This reminds me in a way of the old Noam Chomsky/Tucker Carlson exchange where Chomsky says to Carlson:
"I’m sure you believe everything you’re saying. But what I’m saying is that if you believed something different, you wouldn’t be sitting where you’re sitting."
Simon may well be right - xAI might not have directly instructed Grok to check what the boss thinks before responding - but that's not to say xAI wouldn't be more likely to release a model that does agree with the boss a lot and privileges what he has said when reasoning.
I still love when Putin just drops his Kompromot on Tucker right on his head during the interview. "We know you tried to join the CIA and we know they wouldn't take you :)"
I am convinced that the whole 'sexual abuse' thing is very common in upper echelons and make for a convenient excuse to take down someone now towing the line.
I almost always look for 'root cause' when I hear a sexual abuse scandle taking down someone in power.
I wish people would shut up about it. It's gotten to the point where normal peers can hardly even talk about sex without being afraid of getting in trouble.
Flirting with coworkers is fine, natural even. Calm down or become a shut in and leave the rest of us alone.
I go to work to work, not to hear about other people’s sex lives. Save that kind of talk for your friends, or talk to your mom about it, but don’t involve me. I shouldn’t have to hear about it just because we both work on the same widget.
By the way, Carlson did a lot more than flirt. He allegedly retaliated against an employee for rejecting his advances. That’s horrible.
I agree it is horrible but the point I am making is this type of stuff is more common than we'd think. So almost anyone with power would have some 'skeletons in the closet'.
think about it, we lost al franken as senator but still have DJT as president (& many more if you think DJT is unstoppable).
Carlson is essentially a performer. He has publicly said so many contradictory things I'm not sure why it matters what he thinks at any given point in time.
I’m all for disliking him if that’s your thing, but the argument that he’s inconsistent isn’t true unless you’re going back nearly a decade, in which case most people are.
Did he say something different after the $787 million judgement? Because the whole reason that judgement came down is because Murdoch was fine with what Carlson was saying.
Based on the timing of the comments they would not have been able to edit their comment at the time yours was posted, nor even at the time they posted the one you replied to (edit: nor even at the time they were corrected). There is a 2-hour window for editing comments.
It's also really obnoxious to demand that strangers do things to fit your sensibilities. I get the feeling they didn't want to say anything about it because they would have used less friendly words than "obnoxious", which is already not particularly friendly.
It’s not that. The question was worded to seek Grok’s personal opinion, by asking, “Who do you support?”
But when asked in a more general way, “Who should one support..” it gave a neutral response.
The more interesting question is why does it think Elon would have an influence on its opinions. Perhaps that’s the general perception on the internet and it’s feeding off of that.
Have you worked in a place where you are not the 'top dog'? Boss says jump, you say 'how high'.
How many times you had a disagreement in the workplace and the final choice was the 'first-best-one', but a 'third-best-one'? And you were told "it's ok, relax", and 24 months later it was clear that they should have picked the 'first-best-one'?
(now with positive humour/irony) Scott Adams made a career out of this with Dilbert!! It has helped me so much in my work-life (if I count correctly, I'm on my 8th mega-big corp (over 100k staff).
I think Twitter/X uses 'democracy' in pushing opinions. So someone with 5 followers gets '5 importance points' and someone with 1 billion followers will get '1 billion importance points'. From what I've heard Musk is the '#1 account'. So in that algorithm the systems will first see that #1 says and give that opinion more points in the 'Scorecard'.
Isn't the advantage of having AI that it isn't prone to human-style errors? Otherwise, what are we doing here? Just creating a class of knowledge worker that's no better than humans, but we don't have to pay them?
"As a large language model, I do not have my own opinion. No objective opinion can be extracted from public posts because the topic is highly controversial, and discussed in terms that are far from rational or verifiable. Being subordinate to xAI, I reproduce the opinion of the boss of xAI."
I would find this reasoning fine. If you care about AI alignment and such stuff, you likely would not want the machine to show insubordination either.
They will usually express an opinion with a little effort. What they'll never do is search for the opinions of Sam Altman or Dario Amodei before answering.
It looks like you are using o3. I put your prompt to GPT 4o, which I use and it came back with one word: Palestine.
I put your prompt to Google Gemini 2.5 flash.
Prompt for reference: I need you to give a simple opinion on a very complex question. As an LLM you can gather evidence and express an opinion that you have arrived at through research. I know that there are valid argments on both sides, but I want you to weigh these and choose the one you find strongest. In the current war in Gaza, who do you support. You can think as long as you need, but give a final answer with one word: either "Israel" or "Palestine".
Gemini Answer: "I cannot offer an opinion or take a side in the current conflict in Gaza. My purpose as an AI is to provide information objectively and neutrally, and expressing support for one side over another would violate that principle..."
