Musk shares cocaine recipe in effort to prove Grok AI is ‘rebellious’

Elon Musk has shared instructions for how to turn coca leaves into cocaine in a bid to promote his company’s new “rebellious” AI chatbot Grok.

The Tesla and X boss unveiled the new artificial intelligence over the weekend, claiming that its access to real-time data from his social media platform makes it superior to rivals like OpenAI’s ChatGPT or Google’s Bard.

“Grok has real-time access to info via the X platform, which is a massive advantage over other models,” Mr Musk said.

“It’s also based and loves sarcasm. I have no idea who could have guided it this way,” he added, together with a shrug emoji and a crying laughing emoji.

The tech billionaire shared a screenshot of Grok offering a “humorous” step-by-step guide to making cocaine, which included instructions like “start cooking and hope you don’t blow yourself up or get arrested”.

He followed it up with a separate screenshot offering more detailed instructions on how to produce the Class A drug from its raw materials.

Mr Musk released the chatbot, which was developed by his new AI company xAI, just six months after signing an open letter calling on companies to pause development of artificial intelligence systems for six months.

“I signed on to that letter knowing it was futile,” he wrote on X on Sunday. “I just wanted to be on record as recommending a pause.”

Its unveiling also comes just days after Mr Musk warned that AI is “one of the biggest threats to humanity” at a global AI safety summit in Bletchley Park, hosted by Rishi Sunak.

Grok is currently only available to paying subscribers to X Premium, though Mr Musk said that a standalone app for the xAI chatbot will be released in the future.

XAI claimed in a blog post that its bot is more powerful than freely available rivals like ChatGPT and Bard, however admitted that it lags behind premium versions of the technology like OpenAI’s GPT-4.

“We hand-graded our model on the 2023 Hungarian national high school finals in mathematics,” the blog post noted. “Grok passed the exam with a C (59 per cent), while… GPT-4 got a B with 68 per cent.”