Comment by threetonesun
3 days ago
Well sure if you give up on moderation, and close the platform to people who aren't signed in, and shut off the API then yes you didn't need the people supporting those parts of the platform.
And I guess if you consider "the place with the MechaHitler AI" as good branding there's no arguing with you that it's doing just as well as Twitter.
I don't agree with the direction Musk has set for X, but businesswise it's not doing worse. Twitter was a financial catastrophe before the take over, so you didn't need much improvement. Moderation was a financial drain, the API didn't make them any money and none of the users seems to care all that much about the platform not being open to users without an account... because they all have accounts and wasn't able to interact with you anyway.
The media seems to get a good laugh out if Grok arguing the plight of white South Africans and is fondness to Hitler, but I'm not seeing journalists and politicians leaving X in droves because of it.
I don’t think we can say for sure whether it’s doing worse businesswise since the numbers aren’t public. But consider e.g. https://www.adweek.com/media/advertisers-returning-to-x/
“From January to September 2024, marketing intelligence platform MediaRadar found that (X’s former top advertisers including Comcast, IBM, Disney, Warner Bros. Discovery, and Lionsgate Entertainment) collectively spent less than $3.3 million on X. This is a 98% year-over-year drop from the $170 million spent during the same period in 2023.”
Most of the local journalists, politicians, game devs, and open source maintainers i followed left. It’s just US national pundits, bots, and bait monetization accounts there at this point.
you must not know many journalists because they certainly left in droves
Left where?
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The job of journalists and politicians is to broadcast to as wide an audience as they can. It is not particularly surprising that many retain Twitter accounts for the marketing value.
After NPR left twitter they saw a 1% drop in traffic from socials. It is not a useful platform.
Source: https://niemanreports.org/npr-twitter-musk/
Well, the HitlerGrok thing happened yesterday...
I ask this genuinely and without any intent to cause offense: given your name, are you a bit?
I will fondly remind folks that Grok isn't even the first LLM to become a Nazi on Twitter.
Remember Tay Tweets?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tay_(chatbot)
Honestly I really don't think a bad release of an LLM that was rolled back is really the condemnation you think it is.
I don’t think the third+ flavor of “bad release” this year, of the sort nobody else in this crowded space suffers from, is as innocuous as you think it is.
And Tay was a non-LLM user account released a full 6 years before ChatGPT; you might as well bring up random users’ markov chains.
I posted the Wikipedia page, do you really think I don't know how long ago Tay was? I don't think the capabilities matter if we're just talking about chat bots being racist online.
Also IDK what you mean by third+ flavor? I'm not familiar with other bad Grok releases, but I don't really use it, I just see it's responses on Twitter. Also do you not remember the Google image model that made the founding fathers different races by default?
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There’s a difference between a 3rd party twitter bot and grok. And it’s not a “bad release”, it’s been like this ever since it launched.
Funny how ChatGPT is vanilla and grok somehow has a new racist thing to say every other week.
This ChatGPT? https://futurism.com/chatgpt-encouraged-murder-sam-altman
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> Funny how ChatGPT is vanilla and grok somehow has a new racist thing to say every other week
To be fair, 'exposing' ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini as racist will get you a lot fewer clicks.
Musk claims Grok to be less filtered in general than other LLMs. This is what less filtered looks like. LLMs are not human; if you get one to say racist things it's probably because you were trying to make it say racist things. If you want this so-called problem solved by putting bowling bumpers on the bot, by all means go use ChatGPT.
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It absolutely has not been claiming that it's "MechaHitler" since it was released.
Try.
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