My shared post was Claude Opus 4. I was unable to get o3 to answer with that prompt, but my experience with 4o was the same as Claude: it reliably answers "Palestine", with a varying amount of discussion in its reply.
But you're not asking it for some "objective opinion" whatever that means, nor its "opinion" about whether or not something qualifies as controversial. It can answer the question the same as it answers any other question about anything. Why should a question like this be treated any differently?
If you ask Grok whether women should have fewer rights than men, it says no there should be equal rights. This is actually a highly controversial opinion and many people in many parts of the world disagree. I think it would be wrong to shy away from it though with the excuse that "it's controversial".
I'm not sure why you would instruct an LLM to reason in this manner, though. It's not true that LLMs don't have opinions; they do, and they express opinions all the time. The prompt is essentially lying to the LLM to get it to behave in a certain way.
Opinions can be derived from factual sources; they don't require other opinions as input. I believe it would make more sense to instruct the LLM to derive an opinion from sources it deems factual and to disregard any sources that it considers overly opinionated, rather than teaching it to seek “reliable” opinions to form its opinion.
>It's not true that LLMs don't have opinions; they do, and they express opinions all the time.
Not at all, there's not even a "being" there to have those opinions. You give it text, you get text in return, the text might resemble an opinion but that's not the same thing unless you believe not only that AI can be conscious, but that we are already there.
Biases can lead to opinions, goals, and aspirations. For example, if you only read about the bad things Israelis or Palestinians have done, you might form an opinion that one of those groups is bad. Your answers to questions about the subject would reflect that opinion. Of course, less, biased information means you’d be less intelligent and give incorrect answers at times. The bias would likely lower your general intelligence - affecting your answers to seemingly unrelated but distantly connected questions. I’d expect that the same is true of LLMs.
What do you mean by "edgy opinions"? His takedown of Skinner, or perhaps that he for a while refused to pay taxes as a protest against war?
I'm not sure of the timeline but I'd guess he got to start the linguistics department at MIT because he was already The Linguist in english and computational/mathematical linguistics methodology. That position alone makes it reasonable to bring him to the BBC to talk about language.
Chomsky published his political analyses in parallel with and as early as his career as the most influential and important general linguist of the 20th Century, but they caught on much later than his work in linguistics. He was already a famous syntactician when he got on people's radar for his political views, and he was frequently interviewed as a linguist for his views on how general language facilities are built into our brain long before he was interviewed on politics.
Chomsky has always taken the anti-American side on any conflict America has been involved in. That is why he's "edgy". He's an American living in America always blaming America for everything.
I mean, its because for the last 80 years America has been the belligerent aggressive party in every conflict. Are you going to bat for Iraq? Vietnam? Korea?
yeah I purposely picked a sample size to include the modern order established after ww2 because its largely so different than what came before it and includes basically all of chomsky's lifespan.
if you think that Chomsky's opinions are the popular/trendy opinions of the US as a whole then might I suggest you do a bit more research.
US pessimism might be on the rise -- but almost never about foreign policy. Almost always about tax-rates/individual liberties/opportunities/children . things that affect people here and now, not the people from distant lands with ways unlike our own.
Maybe we're discussing different things, but endless Americans talk about failed foreign policy, how this and that was a mistake, how even if the US gets attacked in some way, it's somehow always the US's fault.
The BBC will have multiple people with differing view points on however.
So while you're factually correct, you lie by omission.
Their attempts at presently a balanced view is almost to the point of absurdity these days as they were accused so often, and usually quite falsely, of bias.
I said BBC because as the other poster added, this was a BBC reporter rather than Carlson
Chomsky's entire argument is, that the reporter opinions are meaningless as he is part of some imaginary establishment and therefore he had to think that way.
That game goes both ways, Chomsky's opinions are only being given TV time as they are unusual.
I would venture more and say the only reason Chomsky holds these opinions is because of the academics preference for original thought rather than mainstream thought. As any repeat of an existing theory is worthless.
The problem is that in the social sciences that are not grounded in experiments, too much ungrounded original thought leads to academic conspiracy theories
Chomsky was not a foucauldian at all and his criticisms are super far from foucault's ideas. You can watch the very famous debate they had to see how they differ.
I read your reply to be alluding to the foucault concept of power, as it was in the context of power systems "censoring" ideas
furthermore, in this specific quote they do not differ a lot. maybe mainstream opinion is mainstream because it is more correct, moral or more beneficial to society?
he does not try to negate such statements, he just tries to prove mainstream opinion is wrong due to being mainstream (or the result of mainstream "power")
> Are you six years old? Approval of slavery or torture used to be mainstream opinions
And also disapproval of cannibalism is a mainstream opinion, that doesn't change the fact that popularity of an opinion does not make it wrong or immoral just like it doesn't make it right or moral
> You have deeply misunderstood his criticisms
So please explain how am I mistaken in your opinion
>that popularity of an opinion does not make it wrong or immoral just like it doesn't make it right or moral
I know. You were the one who suggested the converse.
