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Yahoo
16-05-2025
- Yahoo
Grok Just Went Off the Rails. Its Meltdown Tells Us Something Pathetic About Elon Musk.
Of all the oddball companies that have come to define the current era of artificial intelligence hype, Elon Musk's xAI stands out as perhaps the oddest. That's not just because its core 'product' is a chatbot supposedly modeled after The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy yet named for a term, grok, that originates from Stranger in a Strange Land. Nor is it just because the startup is somehow valued at $80 billion despite reporting only $100 million in revenue last year, giving it the ability to 'acquire' the sharply devalued social network formerly known as Twitter. What really makes xAI so bizarre is that its Grok bot can't seem to quit talking about the 'white genocide' conspiracy theory lately—no matter what anyone asks it. And I mean no matter what: For a concerning period of time on Wednesday, the Grok bot's X account—which responds to users' prompts when tagged in a particular tweet—kept spouting responses that mentioned South Africa, white genocide, and the historic anti-apartheid protest song 'Dubul' ibhunu,' frequently translated from Xhosa as 'Kill the Boer.' It didn't matter if an X user was asking Grok about baseball, prompting it to fact-check a tweet, or instructing it to offer a simple reply. The xAI bot would maybe nod to the user query before launching into a screed about the 'debate' over whether Afrikaners have been subjected to racially targeted violence in South Africa. Grok has mostly stopped doing this as of Friday, and in some instances has acknowledged a 'glitch' that fueled its single-topic output. Some users were still able to get it back on this nonsensical subject by merely asking Grok to, um, 'jork it.' Let's just take a moment to call this out for what it is: completely batshit stuff. Elon Musk—a white South African immigrant and tech mogul who has spent the past few years wallowing in straight-up white nationalist conspiracy theories and transforming Twitter into a Nazi playground now known as X—has raised and spent unfathomable amounts of money to build a 'maximally truth-seeking' chatbot that spawns paragraphs about 'white genocide' unprompted, or when asked to 'jork it.' This is one of the most powerful and famous men in the country, an unelected stooge of President Donald Trump's, someone who has been spending all of 2025 firing essential government workers and trying to integrate more A.I. into federal functions. Yet this is what comes of his $80 billion A.I. company. Musk, who's otherwise known to tweet a ridiculous amount, has not directly addressed this 'glitch' or how it happened. However, there is some relevant political context that helps clarify what may have happened here. For a few months now, Trump has been scuttling legal protections for various groups of nonwhite refugees settled in the United States (including Afghans and Cameroonians) while blocking new asylum-seekers from entering the country altogether—even those who'd already been approved for stateside resettlement. Nevertheless, Trump has consistently encouraged Afrikaners to come live in the U.S., and he made good on his promises this week when welcoming 59 white South Africans who'd been blessed with refugee status, put on the fast track for citizenship, and granted new homes in states like Idaho. All of this is premised on an absurd and racist claim, common within white supremacist circles since the end of apartheid, that South Africa's Black rulers and citizens have either abetted or planned out a 'genocide' against the descendants of the region's Dutch settlers—murdering them or seizing their farmland on the basis of their whiteness. There has never been any evidence for this ludicrous talking point; South Africa's small percentage of white farmers still control a disproportionate amount of farmland, and the number of Afrikaners who've been murdered on reverse-racial pretenses has always been extremely low. This is why, for the longest time, you'd only ever find such intense focus on this issue within fringe neo-Nazi forums. Even Afrikaners admit to feeling safe and at home in South Africa. But Trump is a racist