Grok: Searching X for "From:Elonmusk (Israel or Palestine or Hamas or Gaza)"

Yes it isn't!

>not from a conversation with Tucker Carlson

>not

Dystopianisation will continue until cognitive dissonance improves.

Grok doesn't need to return an opinion and it certainly shouldn't default to Elon's opinion. I don't see how anyone could think this is ok.

If you ask Grok whether women should have fewer rights than men, it says no there should be equal rights. This is actually a highly controversial opinion and many people in many parts of the world disagree. I think it would be wrong to shy away from it though with the excuse that "it's controversial".

Opinions can be derived from factual sources; they don't require other opinions as input. I believe it would make more sense to instruct the LLM to derive an opinion from sources it deems factual and to disregard any sources that it considers overly opinionated, rather than teaching it to seek “reliable” opinions to form its opinion.

Chomsky's entire argument is, that the reporter opinions are meaningless as he is part of some imaginary establishment and therefore he had to think that way.

That game goes both ways, Chomsky's opinions are only being given TV time as they are unusual.

I would venture more and say the only reason Chomsky holds these opinions is because of the academics preference for original thought rather than mainstream thought. As any repeat of an existing theory is worthless.

The problem is that in the social sciences that are not grounded in experiments, too much ungrounded original thought leads to academic conspiracy theories

Not for climate change, as that debate is "settled". Where they do need to pretend to show balance they will pick the most reasonable talking head for their preferred position, and the most unhinged or extreme for the contra-position.

>> they were accused so often, and usually quite falsely, of bias.

Yes, really hard to determine the BBC house position on Brexit, mass immigration, the Iraq War, Israel/Palestine, Trump etc

Every second election cycle Messiah like that becomes the prime minister.

Yes very consistent in promising one thing and then doing another.

https://github.com/xai-org/grok-prompts/commits/main/ shows last update 3 days ago.

> This suggests that Grok may have a weird sense of identity—if asked for its own opinions it turns to search to find previous indications of opinions expressed by itself or by its ultimate owner. I think there is a good chance this behavior is unintended!

I'd say it's far more likely that:

1. Elon ordered his research scientists to "fix it" – make it agree with him

2. They did RL (probably just basic tool use training) to encourage checking for Elon's opinions

3. They did not update the UI (for whatever reason – most likely just because research scientists aren't responsible for front-end, so they forgot)

4. Elon is likely now upset that this is shown so obviously

The key difference is that I think it's incredibly unlikely that this is emergent behavior due to an "sense of identity", as opposed to direct efforts of the xAI research team. It's likely also a case of https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/anticipatory_obedience.

You think that's the tipping point of him being embarrassed?

Cognitive dissonance drives a lot “save the world” energy. People have undeserved wealth they might feel bad about, given prevailing moral traditions, if they weren’t so busy fighting for justice or saving the planet or something that allows them to feel more like a super hero than just another sinful human.

It's had a few changes lately, but I have zero confidence that the contents of that repo fully match / represent completely what is actually used in prod.

which simply detects the speed of new comments. The result is that it tends to kill any interesting topic where people have something to say

Even looking around the thread there's evidence that lots of other people can't even have the kind of meta-level discussion you're looking for without descending into the ideological-battle thing.

Yes, it is tiresome.

There's a clear bias -- either on the part of the flaggers or on the part of HN itself -- in what gets flagged. If it has even a hint of criticism of Elon, it gets flagged. That makes this forum increasingly useless for discussion of obviously important tech topics (e.g., why one of the frontier AI models is spouting Nazi rhetoric).

> The non-determinism at temperature zero, we guess, is caused by floating point errors during forward propagation. Possibly the “not knowing what to do” leads to maximum uncertainty, so that logits for multiple completions are maximally close and hence these errors (which, despite a lack of documentation, GPT insiders inform us are a known, but rare, phenomenon) are more reliably produced.

A fixed seed is enough for determinism. You don't need to set temperature=0. Setting temperature=0 also means that you aren't sampling, which means that you're doing greedy one-step probability maximization which might mean that the text ends up strange for that reason.

dekhn from a decade ago cared a lot about stable outputs. dekhn today thinks sampling from a distribution is a far more practical approach for nearly all use cases. I could see it mattering when the false negative rate of a medical diagnostic exceeded a reasonable threshold.

Better said would be: LLM's are designed to act as if they were non-deterministic.

Every person in this thread understood that Simon meant "Grok, ChatGPT, and other common LLM interfaces run with a temperature>0 by default, and thus non-deterministically produce different outputs for the same query".

Sure, he wrote a shorter version of that, and because of that y'all can split hairs on the details ("yes it's correct for how most people interact with LLMs and for grok, but _technically_ it's not correct").

The point of English blog posts is not to be a long wall of logical prepositions, it's to convey ideas and information. The current wording seems fine to me.

The point of what he was saying was to caution readers "you might not get this if you try to repro it", and that is 100% correct.

With batching matrix shapes/request position in them aren’t deterministic and this leads to non deterministic results, regardless of sampling temperature/seed.

They absolutely can keep such a promise, which anyone who has worked with LLMs could confirm. I can run a sequence of tokens through a large LLMs thousands of times and get identical results every time (and have done precisely this! In fact, in one situation it was a QA test I built). I could run it millions of times and get exactly the same final layer every single time.

