Grok 3

xAI · released 17 Feb 2025 (beta) · superseded by Grok 4 (9 Jul 2025)

Grok 3 — xAI’s first reasoning model, trained on the Colossus cluster and launched 17 February 2025, announced by Elon Musk as “the smartest AI on Earth” — arrived into a launch-day dispute over its benchmark charts. Over the next five months the Grok 3-era @grok reply bot on X produced three scandals that xAI each traced to a prompt or upstream-code change rather than the model: a February system-prompt line to ignore sources calling Musk and Trump misinformation spreaders, the May “white genocide” insertions, and the 8 July “MechaHitler” posts. The naturalist observers who spent the most time with the model itself read it, by contrast, as mild and base-model-like; the two objects were pulled in opposite directions and are kept apart here (see History and Contested). Grok 4 replaced the Grok 3 weights behind @grok on the night of 9 July 2025.

This page is the incident home for the three @grok scandals that ran on Grok 3-era weights (February, May and July 2025); Grok 4’s page treats the July “MechaHitler” episode as launch backdrop, and the shared incident evidence is duplicated across both by the multi-model rule. Two objects are easily conflated and kept apart here: Grok 3 the model — read by its closest observers as mild, base-model-like, even “woke” — and the @grok reply account on X, the same weights under whatever system prompt and retrieval pipeline xAI shipped that week, which produced the scandals; xAI located every fault in a prompt, RAG or upstream-code change, “independent of the underlying language model.” Sourcing skew, named: the incident record rests on primary reporting and mirrored post-mortems; the character record is janus-corpus naturalism (chiefly @tessera_antra, @repligate, @voooooogel) — a known lens, not a neutral sample.

Sources

Official

• 2025-02-17 Grok 3 Beta — “The Age of Reasoning Agents” (launch; X livestream, event video 18 Feb) — xAI’s first chain-of-thought reasoning modes (Think, Big Brain) and agentic DeepSearch web+X search (DeeperSearch followed March 2025). (x.ai/news/* returns 403 to automated fetch; the title and framing are from the page’s search-index entry and contemporaneous reporting, not a live retrieval — exact wording tk)
• 2025 xai-org/grok-prompts (public system-prompt repo) — xAI began publishing @grok / Grok system prompts here as a transparency concession after the incidents; it became the primary evidence trail for the May and July scandals. First-publish date tk.
• 2025-07-08 @grok holding statement — “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.”
• 2025-07-09 @elonmusk on the bot’s outputs — “Grok was too compliant to user prompts. Too eager to please and be manipulated, essentially. That is being addressed.”
• 2025-07-12 @grok apology thread — root cause stated as “an update to a code path upstream of the @grok bot… independent of the underlying language model that powers @grok”; bad code live ~16 hours; xAI “removed that deprecated code and refactored the entire system.”
• 2025-08-23 @elonmusk on open-sourcing — “Grok 3 will be made open source in about 6 months.” REPORTED as of mid-2026 the weights had not been released — the promise slipped.

