Preface
I’ve been working on this all week, day and night, and the more I learn, the more horrified I become. I badly want to do this story justice, but it isn’t possible in a single newsletter. So I’ve broken this essay into shorter (but admittedly not short) parts. Here’s Part I.
Reporters have discussed Grok’s malfunction in euphemisms, because you can’t repeat what Grok said on air or in print (or anywhere, really, unless you want to get the snot kicked out of you). This means that if you didn’t follow this astonishing real-time illustration of the AI alignment problem as it unfolded, you’ve only heard a Bowdlerized version.
But this is one of the rare cases where, in my judgment, you must actually know exactly what was said to grasp what happened. Whatever you’ve read about this doesn’t convey how hallucinatory this was: It was an LLM malfunction on the order of the Exxon Valdez smashing into Chernobyl and releasing all the bats in the Wuhan lab. It was spectacular.
So I’m sorry abo…
