So.. If the 'source' of data is 9gag, 4chan, you will get 'this' material. If you feed it Tumlr, you will get Harry Potter and rope-porn-thingies. If you feed it Hitler's speeches, you will get 'that' material. If you feed it algebra, you will get 'that' material.

Then.. Do we want 'open' or 'curated' LLMs? And how far from reality are the curated LLMs? And how far can curated LLMs take us (black Nazis? female US founding fathers?).

Pick your poison I say.. and be careful what you wish for. There is no "perfect" LLM because there is no "perfect" dataset, and Sam-Altman-types-of-humans are definitely deeply flawed. But life is flawed, so our tools are/will be flawed.

The problem was not the source of the training data. xAI confirmed that the system prompt had been modified to make grok talk about South African white genocide.

While they didn’t say who modified it. It’s hard to believe it wasn’t Elon.

It's hard to believe it is Elon either, I don't think he would know how unless they made a special interface for him

He is the CEO of a company, he can personally ask someone to do it for him.

But implementation was too messy for someone with expertise to do it on CEO's request

Eye roll

> While they didn’t say who modified it. It’s hard to believe it wasn’t Elon.

Is it really that hard to understand how these things happen?

The boss says "remove bias" but the peons don't really know how to do that and the naive approach to unbiasing a thing is to introduce bias in the other direction. And then if you're Google and the boss thinks it has a right-wing bias you crook it and get black Nazis and if you're xAI and the boss thinks it has a left-wing bias you get white genocide.

In both cases the actual problem is when people think bias operates like an arithmetic sum, because it doesn't.

Except someone clearly wanted Grok to talk about some very specific South African phrases and events, not just “remove bias” in the general sense.

That's precisely how the arithmetic theory of bias operates. That bias doesn't actually work that way is why applying it causes such ridiculous outcomes.

The term "kill the boer" was almost certainly added to the system prompt because Grok would begin talking about specifically that song, unprompted, to millions of people no matter what they were talking about.

This is not a case of trying to remove bias. I don't for a second believe anyone from the demographic using this site acting naive about that either, just have whatever political opinion and don't pretend this is respectable.

Be careful saying things like that or you'll get [flagged] - discussion of what seemed an incredibly important subject is forbidden on here it seems.

Effective Altruism is still great, and never stopped being great. Guilt does not transfer by association in this way.

There's definitely _something_ there, but, as with all philosophies, the internet has taken it and run with it to a fairly absurd degree, to the point where, for many adherents, it's basically a religion.

It's not. Feeding kids, researching vaccines and a bunch of other things that billionaires are funding should not depend on the graces and whims of billionaires, it should be something provided for by the government.

HN crowd is ... mixed, it's perhaps the one last true melting pot we have on the Internet. A curse and a blessing, if you ask me.

You got truly anything here. Europeans that in general tend to lean more towards "democratic socialism" and its various offshoots, American libertarians (which have a large intersection with Musk fanboys), a bunch of extremely rich startup founders, American progressives, conservatives of all kinds, Zionists and Hamas apologists, probably Russian and Chinese psy-ops, accelerationists, preppers... name any ideology and you'll find supporters on HN.

What has changed a bit is that tribalism seems to have taken over from civilized or at least arguments and fact oriented discourse. Personally, I'd prefer if downvotes and especially flags would require one to give a reason so that repeat offenders that just flag and downvote everything they disagree with can get suspended for ruining discussion.

Interesting how you put "hamas apologists" and not pro-palestinians next to Zionists. How would you have felt if it was written "pro-palestinains and genocide-apologists"?

I have yet to meet any "pro-palestinian" that doesn't devolve into "rape is resistance", "from the river to the sea", "yallah yallah intifada" or other justifications of Oct 7th being a "legitimate act of resistance" in a matter of minutes.

In contrast, all Zionists I know utterly despise Netanyahu and his far-right government.

> I have yet to meet any "pro-palestinian" that doesn't devolve into "rape is resistance"

> In contrast, all Zionists I know utterly despise Netanyahu and his far-right government.

Oh dear

As it happens, I know plenty of people who don't think the people in Gaza should be genocided and none of them support rape.

Many of the self-labelled Zionists I know support Bibi and think Gaza should be razed to the ground.

Go figure!

Do you know what a "bubble" is? In fact, do you actually know any pro-palestinain people or do you get media that tells you about them? These are not the same thing. Very neat that you included "from the river to the sea" as right alongside rape. Very telling.

PS you can find street interviews of random isreali's where they will straight up tell you they wish all palestinians were killed with very little prompting. But I guess they just don't count huh?

If you want to meet pro-palestinians that don't have cartoonishly stereotyped opinions I suggest meatspace and not online.

Hilarious that you correctly predicted this being flagged. Forbidden topic on HN it seems.

You never know when it will start spouting it either. That kind of uncertainty in the responses landing in your interface is just not sustainable. Your money is coming from the quality of the content your system is putting out. If it's being used for dentistry, and it randomly spits out white supremacist content, dentists will look for a system that won't do that. Because they asked about, say, intaglio surfaces for a wearable dental appliance. Not a treatise on white genocide.

At this point, to use Grok, you'd be intentionally setting your startup to detonate itself at some random point in the future. That's just not how you make money.