On Tuesday, Elon Musk’s AI firm xAI announced the beta launch of two new language fashions, Grok-2 and Grok-2 mini, out there to subscribers of his social media platform X (previously Twitter). The fashions are additionally linked to the lately launched Flux picture synthesis mannequin, which permits X customers to create largely uncensored photorealistic photographs that may be shared on the location.
“Flux, accessible by way of Grok, is a wonderful text-to-image generator, however additionally it is actually good at creating faux images of actual places and other people, and sending them proper to Twitter,” wrote frequent AI commentator Ethan Mollick on X. “Does anybody know if they’re watermarking these in any means? It could be a good suggestion.”
In a report posted earlier right this moment, The Verge noted that Grok’s picture era capabilities seem to have minimal safeguards, permitting customers to create probably controversial content material. In line with their testing, Grok produced photographs 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, comparable to avoiding pornographic or excessively violent content material, these guidelines appear inconsistent in observe. Not like different main AI picture turbines, Grok doesn’t seem to refuse prompts involving actual individuals or add figuring out watermarks to its outputs.
Given what persons are producing to this point—together with photographs of Donald Trump and Kamala Harris kissing or giving a thumbs-up on the way in which 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 probably recordsdata a defamation or copyright go well with).
Individuals utilizing Grok’s picture generator to shock brings up an previous query in AI at this level: Ought to misuse of an AI picture generator be the duty of the one that creates the immediate, the group that created the AI mannequin, or the platform that hosts the pictures? To date, there is no such thing as a clear consensus, and the scenario has but to be resolved legally, though a brand new proposed US legislation referred to as the NO FAKES act would presumably maintain X accountable for the creation of practical picture deepfakes.
With Grok-2, the GPT-4 ceiling nonetheless holds
Wanting past photographs, in a launch blog, xAI claims that Grok-2 and Grok-2 mini signify important developments in capabilities, with Grok-2 supposedly outperforming some main rivals in latest benchmarks and what we name “vibemarks.” It is all the time clever 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 are actually 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 big enhancements, however we haven’t seen any fashions actually leap above GPT-4… but.”
xAI says it lately launched an early model of Grok-2 to the LMSYS Chatbot Enviornment underneath the title “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, however it’s been the topic of controversy lately when people disagreed with OpenAI’s GPT-4o mini putting so extremely within the rankings.
In line with xAI, each new Grok fashions present enhancements over predecessor Grok-1.5 in areas like graduate-level science data, common 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 leads to visible math reasoning and document-based query answering.
The fashions are actually out there 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 house, xAI is not releasing the mannequin weights for obtain or impartial verification. This closed strategy stands in stark distinction to latest strikes by Meta, which 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 necessary multifactor authentication. Particulars on pricing, utilization limits, or knowledge dealing with insurance policies haven’t but been introduced.
Photorealistic picture era apart, maybe Grok-2’s biggest liability is its deep hyperlink to X, which provides it an inclination to tug inaccurate info from tweets. It is a bit like for those who had a buddy who insisted on checking the social media website earlier than answering any of your questions, even when it wasn’t significantly related.
As Mollick identified on X, this shut hyperlink will be annoying: “I solely have entry to Grok 2 mini proper now, and it looks as if a strong mannequin, however typically 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.”
