Elon's Gordian Knot
We recorded 12 claims from this post. 5 were checked against evidence. 7 can’t be checked. 5 more are held. Read the post at its source.
Claims from this post (12)
In the order they appear in the post. Each quotation is the speaker’s words in this post. A label such as “Supported” or “Can’t be checked” is the claim’s current assessment; its page has the evidence and the reasons.
Assessment: UnresolvedSaid
Observation
“Already, despite only being available to a handful of users, Grok has fabricated a story about a British MP being expelled from Parliament, presumably confusing the ouster of disgraced New York congressman George Santos with a separate and unrelated story from across the Atlantic.”
Our reading: Grok has already fabricated a story about a British MP being expelled from Parliament.
No horizon Evidence as of
Limitation: Unavailable or poorly indexed social-media records may contain the needed evidence.
Assessment: UnresolvedSaid
Observation
“Musk rushed a Large Language Model to market in a few months, one where bigotry is a feature not a bug, and has potentially trained it on the garbled musings of people that he has incentivized to fill its data source with nonsense.”
Our reading: Musk rushed a large language model (Grok) to market in a few months, one where bigotry is a feature not a bug, and has potentially trained it on the garbled musings of people he has incentivized to fill its data source with nonsense.
No horizon Evidence as of
Limitation: The finding concerns the 2023 model, not later Grok versions.
Assessment: SupportedSaid
Observation
“And that’s acknowledging the fact that LLMs — even those developed a legion of well-resourced and well-fed PHDs, like GPT-4, and based on a well-curated dataset of high-quality material — have a habit of hallucinating facts, figures, and events.”
Our reading: LLMs, even well-resourced ones like GPT-4 trained on curated data, habitually hallucinate facts, figures, and events.
No horizon Evidence as of
Limitation: The research uses constructed evaluation datasets, not a representative sample of everyday use.
Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid
Conditional forecast
“If he believes that Grok can be a competitor to the legacy media companies he’s claiming are trying to kill his website, he may very well see this as an opportunity to “fight back” and add a section to the website “powered by Grok” that generates publicly-available misinformation at a massive scale.”
Our reading: If Musk believes Grok can compete with the legacy media companies he claims are trying to kill X, he may very well see this as a chance to 'fight back' and add a 'powered by Grok' section to X that generates publicly-available misinformation at massive scale.
No horizon
Only if: if Musk believes Grok can compete with legacy media companies he claims are trying to kill his website
Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid
Forecast
“This is, of course, an extremely obvious thing to avoid, meaning that Musk is likely to try it based on his outright hostility toward journalists.”
Our reading: Musk is likely to have Grok publish content directly on X despite the legal risk.
No horizon
Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid
Forecast
“Even if it doesn’t, it will likely further pollute an already-murky pool of information, the previously-mentioned generative inbreeding churning out useless nonsense that will, in turn, be posted by his gormless fans, which will in turn train Grok further.”
Our reading: Grok will likely further pollute X's information pool via a feedback loop of generated nonsense retraining it.
No horizon
Assessment: UnresolvedSaid
Conditional forecast
“Musk is already using Grok as a marketing vehicle for X Premium+’s $16-a-month subscription, and if he actually offers it to every subscriber, there’s no way in hell that this is a profitable transaction.”
Our reading: If Grok is offered to every X Premium+ subscriber at $16/month, it will not be profitable.
No deadline stated Evidence as of
Only if: if Grok is offered to every Premium+ subscriber
Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid
Causal claim
“Musk’s insistence on creating and owning a Large Language Model (rather than connecting to another LLM like, say, Snap, a company that has had exactly one profitable quarter) means that he is responsible for driving down costs rather than an external vendor, something that he has proven to be incapable of doing without destroying everything in the process.”
Our reading: Owning its own LLM makes Musk responsible for cutting Grok's costs, which he has proven unable to do without destruction.
No horizon
Assessment: UnresolvedSaid
Conditional forecast
“If Musk launches Grok to every Premium+ subscriber, it creates an inverse revenue model where the site becomes less profitable as its products become more popular.”
Our reading: Launching Grok to all Premium+ subscribers would make X less profitable as usage grows.
No deadline stated Evidence as of
Only if: if Grok is launched to every Premium+ subscriber
Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid
Forecast
“Grok is financial cancer for an already-dying company, and may precipitate the actual death of Twitter — or, as Musk has threatened in the past, its bankruptcy.”
Our reading: Grok is a financial drain that may precipitate Twitter's death or bankruptcy.
No horizon
Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid
Forecast
“While one might argue that attaching Grok to the website might increase its value, it’s unlikely to do so by much.”
Our reading: Attaching Grok to X is unlikely to increase its value by much.
No horizon
Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid
Conditional forecast
“Musk could, of course, merge the companies, but doing so would — much like training Grok on xAI’s data — corrupt xAi in the same way that it has corrupted Musk.”
Our reading: If Musk merges the companies (X and xAI), doing so would corrupt xAI in the same way that it has corrupted Musk, much like training Grok on xAI's data.
No horizon
Only if: if Musk merges X and xAI
Held from this post (5)
These records did not pass every check, so nothing about them is published. Held is not a finding.
- The two reviews read the claim differently
- The two reviews reached different assessments. Our reading, not assessed: If Grok costs even a quarter of ChatGPT's daily cost, that is still $175,000 a day for a company that said a year ago it was losing $4 million a day, before it lost a remarkable amount of advertising revenue.
- The two reviews read the claim differently
- The two reviews read the claim differently
- The two reviews read the claim differently