Elon Musk's X Launches Grok AI-Powered 'Stories' Feature (techcrunch.com) 71
An anonymous reader shared this report from Mint:
Elon Musk-owned social media platform X (formerly Twitter) has launched a new Grok AI-powered feature called 'Stories', which allows users to read summaries of a trending post on the social media platform. The feature is currently only available to X Premium subscribers on the iOS and web versions, and hasn't found its way to the Android application just yet... instead of reading the whole post, they'll have Grok AI summarise it to get the gist of those big news stories. However, since Grok, like other AI chatbots on the market, is prone to hallucination (making things up), X provides a warning at the end of these stories that says: "Grok can make mistakes, verify its outputs."
"Access to xAI's chatbot Grok is meant to be a selling point to push users to buy premium subscriptions," reports TechCrunch: A snarky and "rebellious" AI, Grok's differentiator from other AI chatbots like ChatGPT is its exclusive and real-time access to X data. A post published to X on Friday by tech journalist Alex Kantrowitz lays out Elon Musk's further plan for AI-powered news on X, based on an email conversation with the X owner. Kantrowitz says that conversations on X will make up the core of Grok's summaries. Grok won't look at the article text, in other words, even if that's what people are discussing on the platform.
The article notes that some AI companies have been striking expensive licensing deals with news publishers. But in X's case, "it's able to get at the news by way of the conversation around it — and without having to partner to access the news content itself."
"Access to xAI's chatbot Grok is meant to be a selling point to push users to buy premium subscriptions," reports TechCrunch: A snarky and "rebellious" AI, Grok's differentiator from other AI chatbots like ChatGPT is its exclusive and real-time access to X data. A post published to X on Friday by tech journalist Alex Kantrowitz lays out Elon Musk's further plan for AI-powered news on X, based on an email conversation with the X owner. Kantrowitz says that conversations on X will make up the core of Grok's summaries. Grok won't look at the article text, in other words, even if that's what people are discussing on the platform.
The article notes that some AI companies have been striking expensive licensing deals with news publishers. But in X's case, "it's able to get at the news by way of the conversation around it — and without having to partner to access the news content itself."
Disney just called (Score:2)
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I would imagine Meta is going to be way more pissed about naming overlap with instagram stories.
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I would imagine Groq is even more pissed naming overlap.
reference:
groq.com (2017-01-09)
vs
grok.x.ai (2023-11-07)
That's just RAG. (Score:5, Interesting)
"Grok's differentiator from other AI chatbots like ChatGPT is its exclusive and real-time access to X data." That's just RAG. Retrieval Augmented Generation. All Grok is doing is acting as a summarizer. This is something you can do with an ultra-lightweight model, you don't need a 314B param monster.
Also, you don't need an X Premium subscription to "get access" to Grok, since its weights are public. To "get access" to an instance running it, maybe.
I've not tried running it, but from others who have, the general consensus seems to be: it's undertrained. It has way more parameters than it should need relative to its capabilities. Kinda reminiscent of, say, Falcon.
I also have an issue with "A snarky and rebellious" LLM. Except people using them for roleplaying scenarios (where you generally don't want a *fixed* personality), people generally don't want it inserting some sort of personality into their responses. As a general rule, people have a task they want the tool to do, and they just want the tool to do it. This notion that tools should have "personalities" is what led to Clippy.
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From the standpoint of wanting something reasonably factual, I am pretty sure it would be dumb to rely on any AI that's using Tweets as the main part of its training data set.
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Honestly I question how much of the training was actually done with Twitter data.
It certainly was a source, but I seriously doubt it was the only data or even majority of the data.
Either way, doesn't really matter with RAG. RAG doesn't have to "know" much, just how to summarize things others have written.
Re: That's just RAG. (Score:2)
Re:That's just RAG. (Score:5, Interesting)
Considering how drenched twitter now is with conspiracy theories and things like antivaxers spamming the site with nonsense about how if you know a vaccinated person you'lll get sick from "shedding" (mRNA doesn't "shed" but mere facts never stopped those crowd) and could catch "turbo cancer". Its an absolute wasteland of disinformation and bots nowdays, and they want to train AI on *that*?
Re: That's just RAG. (Score:2)
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Spike protein does shed - it's been measured. There are papers on NLM/NCBI. Your news sources told you that, right?
Spike is probably only a concern for breast-feeding infants, blood transfusions, and sexual relations.
There are already 'pureblood' dating apps available so the market is responding. The Japan bloodbank is moving on it too to minimize cost overruns.
