CANNES, FRANCE – JUNE 19: Elon Musk attends “Exploring the New Frontiers of Innovation: Mark Read” … [+]
Artificial intelligence could save the world.
Well, possibly not – but not less than it could save Elon Musk’s X-App.
A splendidly written and well researched book entitled Fight of the Bird by Kurt Wagner was published earlier this yr. It is principally concerning the change of power between what was once called Twitter and the present incarnation under Elon Musk. The creator recently told me that AI may be the one thing that would revive the app, or not less than in the future develop into an intelligent mind meld with Musk’s startup xAI.
“X is a much smaller company than Twitter was a few years ago,” says Wagner. “It feels like we’re in a kind of limbo right now. One possible outcome: X will eventually be integrated into xAI. This would embed X in a much more valuable, promising company and offer X investors a better potential return. It would also take the pressure off Elon to revive X’s business on his own.”
As everyone knows by now, AI is on an enormous upward trend. Analyst firms predict that it grow right into a trillion-dollar industryand the year-on-year growth is overwhelming (approx. 37% expected growth per yr). The ChatGPT app reached a million users in only five days.
If there’s one thing that would save X, it’s artificial intelligence. Imagine a radically transformed app that may write your posts, create content schedules, robotically reply to tweets, summarize the day’s news with a click, and even act as your virtual avatar. Perhaps the largest surprise is that X hasn’t yet rolled out lots of these AI-powered features.
The problems lie on the core of the corporate, says Wagner. And by “the core” all of us mean Musk himself, who tends to make arbitrary decisions without excited about the results. He is an actual troublemaker within the truest sense of the word.
“X has not yet found a way to build a sustainable business beyond advertising,” says Wagner. “I’m not convinced your entry into payment transactions won’t work either. So to illustrate promoting is the business model they stick to. If that is the case, I feel it should be very hard for X to achieve success in business with Elon as involved within the day-to-day as he’s now. When you confer with big advertisers, certainly one of their primary concerns is Elon’s unpredictability.”
At least with artificial intelligence there may be some likelihood of relevance – and with social media, relevance is the last word growth engine. If you lose relevance, you lose users.
“Elon has a lot of money and I think he will be willing to pay out of his own pocket to keep X running as long as he believes he is funding a relevant and important platform for global conversation and politics,” says Wagner. “If X loses its place as a platform for discussing important cultural issues – politics, sports, etc. – I think there is also a risk of losing Elon’s attention.”
One of the truly remarkable things about artificial intelligence is that it creates relevance for itself. It’s a machine that always produces relevance. An AI can sift through trending topics and eat up relevance like popcorn, one post at a time. While a few of us need to stay awake thus far and control Google Trends, AI can drive the expansion and relevance of apps like X without lifting a virtual finger.
The problem, after all, is that the identical is true of another social media app. AI wins when it advances faster and more intelligently than the subsequent app. While X is commonly hampered by Musk and his hasty decisions, AI features could also allow the app to make dramatic progress. Let’s hope Musk and the remainder of the X team can determine save the app from itself.
