He’s yet another rich white dude who managed to fail up all his life… Seriously, some people have very low bars for who they see as admirable and then we wonder why we’re in the fucking mess we’re in… Because people keep mistaking being loud and confident with actual competence.
IYou must have missed Musk unveiling Grok back in November.
“” The Tesla CEO, who [warned last week]"that AI was “one of the biggest threats to humanity”, said the competitor to ChatGPT would be made available to premium subscribers on his X platform after testing.
Musk also revealed that Grok had access to user posts on "(
[[Dan Milmo] Sun 5 Nov 2023 The Guardian (online)
[A competitor to ChatGPT… cue in how X updated its terms of service to prohibit scraping and crawling
That long term plan made of twigs? /s
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No. The fact that he’s using the data he paid 44 billion for to make a chatbot just like everyone else is doing, currently available for testing by people on the platform while he drives everyone other than Nazis off it, is not a plan made of twigs. Because twigs are at least solid and that isn’t a plan.
You know, you can pretend this is all about data or AI or whatever, but somewhere in all this you still have to account for alienating everyone but the extremists…
SEE… super-sekret-geniuz!!!
If you’re suggesting that Elon’s “long game” was to develop a ChatGPT competitor and market it to the tiny subset of Twitter users who pay for premium subscriptions then yes, I’d say that is one of the most idiotic business plans I’ve ever heard.
First off: Twitter makes the lion’s share of its income from advertising, so driving away advertisers under the assumption that an AI app is going to bring in more paid subscribers is ridiculous.
Second, Elon paid considerably more for Twitter than ChatGPT was valued at the time (less than $30 Billion as of last January) so it would make no sense to pay so much just to get the data needed to start work on a ChatGPT competitor.
Third, other companies have been making chatbots by scraping data from Twitter for years without paying a dime. They all turned out to be garbage because when you train an AI on toxic and ignorant content it results in a toxic and ignorant AI.
Oh. I thought there was some bigger goal you had in mind. But sure, a snarky chatbot is totally worth $44billion. My bad.
Yeah. there’s no Xanatos Gambit* in play here at all.
Musk is not a super genius, makes up shit whole cloth, and tends to move the goalposts when called out on his lies. His only real ability is charisma and the ability to sucker people into giving him money.
Some examples: How’s the Tesla Semi Truck Doing? (Well below the hype and expectations, it turns out.)
And the HyperLoop? (lol canceled)
And the Tesla robot? (“overblown hype” and “total scam” were phrases mentioned by actual robotics experts.)
And SpaceX’s lack of apparent progress compared to SLS? (hint: SLS actually made it to lunar orbit and back a year ago.)
(* warning: TVTropes link)
What do they call something like a Xanatos gambit, but where every path leads to defeat?
I mean…
He could have just bought the data for a buck three fifty.
Mr. Musk? What are you? His manservant?
It feels like there are so many people who would just love a chance to suck up to this abusive idiot in person, instead of just over the internet…
It’s an odd fetish. But as the Pope says - who am I to judge?
You mean people have opinions!!! How dare they!!! /s
That’s all this site is. And all free. Enjoy.
I still can’t get over Musk framing Twitter’s (funny how even he called it that) problems as advertisers “destroying” it with “boycotts.” As if it wasn’t just a natural consequence of his every decision making the platform less usable and more hostile for everyone on it - including advertisers. He thinks it’s some ideological position by big corporations and not because Twitter has simply turned into a toxic cesspool where advertisers no longer get engagement. One of the first things he did was get rid of most of the ad staff at Twitter, so advertisers had no one to talk to or coordinate with, which was probably the single biggest thing he did to alienate the big companies. It really shows how Elno has no awareness at all of either Twitter or himself.
I read a while ago that the banks were writing down/off the multi-billion dollar loans they made, and they seem to have been pretty relaxed about the whole thing, investing in such a dumb scheme with no collateral. It really shows how absurd and dysfunctional banking is on that level. Musk very clearly didn’t have anything like a coherent plan for what he was going to do with Twitter, and the deal only could have come about if it got less scrutiny than someone applying for a small business loan would have.
Yeah, I’m guessing the cost of just scraping the public data is substantially less than $44 billion. Probably quite a bit less, but I’m no business genius.
Also the whole AI thing only seemed to materialize once he realized how many companies were already scraping the data, and he wanted in on it, too. As much as he had any sort of plan, it involved turning Twitter into financial services/“everything” app “X,” in which the whole AI scheme doesn’t really even figure - and even works against. (But so many of his decisions have worked directly against that goal, so…)
Twitter is now a pile of shit - but it’s a pile of shit with AI! Ah yes, that’s much better. (Even if Musk hadn’t broken Twitter, I wouldn’t see AI contributing anything of value - under current conditions, that means, what, that the Nazis get to automate their hate speech? It’s an active disadvantage of the platform.)
Hey, that’s not fair - Hyperloop never existed in the first place (as anything other than an idea intended to sabotage real public transit projects like high speed rail and thus sell more cars).
To be (actually) fair, SpaceX is doing really well - but by all accounts, Elon has basically nothing to do with it, being carefully managed by a dedicated team to keep him from participating in any real decision making and screwing things up.
Well, people say Trump has “charisma” - of roughly the same sort, I imagine. (Though I’d say that Musk doesn’t have charisma as much as a highly successful, decades-long, media-created mythologizing of his accomplishments and genius that’s only faltered in the last year. Trump tried to do the same thing, but was less successful. With Trump, you could do research and dig into the reality of him, but until recently you really couldn’t even do that with Musk - only the myth existed.)
Self-referential first post. Very meta.
Fucking A!!
