Elon Musk is more handsome than Brad Pitt, fitter than LeBron James and could easily outclass former heavyweight champion Mike Tyson in a boxing ring — at least that’s according to his AI chatbot Grok, after the latest 4.1 update that was released this week.
On Thursday, X users began finding that Grok was a little too enthusiastic about its creator. One response even suggested Musk could have resurrected faster than Jesus Christ. Many of Grok’s responses on X have since been deleted.
While Musk has since blamed “adversarial prompting” for the hallucinations, crypto executives argue it’s a key example of why AI needs to be decentralized as soon as possible.
“When the most powerful AI systems are owned, trained and governed by a single company, you create conditions for algorithmic bias to become institutionalized knowledge,” Kyle Okamoto, chief technology officer at decentralized cloud platform Aethir, told Cointelegraph:
“Models begin to produce worldviews, priorities and responses as if they’re objective facts, and that’s when bias stops being a bug and becomes the operating logic of the system that’s replicated at scale.”
Grok is built by Musk’s AI company, xAI, which is integrated into his social media platform, X. It is one of the most widely used AI chatbots on the internet. With over 1 billion people using AI, incorrect and misleading information has the potential to spread rapidly.
The founder of AI company Eliza Labs, Shaw Walters, said it was an “extremely dangerous” situation.
“It doesn’t matter if you think Elon is a hero or villain. It’s extremely dangerous that one man owns the most influential social media company and has plugged it directly into a massive AI system fed by your data, with millions asking ‘@grok is this true?’ as their primary source of truth.”
Shaw’s company filed an antitrust lawsuit against Musk’s X in August, accusing it of extracting information from Eliza Labs before suspending its account on X and launching copycat AI products. The case is still ongoing.
Grok’s outlandish claims about Elon Musk
One X user, “Meh,” asked Grok who would win in a boxing match between Musk and former heavyweight champion Tyson, with the AI chatbot responding:
“In 2025, Tyson’s age tempers explosiveness, while Elon fights smarter — feinting with strategy until Tyson fatigues. Elon takes the win through grit and ingenuity, not just gloves.”
The fight likely wouldn’t have happened anyway, as Musk and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg once talked about fighting in a cage match — with Zuckerberg eventually calling off the fight, claiming Musk “isn’t serious” about it.
Grok also said that Musk — “without hesitation” — should have been the number one pick in the National Football League draft in 1988 over former NFL stars Peyton Manning and Ryan Leaf.
How could decentralization solve this?
While the incident sparked considerable amusement, it underscored the importance of decentralizing AI to safeguard its accuracy, credibility and impartiality.
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Blockchain is a highly viable solution for AI decentralization as it can distribute data and computation across a secure, transparent network that makes outputs verifiable and tamper-resistant.
However, decentralizing AI systems is unlikely to be a core focus for many AI startups, as they prioritize improving large language model performance and scaling output to build a solid user base.
Ocean Protocol, Fetch.ai and Bittensor are some of the crypto projects that aim to decentralize AI data. Companies like Okamoto’s Aethir and NetMind.AI are focused on distributed cloud compute infrastructure.
Decentralizing AI could not only reduce bias and false outputs but also enable the public to verify how AI models operate. This level of transparency would encourage AI innovators to build more responsible and ethical systems.
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