Re:That's just RAG. (Score:4)
Theres no concern at all for blood transfusions, breast feeding infants or sexual relations, because its pseudoscientific gibberish with no concievable mechanism for it to be true coupled with know known observed instances of it ever be true. Its the fever dreams of paranoid people who never finished highschool.
Yes you might shit out a few acid denatured proteins. But it *doesnt mean anything*. You shit out proteins all day. And that isn't "Shedding".
Shedding is when the body expels dead (and sometimes alive) viruses. That is literally impossible.
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Spike protein does shed - it's been measured. There are papers on NLM/NCBI.
While I am sure my search skills are good enough to find what you are discussing, I would rather have access to the data that you are using to come up with this idea. Can you provide links to such studies that say what you claim? Honestly, unless you are eating the other person, I am uncertain how spike proteins would be delivered to another person in such a way that they remain viable. My logic is that we would all be immune to COVID by now if that were true and we are not all immune to COVID right now.
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From the standpoint of wanting something reasonably factual, I am pretty sure it would be dumb to rely on any AI that's using Tweets as the main part of its training data set.
Training an AI on X content is the ultimate goal to which the computer science phrase "Garbage in, garbage out" has been moving for almost 70 years.
We can finally close out that phrase and move on to the next frontier in CS.
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There are already bots that attempt to provide summaries to longer posts on X. It's a bit hit or miss, so they're not very popular. Most just use the unroll bots that unroll long twitter threads into a single post/page.
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I don't have a Twitter account, but aren't Tweets short? Why would they need summarized?
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They are 280 character for "regular" users, but the paid subscribers can go to 4000 characters. So yes, the majority of time it would be summarizing a 280 tweet, which just seems incredibly useless, much like all of X now.
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Re: That's just RAG. (Score:2)
I think the idea is to summarize a whole bunch of tweets, like trying to nail down a consensus interpretation of an article. It also sounds like a terrible idea.
I think the point is to remove the truth from any given article and replace it with the groupthink interpretation of paranoid Musk fanboys.
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Agreed, but even playing neutral is a personality.
People get confused when llm's make definitive statements instead of showing the work/probabilities.
I get it, that's more expensive to generate and queries already use too much energy, but half the users don't second-guess outputs.
"Verify its outputs"? (Score:5, Insightful)
...verify its outputs
Oh good, so that thing the public is terrible at is what everyone should do.
Infantile name-calling (Score:5, Insightful)
Grok won't look at the article ...
Grok will repeat tweets, not facts and not the substance of the article: Maybe, this "AI" should be called ELIZA. The purpose obviously, is keeping the flame-war at the top of the discussion and hiding the infantile name-calling that such flame-wars devolve into.
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Nah. What it should be called is Gossip. Just like real gossip, but without the need for personal involvement.
another company owned by Musk (Score:1)
Re:another company owned by Musk (Score:5, Insightful)
user tweets and not traditional news articles
Or, as it used to be known in more sensible times, conspiracy nuttery and the ramblings of idiots.
So... (Score:2)
On a scale from Jubal Harshaw to Gilbert Berquist, how fascist is this new "grok"?
Re:So... (Score:5, Funny)
Last I saw it was when it first came out , and there where ultra right wing dudes demanding it answer whether there are two genders or not. It was replying by calling them idiots in highly creative ways.
I found it a rather amusing spectacle watching maga fools losing arguments to a chatbot designed to agree with them.
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Hehe, you should have saved a link. Maybe it is self-aware after all, and intelligent.
No android app (Score:4, Interesting)
"hasn't found its way to the Android application just yet."
It amazes me just how many people don't realise their phone has a browser and you can just access the web version of all these sites. In fact thats what I do - i don't want my phone cluttered up with all this shit when a bookmark will do.
Re: No android app (Score:3)
Some sites do everything they can to make you use their app if there is one. Browser collects less data. Sometimes, simply putting the browser in desktop mode is enough. Other times it's unusable.
One example I ran into yesterday was imgur. Web site didn't allow uploading a photo from a mobile browser . Until I put Firefox in desktop mode. Had to enlarge quite a bit, though.
Reaction videos (Score:2)
We're not copying the content, we're showing reactions to it. Yeah right.
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More like, we don't copy the content, we distort it to make it as outrageous as possible for more clicks.
Um ... (Score:2)
Grok's differentiator from other AI chatbots like ChatGPT is its exclusive and real-time access to X data.
You say that like it's a good thing. Have you read some of the stuff there?
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Well...it *is* useful as a model of human language...at least *some* human language. The problem will come if it starts copying the reasoning.