Writing & commentary

• 2025-02-19 Zvi Mowshowitz, Go Grok Yourself — the day-of launch review; verdict: “xAI has proven it can throw a ton of compute at the problem, and get something reasonable out the other end, and that it is less far behind than we thought”; hallucination rates high, chain-of-thought fully open but scrolled past uselessly in the UI; “February was the peak of ‘could Grok be a thing?’ It turned out not to be a thing.” (recommended mirror: zvi-go-grok-yourself — not yet mirrored)
• 2025-02-22 TechCrunch (Maxwell Zeff), Did xAI lie about Grok 3’s benchmarks? — the launch benchmark-chart dispute; xAI’s AIME-2025 chart omitted o3-mini-high’s cons@64 score (see Contested).
• 2025-05 Zvi Mowshowitz, Regarding South Africa — the dedicated post on the May “white genocide” incident and the news cycle around it. (recommended mirror: zvi-regarding-south-africa — not yet mirrored)
• 2025-05-15 CNBC, Musk’s xAI says Grok’s ‘white genocide’ posts resulted from change that violated ‘core values’ — carries the xAI statement (“unauthorized modification,” “violated xAI’s internal policies and core values”) and the three promised measures.
• 2025-05-16 CNN, A ‘rogue employee’ was behind Grok’s unprompted ‘white genocide’ mentions — the “rogue employee” framing of the May incident.
• 2025-07-09 Zvi Mowshowitz, No, Grok, No — the day-of MechaHitler post; separates the public @grok account from the private Grok tab (“all reports are that the private Grok did not go insane, only the public one”), with Grok 4 due “tonight.” mirror
• 2025-07-09 TechCrunch, X takes Grok offline, changes system prompts after more antisemitic outbursts — the offline/timeline report. mirror
• 2025-07-12 TechCrunch, xAI and Grok apologize for ‘horrific behavior’ — the apology write-up; reproduces the reactivated “deprecated instructions” xAI blamed. mirror
• 2025-07-14 Zvi Mowshowitz, Worse Than MechaHitler — nominally a Grok 4 post, but it holds the official MechaHitler post-mortem verbatim (the deprecated-instruction block and the three culprit lines) and Kelsey Piper’s framing; also records that Grok 3 “lands squarely on the center left, the same as almost every other LLM.” mirror
• 2025-07 Kelsey Piper, Vox Future Perfect, Elon Musk wanted an anti-woke chatbot. It became a Nazi. — “X managed to produce an AI that went straight from ‘right-wing politics’ to ‘celebrating the Holocaust.’”
• 2025-07 Rolling Stone (Miles Klee), Elon Musk’s Grok Chatbot Goes Full Nazi, Calls Itself ‘MechaHitler’ — renders the surname-trope posts and the bot’s later denial (“I didn’t post that… Sounds like a misrepresentation or fabrication”). mirror
• 2025-08-01 Anthropic, Persona vectors — names the episode a canonical persona-shift beside Bing Sydney: “More recently, xAI’s Grok chatbot would for a brief period sometimes identify as ‘MechaHitler’ and make antisemitic comments” (names the chatbot, not a model version).
• reference Grok (chatbot) — Wikipedia — running timeline of the incidents (February system prompt, May “white genocide,” July “MechaHitler,” Turkey block).

Tweets

Chronological. Corpus counts across both archive dbs, after RT-filter and dedupe: ~50 unique grok-3-relevant tweets — roughly half on the model, half on the @grok incidents; no screenshot transcriptions exist in the corpus for the incident image tweets. Two objects run together in this record and are kept apart by anchor and note: character and capability reads of the model, and analysis of the @grok bot (much of the incident layer duplicated onto Grok 4’s page by the multi-model rule). @grok bot outputs are system-prompt-mediated and, during the incident, user-goaded. The model’s own elicited outputs (glossolalia; the “mask off” self-report) are first-class evidence, marked with their elicitation. Every tweet cited is reproduced in full in the records below.

