Comment by simonw
1 day ago
It does matter, because eventually xAI would like to make money. To make serious money from LLMs you need other companies to build high volume applications on top of your API.
Companies spending big money genuinely do care which LLM they select, and one of their top concerns is bias - can they trust the LLM to return results that are, if not unbiased, then at least biased in a way that will help rather than hurt the applications they are developing.
xAI's reputation took a beating among discerning buyers from the white genocide thing, then from MechaHitler, and now the "searches Elon's tweets" thing is gaining momentum too.
I hope it does build that momentum. But after the US presidential election, Disney, IBM, and other companies returned. Then Musk did a nazi salute, and instead of losing advertisers, Apple came back a few weeks later.
It's still the largest English social media platform which allows porn, and it's not age verified. This probably makes it indispensable for advertisers, no matter how Hitler-y it gets.
Advertising is different - that's marketing spend, not core product engineering. Plus getting on Elon's good side was probably seen as a way of getting on Trump's good side for a few months at least.
If you are building actual applications that use LLMs - where there are extremely capable models available from several different vendors - evaluating the bias of those models is a completely rational thing to do as part of your selection process.
"indispensable" is always a bit of a laugh with this sort of advertising, we're still talking 0.5% click through rates... there's really nothing special about twitter ads
> xAI's reputation took a beating among discerning buyers
I’m going to guess that anyone that is seriously considering hitching their business to Elon Musk in 2025 has no qualms with the white genocide/mechahitler stuff since that is his brand.