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He thinks Twitter data is valuable for AI training. He also blocks archive.org. Grok 4.0, before it deteriorated, had a phase when it was good at writing tweet

• numpad0 22d ago
  I think buying Twitter for data was a blunder big as expecting self driving to be solved by 2015 or whenever it originally was. It is only clear with hindsight, but now everyone knows that tweets are literally detrimental for LLM style AI for whatever reason. Personally I think it's because tweets are responses without CoT or prompts, or could be also because all its meat is in the shape incompatible with en-US culture, even when it's in English, though all that matters is it's actively useless.
  • nomilk 22d ago
    Maybe for training, but how about look up? I often use claude voice and grok voice (both on iOS) and reasonably frequently claude simply cannot find any info about a breaking topic, whereas grok always can.
    • numpad0 22d ago
      I wonder if "no one says no" culture is practically the same thing as instructing LLMs to always hallucinate. You know, LLM hallucination is a phenomenon where the AI would generate syntactically bulletproof chunks of text that are not grounded in reality. Lots of efforts by frontier LLM labs had been made in past few years to solve this by enabling AIs to refute premises in the prompt. Ordinary people still need to be instructed to google stuffs. They don't go to a niche de facto non-American social media to be disappointed by its notoriously bad search to then conclude its notoriously dumb AI can be abused as a makeshift search tool. People are simply unable. Twitter has been doing so much things backwards lately. That's reminiscent of how hallucination hurts whatever you do with AIs.
      • aboardRat4 21d ago
        Hallucination is not something specific to LLM by any means. Remember when you were a kid, your teacher probably told you "At an exam, leave no question unanswered, even if you don't know what to write. Nobody is penalised for wrong answers, but even total gibberish might sometimes add a half-point to your score".
        • angoragoats 21d ago
          Yes, but LLMs are hallucination machines by design. What I mean by this is that everything the LLM generates is a hallucination, untethered from truth or reality, since the data is generated purely based on statistics around what word is most likely to come next. This type of algorithm can never model "truth" or "fact." To the extent that an LLM generates something factual or realistic, it's doing so either accidentally, or because of the various band-aids that the grandparent post describes which will never fully solve the problem.
          • aboardRat4 18d ago
            Yeah, but humans are just as hallucinatory when speaking about pretty much anything other than their flat or kids. 99% of people learn by memorising facts, not by testing reality.
            • angoragoats 18d ago
              > Yeah, but humans are just as hallucinatory when speaking about pretty much anything other than their flat or kids. Do you have a source for this? I vehemently disagree. > 99% of people learn by memorising facts, not by testing reality. I disagree with this too, but whether or not it’s true, LLMs don’t learn via either of these methods, so it’s not relevant to the discussion.
              • aboardRat4 18d ago
                Gees... it never occurred to me that such an obvious thing needs a proof. I used to think that it's enough to kinda... just go out of one's luxury office at Y-Combinator and try talking to a janitor or a taxi driver... https://www.reddit.com/r/4chan/comments/onud4u/anon_researches_iq/ https://www.reddit.com/r/4chan/comments/onud4u/anon_research... >I disagree with this too, but whether or not it’s true, LLMs don’t learn via either of these methods, so it’s not relevant to the discussion. Em... I think it is relevant. In my mental model, an LLM is basically a giant hash table, so memorizing is about 90% of what it does.
  • inigyou 22d ago
    He didn't buy twitter for data, he bought it to shut down criticism of himself and it worked
    • pessimizer 21d ago
      He bought twitter because he was forced to. He got it at twice any valuation (based on fake usage stats) and at least 4x what it was worth. Criticism of him was not "shut down" either off or on twitter. https://techcrunch.com/2023/04/12/elon-musk-admits-he-only-bought-twitter-because-he-thought-hed-be-forced-to/ https://techcrunch.com/2023/04/12/elon-musk-admits-he-only-b...
      • inigyou 21d ago
        Why did he ban the maker of this twitter unblocker thing and the maker of elonjet?
      • angoragoats 20d ago
        You are both correct. He originally wanted to buy it because his feelings were hurt by lots of Twitter users (like the Elon Jet guy), and I can only speculate that he thought it’d fill the emotional void in his soul to own it and do what he wanted with it. Later, when he realized that this was a stupid idea and that his amazing business acumen resulted in him drastically overpaying, he tried to back out of the sale by giving the excuse that the number of bots/spam posts/etc were more than he thought. According to the agreement that he had signed, this was not a valid reason to back out of the deal. His lawyers advised him that he’d probably lose in court, hence he was “forced to” buy the site as your article states.
    • numpad0 19d ago
      Now he's a nobody though. Wasn't the case previously.