[smileysteve]

You and the poster above disagree about the state of Twitter.

Twitter had been a growth company, it was early/missed the market with Vine, but was showing ad growth.

Now, as a private company, backed by the world's richest man, sovreign wealth funds, and banks that have written down their stakes, it has different economics than a tech / growth company.

It's ad revenue is now, not in the ballpark of the fortune 500 or trendy Instagram ads, but somewhere between reddit and sin site markets.

[kranke155]

The purpose of Twitter is IMO no longer to be profitable.

For a man with a trillion dollar fortune it’s just his personal equivalent of Fox News, a way to shape the nations conversation.

Plus a way to get data for xAI.

In that regard it’s a huge sucess. I use grok to find out about stuff on X and it’s very effective. Grok is also nowhere as bad as it should be (it’s still not great).

[oblio]

Most companies aren't that. Twitter is basically yellow journalism owned by a robber barron, just like in the 1880s.

[ben_w]

Shape national conversations*, sure.

A way to get data for xAI? Eh, I guess. But it's a source of bad data. Most social media is, even the best case is stuff like Stack Overflow. It wouldn't surprise me if this was at least a strong component of why Grok called itself "Mecha Hitler".

Huge success? Unfortunately I have to agree, given the US government still ended up integrating it despite the Mecha Hitler incident.

> I use grok to find out about stuff on X and it’s very effective.

As with all of these things, I have to ask: How confident are you that it's telling you true things, rather than just true-sounding things? My expectation is Grok will be overtraining on benchmarks (even relative to the others, who will also be doing so at least a bit), and Grok's benchmarks will include twitter reactions, and it will be Goodhart's-law-ing itself in the process to maximally effective rhetoric rather than maximally effective (even by the standards of other LLMs) "truth-seeking".

* plural, not "the", it also works in at least the UK as well as the US

[kranke155]

You can ask Grok for “find me this tweet on X, with direct links for sources” and it will do that. It’s basically a super charged fuzzy search engine for X which is great, since a lot of my searches are half remembered tweets that I’d like to find again.

So it’s accurate in the sense that it’s accurate finding things on X. I don’t really use it for anything else.

[ben_w]

Thanks, that makes sense. I read too much into your previous comment and thought you were finding out more about things beyond twitter after they were discussed on twitter.