Hello, I appreciate your in-depth take on Twitter and the information crisis. I'd like to note one thing: your reference for the statement that Twitter is a main source of news and information includes data solely from the US. It's a reference to a Twitter post, and the company is to blame for such narrow focus. There's a big world beyond US borders, where the structure of information sources might - or might not - look differently.
I know this might sound like nitpicking, but we need to do our best to complicate the picture at planetary scale. This is the scale at which Twitter functions, and it includes multiple public spaces, some very different from the US public space. This is especially relevant that norms (free speech!), metaphors, implicit biases that are common in this space are constantly pushed onto the rest of the world.
Google+ used to have a feature called Collections. The idea behind it was that users would categorize their content into different buckets, i.e. politics, sports, memes, or whatever. That allowed their followers to subscribe or unsubscribe from individual collections based off of their interest rather than having to completely unfollow someone if you hated reading their posts about sports or something. I’ve often thought that the entire thing was a strategy by Google to get thousands of people to train their algorithms by having them manually categorize text and photos. Regardless, it did provide for a great end user experience.
I’ve always thought that there was an opportunity for social networks to use large language models and ML as a way to identify specific topics that people were talking about. Then, if the platform knows that you’re interested in cars or retro computers or whatever it could easily show you that content. And yet, no one seems to be leveraging this. It seems obvious to me. Is there a reason no one has done this? Is it because of the adversarial nature that ads introduce to these platforms or is there some technical issue that limits implementation?
This man is an opportunist. In that sense, he is a branding specialist with charisma, decent looks, and an authoritarian background. He understands engineering, but he did not invent electric cars or batteries or the technology to run such. He did not invent space travel. Governments did. He gets people to the space station and back to do a job alive. That is good, and it is the right time for this. Due to climate issues, it is the right time for electric cars. He makes such cars for rich people. Is it the right time to buy twitter, become authoritarian with it, and charge cold hard cash to play? Maybe. As for AI, it is a great tool in the right hands at the right time. Scientists and medical professionals are making excellent use of AI and will continue to do so. Will Musk use it well? We will see. He is a good brander. He does have charisma. People do his bidding. But, AI is in the past, always subject to data as it is processed in. Twitter operates in nanosecond present time. Can AI?
Hello, I appreciate your in-depth take on Twitter and the information crisis. I'd like to note one thing: your reference for the statement that Twitter is a main source of news and information includes data solely from the US. It's a reference to a Twitter post, and the company is to blame for such narrow focus. There's a big world beyond US borders, where the structure of information sources might - or might not - look differently.
I know this might sound like nitpicking, but we need to do our best to complicate the picture at planetary scale. This is the scale at which Twitter functions, and it includes multiple public spaces, some very different from the US public space. This is especially relevant that norms (free speech!), metaphors, implicit biases that are common in this space are constantly pushed onto the rest of the world.
Google+ used to have a feature called Collections. The idea behind it was that users would categorize their content into different buckets, i.e. politics, sports, memes, or whatever. That allowed their followers to subscribe or unsubscribe from individual collections based off of their interest rather than having to completely unfollow someone if you hated reading their posts about sports or something. I’ve often thought that the entire thing was a strategy by Google to get thousands of people to train their algorithms by having them manually categorize text and photos. Regardless, it did provide for a great end user experience.
Maybe there's another take on this. Twitter is already irrelevant so these AI-powered bots spewing misinformation is just noise. Ad revenue will find another suitable, stable place soon. Charlie Warzel used the term "Geriatric Social Media" (https://newsletters.theatlantic.com/galaxy-brain/63609043b606fe00376a82da/welcome-to-geriatric-social-media/).
I’ve always thought that there was an opportunity for social networks to use large language models and ML as a way to identify specific topics that people were talking about. Then, if the platform knows that you’re interested in cars or retro computers or whatever it could easily show you that content. And yet, no one seems to be leveraging this. It seems obvious to me. Is there a reason no one has done this? Is it because of the adversarial nature that ads introduce to these platforms or is there some technical issue that limits implementation?
This man is an opportunist. In that sense, he is a branding specialist with charisma, decent looks, and an authoritarian background. He understands engineering, but he did not invent electric cars or batteries or the technology to run such. He did not invent space travel. Governments did. He gets people to the space station and back to do a job alive. That is good, and it is the right time for this. Due to climate issues, it is the right time for electric cars. He makes such cars for rich people. Is it the right time to buy twitter, become authoritarian with it, and charge cold hard cash to play? Maybe. As for AI, it is a great tool in the right hands at the right time. Scientists and medical professionals are making excellent use of AI and will continue to do so. Will Musk use it well? We will see. He is a good brander. He does have charisma. People do his bidding. But, AI is in the past, always subject to data as it is processed in. Twitter operates in nanosecond present time. Can AI?