Elon Musk has exited the White House—physically, at least.
Donald Trump’s “special government employee” is no longer working within the DOGE offices as he prepares his exit from the Trump administration and focuses more on saving his floundering businesses from failure.
“Instead of meeting with him in person, I’m talking to him on the phone, but it’s the same net effect,” White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles told the New York Post in an interview discussing the Trump administration’s first 100 days.
The thing I’ve never really understood about this is what kind of data would the government have that would be any use to an LLM?
I’m sure that musk wanted that government data, but you all ever work with the government? Every data set is some weird pile of forms encoded in fixed width field, wrapped in json, plopped into the cdata of an xml node. Fucking enjoy parsing that shit and when you do you realize you have a form some guy filled out in 1972 to register a trailer.
Is the government sitting on some treasure trove of data that you could feed into an LLM as training data? Because that’s what would actually be valuable.
But musk is a fucking moron so I wouldn’t put it past him to break into an empty bank vault and then scuttle away like the fucking roach he is.
…why would you assume this was all for a stupid AI?
I’m open to the idea it’s for something else. Data to feed into AI is the thing people are willing to pay heaps of money for right now. And musk has an AI company so I thought the thinking was “musk is taking data for his stupid ai company”
If that’s not what he’s doing, then what data and for what purpose?
I loathe musk, but having some trouble connecting the dots.
So if not for feeding into xAI, what data do people think he’s taking and what’s he doing with it?
It has nothing to do with training LLMs.
The US government data (each US citizen’s health, tax, etc. records) will be added to the data from Meta, Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Apple, and every other tech company that stores “advertising” data to create more complete profiles of each and every US citizen. This data can then be analyzed, filtered, collected and collated by whatever criteria “they” want, for whatever purpose.
NOW the LLMs can be used on this dataset to create lists. Very dangerous (and mostly wrong) lists.
Well that makes more sense than LLMs I suppose. Doesn’t really make a lot of sense why musk would want that given the one thing he doesn’t run is an ad network.
As someone that works in the tech sector though, this idea doesn’t really seem super compelling. The advertisers already have this data, so it just seems like a weird kind of heist to go pull off.
Advertisers already know how much money you make, what illnesses your suffering from (based on things you search for), I mean we live in an unprecedented surveillance states.
Maybe musk wanted his own version of that to sell to people, that’s a somewhat plausible scenario. This just sounds a lot like a conspiracy theory and the rule for a conspiracy theory is “someone has to make money” for the theory to be true.
Is musk a piece of shit, sure. Does the government have data, yep. Does taking the data from the government make musk money, maybe? I guess in the world where it’s a play for him to close the gap on a bunch of demographic information people can already buy from google or X, which he owns.
So I suppose if we see X or xAI offering significantly improved ad targeting or data brokerage that would make this all hang together.
He now owns enough information himself to significantly and selectively hurt anyone who passed through american gvmt system. If you are a guy who tracked his jet, he now knows a lot about you and your relatives. And, besides his personal feuds, he can also help Project 2025 with whatever nazi shit they want to do, whenever they have access to this data now or not.
To complete the profiling of every US’s visitor, or nearly everyone, another but scarily more apt shithead Peter Thiel, who supported republicans and allegedly helped to make Vance (pro-technobros guy) the 2nd in power, was a CEO of PayPal, an angel investor into Facebook, is connected to many in the Silicon Valley besides being powerful and wealthy himself, and for many years he looks into data harvesting and machine learning (Palantir) to profile people, draw connections and find potential undesirables. The tools provided by the later are used by ICE since 2014, but, I assume, they themselves haven’t got direct access to gvmnt databases, and now they may have it.
The whole random deportation catastrophe is probably orchestrated not by pure random of ICE getting rouge, but by the combination of these two and LLM-generated suggestions to raid house A and B. I’ve also heard, their products were used in Ukraine and Israel to sniff on possible targets in active warfare, so there’s a lot more to unbox there rather than simple ad targeting.
Not sure about other agencies but CDC and specifically NCHS typically had to anonymize their health data before public release. If you could use other data points from within the government to connect the dots, that might be valuable to someone.