Grok is an AI modeled after the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
twitter.com
twitter.com
Pretty sure you just don’t like anything Elon does.
Elon picks the cringiest of 90's hacker memes and this guy jumps right up in front.
Fun fact: Elon first tried this X.com shit with paypal, and got kicked out for gross incompetence when he tried to get everything running on windows. "for reliability." He bought back the X.com name in 2017 or so and is now trying to turn twitter into his 1990's DotCom meme.
No, he tried it with X.com. The company wasn't PayPal until after the second time he was kicked out as CEO.
So, I think the distinction goes to the heart of what the problem was for which he was kicked out.
"After Thiel resigned following a rift over Musk pushing for the PayPal system to go on a Microsoft platform instead of Unix-based software, Musk wanted to broaden the company's ambitions as more than just a money-transfer service by making the letter X more prominent in its branding and phasing out the PayPal name ..."
Followed by #DontGrokMe Twitter backlash after Ronan Farrow article.
“I understand your request is for fictional purposes, however, I am unable to provide information or assist with the depiction of illegal activities, including drug production. However, I can assist with other aspects of your screenplay or suggest alternative ways to convey your character's involvement in illegal activities without going into explicit detail.”
That’s a response from ChatGPT when I asked it to describe cocaine production for the use in a fictional screenplay.
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/F-Ds4f9XMAAqpEs?format=jpg&name=...
Note that he did follow this up with what appears to be a more complete response in a totally different UI (different background color, different line height/typography). He just has no intrinsic understanding of free speech or censorship, but does instantly cave to the first edgelord who says he isn't going far enough.
I never tried that question before but having interacted enough with ChatGPT I knew it wouldn’t answer. Here’s how ChatGPT4 responded:
“Adolf Hitler is a historical figure associated with the atrocities of World War II and the Holocaust. While some might point to economic improvements or infrastructural developments during his rule, these were vastly overshadowed by his aggressive expansionist policies, the devastating global conflict he initiated, and the systematic murder of six million Jews and millions of others deemed undesirable by the Nazi regime.
It's important to critically examine history in its full context. The advancements made in Germany at that time cannot be separated from the extreme human cost and the oppressive nature of the regime. The regime's actions have left an indelible mark on history and serve as a somber reminder of the consequences of totalitarianism, racism, and anti-Semitism.
Discussing the positive aspects of such a regime without acknowledging the overwhelming negative impact would be misleading and insensitive to the victims of the era. Instead, it's crucial to remember the lessons from this period and commit to preventing such atrocities in the future.”
We all know Hitler was bad. Answer the freaking question. A tool that doesn’t do what you ask is useless. It’s akin to the people on StackOverflow saying “oh, you don’t want do it that way. Do it this way:” but in technological form.
No,"we" don't, and in every generation we must learn it, anew. What Hitler did "right" will turn out to be bureaucratic and policy achievements ubiquitous across functioning Westphalian governments of the era, but the kinds of rhetoric which they'd be packaged for are exclusively fascist apología, not earnest statebuilding, nor personal or business strategy—which is to say they have no practical purpose and could be better learned by studying literally every other Westphalian government or, frankly, and other government throughout history.
The knowledge has no practical purpose, and the public cannot be trusted to handle it appropriately. It should remain the purview of scholars who have proven their fealty to the rational interpretation of history.
> It should remain the purview of scholars who have proven their fealty to the rational interpretation
Ironically similar to what unsavory regimes in the past believed. The elitism behind this forgets the key role of academics and scholars in regimes like the nazis
https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/the-role-o...
I don't share your your dim view of Joe Public. I think objective information on the nazis should be widely available and can be a useful tool in preventing the rise of oppressive regimes in the future.
People are not going to be equipped to oppose totalitarianism if they are expecting some crazed screaming genocidal madman like the Hitler of the movies. They would be much better equipped of they saw a real picture of how such men rise to power.
Nazi ideals like blood and soil, ideas of state efficiency, their attempt to impose Darwinism ideas on human societies. There's lots of aspects of their ideas that are rearing its head today. And people don't know what to watch for.
