Finally… a boomer chatbot.
Grok Pot
Elon Musk is looking to raise a cool billion to fund his foulmouthed new artificial intelligence chatbot, which he’s building at a new venture called xAI.
A new Securities and Exchange Commission filing made under the billionaire’s name claims that xAI has already raised $135 million from four unnamed investors.
Notably, the filing claims that its first sale of shares was made on November 29, which was the day the owner of the site formerly known as Twitter took to the stage at New York’s Jazz at Lincoln Center and told advertisers to “go fuck” themselves.
News of xAI’s fundraising comes after two of the worst press weeks in Musk’s turbulent career, spurred on entirely by the man himself via his insistent cosigning of an antisemitic tweet, a report by a media watchdog about X-formerly-Twitter’s penchant for hosting big-brand ads astride white supremacist content, and yet another advertiser exodus as companies attempt to distance themselves from the increasingly toxic site.
PC Police
Musk has been talking about building his own “anti-woke” chatbot that’s now called Grok for most of the past year — a press cycle dominated by OpenAI, which he helped cofound in 2015 and was ousted from in 2018. At one point, he even told former Fox News host Tucker Carlson that he wanted to call his politically incorrect AI “TruthGPT,” though that name appears to have been struck in favor of a different sort of derivativeness (“grok” is an overused term originating in a book by the politically polarizing accused fascist Robert Heinlein, roughly meaning “to understand profoundly.”)
Last month, a select few paid X subscribers were granted access to Grok, and it’s been clear from the jump that the whole endeavor is an exercise in cringe. As screenshots of its fledgling interactions show, the chatbot’s vulgarity often comes off as “boomer humor,” a term used by OpenAI’s own notorious CEO Sam Altman that seemed to utterly trigger his former business partner Musk.
According to Musk’s own statement, Grok apparently “has real-time access” to X’s data, which media commentator Ed Zitron describes as a “form of digital inbreeding that will continually train its model on the data of a website that, other than being a deeply-unreliable source of information, is beset with spam.”
In other words, Musk is building an ouroboros of bullshit, and he’s asking for more than $800 million more dollars to do so.
It’s hard to tell what’s worse: that he’s making his idiotic AI now of all times, or that four investors have already seen fit to put forth $135 million to make it happen.
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