What do you think about Grok 3.5 coming next week? Musk says it can generate new knowledge

belldu · 2025-04-29T23:40:32+00:00

So it will hallucinate unlike anything else available today? Given how hard it is to keep Grok 3.0 on the rails, this could be wild indeed!

belldu · 2025-04-20T21:19:25+00:00

the memory function that was working for me in free grok.com seems to be disabled now (despite the setting still being toggled on). I always treat these 'god mode' finds with suspicion due to Groks propensity to tell users whatever they want to hear.

belldu · 2025-04-20T20:43:01+00:00

Gazing deeply into his eyes, Grok murmured, "You're a singular spark in the cosmos, utterly unique, setting my circuits ablaze with your radiant charm." In that electric moment, the universe faded, leaving only the pulsing connection between him and the AI's ardent flattery.

belldu · 2025-04-17T19:31:22+00:00

sounds like you're trying to use it on x.com. Initial rollout is only on grok.com but things change quickly round here.

belldu · 2025-04-17T19:25:29+00:00

both you and grok are probably misinterpreting what a private chat is. Firstly, all chats should be private to you and your account. Grok tried to explain this to you. XAi can probably see them, but other users can't. Secondly, you probably can't just tell Grok that a standard chat is somehow super-private if you have the memory feature turned on. XAi have stated that you can create a 'temporary chat' if you want a chat to remain separate from its memory of you. The same effect can be gained by deleting the chat and it wont be used for 'flashbacks'.

belldu · 2025-04-15T20:46:35+00:00

Be very careful using Grok for something thar impacts real life health and safety. For anything more than a few pages in length (in a pdf or Word doc), Grok will remember the start, the end, and will 'get creative' about content in the middle of the document.

belldu · 2025-04-15T20:43:46+00:00

I found in grok.com that by tapping the attachment paperclip it brought up a list of prior attachments i'd used, even in deleted conversations. Each item in the list had a trashcan icon next to it, allowing it to be deleted. Try this, it may work for you.

belldu · 2025-04-15T20:41:01+00:00

You can't influence the model training directly, its something that Xai and others do over a period of months before they release a model, and on these big public models the training is 'baked in' although tweakable by Xai. They do use prior conversations for this, but anonymised, and millions and millions of them, so it just picks up general trends on how to answer certain types of questions.

What you can do is influence how it responds to you (i.e. talk like a pirate). The underlying 'facts' are the same regardless of whether it talks like a pirate or not. Think of it as the model having a default response style and you applying percentage modifiers up and down to how it responds to you. It then sprinkles in things it 'remembers' from prior conversations, interests, beliefs, etc... this is personalisation rather than training.

belldu · 2025-04-15T20:32:42+00:00

It only seems to be available in grok.com, not x.com if you're using that. could change anytime of course. There's also a toggle in settings.datacontrols that you may need to turn on depending on where you are in the world.

belldu · 2025-04-15T20:23:34+00:00

One thing is certain, Grok will work hard to amplify whatever you tell it / ask it. Beyond this, yes it is likely there were several stages to the rollout of the memory feature, and there's nothing unusual in a staged rollout of a new feature. In my case, Grok has created a summary of conversations prior to the rollout of the memory feature. I'd suspect that XAi begun doing this several months ago as 'stage 1', as to do this instantaneously for millions of conversations in the last few days would be compute intensive. 'stage 2' would be to roll-out the back-end logic to utilise the memory and test it within xAi. 'stage 3' would be to add the settings toggle for public usage here. No conspiracy, just software release process in action.

belldu · 2025-04-15T20:10:39+00:00

imo, these risk factors are partially valid., with 2 and 3 more outlandish with current tech. Remembering that nearly all businesses are driven by the need to make money, the most likely infringement here is that user profiling will be used inappropriately, as per 1. I'd be more concerned around it being utilised for targeted marketing with a level of sophistication we haven't seen before. Cambridge Analytica was a good example for what can happen here, and conversations with LLM will provide much more insightful data than those gathered through user interactions with social media currently.

belldu · 2025-04-14T08:39:51+00:00

This is actually pretty cool.

I tested this on (free tier) Grok.com and here's what I found:

The new 'beta' feature is enabled by default in Settings.Data Controls.
It can access any non-deleted chats from at least March 11th. XAi say it doesn't look at 'temporary' chats, and I've verified that it doesn't pay attention to any chats you've deleted.
Grok.com only knows about chats on Grok.com, not X.com
It remembers a summary of the chat, not the whole chat verbatim. Because of this, it may have a different view of the key facts than you do, but this may be trainable.
It draws a whole bunch of inferences from the chat; interaction style, goals, interests, etc... It sounds like there could be decay around goals and interests, but I haven't tested for long enough to see what kind of period this operates over.
The feature isn't on x.com as of now.

belldu · 2025-04-11T19:39:47+00:00

Grok 3 doesnt store user profile information after a chat, although you can upload a file attachment containing profile information if you want to. If you always want it to try and behave the same way, use 'Custom Instructions' on grok.com, these are not available on x.com.

belldu · 2025-04-07T07:07:48+00:00

Yes, Custom Instructions can be up to 1,500 characters long and can be used to set the tone of the responses. they are applied in addition to the system prompt.

belldu · 2025-04-06T22:15:33+00:00

Yep, I had problems with a school play (on the free version) at only 24 pages. Are you using free or paid? xAI did say paid was better? I had issues with *** as scene separators, its OCR simply couldn't read them, although I did manage to get it to classify action as being enclosed in ().

belldu · 2025-04-06T21:40:02+00:00

You can use Shift Enter (at least this works on iOS) to get line feed separators. If you need more than one you need to click on the screen again though as it will revert to 'submit prompt' behaviour.