They don't want to keep such a promise because it limits flexibility and optimizations available when doing things at a very large scale. This is not an LLM thing, and saying "LLMs are non-deterministic" is simply wrong, even if you can find an LLM purveyor who decided to make choices where they no longer have any interest in such an outcome. And FWIW, non-associative floating point arithmetic is usually not the reason.

It's like claiming that a chef cannot do something that McDonalds and Burger King don't do, using those purveyors as an example of what is possible when cooking. Nothing works like that.

Again, are those environments in the room with us?

In the context of the article, is the model executed in such an environment? Do we even know anything about the environment, randomness, sampling and anything in between or have any control over it (see e.g https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44528930)?

> but is likely switching between a few different kernels back and forth, depending on the batch or some other internal grouping.

So you're literally saying it's non-deterministic

How do we also turn off all the intermediate layers in between that we don't know about like "always rant about white genocide in South Africa" or "crash when user mentions David Meyer"?

Well, it's hard to build things we don't even understand ourselves, especially about highly subjective topics. What is "woke" for one person is "basic humanity" for another, and "extremism" for yet another person, and same goes for most things.

If the model can output subjective text, then the model will be biased in some way I think.

I also think it is possible that nobody specifically designed that behavior, and it instead emerged from the way the model was trained.

My current intuition is that the second is more likely than the first.

It's been increasingly explicit that free thought is no longer permitted. WaPo staff got an email earlier this week telling them to align or take the voluntary separation package.

https://ca.news.yahoo.com/washington-post-ceo-encourages-sta...

Substitute almost anything for X - “the robbing of banks”, “fatal car accidents”, etc.

But if I was an API provider that had a secret sauce prompt, it would be pretty simple to throw another outbound regex/lem&stem cosine similarity filter just the same as a "woops model is producing erotica" or "woops model is reproducing the lyrics to stairway to heaven" and drop whatever the fuzzy match was out of the message returned to the caller.

The only risk would be if everyone could see and verify it for themselves. But it is not- it requires motivation and skill.

Grok has been inserting 'white genocide' narratives, calling itself MechaHitler, praising Hitler, and going in depth about how Jewish people are the enemy. If that barely matters, why would the prompt matter?

I can't believe y'all are programmers, there is zero critical thinking being done on malicious opportunities before trusting this.

That Netanyahu still walks free is a consequence of a) Israel not being party to the ICC, therefore not bound to obey their prosecutors' requests and b) the countries he travels to not being party to the ICC either or c) the ICC member states he travels to guaranteeing diplomatic immunity as is tradition for an invited diplomatic guest.

c) is actually a problem, but not one of Israel being undemocratic, but of the respective member states being hypocrites for disobeying the ICC while still being members.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expulsion_of_Jews_from_Spain

And shooting enemies in a war is unfortunately not something you would investigate, it isn't even murder, it is just a consequence of war under the articles of war. In cases where civilians are shot (what Israel defines to be civilians), there are investigations and sometimes even punishments for the perpetrators. Now you may (sometimes rightfully) claim that those investigations and punishments are too few, one-sided and not done by a neutral party. But those do happen, which by far isn't "nothing".

There are over two million Arab citizens of Israel. What ethnicity do they belong to?

A country who government was chosen by its inhabitants could be quite different. I know many states allow voting from abroad, but my home country doesn't and nobody ever questions its democratic credentials.

(I make no comment on the justice or long-term stability of the system in general or specifically in Israel, that has been done at length elsewhere.)

The flagging isn't to hide "anything slightly negative" about particular people. We don't see any evidence of that from the users flagging these stories. Nobody believes that would work anyway; we're not influential enough to make a jot of difference to how global celebrities are seen [1]. It's that we're not a celebrity gossip/rage site. We're not the daily news, or the daily Silicon Valley weird news. We've never been that. If every crazy/weird story about Silicon Valley celebrities made the front page here there'd barely be space for anything else. As dang has said many times, we're trying for something different here.

[1] That's not to say we don't think we're influential. The best kind of influence we have is in surfacing interesting content that doesn't get covered elsewhere, which includes interesting new technology projects, but many other interesting topics too, and we just don't want that to be constantly drowned out by craziness happening elsewhere. Bad stuff happening elsewhere doesn't mean we should lose focus on building and learning about good things.

What we do instead is pay attention to the sentiment (including public comments in threads) of the community, with particular emphasis on the users who make the most positive contributions to the site over the long term, and anyone else who is showing they want to use HN for its intended purpose. And we do a lot of explaining of our decisions and actions, and we read and respond to people’s questions in the threads and via email.

There are ways for us to be transparent without allowing the site to get bogged down in meta-arguments.

You guys have so little cognitive security getting convinced that Elon is the antichrist that he just exploits it like crazy to get you to do things like not use his better AI. He probably doesn't want you using Starlink either, so before the next version he'll probably post some meme to get you to hate Starlink too.

The funniest part of the Elon derangement syndrome is you guys think you are smarter than he is. You're not. Like haha, Elon had revealed his hand and now I will skillfully not use his better AI, little does he know that I have single handedly outsmarted the antichrist!

I read all sorts, including using the chrome browser translation tool to read native language websites converted to English.

My x account has both far left and far right activists accounts followed.