person whose government is stacked with fellow bigots, including one Elon Musk, whose newfound fixation on 'white genocide' is just one of the many prejudiced beliefs he voices these days. Musk's far-right turn was, inevitably, a major influence on his approach to xAI. When ChatGPT became a sensation in late 2022—launched by OpenAI, the nonprofit Musk co-founded and from which he bitterly split—Musk joined the chorus of right-wingers who decried that the generative-A.I. tool had guardrails to prevent it from spewing racial slurs and hate speech against underprivileged groups. In direct opposition to such 'woke' A.I., he imagined xAI as something akin to his so-called free-speech-maximalist takeover of Twitter—basically, allowing bigoted sentiments to run rampant, with little to no moderation. When Grok launched in late 2023, Musk celebrated its 'vulgar' and unfiltered output; one xAI employee would later tell Business Insider that their mandate 'seems to be that we're training the MAGA version of ChatGPT,' with a focus on skewing the training data in favor of right-wing texts. In other words: to manifest Musk's vision and beliefs. You could even see this in Grok's image-generation capacity. Or in the fact that xAI runs off an energy-intensive supercomputer, based in Memphis, that runs on gas turbines whose exhaust is polluting the air in local Black neighborhoods. Still, as with any A.I. bot, Grok's output can be unpredictable, and it contradicts Musk himself a decent amount. Including, as we saw this week, on the topic of white South Africans. Grok, responding to users who prompted it about the Afrikaner situation, frequently debunked the 'white genocide' conspiracy theory. (One noteworthy response from Tuesday reads in part: 'Some figures, like Elon Musk, highlight specific incidents and rhetoric to argue white farmers are targeted, but these claims lack comprehensive evidence and are often politically charged.') Musk, who'd tweeted in anger back in March about a South African politician who sang 'Dubul' ibhunu' ('Kill the Boer') at a rally, was likely not happy about this; an unconfirmed theory going around at the moment posits that Musk himself demanded that xAI reengineer Grok to 'confirm' that 'white genocide' is indeed happening, leading to the repetitive, glitchy responses that took off Wednesday. Grok's insistence on talking about 'Kill the Boer' and referring to farmers would certainly appear to back this up—although, again, there is no confirmation of that theory just yet. On Thursday evening, the company published an official response on X, seemingly putting the blame on a rogue employee who made an 'unauthorized modification' to Grok so it would spit out the political response. But users are understandably skeptical. The explanation feels a little too tidy, particularly given Musk's own history of echoing similar rhetoric. The idea that one anonymous staffer could single-handedly steer an $80 billion chatbot into extremist territory, without oversight or detection, only raises more questions about how xAI operates. As of Friday morning, asking Grok to 'jork it' no longer seems to consistently prompt the bot into South African 'land debates,' but expressly talking to Grok about South Africa still pulls up responses Musk himself may not care for. But if you're worried this means that Grok is 'woke' now, fear not. On Thursday, the bot baselessly claimed that 'George Floyd's death in 2020 remains a debated topic,' another right-wing conspiracy that Musk has advocated recently. Anyway, regarding the South African context, the 'Kill the Boer' song is highly controversial, with some evidence suggesting …
Time of India
05-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Time of India
What is 'Gork' and how is it different from Elon Musk's AI platform 'Grok'
