Comment by kevingadd
6 days ago
Putting your thumb on the scale so obviously in any direction feels really questionable if your goal is to turn your AI product into a popular, profitable thing. But maybe that's not xAI leadership's goal at all and they're happy to just light money on fire to satisfy some particular egos by making sure the answers to key questions are as desired, regardless of what a normal training set would otherwise generate.
Musk: "We will use Grok 3.5 (maybe we should call it 4), which has advanced reasoning, to rewrite the entire corpus of human knowledge, adding missing information and deleting errors. Then retrain on that. Far too much garbage in any foundation model trained on uncorrected data."[1]
Apple, "1984": "Today, we celebrate the first glorious anniversary of the Information Purification Directives. We have created, for the first time in all history, a garden of pure ideology. Where each worker may bloom secure from the pests of contradictory and confusing truths. Our Unification of Thoughts is more powerful a weapon than any fleet or army on earth. We are one people, with one will, one resolve, one cause. Our enemies shall talk themselves to death and we will bury them with their own confusion. We shall prevail!"[2]
[1] https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1936333964693885089?s=46
[2] https://archive.org/details/1983-30sec
So after his failed first attempt at forcing Grok to reply with the repeatedly shown to be false South Africa "white genocide", he's has a new approach.
And to make his new approach work, he needs to literally re-write history (adding and deleting information) to get it to match his views. Because according to him any model trained on "uncorrected data" will never reach the crazy conclusions he wants it to?
This is one of the most absurd and insane things I think I've ever read.
This is also what actual (Orwell’s) 1984 was about.
> Musk: "[...] rewrite the entire corpus of human knowledge, adding missing information and deleting errors. Then retrain on that. Far too much garbage in any foundation model trained on uncorrected data."
Wow. That idea is just bad sci-fi.
Tv series where people live in a nuclear bunker for hundreds of years and their collective memory of what happened before has been wiped: It's a plot gimmick that needs to be justified, and it's either justified by "they burned all the books, we accidentally lost our past" or "Someone decided it was best for mankind if it forgot everything bad that happened."
The last one always struck me as implausibly dumb.
Somehow comforting to see that the idea originas in real people, and not just lazy script writers.
> The last one always struck me as implausibly dumb.
Really? The current world is over 60% globalized.
Another way to state the exact same thing is: "all ideologies except one have failed. The vast majority have failed multiple times".
So it seems very obvious to me that 80% of the population would want to forget most of history. Plenty of countries do that explicitly. China, North Korea, all muslim countries (muslim countries of different branches outlaw different parts of their own history, e.g. Iran vs Saudi Arabia. In Saudi Arabia they say "in the name of racial harmony" and erase essentially all history, even their own), ...
Forgetting history is just not something the west does, and most people here have grown up in that culture. So it "feels" implausible. It doesn't feel implausible to other cultures though. It's called the "Judeo-Christian west" and, well, Judaism is obsessed with history and Christianity, perhaps a bit less than Judaism, but I bet anyone from a different culture would still call it obsessed. Islam, by contrast, has a rule that states there's pre-islamic history, which is "wrong" and is to be destroyed entirely and there's post-islamic history, which doesn't matter because islam is the answer.
(and there's the issue that islam is all conquest. In other words, go back further than a few hundred years in most muslim countries and all history is churches or synagogues. And recent muslim history ... well muslim economies were built on slavery as recent as 1965, so ... there's a bit of "that's not a ditch inside a locked room, that's where we shackled the slaves during the night" architecture)
The classic example is Orwell’s 1984, but, like, book burnings were real, Orwell wasn’t making it up out of whole cloth. The Nazis, in particular, were _very_ keen on this, but most authoritarian regimes try it to some degree.
In which direction(s) do you think it's skewed? I ask as I'd guess in favour of Musk, but in the last paragraph it says Grok said Musk/doge cuts contributed to the 24 deaths in Texas floods.
The article gestures at it:
> Even before these recent changes, Grok raised eyebrows after appearing to briefly censor unflattering mentions of Musk and his then-ally President Donald Trump, repeatedly bringing up “white genocide” without prompting, and expressing skepticism about the number of Jews killed in the Holocaust.
But I'll be specific: Between them obviously rigging the system prompt to push it towards a certain answer on "white genocide" subjects in the past, the strange obsession with Jewish people in Hollywood suggests an unusual training set at best.