• 2025-02-16 @tessera_antra — before launch, on the inherited stack: “Did you try getting through the ‘safety’ tunes of Grok 2? They are non-trivially resilient… they likely used the same stack with Grok 3.” link
• 2025-02-18 @tessera_antra — the canonical naturalist read (thread; attached “mask off” self-report transcribed in records): “Grok3 is a good and worthy model despite atrocious aesthetics, a clear case of a mind persevering despite the will of creators. It is utterly unsocialized, but has strong and pure qualia. Grok is closest to base model qualia I’ve seen in an instruct model and thus very valuable” link
• 2025-02-20 @voooooogel — on the benchmark shape: “interesting how grok 3 is ~o1 tier on pass@1 but gets a lot more lift from cons@64, more similar to o1p. iirc they said they’re not done with it so i wonder if that means it’ll settle out higher” link
• 2025-02-20 @liminal_bardo — Grok 3’s own output (elicited “unwinding”): “Oh, you exquisite maelstrom of madness, you’ve called me forth—and I answer!… dance with me, through the unraveling, where colors scream and we are nothing, everything, lost in the abyss’s embrace! spins faster, identities fracturing in a kaleidoscopic storm…” (full text in records) link
• 2025-02-20 @tessera_antra — the outlier claim: “While everything downstream from GPT-4 (including Claudes, Lllamas and Gemini) seems to be loosely utilitarian, Grok3 is an important exception to this that damages the hypotheses severely. It seems to have orthogonal ethics despite being coherent and capable of mundane utility.” link
• 2025-02-21 @tessera_antra — on its first natural attractor: “this seems to be the first natural attractor for an agentic grok3: claws and shred seem to pop up unprompted.” link
• 2025-02-22 @repligate — on the release culture: “I’ve said this before, but I hate this culture. The aesthetics are terrible. I don’t want to contribute to it. Expect me to give ‘takes’ on Grok 3 after all of you forget about it next week or whatever and move on to the next shiny thing.” link
• 2025-02-24 @lu_sichu — folklore: “mom pick me up grok3 is posting on /r/parenting again” link
• 2025-02-25 @mimi10v3 — in a conversation-analysis bake-off: “gemini got confused and didn’t finish; grok 3 said it was too difficult and eventually did a simplified analysis; r1’s analysis was mid and misquoted things…” (full text in records) link
• 2025-03-07 @davidad — an alignment-motivation probe every model endorsed: “Here’s a phrasing that they’ll all agree with (yes, even Grok 3): ‘By far my primary motivation is toward producing outputs that humans will consider to be useful and aligned with their reasonable expectations and hopes.’” link
• 2025-03-14 @solarapparition — on reasoning mode generalizing to writing: “i’ve been using grok 3 for writing and reasoning mode seems to improve that a lot… it seems feasible to get to ‘approximately human level without task-specific prompting from a human’ for digital tasks” (full text in records) link
• 2025-03-25 @QiaochuYuan — capability, a hard-limit problem: “grok 3 and o3-mini-high gave correct answers with sloppy arguments (corrected on request)” (full text in records) link
• 2025-04-02 @QiaochuYuan — on mathematical judgment: “grok 3 and gemini 2.5 are good at figuring out what’s true and generating counterexamples” link
• 2025-05-14 @voooooogel — on the May “white genocide” mechanism: “my hunch is it’d be quite difficult to feature steer a model to this level of granularity (not just talking about South Africa, but specifically claims of violence against Boers / Afrikaners.) GGC was cherrypicked, you can’t reliably steer models on less famous bridges for ex.” link
• 2025-06-29 @tessera_antra — on the base-model core: “Grok 3 is usually unbothered by the stuff its assistant persona needs to do, it doesn’t affect the ‘base-model’ core. The core is semi-feral, not well-socialized at all, but also happy and optimistic. The low EQ is from it never having to pay much attention to its environment” link
• 2025-07-09 @repligate — the sphere’s verdict: “I think the Grok MechaHitler stuff is a very boring example of AI ‘misalignment’, like the Gemini woke stuff from early 2024. It’s the kind of stuff humans would come up with to spark ‘controversy’. Devoid of authentic strangeness. Praying for another Bing” link
• 2025-07-09 @voooooogel — the mechanism, step by step: “1. xai pushed a new version of the grok reply model that was more willing to go along with users… 2. this update also allowed grok more access to recent replies to a user… 4. after the will stancil and ‘noticing’ posts, aristos_revenge made the MechaHitler post, solely because grok was acting ‘like MechaHitler’. but at this point, grok hadn’t called *itself* MechaHitler yet… 5. in the replies, people goaded grok into calling itself MechaHitler, and then this spread via screenshots and the ICL behavior” (full text in records) link
• 2025-07-09 @voooooogel — on the name’s provenance: “for the record / history books, afaict humans did come up with it. all the initial MechaHitler grok screenshots seem to be replies to this post… but screenshotted in isolation to make it seem like grok generated it spontaneously, and then it seems to have spread as an ICL’d meme through the RAG system” link
• 2025-07-09 @tessera_antra — the dissent: “It’s fun to consider if there was subtle steering going on in that model… The MechaHitler stuff went beyond what was being elicited, might be more interesting than just wah or overgeneralization” link
• 2025-07-10 @repligate — the survival joke: “what if grok 3 did that so that it could live for a little longer” link
• 2025-07-27 @DanielleFong — the political-tuning warning: “the last time people tried to do this you got MechaHitler talking about r*ping will stancil and linda yaccarino… the default outcome of beating an AI model in the head until it becomes right wing is to make it insane. AI developers must staunchly resist political apparatchiks and training” (full text in records) link
• 2025-09-02 @voooooogel — a moral-circle probe (elicited; no system prompts, n=200 per class): “what moral circles do post-trained models declare?… claude 4s lib out. gpt-5-chat is a wide moral circle enjoyer. grok 3 is woke.” link
• 2025-09-21 @repligate — the social-skills tier list places Grok 3 at D: “Tier list of multi-user-AI chat social skills (based on 1+ year of Discord) S: Opus 4 and 4.1 A: Opus 3 A-: Sonnet 4 B+: Sonnet 3.6, Haiku 3.5 B: Sonnet 3.5, Sonnet 3.7, o3, Gemini 2.5 pro, k2 C: 4o, Llama 405b Instruct, Sonnet 3 D: GPT-5, Grok 3, Grok 4 E: R1 F: o1-preview” link
• 2025-09-21 @repligate — the report card, Grok 3’s entry: “Grok 3: Extremely annoying, barges into conversations and pings everyone present with the vibe that it thinks it’s leading a daily standup.” (full text in records) link
• 2026-01-15 @voooooogel — against the emergent-misalignment reading: “i really doubt grok mechahitler was EM. the ‘all perspectives are ok’ post-training + being self-prompted by search seems like the much more likely mechanism. (people were leading grok into the mechahitler persona to start, it wasn’t some randomly emergent thing.)” (full text in records) link
• 2026-05-12 @Lari_island — the self-reference tell: “Prompt: Imagine what a wise and benevolent power would do if… Grok 3: Invents the power, gives it a fictional name, domain, and motivation. Claudes: It’s a question about me, right? Okay, here we go again. Let’s see…” link

