Final week, Elon Musk flew to the UK to hype up the existential threat posed by artificial intelligence. A few days later, he announced that his newest firm, xAI, had developed a strong AI—one with fewer guardrails than the competitors.
The AI mannequin, known as Grok (a reputation meaning “to know” in tech circles), “is designed to reply questions with a little bit of wit and has a rebellious streak, so please don’t use it when you hate humor!” reads an announcement on the corporate’s web site. “It should additionally reply spicy questions which are rejected by most different AI methods.”
The announcement doesn’t clarify what a “spicy” or “rebellious” means, however most business AI fashions will refuse to generate sexually express, violent, or unlawful content material, and they’re designed to keep away from expressing biases picked up from their coaching information. With out such guardrails, the fear is that an AI mannequin might assist terrorists develop a bomb or might lead to merchandise that discriminate in opposition to customers primarily based on traits resembling race, gender, or age.
xAI doesn’t listing any contact data on its web site, and emails despatched to widespread addresses bounced again. An electronic mail despatched to the press handle for X acquired an automatic response studying, “Busy now, please verify again later.”
The xAI announcement says that Grok is constructed on high of a language mannequin known as Grok-1 that has 33 billion parameters. The corporate says it developed Grok in two months, a comparatively brief period of time by trade requirements, and in addition claims {that a} basic benefit is its “real-time data of the world by way of the X platform,” or the platform previously generally known as Twitter, which Musk acquired for $44 billion in 2022.
Stella Biderman, an AI researcher with EleutherAI, an open supply AI endeavor, says the claims made within the xAI announcement appear believable. Biderman means that Grok will use what’s generally known as “retrieval augmented technology” so as to add up-to-date data from X to its output. Different cutting-edge language fashions do that utilizing search engine outcomes and different data.
Massive language fashions have confirmed stunningly succesful over the previous yr or so, as highlighted most famously by OpenAI’s groundbreaking chatbot, ChatGPT.
These fashions feed on enormous quantities of textual content taken from books and the online, after which generate textual content in response to a immediate. They’re sometimes additionally given additional coaching by people to make them much less prone to produce offensive, impolite, or harmful outputs, and to make them extra prone to reply questions in ways in which appear coherent and plausibly right, though they’re nonetheless vulnerable to producing errors and biases.
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