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Posted by mxstbr 5 days ago

Source code for the X recommendation algorithm(github.com)
249 points | 142 commentspage 2
OG_BME 5 days ago|
I tried going through the latest diff, but there is so much boilerplate that I was nt able to find any real insights through skimming.

Has anyone found anything useful? Interesting needle-in-a-haystack problem for LLMs to try as well.

mxstbr 5 days ago||
https://x.com/XEng/status/1965226798460887127
numpad0 5 days ago|
Interesting. So the numbers/fractions of "for you feed isn't working" complaints, and specifically that complaint, is above some threshold?
barrenko 5 days ago||
Just ping Nikita, he'll tell you the current algo.
qiine 5 days ago|
hope it doesn't involve goat again
mrtksn 5 days ago||
I want a social media where I can ssh into the servers with limited privileges, enough to see what's going on but not cause harm.
nativeit 5 days ago|
I want a social media where all of that is true of its owners.
anonym29 5 days ago||
It's so disappointing to see that Twitter has only released the source code of their algorithm while all of their competitors have released both algorithms and weights.
guluarte 5 days ago||
so basically pay to play
wetpaws 5 days ago||
[dead]
barbazoo 5 days ago||
[flagged]
ivape 5 days ago|
Elon’s father was not keen on him leaving South Africa from what I recall. There was an element of daddy doesn’t believe in me. He left against his fathers wishes.

https://people.com/human-interest/elon-musk-errol-musk-relat...

’“He was such a terrible human being,” Elon, 46, told the magazine. “You have no idea.”’

Daddy issues out the ass. This is actually the simplest answer, because people that pursue external validation (in Elon’s case it is very extreme, nothing is ever enough) are a genuine product of child abuse (it’s obvious emotional abuse is a major factor here).

I’m not absolving Elon, just trying to understand the initial state.

Edit:

When Elon finally came home from the hospital, his father berated him. "I had to stand for an hour as he yelled at me and called me an idiot and told me that I was just worthless," Elon recalls. Kimbal, who had to watch the tirade, says it was the worst memory of his life. "My father just lost it, went ballistic, as he often did. He had zero compassion."

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/book-excerpt-elon-musk-by-walte...

Remember, this is a guy that showed up with a toilet to the Twitter offices and fired everyone, got on everyone’s case to sleep in the offices. He is a literal product of child abuse, and while he may not be continuing the cycle with his kids (which is hard to say because he disowned his Trans kid), he is absolutely unleashing the cycle of abuse onto others wherever he goes.

rurp 5 days ago|||
He didn't just disown the Trans kid, he's disowned most of his kids. He literally has the mom's sign a contract that says the kid will have no legal claim as his child.
barbazoo 5 days ago||||
Sucks, dads, please show your children that you love them unconditionally.
simianwords 5 days ago|||
This is the most shallow take on Elon I have read.
ivape 5 days ago||
No it’s not. People who don’t take child abuse seriously say stuff like that. Michael Jackson is another case of a man who regularly brought up his father’s abuse. These are lifelong scars that show up in everything you do in your life if you don’t face it. Both Elon and MJ engage in drug abuse very late into life. If you stop looking at them as extraordinary humans, and just look at them as ordinary humans, you’ll see that they track the path of many with dark upbringings (they become dysfunctional in some form or another if they don’t face the reality of their journey). They have a veeeery fucked up concept of what human worth is because their caretakers disrespected them.

https://www.unicef.org/press-releases/nearly-400-million-you...

This is a common thing, not a hot take.

davidw 5 days ago||
Does it include the bit about white South Africans?
kennyadam 5 days ago|
That was Grok, not the X algorithm.
cubefox 5 days ago||
And the Grok prompts are also open source: https://github.com/xai-org/grok-prompts
jsheard 5 days ago|||
Well, some version of them are open source, which may or may not be what is actually running in prod. AFAIK the patch which made it obsessively bring up white South Africans was never published, and this algorithm repo went over two years between updates so it obviously wasn't tracking prod.
cubefox 5 days ago||
> which may or may not be what is actually running in prod.

This is the case for every open source software ever.

> AFAIK the patch which made it obsessively bring up white South Africans was never published

Or there never was a specific patch for that purpose, contrary to what you are assuming.

> this algorithm repo went over two years between updates so it obviously wasn't tracking prod.

You are mixing up something. The Grok prompt repo is a different repo from the recommendation algorithm, and the former has been updated regularly.

cma 5 days ago|||
Did they ever open source in there the stuff that was making Grok search for Musk's opinion before giving an opinion on world news?
luma 5 days ago||
Nope, nor did that repo have the system prompts that brought is MechaHitler, nor the time earlier this year where it started injecting Trump into every completion.

The Grok repo is a smokescreen for deniability (just not particularly plausible).

cubefox 5 days ago||
> Nope, nor did that repo have the system prompts that brought is MechaHitler

False, you made that up.

https://decrypt.co/329365/bye-bye-mechahitler-elon-musk-xai-...

> The Grok repo is a smokescreen for deniability (just not particularly plausible).

Completely unfounded conspiracy theory.

cma 5 days ago||
I would be surprised if that line in the prompt caused it without the other thing they did just before mecha Hitler: Elon created a Twitter thread asking users to submit divisive politically incorrect facts for grok training. It was full of Holocaust denial and white supremecy stuff.

https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1936493967320953090

Most likely they rolled back finetuning on that thread at the same time they adjusted the prompt.

keepamovin 5 days ago|
I think Elon said he would release the weights. In a video somewhere. That's what he meant - when the next major version lands, they release the previous one?

People's choices can change, maybe the economic/geopolitical reality of AI race has been impressed upon him, but I think that's what he said.

TheAceOfHearts 5 days ago|
This post is about the Twitter algorithm. He originally said it would be open source, but he just did a source dump 2 years ago. Now they did a new source dump with updated but heavily redacted code for the For You feed.

As for his claims about opening up Grok: Elon said that they would publish the n-1 weights for Grok. However, he dragged his feet and only recently released the weights for Grok 2. So now we're up to Grok 4 but he has yet to release the weights for Grok 3 despite his claims.

I think the problem with Elon is that he doesn't fully hold himself accountable for his words. If he decided that it was no longer economically viable to share Grok's weights then he should post an update about that. You cannot expect to win the goodwill of claiming to support open source and then continuously drag your feet while refusing to communicate your intentions clearly.