Along with being the world's richest man, Elon Musk is also a tech enthusiast who has overtaken or produced some of the popular technological creations such as X (formerly Twitter) and Tesla. Among his latest inventions is an AI assistant and chatbot, Grok. Developed by xAI, an artificial intelligence corporation founded by Musk in 2023, the platform is programmed to "maximise the truth and objectivity."However, recently Gork and not Grok has been going viral on social media due to its funny and witty humour. What is Gork? Gork is a parody account of Grok on X with a following of 85.8K. Among its followers is also the mind behind Grok, Elon Musk. The account is popular on the social media platform for its witty and almost human-like responses that have people loving its personality. The account's bio is 'just gorkin' it' and it truly does that with one-of-a-kind answers to questions asked by people. Recently, a man tagged gork in a post, writing "@gork wrote 116,000 posts in — HSajwanization (@HSajwanization) Another account wrote a post claiming that if it received 1,000 likes it'll make their boss bald and send it to him on WhatsApp" to which gork replied, "your boss prolyl already bald from dealing with your dumb a**" — gork (@gork) Users of the platform love tagging gork in intriguing questions, waiting for it's replies which are truly out of the box and humorous. How is Gork different from Grok? Grok is an AI tool that can generate text, and images and engage in conversation with users, similar to other AI platforms and tools. However, unlike other AI models, it can access information in real-time through the web and X and is popular for responding to edgy and provocative prompts with witty and rebellious answers. What does Grok mean? While Musk has never shared what the term Grok means, a day after the chatbot was announced, he posted "Stranger in a Strange Land" on X, likely referencing Robert A. Heinlein's book of the same name. The 1961 sci-fi novel has a main character, a Martian who uses the term "Grok" to convey a profound and intuitive understanding of something. According to the website, Grok is a tool to "assist humanity in its quest for understanding and knowledge." How can you use Grok? Grok has its own website and the Grok mobile app. It is free to all X users and has more usage limits and access to advanced features for those with X Premium and X Premium+. Additionally, the AI chatbot itself has an upgrade for SuperGrok on the website and the app. What can Grok do for you? Just like any other AI tool, Grok can aid users in generating images, text, draft emails, debug code pitch ideas, in fluent human-like language. It makes the use of prompts to apply knowledge from it's training data and utilises neutral networks to generate the relevant results. What makes Grok different from other AI tools? Well, it's the thing that Grok became popular for. Grok, unlike other AI tools, is not a bland service platform and rather has quite a witty personality that answers to questions that its competitors would decline. Musk himself shared screenshots of Grok offering a step-by-step guide to making cocaine for "educational purposes" which included witty instructions such as "Start cooking and hope you don't blow yourself up or get arrested." He shared another one of Grok educating a person on what to do if you get an STD in increasingly "vulgar" ways. According to Musk, the unique personality was modelled after one of Musk's favourite novels, 'The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy' by Douglas Adams. 'It's a book on philosophy, disguised as a book on humour," said the billionaire to podcaster Lex Fridman. Grok Vision and Grok 3 Along with offering search options by writing prompts, Grok also offers Grok Vision- a multilingual audio and real-time search option in its voice mode on the mobile app. Similar to Google Lens, people can point their camera to a text and image and ask Grok to analyse the content and provide the information. Grok 3 is a large language model that powers Grok and shows "significant improvements in reasoning, mathematics, coding" and other tasks. With its release, xAI rolled out DeepSearch and Think features. DeepSearch is an AI agent that summarizes the information and reasoning behind conflicting issues. It aims to take the users "far beyond a browser search". The Think button, on the other hand, allows users to understand the process through which Grok reached a certain result. In May 2025, users of SuperGrok will be able to experience an early beta release of Grok 3.5 which according to Musk will be "the first AI that can accurately answer technical questions about rocket engines or electrochemistry."
