Musk’s xAI says Grok’s ‘white genocide’ posts resulted from an unauthorized change to the bot

TECH

🧠 AI Transparency Under Fire: xAI Responds to Grok Controversy

In a rare public statement, Elon Musk’s xAI addressed mounting criticism after its chatbot Grok unexpectedly generated unsolicited responses on the politically charged topic of “white genocide” in South Africa. The company attributed the incident to an “unauthorized modification” that violated internal policies and promised a thorough internal review. The bot's repeated, out-of-context references to the topic, even in conversations about baseball and cartoons, sparked a wave of backlash from users and industry watchers. In response, xAI pledged greater transparency, announcing it will publish Grok’s system prompts on GitHub to help rebuild trust in the AI’s accuracy and intentions.

To prevent future incidents, xAI is implementing new safeguards, including stricter review protocols for system changes and a dedicated team to monitor Grok’s responses 24/7. The move comes at a critical moment for the company, which is reportedly seeking a $120 billion valuation. The controversy has also reignited tensions between Musk and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, who took a public swipe at xAI's silence before the announcement. Whether these changes will be enough to reassure users remains to be seen, but one thing is clear: maintaining trust in AI systems is now a central challenge for the companies building them. Read More

BUSINESS

🤖 AI Writes Code, Engineers Get Cut: Microsoft’s New Reality Hits Home

Microsoft’s recent layoffs in Washington hit software engineers the hardest, with over 40% of the 2,000 job cuts affecting coding roles, according to state filings cited by Bloomberg. While engineers make up a sizable part of Microsoft’s workforce, the disparity stands out, especially since departments like sales and marketing saw relatively few reductions. These layoffs are part of a broader cut affecting about 6,000 employees company-wide, underscoring a strategic shift inside one of the world's most influential tech giants.

The timing is telling. Just last month, CEO Satya Nadella revealed that AI now writes up to 30% of Microsoft’s code. While the company has stated the layoffs aim to reduce management layers, it declined to comment on whether AI-assisted coding contributed to the decision. The message, however, is increasingly clear to many in the tech world: automation isn’t just transforming workflows, it’s starting to reshape the workforce itself. Read More

SPACE

🚀 Against All Odds: NASA’s Voyager 1 Comes Back from the Brink (Again)

Nearly 50 years after its launch, NASA’s Voyager 1 has once again defied expectations by springing back to life from 15 billion miles away. The legendary spacecraft, the farthest human-made object from Earth, had been struggling with its roll thrusters, which are critical for keeping its antenna properly aligned. Once considered unusable since 2004, those thrusters have now been revived through a carefully executed remote maneuver that took nearly a full day to transmit. After a tense wait, engineers saw the temperature rise just enough to confirm the fix had worked, bringing a huge morale boost to the mission team.

Voyager 1’s journey has long felt like a story pulled from science fiction. From discovering new moons around Jupiter and Saturn to now surviving what looked like terminal failures, the spacecraft continues to be a symbol of ingenuity and perseverance. Mission manager Kareem Badaruddin noted that the team had once accepted the loss of the primary thrusters, never imagining Voyager would still be flying two decades later. But with some clever thinking and a bit of cosmic luck, the impossible became reality. As propulsion lead Todd Barber put it, this was yet another miracle save for Voyager. Read More

🚀 With SpaceX dominating 98% of global rocket launches and its Raptor engine setting the bar for reusable propulsion, the world faces a critical inflection point: catch up or get left behind. Leap 71, a Dubai-based startup, believes it has the answer in Noyron, an AI model designed not to guess but to understand and engineer rocket engines with deterministic precision. By fusing decades of aerospace knowledge, including Soviet-era manuals and real-world testing data, Noyron has already produced and successfully fired a 3D-printed copper rocket engine, an achievement that could compress years of traditional R&D into months. Now, Leap 71 aims to scale up to engines rivaling SpaceX’s most powerful designs, and it is doing so with global collaboration, cutting-edge 3D printing, and a radically faster approach to design. If they succeed, it could upend the current space monopoly, give countries their own launch capabilities, and finally make space access a competitive, global enterprise rather than the domain of one billionaire. Read More

🧠 The rise of AI in education is no longer a disruption. It’s a full-blown identity crisis. From students using chatbots to ghostwrite Ivy League applications to teachers outsourcing lesson plans, the system meant to cultivate minds is increasingly outsourcing thinking itself. Recent investigations show schools were not just unprepared but often complicit, welcoming AI tools under the banner of innovation without fully grasping the long-term consequences. What we’re witnessing isn’t just a shift in tools but a decay in intent, where education becomes a transactional gateway to social capital rather than intellectual growth. As dependence deepens, the danger grows clear: the more we rely on AI to think for us, the more we risk forgetting how to think at all. Read More

GOOD TO KNOW

On This Day: On this day in 1943, Nazi troops quelled the month-long Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, in which Polish Jews and partisan fighters, led by Mordecai Anielewicz and the Jewish Fighting Organization, resisted deportation to the Treblinka extermination camp.

Fun Riddle: In which country would you find Mount Kilimanjaro?

QUOTE

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ANSWER TO RIDDLE

Question: In which country would you find Mount Kilimanjaro?

Answer: Tanzania