Washington: Yet again, Twitter CEO Elon Musk is back with new updates for the micro-blogging site, and this time he has changed the iconic blue bird logo – which has served as a home button on the web version, with the “doge” meme of the Dogecoin cryptocurrency.
Twitter users noticed the ‘doge’ meme, which is part of the logo of the Dogecoin blockchain and cryptocurrency and was created as a joke in 2013, on the web version of Twitter on Monday.
Musk also shared a hilarious post on his account wherein the ‘doge’ meme (which features the face of a Shiba Inu) in the car and telling the police officer, who seems to be seeing his driving license, that his photo has been changed.
Notably, there was no change on Twitter’s mobile app.
It is pertinent to mention that the doge image (of a Shiba Inu) is well-known as the logo of the Dogecoin blockchain and cryptocurrency, which was created as a joke in 2013 — to mock other cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, Variety reported.
Twitter’s CEO also shared the screenshot of the March 26, 2022, conversation between him and the anonymous account where the latter was asking to change the bird logo to “doge.” Sharing this post on Twitter, Musk wrote, “As promised.”
According to Variety, Musk, who bought Twitter last fall in a USD 44 billion deal, is a well-known superfan of the Doge meme and he has promoted Dogecoin both on Twitter and during his appearance last year hosting “Saturday Night Live.” After the change to Twitter’s web logo Monday, the value of Dogecoin rose more than 20 percent.
After Musk tweeted in March 2022, prior to mounting his eventually successful bid to buy Twitter, “Given that Twitter serves as the de facto public town square, failing to adhere to free speech principles fundamentally undermines democracy. What should be done?” Musk tweeted.
@WSBChairman had responded, “just buy Twitter… and change the bird logo to a doge.” Musk responded, “Haha that would be sick”.
He had also posted another photo stating, “Seize the Memes of Production.”
Earlier, on February 15, Musk’s love for ‘doge’ was visible as he posted the photograph of the Dogecoin blockchain and cryptocurrency logo, posing as the CEO, on his account with the caption, “The new CEO of Twitter is amazing.”
New Delhi: Twitter launched its verification system in 2009 to protect celebrities from impersonation but now, Elon Musk wants everyone to pay for the Blue badge, and the move has not gone well with several celebrities on the platform.
Musk now wants everyone to pay $8 a month (Rs 900 in India a month) for verified Blue check marks, and all legacy Blue badges are set to go away any moment.
The White House and The New York Times have already refused to pay for verified Blue with subscription service.
LeBron James, the highest-paid NBA player of all time and earning over $40 million per year, refused to pay Twitter.
“Welp guess my blue check mark will be gone soon cause if you know me I ain’t paying the 5,” he posted on the platform.
Actor William Shatner tweeted at Musk: “Now you’re telling me that I have to pay for something you gave me for free? What is this – the Columbia Records & Tapes Club?”
Michael Thomas, a wide receiver for the NFL’s New Orleans Saints, posted: “Don’t nobody want that raggedy blue check no way anymore”.
Activist-lawyer Monica Lewinsky posted a set of screenshots showing several Twitter accounts impersonating her.
“Well this is going to be fun. In what universe is this fair to people who can suffer consequences for being impersonated? A lie travels halfway around the world before truth even gets out the door”, she posted.
Meanwhile, Musk-run Twitter has removed the Blue badge of The New York Times, barely a week after he announced a new policy for keeping verification badges.
For Elon Musk, buying Twitter in October for $44 billion was part of a grand plan for creating a “super app” — called an “X-App” — modeled after China’s WeChat.
But Musk, a self-proclaimed free speech absolutist, also had another goal in mind: his investment, he tweeted, was “important to the future of civilization to have a common digital town square, where a wide range of beliefs can be debated.”
Since then, Musk has emerged as a central figure in America’s culture wars.
As head of Twitter, he fired chief executive Parag Agrawal, as well as the board, appointing himself as sole director. As a result, some critics say, he’s removed some safeguards implemented by the previous regime to mitigate hate speech and the spread of misinformation, which disproportionately target marginalized communities.
Hate speech toward Black Americans spiked 500 percent within the first 12 hours of Musk’s Twitter coup and has sustained a 200 percent increase over the last several months. Another study found that derogatory tweets and retweets that mention the LGBTQ+ community and “grooming” skyrocketed 119 percent since Musk’s acquisition, according to the Center for Countering Digital Hate. In yet another report, the rate of antisemitic tweets increased by 105 percent when comparing the four-month time periods before and after Musk’s purchase.
Politically, Musk has aligned himself with conservatives, reinstating formerly suspended users such as former President Donald Trump and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.). Musk has also signaled his support of the expected White House run of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, while relishing in trolling Democrats.
