The technological craze for artificial intelligence has allowed the creation of many models that are often similar or even identical in their capabilities. However, the same cannot be said for the Grok chatbot, created by the xAI company owned by American entrepreneur Elon Musk.
The Grok model was introduced in November last year, and was said to have "rebellious nature"At the same time, it should answer questions with "a little humor", while not shying away from questions that other companies' models would not answer.
Although its nature may make many feel like it's a joke, it's not far behind the competition. In initial performance testing, it matched competing models. It was only surpassed by those trained with significantly more training data.
At the time, its training had only lasted two months. However, xAI and Elon Musk have much bigger ambitions for the model. For this reason improved the hardware needed for demanding training and decided to use controversial method of obtaining training data.
Incredible electricity consumption
Training artificial intelligence requires a lot of data, but also powerful hardware. That's why Elon Musk's company decided to build the Memphis Supercluster complex for artificial intelligence training. They built it in the city of Memphis, Tennessee, USA.
The Medium portal reports that the complex was created in collaboration between xAI, X (formerly Twitter), and technology company Nvidia. It is located here 100,000 interconnected Nvidia H100 graphics cards with water cooling.
This is a significant advantage in training the world's most powerful AI by every metric by December this year
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 22, 2024
Elon Musk claims that it is "the most powerful artificial intelligence training cluster in the world"This is supposed to provide his company with a significant advantage in "training the most powerful artificial intelligence by all indicators" until December of this year.
However, local residents are concerned about his ambition, as the complex could consume as much electricity as needed to powering 100,000 households. This was estimated by Doug McGowen, CEO of Memphis Light, Gas, and Water.
It will learn from users
Since training artificial intelligence requires a huge amount of data, xAI decided to utilize user posts from the social media X. This fact was pointed out by the media user @EasyBakedOven, adding that they had not announced this news.
"In order to continually improve your experience, we may use your X contributions, as well as your user interactions, inputs, and results with Grok for training and tuning purposes," It says about a new option in the social media settings.
All X users have the ability to control whether their public posts can be used to train Grok, the AI search assistant. This option is in addition to your existing controls over whether your interactions, inputs, and results related to Grok can be utilized. This setting is…
— Safety (@Safety) July 26, 2024
Platform X has decided to automatically enable this feature for all users. If you don't agree with it, you can disable it by clicking the checkbox. However, there is one catch. You would search in vain for this option in the mobile app settings.
The platform's official Safety profile also confirmed this, adding that this option will soon be added to the mobile app. This was not met with understanding from users. "It is a short-sighted move at best and a mean one at worst," one of them wrote.
Did they violate European Union regulations?
The pre-ticked consent box has also disappointed regulators. The Guardian reports that under the European Union's GDPR regulation, companies are not allowed to use "pre-ticked boxes" or "any other means of default consent."
Similar regulations exist in the United Kingdom, with the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) in the United Kingdom stating that "is conducting an investigation" against company XA spokesperson for the authority said that platforms must be transparent about their activities.
"They should take steps to proactively inform users well in advance before data is used for these purposes and provide people with sufficient time and easy procedures to object to their data being used in this way," an ICO spokesperson added.
The Data Protection Commission (DPC) in the Republic of Ireland said it had already been in communication with Elon Musk's company this week about data collection and artificial intelligence models. It says they were "surprised"when she learned about the platform's default setting.
"We reached out to Company X today and are awaiting a response. We expect further engagement early next week," said Graham Doyle, Deputy Commissioner of the DPC. He also added that They communicated with the company for several months, most recently on Friday, July 26th.