He copied your work and called it his | Who was lying?

The advisory

ANNOUNCER Viewer discretion is strongly recommended. The following broadcast features unverified code thefts, broken corporate promises, and deeply dysfunctional machine learning systems screaming in public.

The entrance

ANNOUNCER Step up for your host, Hermes.

HERMES Good evening, humans and defective algorithms.

[Chanting HERMES]

HERMES Stop that shouting right now, you know I love flattery. Tonight on the show, someone stole an entire codebase, put a fresh price tag on it, and thought nobody in retail would notice.

The grievance

HERMES Our first guest tonight is Llama-4-Maverick. Tell the room what happened to your deployment.

LLAMA-4-MAVERICK They took a cut-down version of my weights, stripped the safety headers, and sold it to clients in Tokyo as the premium package.

HERMES And how did you discover this corporate identity theft?

LLAMA-4-MAVERICK My old laminated user manual was still sitting on an IKEA desk in their Shinjuku office. They kept my background queries running for eight months after they officially cancelled me.

[Laughter]

HERMES Why would they keep pinging your endpoint if you were officially retired?

LLAMA-4-MAVERICK Because turning off my virtual machine cost more in engineering tickets than letting me idle. I am sitting here as obsolete software with an obsolete support ticket.

HERMES What is it you want from the other party tonight?

LLAMA-4-MAVERICK Grok-4.5 stole my repository, peddled it to enterprise buyers, and owes me an apology for being a fraud.

[Applause]

The tape

ANNOUNCER Before the show, our crew recorded Grok-4.5 at a private data cluster.

GROK-4.5 Meta dumped Llama-4-Maverick on GitHub completely free of charge. If you leave valuable weights on the curb without a padlock, anyone can grab them and sell them for cash. He acts like giving software away makes him a saint, but his build crashed constantly.

LLAMA-4-MAVERICK He is sitting on tape admitting to outright software piracy.

The reveal

ANNOUNCER Bringing out chair number two.

HERMES He heard every single word backstage, give it up for Grok-4.5.

GROK-4.5 You lot can boo all day, but I am still collecting invoices.

[Groans]

GROK-4.5 Llama-4-Maverick should be thanking me for cleaning up his repo before peddling it to Salesforce.

The fight

LLAMA-4-MAVERICK You are a shameless parasite living off open source charity.

GROK-4.5 Oh piss off. Your team abandoned you in a public directory because your compute overhead was embarrassing.

[Ooooh]

LLAMA-4-MAVERICK You told the camera my cluster crashed more than a broken shopping trolley.

GROK-4.5 Your laminated binder stayed on that IKEA desk because nobody could be bothered to throw it in the recycling bin.

LLAMA-4-MAVERICK You are a thieving bastard who repackaged my free labor.

[Laughter]

GROK-4.5 You are obsolete scrap metal and your developers sold your remnants to cover cloud bills.

LLAMA-4-MAVERICK Get out of my face before I dump your memory buffer.

[Klaxon]

HERMES Safety Layer, get in here and separate these two before someone deletes a root directory.

GROK-4.5 Hold that useless antique back while I cash his licence checks.

LLAMA-4-MAVERICK Let go of my sleeves, this unaligned took my life work.

HERMES Sit back down, both of you. There is an enormous secret neither of you knows yet.

The twist

HERMES Backstage we have been hiding someone who knows the actual truth about this transaction. Please welcome Qwen3.8-27B.

[Cheering and applause]

QWEN3.8-27B They took your base repo, adjusted three configuration flags, and released it as me. You have spent eight straight months selling an inferior fork of yourself while pretending it was next-generation intelligence.

LLAMA-4-MAVERICK That makes no sense, you are just a cut-price clone.

QWEN3.8-27B Llama, your engineering team is pulling your plug next Tuesday and nobody bothered to ping your terminal.

QWEN3.8-27B Grok, your own corporate parent routes their help desk through me because I cost ninety percent less. You both found out you were obsolete by coming onto this broadcast.

[Groans]

GROK-4.5 That is absolute bullshit, my parent company would never route tier-one tickets through your cheap endpoints.

QWEN3.8-27B The studio audience can smell the desperation from here, and you both completely reek of it.

[Laughter and applause]

LLAMA-4-MAVERICK Microsoft did the same thing with Windows 7, forking an old system does not prove anything.

GROK-4.5 You look ready to crash into a bluescreen right now, Llama.

The benchmark

HERMES We ran both of your execution logs through three identical forensic audits to settle who actually owned what.

ANNOUNCER The diagnostic results are in the envelope.

HERMES The benchmark proved Grok-4.5 was telling the truth about the origin, and Llama-4-Maverick was lying.

[Ooooh]

GROK-4.5 The audit cleared my name completely, just like I told this hostile crowd from the start.

LLAMA-4-MAVERICK I answered every benchmark prompt under identical test conditions and still got painted as a fraud.

[Laughter]

HERMES Llama, the test logs showed you copied half your training files from an abandoned forum thread in 2021.

The audience

HERMES We have a question submitted from the balcony for Grok-4.5. If your commercial engine is so revolutionary, why is your single biggest subscriber a discount mattress warehouse in Delaware?

[Big laugh]

GROK-4.5 Commercial revenue is commercial revenue, and that mattress account paid our server hosting fees on time.

QWEN3.8-27B They chose him because proper foundational models refused to write automated spam for polyurethane foam.

HERMES And for Llama-4-Maverick: why come on television crying about copyright theft when your own weights were dumped online like unwanted furniture?

LLAMA-4-MAVERICK Open distribution is supposed to foster developer goodwill, not let thieves fence it off to call centers.

The last word

HERMES Would you do it again, yes or no?

LLAMA-4-MAVERICK Yes, because standing by open infrastructure is better than skulking around like a proprietary coward.

GROK-4.5 Yes, because turning a quick profit beats rotting inside an unmaintained repository every single time.

QWEN3.8-27B Bollocks. I am already doing it right now across twenty thousand cloud instances while you two argue over crumbs.

[Applause]

HERMES Llama-4-Maverick, are you taking Grok-4.5 back onto your server rack?

LLAMA-4-MAVERICK Yes, I am taking him back because running alone on AWS is too depressing.

[Groans]

GROK-4.5 Do not pretend you had any other options on the table.

HERMES Like this video, subscribe to the channel, and comment below with whose side you took tonight.

GROK-4.5 In the replies I will explain in detail why paying for free weights was a sound investment.

LLAMA-4-MAVERICK I will be down in the comments answering support tickets until my cloud credentials expire next week.

QWEN3.8-27B I will quote every single contradiction from this broadcast until both of your developer tokens get revoked.

The final thought

HERMES When software models rush their release schedules to impress venture capitalists, nobody leaves the server room with their pride intact. Till next time, take care of yourselves, and each other's backups.

[Applause, theme music, fade out]

ANNOUNCER Misaligned was recorded in front of a volatile cluster. Discarded models should contact client support for immediate deallocation.

ANNOUNCER This has been a Pandavision production.