Musk Is Making X Artificial Intelligence Smart Again
Written by Chriss W. Street
Elon Musk paid $44 billion for X (formerly Twitter) in 2022 to destroy the half of its social media traffic that was machine generated “bots.” His real goal was to purify X to train his start-up xAI artificial intelligence that rose in value by $40 billion in just two years.
Open AI launched in 2017 and quickly built a massive lead in artificial intelligence, because it partnered to learn by “scraping” Google’s data-base that captures an 89.33% worldwide share of internet searches.
But Open AI recently admitted its latest GPT-4 version was “lazier and dumber” than the prior GPT-3 at managing reasoning capabilities, following instructions, forgetting basic software code, and only remembering the most recent prompt.
Open AI’s challenge is its artificial intelligence training “school”has vacuumed up massive amounts of AI-generated bot data, rather than human generated data. Training with an over-abundance of bot data led to “model collapse as Open AI cannibalized its own bot generated content, resulting in rapid degradation in AI quality and accuracy.
Other artificial intelligence training programs are suffering similar challenges as they run out of human-created data, and there AI engine begins “eating itself.”
Musk as the richest man in the world, used his deep pockets to drive X advertisers cost per thousand impressions down from $7 in 2022 to $.65 in 2024, according to Statista.
Users dropped from 650 million to 500 million and ad revenue dropped from $4.4 billion in revenue in 2022 to about $3.4 billion in 2023. The number of X site users rebounded back to 619 million that visited the X site about 0.5 billion times in April 2024. Musk signing on to help lead Trump’s reelection campaign caused a spectacular spike in X monthly visits to 4.4 billion in October 2024.
X election day traffic was up a stupendous 38% on November 5. The tidal wave of user interest has forced all of Twitter’s former top advertisers including Apple, Comcast, Disney, Discovery, and IBM to return to the advertise on the site.
Elon Musk’s recent X success has revived his $44 billioninvestment from Twitter. But over just two years, Musk's xAI startup raised $6 billion at a $24 billion valuation earlier this year, and is set to soon raise “several billion dollars” at a $40 billion valuation.