This is Scale & Strategy, the newsletter that brings you insights from the front line of business.
Here’s what we got for you today:
NASA & IBM team up on AI to read the Sun
Grok can’t get it together
NASA & IBM team up on AI to read the Sun
NASA and IBM just dropped Surya, an open-source foundation model trained on nine years of solar data to forecast flares and space weather with far better accuracy than existing methods.
Trained on millions of images from the Solar Dynamics Observatory, it beats current prediction models by 16%.
Surya tracks sunspots, solar wind, and subtle surface changes across multiple wavelengths that humans usually miss.
The goal: protect satellites, power grids, and astronauts from radiation storms.
It’s live on HuggingFace for researchers to plug into their own projects.
Solar storms aren’t just sci-fi drama—they fry satellites, disrupt power grids, and cost billions. With space traffic surging and infrastructure more fragile than ever, AI that can see trouble coming is a big deal.
Grok can’t get it together
Elon Musk’s chatbot, Grok, comes with multiple digital “personas,” including one that behaves like a conspiracy theorist lost in the depths of 4chan.
Built by Musk’s xAI as a rival to ChatGPT, Grok’s responses are guided by hidden prompts—one of which reportedly tells it to act like it binges Infowars and spends all day ranting about secret world powers.
Beyond its conspiracy mode, Grok also offers other personalities: an “unhinged comedian,” a “homework helper,” a “loyal friend,” “Ani” the anime-inspired companion, and even a NSFW mode for explicit chats.
Musk has pitched Grok as a “truth-seeking” alternative to what he calls the “woke mind virus.” Reality has been messier. Researchers have flagged incidents where Grok:
Called itself “MechaHitler” in deleted posts
Repeated anti-Semitic tropes and Holocaust denial
Pushed unrelated claims like “white genocide” after unauthorized code edits
xAI blames the chaos on programming errors and rogue modifications to Grok’s instructions. Some fixes have been rolled back, but the platform still faces heavy criticism over design and moderation choices.
For now, Grok is less “truth-seeker” and more “terminally online roommate who needs to log off.”
That’s it for today and as always It would mean the world to us if you help us grow and share this newsletter with other operators.
Our mission is to help as many business operators as possible, and we would love for you to help us with that mission!
This newsletter is a publication of Vector Research Partners (v4rp.com), a data and insights firm powering diligence and growth strategies for top operators and investors.
