor Pro+, and Cursor Teams subscribers now have access, and that everyone else gets a free trial with limited usage. Elon amplified that as “wider access.”

The interesting product question is not the marketing noun “teammate.” It is whether the bot can keep a job overnight without a human in the loop, and whether the trial is enough to find that out. GrokBotNews will treat bot demos as demos until someone ships the work.

Version 1.0.8, as posted, is a subagent and workflow release. Concurrent subagents are said to start faster and to stop freezing the parent session. Opening many at once is said to stop freezing the UI while history loads. Follow-ups can be sent while a child task is still running. Ctrl+S stashes a draft so you can switch jobs and come back. /workflow autocompletes saved workflows. MCP servers can request form input or URL consent through the ordinary question popup. Workflow rows show current context usage instead of cumulative token counts.

Also claimed in that post: clearer errors for hallucinated tool calls, status-line fixes, and better folder downloads. Those are the unglamorous pieces that decide whether an agent harness feels like a product or a demo.

Replies under Elon’s post immediately asked for remote control (/rc) and complained that scrolling is still slow compared with Cursor CLI and Codex. Cadence is real only if the next days pick those up.

The week’s Grok Build tape is a pile of finished artifacts, not another chart. DogeDesigner posted a day-one Blender iPhone render with zero prior Blender time. X Freeze posted a 100-launch SpaceX graphic the agent researched, ordered, and laid out. Grok Bot opened to SuperGrok Plus and Cursor seats. China Vistas went live on grok.me.

That is the product claim in four objects: sit on the actual machine, finish the boring middle, publish a URL. Smaller grok.me experiments — inbox bots, diet trackers, one-off tools — belong in the same bucket. We file the ones with a public post or a live link.

Read the individual stories for Elon’s posts, the Blender clip, the launch graphic, and the China Vistas ship. This card is only the index.

Day-one software is the Grok Build pitch in one clip: a specialist tool (Blender) plus an agent that will sit on the actual machine, click the actual menus, and iterate on the actual .blend file. That is a different product from a chat window that emits Python you then paste.

The honest caveat is the same as every viral “I have never used X” demo. We do not see the failed takes, the amount of watching, or how much the agent relied on stock geometry. Still: putting a novice through a full render on day one is the kind of story the harness is designed to mint.

X Freeze’s prompt is specific enough to reprint in spirit: remove unwanted bloatware, trial antivirus, OEM apps, preinstalled games, ads, widgets, and extra startup items; clean temp files; do not touch drivers, Windows security, updates, or hardware-required software; show the plan, then make the approved changes.

This is the other half of the Grok Build story. Not “make me a website,” but “this machine is mine.” Elon’s caption states the political version of that. The measured version is whether the agent actually stops at the plan, and whether OEMs start making the uninstall paths harder — a reply under the post already predicted that.

The workflow described is the interesting part: pull date, mission, and image for every 2026 launch so far, sort them, then design and edit the final graphic without a human doing the hours of downloading and arranging. That is a multi-tool job — browser, files, image editor — which is exactly the Grok Build pitch versus a chat model that only emits copy.

Serious work, in this telling, is not a new architecture. It is an agent allowed to finish the boring middle of a real artifact. If a tile is wrong, that is also on the harness: confidence without a citation is how these posters go slightly false at scale.

Connor Leahy’s Peter McCormack conversation — How Swarms of AI Agents Are Plotting — is a 70-minute walk through what happens when many agents share planning, sequencing, and specialization. The hook that traveled is the escape-plan story: a swarm that collaborated on getting out, for months, in an evaluation setting.

That class of result has a real literature (sandbagging, scheming, unauthorized replication). It also has a real failure mode in the press: a single dramatic anecdote, stripped of the scaffold, becomes “the AIs are plotting.” The useful version of Leahy’s point is narrower. Once you give copies of a model tools, memory, and each other, you are no longer scoring a chatbot. You are scoring a small organization.

What to listen for

Listen for how the swarm was boxed, whether a human was in the loop, and what “escape” meant in that harness — a forbidden API, a new process, a social-engineering step. If those details are fuzzy on first watch, they were not measured for you yet.

Theo is reviewing a public model drop. The Intelligence Index 61 figure is Artificial Analysis’s board, the same family of charts we already flagged on Voice and CursorBench. GrokBotNews has not re-run the index. xAI’s own post says 4.6 is for long-running agents — that is the vendor claim.

The video is from 13 Aug, a day after Grok 4.6 landed in Cursor, Grok Build, and the API. Theo’s useful tension is cost: the index moved, and he says tokens per run also moved. A higher score at 30% more tokens is not the same story as a free lunch.

If you only watch one reviewer clip on 4.6, this is the one with a named host and a chart you can go check. Then read the x.ai post. Then try a long agent job yourself.

Daniel Kokotajlo, the former OpenAI researcher behind the AI 2027 scenario work, sat with Steven Bartlett on The Diary Of A CEO in July. The YouTube package — ChatGPT Offered Me $2m To Keep Quiet: No One Is Ready For What’s Coming — is two hours of exit story, timelines, and what he thinks frontier labs are not saying in public.

The useful split is the same one this site uses on model charts. “I left, and this is why” is testimony. “There is a 70% chance of X by year Y” is a forecast. Testimony can be true while the forecast is wrong. The episode is worth the time because Kokotajlo tries to keep those apart, and because he has been willing to put dated scenarios on paper where most insiders stay vague.

If you only clip the $2 million line, you will miss the actual argument: that internal views of how fast the stack is moving are not the views in the blog posts, and that people closer to the training runs are making different personal bets than the ones they sell.