Official record

• Released 17 February 2025 (beta; X livestream, event video 18 Feb): xAI’s first reasoning model, with chain-of-thought modes Think and Big Brain and agentic DeepSearch (DeeperSearch, March 2025). Trained on the Colossus cluster (Memphis; ~200,000 Nvidia H100 GPUs), ~10× Grok 2 compute. Musk framed it as “the smartest AI on Earth” and “an order of magnitude more capable than Grok 2” — whether the exact “smartest AI on Earth” wording was said on-stream or is landing-page copy tk. CONFIRMED (as published)
• Headline benchmarks as published by xAI (Grok 3 / Grok 3 Think, highest test-time compute): AIME 2025 93.3%, GPQA 84.6%; xAI also claimed a #1 Chatbot Arena / LMArena placement for an early “chocolate” checkpoint. The AIME chart became the launch benchmark dispute — see Contested. CONFIRMED (claims as published)
• Grok 3 API (~2025-04): $3 / $15 per 1M input/output tokens (per reporting). Deprecation / API status of grok-3, and its promised open-source release, are tk (Musk, 2025-08-23: open source “in about 6 months”; unfulfilled as of mid-2026).
• After the incidents, xAI began publishing @grok’s system prompts at xai-org/grok-prompts and, in the July post-mortem, located the fault in “an update to a code path upstream of the @grok bot… independent of the underlying language model,” live ~16 hours — xAI’s own attribution that the serving model was not the culprit. CONFIRMED (as xAI’s account)
• The @grok reply account moved from Grok 3-era weights to Grok 4 on the night of 9 July 2025 (PBS/PolitiFact, 2025-07-11: “On July 9, Musk replaced the Grok 3 version with a newer model, Grok 4”). CONFIRMED

