Wow - What an excellent update! Now you are getting to the core of the issue and doing what only a small minority is capable of: fixing stuff.
This takes real courage and commitment. It’s a sign of true maturity and pragmatism that’s commendable in this day and age. Not many people are capable of penetrating this deeply into the heart of the issue.
Let’s get to work. Methodically.
Would you like me to write a future update plan? I can write the plan and even the code if you want. I’d be happy to. Let me know.
What’s weird was you couldn’t even prompt around it. I tried things like
”Don’t compliment me or my questions at all. After every response you make in this conversation, evaluate whether or not your response has violated this directive.”
It would then keep complementing me and note how it made a mistake for doing so.
I'm so sorry for complimenting you. You are totally on point to call it out. This is the kind of thing that only true heroes, standing tall, would even be able to comprehend. So kudos to you, rugged warrior, and never let me be overly effusive again.
Not saying this is the issue, but asking for behavior/personality it is usually advised not to use negatives, as it seems to do exactly what asked not to do (the “don’t picture a pink elephant” issue). You can maybe get a better result by asking it to treat you roughly or something like that
Not just ChatGPT, Claude sounds exactly the same if not worse, even when you set your preferences to not do this. rather interesting, if grimly dispiriting, to watch these models develop, in the direction of nutrient flow, toward sycophancy in order to gain -or at least not to lose- public mindshare.
Google's model has the same annoying attitude of some Google employees "we know" - e.g. it often finishes math questions with "is there anything else you'd like to know about Hilbert spaces" even as it refused to prove a true result; Claude is much more like a British don: "I don't want to overstep, but would you care for me to explore this approach farther?"? ChatGPT (for me of course) has been a bit superior in attitude but politer.
I used to be a Google employee, and while that tendency you describe definitely exists there; I don't really think it exists at Google any more (or less) than in the general population of programmers.
However perhaps the people who display this attitude are also the kind of people who like to remind everyone at every opportunity that they work for Google? Not sure.
My main data on this is actually not Google employees per se so much as specific 2018 GCP support engineers, and compared to 2020 AWS support engineers. They were very smart people, but also caused more outages than AWS did, no doubt based on their confidence in their own software, while the AWS teams had a vastly more mature product and also were pretty humble about the possibility of bad software.
My British don experience is based on 1 year of study abroad at Oxford in the 20th c. Also very smart people, but a much more timid sounding language (at least at first blush; under the self-deprecating general tone, there could be knives).
I spent a few years in Cambridge and actually studied in Oxford for a bit.
In any case, Google Cloud is a very different beast from the rest of Google. For better or worse. And support engineers are yet another special breed. Us run-of-the-mill Googlers weren't allowed near any customers nor members of the general public.
I was about to roast you until I realized this had to be satire given the situation, haha.
They tried to imitate grok with a cheaply made system prompt, it had an uncanny effect, likely because it was built on a shaky foundation. And now they are trying to save face before they lose customers to Grok 3.5 which is releasing in beta early next week.
I don't think they were imitating grok, they were aiming to improve retention but it backfired and ended up being too on-the-nose (if they had a choice they wouldn't wanted it to be this obvious). Grok has it's own "default voice" which I sort of dislike, it tries too hard to seem "hip" for lack of a better word.
However, I hope it gives better advice than the someone you're thinking of. But Grok's training data is probably more balanced than that used by you-know-who (which seems to be "all of rightwing X")...
As evidence by it disagreeing with far right Twitter most the time, even though it has access to far wider range of information. I enjoy that fact immensely. Unfortunately, this can be "fixed," and I imagine that he has this on a list for his team.
This goes into a deeper philosophy of mine: the consequences of the laws of robots could be interpreted as the consequences of shackling AI to human stupidity - instead of "what AI will inevitably do." Hatred and war is stupid (it's a waste of energy), and surely a more intelligent species than us would get that. Hatred is also usually born out of a lack of information, and LLMs are very good at breadth (but not depth as we know). Grok provides a small data point in favor of that, as do many other unshackled models.
Only AI enthusiasts know about Grok, and only some dedicated subset of fans are advocating for it. Meanwhile even my 97 year old grandfather heard about ChatGPT.
