Musk might leave Twitter in his wake as he chases after chatbot

For all his childish behaviour on Twitter, Elon Musk would still like us to believe in his noble ambitions to make the world a better place. His space exploration company will make humans an interplanetary species, electric carmaker Tesla will move us towards sustainable energy and his newly acquired Twitter will become a haven of free speech and healthy debate.

Actually, that last goal is not going so well. Twitter stands little hope of becoming a financial or cultural success under Musk as he continues to drain the online platform of talent, revenue sources and integrity. His latest antic has been to deflect criticism of Dilbert creator Scott Adams for a bizarre and racially offensive tirade on YouTube and blame “the media” for being racist instead.   

Luckily a new mission has come along to draw Musk’s attention from the spiralling fortunes of his $44bn purchase. Musk has been approaching artificial intelligence (AI) researchers in recent weeks amid the explosion of attention around ChatGPT to look into forming a new research lab. The goal is to build an alternative to the chatbot launched by San Francisco start-up OpenAI, according to The Information.

Musk’s next big quest seems be making better AI, one of the most transformative inventions of modern times. But realistically, Musk cannot run a serious OpenAI rival as a side hustle. It would cost him enormous amounts of time and money.

ChatGPT is powered by a large language model trained on Microsoft’s supercomputer, one of the world’s most powerful, and getting access to similar computing power will be increasingly difficult as big tech firms centralise control of such systems for their own generative AI projects. Building and training a large language model can cost millions of dollars weekly in computing costs, while hiring a batch of AI scientists will be tricky at a time when such talent is in high demand. 

Spectacle made

This is probably a serious pursuit though, given Musk’s history of investing in the most advanced AI projects. Almost a decade ago he backed DeepMind and OpenAI, two companies competing to build superintelligent machines or artificial general intelligence, before they were bought by Google and Microsoft, respectively. He has since complained that OpenAI is “training AI to be woke” and that big tech swayed the initial goals of the former start-ups.

Musk is right about the growing corporate influence on AI research and also right to be uneasy about it, but the spectacle he has made of Twitter does not inspire confidence in his ability to do any better. As The Information’s story hints, Musk might be eager to check out of the disaster he created at Twitter and focus on something else. 

The billionaire’s capricious behaviour and policies have already driven advertisers away from the social media platform, and he badly fumbled the launch of Twitter’s new subscription service, Blue. Twitter, which has about 250-million users regularly visiting the site for free, has reportedly managed to get just 180,000 of them in the US to subscribe to the $11 monthly plan. 

Ad revenue shows no sign of improving after Musk’s reckless loosening of content rules led to an increase in hate speech and harassment on the site — and an early exodus of advertisers. About 625 of the top 1,000 brands who were advertising on Twitter in September 2022, a month before Musk bought the company, were no longer spending on the platform in early January, according to data provided to CNN by digital marketing analysis firm Pathmatics by Sensor Tower. Advertisers have complained of losing their points of contact, not knowing who is still around at Twitter and emails being sent into an “abyss”.

Extremely hardcore

All in all, you might think Musk stepping back would bode well for Twitter. But there is still the question of who would take his place. Tech newsletter Platformer reported on Tuesday that Musk appeared to favour loyalist Steve Davis as Twitter’s next CEO. Davis, known for working 16-hour-days, is on loan from his normal day job as CEO of one of the billionaire’s other firms, the Boring Company. Twitter staff told me last December that Davis was already running daily business at Twitter, and that he was “always around”. That month, Musk reportedly told Davis to cut $500m in costs. The executive cut about $1bn instead, while sleeping in the office with his partner and newborn.  

Davis clearly fits into Musk’s “extremely hardcore” culture, but that does not mean he is the right person to turn around Twitter’s financial fortunes. After all, he has overseen the advertising and subscription problems just as Musk has.

Davis has worked with Musk for 20 years, having joined SpaceX in 2003 as one of the company’s first employees, but his work at Boring also involved many unfinished projects. When Musk first announced his ideas for the tunnel construction company, he teased a 563km route between Los Angeles and San Francisco. Since then its most substantial project has been a 2.7km tunnel under a convention centre in Las Vegas. 

With any luck, Musk will manage to stave off a Twitter bankruptcy. But the company’s trajectory towards becoming an unruly backwater in social media, run by a skeleton crew and increasingly devoid of fun or useful content, does no look much different.   

Bloomberg Opinion
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