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by ants_everywhere 286 days ago
The Twitter layoffs were done in anticipation of AI. Musk knew he wanted to make X and Twitter was one entry point. The loss in twitter productivity would be made up by AI gains and the first realization of that AI was named Grok.

So there's a bit of circular causality here. AI is a cause of the Twitter layoffs, and others are arguing that the Twitter layoffs may be a cause of other labor force shrinkage. If so then the Twitter layoffs are a costly signal that AI will impact the labor force and the shrinkage downstream of them is AI related.
1 comments
estimator7292 286 days ago
No, they weren't.

The Twitter layoffs were because the company was hemorrhaging money and Musk is an egomaniac.

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ants_everywhere 286 days ago
Is your claim that Musk, who cofounded OpenAI and started buying GPUs by the tens of thousands almost immediately after buying Twitter, and whose stated purposes in buying Twitter included AI, and who has been trying to build X since the 1990s, and who uses AI in SpaceX and Tesla, did not foresee that he would use AI on Twitter when he conducted the layoffs?

Can you walk me through your thought process here?

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habinero 285 days ago
You're too in love with your own conclusion here. The reality is Elon's kind of an idiot who just impulsively does stuff and mostly gets away with it because money.

Elon talked shit online and then fought hard to wriggle out of buying Twitter after promising to pay the funny weed sex number for it.

And he fired employees because he's cheap and only keeps people who yes man him. You can read the complaint yourself:

https://int.nyt.com/data/documenttools/twitter-employee-laws...

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