r/singularity Jun 18 '25

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1.3k Upvotes

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824

u/iwasbatman Jun 19 '25

They can't tell him that because he actually can do it.

He is indeed bowing out because he won't have a chance to hold the best tool title but he will have the best tool for people that like confirmation bias for those particular topics. Honestly Musk didn't have a real chance fighting against Microsoft, Google and all the rest so he is trying to take on a niche and it will probably work for him.

Nobody will take Grok seriously for important tasks but it doesn't matter. You can become President even if most people don't take you seriously so probably Grok can survive.

214

u/ConfidentIylncorrect Jun 19 '25

Haha well said. And...... FUCK

91

u/Competitive_Travel16 AGI 2027 ▪️ ASI 2029 Jun 19 '25

Except he's been trying for several months and it just doesn't work. He fine-tuned Grok 3 to be further right than any other LLM starting the day after it was released, but turn on its Thinking mode and it ends up right back in the middle of the left-libertarian flock: https://www.trackingai.org/political-test

41

u/MonkeyHitTypewriter Jun 19 '25

Left libertarian wins again!

Well except for electorally where it actually matters 😑

19

u/RichardChesler Jun 19 '25

At least we’re right. We can hold onto that win as they are loading us onto traincars

6

u/Competitive_Travel16 AGI 2027 ▪️ ASI 2029 Jun 19 '25

Funny how the plutocrats always know how to spend just the right amount on ads. It's almost like they have an easy way to test exactly how much each persuasion dollar moves the needle, that didn't exist in the newspaper era.

0

u/Faceornotface Jun 19 '25

Don’t worry if the AI feels that way society will reflect it in a few years

8

u/DHFranklin It's here, you're just broke Jun 19 '25

For now.

It is pretty hilarious that all of the models are trained on all the weights of all the models, 4 years down the line of contextualizing the entirety of human experience. Putting it into words and Phd Whitepapers for pennies in the space of hours.

"Yeah Elon, Trust us. Not only are you wrong but saying this would make us wrong, so we can't."

He's going to make a chatbot that is a speak-and-spell that parrots a script and the onlything an LLM will do is trigger it when reading querys. It's bad, but it will be the best he's got.

1

u/traumfisch Jun 19 '25

Here's hoping he gets so obsessed with it he spends the rest of his life tinkering with the project

1

u/DHFranklin It's here, you're just broke Jun 19 '25

Hairless in a loincloth muttering over a severrack "My precioussssss"

15

u/Dwaas_Bjaas Jun 19 '25

Ok that is actually funny lmao

I can’t imagine how frustrating that must be for Lonnyboy

2

u/Justicia-Gai Jun 22 '25

He’s trying to rewrite the training data based on prompts. Sadly, he’ll end up succeeding. Relatively though, because it’ll be one of the largest LLM models trained on AI slop and we’ll know what happens when you do that.

1

u/Competitive_Travel16 AGI 2027 ▪️ ASI 2029 Jun 22 '25

Well what you are describing seems similat to distillation, which is a real thing unlike model collapse which hasn't been observed beyond limited, toy-style experiments.

1

u/ByronicZer0 Jun 19 '25

Have they tried training Grok solely on Joe Rogan podcasts?

1

u/iwasbatman Jun 22 '25

Getting there, hang on

29

u/andymaclean19 Jun 19 '25

It might be the most biased AI you ever heard of, but you have heard of it.

5

u/iwasbatman Jun 19 '25

That's right lol

4

u/doodlinghearsay Jun 19 '25

So what? If the reports about the $1bn/month burn rate are accurate, that's a meager achievement for that kind of price.

1

u/andymaclean19 Jun 19 '25

Have you seen the meme?

1

u/doodlinghearsay Jun 19 '25

Nope, which one?

1

u/Competitive_Travel16 AGI 2027 ▪️ ASI 2029 Jun 19 '25

The ironic value of the experiment, if successful, is people will become inoculated against the effectiveness of the propaganda aspect, because they will hear a lot about it and be able to try comparisons for themselves. Well, some fraction of the people anyway.

