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Linda Yaccarino is leaving X

(www.nytimes.com)
543 points donohoe | 4 comments | 09 Jul 25 14:52 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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Hoasi ◴[09 Jul 25 15:21 UTC] No.44511157[source]▶
X has been nothing short of an exercise in brand destruction. However, despite all the drama, it still stands, it still exists, and it remains relevant.
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mrweasel ◴[09 Jul 25 16:05 UTC] No.44511712[source]▶
More and more I think Musk managed to his take over of Twitter pretty successfully. X still isn't as strong a brand as Twitter where, but it's doing okay. A lot of the users who X need to stay on the platform, journalists and politicians, are still there.

The only issue is that Musk vastly overpaid for Twitter, but if he plans to keep it and use it for his political ambitions, that might not matter. Also remember that while many agree that $44B was a bit much, most did still put Twitter at 10s of billions, not the $500M I think you could justify.

The firings, which was going to tank Twitter also turned out reasonably well. Turns out they didn't need all those people.

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threetonesun ◴[09 Jul 25 16:20 UTC] No.44511868[source]▶
Well sure if you give up on moderation, and close the platform to people who aren't signed in, and shut off the API then yes you didn't need the people supporting those parts of the platform.

And I guess if you consider "the place with the MechaHitler AI" as good branding there's no arguing with you that it's doing just as well as Twitter.

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rockemsockem ◴[09 Jul 25 16:41 UTC] No.44512116[source]▶
I will fondly remind folks that Grok isn't even the first LLM to become a Nazi on Twitter.

Remember Tay Tweets?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tay_(chatbot)

Honestly I really don't think a bad release of an LLM that was rolled back is really the condemnation you think it is.

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amrocha ◴[09 Jul 25 16:48 UTC] No.44512219[source]▶
There’s a difference between a 3rd party twitter bot and grok. And it’s not a “bad release”, it’s been like this ever since it launched.

Funny how ChatGPT is vanilla and grok somehow has a new racist thing to say every other week.

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timschmidt ◴[09 Jul 25 17:21 UTC] No.44512620[source]▶
This ChatGPT? https://futurism.com/chatgpt-encouraged-murder-sam-altman
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amrocha ◴[09 Jul 25 22:22 UTC] No.44515302{3}[source]▶
Not to say there aren’t problems with ChatGPT, but it generally steers clear of controversial subjects unless coaxed into it.

Grok actively leans into racism and nazism.

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timschmidt ◴[10 Jul 25 00:14 UTC] No.44516006{4}[source]▶
It seems that there is tremendous incentive for people like yourself (I see you're very active in these comments) to claim that. But I see you've presented no quantitative evidence. Given the politicization of the systems and individuals involved, without evidence, it all reads like partisan mud slinging.

Any LLM can be convinced to say just about anything. Pliny has shown that time and time again.

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arp242 ◴[10 Jul 25 02:00 UTC] No.44516493{5}[source]▶
Does ChatGPT start ranting about Jews and "White Genocide" unprompted? How can I even quantify that it doesn't do that?

This is a classic "anything that can't be empirically measured is invalid and can be dismissed" mistake. It would be nice if we could easily empirically measure everything, but that's not how the world works.

The ChatGPT article is of a rather different nature where ChatGPT went off the rails after a long conversation with a troubled person. That's not good, but just no the same as "start spewing racism on unrelated questions".

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1. timschmidt ◴[10 Jul 25 02:17 UTC] No.44516588{6}[source]▶
Friend, if you can't empirically measure the outputs of LLMs which provide lovely APIs for doing so, what are you doing?

20 lines of code and some data would really bolster your case, but I don't see them.

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2. amrocha ◴[10 Jul 25 09:11 UTC] No.44518947[source]▶
idk friend, it seems kind of presumptuous to demand other people’s time like this.

It’s pretty evident that the people building grok are injecting their ideology into it.

I don’t need more evidence, and I don’t need you to agree with me. Go ahead and write those 20 lines if you so desire. I’m happy to be proven wrong.

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3. arp242 ◴[10 Jul 25 14:38 UTC] No.44521615[source]▶
You can't just run a few queries and base conclusion off that, you need to run tens of thousands of different ones and then somehow evaluate the responses. It's a huge amount of work.

Demanding empirical data and then coming up with shoddy half-arsed methodology is unserious.

4. timschmidt ◴[10 Jul 25 15:45 UTC] No.44522292[source]▶
I don't think I'm the one being presumptuous or demanding. I've actually tried to help you make a stronger argument. Shooting a hundred or even a thousand queries to 3 or 4 LLMs and shoving the results through established sentiment analysis algorithms is something ChatGPT can one-shot in just about any language. You demand people agree with your opinion and refuse to spend 20 minutes supporting it with facts. Not my problem, I tried to help. You may not see it that way. That's fine.