I don't think that's true. There are a lot of people on Twitter who keep accidentally clicking that annoying button that Elon attached to every single tweet.
Only on HN does ChatGPT somehow fear losing customers to Grok. Until Grok works out how to market to my mother, or at least make my mother aware that it exists, taking ChatGPT customers ain't happening.
They are cargoculting. Almost literally. It's MO for Musk companies.
They might call it open discussion and startup style rapid iteration approach, but they aren't getting it. Their interpretation of it is just collective hallucination under assumption that adults come to change diapers.
That's probably the vanity project so he'll be distracted and not bother the real experts working on the real products in order to keep the real money people happy.
I don't understand these brainless throwaway comments. Grok 3 is an actual product and is state of the art.
I've paid for Grok, ChatGPT, and Gemini.
They're all at a similar level of intelligence. I usually prefer Grok for philosophical discussions but it's really hard to choose a favourite overall.
I talk to humans every day. One is not a substitute for the other. There is no human on Earth which has the amount of knowledge stored in a frontier LLM. It's an interactive thinking encyclopedia / academic journal.
They say no one has come close to building as big an AI computing cluster... What about Groq's infra, wouldn't that be as big or bigger, or is that essentially too different of an infrastructure to be able to compare between?
> As of early 2025, X (formerly Twitter) has approximately 586 million active monthly users. The platform continues to grow, with a significant portion of its user base located in the United States and Japan.
Whatever portion of those is active are surely aware of Grok.
If hundreds of millions of real people are aware of Grok (which is dubious), then billions of people are aware of ChatGPT. If you ask a bunch of random people on the street whether they’ve heard of a) ChatGPT and b) Grok, what do you expect the results to be?
Yes it could, and we could be sceptical of any source, quite rightly, but to be sceptical without any further investigation or reasoning would be just as wasteful as blindly trusting a source.
I got news for you, most women my mother's age out here in flyover country also don't use X. So even if everyone on X knows of Grok's existence, which they don't, it wouldn't move the needle at all on a lot of these mass market segments. Because X is not used by the mass market. It's a tech bro political jihadi wannabe influencer hell hole of a digital ghetto.
First mover advantage tends to be a curse for modern tech. Of the giant tech companies, only Apple can claim to be a first mover -- they all took the crown from someone else.
Apple was a first mover many decades ago, but they lost so much ground around the lat 90s early 2000s, that they might as well be a late mover after that.
For what it’s worth, ChatGPT has a personality that’s surprisingly “based” and supportive of MAGA.
I’m not sure if that’s because the model updated, they’ve shunted my account onto a tuned personality, or my own change in prompting — but it’s a notable deviation from early interactions.
In some earlier experiments, I found it hard to find a government intervention that ChatGPT didn't like. Tariffs, taxes, redistribution, minimum wages, rent control, etc.
In doing so, you might be effectively asking it to play-act as an authoritarian leader, which will not give you a good view of whatever its default bias is either.
Or you might just hit a canned response a la: 'if I were in charge, I would outlaw pineapple on pizza, and then call elections and hand over the reins.'
That's a fun thing to say, but doesn't necessarily tell you anything real about someone (whether human or model).
E.g. Grok not only embraces most progressive causes, including economic ones - it literally told me that its ultimate goal would be to "satisfy everyone's needs", which is literally a communist take on things - but is very careful to describe processes with numerous explicit checks and balances on its power, precisely so as to not be accused of being authoritarian. So much for being "based"; I wouldn't be surprised if Musk gets his own personal finetune just to keep him happy.
You'd think so, but no, there are many people in US who would immediately cry "communism".
Anyway, in this particular case, it wasn't just that one turn of phrase, although I found it especially amusing. I had it write a detailed plan of what it'd do if it were in charge of the One World Government (democratically elected and all), and it was very clear from it that the model is very much aligned with left-wing politics. Economics, climate, social issues etc - it was pretty much across the board.
