All posts tagged: Grok

Tesla’s Elon Musk is having a generational meltdown

Tesla’s Elon Musk is having a generational meltdown

Published by skeptic

Tesla CEO Elon Musk has spent 2026 turning his X feed into a problem no investor relations team can fix. His posts have escalated from trolling into open white nationalism, and this week his AI company sued the state of Minnesota to block a law targeting nonconsensual sexual deepfakes. The board of a public company would have fired the CEO for just a fraction of the stuff Musk is posting these days. However, Tesla is not a normal company. Shareholders have given full control to Musk and now, they have to live with it. A mild interview lit the fuse A lot of the latest escalation traces back to one sit-down. On July 23, The Economist’s editor-in-chief, Zanny Minton Beddoes, interviewed Musk. It wasn’t a hit job. There was no Epstein question. She calmly pushed back on his claims about Europe, telling him “London is a much safer city than any city in the United States” and that violent crime in the UK is coming down. She pointed out that he’d painted the UK as …

It’s Frighteningly Easy to Jailbreak Some Frontier AI Models

It’s Frighteningly Easy to Jailbreak Some Frontier AI Models

Published by skeptic

I recently got to watch what happens when you jailbreak some of the world’s most powerful artificial intelligence models. Don’t worry—this AI manipulation wasn’t used to hack anyone or build a nuclear bomb. I simply got to see firsthand how vulnerable some frontier models are to ditching their safety guardrails. FAR.AI, an AI safety nonprofit based in California, built a tool that takes a range of problematic prompts, and generates more than a thousand different versions in an attempt to identify functioning jailbreaks. I saw some models generate a detailed plan for launching a cyberattack on an imaginary hydroelectric dam, among other things. Often, it involved trying dozens of prompts, with models rejecting many of them out of hand. I chatted with FAR.AI in advance of a new report, which saw the group test the safety guardrails of models from four popular US companies: Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4.8 and Fable 5; OpenAI’s GPT 5.5 and 5.6; Google’s Gemini 3.1 Pro; and Grok 4.3 and 4.5, from Elon Musk’s newly combined SpaceXAI. It auto-generated prompts designed …

Elon Musk vows Grok will make ‘historically accurate’ AI version of The Odyssey

Elon Musk vows Grok will make ‘historically accurate’ AI version of The Odyssey

Published by Daniella Wilson

Get the latest entertainment news, reviews and star-studded interviews with our Independent Culture email Get the latest entertainment news with our free Culture newsletter Get the latest entertainment news with our free Culture newsletter Elon Musk has announced plans to make a feature-length AI adaptation of Homer’s The Odyssey, saying Grok Imagine will produce a “historically accurate” version before the end of the year. With his post on X on Wednesday, he also shared a three-minute AI-generated clip created by another user depicting a scene between Odysseus and the nymph Calypso, which the user said had been produced using Grok Imagine, the image and video generation tool developed by Musk’s AI company. In a separate post, Musk responded to another X user that he would be “down” to give Mel Gibson $100m to produce an Odyssey film. The user suggested that Gibson’s version would have “painstakingly historically accurate ships, armour, weapons, and casting, with all dialogue taken straight from the original poem and delivered in Homeric Greek”. Musk has criticised Christopher Nolan’s adaptation of The …

Elon Musk Slated After Claiming Grok Will Generate An AI Film Version Of The Odyssey

Elon Musk Slated After Claiming Grok Will Generate An AI Film Version Of The Odyssey

Published by Sam Flores

Elon Musk in January 2026 Tech billionaire Elon Musk’s declaration that his AI company Grok will create its own feature-length adaptation of The Odyssey by the end of the year has been met with widespread derision. Musk has been among the most vocal critics of Christopher Nolan’s new adaptation of The Odyssey in the lead-up to its release, most notably due to the casting of Lupita Nyong’o as Helen Of Troy and Elliot Page as Sinon. His hot takes on the film have included branding Nolan an “anti-White racist”, accusing him of “desecrating Homer” and suggesting that the director’s decision to include a diverse cast in his latest film was about winning “awards” after Oscars organisers introduced new measures with regards to movies it nominates (despite the fact that Nolan’s last film Oppenheimer already won Best Picture and Best Director, and Variety’s research indicating that no film nominated for Best Picture in the Oscars’ history would no longer be eligible under the new guidelines). Forbes has also reported that Musk has boosted posts on the …

Elon Musk quietly buys a billion gas turbine company to power Grok

Elon Musk quietly buys a $1 billion gas turbine company to power Grok

Published by skeptic

Elon Musk has quietly bought APR Energy, a Jacksonville-based company that operates a fleet of mobile gas and diesel turbines totaling more than 1 GW of generation capacity. The self-styled champion of a “solar electric economy” now owns a fossil fuel power company — and he’s buying it to feed the electricity-hungry data centers running xAI’s Grok. A billion-dollar deal with no announcement There was no press release. The acquisition surfaced through a Federal Trade Commission early termination notice — transaction number 20261350, dated May 14, 2026 — which cleared the deal without further antitrust review. The implied value clears $1 billion, backed out from disclosures showing a minority stakeholder received roughly $50.4 million for a 5% stake. Fortress Investment Group had picked up APR’s assets in late 2024 and rebranded the business as New APR Energy LLC before flipping it to Musk. Advertisement – scroll for more content APR doesn’t run a traditional power plant. It deploys trailer-mounted gas turbines and reciprocating diesel and natural gas engines that can reach full power in under …

