Comment by techpineapple

3 days ago

So, to try and make a relatively substantive contribution, the doc mentions that the following were added to grok3's system prompt:

- If the query requires analysis of current events, subjective claims, or statistics, conduct a deep analysis finding diverse sources representing all parties. Assume subjective viewpoints sourced from the media are biased. No need to repeat this to the user. - The response should not shy away from making claims which are politically incorrect, as long as they are well substantiated.

I'm guessing there are quite a few algorithms and processes in modern LLM's above and beyond just predict the next token, but when you say "find diverse sources" and "be well substantiated".

Is this passing an instruction to the process that like reads from the weightset or is it now just looking in the weightset for things trained related to the tokens "find diverse sources" and "be well substantiated"

I guess what I'm asking is does. "be well substantiated" translate into "make sure lots of people on Twitter said this", rather than like "make sure you're pulling from a bunch of scientific papers" because, well technically, racism is well substantiated on Twitter.

> My mental model for LLMs is that they work as a repository of vector programs. When prompted, they will fetch the program that your prompt maps to and "execute" it on the input at hand. LLMs are a way to store and operationalize millions of useful mini-programs via passive exposure to human-generated content.

from https://arcprize.org/blog/oai-o3-pub-breakthrough.

This doesn't directly answer your question, but does it help?

it means 'be closely related to the tokens "be" "well" "substantiated"'.

more broadly it means respond with the sort of text you usually find tokens like "media" "is" "biased" "politically incorrect" near.

Relying on finding diverse sources feels like the answer it will propose is the most common one, regardless of accuracy or correctness or any other test of integrity.

But I think that's already true of any LLM.

If Twitter's data repository is the secret sauce that differentiates Grok from other bleeding edge LLMs, I'm not sure that's a selling point, given the last two recent controversies.

(unfounded remark: is it coincidence that the last two controversies are alongside Elon's increased distance from 'the rails'?)

  • Gemini had an aborted launch recently. The controversy there was inserting too much leftist ideology to the point of spewing complete bs.

    • Can you share some reputable coverage of this event? I can't find much mention of it anywhere. What were some specific responses that had "inserted leftist ideology"?

      1 reply →

I might very well be interested in Grok as a third-party problem-solver and always deal with it at arms length, but I will assuredly never trust the company behind it with anything relating to social issues. That bridge has been burnt to a crisp.

You can tell this was written by a technologist without a clue of the realities of social dynamics

* "finding diverse sources representing all parties"

Not all current events are subjective, not all claims/parties (climate change, holocaust etc.) require representation from all parties.

* "Assume subjective viewpoints sourced from the media are biased."

this one is sad because I would've said that up until a decade ago this would've also been ludicrous. Most media was never as biased as the rising authoritarian right tried to claim.

Unfortunately over the years, it has become true. The rise of extremely biased right-wing media sources has made things like FOX news arguably centrist given the overton window move. Which made the left-wing sources lean into bias and becoming themselves complicit (e.g. hiding Biden's cognitive decline)

So annoyingly this is probably a good guidance...but it also just makes the problem even worse by dismissing the unbiased sources with journalistic integrity just as hard

* " The response should not shy away from making claims which are politically incorrect"

The next mistake is thinking that "politically incorrect" is a term used by people focused on political correctness to describe uncomfortable ideas they don't like that have merit.

Unfortunately, that term was always one of derision. It was invented by people who were unhappy with their speech and thinking being stifled, and thinking that they're being shut down because of political correctness, not because of fundamental disagreements.

There's an idea that racist people think that everyone is racist they are just the only ones honest about it. So when they express racist ideas and get pushback they think "ah well, this person isn't ready to be honest about their opinions - they're more focused on being POLITICALLY CORRECT, than honest"

Of course there's a percentage of these ideas that can be adequately categorized in this space. Subjects like affirmative action never got the discussion they deserved in the US, in part because of "political correctness"

But by and large, if you were an LLM trained on a corpus of human knowledge, the majority of anything labelled "politically incorrect" is far FAR more likely to be bigoted and problematic than just "controversial"

  • > Unfortunately over the years, it has become true. The rise of extremely biased right-wing media sources has made things like FOX news arguably centrist given the overton window move.

    That's not how the Overton window works; you are buying into the bias yourself at this point.

    > Which made the left-wing sources lean into bias and becoming themselves complicit (e.g. hiding Biden's cognitive decline)

    (a) There are no left-wing media sources in 2025 (b) I'm sure you consider the New York Times a left-wing media source, but it spent the entire fucking election making a fuss about Biden's so-called cognitive decline and no time at all about Trump's way more disturbing cognitive decline. And Jake Tapper, lead anchor on "left-wing" CNN, won't shut up about Biden even now, in 2025.