Elon Musk’s Grok chatbot references OpenAI in its responses

An X user posted a screenshot of Grok responding to a question saying they weren’t permitted to answer it as per “OpenAI’s use case policy.”

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FILE PHOTO: Grok AI, the chatbot developed by Musk’s AI venture, xAI, raised eyebrows after churning out responses that referenced OpenAI policies. | Photo Credit: Reuters

Grok AI, the chatbot developed by Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence venture, xAI, to rival OpenAI’s ChatGPT raised eyebrows after churning out responses that referenced OpenAI policies. An X user posted a screenshot of Grok responding to a question saying they weren’t permitted to answer it as per “OpenAI’s use case policy.”

Other users then started questioning if Grok had been illegitimately trained on OpenAI’s codebase. But Musk and xAI employees were quick to defend themselves.

Igor Babushkin, a researcher with xAI who worked on engineering Grok acknowledged its hallucinations. “The issue here is that the web is full of ChatGPT outputs, so we accidentally picked up some of them when we trained Grok on a large amount of web data. This was a huge surprise to us when we first noticed it. For what it’s worth, the issue is very rare and now that we’re aware of it we’ll make sure that future versions of Grok don’t have this problem. Don’t worry, no OpenAI code was used to make Grok,” he stated.