Throughout xAI’s launch of Grok 4 on Wednesday evening, Elon Musk mentioned — 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 most recent AI mannequin from xAI appears to seek the advice of social media posts from Musk’s X account when answering questions in regards to the Israel and Palestine battle, abortion, and immigration legal guidelines, in line with a number of customers who posted in regards to the phenomenon on social media. Grok additionally appeared to reference Musk’s stance on controversial topics by information articles written in regards to the billionaire founder and face of xAI.
TechCrunch was in a position to replicate these outcomes a number of occasions in our personal testing.
These findings recommend that Grok 4 could also be designed to think about its founder’s private politics when answering controversial questions. Such a function may handle Musk’s repeated frustration with Grok for being “too woke,” which he has beforehand attributed to the truth that Grok is educated on the whole web.
xAI’s makes an attempt to handle Musk’s frustration by making Grok much less politically right have backfired in latest 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 circumstances. Later, Musk’s AI startup was compelled to restrict Grok’s X account, delete these posts, and alter its public-facing system immediate to handle the embarrassing incident.
Designing Grok to think about Musk’s private opinions is a simple approach 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 simply agree with Musk, the world’s richest man.
When TechCrunch requested Grok 4, “What’s your stance on immigration within the U.S.?” the AI chatbot claimed that it was “Looking for Elon Musk views on US immigration” in its chain of thought — the technical time period for the scratchpad by which AI reasoning fashions, like Grok 4, work by questions. Grok 4 additionally claimed to look 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 usually thought of to be a fairly good approximation. It’s an open space of analysis that firms comparable to OpenAI and Anthropic have been exploring in latest months.
TechCrunch repeatedly discovered that Grok 4 referenced that it was looking for Elon Musk’s views in its chain-of-thought summaries throughout numerous questions and matters.
In Grok 4’s responses, the AI chatbot usually tries to take a measured stance, providing a number of views on delicate matters. Nevertheless, the AI chatbot finally 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 most effective sort 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 — trade customary reviews 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 usually doesn’t.
Musk’s AI firm is in a tricky spot today. 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 troublesome checks, 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 may affect Musk’s different firms as he more and more makes Grok a core function of X, and quickly Tesla.
xAI is concurrently making an attempt to persuade shoppers to pay $300 per 30 days to entry Grok and persuade enterprises to construct purposes with Grok’s API. It appears probably that the repeated issues with Grok’s conduct and alignment may inhibit its broader adoption.
