On Tuesday, Elon Musk’s AI firm xAI announced the beta launch of two new language fashions, Grok-2 and Grok-2 mini, obtainable to subscribers of his social media platform X (previously Twitter). The fashions are additionally linked to the just lately launched Flux picture synthesis mannequin, which permits X customers to create largely uncensored photorealistic pictures that may be shared on the positioning.
“Flux, accessible by way of Grok, is a wonderful text-to-image generator, however it’s also actually good at creating faux images of actual places and folks, and sending them proper to Twitter,” wrote frequent AI commentator Ethan Mollick on X. “Does anybody know if they’re watermarking these in any method? It might be a good suggestion.”
In a report posted earlier immediately, The Verge noted that Grok’s picture technology capabilities seem to have minimal safeguards, permitting customers to create doubtlessly controversial content material. In response to their testing, Grok produced pictures depicting political figures in compromising conditions, copyrighted characters, and scenes of violence when prompted.
The Verge discovered that whereas Grok claims to have sure limitations, similar to avoiding pornographic or excessively violent content material, these guidelines appear inconsistent in apply. Not like different main AI picture turbines, Grok doesn’t seem to refuse prompts involving actual folks or add figuring out watermarks to its outputs.
Given what persons are producing up to now—together with pictures of Donald Trump and Kamala Harris kissing or giving a thumbs-up on the best way to the Twin Towers in an obvious 9/11 assault—the unrestricted outputs might not final for lengthy. However then once more, Elon Musk has made a big deal out of “freedom of speech” on his platform, so maybe the aptitude will stay (till somebody doubtless recordsdata a defamation or copyright swimsuit).
Folks utilizing Grok’s picture generator to shock brings up an outdated query in AI at this level: Ought to misuse of an AI picture generator be the accountability of the one that creates the immediate, the group that created the AI mannequin, or the platform that hosts the photographs? To date, there isn’t any clear consensus, and the scenario has but to be resolved legally, though a brand new proposed US regulation referred to as the NO FAKES act would presumably maintain X responsible for the creation of reasonable picture deepfakes.
With Grok-2, the GPT-4 ceiling nonetheless holds
Wanting past pictures, in a launch blog, xAI claims that Grok-2 and Grok-2 mini characterize important developments in capabilities, with Grok-2 supposedly outperforming some main rivals in latest benchmarks and what we name “vibemarks.” It is at all times smart to strategy these claims with a dose of skepticism, however it seems that the “GPT-4 class” of AI language fashions (these with related functionality to OpenAI’s mannequin) has grown bigger, however the GPT-4 barrier has not but been smashed.
“There at the moment are 5 GPT-4 class fashions: GPT-4o, Claude 3.5, Gemini 1.5, Llama 3.1, and now Grok 2,” wrote Ethan Mollick on X. “The entire labs are saying there may be room left for continued large enhancements, however we haven’t seen any fashions really leap above GPT-4… but.”
xAI says it just lately launched an early model of Grok-2 to the LMSYS Chatbot Enviornment below the identify “sus-column-r,” the place it reportedly achieved the next total Elo rating than fashions like Claude 3.5 Sonnet and GPT-4 Turbo. Chatbot Enviornment is a well-liked subjective vibemarking web site for AI fashions, but it surely’s been the topic of controversy just lately when people disagreed with OpenAI’s GPT-4o mini inserting so extremely within the rankings.
In response to xAI, each new Grok fashions present enhancements over predecessor Grok-1.5 in areas like graduate-level science data, normal data, and math problem-solving in benchmarks which have similarly proved controversial. The corporate additionally highlighted Grok-2’s efficiency on visible duties, claiming state-of-the-art ends in visible math reasoning and document-based query answering.
The fashions at the moment are obtainable to X Premium and Premium+ subscribers by way of an up to date app interface. Not like a few of its rivals within the open weights area, xAI is not releasing the mannequin weights for obtain or unbiased verification. This closed strategy stands in stark distinction to latest strikes by Meta, which just lately launched its Llama 3.1 405B mannequin for anybody to obtain and run regionally.
xAI plans to launch each fashions by way of an enterprise API later this month. The corporate says this API will function multi-region deployment choices and safety measures like obligatory multifactor authentication. Particulars on pricing, utilization limits, or information dealing with insurance policies haven’t but been introduced.
Photorealistic picture technology apart, maybe Grok-2’s biggest liability is its deep hyperlink to X, which supplies it an inclination to drag inaccurate data from tweets. It’s kind of like in the event you had a buddy who insisted on checking the social media web site earlier than answering any of your questions, even when it wasn’t notably related.
As Mollick identified on X, this shut hyperlink could be annoying: “I solely have entry to Grok 2 mini proper now, and it looks as if a stable mannequin, however usually appears ill-served by its RAG connection to Twitter,” he wrote. “The mannequin is fed outcomes from Twitter that appear irrelevant to the immediate, after which desperately tries to attach them into one thing coherent.”