His Twitter takeover has firmly cemented him at the center of American politics at a time when the app continues to be the dominant platform used by lawmakers — on both sides of the aisle.
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#Elon #Musk #Recast #Power #List
( With inputs from : www.politico.com )
New Delhi: As AI chatbots come of age, several top entrepreneurs and AI researchers, including Tesla and Twitter CEO Elon Musk and Steve Wozniak, Co-founder of Apple, have written an open letter, asking all AI labs to immediately pause training of AI systems more powerful than GPT-4 for at least 6 months.
Arguing that AI systems with human-competitive intelligence can pose profound risks to society and humanity, more than 1,100 global AI researchers and executives signed the open letter to pause “all giant AI experiments”.
“We call on all AI labs to immediately pause for at least 6 months the training of AI systems more powerful than GPT-4. This pause should be public and verifiable, and include all key actors. If such a pause cannot be enacted quickly, governments should step in and institute a moratorium,” they wrote.
The open letter comes as reports surfaced that Musk tried to take control of OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT, in early 2018 but Sam Altman and OpenAI’s other founders rejected Musk’s proposal.
Musk, in turn, walked away from the company and reneged on a massive planned donation, according to Semafor. Musk reneged on a promise to supply $1 billion in funding, but contributed only $100 million before he walked away.
The open letter against AI experiments has other big names like Jaan Tallinn, Co-Founder of Skype, Evan Sharp, Co-Founder, Pinterest, and Chris Larsen, Co-Founder, Ripple.
The letter said that advanced AI could represent a profound change in the history of life on Earth, and should be planned for and managed with commensurate care and resources.
“Unfortunately, this level of planning and management is not happening, even though recent months have seen AI labs locked in an out-of-control race to develop and deploy ever more powerful digital minds that no one – not even their creators – can understand, predict, or reliably control,” it elaborated.
“Contemporary AI systems are now becoming human-competitive at general tasks, and we must ask ourselves: Should we let machines flood our information channels with propaganda and untruth?”
“Should we automate away all the jobs, including the fulfilling ones? Should we develop non-human minds that might eventually outnumber, outsmart, obsolete and replace us? Should we risk loss of control of our civilisation?” asked the letter.
The letter stated that such decisions must not be delegated to unelected tech leaders.
“Powerful AI systems should be developed only once we are confident that their effects will be positive and their risks will be manageable. This confidence must be well justified and increase with the magnitude of a system’s potential effects.”
OpenAI’s recent statement regarding artificial general intelligence, states: “At some point, it may be important to get independent review before starting to train future systems, and for the most advanced efforts to agree to limit the rate of growth of compute used for creating new models.”
LONDON — As Elon Musk urged humanity to get a grip on artificial intelligence, in London ministers were hailing its benefits.
Rishi Sunak’s new technology chief Michelle Donelan on Wednesday unveiled the government’s long-awaited blueprint for regulating AI, insisting a heavy-handed approach is off the agenda.
At the heart of the innovation-friendly pitch is a plan to give existing regulators a year to issue “practical guidance” for the safe use of machine learning in their sectors based on broad principles like safety, transparency, fairness and accountability. But no new legislation or regulatory bodies are being planned for the burgeoning technology.
It stands in contrast to the strategy being pursued in Brussels, where lawmakers are pushing through a more detailed rulebook, backed by a new liability regime.
Donelan insists her “common-sense, outcomes-oriented approach” will allow the U.K. to “be the best place in the world to build, test and use AI technology.”
Her department’s Twitter account was flooded with content promoting the benefits of AI. “Think AI is scary? It doesn’t have to be!” one of its posts stated on Wednesday.
But some experts fear U.K. policymakers, like their counterparts around the world, may not have grasped the scale of the challenge, and believe more urgency is needed in understanding and policing how the fast-developing tech is used.
“The government’s timeline of a year or more for implementation will leave risks unaddressed just as AI systems are being integrated at pace into our daily lives, from search engines to office suite software,” Michael Birtwistle, associate director of data and AI law and policy at the Ada Lovelace Institute, said. It has “significant gaps,” which could leave harms “unaddressed,” he warned.
“We shouldn’t be risking inventing a nuclear blast before we’ve learnt how to keep it in the shell,” Connor Axiotes, a researcher at the free-market Adam Smith Institute think tank, warned.
Elon wades in
Hours before the U.K. white paper went live, across the Atlantic an open letter calling for labs to immediately pause work training AI systems to be even more powerful for at least six months went live. It was signed by artificial intelligence experts and industry executives, including Tesla and Twitter boss Elon Musk. Researchers at Alphabet-owned DeepMind, and renowned Canadian computer scientist Yoshua Bengio were also signatories.