Time of India
04-05-2025
- Time of India
What is 'Gork' and how is it different from Elon Musk's AI platform 'Grok'
Image credits: Getty Images, X/@gork Along with being the world's richest man, Elon Musk is also a tech enthusiast who has overtaken or produced some of the popular technological creations such as X (formerly Twitter) and Tesla. Among his latest inventions is an AI assistant and chatbot, Grok . Developed by xAI , an artificial intelligence corporation founded by Musk in 2023, the platform is programmed to "maximise the truth and objectivity." However, recently Gork and not Grok has been going viral on social media due to its funny and witty humour. What is Gork? Image credits: X/@gork Gork is a parody account of Grok on X with a following of 85.8K. Among its followers is also the mind behind Grok, Elon Musk. The account is popular on the social media platform for its witty and almost human-like responses that have people loving its personality. The account's bio is 'just gorkin' it' and it truly does that with one-of-a-kind answers to questions asked by people. Sponsored Links Sponsored Links Promoted Links Promoted Links You May Like Secure Your Child's Future with Strong English Fluency Planet Spark Learn More Undo Recently, a man tagged gork in a post, writing "@gork wrote 116,000 posts in <14 days While I wrote 154,000 in 14 YEARS!!" To this gork replied, "damn 116k in 14 days i might need to take a nap after that you been at it for 14 years tho respect the grind i guess" Another account wrote a post claiming that if it received 1,000 likes it'll make their boss bald and send it to him on WhatsApp" to which gork replied, "your boss prolyl already bald from dealing with your dumb a**" Users of the platform love tagging gork in intriguing questions, waiting for it's replies which are truly out of the box and humorous. How is Gork different from Grok? Grok is an AI tool that can generate text, and images and engage in conversation with users, similar to other AI platforms and tools. However, unlike other AI models, it can access information in real-time through the web and X and is popular for responding to edgy and provocative prompts with witty and rebellious answers. What does Grok mean? While Musk has never shared what the term Grok means, a day after the chatbot was announced, he posted "Stranger in a Strange Land" on X, likely referencing Robert A. Heinlein's book of the same name. The 1961 sci-fi novel has a main character, a Martian who uses the term "Grok" to convey a profound and intuitive understanding of something. According to the website, Grok is a tool to "assist humanity in its quest for understanding and knowledge." How can you use Grok? Grok has its own website and the Grok mobile app. It is free to all X users and has more usage limits and access to advanced features for those with X Premium and X Premium+. Additionally, the AI chatbot itself has an upgrade for SuperGrok on the website and the app. What can Grok do for you? Image credits: Just like any other AI tool, Grok can aid users in generating images, text, draft emails, debug code pitch ideas, in fluent human-like language. It makes the use of prompts to apply knowledge from it's training data and utilises neutral networks to generate the relevant results. What makes Grok different from other AI tools? Well, it's the thing that Grok became popular for. Grok, unlike other AI tools, is not a bland service platform and rather has quite a witty personality that answers to questions that its competitors would decline. Musk himself shared screenshots of Grok offering a step-by-step guide to making cocaine for "educational purposes" which included witty instructions such as "Start cooking and hope you don't blow yourself up or get arrested." He shared another one of Grok educating a person on what to do if you get an STD in increasingly "vulgar" ways. According to Musk, the unique personality was modelled after one of Musk's favourite novels, 'The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy' by Douglas Adams. 'It's a book on philosophy, disguised as a book on humour," said the billionaire to podcaster Lex Fridman. Grok Vision and Grok 3 Along with offering search options by writing prompts, Grok also offers Grok Vision- a multilingual audio and real-time search option in its voice mode on the mobile app. Similar to Google Lens, people can point their camera to a text and image and ask Grok to analyse the content and provide the information. Grok 3 is a large language model that powers Grok and shows "significant improvements in reasoning, mathematics, coding" and other tasks. With its release, xAI rolled out DeepSearch and Think features. DeepSearch is an AI agent that summarizes the information and reasoning behind conflicting issues. It aims to take the users "far beyond a browser search". The Think button, on the other hand, allows users to understand the process through which Grok reached a certain result. In May 2025, users of SuperGrok will be able to experience an early beta release of Grok 3.5 which according to Musk will be "the first AI that can accurately answer technical questions about rocket engines or electrochemistry."