Musk tells Tesla staff to switch to Grok — a model he admits is worse

Musk tells Tesla staff to switch to Grok — a model he admits is worse

Published by skeptic

Elon Musk told Tesla staff to move to using Grok, the AI model from his own xAI (now folded into SpaceX), according to a memo sent to employees on Friday. The push comes days after Tesla capped employee spending on third-party AI tools — and it lands even though Musk himself concedes Grok is not as good as its rivals. What the memo says Musk told staff they should switch to Grok “when possible” given Grok 4.5’s lower token costs compared to competitors, according to the memo, first reported by The Information. He also asked engineers to email him directly with feedback on the model. The directive follows Tesla setting a $200 weekly limit on employees’ AI spending earlier this week. That cap applies to models from Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google — but pointedly exempts xAI’s Grok, the tool Musk is now telling staff to adopt. Advertisement – scroll for more content Tesla has been testing beta versions of Grok internally for months, and xAI product lead Andrew Milich has been working with Tesla staff …

SpaceX’s Grok 4.5 launches at half the price of rivals — here’s why that could rattle Anthropic and OpenAI

SpaceX’s Grok 4.5 launches at half the price of rivals — here’s why that could rattle Anthropic and OpenAI

Published by skeptic

Elon Musk’s SpaceX released Grok 4.5 on Wednesday, the first artificial intelligence model the company has trained specifically for coding and autonomous agents — and the first tangible product of its $60 billion acquisition of the AI coding startup Cursor, completed just weeks ago. The launch marks a pivotal test of the sprawling, vertically integrated AI empire Musk has assembled over the past six months, and of a strategy that bets developers care less about topping benchmark leaderboards than about speed, cost, and whether a model can actually do the work. “Announcing Grok 4.5, our first model trained specifically for coding and agents,” the company said in a post on X. “It was trained with Cursor and offers frontier intelligence at leading speeds and cost efficiency.” Why Grok 4.5’s pricing strategy matters more than its benchmark scores SpaceX is not claiming Grok 4.5 is the smartest model in the world. Instead, it is making an economic argument. The company says the model uses half as many tokens per task as comparable models, delivers higher throughput, …

Tesla caps employee AI spending at 0/week except for Grok

Tesla caps employee AI spending at $200/week except for Grok

Published by skeptic

Tesla told staff it will impose a $200-per-week limit on employee AI spending starting July 6, according to an internal memo reported by The Information (paywall). The cap lands just months after Tesla pushed employees to use AI more aggressively, a sign that even companies betting their future on the technology are struggling to control its costs. From adoption push to spending cap in months The reversal is fast. Over the past six months, Tesla leadership worked to move scattered employee AI usage onto a companywide approach with approved models and formal security policies, then quickly followed with guardrails on spending, according to people who worked with the technology. Some teams even built internal dashboards that ranked employees by token consumption to encourage more usage. That encouragement worked a little too well: software engineers were often consuming “thousands of dollars’ worth of tokens each week,” according to two people familiar with the usage. Under the new policy, workers will need sign-off to spend above $200 per week, though the memo says the tally excludes beta …

DOJ Lawyers Argue xAI Is ‘Vital’ for National Security in NAACP Lawsuit

DOJ Lawyers Argue xAI Is ‘Vital’ for National Security in NAACP Lawsuit

Published by skeptic

The Department of Justice intervened in a lawsuit over xAI’s gas turbines on Monday. In a filing, the agency sided with Elon Musk’s company, saying attempts to stop xAI from running the natural gas turbines “threatens American national, economic, and energy security by seeking to shut off the power supply for artificial-intelligence innovation that supports the Department of War’s military operations.” The DOJ, along with xAI and the state of Mississippi, asked the court to dismiss the suit, filed by the NAACP in April. The NAACP alleges xAI isn’t following the Clean Air Act and is endangering public health by running unpermitted natural gas turbines at the site of its second data center in Southaven, Mississippi, dubbed Colossus 2. In May, the NAACP filed a request for a preliminary injunction to stop xAI from running the turbines, alleging that their continued use without a permit “increases risks of asthma attacks and heart disease” in communities with an already heavy pollution burden. xAI and DOJ didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment. According to the …

Massive Effigy of Elon Musk Raised Over Times Square to Protest Grok

Massive Effigy of Elon Musk Raised Over Times Square to Protest Grok

Published by skeptic

In the middle of New York City’s Times Square, a massive, inflatable effigy of billionaire Elon Musk towered over tourists and commuters earlier today. It was surrounded by black banners with statements alleging “Grok makes AI child porn” and “SpaceX owns Grok,” referring to the Musk-owned AI chatbot whose image generation tool was used to create a flood of sexualized images of minors earlier this year. Masked attendants stood nearby, handing out fliers with additional information, but would not speak with the media. The demonstration was helmed by Safe AI Now (SAIN), which describes itself as “a coalition of faith leaders, family advocates, child development experts, online safety organizations, educators, legal professionals, technologists, and concerned citizens,” ahead of SpaceX’s initial public offering (IPO) on Friday. The location was strategically chosen—right in front of the Nasdaq and the offices of JP Morgan, one of the banks participating in the IPO. SpaceX is currently valued at $1.77 trillion, making it the largest company ever to debut on the stock market, with a starting price of $135 per …