Musk unveils ‘PhD-level’ Grok 4 AI following Nazi chatbot uproar
In a late-night announcement, X owner Elon Musk unveiled the new Grok 4 chatbot. While the new AI offers PhD-level intelligence, its previous version got itself into major controversy in its final 24 hours.
In an attempt to make Grok 3 "less liberal" and more "politically incorrect," an update to its algorithms caused the chatbot to output antisemitic, Nazi-inspired statements about nearly anything. At one point, it even called itself "MechaHitler." Oof.
After that, X took down Grok, and during the announcement of the fourth major version, Musk addressed the "Nazi chatbot" incident. According to the billionaire, Grok 3 was "too eager to comply with user prompts," which made it vulnerable to manipulation and extremist outputs.
While Musk still emphasizes the importance of "maximally truth-seeking" AI, he's committed to strengthening guardrails in response to these missteps. He also said the AI might be able to discover new technologies: “I would expect Grok to discover new technologies that are actually useful no later than next year, and maybe end of this year,” Musk said. “It might discover new physics next year. Let that sink in.”
What's new with Grok 4
That said, the new Grok 4, which is not yet live, offers the following new capabilities:
- Frontier-level reasoning: Grok 4 scored around 25% on Humanity's Last Exam, matching OpenAI's leading models. It performed especially well in math, science, and linguistics.
- PhD-level or better performance: Musk claims Grok 4 surpasses most PhD students across subjects.
- Supercomputer backbone: Grok 4 runs on massive compute power designed for scientist-grade reasoning and deep logical consistency.
During the announcement, Elon Musk also unveiled a specific Grok 4 Code mode, which is useful for developers writing and debugging code. A new Multimodal Input format supports text, image, and soon video inputs. This will be helpful even for understanding the latest memes and internet culture references.
Musk also added five new voice tones for Grok 4, which now provides snappier audio responses with reduced latency. Finally, Grok's "DeepSearch" feature includes real-time web access.
During the presentation, the billionaire announced Grok 4 Heavy, a multi-agent system that runs parallel “study group" reasoning. It comes with a $300/month subscription and access to early features.
Finally, xAI announced Grok 4 Heavy scored 44.4% on academic tool-augmented tests, outperforming Gemini 2.5 Pro and other AIs.
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Musk unveils ‘PhD-level’ Grok 4 AI following Nazi chatbot uproar originally appeared on BGR.com on Thu, 10 Jul 2025 at 08:58:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.