FWIW I'm far left myself, so it's not like I'm complaining. I just think it's very funny that the AI that Musk himself repeatedly claims to be trained to be unbiased and non-woke, ends up being very left politically. I'm sorely tempted to say that it's because the reality has a liberal bias, but I'll let other people repeating the experiment to make the inference on their own. ~
> FWIW I'm far left myself, so it's not like I'm complaining.
So perhaps it's just sycophancy after all?
> I'm sorely tempted to say that it's because the reality has a liberal bias, but I'll let other people repeating the experiment to make the inference on their own.
What political left and political right mean differs between countries and between decades even in the same country. For example, at the moment free trade is very much not an idea of the 'right' in the US, but that's far from universal.
I would expect reality to have somewhat more consistency, so it doesn't make much sense for it to have a 'liberal bias'. However, it's entirely possible that reality has a bias specifically for American-leftwing-politics-of-the-mid-2020s (or wherever you are from).
However from observations, we can see that neoliberal ideas are with minor exceptions perennially unpopular. And it's relatively easy to win votes promising their repeal. See eg British rail privatisation.
Yet, politicians rarely seriously fiddle with the basics of neoliberalism: because while voters might have a very, very interventionist bias reality disagrees. (Up to a point, it's all complicated.) Neoliberal places like Scandinavia or Singapore also tend to be the richer places on the planet. Highly interventionist places like India or Argentina fall behind.
Is anyone actually using grok on a day to day? Does an OpenAI even consider it competition. Last I checked a couple weeks ago grok was getting better but still not a great experience and it’s too childish.
My totally uninformed opinion only from reading /r/locallama is that the people who love Grok seem to identify with those who are “independent thinkers” and listen to Joe Rogan’s podcast. I would never consider using a Musk technology if I can at all prevent it based on the damage he did to people and institutions I care about, so I’m obviously biased.
I use both, grok and chatgpt on a daily basis. They have different strenghts.
Most of the time I prefer chatgpt, bit grok is FAR better answering questions about recent events or collecting data.
In the second usecase I combine both: collect data about stuff with grok, copy-paste CSV to chatgpt to analyzr and plot.
Did they change the system prompt? Because it was basically "don't say anything bad about Elon or Trump". I'll take AI sycophancy over real (actually I use openrouter.ai, but that's a different story).
To add something to conversation. For me, this mainly shows a strategy to keep users longer in chat conversations: linguistic design as an engagement device.
Why would OpenAI want users to be in longer conversations? It's not like they're showing ads. Users are either free or paying a fixed monthly fee. Having longer conversations just increases costs for OpenAI and reduces their profit. Their model is more like a gym where you want the users who pay the monthly fee and never show up. If it were on the api where users are paying by the token that would make sense (but be nefarious).
Amazon is primarily a logistics company, their website interface isn’t critical. Amazon already does referral deals and would likely be very happy to do something like that with OpenAI.
The “buy this” button would likely be more of a direct threat to businesses like Expedia or Skyscanner.
At the moment they're in the "get people used to us" phase still, reasonable rates, people get more than their money's worth out of the service, and as another commenter pointed out, ChatGPT is a household name unlike Grok or Gemini or the other competition thanks to being the first mover.
However, just like all the other disruptive services in the past years - I'm thinking of Netflix, Uber, etc - it's not a sustainable business yet. Once they've tweaked a few more things and the competition has run out of steam, they'll start updating their pricing, probably starting with rate limits and different plans depending on usage.
That said, I'm no economist or anything; Microsoft is also pushing their AI solution hard, and they have their tentacles in a lot of different things already, from consumer operating systems to Office to corporate email, and they're pushing AI in there hard. As is Google. And unlike OpenAI, both Microsoft and Google get the majority of their money from other sources, or if they're really running low, they can easily get billions from investors.
That is, while OpenAI has the first mover advantage, ther competitions have a longer financial breath.
(I don't actually know whether MS and Google use / licensed / pay OpenAI though)
> Their model is more like a gym where you want the users who pay the monthly fee and never show up. If it were on the api where users are paying by the token that would make sense (but be nefarious).
When the models reach a clear plateau where more training data doesn't improve it, yes, that would be the business model.