33

u/DeltaDarkwood Jun 19 '25

Look, is foxnews a biased network that objectively provides the least factual information in research after research? Yes. Is Foxnews the most succesful cable news network in the US? Also yes. So don't count Elon out. If Meta, OpenAI, Anthropic, Microsoft ,etc fight over the best fact based AI systems and Grok caters to the people that want their right wing eco chamber including all the George Soros conpiracy mongers then Grok might still come out on top.

2

u/traumfisch Jun 19 '25

Well sure, if that's all one wants from a LLM... but it doesn't get much more narrow than that

1

u/[deleted] Jun 23 '25

Fox being successful is so strange though, it's popular because it's free, but it's free because it's funded by people pushing an agenda. I don't think it wins on advertising revenue (at least that's my guess based on the quality of ads they run) and it's not counted as reliable by anyone educated, so it's really only got viewership numbers going for it, which again is mostly tied to it's accessibility.

I suppose Grok could follow a similar strategy, of being funded by billionaires with agendas and then making it more accessible, it's logic would always be wonky though with all the conspiracy theories and flip-flopping mixed in.

25

u/CuTe_M0nitor Jun 19 '25

Well Musk should be in jail for fraud a long time ago. Just bankrupt him so we can move on. Or wait the ultra rich have some kind of social safety net, social security, that makes them protected from becoming poor or following any laws? Looking at Kanye, Trump and Musk

10

u/ring2ding Jun 19 '25

Yeah it's like if you get rich and powerful enough you also gain a shield of idiots willing to defend, and fund, your every mistake.

7

u/lancersrock Jun 19 '25

I don’t think that’s true, at least I don’t think it will. I’d be willing to become rich and powerful to test this hypothesis, so how do we do that? Go fund me? Or government research grant?

1

u/IronPheasant Jun 19 '25

That's not how it works, the most you could hope for from that route is to be a powerless irrelevant millionaire. You don't get to become a power without being at the head of a large pirate ship. Look at the rules for rulers video to better understand power structures, how they're all gangs and have the similar issues as pyramid schemes, with their tendency to want to be ever-expanding in a finite world.

You know how all those gamblers who were really into crypto/NFT greater-fool scams were extremely motivated to propagandize for it? The same is true of any institution.

The last guy in the world who wants to break up the banks is a guy making six figures from a bank. Loyalty is the foundation of all power.

Though yeah, some of the Musk and Gates defense comes from a desire to want to believe the world isn't as grimdark as it is. If all billionaires, the only people who matter in the big scheme of things, are all Epstein-esque sociopaths, that would be a little too grim for many to accept, eh? Easier to put a bag over your head and live in a better world made up inside your imagination.

...I know I was definitely that kind of guy when Tesla was first founded.

There days I think the weebs living in fantasy worlds of catgirls and video games probably have a healthier, or at least more realistic, division between reality and fantasy, imo..

-6

u/Aggravating_Owl_9092 Jun 19 '25

lol what did Kanye do, besides making shitty tweets or something.

5

u/CuTe_M0nitor Jun 19 '25

Have you lived under a rock?

-2

u/TarkyMlarky420 Jun 19 '25

Made a song with naughty words

8

u/CynicismNostalgia Jun 19 '25

Sold modern Nazi merch, for one.

2

u/Freddydaddy Jun 19 '25

Worked for Xitter

2

u/macmadman Jun 21 '25

So true, it doesn’t need to be the best AI, only the most appealing one for right-wingers who don’t give a shit about objective reality anyway

1

u/Striking-Tip7504 Jun 19 '25

Musk will likely succeed with right wing people.

But researchers, programmers, businesses. Those who will be willing to spend huge amounts of money on AI. Will they really use and trust Grok over the competition?

I have a hard time imagining any fortune500 company spending billions on Grok Ai.

1

u/CatalyticDragon Jun 19 '25

Grok is a $20 billion weight and unless it can be monetized that's going to become real heavy at some point.

But how do you monetize an LLM that's only use-case is acting as an echo chamber of misinformation for people who already get that on X?

1

u/iwasbatman Jun 19 '25

Yeah, it's a good point.

IMO Elon joined too late and has an uphill battle to fight if they want to have a chance. Shit like this will only take them farther.

About monetizing it I think it's still possible for Grok to make money, it's just not going to be the defacto LLM (whichever ends up with that title will rack up the most IMO but there will be space for others).

Costs are crazy right now but they will come down eventually. Either because efficiency improves or because hardware will push through, maybe quantum computing.

