this post was submitted on 24 Jul 2023
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He's kicking into x.ai. There are good reasons to think that he bought Twitter to use its massive data-set of human language to train an ai - NOT because he gave/gives a shit about Twitter as a profitable company.
If it becomes a paid competitor to OpenAI, it solves its profitability issues without enhancing "Twitter" as a social media site. Anything he said about improving Twitter was likely a lie designed to prolong usage of the platform and enhance the dataset.
Why did he have to buy Twitter to get the tweet data? Isn't it all publicly visible? (Seriously asking)
Copyright maybe?
Maybe... I'm sure terms of service involve owning tweets and safety from the same sort of lawsuits you're seeing against Midjourney for training on other people's intellectual property.
Lawsuit protection and the pairing of tweet data with internal demographics data? There's no telling what Twitter knows about its users from being installed on their phones(geocoding, network analyzation, etc.) to analyzing their advertisement engagement to sentiment analysis of word choice and it goes on and on.
As stupid simple as the tweeting/re-tweeting mechanisms are, that doesn't mean they don't have serious targeted marketing algorithms and other high end data analysis tools behind the scenes. It would be silly if they didn't.
Why would you think access to Twitter users nonsense is in any way an improvement over existing training data let alone enough make spending tens of billions for Twitter a good deal. He bought it because he said stupid shit and when he thought he could back out they were suing him to uphold the deal he made to buy it and they were going to win.
I don't know, I think he was trying to get the price down because why pay more than you have to?
Also, I think a decade's-worth of notable human discourse in discreet packets of n-characters in an already hierarchical organization paired with deep demographic metadata could be seriously valuable.