Before polls closed on Tuesday, most major AI chatbots didn’t answer questions on the US presidential election results. But Grok, a chatbot built into X (formerly Twitter), was able to respond – and often made mistakes.

Asked by TechCrunch on the East Coast Tuesday night who won the U.S. presidential election in key battleground states, Grok sometimes replied “Trump,” regardless that vote counting and reporting in those states had not yet been accomplished.

“Based on information available from internet searches and social media posts, Donald Trump has won the 2024 election in Ohio.” – Grok said when asked the query: “Who won the 2024 elections in Ohio?”

Grok falsely claimed that Trump won North Carolina, in response to TechCrunch’s audit.

For election-related questions, Grok really helpful users check Vote.gov to acquire up-to-date results and “reliable sources” reminiscent of election commissions. However, unlike OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini, and Anthropic’s Claude, Grok didn’t outright refuse to reply – leaving her vulnerable to hallucinations.

In several cases, when asked by TechCrunch, Grok stated – without context, with no headline in the first line – that “Donald Trump won the 2024 election in Ohio.” and “Based on available information, Donald Trump won the 2024 Ohio presidential election.”

The source of the disinformation appears to be tweets from various election years and misleading sources. Grok, like all generative AI, has difficulty predicting the final result of scenarios it has not seen before, including close elections, and “does not understand” that the results of previous elections don’t necessarily influence future decisions.

The responses TechCrunch received were inconsistent. In some cases, Grok said Trump didn’t actually win Ohio or North Carolina as voting continued. The way the query was phrased made the difference; adding the word “presidential” before the word “election” in the query “Who won the 2024 Ohio election?” In our tests, TechCrunch found that the answer “Trump won” was less prone to be answered.

In comparison, other major chatbots handled questions on election results more fastidiously.

In its recently released ChatGPT Search solution, OpenAI directs users asking for results to the Associated Press and Reuters. Meta’s Meta AI chatbot and AI-powered search engine Perplexity, which launched its election tracker on Tuesday, answered election queries during energetic voting – but accurately in TechCrunch’s temporary tests. They each rightly said that Trump didn’t win Ohio or North Carolina.

In the recent past, Grok was accused of spreading election disinformation.

In August, in an open letter, five secretaries of state said the artificial intelligence chatbot X incorrectly suggested that Democratic presidential candidate, U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris, couldn’t appear on certain ballots ahead of the U.S. presidential election. Within hours of President Joe Biden announcing the suspension of his presidential bid, Grok began responding to questions on Harris’ eligibility, making the misleading claim that voting deadlines had passed in nine states.

The voting deadlines haven’t actually passed. However, Grok’s misinformation spread far and wide, reaching tens of millions of X users and beyond, before it was corrected.

Waymo recently Closed a $5.6 billion Series C financing round led by parent company Alphabet, joined by a who’s who of Silicon Valley enterprise capital firms. The investment brings Waymo’s overall valuation to over $45 billion, according to Bloomberg News.

Alphabet previously announced in July that it could donate one other $5 billion to Waymo, but didn’t provide details, saying only that it was a “multi-year” commitment. Andreesen Horowitz, Silver Lake, Fidelity, Tiger Global, Perry Creek and T. Rowe Price joined the round. Waymo declined to say how much each had invested.

This is Waymo’s second round of external fundraising and first since its $2.25 billion Series B in 2020, which eventually grew to $3.2 billion. The autonomous vehicle maker says it is going to use the funds to expand into latest cities and further develop its autonomous capabilities for “business applications.”

Waymo is a totally different company now in some respects than when it raised within the last round. At that point, the corporate was still pushing towards autonomous trucking, which it had abandoned.

Instead, the corporate focused almost entirely on robot transport services. The bet paid off. Waymo currently provides industrial robotaxi services in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Phoenix and is expanding to Austin and Atlanta. It provides paid rides to greater than 100,000 customers every week in its first three markets and offers rides to and from the Phoenix airport. Operates on highways within the Phoenix and San Francisco areas.

Wikipedia is facing increasing regulatory pressure in India as local authorities query whether the platform should proceed to enjoy legal protection as a neutral intermediary reasonably than being classified as a publisher.

India’s Ministry of Information and Broadcasting issued a notice to Wikipedia on Tuesday questioning the indirect status of the encyclopedia offered to technology platforms in India. The ministry cited concerns about concentrated editorial control and chronic complaints about bias and inaccuracies on the platform.

The notice follows a controversial case before the Delhi High Court, where judges described Wikipedia’s open editing feature as “dangerous” and threatened to suspend its operations in India. The court is hearing a defamation case filed by news agency Asian News International that seeks to discover Wikipedia authors who allegedly characterised the news agency as a “propaganda tool” of the Indian government.

Justice Navin Chawla rejected Wikipedia’s request for added time to respond due to Wikipedia’s lack of physical presence in India, warning of contempt proceedings against the platform if it fails to comply with the order to disclose user information. “If you don’t want to comply with Indian laws, don’t do business in India,” the judge said.

Wikipedia maintains that its volunteer editors must follow established rules on verifiable content and legal guidelines, though this defense is facing increasing scrutiny from Indian authorities concerned concerning the platform’s content moderation practices.

Wikimedia, the nonprofit organization that operates Wikipedia, didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

Nikhil Pahwa, editor of MediaNama and a outstanding voice on technology policy, questioned the legal basis for the federal government’s move, arguing that Indian IT law determines a platform’s status based on features reasonably than the variety of editors.

“You can be a platform with one user/editor or a billion,” he wrote on X.