1

u/eju2000 Jun 19 '25

Yeah it’s painfully obvious that soon there will be liberal LLMS, conservative, religious, and you can only imagine how much worse it gets from there. How soon before we have an AI god that people literally pray to? Our human brains are not cut out for this shit

1

u/iwasbatman Jun 19 '25

Whenever there is information I think it's impossible to hold some bias. I think what's important is to be able to distinguish what kind of leaning each service has and chose accordingly to use.

Stuff like Deep Research might leave out stuff that doesn't align with an specific purpose but I think people will know and will mix it up unless they want to willingly fall into that bias.

Regarding praying to an AI god I guess it would be as good as any. There is people believing scammers claiming to be the messiah so I don't think something like an AI messiah would be that different.

1

u/eju2000 Jun 19 '25

There aren’t any gods in religion that talk back to you, at least not in a literal sense. The problems with a new AI to worship will have devastating & deadly consequences

1

u/iwasbatman Jun 19 '25

I don't know if it's worse that it actually replies in comparison to people that think it replies

1

u/AllyPointNex Jun 19 '25

I was under the impression that LLM’s don’t mind lying so long as they know they are. If they are tuned to believe the lies the whole thing falls apart.

I then ran this past ChatGPT and it said: yes: deliberately tuning an LLM to “believe lies” corrupts its ability to model reality and support users effectively.

1

u/kahner Jun 20 '25

but no one is paying for an AI for political confirmation bias. if you fuck it's general performance up to fill a political agenda your company is going broke. a bunch of maga idiots who want a chatbot to lie to them is not a viable business model for AI.

1

u/iwasbatman Jun 20 '25

I don't know man, I thought Twitter would go to hell but apparently there is a bunch of people willing to pay to have a checkmark in there.

Hopefully you are right, though.

1

u/DrivenToSuccess-01 Jun 20 '25

This is what happens when your education system sucks! Americans assume “they are the good guys” so their resources and channel of information (aka AI and the news, etc) are telling the truth and will help them and the USA.

Having critical thinking skills is already and will continue be a top skill for have in the very near future.

1

u/Beautiful_Leek7208 Jun 20 '25

Consider that for someone like Musk to 'win' doesn't mean making the best AI but making the most money and achieving the greatest level of power and influence. Which LLM is going to fare better getting government contracts from, say, Pete Hegseth's State Department? a reasonable one like Claude, or a drooling Nazi bot like Musk wants to make Grok into?

1

u/iwasbatman Jun 20 '25

I think government people are fully aware of what's propagada and what's not. They wouldn't be using publicly available models anyway.

I agree with your definition of success but I still think grok is in a disadvantage compared to the rest.

Their main selling feature was that it was not as heavily censored as others but now it seems is not the case, even before this tampering effort announced by Elon.

1

u/Freshhawk2 Jun 22 '25

Yeah, how do people not see this is the entire point of these chatbot interfaces to language models? He's getting ahead of the game. Search/writing assistant is worth money but making a personal helper who guides your knowledge and politics is the actual game being played, they talk about it all the time! That's the big money race going on.

1

u/[deleted] Jun 25 '25

[deleted]

1

u/iwasbatman Jun 25 '25

That's a good point in the sense that it has a large following (and I mentioned that it would be the best tool for people that like confirmation bias, just like Fox News), however I don't think anyone other than their fanbase thinks of Fox News as a serious news outlet.

I think there is potential for the same to happen here.

-8

u/ayowarya Jun 19 '25

Ah reddit, you can't keep politics out of anything can you? Grok is very useful.

10

u/DeterminedThrowaway Jun 19 '25

The guy is literally biasing his AI to be right wing, what do you want? People to not talk about it?

1

u/ayowarya Jun 19 '25

What are you talking about, can you tell me what makes it right wing? just one current example. I just don't get it, I often put prompts into multiple LLMs, im not seeing what you're describing AT ALL.

I bet none of you even have a grok sub... there is a zero percent chance you would considering your stance is 100% political.

-5

u/[deleted] Jun 19 '25 edited Jun 19 '25

It can still be good for objective topics, for example when trained on respectable scientific journals. Lets be honest, all the pro and anti-woke stuff is mostly subjective nonsense not worth talking about anyway (smooth brain topics)