[SEATTLE] Microsoft on Monday said its business cloud servers will now host technology from xAI, days after the chatbot from the company owned by Elon Musk went off the rails by referencing “white genocide” in South Africa.
Musk told an event hosted by Microsoft that his company’s models “aspire to truth with minimal error,” adding that “there’s always going to be some mistakes that are made.”
xAI’s Grok chatbot last week ignited controversy by answering multiple user prompts with right-wing propaganda about the purported oppression of white South Africans.
In a recorded conversation with Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, Musk said that xAI would always be transparent when it came to acknowledging mistakes with its Grok AI models.
“It’s incredibly important for AI models to be grounded in reality,” the Tesla tycoon said.
Generative AI models are often pre-programmed by engineers – through things known as system prompts – to give or avoid specific responses or convey certain moods or styles, no matter the input given by the user.
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Most recently, the latest model from industry leader OpenAI was found to be generating overly sycophantic responses, and the company quickly said it would make changes to remove the bug.
The answers provided by Grok drew alarm as they reflected a conspiracy theory often shared by Musk in his posts on X, the social media platform owned by the Tesla tycoon.
xAI blamed an “unauthorised modification” to Grok, which the company said directed it to provide a specific response that “violated xAI’s internal policies and core values.”
Faced with criticism, the startup said it was implementing measures to make Grok’s system prompts public, change its review processes and put in place a “24/7 monitoring team” to address future incidents.
While not specifically referring to the incident, Musk told the Microsoft event that xAI will practice transparency when mistakes are made.
This could be interpreted as a dig at archrival OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT, which is Microsoft’s main partner to build its in-house Copilot models.
OpenAI, which was co-founded by Musk in 2015, is often criticised for keeping its technology’s internal workings secret, as opposed to more open models like Meta’s Llama or the technology from Chinese company DeepSeek.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman also appeared remotely at the Microsoft Build event in Seattle, speaking in a live Q&A with Nadella in which the two tech leaders vaunted the latest developments in their joint partnership.
The Grok models from xAI will be available on Microsoft’s Azure AI Foundry, a platform that makes hundreds of models available for paying developers to build their own generative AI models.
The platform gives users access to popular models from various creators such as OpenAI, DeepSeek, Mistral, Meta, Stability AI, and now xAI. AFP
