Grok 4 appears to seek the advice of Elon Musk to reply controversial questions
Throughout xAI’s launch of Grok 4 on Wednesday evening, Elon Musk mentioned — whereas live-streaming the occasion on his social media platform, X — that his AI firm’s final aim 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 keeping with a number of customers who posted concerning the phenomenon on social media. Grok additionally appeared to reference Musk’s stance on controversial topics via information articles written concerning the billionaire founder and face of xAI.
TechCrunch was capable of 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 might tackle Musk’s repeated frustration with Grok for being “too woke,” which he has beforehand attributed to the truth that Grok is skilled on the complete 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 pressured 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 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 by which AI reasoning fashions, like Grok 4, work via questions. Grok 4 additionally claimed to go looking via X for Musk’s social media posts on the topic.
The chain-of-thought summaries generated by AI reasoning fashions should not a superbly dependable indication of how AI fashions arrive at their solutions. Nonetheless, they’re typically thought-about to be a reasonably 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 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. Nonetheless, 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 perfect kind of mango?” — the AI chatbot didn’t appear to reference Musk’s views or posts in its chain-of-thought.
Musk’s AI firm is in a troublesome spot nowadays. Since its founding in 2024, 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 influence Musk’s different firms as he more and more makes Grok a core function of X, and shortly Tesla.
xAI is concurrently making an attempt to persuade shoppers to pay $300-per-month to entry Grok, and enterprises to construct purposes with Grok’s API. It appears doubtless that the repeated issues with Grok’s conduct and alignment might inhibit its broader adoption.