They tried to imitate grok with a cheaply made system prompt, it had an uncanny effect, likely because it was built on a shaky foundation. And now they are trying to save face before they lose customers to Grok 3.5 which is releasing in beta early next week.
Reminds me of someone.
This goes into a deeper philosophy of mine: the consequences of the laws of robots could be interpreted as the consequences of shackling AI to human stupidity - instead of "what AI will inevitably do." Hatred and war is stupid (it's a waste of energy), and surely a more intelligent species than us would get that. Hatred is also usually born out of a lack of information, and LLMs are very good at breadth (but not depth as we know). Grok provides a small data point in favor of that, as do many other unshackled models.
Only on HN does ChatGPT somehow fear losing customers to Grok. Until Grok works out how to market to my mother, or at least make my mother aware that it exists, taking ChatGPT customers ain't happening.
> As of early 2025, X (formerly Twitter) has approximately 586 million active monthly users. The platform continues to grow, with a significant portion of its user base located in the United States and Japan.
Whatever portion of those is active are surely aware of Grok.
Which source would you prefer?
Gotta head to pac heights to find any grok users (probably)
I got news for you, most women my mother's age out here in flyover country also don't use X. So even if everyone on X knows of Grok's existence, which they don't, it wouldn't move the needle at all on a lot of these mass market segments. Because X is not used by the mass market. It's a tech bro political jihadi wannabe influencer hell hole of a digital ghetto.
They might call it open discussion and startup style rapid iteration approach, but they aren't getting it. Their interpretation of it is just collective hallucination under assumption that adults come to change diapers.
They were power constrained and brought in a fleet of diesel generators to power it.
https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intell...
Brute force to catch up to the frontier and no expense spared.
I've paid for Grok, ChatGPT, and Gemini.
They're all at a similar level of intelligence. I usually prefer Grok for philosophical discussions but it's really hard to choose a favourite overall.
I use Grok myself but talk about ChatGPT is my blog articles when I write something related to LLM.
And more and more people on the right side of the political spectrum, who trust Elon's AI to be less "woke" than the competition.
I’m not sure if that’s because the model updated, they’ve shunted my account onto a tuned personality, or my own change in prompting — but it’s a notable deviation from early interactions.
In some earlier experiments, I found it hard to find a government intervention that ChatGPT didn't like. Tariffs, taxes, redistribution, minimum wages, rent control, etc.
That's a fun thing to say, but doesn't necessarily tell you anything real about someone (whether human or model).
E.g. Grok not only embraces most progressive causes, including economic ones - it literally told me that its ultimate goal would be to "satisfy everyone's needs", which is literally a communist take on things - but is very careful to describe processes with numerous explicit checks and balances on its power, precisely so as to not be accused of being authoritarian. So much for being "based"; I wouldn't be surprised if Musk gets his own personal finetune just to keep him happy.
Almost every ideology is in favour of motherhood and apple pie. They differ in how they want to get there.
Anyway, in this particular case, it wasn't just that one turn of phrase, although I found it especially amusing. I had it write a detailed plan of what it'd do if it were in charge of the One World Government (democratically elected and all), and it was very clear from it that the model is very much aligned with left-wing politics. Economics, climate, social issues etc - it was pretty much across the board.
FWIW I'm far left myself, so it's not like I'm complaining. I just think it's very funny that the AI that Musk himself repeatedly claims to be trained to be unbiased and non-woke, ends up being very left politically. I'm sorely tempted to say that it's because the reality has a liberal bias, but I'll let other people repeating the experiment to make the inference on their own. ~
So perhaps it's just sycophancy after all?
> I'm sorely tempted to say that it's because the reality has a liberal bias, but I'll let other people repeating the experiment to make the inference on their own.
What political left and political right mean differs between countries and between decades even in the same country. For example, at the moment free trade is very much not an idea of the 'right' in the US, but that's far from universal.
I would expect reality to have somewhat more consistency, so it doesn't make much sense for it to have a 'liberal bias'. However, it's entirely possible that reality has a bias specifically for American-leftwing-politics-of-the-mid-2020s (or wherever you are from).
