Pundit ClaimsAI claims by Gary Marcus and Ed Zitron, with the evidence

Ed Zitron Where's Your Ed At Published

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.

  1. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    “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.”

    What we tested: Grok has already fabricated a story about a British MP being expelled from Parliament.

  2. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    “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.”

    What we tested: 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.

  3. Assessment: SupportedSaid

    “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.”

    What we tested: LLMs, even well-resourced ones like GPT-4 trained on curated data, habitually hallucinate facts, figures, and events.

    What happened: OpenAI acknowledges factual hallucinations in GPT-4. Its accompanying report of improvement over earlier models does not remove that recurring limitation. (OpenAI, )

  4. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    “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.”

    What we tested: 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.

  5. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    “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.”

    What we tested: Musk is likely to have Grok publish content directly on X despite the legal risk.

  6. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    “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.”

    What we tested: Grok will likely further pollute X's information pool via a feedback loop of generated nonsense retraining it.

  7. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    “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.”

    What we tested: If Grok is offered to every X Premium+ subscriber at $16/month, it will not be profitable.

  8. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    “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.”

    What we tested: Owning its own LLM makes Musk responsible for cutting Grok's costs, which he has proven unable to do without destruction.

  9. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    “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.”

    What we tested: Launching Grok to all Premium+ subscribers would make X less profitable as usage grows.

  10. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    “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.”

    What we tested: Grok is a financial drain that may precipitate Twitter's death or bankruptcy.

  11. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    “While one might argue that attaching Grok to the website might increase its value, it’s unlikely to do so by much.”

    What we tested: Attaching Grok to X is unlikely to increase its value by much.

  12. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    “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.”

    What we tested: 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.

Held from this post (5)

These records did not pass every check, so nothing about them is published. Held is not a finding.