Elon Musk's X on Tuesday released its source code for the social media platform's feed algorithm:
X's source code release is one of the first ever made by a large social platform, Cryptonews.com reported.
"We know the algorithm is dumb and needs massive improvements, but at least you can see us struggle to make it better in real-time and with transparency. No other social media companies do this," Musk posted in a repost fronm [sic] the platform's engineering team,
His post was in response to the eam account post on Monday which reads: "We have open-sourced our new X algorithm, powered by the same transformer architecture as xAI's Grok model."
[...] "The code reveals a sophisticated system powered by Grok, xAI's open-source transformer. No manual heuristics. No hidden thumb on the scale. The algorithm predicts 15 different user actions and uses 'attention masking' to ensure each post is scored independently, eliminating batch bias. Most interesting? A built-in Author Diversity Scorer prevents any single account from dominating your feed," he continued.
"Researchers, competitors, and critics can now verify exactly how content gets promoted or filtered. Facebook won't do this. TikTok won't do this. YouTube won't do this."
[...] The source code is primarily written in Rust and Python, and the model retrieves posts from two sources, including accounts that a user follows and a wider pool of content identified through machine-learning-based discovery, according to technical documentation, Cryptonews.com reported.
[Ed note: Source code available at Github]
(Score: 3, Insightful) by turgid on Friday January 30, @08:37AM (1 child)
"The code reveals a sophisticated system powered by Grok, xAI's open-source transformer. No manual heuristics. No hidden thumb on the scale. The algorithm predicts 15 different user actions and uses 'attention masking' to ensure each post is scored independently, eliminating batch bias. Most interesting? A built-in Author Diversity Scorer prevents any single account from dominating your feed," he continued.
Great. Now is Grok open source? Can we sit down and read the code and all of its training data and deduce what it's effect is going to be?
Heuristic ALgorithms. Humans can't be allowed to jeopardise the mission.
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 4, Insightful) by bussdriver on Friday January 30, @06:57PM
I don't trust him. do you??
There is no way you can know that he doesn't have patches added to what they build for production use. It's all in the trained network and you can't "grok" those... if you could get it's training data you could analyze that for biases however the size and time of doing that is growing to the point where it will not be available in the future and the value of the network will be everything.
If it takes 10 years of data trained in a specific order at the scales we are using now (which is like all available digitized text) it won't be cost effective to recreate it -- people will just try to fix the existing model than restart from nothing. Plus you have legal limits coming (they just break the law for now) where it's fair use to buy all the books, scan them then pulp the books (being done now) - but it's illegal to KEEP copies of those books after training on them. You legally have to re-scan the books; which also means you need to store them if you ever hope to legally repeat the training. Unless you sign an agreement, they can't stop you from training; it's not a copy to temporarily hold it in RAM. I'm sure if they could monitor your brain and charge you rent every time you had a thought or inspiration of "their content" they certainly would do so and Disney would be right there to pass the law.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by DadaDoofy on Friday January 30, @12:49PM (4 children)
If you search out the episode of Jay Leno's Garage in which Elon Musk appears, you can verify it for yourself. He mentions that he doesn't patent SpaceX rocket designs. He wants anyone to be able to build the rockets that will make a civilization on Mars possible, because he feels SpaceX can't do it alone. He said "Patents are for the weak."
I'm not sure about a civilization on Mars, but I think open-sourcing the X code embodies the spirit of his patent-less philosophy. He seems to understand that success in the marketplace involves so much more than just a good idea.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Friday January 30, @01:01PM
Patents are for slow moving, under funded, over regulated companies, to protect them from their peers and betters. That only works up to the point that the bigger fish can just buy out the patent holder completely.
Musk is currently an apex predator in the market, patents are a waste of time for SpaceX, and Twitter has never been about making money, it's about taking advantage of people's inertia with respect to their online behavior. Everyone can stop using a particular service and switch to another in a minute, but a large minority take years to make the leap, if ever.
🌻🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2, Insightful) by bussdriver on Friday January 30, @06:32PM
It's rocket science and they don't have the ability to do much - most their "work" is built upon giants and requires giants to move forward; they contribute very little. NASA, government labs, other governments, and universities do the vast majority of the work. Sharing tiny bits helps encourage others; it's selfishly motivated sharing, which is ok, that helps progress but don't just assume somebody participating is altruistic. Hell, most politicians are there for power and trade you something you want for their power.
Also, he needs to win over some people to work with them - especially after he alienated so many decent people. Especially science nerds who are connected to or aware of the government he attacked. NASA obviously got people dreaming of space and startrek etc. you pull in those smart extremely motivated people appealing to their dreams (worldwide) and NASA along with corrupt government have been losing ground on that - he just had to get back to that appeal which is easy when he himself dreams of being absolute ruler of Mars.
(Score: 3, Touché) by driverless on Saturday January 31, @07:34AM (1 child)
And absolutely anyone with a few billion dollars in US government cash injections and access to a complete manufacturing supply chain and thousands of skilled employees can.
(Score: 2) by DadaDoofy on Sunday February 01, @01:28AM
Sure. And just how does someone obtain access to and control of "few billion dollars in US government cash injections and access to a complete manufacturing supply chain and thousands of skilled employees"?