What you need to know about Grok and the controversies surrounding it

NEW YORK — Elon Musk's Grok keeps getting into trouble, and this time, more of the world's governments are trying to intervene. First launched in 2023, Grok is Musk’s attempt to outdo rivals such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini in building an AI assistant powered by a large language model, which is trained on vast pools of data to help predict the most plausible next word in a sentence. It's the main product of Musk's AI startup, xAI, which has been merged with his social media platform, X. Much like ChatGPT and Gemini, Musk's company has also folded AI image generation capabilities into the chatbot. Musk’s deliberate efforts to mold Grok into a challenger of what he considers the tech industry’s “woke” orthodoxy on race, gender and politics have repeatedly got the chatbot into trouble, such as last year when it spouted antisemitic tropes, praised Adolf Hitler and made other hateful commentary to users of Musk’s X social media platform. The chatbot was also found last year to be echoing the views of its billionaire creator, so much so that it would sometimes s