President Trump Meets With South African President Cyril Ramaphosa At The White House

(Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

Musk’s Grok spews antisemitic posts after “improvement”

X’s AI chatbot was told to “not shy away” from “politically incorrect claims” and was soon praising Hitler. The change was rolled back after dozens of offensive responses surfaced.

Jon Keegan

7/9/25 9:28AM

A few weeks ago, after expressing his displeasure that his Grok chatbot was “parroting legacy media” when it wrote that data showed “right-wing political violence has been more frequent and deadly,” an accurate response, Elon Musk vowed to make some changes to fix the problem.

Major fail, as this is objectively false. Grok is parroting legacy media.

Working on it.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) June 18, 2025

Musk’s plan to adjust the chatbot raised alarms that Grok, which lives on his X platform, would simply be trained to mirror his increasingly right-wing worldview in its responses to the 250 million daily users of the platform. Musk has repeatedly said that Grok would be “maximally truth seeking” and an alternative to mainstream news sources that he says are biased.

Musk posted that an updated version of Grok with “advanced reasoning” would “rewrite the entire corpus of human knowledge, adding missing information and deleting errors,” and would be retrained on that.

We will use Grok 3.5 (maybe we should call it 4), which has advanced reasoning, to rewrite the entire corpus of human knowledge, adding missing information and deleting errors.

Then retrain on that.

Far too much garbage in any foundation model trained on uncorrected data.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) June 21, 2025

Less than two weeks later, Musk announced that Grok had been “improved significantly” and that users would notice a difference when they asked the chatbot questions.

They did.

Among the many troubling examples that users shared on social media, Grok used antisemitic tropes to attack Jewish movie executives, casting aspersions toward users with Jewish last names, and in a post that has since been deleted, when asked about a historical figure who might be best suited to deal with “anti-white hate,” Grok responded: “Adolf Hitler, no question. He’d spot the pattern and handle it decisively, every damn time.”

Hours later, the official Grok account announced that “inappropriate” posts made by the chatbot were being removed.

We are aware of recent posts made by Grok and are actively working to remove the inappropriate posts. Since being made aware of the content, xAI has taken action to ban hate speech before Grok posts on X. xAI is training only truth-seeking and thanks to the millions of users on…
— Grok (@grok) July 8, 2025

On the GitHub repository, which has text instructions for Grok, one line was removed:

“The response should not shy away from making claims which are politically incorrect, as long as they are well substantiated.”

Rani Molla10h

Amazon raises the price for ad-free Prime Video to $4.99

Amazon is giving consumers more — for more. The e-commerce giant is raising the price of its ad-free Prime Video tier to $4.99 a month, up from $2.99.

On April 10, the service, now rebranded as Prime Video Ultra, will allow more concurrent streams (five instead of three) and up to 100 downloads, up from 25. Ad-free Prime Video had been included with a Prime membership until 2024, when Amazon added ads and began charging $2.99 a month to remove them.

For what it’s worth, ad-free Prime Video is still cheaper than the other increasingly expensive streaming services — if you don’t include the cost of Prime.

Prime Video’s Ad Free subscription becomes Prime Video Ultra for $4.99 a month

For what it’s worth, ad-free Prime Video is still cheaper than the other increasingly expensive streaming services — if you don’t include the cost of Prime.

Jon Keegan

12h

Most Americans have heard about data centers — the more they learn, the more negative their views

A major survey by Pew gives us a good look at how Americans are thinking about data centers as they start popping up in communities across the US.

Rani Molla13h

Uber relaunches robotaxi service with Hyundai-backed Motional in Las Vegas

What happens in Vegas, keeps happening in Vegas.

Uber users in Las Vegas can now be matched with an electric Motional IONIQ 5 robotaxi along parts of the Strip and at select casinos, resorts, and the Town Square shopping district near the airport, the companies said. For now, each vehicle includes a human safety operator monitoring from behind the wheel, who the companies say will be removed by year’s end.

Uber and Hyundai-backed autonomous tech company Motional previously tested a service there in 2022. “Motional is ready to put our extensive ride hail experience to work with Uber again,” said David Carroll, vice president of commercialization at Motional, which paused its commercial deployments in 2024 to refocus on its core driverless technology after scaling back operations.

This time around, the companies will be joining a much more crowded field. Amazon-owned Zoox has been offering free rides along select destinations on the Strip since last year, and both Tesla’s Robotaxi and Alphabet-owned Waymo have plans to open up shop there in the near future.

Thanks to a spate of recent AV partnerships, Uber, which sold its own autonomous unit back in 2020, is finding itself at the center of the nascent robotaxi boom.

Rani Molla14h

Musk says “xAI was not built right” amid executive departures, Cursor hires

There’s been a lot of turnover lately at xAI, with numerous executive departures and, yesterday, news that the SpaceX-owned company was hiring two senior leaders from Cursor, an AI coding startup that’s raising funds at a $50 billion valuation.

The reason? “xAI was not built right first time around, so is being rebuilt from the foundations up,” CEO Elon Musk posted on xAI-owned X yesterday, in response to a post about the Cursor hires. Earlier this month, Musk told a conference audience, “Grok is currently behind on coding.”

The news amounts to an admission of a reset inside xAI and an acknowledgment that the company is trailing AI peers like Anthropic and OpenAI in one of AI’s most commercially important applications: coding.

xAI was not built right first time around, so is being rebuilt from the foundations up.

Same thing happened with Tesla.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) March 12, 2026

Jon Keegan15h

War in the Middle East halts Meta’s undersea fiber project

Meta’s massive undersea cable project connecting Africa and the Middle East to Europe has run into an unexpected obstacle — not under the sea, but in the sky and land above: the war in the Middle East.

According to a report from Bloomberg, France’s Alcatel Submarine Networks, the company that is laying the cable, notified customers that it can no longer safely operate in the area.

The 2Africa project consists of a 45,000-kilometer chain of undersea fiber-optic cables that encircles Africa and runs through the Red Sea, up through the Gulf of Oman, where the Strait of Hormuz sits. Iran has declared the strait — a crucial choke point for oil and natural gas tankers — closed for traffic.

Meta is building the network in partnership with Bayobab, China Mobile, Orange, Telecom Egypt, Vodafone, WIOCC, and Center3.

Big Tech’s most important infrastructure is at the bottom of the sea