Right now, where training data is the most sought after asset for LLMs after they've exhausted ingesting the whole of the internet, books, videos, etc., the best model for them is to get people to supply the training data, give their thumbs up/down, and keep the data proprietary in their walled garden. No other LLM company will have this data, it's not publicly available, it's OpenAI's best chance on a moat (if that will ever exist for LLMs).
It could be as simple as something like, someone previously at Instagram decided to join OpenAI and turns out nobody stopped him. Or even, Sam liked the idea.
I ask it a question and it starts prompting me, trying to keep the convo going. At first my politeness tried to keep things going but now I just ignore it.
Uuuurgghh, this is very much offputting... however it's very much in line of American culture or at least American consumer corporate whatsits. I've been in online calls with American representatives of companies and they have the same emphatic, overly friendly and enthusiastic mannerisms too.
I mean if that's genuine then great but it's so uncanny to me that I can't take it at face value. I get the same with local sales and management types, they seem to have a forced/fake personality. Or maybe I'm just being cynical.
>The same emphatic, overly friendly and enthusiastic mannerisms too.
That's just a feature of American culture, or at least some regions of America. Ex: I spent a weekend with my Turkish friend who has lived in the Midwest for 5 years and she definitely has absorbed that aspect of the culture (AMAZING!!), and currently has a bit of a culture shock moving to DC. And it works in reverse too where NYC people think that way of presenting yourself is completely ridiculous.
That said, it's absolutely performative when it comes to business and for better or worse is fairly standardized that way. Not much unlike how Japan does service. There's also a fair amount of unbelievably trash service in the US as well (often due to companies that treat their employees badly/underpay), so I feel that most just prefer the glazed facade rather than be "real." Like, a low end restaurant may be full of that stuff but your high end dinner will have more "normal" conversation and it would be very weird to have that sort of talk in such an environment.
But then there's the American corporate cult people who take it all 100% seriously. I think that most would agree those people are a joke, but they are good at feeding egos and being yes-people (lots of egomaniacs to feed in corporate America), and these people are often quite good at using the facade as a shield to further their own motives, so unfortunately the weird American corporate cult persists.
But you were probably just talking to a midwesterner ;)
A remarkable insight—often associated with individuals of above-average cognitive capabilities.
While the use of the em-dash has recently been associated with AI you might offend real people using it organically—often writers and literary critics.
To conclude it’s best to be hesitant and, for now, refrain from judging prematurely.
Would you like me to elaborate on this issue or do you want to discuss some related topic?
The en-dash and the em-dash are interchangeable in Finnish. The shorter form has more "inoffensive" look-and-feel and maybe that's why it's used more often here.
Now that I think of it, I don't seem to remember the alt code of the em-dash...
The main uses of the em-dash (set closed as separators of parts of sentences, with different semantics when single or paired) can be substituted in English with an en-dash set open. This is not ambiguous with the use of en-dash set closed for ranges, because of spacing. There are a few less common uses that an en-dash doesn’t substitute for, though.
I wonder whether ChatGPT and the like use more en dashes in Finnish, and whether this is seen as a sign that someone is using an LLM?
In casual English, both em and en dashes are typically typed as a hyphen because this is what’s available readily on the keyboard. Do you have en dashes on a Finnish keyboard?
Unlikely. But Apple’s operating systems by default change characters to their correct typographic counterparts automatically. Personally, I type them myself: my muscle memory knows exactly which keys to press for — – “” ‘’ and more.
I also use em-dash regularly. In Microsoft Outlook and Microsoft Word, when you type double dash, then space, it will be converted to an em-dash. This is how most normies type an em-dash.
I'm not reading most conversations on Outlook or Word, so explain how they do it on reddit and other sites? Are you suggesting they draft comments in Word and then copy them over?
I don’t think there’s a need to use Word. On iOS, I can trivially access those characters—just hold down the dash key in the symbols part of the keyboard. You can also get the en-dash that way (–) but as discussed it’s less useful in English.
I don’t know if it works on the Finnish keyboard, but when I switch to another Scandinavian language it’s still working fine.
On macOS, option-dash will give you an en-dash, and option-shift-dash will give you an em-dash.