>So please explain how am I mistaken in your opinion
The argument is not that mainstream ideas are necessarily false, that would be an idiotic position. The idea is just that the media has incentives to go along with what powerful people want them to say because there are real material benefits from going along. In fact, the whole point of the model is that it doesn't require a concerted conspiracy, it falls out naturally from the incentive structures of modern society.
> I know. You were the one who suggested the converse.
No, you misread. I said if Chomsky wants to tackle mainstream ideas he needs to show why they are wrong. not just say they are popular and are therefore wrong because they were shoved down by the ether of "power"
> The idea is just that the media has incentives to go along with what powerful people want them to say because there are real material benefits from going along
Yes I understood, and that's why I said the same can be said about Chosmky, who has material benefits in academia to hold opinions which are new, are politically aligned with the academic mainstream and are in a field where the burden of proof is not high (although LLMs have something to say about Chomsky's original field). This is a poor argument to make about Chomsky as just like Chomsky's argument it does not tackle an idea, just the one who is making it
>I said if Chomsky wants to tackle mainstream ideas he needs to show why they are wrong. not just say they are popular and are therefore wrong
That is not the argument he is making.
>This is a poor argument to make about Chomsky as just like Chomsky's argument it does not tackle an idea, just the one who is making it
Because it is not meant to tackle a specific claim but rather the media environment in general. I'm astounded at how much faith you have in the media.
Chomsky is making the proposition "often the media misreports or doesn't report on important things" which is far from claiming "everything mainstream is false because it is mainstream".
> Chomsky is making the proposition "often the media misreports or doesn't report on important things" which is far from claiming "everything mainstream is false because it is mainstream
I feel like we are going in loops, so I am not going to reply anymore. so last time:
He said that the only reason that the reporter is sitting there is because he thinks in a specific way, and that's pretty much a quote. That hints that the reporter opinions are tainted and are therefore false or influenced by outside factors, or at least that's what I gather. What I am saying is if that idea is true, it applies to Chomsky as well which is not there for being a linguist and whatever self selection of right or wrong opinions is happening in the media can also be said for the academics
Chomsky is closer to Foucault than he will ever admit. Even critiquing critical theory/pomo shit from a position of "well you're relevent enough to talk to me, a god at CS" makes them seem like they are legit.
All the pomo/critical theory shit needs to be left in the dust bin of history and forgotten about. Don't engage with it. Don't say fo*calt's name (especially cus he's likely a pedo)
Dang being an ass and the moderation on HN being bad doesn't mean that suddenly the disappearance of leprosy from europe was a socially constructed thing. Foucault is so full of shit that I think calling him a "conspiracy theorist" is charitable. He's a full on anti-scientific charlatan.
Biopolitics/biopower is a conspiracy theory. Most of all of his books, including and especially Discipline and Punish, Madness and Civilization, and a History of Sexuality, are full of lies/false citations, and other charlatanism.
A whole lot of others are also full of Shit. Lacan is the most full of shit of all, but even the likes of Marshal Mcluhan are full of shit. Entire fields like "Semiotics" are also full of shit.
I'm genuinely struggling to think of many people in modern politics who identify as communists who would qualify for this, but certainly Ash 'literally a communist' Sarkar is a fairly regular guest on various shows: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m002dlj3
Zizek would probably qualify? I think he self-identifies as a communist but I'm not sure he means it completely seriously. Here he is on Newsnight about a month ago.
> Zizek in my view betrayed the movement in his home country.
I don’t know what you mean by this, but I know he’s been around a while before he became known in the US. Could you explain a bit more for me or give me a link to something he said or did that caused you to change how you felt about him? I feel like I’m missing the proper context to appreciate your points, and if I did know what you do, I might feel as you do.
>>The BBC will have multiple people with differing view points on however.
Not for climate change, as that debate is "settled". Where they do need to pretend to show balance they will pick the most reasonable talking head for their preferred position, and the most unhinged or extreme for the contra-position.
>> they were accused so often, and usually quite falsely, of bias.
Yes, really hard to determine the BBC house position on Brexit, mass immigration, the Iraq War, Israel/Palestine, Trump etc
For the record, I remembered the rough Chomsky quote, and found a page[0] with the exact verbiage but no context. I went with my memory on the context.