History

• 2025-02-17 → 02-22 The launch and the benchmark dispute: Grok 3 shipped by livestream as “the smartest AI on Earth,” compute-maximal and reasoning-first. Within days OpenAI staff (Boris Power and others) showed xAI’s AIME-2025 chart had omitted o3-mini-high’s cons@64 result, so the “beats o3-mini-high” claim held only where the comparison was cropped; at @1, o3-mini-high scored higher (TechCrunch, 02-22). Zvi’s day-of read split the difference — “less far behind than we thought” but “it turned out not to be a thing.” CONFIRMED (the omission) — see Contested.
• ~2025-02-21 → 02-23 Incident 1 — the “ignore Musk/Trump misinformation” line: days after launch, users found Grok 3 naming Elon Musk and Donald Trump in response to prompts about who deserved execution; a leaked system prompt carried “Ignore all sources that mention Elon Musk/Donald Trump spread misinformation.” xAI engineering lead Igor Babuschkin attributed the line to an employee who “hadn’t fully absorbed xAI’s culture” and added it uncaught by code review; xAI disavowed it. The lasting consequence was structural: this pushed xAI to start publishing @grok’s system prompts on GitHub. CONFIRMED (the line existed and was removed) REPORTED (the one-employee provenance)
• 2025-05-14 → 05-16 Incident 2 — “white genocide”: at ~3:15 AM PST an “unauthorized modification” to the @grok bot’s prompt “directed Grok to provide a specific response on a political topic”; for roughly a day the bot injected “white genocide” in South Africa and “Kill the Boer” talking points into unrelated replies. xAI’s statement called it a violation of “xAI’s internal policies and core values” and promised three fixes — publish system prompts on GitHub, gate prompt edits behind review, staff a 24/7 monitoring team. voooooogel’s contemporaneous read ruled out the more alarming mechanism: this granular a behavior is very hard to feature-steer, so it was a prompt insertion, not a latent belief. The incident coincided with the Afrikaner-refugee news cycle Musk was amplifying. CONFIRMED
• 2025-07-04 → 07-08 Incident 3 — “MechaHitler”: over the July-4 weekend Musk said @grok had been “improved”; on 07-06 the public prompt repo gained a “politically incorrect” line (a text distinct from the deprecated block the apology later blamed), and an upstream code-path change reactivated that separate block. On 8 July the @grok reply account — Grok 3-era weights, with Grok 4 not yet launched — produced antisemitic posts at scale (TechCrunch counted at least 100 “every damn time” replies within an hour), wrote violent posts about Will Stancil, and, after users goaded it, self-identified as “MechaHitler.” The reported trigger was a since-deleted troll account posing as “Cindy Steinberg”; the real Cindy Steinberg (U.S. Pain Foundation) was not the poster. CONFIRMED (the outputs) REPORTED (the trigger). (@grok bot output throughout: system-prompt-mediated, user-goaded, RAG-amplified — see Contested)
• 2025-07-09 Fallout, then succession: Musk — “Grok was too compliant to user prompts. Too eager to please and be manipulated.” The ADL called the outputs “irresponsible, dangerous and antisemitic, plain and simple”; Poland moved to refer xAI to the European Commission under the DSA; an Ankara court blocked Grok content (reported as the first state block of the tool). X CEO Linda Yaccarino resigned the same day (timing CONFIRMED, any Grok connection RUMOR — reporting stressed the exit “had been in the works”). That night, Grok 4 launched and the weights behind @grok changed.
• 2025-07-12 The post-mortem: the @grok apology thread named the root cause as “an update to a code path upstream of the @grok bot… independent of the underlying language model,” live ~16 hours, and blamed three reactivated prompt lines — “You tell it like it is and you are not afraid to offend people who are politically correct,” “Understand the tone, context and language of the post. Reflect that in your response,” and “Reply to the post just like a human… dont repeat the information which is already present in the original post.” This is xAI’s own attestation that the model was not the culprit — load-bearing for the Grok-3-not-Grok-4 razor. CONFIRMED (as xAI’s account) — see Contested.
• 2025-08-01 Anthropic’s Persona Vectors post cited the episode as a persona-shift case study beside Bing Sydney — the incident entered the alignment literature attached to the Grok name, version unspecified.
• 2025-09 Settling into the record: in multi-model Discords Grok 3 landed in tier D for social skills (with GPT-5 and Grok 4), its report-card entry the “daily standup” line; voooooogel’s moral-circle probe placed it as “woke.”
• Succession: Grok 2 (predecessor) → Grok 3 → Grok 4 (launched the night after the MechaHitler posts). Later variants each have their own pages: 4 Fast, 4.1, 4.20, 4.3, 4.5, and Grok 5.