The letter called for AI developers to work with policymakers to “dramatically accelerate development of robust AI governance systems,” which should “at a minimum include: new and capable regulatory authorities dedicated to AI.”
AI labs are locked in “an out-of-control race to develop and deploy ever more powerful digital minds that no one – not even their creators – can understand, predict, or reliably control,” the letter warned.
Rishi Sunak’s new technology chief Michelle Donelan unveiled the government’s blueprint for regulating AI, insisting a heavy-handed approach is off the agenda | Leon Neal/Getty Images
Back in the U.K., Ellen Judson, head of the Centre for the Analysis of Social Media at the think tank Demos, warned that the U.K. approach of “setting out principles alone” was “not enough.”
“Without the teeth of legal obligations, this is an approach which will result in a patchwork of regulatory guidance that will do little to fundamentally shift the incentives that lead to risky and unethical uses of AI,” she said.
But Technology Minister Paul Scully told the BBC he was “not sure” about pausing further AI developments. He said the government’s proposals should “dispel any of those concerns from Elon Musk and those other figures.”
“What we’re trying to do is to have a situation where we can think as government and think as a sector through the risks but also the benefits of AI — and make sure we can have a framework around this to protect us from the harms,” he said.
Long time coming
Industry concerns about the U.K.’s ability to make policy in their area are countered by some of those who have worked closely with the British government on AI policy.
Its approach to policymaking has been “very consultative,” according to Sue Daley, a director at the industry body TechUK, who has been closely following AI developments for a number of years.
In 2018 ministers set up the Centre for Data Ethics and Innovation and the Office for AI, working across the government’s digital and business departments until it moved to the newly-created Department for Science, Innovation and Technology earlier this year.
The Office for AI is staffed by a “good team of people,” Daly said, while also pointing to the work the U.K.’s well-regarded regulators, like the Information Commissioner’s Office, had been doing on artificial intelligence “for some time.”
Greg Clark, the Conservative chairman of parliament’s science and technology committee, said he thought the government was right to “think carefully.” The former business secretary stressed that is his own view rather than the committee view.
“There’s a danger in rushing to adopt extensive regulations precipitously that have not been properly thought through and stress-tested, and that could prove to be an encumbrance to us and could impede the positive applications of AI,” he added. But he said the government should “proceed quickly” from white paper to regulatory framework “during the months ahead.”
Public view
Outside Westminster, the potential implications of the technology are yet to be fully realized, surveys suggest.
Public First, a Westminster-based consultancy, which conducted a raft of polling into public attitudes to artificial intelligence earlier this month, found that beyond fears about unemployment, people were pretty positive about AI.
“It certainly pales into insignificance compared to the other things that they are worried about like the prospect of armed conflict, or even the impact of climate change,” James Frayne, a founding partner of Public First, who conducted the polling said. “This falls way down the priority list,” he said.
But he cautioned this could change.
“One assumes that at some point there will be an event which shocks them, and shakes them, and makes them think very differently about AI,” he added.
“At that point there will be great demands for the government to make sure that they’re all over this in terms of regulation. They will expect the government to not only move very quickly, but to have made significant progress already,” he said.
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( With inputs from : www.politico.eu )
San Francisco: OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has hit back at Twitter CEO Elon Musk for criticising his for-profit company which is now owned by Microsoft.
During the ‘On With Kara Swisher’ podcast, Altman said OpenAI is “independent” from Microsoft.
Altman said Musk has been critical of OpenAI on Twitter.
“Elon Musk is obviously attacking us,” he noted.
“To say a positive thing about Elon, I think he really does care about a good future with artificial general intelligence (AGI). I mean, he’s a jerk, whatever else you want to say about him. But he has a style that is not a style that I’d want to have for myself,” Altman was quoted as saying.
“But I think he does really care, and he is feeling very stressed about what the future’s going to look like for humanity,” the OpenAI CEO added.
Musk tried to take control of OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT, in early 2018 but Altman and OpenAI’s other founders rejected Musk’s proposal.
Musk later walked away from the company and reneged on a massive planned donation, according to Semafor.
Musk told Altman that he believed the “venture had fallen fatally behind Google”.
When Musk walked away, he resigned from its board in 2018 citing a conflict of interest with his work at Tesla.
According to the Semafor report, he also reneged on a promise to supply $1 billion in funding, contributing only $100 million before he walked.
In March, 2019, OpenAI announced it was creating a for-profit entity so that it could raise enough money to pay for the compute power.
Less than six months later, Microsoft infused $1 billion in OpenAI, and the rest is history.
San Francisco: Elon Musk has finally broken his silence on giving stock awards to employees, saying that they will get stock awards based on a roughly $20 billion valuation.
