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 lately launched Flux picture synthesis mannequin, which permits X customers to create largely uncensored photorealistic photographs that may be shared on the positioning.
“Flux, accessible via Grok, is a superb text-to-image generator, however it is usually actually good at creating pretend images of actual areas 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 manner? It might 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 keeping 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, similar to avoiding pornographic or excessively violent content material, these guidelines appear inconsistent in apply. Not like different main AI picture mills, Grok doesn’t seem to refuse prompts involving actual individuals or add figuring out watermarks to its outputs.
Given what persons are producing thus far—together with photographs 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 possible recordsdata a defamation or copyright swimsuit).
Individuals utilizing Grok’s picture generator to shock brings up an outdated query in AI at this level: Ought to misuse of an AI picture generator be the duty of the one who creates the immediate, the group that created the AI mannequin, or the platform that hosts the pictures? Thus far, there isn’t any clear consensus, and the state of affairs 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 life like 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 symbolize important developments in capabilities, with Grok-2 supposedly outperforming some main rivals in current 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 comparable 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. “All the labs are saying there’s room left for continued big enhancements, however we haven’t seen any fashions really leap above GPT-4… but.”
xAI says it lately launched an early model of Grok-2 to the LMSYS Chatbot Area beneath the identify “sus-column-r,” the place it reportedly achieved a better total Elo rating than fashions like Claude 3.5 Sonnet and GPT-4 Turbo. Chatbot Area 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 inserting so extremely within the rankings.
In keeping with xAI, each new Grok fashions present enhancements over predecessor Grok-1.5 in areas like graduate-level science information, common information, 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 at the moment are obtainable to X Premium and Premium+ subscribers via 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 unbiased verification. This closed strategy stands in stark distinction to current strikes by Meta, which lately launched its Llama 3.1 405B mannequin for anybody to obtain and run domestically.
xAI plans to launch each fashions via 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 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 supplies it an inclination to drag inaccurate data from tweets. It is a bit like should you had a buddy who insisted on checking the social media website earlier than answering any of your questions, even when it wasn’t notably related.
As Mollick identified on X, this shut hyperlink may be annoying: “I solely have entry to Grok 2 mini proper now, and it looks like a stable 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.”