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XAI releases Grok 4 amid furor over antisemitic comments

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Generative AI vendors xAI and Perplexity released new models and products to challenge mainstream vendors.

Amid controversy surrounding its Grok AI chatbot making a series of antisemitic comments, xAI released Grok 4 on Wednesday night.

During a live stream on X, xAI’s founder and X owner, Elon Musk, said the model can perform at a postgraduate level in mathematics, chemistry and linguistics based on tests like AI benchmarking platform Humanity’s Last Exam.

“With respect to academic questions, Grok 4 is better than a PhD level in every subject, with no exception,” Musk said during the livestream.

He added that while the multimodal generative AI model has not yet discovered new technologies, it could do so later this year or by 2026.

“AI is advancing faster than any human,” Musk said.

Meanwhile, upstart AI search vendor Perplexity released an AI browser.

Examining Grok 4

The new model has reasoning and problem-solving capability and uses DeepSearch to access factual information from the web, including the X platform. DeepSearch is a tool for web-based analysis and helps with complex queries that require multiple steps.

Grok 4 can process text and image inputs and has a new voice called Eve. The model can also perform multiple tasks simultaneously and is agentic, meaning it can use one or numerous agents for functions. It has a 256k context window and comes in standard and Heavy versions. Standard costs $30 per month, and Heavy costs $300.

The standard version performs single-agentic tasks, while the Heavy version is multi-agentic.

The release of Grok 4 comes only a few months after Grok 3 was released earlier this year, and days after Grok produced a slew of antisemitic responses.

While Grok 4 shows the progress xAI is making in foundation models, the uproar over the model overshadowed the latest version’s technical capabilities, said Arun Chandrasekaran, an analyst with Gartner.

“They have solid research and technical capabilities,” Chandrasekaran said.

Also, the benchmarks that xAI cites seem accurate, but enterprises should not make their decisions about models based on benchmarks, said Bradley Shimmin, an analyst with Futurum Group.

“It is a very much a guidepost, at best,” Shimmin said. “It tells us that Grok 4 aligns with other frontier-scale models.”

He added that the Grok models have been in line with other frontier models for some time, but the update with Grok 4 shows that xAI has been trying to improve the model’s ability to exceed other models on Humanity’s Last Exam.

Safe and responsible AI

Despite the advancement, xAI needs to focus on responsible and safe AI, according to many tech observers

“They need to focus more on guardrails,” Chandrasekaran said. XAI should concentrate more on safety and ensure that the safety mechanisms are layered as part of the entire process of training and releasing a model, including considering prompt inputs.

“Particularly in the case of Grok, it’s more about the recency,” Chandrasekaran said. This is because Grok seems to be taking context from the content coming from the X social media platform, known for its sometimes virulent and uncensored arguments about politics and culture. “They need to have a better filtering way from the context because otherwise the model could be very easily baited and biased from the recency of the inputs that are coming from X.”

In response to the comments the Grok chatbot made about the holocaust and false statements about “white genocide” in South Africa, xAI blamed a programming error.

But for some, model’s offensive hallucinations go beyond an error made by a computer system.

“This is just the latest instance in which [Musk’s] work and reputation are bound up with antisemitism,” said Michael Bennett, associate vice chancellor for data science and artificial intelligence strategy at the University of Illinois Chicago. “For the industry, it’s just a clear indicator that there’s still a lot of work to be done to get these models to produce useful, unbiased and socially acceptable responses. For his enterprises, it’s a further datapoint suggesting that his antisemitism perhaps is not a one-off.”

Permissiveness in the industry

The model’s responses also signal an attitude of laxness in the AI industry that has cropped up over the last year, said Kashyap Kompella, CEO of RPA2AI Research.

“The Grok incident is a sharp reminder that unfettered AI is a bad idea,” Kompella said. “Grok’s shenanigans expose the challenges of letting out AI chatbots unsupervised. We are ignoring and underinvesting in AI governance and guardrails. If there is a silver lining, this incident should wake up the AI industry to take AI governance seriously.”

Taking AI governance is especially important because these tools and technologies have a wider reach beyond the bounds of the U.S. and traditions of free speech, Bennett said.

“For technologies that enable speech that reaches a broader audience … the norms that we ought to be targeting to get the technology to align with, must necessarily be broad as well.”

The lack of governance could also affect xAI’s ability to attract enterprise customers.

“Model safety and responsible AI is a critical evaluation factor for a lot of enterprises; it’s an area where xAI needs to make a lot of progress if they want to be a serious enterprise contender,” Chandrasekaran said.

Perplexity AI

Meanwhile, Perplexity made good on its promise to launch an AI-powered web browser.

On Wednesday, the AI-search vendor launched Comet, a browser that Perplexity said is built for today’s internet.

The new browser is available to Perplexity Max subscribers and other select users by invite-only access.

With Comet, Perplexity appears to be to following a trend that has been developing with major search engines such as Google, Edge, and Safari, in which the value proposition is no longer the link the user has to click on, Shimmin said. Instead, the model is producing an answer, while the link might still be present in terms of a footnote.

“These are all merging into one user experience,” Shimmin said.

He added that it’s not clear whether Perplexity will disrupt existing search engines or user experience, but the vendor differs from traditional search vendors because it does not try to protect the existing search browser model. While other search engines are trying to protect the existing search system because of ad revenue, so Perplexity took a slower approach in embedding AI into search and started embedding AI right away.

Comet can connect with enterprise applications, including Slack, and users can ask questions with voice and text.

