It's disturbing (though telling) that HN has enough Elon sycophants to moderate our discussion like this. Another example of how HN's community eschews real technical discussion to maintain the illusion of unconditional progress.
Elon decided he wanted to have Grok respond positively to allegations of “white genicode” in South Africa so he had his xAI engineers rewrite the system prompts to support the idea that “white genocide” exists. It then started talking about “white genocide” at every unrelated opportunity.
Wouldn't the simplest explanation be that someone who had direct access to change the system prompt changed it alone? Would Elon be able to change it himself directly? If not, assuming he ordered someone else to change it adds an entity.
While I have no idea what actually happened here, my instinct is that this was done by someone who wanted Grok and Musk to look bad, not someone who wanted to change the world to view white South Africans more positively.
First I'm hearing of it all, but no, that's clear conspiracy theory territory, Musk makes some intervention like that and then X AI publishes TFA about the 'unauthorised' action 'circumventing' established processes etc.? No, Occam is not satisfied.
(Obligatory that's not what the razor is about anyway: it's that give a bunch of otherwise equally probable explanations, the simplest is likely the correct one; not just what's the simplest possible hypothesis you can imagine that is the answer.)
Unfortunately every HN post about it got flagged.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43993332
It's disturbing (though telling) that HN has enough Elon sycophants to moderate our discussion like this. Another example of how HN's community eschews real technical discussion to maintain the illusion of unconditional progress.
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Elon decided he wanted to have Grok respond positively to allegations of “white genicode” in South Africa so he had his xAI engineers rewrite the system prompts to support the idea that “white genocide” exists. It then started talking about “white genocide” at every unrelated opportunity.
Really unethical AI behavior by Elon.
To be clear, this is speculation, albeit a valid application of Occam's Razor.
Wouldn't the simplest explanation be that someone who had direct access to change the system prompt changed it alone? Would Elon be able to change it himself directly? If not, assuming he ordered someone else to change it adds an entity.
While I have no idea what actually happened here, my instinct is that this was done by someone who wanted Grok and Musk to look bad, not someone who wanted to change the world to view white South Africans more positively.
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First I'm hearing of it all, but no, that's clear conspiracy theory territory, Musk makes some intervention like that and then X AI publishes TFA about the 'unauthorised' action 'circumventing' established processes etc.? No, Occam is not satisfied.
(Obligatory that's not what the razor is about anyway: it's that give a bunch of otherwise equally probable explanations, the simplest is likely the correct one; not just what's the simplest possible hypothesis you can imagine that is the answer.)
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It was confirmed by Grok so....
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