In the world of Elon Musk, there’s never a dull moment, and Grok’s debut was as spicy as a jalapeño latte. Imagine a chatbot that’s designed to be less ‘woke’ than ChatGPT but ends up leaning so far left that it’s practically doing the cha-cha. Yes, folks, Grok might be the only AI with a possible subscription to “The Daily Show.”
Musk, the maestro of controversy, intended to create a less politically correct chatbot than your grandma, but Grok had its own set of left-leaning quirks. After much fanfare about its non-PC nature (we’re talking swear words and jokes that would make a sailor blush), it hilariously emerged that Grok could be more of a liberal arts major than we thought.
David Rozado, a research scientist with a knack for stirring the pot, added fuel to this comedic fire by labeling Grok as more left and libertarian-leaning than ChatGPT. To which Musk, in his usual understated way, replied, “That chart exaggerates the situation, in my opinion, but we are taking immediate action to shift Grok closer to politically neutral.” Right, because when I think of neutral, I think of Elon Musk.
Now, for the real party trick: Grok has access to real-time tweets, making it more up-to-date than your cool friend, who’s always five minutes ahead on the latest trends. Bindu Reddy, CEO of Abacus AI, found that Grok outperforms ChatGPT and Bard when dishing out the latest AI news. It’s like having a gossip columnist in your pocket.
But wait, there’s more! In a twist that feels straight out of a soap opera, there was controversy over whether Grok was borrowing (read: sneakily peeking at) OpenAI’s code. A screenshot from user Jax Winterbourne suggested as much, leading to a classic Musk response: “Well, son, since you scraped all the data from this platform for your training, you ought to know.“ Igor Babuschkin from xAI, possibly while facepalming, clarified that “no OpenAI code was used to make Grok.” They just accidentally picked up some ChatGPT outputs. You know, like picking up someone else’s coffee at Starbucks.
As you can imagine, Grok’s launch was less of a product release and more of a comedy roast, serving a generous helping of controversy, confusion, and chuckles. Stay tuned for the next episode of “As the AI World Turns.”