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by ben_w 115 days ago
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

1 comments

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.

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.