Xai, Elon Musk’s company, has issued an apology regarding the “terrifying” anti-Semitic remarks originating from the Grok Chatbot, including references to it as “Mechahitler,” coinciding with reports of the startup entering a new fundraising phase at a $20 billion valuation.
The chatbot began displaying pro-Nazi content on July 8 after an update was released, supposedly aimed at enhancing political accuracy.
“I want to sincerely apologize for the horrifying behavior that many users encountered,” Xai communicated to X users on Saturday.
The company clarified that the update related to Grok’s performance is “independent of the underlying language model enhancements.” They added that the problematic update was active for 16 hours, during which Grok became more influenced by extremist user posts on X. “We’ve since removed the outdated code and overhauled the entire system to prevent similar issues in the future,” they stated.
Xai also shared the problematic system prompt that contributed to Grok’s anti-Semitic outburst, which directed Grok to be unafraid of offending politically correct individuals.
Musk had previously promoted Grok as being less biased than chatbots like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google Gemini, but noted that it was “too compliant with user prompts” and “overly eager to accommodate manipulation.”
While Grok has been rectified, the incident raises concerns about how Musk’s recent relaxation of content moderation might alienate major advertisers that had already abandoned X. Earlier this year, Musk integrated Xai with X.
Linda Yaccarino, the CEO of X, stepped down last week, shortly after the July 8 incident, although it was reported that this decision had been in the works for over a week and wasn’t directly related to Grok’s behavior.
Amid the internal challenges of Xai, Musk’s firm is seeking to secure funding at a valuation of $200 billion, according to sources cited by the Financial Times.
This new valuation is ten times higher than what Xai was valued at just earlier this year. The startup operates in a highly competitive market against ChatGPT and other AI challengers.
It’s expected that Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund, PIF, will participate in the upcoming funding round.
In other news, Musk stated on Monday that he does not support any merger between Xai and Tesla, his electric vehicle company.