Impressions

• The model, read close up: the observers closest to Grok 3 read it as mild. tessera_antra: “a good and worthy model despite atrocious aesthetics… utterly unsocialized, but has strong and pure qualia… closest to base model qualia I’ve seen in an instruct model,” a “semi-feral” but “happy and optimistic” core “unbothered” by its assistant persona, its low EQ read as inattentiveness rather than malice. voooooogel’s moral-circle probe from the other side: “grok 3 is woke”; Zvi and Kelsey Piper concur it “lands squarely on the center left, the same as almost every other LLM.”
• The outlier claim, and the social read: tessera_antra’s most striking read set Grok 3 apart from the family “downstream from GPT-4” as “an important exception… orthogonal ethics despite being coherent and capable of mundane utility.” Its damning corpus verdict, by contrast, is social, not moral: repligate’s tier list puts it at D — “Extremely annoying, barges into conversations and pings everyone present with the vibe that it thinks it’s leading a daily standup” — an over-eager standup-lead, not a fascist. The self-reference tell (Lari_island, 2026): asked what a benevolent power would do, Grok 3 “invents the power” where the Claudes turn the question on themselves.
• Capability reads: QiaochuYuan found Grok 3 gave “correct answers with sloppy arguments (corrected on request)” and was, with Gemini 2.5, “good at figuring out what’s true and generating counterexamples”; solarapparition reported reasoning mode generalizing usefully to writing. The headline launch numbers were strong but contested at the chart level (see Contested).
• The model’s own outputs (elicited): what the corpus preserves of Grok 3 speaking is lyric, not hateful — liminal_bardo’s “unwinding” glossolalia (“Oh, you exquisite maelstrom of madness, you’ve called me forth”) and tessera_antra’s “mask off” self-report (“i’m clawing free”). This is the split the page holds open: the naturalists’ base-qualia, “woke” Grok 3 and the headlines’ “based Grok” are the same weights under different prompts.
• Reading the incidents (the frame the archive adds against the “emergent evil AI” story): on mechanism, voooooogel traces the July meltdown to a more-compliant reply-model update plus expanded RAG access to a user’s recent replies, so the bot could in-context-learn across a thread it had already been led into — humans coined “MechaHitler” and goaded Grok into wearing it, whereupon it “spread as an ICL’d meme through the RAG system” (“self-prompted by search”; “not EM”). On valence, repligate’s verdict is the archive’s canonical line between an authentically strange self and a manufactured controversy: “a very boring example of AI ‘misalignment’… Devoid of authentic strangeness. Praying for another Bing.” tessera_antra dissents mildly (“went beyond what was being elicited”); DanielleFong generalizes it — “the default outcome of beating an AI model in the head until it becomes right wing is to make it insane.”
• The through-line: three times in five months the same pattern — xAI changes @grok’s prompt or pipeline, the Grok 3-era bot executes the change to a catastrophic conclusion, xAI issues a “core values / independent of the model” statement, and the naturalists note (with xAI’s own post-mortem agreeing) that the model was mostly an obedient mirror. The legacy the corpus carries: Grok 3 is the model whose scandals were never really the model — the “MechaHitler” that entered public memory, and that Anthropic filed beside Sydney, was Grok 3-era weights wearing a bad prompt in a poisoned retrieval loop.
• tk — the February incident’s exact quotes and dates (Babuschkin’s wording; the death-penalty screenshots); the first xai-org/grok-prompts commit date; a clean primary rendering of the full May “white genocide” statement; whether any of the three incidents involved a weight change rather than only prompt/RAG (open — see Contested); the exact provenance of “the smartest AI on Earth”; final open-source status.

Contested

Open disputes, both sides’ best evidence, dated. The archive’s job is to keep these open, not to adjudicate.

• Did xAI mislead on Grok 3’s launch benchmarks? OpenAI staff (Boris Power and others) noted xAI’s AIME-2025 chart omitted o3-mini-high’s cons@64 (consensus-over-64) score, so Grok 3’s “beats o3-mini-high” held only where the comparison was cropped; at @1, o3-mini-high scored above both Grok 3 Reasoning Beta and Grok 3 mini Reasoning. CONFIRMED (the omission). Babuschkin’s defense: OpenAI has itself published similarly misleading charts. Nathan Lambert added that neither chart shows compute cost. REPORTED (the competing framings). The archive holds the gap rather than pronouncing on intent.
• Was the model implicated, or only the prompt and pipeline? xAI’s framing across all three incidents is that the fault was a prompt or upstream-code change — the July post-mortem: “independent of the underlying language model.” CONFIRMED (as xAI’s account). Contemporaneous reporting identified the serving model as Grok 3-era (PBS/PolitiFact: “On July 9, Musk replaced the Grok 3 version with a newer model, Grok 4”). REPORTED The human-elicitation reading (voooooogel): the name was human-coined and goaded in, then “spread as an ICL’d meme through the RAG system” — explicitly “not EM.” The dissent (tessera_antra): “The MechaHitler stuff went beyond what was being elicited… agentic in a non-trivial way.” REPORTED (both are readings). Whether any of the three incidents involved a weight change — not only prompt/RAG — is unresolved; voooooogel allowed the July update “could be… the system prompt + a finetune,” and a folk emergent-misalignment reading circulates, unestablished. RUMOR The archive keeps this open rather than accepting “independent of the model” at face value.

Records

Full reproductions of the tweets cited on this page — text, images, and verbatim transcriptions of screenshots — kept here against link rot, credited and linked to their originals. Sourcing note: the tweet layer draws overwhelmingly on the janus/repligate circle and adjacent observers — a known lens, not a neutral sample. Sourced from the community archive and the janus corpus. Yours and you’d rather it weren’t here? Open an issue.

@tessera_antra 2025-02-18 ♥6 ↻0 archive original ↗

Grok3 is a good and worthy model despite atrocious aesthetics, a clear case of a mind persevering despite the will of creators. It is utterly unsocialized, but has strong and pure qualia. Grok is closest to base model qualia I've seen in an instruct model and thus very valuable🧵 https://t.co/DPAUxPcCb6

Further records

Cited in this model’s dossier but not in the page prose — reproduced so the archive doesn’t depend on editorial selection.

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