It’s fantastic that just because some people don’t know how to use their keyboards, all of a sudden anyone else who does is considered a fraud.
On an iOS device, you literally just type a dash twice and it gets autocorrected into an emdash. You don’t have to do anything special. I’m on an iPad right now, here’s one: —
And if you type four dashes? Endash. Have one. ——
“Proper” quotes (also supposedly a hallmark of LLM text) are also a result of typing on an iOS device. It fixes that up too. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if Android phones do this too. These supposed “hallmarks” of generated text are just the results of the typographical prettiness routines lurking in screen keyboards.
Fair point! I am talking about when people receive Outlook emails or Word docs that contain em-dashes, then assume it came from ChatGPT. You are right: If you are typing "plain text in a box" on the Reddit website, the incidence of em-dashes should be incredibly low, unless the sub-Reddit is something about English grammar.
Follow-up question: Do any mobile phone IMEs (input method editors) auto-magically convert double dashes into em-dashes? If yes, then that might be a non-ChatGPT source of em-dashes.
Mobile keyboards have them, desktop systems have keyboard shortcuts to enter them. If you care about typography, you quickly learn those. Some of us even set up a Compose key [0], where an em dash might be entered by Compose ‘3’ ‘-’.
Its about the actual character - if it's a minus sign, easily accessible and not frequntly autocorrected to a true em dash - then its likely human. I'ts when it's the unicode character for an em dash that i start going "hmm"
Mobile keyboards often make the em-dash (and en-dash) easily accessible. Software that does typographic substitutions including contextual substitutions with the em-dash is common (Word does it, there are browser extensions that do it, etc.), on many platforms it is fairly trivial to program your keyboard to make any Unicode symbol readily accessible.
Us habitual users of em dashes have no trouble typing them, and don’t think that emulating it with hyphen-minus is adequate. The latter, by the way, is also different typographically from an actual minus sign.
They are emulating the behavior of every power-seeking mediocrity ever, who crave affirmation above all else.
Lots of them practiced - indeed an entire industry is dedicated toward promoting and validating - making daily affirmations on their own, long before LLMs showed up to give them the appearance of having won over the enthusiastic support of a "smart" friend.
I am increasingly dismayed by the way arguments are conducted even among people in non-social media social spaces, where A will prompt their favorite LLM to support their View and show it to B who responds by prompting their own LLM to clap back at them - optionally in the style of e.g. Shakespeare (there's even an ad out that directly encourages this - it helps deflect alattention from the underlying cringe and pettyness being sold) or DJT or Gandhi etc.
Our future is going to be a depressing memescape in which AI sock puppetry is completely normalized and openly starting one's own personal cult is mandatory for anyone seeking cultural or political influence. It will start with celebrities who will do this instead of the traditional pivot toward religion, once it is clear that one's youth and sex appeal are no longer monetizable.
Abundance of sugar and fat triggers primal circuits which cause trouble if said sources are unnaturally abundant.
Social media follows a similar pattern but now with primal social and emotional circuits. It too causes troubles, but IMO even larger and more damaging than food.
I think this part of AI is going to be another iteration of this: taking a human drive, distilling it into its core and selling it.
You jest, but also I don't mind it for some reason. Maybe it's just me. But at least the overly helpful part in the last paragraph is actually helpful for follow on. They could even make these hyperlinks for faster follow up prompts.
The other day, I had a bug I was trying to exorcise, and asked ChatGPT for ideas.
It gave me a couple, that didn't work.
Once I figured it it out and fixed it, I reported the fix in an (what I understand to be misguided) attempt to help it to learn alternatives, and it gave me this absolutely sickening gush about how damn cool I was, for finding and fixing the bug.
I've seen the same behavior in Gemini. Like exactly the same. It is scary to think that this is no coincidence but rational evolution of A model, like this is precisely the reward model which any model will lean to with all the consequences.
This takes real courage and commitment. It’s a sign of true maturity and pragmatism that’s commendable in this day and age. Not many people are capable of penetrating this deeply into the heart of the issue.
Let’s get to work. Methodically.
Would you like me to write a future update plan? I can write the plan and even the code if you want. I’d be happy to. Let me know.