Esther Shittu is an Informa TechTarget news writer and podcast host covering artificial intelligence software and systems.



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Tech Philosophy and AI Strategy – Stratechery by Ben Thompson

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A drawing of Apple, Microsoft, OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta, and Google on the AI Tech Philosophy Opportunity Graph
(Stratechery)

Welcome back to This Week in Stratechery!

As a reminder, each week, every Friday, we’re sending out this overview of content in the Stratechery bundle; highlighted links are free for everyone. Additionally, you have complete control over what we send to you. If you don’t want to receive This Week in Stratechery emails (there is no podcast), please uncheck the box in your delivery settings.

On that note, here were a few of our favorites this week.

  1. Who Invests and Why? As Mark Zuckerberg and Meta inflame the already raging talent wars, I wanted to explore if there was a way to understand who was willing to invest to win, and who was not. I came up with two scales: how big is the business opportunity for a given company, and whether or not that company’s philosophy is about helping users, or doing things for them. Not only does this intersection of Tech Philosophy and AI Opportunity explain the actions of Meta and Apple, it also helped me fully rectify some of my long-standing confusion about Google. Ben Thompson
  2. Apple Searches for an AI Partner. If Apple isn’t going to pay for AI talent, then they need a partner, which is why Apple is considering a partnership with either Anthropic or OpenAI to power a new version of Siri. For one, thinking about what OpenAI and Anthropic would want from a deal with Apple provides a window into the goals distinguishing two of the leading AI labs in the world. As for Apple, the news highlights the corner that they’ve backed themselves into after several years of failed AI efforts internally and one prolonged and very public failure with last year’s Apple Intelligence rollout. The choices now? Either surrender control and branding to OpenAI, or pay big money to Anthropic (a far cry from collecting $20 billion a year from Google for default search placement). In either case, Apple management will have to leave its comfort zone, and looking at the past few years, perhaps that comfort zone was the problem.  Andrew Sharp
  3. Is Xi Jinping on His Way Out? Every week I survey the news to prep for Sharp China, and for about two months now, there’s been a steady thrum of rumors concerning the political fate of Xi Jinping. Connecting the dots between Xi’s unexplained absences from public view, a spate of dismissals of powerful generals from the People’s Liberation Army, and a surprise absence at the BRICS summit in Brazil a few weeks ago, various internet sleuths and commentators are wondering whether Xi’s long-unshakeable hold on power may be waning. For the second half of this week’s episode, Sinocism’s Bill Bishop, who’s been studying the CCP for 30 years, explained why he finds the public evidence unconvincing and the rumor ecosystem increasingly frustrating. It was a rollicking conversation, and one that I caveated with my own note: what’s most remarkable to me about this rumor cycle is that because of the CCP’s unbelievable opacity, there is a hard limit on what any expert can conclusively say about the future of anyone in powereven the big man, himself.  AS

Stratechery Articles and Updates

Dithering with Ben Thompson and Daring Fireball’s John Gruber

Asianometry with Jon Yu

Sharp China with Andrew Sharp and Sinocism’s Bill Bishop

Greatest of All Talk with Andrew Sharp and WaPo’s Ben Golliver

Sharp Tech with Andrew Sharp and Ben Thompson

This week’s Stratechery video is on Checking In on AI and the Big Five.


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Intel spins out AI robotics company RealSense with $50 million raise

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Brian Krzanich, chief executive officer of Intel Corp., right, shows the collision avoidance feature of an AscTec Firefly drone with Intel RealSense cameras during the 2015 Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas, Nevada.

Patrick T. Fallon | Bloomberg | Getty Images

Intel is spinning out its artificial intelligence robotics and biometric venture as more companies bet big on automation tools.

The new company, known as RealSense, was announced Friday and comes alongside a $50-million Series A funding round that includes MediaTek Innovation Fund and Intel Capital, the chipmaker’s venture arm that it is also spinning out.

RealSense, which makes the tools and technology for robotics automation, said it plans to use the funding to develop new product lines and meet growing demand worldwide. Nadav Orbach, Intel’s current vice president and general manager for incubation and disruptive innovation, will serve as CEO.

“The timing is now for physical AI,” as the technology gains more use cases and traction, Orbach told CNBC in an interview. “We want to develop new product lines. We see the demand and we see the need, and with where it’s at right now, the right thing for us was to raise external funds.”

Companies across the globe have ramped up investment in the burgeoning robotics space as AI use cases expand.

Morgan Stanley expects the market for humanoid robots to hit $5 trillion by 2050 as tech companies, including Tesla and Amazon, bet big on the technology and automation.

Elsewhere, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang called robotics the biggest opportunity for the chipmaker after AI, and Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff last month claimed AI is handling 30% to 50% of the software vendor’s work.

Intel has undergone a series of cost-cutting plans after the worst year for its stock in decades.

The company axed CEO Pat Gelsinger and cut jobs last year as it struggled to keep up with AI competition. In April, the company said it would sell a majority of its stake in chip subsidiary Altera.

RealSense, formerly known as Intel Perceptual Computing, was created more than a decade ago to investigate 3D vision technology and launched its first product in 2015. The company employs about 130 people across the U.S., Israel and China and caters to autonomous robot manufacturers such as Eyesynth and Unitree Robotics.

Orbach said RealSense is focused on bringing more safety tools to the industry and easy-to-use technology for its customers. Intel will maintain a minority stake in the company.



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The AI trends driving business success

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