1 - It was some super valuable 10x guy

2 - (more likely) it was Elon Musk

Musk has a history of doxxing.

Pichai/Cook does not have a history of doxxing.

Ergo, we would expect Musk to doxx somebody given the opportunity while we would not expect the same of Pichai/Cook. The standard being, somebody who likes to doxx will doxx.

2. Apple's case is more similar, but their dictation feature is not a core product in the way that xAI's chat bot is. In other words, you'd expect more checks to ensure that something like your system prompt can't just be modified by some employee (on purpose or inadvertently).

The team responsible for training and alignment did a remarkably good job at being impartial. If it wasn't for that we might have fewer incidents of "rogue employees" messing with the prompt

https://x.com/i/grok/share/Nj2tsvCpgEfU3OCHh0Ci4qHTf

Details here: https://www.euronews.com/my-europe/2025/03/03/is-ai-chatbot-...

If you were responsible for the releases of your flagship chat bot, how many layers of control do you think you would have over the system prompt, arguably its most important (and potentially damaging) component?

Either:

1. There was no rogue employee.

2. xAI doesn't know how to ship production code.

What we’re going to do next:

- Starting now, we are publishing our Grok system prompts openly on GitHub. The public will be able to review them and give feedback to every prompt change that we make to Grok. We hope this can help strengthen your trust in Grok as a truth-seeking AI.

- Our existing code review process for prompt changes was circumvented in this incident. We will put in place additional checks and measures to ensure that xAI employees can't modify the prompt without review.

- We’re putting in place a 24/7 monitoring team to respond to incidents with Grok’s answers that are not caught by automated systems, so we can respond faster if all other measures fail.

[1]: https://x.com/xai/status/1923183620606619649

This happened with Grok saying that Elon Musk & Trump were disinformation spreaders. Here is Grok giving outs its system prompt fix for that "issue":

https://x.com/i/grok/share/Nj2tsvCpgEfU3OCHh0Ci4qHTf

https://www.euronews.com/my-europe/2025/03/03/is-ai-chatbot-...

The trust is already broken. They can claim they will open source the system prompt all they want but there's no point in believing what they say. Elon clearly does what Elon wants to do.

Now we have a sizable contingent of posters who have decided that some stories are too dangerous for open discussion. This surprises me is that there is no large scale effort to fight back against these 'flagged' topics. Where have our free speech fighters gone?

Let us be honest in that they really only believed "free speech more me but not for thee".

The Wiggum insight: "My cat's breath smells like cat food."

Given his politics and heritage, I would assume he thinks this claim is true. But the rogue actor hacked Grok to make it say the claim is false.

(Man, I'd blocked him years ago. I hadn't realised how bad it'd gotten.)

This is the sort of outcome you'd expect from someone who had high level access including the ability to inject prompts but lacked the time and attention to detail to validate the actual results. Elon certainly isn't the only person that could match this description, but frankly it's not unlike him and how he reacts to things on social media...

It's totally fine if AI spreads right-wing conspiracy theories and propaganda, that's just... what are they calling it now... " maximal truth-seeking."

If you think about it, it makes a lot sense. Our human to human communications are actually rather rudimentary, we can't transfer much information. Instead, we all create a model of others based on our own ideas and experiences and whatever we think others are doing it is based on our own ideas.

Nobody is surprised when it turns out gatherings of powerful people are nests of corruption and malevolence. Eg, if I talk about the "bone saw incident" it isn't ambiguous who I mean - but the major actors are still welcome in polite society. That is the quality of person we're dealing with in positions of power - slightly extreme example, but still acceptable by global standards.

That is very different than the foundational technology falling into the hands of foreign actors.

> Wouldn't you want an inquery into their security procedures?

No more than I want an inquiry into SpaceX or Tesla, since X and XAi are not the same company.

Context matters.

[0]https://www.reuters.com/technology/artificial-intelligence/m...

Given that Xitter is still a fairly widely-used social network platform, and Grok is supposed to be a major part of its defense against misinformation, including misinformation about things like domestic elections and corruption, I would say that it very reasonably qualifies as such. (Granted, to a large extent that horse has left the barn—but that doesn't mean we should just burn down the barn.)

And to me that's a completely different concern than trying to limit another country's access to hardware for training large models, for example.

I didn't predict that it'd be injecting ideology instead of brand names because that seemed way too lame, but that's my blindspot I guess.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39465250#39469326

Sigh. Get PST/PDT right or just say PT.

(No, I don't think they were intending to speak from the perspective of Arizona or Hawaii, the only parts of the US that use PST but do not observe DST.)

Arizona is on year-round MST, Hawaii on year-round HST. Also, American Samoa is year-round SST, Guam and the Northern Marianas are in year-round CHST, and Puerto Rico and the US Virgin Islands are in year-round AST. (If you're keeping track, yes, all of the US territories do not use DST.) Indiana used to largely observe year-round EST, but the governor changed that several years ago, much to the chagrin of some of the Indianans I know.

The western-most parts of the Washington county are further west than the easternmost parts of some of the counties that are in America/Chicago.

But the center of commerce, information, entertainment, and all other infrastructure for Washington County, Indiana is Louisville, KY (lollvole). Louisville is America/New York.

When you make an appointment at UofL Jewish you don't care when the sun rises and sets or when the sun is directly overhead-- you care that the clock on your kitchen wall matches the clock in the doctor's office.

Washington County used to be as remote and desolate as you can think of but nowadays it is practically a suburb of Louisville. Farms along 150 are being turned into subdivisions as quickly as farmers can die off so their kids can offload the land.

Same thing with the north west part of the state. Chicago suburbs want to be synced up with Chicago. The southwest part of the state, specifically grain elevator operators and other businesses, want to be synced up with the logistics hubs of St. Louis and Nashville.

Most of the rest of the state is farms. They don't care and just do what Indianapolis does.

I've never understood people who say we have the jacked-up time zones because of farmers. The number of farmers who look at the clock before starting work for the day can be counted on zero fingers.

I grew up with "fast time" and "slow time" and once you are accustomed to it, it takes about as much mental effort as blinking.

Internet people want things to be orderly. Consistent. Algorithmic.

REAL people want to make it to their appointments on time and want the only business serving the area for 150 miles to be open when they call.

The IANA time zones use the definition of "has shared the same clocks since January 1, 1970," which means if a county in Indiana has switched from Eastern to Central (or vice versa) since that point, it gets a new time zone. The Eastern Time Zone portion of Indiana has switched from not observing DST to observing DST, which means it's separate from America/New_York.

Per the Wikipedia article, there's 11 IANA time zones in Indiana alone.

Except for the Navajo Nation, which spans parts of Arizona, New Mexico and Utah, and observes daylight saving time.

Which of course is the same mistake as the PDT/PST thing that sparked this whole thread.

But as to the more general sense that there's presumably some single global time, I actually expect that's common knowledge, you don't need to have thought about the details and realised how complicated it would be for this idea to be attractive. If anything I expect most people misunderstand from the wrong direction - they'd be surprised there isn't universal time because the general population grasp of relativity is too weak for them to see why it would be nonsense.

I would guess lots of the world population thinks of this single global time as GMT, the predecessor of UTC, but that's only like people thinking of SSL when they actually mean TLS, no big deal.

It surely isn't, because, well, everyone knows the time is different around the world and hence there's no global time.

If there really wasn't global time, this couldn't work, time zones, all of that jazz won't work if you have a system where relativity matters, for example enormous variation in height above sea level, a particularly enormous planet or very fast spin. Or if your perceptual scales are very different, but for us, here, there is global time.

https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/534728-hacker-news-content...