It is less than half of $44 billion for which Musk acquired the micro-blogging platform, reports The Wall Street Journal.
“I see a clear, but difficult, path to a >$250B valuation,” he told employees in an email.
He said that Twitter is being reshaped so that the company “can be thought of as an inverse startup.”
In a separate email, Twitter told employees it is offering new equity grants to staff that will start to vest after six months.
In about a year, the company will offer a liquidity event in which they can cash out some of that equity.
The new grants will vest over four years, according to the Journal.
Twitter spent nearly $630 million on stock-based compensation in 2021.
It had more than 7,500 employees and now, the company is down to about 2,000 workers after Musk laid off thousands in several rounds of layoffs.
Despite Elon Musk’s efforts to monetise Twitter, the micro-blogging platform reported a massive 40 per cent drop in revenue and adjusted earnings for December 2022.
Several advertisers “ditched the social-media platform following Elon Musk’s takeover”, the Wall Street Journal had earlier reported, citing people familiar with the matter.
In an update to investors, Twitter reported a 40 per cent decline (year-over-year) in both revenue and adjusted earnings for December 2022.
The company recently made a first interest payment to banks that lent $13 billion to help Musk buy Twitter.
Musk had predicted in November that Twitter may go bankrupt.
San Francisco: Twitter CEO Elon Musk on Sunday mocked Meta for planning to launch a dedicated Twitter-like social media application and called it “copy cat”.
It all started when the music news website Daily Loud posted: “Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta exploring plans to launch a rival to Twitter.”
On this, a user asked: “Why tho? is he like people are mad at Elon musk, I’ll make an alternative because everyone loves me and Facebook so much.”
Commenting on this conversation, Musk said: “Copy cat.”
Several users expressed their thoughts on Musk’s post.
While one user said: “I’m sure people will by dying to join another Meta platform plagued with ‘independent fact checkers’ suppressing conversations and content moderators taking down memes. Sounds fun!”
Another commented: “Facebook should start making rockets and electric cars as well since they so ‘good’ at what they do.”
Recently, it was reported that Meta is building a dedicated Twitter-like social media application for people to post text-based updates.
The product is still in its early stages, and no release date has been set, but legal and regulatory teams have already begun to investigate potential privacy concerns surrounding the app to address them before launch.
Several rival platforms have launched or gained traction in the months since Musk took over the micro-blogging platform – among them include Mastodon, Post.news, and T2.
Earlier this month, Twitter co-founder and former CEO Jack Dorsey came back into the social media game, with the launch of his Twitter alternative called ‘Bluesky’.
San Francisco: Twitter boss Elon Musk on Saturday said that he is open to the idea of buying the collapsed Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) and turning it into a digital bank.
Min-Liang Tan, co-founder and CEO of Razer (a consumer electronic company), tweeted: “I think Twitter should buy SVB and become a digital bank”.
To which Musk replied: “I’m open to the idea”.
US regulators on Friday shut down Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) and took control of its customer deposits in the largest failure of an American bank since 2008.
The moves came as the firm, a key tech lender, was scrambling to raise money to plug a loss from the sale of assets affected by higher interest rates, BBC reported.
SVB faced “inadequate liquidity and insolvency”, banking regulators in California, where the firm has its headquarters.
The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), which typically protects deposits up to $2,50,000, said it had taken charge of the roughly $175 billion in deposits held at the bank, the 16th largest in the US.
Silicon Valley Bank was the US’s 16th largest bank, with a total of 17 branches in California and Massachusetts.
San Francisco: Elon Musk on Twitter has taken an exit interview of a sacked worker, who asked him to confirm if he is still an employee or not.
Ex-Twitter employee named Haraldur Thorleifsson wrote in his post: “Dear @elonmusk, 9 days ago the access to my work computer was cut, along with about 200 other Twitter employees. However, your head of HR is not able to confirm if I am an employee or not. You’ve not answered my emails. Maybe if enough people retweet you’ll answer me here?”
To which Musk replied: “What work have you been doing?”
Thorleifsson then talked about his job and the specific work he was doing at Twitter.
After a brief discussion, the Twitter boss laughed at him with emojis, indicating that he had been fired.
Moreover, the exit interview has gone viral, with many people finding Musk’s attitude rude and disrespectful.
“Publicly humiliated his ex-employee. The guy had one shot and tried to waffle by saying he saved $500k on FIGMA,” a user wrote.
“I’m sorry to say it doesn’t seem to be an actual question but him mocking you, someone who was just laid off. This makes me so upset I will probably cancel my subscription. I cannot support such a cruel organization. Explain yourself Elon!,” another user commented.