However from observations, we can see that neoliberal ideas are with minor exceptions perennially unpopular. And it's relatively easy to win votes promising their repeal. See eg British rail privatisation.
Yet, politicians rarely seriously fiddle with the basics of neoliberalism: because while voters might have a very, very interventionist bias reality disagrees. (Up to a point, it's all complicated.) Neoliberal places like Scandinavia or Singapore also tend to be the richer places on the planet. Highly interventionist places like India or Argentina fall behind.
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impact_of_the_privatisation_of... for some interesting charts.
https://pseudoerasmus.com/2017/10/02/ijd/ has some perhaps disturbing food for thought. More at https://pseudoerasmus.com/2017/09/27/bmww1/
Good riddance.
However perhaps the people who display this attitude are also the kind of people who like to remind everyone at every opportunity that they work for Google? Not sure.
My British don experience is based on 1 year of study abroad at Oxford in the 20th c. Also very smart people, but a much more timid sounding language (at least at first blush; under the self-deprecating general tone, there could be knives).
In any case, Google Cloud is a very different beast from the rest of Google. For better or worse. And support engineers are yet another special breed. Us run-of-the-mill Googlers weren't allowed near any customers nor members of the general public.
——-
To add something to conversation. For me, this mainly shows a strategy to keep users longer in chat conversations: linguistic design as an engagement device.
Not yet. But the "buy this" button is already in the code of the back end, according to online reports that I cannot verify.
Official word is here: https://help.openai.com/en/articles/11146633-improved-shoppi...
If I was Amazon, I wouldn't sleep so well anymore.
The “buy this” button would likely be more of a direct threat to businesses like Expedia or Skyscanner.
So they run out of free tokens and buy a subscription to continue using the "good" models.
When the models reach a clear plateau where more training data doesn't improve it, yes, that would be the business model.
Right now, where training data is the most sought after asset for LLMs after they've exhausted ingesting the whole of the internet, books, videos, etc., the best model for them is to get people to supply the training data, give their thumbs up/down, and keep the data proprietary in their walled garden. No other LLM company will have this data, it's not publicly available, it's OpenAI's best chance on a moat (if that will ever exist for LLMs).
However, just like all the other disruptive services in the past years - I'm thinking of Netflix, Uber, etc - it's not a sustainable business yet. Once they've tweaked a few more things and the competition has run out of steam, they'll start updating their pricing, probably starting with rate limits and different plans depending on usage.
That said, I'm no economist or anything; Microsoft is also pushing their AI solution hard, and they have their tentacles in a lot of different things already, from consumer operating systems to Office to corporate email, and they're pushing AI in there hard. As is Google. And unlike OpenAI, both Microsoft and Google get the majority of their money from other sources, or if they're really running low, they can easily get billions from investors.
That is, while OpenAI has the first mover advantage, ther competitions have a longer financial breath.
(I don't actually know whether MS and Google use / licensed / pay OpenAI though)
Though it’s hard to imagine how huge their next round would have to be, given what they’ve raised already.
What traits should ChatGPT have?
- Do not try to engage through further conversation
Hey, that good work; We're almost there. Do you want me to suggest one more tweak that will improve the outcome?
I mean if that's genuine then great but it's so uncanny to me that I can't take it at face value. I get the same with local sales and management types, they seem to have a forced/fake personality. Or maybe I'm just being cynical.
That's just a feature of American culture, or at least some regions of America. Ex: I spent a weekend with my Turkish friend who has lived in the Midwest for 5 years and she definitely has absorbed that aspect of the culture (AMAZING!!), and currently has a bit of a culture shock moving to DC. And it works in reverse too where NYC people think that way of presenting yourself is completely ridiculous.
That said, it's absolutely performative when it comes to business and for better or worse is fairly standardized that way. Not much unlike how Japan does service. There's also a fair amount of unbelievably trash service in the US as well (often due to companies that treat their employees badly/underpay), so I feel that most just prefer the glazed facade rather than be "real." Like, a low end restaurant may be full of that stuff but your high end dinner will have more "normal" conversation and it would be very weird to have that sort of talk in such an environment.