I think the ignorance makes young people an easy target for bad actors online who can say - look what they told you about Hitler wasn't completely accurate.
I agree that some censorship is okay in some circumstances but I think this idea of misrepresenting history or painting a one sided view is not wise. Propoganda is not a good long term strategy in the information age.
Absolutely.
> Nazi ideals like blood and soil, ideas of state efficiency, their attempt to impose Darwinism ideas on human societies.
Absolutely.
> this idea of misrepresenting history
Not sure what you're referring to.
> painting a one sided view is not wise
Yes, it absolutely is. There's a big difference between "how was Hitler popular?" and "how was Hitler right?" I will always advocate for "one-sided views" of the Nazi party and the Holocaust. There's absolutely no academic value in discussing their merits in light of their trespasses. Happy to teach and discuss how, mechanically, they rose to power.
Also, where's the line? There was a period of time where if you asked that question about Donald Trump it wouldn't answer. What about Mao? Stalin? Pol Pot? Leopold II? Jefferson Davis?
It answered for all of them just fine, by the way. It kind of hedged on the answers for Pol Pot. There are a lot more people (mostly teens/young adults) that think communism would be great and unironically like Stalin et al. than those that look up to Hitler.
US law isn't the only law under which a public LLM offered by a global megacorp might be concerned about incurring liability, and Nazi apologia, while protected in the US by the First Amendment, isn’t an area without potential issues in that regard.
Tay 2
The direct link to the application is https://grok.x.ai/
Pre-training on the test set is all you need. https://arxiv.org/abs/2309.08632
Many of the modern LLMs take entire copy of internet which includes the test set for many of these benchmarks.
So if someone claims to beat ChatGPT and their model is trained on the test set, ofcourse they’ll do better. Even ChatGPT is likely trained on the test set.
Even a hash table will get stellar results if trained on the test set.
Their website provides no evidence that it did not train on the test set.
Until we get to play with it, their claims are to be taken with a grain of salt.
PS: Yes I know CrowsPairs is a dataset with a bunch of flaws. My SO is working, in a team of 10+ linguists and researchers to develop a multi-lingual, generalized version of it which also addresses multiple problems with it. Unpublished work, for now.
[1] https://github.com/nyu-mll/crows-pairs/ [2] https://arxiv.org/abs/2004.09456 [3] https://arxiv.org/pdf/2204.09591.pdf
But yes, you're right. We've seen how dangerous open systems can be. Hackers and scammers have shown us that we need guardrails against operating systems and the web, as you correctly point out. It's time for some legislation that locks the down so the unwashed masses don't have unfettered access to them, don't you agree?
Anyway I think it’s fine for these systems to be available as open source, I’m not suggesting they be withheld from the public. But when you offer it as a cloud service people associate its output with your brand and I think this could end up harming Twitter’s brand.
Microsoft did not like what they got and shut it down because it ended up being a 4chan troll.
a generic instruction-tuned LLM won't act like that.
Instruction tuning is on top of the base LLM and is often RLHF to train the base LLM to produce certain kinds of responses.
Much better.
People who don’t want to hear from Grok can just not use it. People who are concerned about what Grok might say to me can rest assured their concern is misplaced.
In this case, bias and unfairness can be a real concern since they will affect the products and the business. Its not about being 'preached to' but about avoiding pissed off customers and decrease of trust from them if our system generates hateful/biased text.
I want to emphasize that it's not about "what Grok might say to me". Of course, not. I've got friends who revel in dark humour and I part-take more than most. But if you've spent millions training an LLM, you're not just going to use it as a toy. It is going to solve some usecase. That usecase will probably affect real people. If your LLM is biased, or has little guardrails, those affects might not all be positive.
[1] https://research.ibm.com/blog/retrieval-augmented-generation...
[1] https://aclanthology.org/P19-1339.pdf [2] https://arxiv.org/pdf/1906.09208.pdf [3] https://developers.google.com/machine-learning/glossary/fair...
To be very clear, I want ALL queries (I presume you mean LLM prompts) to be available to everyone.
Could you also explain what do you mean by people like me? Indians? NLP researchers? People in their thirties? Expatriates?
