Kelsey Piper
Appearances
Today, Explained
White genocide Grok
And I don't think we've seen from these companies the sort of stable, careful, thoughtful track record where we should be excited about that. I think we should be pretty worried about what might happen if they were to pull that off.
Today, Explained
White genocide Grok
There are a lot of them. So X has Grok. Google has Gemini. OpenAI has ChatGPT, which sort of started the whole thing. Anthropic has Claude. China's DeepSeek is an app that has an AI you can talk to. And that's not even a full survey of all of them, but those are the ones that I sort of use regularly, the ones that are at the frontier of what it's possible to do.
Today, Explained
White genocide Grok
So Grok has a couple of features that I actually think are great and I'm excited to see other AI companies imitate. One thing that people were originally excited about AIs was what if they could in a neutral way that was not government-imposed and not just about what the most popular view was,
Today, Explained
White genocide Grok
sort of answer like false information in a way that's persuasive to people who are maybe skeptical of the mainstream media or whatever. And I think one of the hopes with Grok was that it would do that.
Today, Explained
White genocide Grok
So I think Grok's batting average would look really good. That's because a lot of the questions that Grok gets asked are, in fact, very straightforward questions. What's the text of this law? What is this thing that's like settled science? Grok is going to get those right.
Today, Explained
White genocide Grok
It's more interesting in cases where something is actually disputed or in cases where the answer you would find on the first page of Google searches isn't the right answer. I don't think Grok tends to perform well on those. But again, all of these AI models are way better at what they do than they were a year ago.
Today, Explained
White genocide Grok
So whenever we have these conversations, I do try and look a little forward and ask myself, if we have this conversation same time next year, what will we be talking about? And getting better at answering questions accurately is something that we've seen and I think we'll continue to see.
Today, Explained
White genocide Grok
So I would bet pretty confidently that Grok in a year will have a better batting average, unless it is deliberately manipulated by Elon to lie in favor of his biases.
Today, Explained
White genocide Grok
One thing I do sort of out of morbid curiosity is I invite all the AIs to look at my document of notes and then write the future perfect newsletter for me. Of course, I would never, I never publish that version, but I'm curious, like, are they capable of it? You know, am I soon to be obviated? And they are not capable of it. But Gemini comes the closest.
Today, Explained
White genocide Grok
But almost nobody uses Gemini in the AI studio chat window. Most people see Google's AI either in Google search results, which is a cheaper to run model, or they see integrations being offered to them in eight different products where they don't necessarily want an integration. I'm perfectly happy to write my own emails.
Today, Explained
White genocide Grok
Yes. They were the first to launch a language model in the form of a chatbot that you could talk with. And they have the largest share of users. And a lot of the recent, like, very cool AI functionality people have seen, like the ability to turn all your family pictures into cartoons, that has come out of OpenAI and out of ChatGPT.
Today, Explained
White genocide Grok
You can still, if you work really hard at it, find some crazy behavior from OpenAI's models. The way I would say it is how much work you have to put in to get it to say something horrible is much higher for OpenAI than Grok. For Grok, it's pretty easy to lead Grok into saying something horrible, even when they haven't tampered it to talk about South Africa exclusively.
Today, Explained
White genocide Grok
Great question. Yeah, I asked Claude once, and Claude was like, as an AI language model, I don't have a gender identity.
Today, Explained
White genocide Grok
At some point at OpenAI, a ton of employees left. They found it anthropic. It is a competitor. It has the same mission as OpenAI, but their positioning is sort of like, we're true to the mission. We're really going to make sure that AI is done right for the benefit of humanity.
Today, Explained
White genocide Grok
Claude is excellent at code. That's sort of the niche they've carved out for themselves is Claude as a coding assistant tool for people who program. I don't program, so I can't actually speak to Claude for that. But these AIs have different personalities. Like, they vary in how much they... Like actual personalities? Yeah, like...
Today, Explained
White genocide Grok
How much they push back on you, how much they ask follow-up questions, how curious they feel, how much they draw connections across different topics. If I'm picking between all the AIs for one to just chat with, I tend to pick Claude. Oh, yeah?
Today, Explained
White genocide Grok
Well, Claude's not cool, but Claude's uncool the same way I'm uncool. See? So...
Today, Explained
White genocide Grok
Oh, yeah. Yeah. So DeepSeek is a very good language model, and it was sort of important in two ways. One is that people had believed that China couldn't produce language models that were as good as everybody else's. They thought that China was behind. And DeepSeek kind of proved, nope, China's not behind. They can put out a language model that is... What? What?
Today, Explained
White genocide Grok
So one thing I do a ton is I ask an AI for an answer. And if I don't like its answer, I think about how could I have asked this question better to get a better answer? I will do a lot of, no, you got it wrong. Here's what I was looking for. What would you have needed to know to get it right?
Today, Explained
White genocide Grok
In a lot of ways, I think it's like managing a very junior employee where their first answer is not going to be very good, but you want to be patient and you want to say, okay, actually, I was looking for something more like this. Do you think you can try it again with that in mind?
Today, Explained
White genocide Grok
I tend to think that technologies change how our brains are wired and how we think. And over time, we adjust and we learn and, you know, we develop good habits around them. But at the same time, you can do a lot of damage before we adjust and learn and develop good habits. It's very much a tool that depends what you make of it. you can use it to go understand something that you didn't understand.
Today, Explained
White genocide Grok
It's like quite good at explaining minutiae of some issue you're interested in. You should double check its answers, but you should also double check an answer you get from a source, right? Like in a lot of ways, if you treat it as a source that's very smart, but not perfectly reliable, and you should check its claims, then you're in the right place.
Today, Explained
White genocide Grok
But a lot of people probably aren't using it that way and are taking it as gospel or just using it to confirm what they already believe. And yeah, I think that's a very real risk.
Today, Explained
White genocide Grok
Yeah, I'm Kelsey Piper. I'm a senior writer with Fox's Future Perfect.
Today, Explained
White genocide Grok
So I use AI almost every day. I use it in place of Google search sometimes if I'm looking for something very specific. I use it for product recommendations. I use it to play with family pictures and touch them up. I use it to entertain my kids. I... Yeah, I spend a lot of time just playing around with AIs.
Today, Explained
White genocide Grok
I think, you know, I have a lot of reservations about AI, but at the same time, we have these bizarre alien intelligences made out of the internet and we can talk to them. And I think that's pretty cool.
Today, Explained
White genocide Grok
Yeah, so from the beginning, the companies that are raising billions of dollars to train these AIs have said that their goal is superintelligence that can surpass humans at every task, take all economically valuable work, and sort of compress a century of inventions and developments and technology into a very short time, like a matter of years.