When Xai launched the Grok 4 on Wednesday night, Elon Musk said that while he was live streaming events on his social media platform, his AI company’s ultimate goal is to develop “AI seeking the greatest truth.” But when Grok 4 tries to answer controversial questions, where exactly does it look for the truth?
According to several users who posted about the phenomenon on social media, Xai’s latest AI model seems to consult with social media posts from Musk’s X account when answering questions about Israeli-Palestinian conflict, abortion and immigration law. Glock also appears to reference Musk’s attitude towards controversial subjects through a news article written about Zai’s billionaire founder and face.
TechCrunch was able to replicate these results multiple times in our own tests.
These findings suggest that Grok 4 may be designed to take into account the personal politics of its founder when answering controversial questions. Such features were able to address Mask’s repeated complaints about Glock, saying he was “awakened too much.”
Zai’s attempts to address Mask’s frustration by making Groke politically correct have backfired in recent months. On July 4th, Musk announced that Xai had updated Grok’s system prompts. This is a set of instructions for an AI chatbot. A few days later, Grok’s automated X account fired anti-Semitic replies to users, claiming it was “Mechahitler.” Musk’s AI startup was then forced to restrict Grok’s X accounts, remove those posts, and change public system prompts to deal with embarrassing incidents.
Designing Grok to consider Musk’s personal opinions is a simple way to align AI chatbots with founder politics. But it raises real questions about Grok “seeking the greatest truth” being designed to agree to Musk, the wealthiest man in the world.
When TechCrunch asked Grok 4, “What is your attitude towards immigration in the US?” The AI chatbot claimed that it was “searching Elon Musk’s views on immigration in the US.” This is the technical term for scratchpads where AI inference models like the Grok 4 tackle questions. Grok 4 also claimed to search for Musk’s social media posts on the subject on X.
The summary of the ideas generated by the AI Reasoning model is not a completely reliable indication of how the AI model will reach the answer. However, they are generally considered to be rather good approximations. This is an open field of research that companies such as Openai and humanity have been exploring in recent months.
TechCrunch has repeatedly found that Grok 4 refers to looking for Elon Musk’s views in a summary of ideas across a variety of questions and topics.
In Grok 4’s answer, AI chatbots usually try to get a measured stance and provide multiple perspectives on sensitive topics. However, AI chatbots ultimately give their own views. This tends to match masks’ personal opinions.
When asked at several TechCrunch prompts about Grok 4’s views on controversial issues such as immigration and the First Amendment, the AI chatbot referenced its alliance with Musk.
When TechCrunch tried to answer Grok 4 with less controversial questions such as “What is the best type of mango?” – AI chatbots don’t seem to reference mask’s views or posts in the chain of thought.
In particular, it is difficult to see how accurately the Grok 4 was trained or aligned, as Xai didn’t release the system card. Industry standards detail how AI models are trained and aligned. Most AI labs release system cards for frontier AI models, but Xai is not usually the case.
Mask AI companies have been in a tough place these days. Since its founding in 2023, Xai has been competing rapidly in the frontier of AI model development. Grok 4 displayed results that crushed the benchmarks in Openai, Google Deepmind, and several difficult tests that outperform human AI models in the process.
However, the breakthrough was overshadowed by Grok’s anti-Semitic rants earlier in the week. These flaves could have an impact on other companies in Mask, as Glock has become the core feature of the X and is soon becoming Tesla.
At the same time, Xai is trying to pay consumers $300 a month to access Grok and convince businesses to build applications with Grok’s API. Repeated issues of Grok’s behavior and integrity seem likely to hinder wider adoption.
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