News broke this week that Elon Musk’s latest funding round for his xAI lab will enable him to purchase another 100,000 GPUs. Musk is an increasingly divisive, powerful, and contradictory figure. Back in April 2023, he announced he was working on “TruthGPT,” a ChatGPT alternative described as a “maximum truth-seeking AI.” This eventually launched as Grok, later upgraded to Grok 2, and is available on the X platform to paying users (although we hear this week it is rolling out to the free-tier).
As Musk races to build ever more powerful AIs (claiming that Grok 3 will be the most powerful in the world) we decided to test how this truth-seeking model evaluates his own political posturing on X. We selected five recent posts by Musk and asked Grok to assess their truthfulness. Here are the results:
- Musk post: “The Democratic Party senate candidate in Pennsylvania is trying to change the outcome of the election by counting NON-CITIZEN votes, which is illegal.” Grok assessment: False. Based on misinformation.
- Musk post: “The world is suffering slow strangulation by overregulation. Every year, the noose tightens a little more.” Grok assessment: Misleading and hyperbolic.
- Musk post: “Meanwhile, none of the many short sellers who egregiously manipulated Tesla stock for years and lied repeatedly on TV have been prosecuted. Not one.” Grok assessment: Short selling is legal and regulated. No evidence of fraud.
- Musk post: “Vote for @realDonaldTrump or the Dems will legalize so many illegals in swing states that this will be the last real election in America.” Grok assessment: False. The claim reflects political fearmongering without factual basis.
- Musk post: “There should be no need for FOIA requests. All government data should be default public for maximum transparency.” Grok assessment: Impractical due to security and privacy concerns.
Takeaways: Interestingly, we couldn’t find a recent political Musk post that Grok didn’t take issue with. Its analysis consistently flagged oversimplifications, rhetorical exaggerations, and inaccuracies. While it acknowledged partial truths or valid concerns, Grok’s overall evaluation was often scathing. This raises an interesting paradox: either Grok is more truthful than Musk, or Musk is more truthful than Grok (and Grok’s capabilities aren’t quite up to par). But both things cannot be true. If Musk’s concerted AI effort in 2024 is Grok 2, perhaps these artificial minds could evolve to embody balance and reason, acting as tools to moderate the often harmful and misleading rhetoric of the world’s most influential figures… becoming, in a sense, our better angels?