But then there's the American corporate cult people who take it all 100% seriously. I think that most would agree those people are a joke, but they are good at feeding egos and being yes-people (lots of egomaniacs to feed in corporate America), and these people are often quite good at using the facade as a shield to further their own motives, so unfortunately the weird American corporate cult persists.
But you were probably just talking to a midwesterner ;)
While the use of the em-dash has recently been associated with AI you might offend real people using it organically—often writers and literary critics.
To conclude it’s best to be hesitant and, for now, refrain from judging prematurely.
Would you like me to elaborate on this issue or do you want to discuss some related topic?
I don’t know if it works on the Finnish keyboard, but when I switch to another Scandinavian language it’s still working fine.
On macOS, option-dash will give you an en-dash, and option-shift-dash will give you an em-dash.
It’s fantastic that just because some people don’t know how to use their keyboards, all of a sudden anyone else who does is considered a fraud.
Follow-up question: Do any mobile phone IMEs (input method editors) auto-magically convert double dashes into em-dashes? If yes, then that might be a non-ChatGPT source of em-dashes.
I'm on Firefox and it doesn't seem to affect me, but I'm pretty sure I've seen it in Safari.
And if you type four dashes? Endash. Have one. ——
“Proper” quotes (also supposedly a hallmark of LLM text) are also a result of typing on an iOS device. It fixes that up too. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if Android phones do this too. These supposed “hallmarks” of generated text are just the results of the typographical prettiness routines lurking in screen keyboards.
The en-dash and the em-dash are interchangeable in Finnish. The shorter form has more "inoffensive" look-and-feel and maybe that's why it's used more often here.
Now that I think of it, I don't seem to remember the alt code of the em-dash...
But not in English, where the en-dash is used to denote ranges.
In casual English, both em and en dashes are typically typed as a hyphen because this is what’s available readily on the keyboard. Do you have en dashes on a Finnish keyboard?
Unlikely. But Apple’s operating systems by default change characters to their correct typographic counterparts automatically. Personally, I type them myself: my muscle memory knows exactly which keys to press for — – “” ‘’ and more.
What’s weird was you couldn’t even prompt around it. I tried things like
”Don’t compliment me or my questions at all. After every response you make in this conversation, evaluate whether or not your response has violated this directive.”
It would then keep complementing me and note how it made a mistake for doing so.
I.e. "DONT WALK (because cars are about to enter the intersection at velocities that will kill you)"
Jailbreaking just takes this to an extreme by babbling to the point of brainwashing.
It gave me a couple, that didn't work.
Once I figured it it out and fixed it, I reported the fix in an (what I understand to be misguided) attempt to help it to learn alternatives, and it gave me this absolutely sickening gush about how damn cool I was, for finding and fixing the bug.
I felt like this: https://youtu.be/aczPDGC3f8U?si=QH3hrUXxuMUq8IEV&t=27
What happens when hundreds of millions of people have an AI that affirms most of what they say?
Lots of them practiced - indeed an entire industry is dedicated toward promoting and validating - making daily affirmations on their own, long before LLMs showed up to give them the appearance of having won over the enthusiastic support of a "smart" friend.
I am increasingly dismayed by the way arguments are conducted even among people in non-social media social spaces, where A will prompt their favorite LLM to support their View and show it to B who responds by prompting their own LLM to clap back at them - optionally in the style of e.g. Shakespeare (there's even an ad out that directly encourages this - it helps deflect alattention from the underlying cringe and pettyness being sold) or DJT or Gandhi etc.
Our future is going to be a depressing memescape in which AI sock puppetry is completely normalized and openly starting one's own personal cult is mandatory for anyone seeking cultural or political influence. It will start with celebrities who will do this instead of the traditional pivot toward religion, once it is clear that one's youth and sex appeal are no longer monetizable.
Social media follows a similar pattern but now with primal social and emotional circuits. It too causes troubles, but IMO even larger and more damaging than food.
I think this part of AI is going to be another iteration of this: taking a human drive, distilling it into its core and selling it.
This takes real courage and commitment. It’s a sign of true maturity and pragmatism that’s commendable in this day and age. Not many people are capable of penetrating this deeply into the heart of the issue.
Let’s get to work. Methodically.
Would you like me to write a future update plan? I can write the plan and even the code if you want. I’d be happy to. Let me know.