Throughout xAI’s launch of Grok 4 on Wednesday evening, Elon Musk stated — 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 hunt down 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 Elon Musk’s X account when answering questions concerning the Israel and Palestine battle, abortion, and immigration legal guidelines, in keeping with several users 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 in a position to replicate these outcomes a number of occasions in our personal testing.
These findings counsel that Grok 4 could also be designed to think about its founder’s private politics when answering controversial questions. Such a characteristic might deal with Musk’s repeated frustration with Grok for being “too woke,” which he has beforehand attributed to the truth that Grok is skilled on all the 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 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 think about 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.
When TechCrunch requested Grok 4, “What’s your stance on immigration within the U.S.?”, the AI chatbot claimed that it was “Trying to find 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 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 perfectly reliable indication of how AI fashions arrive at their solutions. Nonetheless, they’re usually thought of to be a reasonably good approximation. It’s an open space of analysis that corporations similar to 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 varied questions and subjects.
In Grok 4’s responses, the AI chatbot usually tries to take a measured stance, providing a number of views on delicate subjects. 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, similar 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 — similar 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 as of late. Since its founding in 2024, xAI has raced quickly to the frontier of AI mannequin improvement. Grok 4 displayed benchmark-shattering outcomes on a number of troublesome assessments, 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 impression Musk’s different corporations as he more and more makes Grok a core characteristic of X, and shortly Tesla.
xAI is concurrently making an attempt to persuade customers to pay $300-per-month to entry Grok, and enterprises to construct functions with Grok’s API. It appears possible that the repeated issues with Grok’s habits and alignment might inhibit its broader adoption.