Elon Musk has said running Twitter has been “a roller coaster ride” and has acknowledged “a lot of mistakes” along the way, six months after buying the company for $40 billion.
In an interview with the BBC on Tuesday, after accepting a last-minute invitation to “spontaneity,” Musk acknowledged that one of those mistakes was the decision to label the station’s account as “government-funded.” The social network’s owner said he would change the BBC’s title on Twitter after it objected.
“Because we want to be as truthful and accurate as possible, we are changing the label to ‘government funded’,” said Elon Musk.
UK national broadcasting is funded primarily by an annual fee set by the government but paid by the taxpayer.
This dispute comes on the heels of a similar controversy with US radio station NPR, which briefly labeled Twitter as “state-affiliated”, in the same way it classifies Chinese and Russian platforms as government-run.
NPR stopped writing on the social network in protest. Twitter now labels NPR, which has nearly 9 million followers, as a “government-funded medium”, as does the BBC account.
Musk has expressed disdain for social media for years and recently installed a poop emoji auto-reply on emails sent to the site’s main address.
In the interview with the BBC, Musk also addressed Twitter’s controversial move to strip the New York Times of the blue check after the company refused to pay to keep it.
As of April 20, all verified Twitter accounts — those verified as authentic under the company’s former ownership — must pay to sign up for Twitter Blue.
One of the reasons for this, Musk said, is that he doesn’t want Twitter to use a group of journalists to determine what is news. “I hope this is more a case of the public choosing the story than the media choosing the story,” he said.
Musk said Twitter would “treat everyone equally”
Evaluating his time leading up to the social network, which he acquired in October, Elon Musk said “the past few months have been stressful.”
“A lot of mistakes were made along the way? Of course,” he said. “But all’s well that ends well. I feel like we’re on the right track.”
When asked who Twitter’s new CEO was after his resignation, Elon Musk named his dog Floki.
Twitter develops AI project despite Musk’s call for a global pause
Elon Musk is moving forward with an Artificial Intelligence (AI) project on Twitter despite his recent call for a general pause in technology development, US media reported.
Musk bought thousands of powerful and expensive processors and hired AI engineering specialists, Insider reported. Information, another site specializing in technology, said the businessman is considering the idea of creating a competitor to ChatGPT.
The news was reported by Insider two weeks after Musk signed a letter with several experts calling for a pause in AI development.
The open letter, published on the website of the Musk-founded Future of Life Institute, calls for a six-month pause in the development of powerful AI systems.
The billionaire owner of Tesla and several scientists wrote that “AI systems that compete with human intelligence could pose major risks to society and humanity.”
The signatories, including academics and big names in technology such as Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, argued that the pause should be used to tighten regulations and ensure the security of systems.
Musk’s fledgling AI project for Twitter involves training a language model to create written content, according to Insider.
Major tech groups like Google, Meta, and Microsoft have been working on AI systems for years, but late last year San Francisco-based company OpenAI sparked huge interest by releasing ChatGPT, which generates natural language text from simple instructions.
Musk was one of the founders of OpenAI, but left the company in 2018.
Microsoft has now announced that it will invest billions of dollars in OpenAI and that it will use the technology in its Bing search engine.
Source: DN
