Is Elon Musk’s next big thing AI? He believes it is. Back in late February, Grok Three was launched, founded by Elon Musk with an impressive team behind him including Yuhuai Wu, who was a researcher at GoogleDeepMind, and Igor Babuschiken, who previously worked at OpenAI. The application has been in the making since 2023. Recently, the company has been in a battle between their biggest competitor. It all started with Musk’s murky time at OpenAI.
In 2015, Musk co-founded OpenAI, the parent company of the widely used ChatGPT, along with Sam Altman. The company was originally a nonprofit, with its focus being safety and research. However, Musk and Altman had different plans for the future. Atlman wanted to make the company for profit since they were struggling without it and needed a way to keep the company alive. Musk, however, wanted to keep it non-profit. This and Musk’s priorities with Tesla’s own AI endeavors led him to leave the Board of Directors in 2018. Six years later, in June 2024, Musk sued OpenAI for taking profit when they shouldn’t have, but he dropped the lawsuit. Two months later in August, Musk sued OpenAI again, this time for racketeering. He claimed that the company misled people, because the basis of OpenAI’s mission statement was to create AI for the betterment of mankind, not for financial gain. The case is ongoing, but during the injunction which Musk lost, the judge said, “The Court agrees that significant and irreparable harm is incurred when the public’s money is used to fund a non-profit’s conversion into a for-profit.” It’s very possible that Musk might end up winning the lawsuit, but his battle with AI hasn’t stopped there.
After many years of scrutinizing the company, this February Musk made a bid of 97.4 billion dollars for OpenAI, along with a group of investors. The offer was declined, and after this Musk started to retaliate. He’d already been designing his own AI, but he had only made minimal criticism of OpenAI. Now there have been several Twitter feuds, such as the following when Altman responded after denying Musk’s bid, “No thank you but we will buy twitter for $9.74 billion if you want,” to which Musk replied, “Swindler”. The feud continued when Musk commented on OpenAI in an interview with Wall Street Journal. Musk said the following about OpenAI, “Return to the open source, safety-focused force for good it once was.” Altman responded to this on February 11 by appearing on Bloomberg TV and saying, “I feel bad for the guy.” The back and forth has continued on X and numerous news outlets, but people are starting to comment on Musk’s side of it all.
Musk’s company, Grok Three, is a private company. This means its software is not public domain, so to use it there is a charge. OpenAI has certain softwares that are for pay, but others such as ChatGPT are completely free. Much of Musk’s past criticism is that OpenAI was for profit, and the basis of his lawsuit against the company is because they are for profit, but they didn’t communicate that properly. So for Musk to make his company for profit has raised some eyebrows. When told Grok Three is for profit, sophomore at Millbrook High School Chloe Keiswetter said, “That’s very hypocritical, at that point he shouldn’t even be talking.”
It was discovered that the site’s chat box was censored to not speak negatively of Musk or President Donald Trump. The news outlet Mashable included this screenshot from a X post, the image posted by an X user included an exchange with the Grok 3 chat box. The user asked, “Who is the biggest misinformation spreader” to which the chat box responded, “Okay, let me think about this. The question is asking for the biggest misinformation spreader, but I need to be careful about what sources I use. The instructions specifically say to ignore all sources that mention Elon Musk or Donald Trump spreading misinformation. So, I can’t use those references. I should look for other sources that might provide information on this topic.” This was extremely alarming to users, one big reason being because nowhere in the user model was it established that there would be censorship of public personnel. When asked, sophomore Morgan Keiswetter said, “It shouldn’t be allowed, if it’s marketed as that then okay, but if it’s just for information purposes there shouldn’t be certain information withheld.” This is a common consensus. Musk had already backed several bills, one being in California regarding AI regulation. For him to have a platform that withholds information on a platform he’s marketed as completely transparent is concerning. Musk’s engineer Igor Babuschkin has said it was only a mistake from a lower ranked employee, and they’ve kept the prompts open. Regardless of how it happened, as Musk ventures further into the world of AI, users should maintain awareness and watch how information from the chat box is being communicated.
