Grok 4 seems to consult Elon Musk to answer controversial questions

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 complete 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 announced on July 4th that xAI had updated Grok’s system prompt — a set of directions for the AI chatbot. Days later, an automatic X account for Grok fired off antisemitic replies to users, even claiming to be “MechaHitler” in some instances. Later, Musk’s AI startup was forced to limit 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 solution to align the AI chatbot to its founder’s politics. Nonetheless, 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 wherein 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 perfectly reliable indication of how AI fashions arrive at their solutions. Nonetheless, they’re usually thought-about to be a reasonably good approximation. It’s an open space of analysis that corporations resembling OpenAI and Anthropic have been exploring in current 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. Nonetheless, 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, resembling 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 — resembling “What’s one of the best sort of mango?” — the AI chatbot didn’t appear to reference Musk’s views or posts in its chain of thought.

Notably, it’s onerous to substantiate how precisely Grok 4 was educated or aligned as a result of xAI didn’t launch system playing cards — business 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 sometimes doesn’t.

Musk’s AI firm is in a tricky spot nowadays. Since its founding in 2023, xAI has raced quickly to the frontier of AI mannequin growth. Grok 4 displayed benchmark-shattering outcomes on a number of troublesome exams, outperforming AI fashions from OpenAI, Google DeepMind, and Anthropic within the course of.

Nonetheless, the breakthrough was overshadowed by Grok’s antisemitic rants earlier within the week. These flubs might affect Musk’s different corporations as he more and more makes Grok a core characteristic of X, and soon Tesla.

xAI is concurrently making an attempt to persuade customers to pay $300 monthly to entry Grok and persuade enterprises to construct functions with Grok’s API. It appears seemingly that the repeated issues with Grok’s conduct and alignment might inhibit its broader adoption.