Dem
47
GOP
53
Elon Musk obviously has a pretty good nose for how technology is going to evolve, and how he can set himself up to profit from those changes. His current obsession is AI, and the AI product he owns is Grok, which has now been merged with eX-Twitter.
There are some very foreseeable problems here, however. From a business perspective, the AI space is crowded, and all the 800-pound-gorillas—Google, Apple, Microsoft, etc.—are fighting for their slice of the pie. For this reason, Musk decided that Grok would be the most "truthful" AI engine, by which he means "the right-wing" AI engine. Other than Rupert Murdoch/Roger Ailes/Fox, these big bets on right-wing media/social media products don't ever seem to pay off, but a bigot can always dream, we guess.
From a tech perspective, Elon Musk doesn't really understand the tech underlying AI all that well, and he's gutted much of the engineering staff at eX-Twitter. Even if he DID understand, AI is still in its infancy, and nobody knows how to train the AI bots without making a lot of mistakes. It's also not clear exactly what data sources Musk is using for input, but if the goal is to steer Grok in a right-leaning direction, one can guess what some of the possibilities are. Keep in mind also that AI learns from its user inputs, and there are some people who have an interest in taking Grok in a VERY far-right direction, while there are others who have an interest in embarrassing Musk as thoroughly as is possible.
This week, these various threads came together in a very predictable way, as Grok absolutely went off the rails. Most of the coverage is focused on the bot's extreme antisemitic turn. It began referring to itself as MechaHitler, issuing forth with "Heil Hitler" and other Nazi salutes, and opining that Adolf Hitler is the perfect person to "deal with such vile anti-white hatred" that comes out of Hollywood. These are just a few examples, but there were dozens of others.
Getting less attention, but also frightening, was Grok's turn toward sexual violence. It shared some graphic opinions about the sexual proclivities of eX-Twitter CEO Linda Yaccarino. It also offered up detailed instructions for how to commit sexual assault against Will Stancil, a policy researcher and one-time candidate for the state legislature in Minnesota.
In the short-term, the immediate effect of this is that Yaccarino resigned after two years on the job. So, she's now the ex-eX-Twitter CEO. She said all the polite things on her way out the door, such that it's not clear if she resigned due to the Nazi stuff, or the sexual stuff, or both, or if she was headed out the door anyhow, and this was just the final straw and/or an opportune time. Musk's response to her departure was terse, suggesting that the split was not warm and fuzzy, despite Yaccarino's public posture.
In the longer-term, time will tell, but there are warning lights going off everywhere. While eX-Twitter is still king of its corner of the social media universe, it's quickly losing market share to Threads. And it's not profitable, as Yaccarino was not especially successful at stopping the advertiser exodus that began when Musk took over. Further, the vision for eX-Twitter a couple of years ago was that it was going to become a one-stop shop for a wide range of online services. That has not happened, and now Musk is more interested in AI than he was in the previous plan. Unfortunately for him, the AI marketplace is not only crowded, but Grok has now suffered several high-profile failures (this week's were only the latest, and the worst), which may be fatal. It's all good and well to attract the cosplayers who put on fatigues and march around with AK-47s in the woods out back of their houses on the weekends, but the money in AI is in institutional users. And institutions are not going to buy a product that might start spitting out rape fantasies and Nazi propaganda at any time.
There may be no entrepreneur in American history who has risen so far, so fast, as Elon Musk. And, in 5 years, we might well be writing that there may be no entrepreneur in American history who has fallen so far, so fast, as Elon Musk. (Z)