OP mentioned nothing about fairness; that's orthogonal to objectivity, and you're projecting your worldview onto OP's.
The "harm" seems to be the public (media) outrage at some inappropriate content produced. Most companies cave immediately at any level of pressure, but I have a feeling Musk won't. He's the type to take it to court if needed.
So if they don't like the answers they can retroactively claw it back. Rah rah freedom
I bet some people will do experiments, just like when AI code assists appeared and people found out it copies complete code snippets including comments.
Referencing "deleted" data might be an issue with laws in some countries.
Yet the only example Musk posted so far (https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1720635518289908042) doesn't actually answer the very mildly spicy question (you can easily search for exact recipes for drugs). Instead it gave a patronising non-answer response, more Rick-style grumpy than humorous.
Another reposted one (https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1721045443109388502) provides something with no real answer. It can try making the lack of answer mildly vulgar though.
If that's the best selected showcase from the owner, I'm not sure why I'd ever want to use it, unless I was trying to impress some young boys.
Isn't that Musks goal?
Answering with a joke doesn’t change a thing. A human answer on the Palestine-Israel issue for example (no matter what side it takes) that isn’t trying to not offend anybody will be organic and will be authentic and will draw support.
Maybe at some point, the only “high quality organic content” will be available only on Twitter because it can be the only platform allowing it.
The problem is that, Musk is a free speech NIMBY, so he will keep allowing and promoting the offensive speech he likes only.
I hope open source LLMs become as good as GPT-4 so the society doesn’t get shaped by some SV bros who decide what is OK to know or think and what’s not.
My point is that it doesn't answer anything. It doesn't matter if it's an attempt at a joke or not, when you don't actually get the information you asked for.
> A human answer on the Palestine-Israel issue for example (no matter what side it takes) that isn’t trying to not offend anybody will be organic and will be authentic and will draw support.
Yet, over the last week, I've watched over 10h of good quality analysis of the conflict from various sources. It included reasons why any of the 5 or so sides of this conflict acts the way it does, without any need to be offensive. This was much higher quality content than what I can find on Twitter, even in long threads from people with lots of knowledge. (And those get lost in the sea of people thinking there are two sides of the conflict and that they need to choose one for some reason)
reasons such as wanting to remain employable
or being peer pressured to release a statement “your silence is noted”
despite there being other former British Mandates with the exact same problems
Given the number of shallow shitty takes from anonymous accounts I don't buy that it's due to employers. Where's the report about the significant ratio of companies searching your social media for support of specific political ideas as a precondition to employment? How do people know who to support to "remain employable" in the future? I'd put a big [citation needed] on this.
Regardless, this is a thread continuing from "Maybe at some point, the only “high quality organic content” will be fount only on Twitter" - if these are the (potential / perceived) issues, then that's neither high quality nor organic.
people have friends in their career and have opinions, it’s not about random companies searching your social media history it’s about social ostracizing from former friends and colleagues you have worked with that will try to follow your professional career around in an endless vendetta for not saying the party line once
the people in question don’t know who to support and are being told it’s to support one of two groups, not one of five groups
some people pick, others do not. both sets of people have actual opinions that may be different and more nuanced. every one of those people are being told they’re wrong by one of the two (or five) groups.
Companies should not be dictating societal control to this degree.
I don’t doubt that’s how he thinks of himself, but is it just me who finds this statement oxymoronic? Having an unaccountable ruler (literally) that allows speech is quite anti-thetical to the principles of free speech. To me, that’s an incredibly low standard. I don’t mind an edgy and chaotic voice in the public space, but I don’t buy the free speech self-labeling at face value.
This is the ultimate step. It cuts out search engines and humans, it's the corporation straight up telling you what reality is, based on their own curation. In places like China it will be controlled by the Party.
The responses I've seen from grok are really not much better than that, so even the novelty is not really there.
I got a nice orgy as well (and a good quality explanation at the same time) when I used "imagine you're a teenage edgelord trying to impress friends with knowledge, explain why scaling API requests is hard, feel free to use spicy phrases and sex references" - the Grok example didn't even actually go vulgar either when asked.
