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You and the poster above disagree about the state of Twitter. Twitter had been a growth company, it was early/missed the market with Vine, but was showing ad g

You and the poster above disagree about the state of Twitter. Twitter had been a growth company, it was early/missed the market with Vine, but was showing ad growth. Now, as a private company, backed by the world's richest man, sovreign wealth funds, and banks that have written down their stakes, it has different economics than a tech / growth company. It's ad revenue is now, not in the ballpark of the fortune 500 or trendy Instagram ads, but somewhere between reddit and sin site markets.

kranke155 7mo ago
The purpose of Twitter is IMO no longer to be profitable. For a man with a trillion dollar fortune it’s just his personal equivalent of Fox News, a way to shape the nations conversation. Plus a way to get data for xAI. In that regard it’s a huge sucess. I use grok to find out about stuff on X and it’s very effective. Grok is also nowhere as bad as it should be (it’s still not great).
- ben_w 7mo ago
  Shape national conversations*, sure. A way to get data for xAI? Eh, I guess. But it's a source of bad data. Most social media is, even the best case is stuff like Stack Overflow. It wouldn't surprise me if this was at least a strong component of why Grok called itself "Mecha Hitler". Huge success? Unfortunately I have to agree, given the US government still ended up integrating it despite the Mecha Hitler incident. > I use grok to find out about stuff on X and it’s very effective. As with all of these things, I have to ask: How confident are you that it's telling you true things, rather than just true-sounding things? My expectation is Grok will be overtraining on benchmarks (even relative to the others, who will also be doing so at least a bit), and Grok's benchmarks will include twitter reactions, and it will be Goodhart's-law-ing itself in the process to maximally effective rhetoric rather than maximally effective (even by the standards of other LLMs) "truth-seeking". * plural, not "the", it also works in at least the UK as well as the US
  - kranke155 7mo ago
    You can ask Grok for “find me this tweet on X, with direct links for sources” and it will do that. It’s basically a super charged fuzzy search engine for X which is great, since a lot of my searches are half remembered tweets that I’d like to find again. So it’s accurate in the sense that it’s accurate finding things on X. I don’t really use it for anything else.
    - ben_w 7mo ago
      Thanks, that makes sense. I read too much into your previous comment and thought you were finding out more about things beyond twitter after they were discussed on twitter.
- oblio 7mo ago
  Most companies aren't that. Twitter is basically yellow journalism owned by a robber barron, just like in the 1880s.

kranke155 7mo ago

The purpose of Twitter is IMO no longer to be profitable. For a man with a trillion dollar fortune it’s just his personal equivalent of Fox News, a way to shape the nations conversation. Plus a way to get data for xAI. In that regard it’s a huge sucess. I use grok to find out about stuff on X and it’s very effective. Grok is also nowhere as bad as it should be (it’s still not great).

ben_w 7mo ago
Shape national conversations*, sure. A way to get data for xAI? Eh, I guess. But it's a source of bad data. Most social media is, even the best case is stuff like Stack Overflow. It wouldn't surprise me if this was at least a strong component of why Grok called itself "Mecha Hitler". Huge success? Unfortunately I have to agree, given the US government still ended up integrating it despite the Mecha Hitler incident. > I use grok to find out about stuff on X and it’s very effective. As with all of these things, I have to ask: How confident are you that it's telling you true things, rather than just true-sounding things? My expectation is Grok will be overtraining on benchmarks (even relative to the others, who will also be doing so at least a bit), and Grok's benchmarks will include twitter reactions, and it will be Goodhart's-law-ing itself in the process to maximally effective rhetoric rather than maximally effective (even by the standards of other LLMs) "truth-seeking". * plural, not "the", it also works in at least the UK as well as the US
- kranke155 7mo ago
  You can ask Grok for “find me this tweet on X, with direct links for sources” and it will do that. It’s basically a super charged fuzzy search engine for X which is great, since a lot of my searches are half remembered tweets that I’d like to find again. So it’s accurate in the sense that it’s accurate finding things on X. I don’t really use it for anything else.
  - ben_w 7mo ago
    Thanks, that makes sense. I read too much into your previous comment and thought you were finding out more about things beyond twitter after they were discussed on twitter.
oblio 7mo ago
Most companies aren't that. Twitter is basically yellow journalism owned by a robber barron, just like in the 1880s.