Wait a second:
Kind of remarkable Elon Musk bought Twitter, cut 90% of the staff and things worked fine, then annoyed users and advertisers through platform and algorithm shifts so the value tanked; then used it to train an AI company now valued at $40 billion https://t.co/kxTiSV8dhm
— Arpit Gupta (@arpitrage) December 5, 2024
Originally Musk was said to have laid off 80% of Twitter. Now it's 90%? Before long the legend will be Elon firing 100% of the staff and heroically recoding the entire platform himself in a single Red Bull-fueled night.
But even the 80% number doesn't really count if you then hire a whole bunch of people back—which Elon did. In the end, he let go about 60% of the staff.
Which is still kind of amazing. I really do wish we could learn more about precisely how this was done. But in any case, there's no need to exaggerate or rely on outdated figures. In December 2024, the correct number is about 60%.
Fire fast and rehire where things break?
Even by this rosy account the end result seems to be that xitter turned to xit, he just found a way to use the manure for something else.
The moral of the story is still that a company was working fine before he got his hands on it, and then he broke it.
So he cut 60% and lost 80% of its valuation. Who is this Arpit Gupta moron? Obviously a lot of the people who were cut were into moderation and sales which were directly affected by Musk’s actions and those actions (porn and racism) are the reason no one advertises there.
+1
Porn skipped out to bsky and other platforms. It's bad for business to have a platform that doesn't use moderation.
Also, I'm skeptical it was the Twitter data that made xAI worth $40 billion in a private valuation. It's $40 billion because Musk founded it and has a cult of personality.
That's nonsensical. There are plenty of AI startups getting high valuations. OpenAI, which he dumped and they dumped him, is worth 157 billion.
So, nothing to do with Twitter, then. That's the important point. I see below that you agree.
IOW, you -- and all the chumps still on there -- are providing Musk free data.
The very same people and institutions that complain about AI training on their data (news media, etc.) for free, continue to remain on birdsite. Fools, every last one of them.
That's nonsensical. Twitter posts are basically useless for AI training unless you want to make a racism, paranoid, ignorant LLM.
You should leave X-twitter because it's toxic, doesn't work for advertising, and has no moderation for the vast majority of accounts.
Assuming it is true that Twiiter posts are being used for AI training I'm not sure there is a market for a fantastically misinformed, racist AI bot.
Exactly.
The data is more about the connections and the search engine possibilities rather than as training data.