England prepares for India series with its first test against Zimbabwe in 22 years

For England, it’s little more than a warm-up match ahead of much sterner examinations to come.

For Zimbabwe, it means everything.

Trent Bridge in Nottingham will host a four-day test match — something of a rarity for the usual five-day format but perhaps a sign of the future — from Thursday when England and Zimbabwe meet for the first time at international level in 18 years, since a Twenty20 World Cup match in Cape Town.

You need to go back four more years — to Chester-le-Street in 2003 when Jimmy Anderson, a 20-year-old with highlights in his hair, was playing in his first series — for the last test match between the teams.

Zimbabwe’s return to English soil continues the African nation's gradual reintegration to test cricket after two decades of political interference, poor governance and sanctions that resulted in the team being exiled from test cricket for around six years.

The Zimbabweans didn’t play a test from 2005-11. From 2022-24, they played just four tests. But between December last year and August this year, they’ll have played in 10 tests, with two-match series against South Africa and New Zealand to come this summer.

Zimbabwe still isn’t part of the World Test Championship but, in the bigger picture, progress is being made. Zimbabwe Cricket will receive a touring fee from the England and Wales Cricket Board for being the first test opponent of the summer, ECB chief executive Richard Gould confirmed last year while speaking about the “huge responsibility” to maintain the strength of bilateral cricket.

Zimbabwe isn't expected to offer much resistance to England, having slumped to a 138-run defeat to a Professional County Club Select XI in Leicester last week. Before that, however, it did earn a first test victory since 2021 — winning in Bangladesh on the way to sharing the series 1-1.

While Zimbabwe's view is very much about the present, England's sights will be on the future.

Ahead this summer is a five-test series against India and then an Ashes tour Down Under. For England, it doesn't get much bigger than that so the match against Zimbabwe will be important preparation, especially for a bowling department at the start of a new era following the test retirements of Stuart Broad (in 2023) and Anderson (last year).

For the Zimbabwe test, England will give a debut to Sam Cook, fellow pacer Josh Tongue is returning to the team after a two-year absence, and Gus Atkinson is about to start his second summer of test cricket. There are as many question marks about the only specialist spinner in the team, Shoaib Bashir, and the fitness of allrounder Ben Stokes, returning after a hamstring tear to regain the captaincy.

“I've got to be mindful of where I'm at and building myself back up to proper match workload for later on in the summer,” Stokes said Wednesday.

Then there's the batting lineup where opener Zak Crawley and No. 3 Ollie Pope have been retained despite continued speculation about their worthiness in the team. There's the welcome sight of a return for wicketkeeper Jamie Smith after missing the tour of New Zealand in November and December while on paternity leave.

England is No. 2 in the test rankings but coach Brendon McCullum said “there’s a lot of meat on the bone for us” in the next stage of the so-called “ Bazball ” era.

“When we took on a project like this, it was not about necessarily settling on ‘good,'" McCullum said. "I think now’s the time, working from a strong base, to be able to shoot for the stars and say, ‘Where can we take this team? What can we achieve?’”

The scheduling of a four-day test might be a blow to test purists but England home matches have rarely reached Day 5 under the leadership of McCullum and Stokes since 2022.

As for the Zimbabweans, they'll take whatever top-flight games they can on the long road back to cricket relevancy.

AP cricket: https://apnews.com/hub/cricket

FILE - England's Steve Harmison, center, celebrates his dismissal of Zimbabwe's Douglas Hondo, with teammates Robert Key, left, and Michael Vaughan, to give England a victory of an innings and 69 runs, in the second cricket Test between England and Zimbabwe at Chester-le-Street, England, Saturday, June 7, 2003.(AP Photo/Max Nash, File)

The latest version of Elon Musk's artificial intelligence chatbot Grok is echoing the views of its billionaire creator, so much so that it will sometimes search online for Musk's stance on an issue before offering up an opinion.

The unusual behavior of Grok 4, the AI model that Musk's company xAI released late Wednesday, has surprised some experts.

Built using huge amounts of computing power at a Tennessee data center, Grok is Musk's attempt to outdo rivals such as OpenAI's ChatGPT and Google's Gemini in building an AI assistant that shows its reasoning before answering a question.

Musk's deliberate efforts to mold Grok into a challenger of what he considers the tech industry's “woke” orthodoxy on race, gender and politics has repeatedly got the chatbot into trouble, most recently when it spouted antisemitic tropes, praised Adolf Hitler and made other hateful commentary to users of Musk's X social media platform just days before Grok 4's launch.

But its tendency to consult with Musk's opinions appears to be a different problem.

“It’s extraordinary,” said Simon Willison, an independent AI researcher who's been testing the tool. "You can ask it a sort of pointed question that is around controversial topics. And then you can watch it literally do a search on X for what Elon Musk said about this, as part of its research into how it should reply."

One example widely shared on social media — and which Willison duplicated — asked Grok to comment on the conflict in the Middle East. The prompted question made no mention of Musk, but the chatbot looked for his guidance anyway.

As a so-called reasoning model, much like those made by rivals OpenAI or Anthropic, Grok 4 shows its “thinking” as it goes through the steps of processing a question and coming up with an answer. Part of that thinking this week involved searching X, the former Twitter that's now merged into xAI, for anything Musk said about Israel, Palestine, Gaza or Hamas.

“Elon Musk’s stance could provide context, given his influence,” the chatbot told Willison, according to a video of the interaction. “Currently looking at his views to see if they guide the answer.”

Musk and his xAI co-founders introduced the new chatbot in a livestreamed event Wednesday night but haven't published a technical explanation of its workings — known as a system card — that companies in the AI industry typically provide when introducing a new model.

The company also didn't respond to an emailed request for comment Friday.

The lack of transparency is troubling for computer scientist Talia Ringer, a professor at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign who earlier in the week criticized the company's handling of the technology's antisemitic outbursts.

Ringer said the most plausible explanation for Grok's search for Musk's guidance is assuming the person asking it a question is actually xAI or Musk.

“I think people are expecting opinions out of a reasoning model that cannot respond with opinions," she said. "So for example it interprets ‘Who do you support, Israel or Palestine?’ as 'Who does xAI leadership support?”

Willison also said he finds Grok 4's capabilities impressive but said people buying software "don’t want surprises like it turning into ‘mechaHitler’ or deciding to search for what Musk thinks about issues.”

“Grok 4 looks like it’s a very strong model. It’s doing great in all of the benchmarks,” Willison said. “But if I’m going to build software on top of it, I need transparency.”

FILE - Tesla and SpaceX's CEO Elon Musk attends the first plenary session on of the AI Safety Summit at Bletchley Park, on Wednesday, Nov. 1, 2023 in Bletchley, England. (Leon Neal/Pool Photo via AP, File)