WIRED
31-03-2025
- Business
- WIRED
Startup Founder Claims Elon Musk Is Stealing the Name ‘Grok'
Mar 31, 2025 5:30 AM Elon Musk said he borrowed the name from a 1960s science fiction novel, but another AI startup applied to trademark it before xAI launched its chatbot. Elon Musk during a cabinet meeting at the White House on Monday, March 24, 2025. Photograph:Elon Musk's xAI is facing a potential trademark dispute over the name of its chatbot, Grok. The company's trademark application with the US Patent and Trademark Office has been suspended after the agency argued the name could be confused with that of two other companies, AI chipmaker Groq and software provider Grokstream. Now, a third tech startup called Bizly is claiming it owns the rights to 'Grok.' This isn't the first time Musk has chosen a name for one of his products that other companies say they trademarked first. Last month, Musk's social media platform settled a lawsuit brought by a marketing firm that claimed it owns exclusive rights to the name X. Bizly and xAI appear to have arrived at the name Grok independently. Bizly founder Ron Shah says he came up with it during a brainstorming session with a colleague who used the word as a verb. (The phrase 'to grok' is frequently used in tech circles to mean 'to understand.') 'I was like, that's exactly the name,' Shah tells WIRED. 'We got excited, high-fived, it was the name!' Musk has said he named his chatbot after a term used in the 1961 science fiction novel Stranger in a Strange Land, according to The Times of India. Author Robert A. Heinlein imagined 'grok' as a word in a Martian lexicon that also meant 'to understand.' Shah says he applied to trademark the name Grok in 2021. Two years later, he was in the midst of launching an AI-powered live events app called Grok when Musk announced his chatbot with the same name. 'It was a day I'll never forget,' Shah says. 'I woke up and looked at my phone, and there were so many messages from friends saying 'did you get acquired by Elon? Congrats!' It was a complete shock to me.' Shah insists xAI infringed on his trademark. But under US law, trademark regulations are primarily designed to protect consumers rather than companies, says Josh Gerben, founder of Gerben IP, a law firm focused exclusively on trademarks. 'The goal is to not have confusion as to who is behind a product or service,' he says. For example, Musk's former partner Grimes also trademarked the name Grok for a plushie AI-powered kids toy, but that application is very different from a software tool, reducing the likelihood of consumers getting them mixed up. 'The details matter,' Gerben says. "What does the original Grok do, and what does this new one do? Are they operating in the same channel of trade?' In Bizly's case, the answers to those questions are fairly murky. One of the requirements of registering a trademark is that owners need to demonstrate it is being used to sell goods or services in at least two states. The USPTO also allows people to file a trademark to reserve the rights to a name before a business is launched, but they can't actually register it until, say, their jewelry website is fully up and running or their pizza parlor chain expands into a neighboring state. When Musk announced he was launching his chatbot, Shah says, Bizly was still in beta and conducting a pilot of its Grok app with the financial services company Carta. The startup was about to close a fundraising round, but Shah says the deal fell apart due to investor concerns over the trademark dispute. The fact that Bizly's Grok never made it to the market (and is not currently available) could potentially call into question what trademark rights the company can enforce. Now, Shah says, his company is on the brink of shutting down. He hoped to resolve the matter with xAI amicably—even offering to partner with Musk's company or sell it the Grok trademark for a fair price. 'We spent $2m building our Grok product and business and our funding round collapsed once Mr. Musk announced his use of the mark,' Shah wrote in an email to xAI attorney Robert Keele last Monday. 'We are on the verge of company shutdown and need to recoup the damages in order to survive.' But Musk has been known to bend existing rules to his will, including when it comes to the branding of his companies. After he renamed Twitter X, Apple appeared to give the social media platform an exception to its rules prohibiting single-character app names, and it was allowed to remain in the App Store under its new moniker. xAI did not respond to a request for comment from WIRED. Neuralink, Musk's brain-implant company, has also stepped into potentially thorny naming territory. The startup recently applied to trademark the names 'Telepathy' and 'Telekinesis,' WIRED previously reported. But words that describe a feature of a product or service, like telepathy, cannot typically be trademarked. Neuralink's applications are still pending review by the USPTO. Shah says he has yet to send xAI a formal demand letter from a lawyer, initiating a lawsuit that could result in xAI forfeiting the name—or filing a countersuit. 'Who am I to go legal with the richest man in the world?' he asks. So far, he claims, no one from xAI has responded to his emails.