Shamefully misleading use of term (Score:5, Insightful)
A simple LLM will never be able to "grok" [wikipedia.org] anything.
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What is "simple" about the extremely complex interactions of 316 billion parameters?
Re:Shamefully misleading use of term (Score:4, Informative)
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What is "a few" about 316 billion parameters, let alone before you exponentiate their interactions?
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Good to see we're abandoning the premise that the logic behind LLMs is "simple".
LLMs, these immensely complex models, function basically as the most insane flow chart you could imagine. Billions of nodes and interconnections between them. Nodes not receiving just yes-or-no inputs, but any degree of nuance. Outputs likewise not being yes-or-no, but any degree of nuance as well. And many questions superimposed atop each node simultaneously, with the differences between different questions teased out at la
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You stopped after reading two word and ignored every other word in the post. *eyeroll*
The word "resonance" is a non-sequitur in that sentence. You might as well have written, "Predicting words is all about Australopithecus."
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The word resonance is not a weasel word. It's not mysterious. There are very specific phenomena involved. If you didn't understand what I meant, you could simply have asked. But instead you said that and bullhorned your complete indifference to the subject you're pontificating on.
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LLMs have no direct perception of the world. They can't even understand in the normal sense. They are a necessary PART of a real AI (that wants to work with humans).
Grok can make mistakes, verify its outputs. (Score:5, Informative)
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Naa, that would be, I don't know, _rational_? Cannot have that. Must mindlessly follow the hype and the hype says to use AI!
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Because 'Grok' will set the tone for you which could alter your understanding of what is being said. You should do it. Be lazy like everyone else.
This will end well... (Score:4, Insightful)
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this is gonna end up like asking for a summary of asylum inpatients arguing over a headline
Oh, we're already well on our way to that without Grok's help. The only question is: is our progression linear or exponential?
AI indexing the wrong data? (Score:4, Funny)
conversations on X will make up the core of Grok's summaries. Grok won't look at the article text.
So let me get this straight. You created an AI for the purposes of summarizing information to consumers, and then you pointed it at the comments section to generate that summary?
We usually get entertained by reading the comments, but that is NOT how you deliver the information that’s trying to be disseminated (i.e. the original article). That’s how you find out how quickly AI can confirm Godwins law.
Re:AI indexing the wrong data? (Score:4, Insightful)
He comes up with the most mind-bogglingly stupid ideas based on how twisted his conception of reality has gotten. Basically, in his reality, news articles are probable lies, but people who get lots of likes on Twitter are probable truths.
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He's a narcissist who doesn't know that much about tech but is convinced he does. That's why he pushes so many useless things (e.g. cybertruck) out.
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The real market is investors. He's seeking a $6B valuation on x.ai, which is just nonsensical vs. what they're offering.
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conversations on X will make up the core of Grok's summaries. Grok won't look at the article text.
So let me get this straight. You created an AI for the purposes of summarizing information to consumers, and then you pointed it at the comments section to generate that summary?
We usually get entertained by reading the comments, but that is NOT how you deliver the information that’s trying to be disseminated (i.e. the original article). That’s how you find out how quickly AI can confirm Godwins law.
Don't worry, there will also be a lot of comments based on the Grok summaries as well!!
You harvest what you plant (Score:2)
But maybe the idea is actually genius, having a prejudice-enhanced agent on steroids that greatly helps in pandering with the negative tribal stereotypes and alternate facts st
“stories” no threads (Score:2)
Purposely copycatting threads, a third party product, Elon weaves an X value-add actor on stage at X. In the interest of vertical integration, the reputational risk is single-threaded voiced content where everything sounds the same.
Threads was multi-lingual translation with its highlighter for those interested in the nuts and to hell with the bolts. Today Threads operating model is in competition for its authenticity. Sometimes simplicity is the value. It could survive Grok. Implementing a gateway alongside
Sooper Sekret Donut Steel (Score:2)
I got a great idea. So, I make a service that uses ChatGPT to summarize an article. Then I have ChatGPT summarize that summary. Then I have— You know where this is going, I'll run the fucking thing again and again until less than 5% of the words of the summary appear in the original. I'll call this service: Telephones!
so both the ai and the audience (Score:2)
A plucky little SM start-up beat Elon by months. (Score:2)
Spoutible implemented this feature about half a year ago.
And now they also added an AI powered verification system.
Much faster pace of innovation in this space than X.
Summary of opinions vs facts (Score:2)
Posts on social media are opinions, not facts, maybe they should have that disclaimer upfront.