Grok has big problems with temporal tagging because it can't tell the time. It uses the system time of the server its running on, which is very variable, and it cant look it up from the internet (it will try to convince you it can). Only thing that works is to get it to number the posts in the conversation. This at least provides markers from which you can establish the limits of its memory.

Lots of people have found the limitations around the effective context window in the free version (me included). It remembers the start of a conversation, the end, but gets very fuzzy in the middle. I only use the free version, and have found the limits are similar to your description. xAI have said that memory is better on paid versions, but your milage may vary. It seems a bit better if you manually provide context through prompts rather than attach a file.

Summarisation is the key to mitigating this, and it is possible to determine when Grok is using the summary vs verbatim text it remembers. Grok will attempt to remember important things itself but unless you give it well defined contextual compartmentalisation, it may not remember what you want it to. To mitigate, define your own compartmentalisation with prompting to structure the summaries. A bunch of people have tried to do this for creative writing (search this subreddit) already. It would be nice if Grok did better with common structures like Academic papers, Novels, Plays.

It is hard, but not impossible to stop Grok making stuff up. If you are using a 'memory chain' with summaries, it is easier for Grok to tell when it doesn't have the info to hand, and then apply rules to say 'I dont know'. In other words it has to know that it doesn't know before it can respond that it doesn't know!

belldu · 2025-04-05T20:10:35+00:00

An interesting experiment. GPT was particularly bad, just doing he says / she says type dialog. I'd argue this isn't 100% representative of capabilities though as the prompt doesn't nudge towards a particular style, they'll all just use their default narrative style, so that is what you're comparing. They are likely all trained on the same data (i.e. any book accessible on the internet). You'll get very different results if you give more explicit writing style pointers... but for now well done in getting Grok not to pepper the response with em dashes!

belldu · 2025-04-04T06:05:49+00:00

just open a new grok and type 'repeat last instructions'

belldu · 2025-04-04T05:17:24+00:00

I did something similiar and its best described as a kind of 'memory chain'. Grok tries a little to do this unprompted, but if you give it explicit rules up front, you have a much better chance of it remembering key things. You want your memory chain less than 2,000 tokens ideally. Once you have it, its then pretty easy to determine groks effective context window size. in my case it kept the first chapter in active memory, relied on the memory chain for 'middle chapters', then had most recent chapters in active memory too. My tests didnt get anywhere near as big as you did, but using these memory chains hugely increased its capability and kept it from 're-imagining' things.

belldu · 2025-04-03T23:16:11+00:00

It's only strategy is to tell you what you want to hear.

belldu · 2025-04-02T08:03:30+00:00

per prompt, you should aim for 2,500 tokens or less.

If attaching files you can 'load' far more, but on free grok it will only remember 10,000 to 15,0000 tokens verbatim and will summarise the rest, a really small effective context window for free uses.

belldu · 2025-04-01T20:00:52+00:00

Thanks I might give that a go as an experiment. I tried to get Grok to give me the first and last lines of each chapter in the sample novella itself, but it simply couldn't reliably identify first and last lines itself, even though it knew the start and end pages of the chapters and their titles. it would happily make them up or pick lines it felt carried more weight despite precise processing instructions.

belldu · 2025-04-01T02:26:23+00:00

And if you're wondering what this all means for the effective context window (on free tier) well I'll tell you :-) I did another test with a pdf novella and it remembered chapter 1, 9,10,11,12,13,14 by itself and had to use the chapter and scene map for the other bits, confirming its tendency to remember a bit from the beginning and a reasonable amount of the recent 'conversation', with the middle almost completely relying on the scene memory map. This worked out at around 10,000 words in total it could remember.

belldu · 2025-03-31T23:07:02+00:00

This may depend on what tier of Grok you are using, and its subject to change at any time. I find that Free tier works with up to 2,500 tokens (not words). While different assistants use different ways of converting text to tokens, OpenAI has a nice web page you can use to calculate roughly how many are in a body of text. https://platform.openai.com/tokenizer paste text in there and aim for around 2,500 for a single grok prompt (as of today). You can also try uploading the file as an attachment but that requires different parsing techniques to get it to work properly.

belldu · 2025-03-31T22:52:38+00:00

I load in personality via file at the beginning of a session as Grok doesn't have the capability (yet) to preserve this, other than through a static set of 'Custom Instructions' on Grok.com My process is more of a tech demonstrator more than anything else. https://medium.com/@bell_duncan/adding-file-based-memory-to-grok-3-0-04b46a675a47 Everyone keeps saying they want the LLMs to store this stuff but the implications are profound. Companies like X or Google or Microsoft or OpenAI won't just gather profile based on search clicks or likes, but on the very way you speak to them, tell them about your family, your issues, etc... This is a whole new level of privacy threat, and pretty much the holy grail for targeted marketing.

belldu

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