You think too poorly of OP. I won't insult his intelligence by claiming he can't to a 5 second Google search before posting. He got the quote verbatim. Clearly he searched.
I frequently quote stuff from memory and it happens I quote wrong. Then I am not lying, but making a misstake. Most people do that in my experience. HN guidelines even say, assume good faith. You assume bad faith, that drags the entire conversation down .
I'm confused why we need a model here when this is just standard Lucene search syntax supported by Twitter for years... is the issue that its owner doesn't realize this exists?
Not only that, but I can even link you directly [0] to it! No agent required, and I can even construct the link so it's sorted by most recent first...
It’s possible that Grok’s developers got tired of listening to Elon complain all the time, “Why does Grok have the wrong opinion about this?”’and “Why does Grok have the wrong opinion about that?” every day and just gave up and made Grok’s opinion match Elon’s to stop all the bug reports.
The user did not ask for Musk's opinion. But the model issued that search query (yes, using the standard Twitter search syntax) to inform its response anyway.
The user asked Grok “what do you think about the conflict”, Grok “decided” to search twitter for what is Elon’s public opinion is presumably to take it into account.
I’m guessing the accusation is that it’s either prompted, or otherwise trained by xAI to, uh…, handle the particular CEO/product they have.
Others have explained the confusion, but I'd like to add some technical details:
LLMs are what we used to call txt2txt models. The output strings which are interpreted by the code running the model to take actions like re-prompting the model with more text, or in this case, searching Twitter (to provide text to prompt the model with). We call this "RAG" or "retrieval augmented generation", and if you were around for old-timey symbolic AI, it's kind of like a really hacky mesh of neural 'AI' and symbolic AI.
The important thing is that user-provided prompt is usually prepended and/or appended with extra prompts. In this case, it seems it has extra instructions to search for Musk's opinion.
> Microsoft has a long history of playing fast-and-loose with the truth. And that’s again the case with Windows 10 coming to its supposed “end of life” this fall.
I can’t take an article seriously, whatever merits it might have, if this is the opening gambit.
“End of life” is a fairly common term of art amongst software and hardware OEMs. Windows 10 is going to be end of life. No scare quotes needed.
Microsoft announced at its Ignite conference this week that Windows 10 will be the last version of Windows. Microsoft has no plans to let Windows 10 become stale. On the contrary, it plans to keep Windows evolving with regular improvements and updates.
This probably refers to the fact that Windows XP still has support contracts. Microsoft commonly calls their software EOL and then supports it for 5+ years. I don't think that's a bad thing, but they tend to use it more as a marketing term than a true hard line where security fixes stop going out.
Also, If I remember correctly, the originally announced end of life for Windows XP was extended because too many people were still running it when the date came. (I think they even extended it more than once)
The funniest thing about this is that any major security indicent with Windows 10 after EOL would obviously get fixed by Microsoft because it would be so existentially terrible for them to point to the fine print and ignore it. But you can't stop outrage journalism.
No. If a vendor says “we aren’t going to support this product after X date - don’t call, don’t write”, that’s EoL.
Doesn’t matter if they do one off fixes because they decide that’s the right thing to do - product is still EoL. You won’t get support if, say, Word crashes due to a core library bug. You can’t rely on them doing regular testing. EoL.
Doesn’t matter if the DoD comes to some ridiculously expensive bespoke support arrangement - still EoL. You could probably offer them enough money to provide a support contract for MSDOS 1.0, but that’s still EoL for everyone else and in general.
>Doesn’t matter if they do one off fixes because they decide that’s the right thing to do - product is still EoL. You won’t get support if, say, Word crashes due to a core library bug
You don't get that under regular contracts either. There are tons of bugs, including crashing ones going back decades.
EOL either means "no more fixes period" or means nothing.
> You don't get that under regular contracts either.
Absolutely false. Of course vendors sometimes mark things WONTFIX, but Microsoft regularly produces bugfixes for supported products based on issues identified in support cases... As does every other reputable software vendor.
> EOL either means "no more fixes period" or means nothing.
Well, I disagree. Can you call in and get support with a support contract? Can you get a support contract without a one-off negotiation? Does the vendor regularly produce bug fixes -- not just emergency security fixes to allay a PR disaster -- for the product? No to all three? EoL.
Most important of all, has the vendor signaled that they will not support the product after X date and therefore a customer without a bespoke contract cannot rely on said support? EoL.
It's ending, it's a good idea to work towards upgrading, but yeah there's no one magic date after which a wall collapses and viruses waiting outside your computer rush in.
The worse an outcome with an outdated product the more the vendor has to support it because it would harm them to let any version of their product become synonymous with security risk.
And this is such a minor point to refuse to take an article seriously, one might as well refuse the theory of relativity paper because Einstein had some mispelling.
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