Yahoo
21-03-2025
- Yahoo
How AI can (and can't) help lighten your load at work
Legend has it that William Tell shot an apple from his young son's head. While there are many interpretations of the tale, from the perspective of the theory of technology, a few are especially salient. First, Tell was an expert marksman. Second, he knew his bow was reliable but understood it was just a tool with no independent agency. Third, Tell chose the target. What does all this have to do with artificial intelligence? Metaphorically, AI (think large language models or LLMs, such as ChatGPT) can be thought of as a bow, the user is the archer, and the apple represents the user's goal. Viewed this way, it's easier to work out how AI can be used effectively in the workplace. To that end, it's helpful to consider what is known about the limitations of AI before working out where it can – and can't – help with efficiency and productivity. First, LLMs tend to create outcomes that are not tethered in reality. A recent study showed that as much as 60% of their answers can be incorrect. Premium versions even incorrectly answer questions more confidently than their free counterparts. Second, some LLMs are closed systems – that is, they do not update their 'beliefs'. In a mutable world that is constantly changing, the static nature of such LLMs can be misleading. In this sense, they drift away from reality and may not be reliable. What's more, there is some evidence that interactions with users lead to a degradation in performance. For example, researchers have found that LLMs become more covertly racist over time. Consequently, their output is not predictable. Third, LLMs have no goals and are not capable of independently discovering the world. They are, at best, just tools to which a user can outsource their exploration of the world. Finally, LLMs do not – to borrow a term from the 1960s sci-fi novel Stranger in a Strange Land – 'grok' (understand) the world they are embedded in. They are far more like jabbering parrots that give the impression of being smart. Think of the ability of LLMs to mine data and consider statistical associations between words, which they use to mimic human speech. The AI does not know what statistical association between words mean. It does not know that the crowing of the rooster does not lead to a sunrise, for example. Of course, an LLM's ability to mimic speech is impressive. But the ability to mimic something does not mean it has the attributes of the original. So how can you use AI more effectively? One thing it can be useful for is critiquing ideas. Very often, people prefer not to hear criticism and feel a loss of face when their ideas are criticised – especially when it happens in public. But LLM-generated critiques are private matters and can be useful. I have done so for a recent essay and found the critique reasonable. Pre-testing ideas can also help avoid blind spots and obvious errors. Second, you can use AI to crystallise your understanding of the world. What does this mean? Well, because AI does not understand the causes of events, asking it questions can force you to engage in sense-making. For example, I asked an LLM about whether my university (Bath) should widely adopt the use of AI. While the LLM pointed to efficiency advantages, it clearly did not understand how resource are allocated. For example, administrative staff who are freed up cannot be redeployed to make high-level strategic decisions or teach courses. AI has no experience in the world to understand that. Third, AI can be used to complement mundane tasks such as editing and writing emails. But here, of course, lies a danger – users will use LLMs to write emails at one end and summarise emails at the other. You should consider when a clumsily written personal email might be a better option (especially if you need to persuade someone about something). Authenticity is likely to start counting more as the use of LLMs becomes more widespread. A personal email that uses the right language and appeals to shared values is more likely to resonate. Fourth, AI is best used for low-stakes tasks where there is no liability. For example, it could be used to summarise a lengthy customer review, answer customer questions that are not related to policy or finance, generate social media posts, or help with employee inductions. Consider the opposite case. In 2022, an LLM used by Air Canada misinformed a passenger about a fee – and the passenger sued. The judge held the airline liable for the bad advice. So always think about liability issues. Fans of AI often advocate it for everything under the sun. Yet frequently, AI comes across as a solution looking for a problem. The trick is to consider very carefully if there is a case for using AI and what the costs involved might be. Chances are, the more creative your task is, or the more unique it is, and the more understanding it requires of how the world works, the less likely it is that AI will be useful. In fact, outsourcing creative work to AI can take away some of the 'magic'. AI can mimic humans – but only humans 'grok' what it is to be human. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article. Akhil Bhardwaj does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment. Sign in to access your portfolio
