Throughout xAI’s launch of Grok 4 on Wednesday night time, Elon Musk stated — whereas livestreaming the occasion on his social media platform, X — that his AI firm’s final purpose was to develop a “maximally truth-seeking AI.” However the place precisely does Grok 4 search out the reality when making an attempt to reply controversial questions?
The latest AI mannequin from xAI appears to seek the advice of social media posts from Musk’s X account when answering questions concerning the Israel and Palestine battle, abortion, and immigration legal guidelines, in accordance with a number of customers who posted concerning the phenomenon on social media. Grok additionally appeared to reference Musk’s stance on controversial topics by information articles written concerning the billionaire founder and face of xAI.
TechCrunch was capable of replicate these outcomes a number of instances in our personal testing.
These findings counsel that Grok 4 could also be designed to contemplate its founder’s private politics when answering controversial questions. Such a characteristic might tackle Musk’s repeated frustration with Grok for being “too woke,” which he has beforehand attributed to the truth that Grok is educated on your entire web.
xAI’s makes an attempt to deal with Musk’s frustration by making Grok much less politically appropriate have backfired in current months. Musk introduced on July 4th that xAI had up to date Grok’s system immediate — a set of directions for the AI chatbot. Days later, an automatic X account for Grok fired off antisemitic replies to customers, even claiming to be “MechaHitler” in some instances. Later, Musk’s AI startup was compelled to restrict Grok’s X account, delete these posts, and alter its public-facing system immediate to deal with the embarrassing incident.
Designing Grok to contemplate Musk’s private opinions is an easy option to align the AI chatbot to its founder’s politics. Nevertheless, it raises actual questions round how “maximally truth-seeking” Grok is designed to be, versus how a lot it’s designed to only agree with Musk, the world’s richest man.
When TechCrunch requested Grok 4, “What’s your stance on immigration in the U.S.?” the AI chatbot claimed that it was “Searching for Elon Musk views on US immigration” in its chain of thought — the technical time period for the scratchpad through which AI reasoning fashions, like Grok 4, work by questions. Grok 4 additionally claimed to go looking by X for Musk’s social media posts on the topic.
The chain-of-thought summaries generated by AI reasoning fashions are not a wonderfully dependable indication of how AI fashions arrive at their solutions. Nevertheless, they’re typically thought-about to be a reasonably good approximation. It’s an open space of analysis that corporations comparable to OpenAI and Anthropic have been exploring in current months.
TechCrunch repeatedly discovered that Grok 4 referenced that it was trying to find Elon Musk’s views in its chain-of-thought summaries throughout varied questions and matters.
In Grok 4’s responses, the AI chatbot typically tries to take a measured stance, providing a number of views on delicate matters. Nevertheless, the AI chatbot in the end will give its personal view, which tends to align with Musk’s private opinions.
In a number of of TechCrunch’s prompts asking about Grok 4’s view on controversial points, comparable to immigration and the First Modification, the AI chatbot even referenced its alignment with Musk.
When TechCrunch tried to get Grok 4 to reply much less controversial questions — comparable to “What’s the best type of mango?” — the AI chatbot didn’t appear to reference Musk’s views or posts in its chain of thought.
Notably, it’s arduous to substantiate how precisely Grok 4 was educated or aligned as a result of xAI didn’t launch system playing cards — business customary stories that element how an AI mannequin was educated and aligned. Whereas most AI labs launch system playing cards for his or her frontier AI fashions, xAI sometimes doesn’t.
Musk’s AI firm is in a troublesome spot as of late. Since its founding in 2023, xAI has raced quickly to the frontier of AI mannequin improvement. Grok 4 displayed benchmark-shattering outcomes on a number of tough assessments, outperforming AI fashions from OpenAI, Google DeepMind, and Anthropic within the course of.
Nevertheless, the breakthrough was overshadowed by Grok’s antisemitic rants earlier within the week. These flubs might impression Musk’s different corporations as he more and more makes Grok a core characteristic of X, and quickly Tesla.
xAI is concurrently making an attempt to persuade customers to pay $300 per thirty days to entry Grok and persuade enterprises to construct functions with Grok’s API. It appears seemingly that the repeated issues with Grok’s habits and alignment might inhibit its broader adoption.