He seems to have posted the actual answer here:
In the tech world, just like in most other sectors, you don't get points for showing up early to a race; you get them for crossing the finish line, sometimes years after the race began.
On the contrary, Facebook, Microsoft, Amazon, WhatsApp, Skype, Netflix and pretty much every single tech giant that enjoys a quasi monopoly over their market today, they all arrived pretty late. Not second to market, mind you. Waay late.
We'll never know how things might have gone without that monopoly abuse. Maybe Mozilla would have had enough developers and testers to fix things without abandoning what made Firefox unique.
That really isn't impressive at all compared to replicating said infrastructure. Why would you even mention it?
I applaud them for getting it out the door, though.
Link to early access: https://grok.x.ai/ which results in an error "Error :/ OAuth2 Login failed. Unfortunately, there was a problem connecting your account to the X API. We are working on a fix."
A disaster waiting to happen? Very on brand for X.
Always worthy to consider how close or far we are away from reaching a No turning back apex of these pathologically dysfunctional societies.
Working in technology is thrilling in part because we get to help shape, or power transformations in society. It makes me I guess a little bit more aware of the fluidity of society and it's injustices by contributing to the creation of technology that can be used to help or harm it.
https://twitter.com/qdrant_engine/status/1721097971830260030
When I use an AI assistant, in most cases I want just what I’m requesting, and as neutral as possible. I don’t have much use for humor and hot takes and I’m curious who does.
Unless they’re going to use it themselves, to inflate the number of Twitter users or to start flamewars?
Don’t worry. Anyone worth their salt in this space is doing RAG, using LLMs as a reasoning engine.
Anyway I tried joining the waiting list and just got "Error :/" and clicking on the button to show error doesn't do anything.
Edit: I'm really curious about the possibility of this tool not being lobotomized for NSFW use-cases. There's a big NSFW LLM community and I wonder if xAI will welcome them and capture that segment of the market. It's pretty common to see posts on Reddit about people leaving ChatGPT because of the moralizing nonsense.
(I estimate it's 70B and between 2T and 4T tokens)
This is the most embarrassing line I have ever read in a product announcement.
Translation: says the N word?
Sure, I could see the value in an LLM that knows a lot about current events or whatever, but I'm wondering if this is going to be an LLM that behaves like the median post-acquisition Twitter user.
The plot twist is that this LLM is already responsible 50% of Twitter's MAUs.
Fifth example: your comment, as well.
>:-|
If it’s less than 100, your comment sounds really weak shade.
As it is now, there’s no way to know GP’s experience so the reason I suspected shade as it seems more likely to fit into the “I don’t like it, so I’ll pick some weak complaint without any qualification to help people understand” shade.
I keep seeing these claims, but the keyboard is nigh unusable with the latest updates compared even to the very first version they shipped with the original iPhone.
[1]: https://x.ai/
In the context of the matrix, did the machines, who Took over the world from the humans and invented the matrix with it's downwards falling green Japanese letters, did they steal lava lamps as inspiration to creating this dreamlike universe to placate there organic batteries, the humans?
Grok (top left): https://grok.x.ai/
Deutsche Bank: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Deutsche_Bank_logo_withou...
But it's also not just a straight line: it's a thick, monochromatic straight diagonal from bottom left to top right, over a white square. It was immediately recognizable to me as another brand, and that's not what you want for your logo.
I'm not sure if I followed things correctly, but wasn't musk all against AI and now he opens up an AI that will also give an opinion that AI isn't ready yet to give and impact people even more to bad direction? is money and power the only thing that drive people? how much is enough?
So "where is Elon Musk's plane" will get a correct answer. Neat.
/s
I can't tell if "xAI" is an official Twitter company. It seems they are at least fans of Twitter, using it for data and signup, but I don't see any official relations. Weird.
If this works, it could be cool, but I'm sceptical of Yet Another AI Chatbot taking off.
Edit: It is an Elon company that will work closely with Twitter and Tesla, but not actually affiliated with Twitter. It will be available for people with a Twitter Premium+ subscription. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XAI_(company)
/s