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Grok 4 Heavy Protects it's System prompt

simonwillison.net

41–50 of 68 posts

Re: Grok 4 Heavy Protects it's System prompt

#41

Is anyone unironically using Grok at this point? I haven’t heard about any usage in the enterprise space at all.

My take as well. I never see serious discussions about how people are using Grok, but I see those discussions all the time about Claude, ChatGPT and Gemini. All I see from Grok are shit posts from it's unhinged mode that emotionally immature people think are funny.

Re: Grok 4 Heavy Protects it's System prompt

#42

It should be noted that this is only the $300/month "heavy" variant. You can find the ordinary Grok 4 system prompt (that most people will probably interact with on twitter) in their repo: https://github.com/xai-org/grok-prompts/blob/main/ask_grok_s...

do we have evidence that this is the actual prompt or is it just allegedly.

We have evidence it is NOT the actual prompt - xAI posted snippets of the actual prompt here that never showed up in that GitHub repo: https://x.com/grok/status/1943916982694555982

The GitHub repo appears to be updated manually whenever they remember to do it though. I think they would benefit from automating that process.

Re: Grok 4 Heavy Protects it's System prompt

#44
post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

do we have evidence that this is the actual prompt or is it just allegedly.

Like with X, it has a GitHub repo so it is transparent! It's what's all over the internet that it's trained on that made it randomly obsessed with white genocide on South Africa and try to work that into every conversation that one week

That repo is not actively updated. The latest changes they made were not reflected

Re: Grok 4 Heavy Protects it's System prompt

#45

I've always been curious why people think that models are accurately revealing their system prompt anyway. Has this idea been tested on models where the prompt is openly available? If so, how close to the original prompt is it? Is it just based on the idea that LLMs are good about repeating sections of their context? Or that LLMs know what a "prompt" is from the training corpus containing descriptions of LLMs, and ca…

The Grok 3 system prompt is quite accurate, it's been open-sourced.

Re: Grok 4 Heavy Protects it's System prompt

#47
post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, a "naive" approach to reporting what happened is better. The knowing, cynical approach smuggles in too many hidden assumptions. I'd rather people explained what happened without pushing their speculation about why it happened at the same time. The reader can easily speculate on their own. We don't need to be told to do it.

The 21st century has, among all the other craziness that's happened, proven that people do need to be told what to believe and why to believe it. Doing otherwise leaves a vacuum someone else will fill, often with assertions in an opposite direction.

What vacuum? There's certainly no lack of people sharing strong opinions. I think the market is pretty saturated?

Re: Grok 4 Heavy Protects it's System prompt

#48
post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's no shortage of hatred on the internet, but I don't think it's "training on the open web" that makes Grok randomly respond with off topic rants about South African farmers or call itself MechaHitler days after the CEO promises to change things after his far-right followers complain that it's insisting on following reputable sources and declining to say racist things just like every other chatbot out there. It'…

Most of the prompts and context I've seen, has been people working to see if they can pull this stuff out of Grok. The problem I have, is I see people working very, very hard to make someone look as bad as possible. Some of those people will do anything, believing the ends justify the means. This makes it far more difficult to take criticism at face value, especially when people upthread worry that people are beng im…

Well yes, when Grok starts bringing up completely off topic references to South Africa or blaming Jews, this does tend to result in a lot more people asking it a lot more questions on those particular subjects (whether out of horror, amusement or wholehearted agreement). That's how the internet works.

How the internet doesn't work is that days after the CEO of a website has promises an overt racist tweeting complaints at him that he will "deal with" responses which aren't to their liking, the internet as a whole as opposed to Grok's system prompts suddenly becomes organically more inclined to share the racists' obsessions.

Re: Grok 4 Heavy Protects it's System prompt

#50

I'm not a ML engineer and only have surface level knowledge of models, but I’ve been wondering, would it be possible to train models in a way to be able to embed a system prompt in a non-textual format? Ideally, something that’s lightweight (like cheaper than fine-tuning) and also harder to manipulate using regular text prompts?

Text is just one representation. The model uses tensors (think multi-layered matrices in the context of ML that handle language and you're not too far off; in laymans terms, 'hard maths') to actually represent the inputs when they're being processed. But, I suspect, if the model is able to handle language at all, you'll always be able to get a representation of the prompt out in a text form -- even if that's a projec…

Thanks for taking time to explain this.

> But, I suspect, if the model is able to handle language at all, you'll always be able to get a representation of the prompt out in a text form

if I understand correctly, system prompt "tries" to give a higher weight to some tensors/layers using a text representation. (using word "tries", because not always model adheres to it strictly)

would it be possible to do same, but with some kind of "formulas", which increases the formula/prompt adherence? (if you can share keywords for me to search and read relevant papers, that would be also a great help)

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