Tag: Elon Musk

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Cybertruck production line gets Musk’s stamp of approval

Late in March, Tesla’s Cybertruck was spotted on the roads, undergoing a stringent steering test.

Now, a week later, Tesla CEO Elon Musk is hyping up the long-delayed truck.

According to a tweet, Musk recently toured the Cybertruck production line in the Texas Gigafactory, and he was impressed with what he saw. In a reply to his own tweet, he also said that the production line “Feels like the future.” Musk does not mention what aspect he was impressed with, or what part of the production line feels like the future.

Considering that the early production for the Cybertruck is planned for mid-2023, it might be that Musk is impressed with how quickly the line was put together, or it could be that the anticipated electric vehicle (EV) will hit the road sooner than initially expected.

The Cybertruck has recently been spotted in other locations as well, so it might be that the automaker is done with the delays and will stand good on its ‘mass production in 2024’ and ‘early production in mid-2023’ promise.

It’s worth noting that when the truck was first revealed in 2019, Tesla quoted a $39,900 USD (roughly $54,400 CAD at the time) price tag for the vehicle.

During a Tesla shareholder’s meeting last August, Musk said that “a lot has changed” since then and the Cybertruck’s price and specifications will shift.

Source: @elonmusk

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Musk replaces the Twitter bird logo with the Dogecoin logo

Last year, in a Tweet reply, Twitter user @WSBChairman suggested that Elon Musk should buy Twitter and change the bird logo to the Shiba Inu Doge logo. One year later, both of @WSBChairman‘s suggestions have materialized.

For starters, Musk acquired Twitter. To add to that, he’s now even changed the bird Twitter logo to the Doge logo, a nod to the cryptocurrency dogecoin.

Musk has long been a vocal supporter of cryptocurrency, especially dogecoin, and often comments on crypto via his Twitter account. The current move comes nearly a year after Musk announced that his Boring Company would accept dogecoin for rides in the Las Vegas loop tunnel.

It is currently unknown if the logo change is temporary or permanent. Whatever might be the case, it didn’t fail to sway the market. After the logo change, Doge’s market cap increased by roughly $3.9 billion from approximately $10.645 billion to $14.545 billion. Additionally, there is no way to inquire whether the change is permanent as Musk has set Twitter’s press email to auto-reply with poop emoji.

Image credit: Shutterstock

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Twitter changes legacy verified descriptions after missing April 1 removal deadline

Elon Musk’s self-imposed April 1st deadline to remove blue checkmarks from legacy verified accounts on Twitter has come and gone, and it appears most accounts have kept their status.

Roughly a week and a half ago, a tweet from the company’s verified account stated the company would “begin winding down our legacy verified program and removing legacy verified checkmarks.”

Twitter said anyone wanting to keep their verified status needed to sign up for Twitter Blue. Individual accounts start as low as $8.75/month, and organizations have a $1,000 price tag.

It’s unclear if the move was part of an April Fool’s day joke, as no clarification has been provided since the original tweet was made. News reports indicate the only account to have its blue checkmark removed is the primary New York Times account.

According to Reuters, the publication said it won’t pay for the service “hours after it lost the verified badge.” The publication said it wouldn’t reimburse employees subscribing to the service unless it’s needed for reporting purposes.

However, one change has occurred. The description attached to verified badges has changed. “This account is verified because it’s subscribed to Twitter Blue or is a legacy verified account,” the description now reads.

The descriptions previously differentiated between legacy verified and Blue accounts.

The description for Twitter Blue accounts previously mentioned the subscription, while accounts verified in Twitter’s past life read, “this is a legacy verified account. It may or may not be notable.”

Via: Reuters, Variety

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T2 wants to let you keep your legacy Twitter status

A new Twitter alternative wants to allow legacy verified Twitter users to keep their checkmarks.

T2 is a “straightforward copy” of Twitter, according to co-founder Gabor Cselle, a former Twitter employee.

The invite-only service is currently offering a feature that will essentially allow users who earned a blue checkmark on Twitter before Elon Musk took over the keep the verification status on T2.

As Engadget reports, T2’s goal is to recreate the “public square” that folded once Musk became CEO.

“We believe in the basics: offering simple tools and creating space for human conversation,” the company states on its website. “From day one, our platform has been built on the belief that trust and safety must be integral, and that a positive user experience is paramount.”

Given only those invited can currently use T2, Engadget reports the verification feature will work for those on T2’s waitlist. Anyone planning on making the move should do so quickly, as Musk said he’d pull legacy verifications on April 1st. 

Image credit: T2

Source: T2 Via: Engadget

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Apple co-founder, Musk and more call for AI development pause

Elon Musk and other well-known AI researchers have penned an open letter addressed to AI labs globally to pause the development of large-scale AI systems.

“Pause Giant AI Experiments” is the title of the open letter, and it is co-signed by Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, Skype co-founder Jaan Tallinn, Pinterest co-founder Evan Sharp, Stability AI CEO Emad Mostaque, and several other notable AI researchers. 

The letter says that “AI systems with human-competitive intelligence can pose profound risks to society and humanity, as shown by extensive research and acknowledged by top AI labs.” The letter says that working on such technology requires labs to take meticulous precaution measures and should be planned for and managed with “commensurate care and resources.”

However, that level of planning and management is not happening, and rather, AI labs are in a race to develop and deploy the large-scale AI systems that “no one – not even their creators – can understand, predict, or reliably control.”

Therefore, the letter suggests AI labs should “immediately pause” the training of AI systems more powerful than GPT-4 for at least six months. “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.”

The letter also quotes OpenAI and its recent statement regarding artificial general intelligence, stating that “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.”

The letter offers a solution. A set of shared safety protocols for advanced AI design and development should be put in place, and they must be rigorously audited and overseen by independent outside experts. This does not mean that AI development halts, it just means that it takes a temporary pause until more favourable safety protocols can be put in place.

You can check out the full letter here.

Image credit: Shutterstock

Source: Future of Life

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Elon Musk is on a secret VIP Twitter list boosting certain accounts

Twitter has a secret VIP list, and it’s the reason why tweets from certain accounts are recommended so often.

“For months, the platform has maintained a list of around 35 VIP users whose accounts it monitors and offers increased visibility,” according to Platformer.

Besides Elon Musk, LeBron James, Ben Shapiro, and President Joe Biden are some of the people to make the VIPs. The list was “created to monitor the engagement received by Twitter power users,” Platformer reports.

The news comes alongside Musk’s latest money-making move, which will see For You recommendations limited to accounts subscribed to Twitter Blue.

According to Musk, the move “is the only realistic way to address advanced AI bot swarms.” Of course, this doesn’t apply to verified bots that are paying for a subscription.

Image credit: Shutterstock 

Source: Platformer Via: Engadget

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Twitter will restrict For You recommendations to ‘verified’ accounts

Twitter owner Elon Musk’s latest scheme to address “bot swarms” make money is to limit the platform’s ‘For You’ page to verified accounts.

In a tweet (it’s always a tweet), Musk said that the change would come into effect on April 15th. Along with limiting For You recommendations to verified accounts, Twitter will also limit voting in polls to verified accounts.

Verified, in this case, refers to accounts subscribed to Twitter’s ‘Blue’ service, a system that hands out the blue checkmark verification symbol to anyone who pays. It was a controversial change from the old verification system that, while not perfect, was actually a useful way of determining whether an account was authentic. (That system is supposedly going away on April 1st, though Musk has been talking about killing off legacy verified for months). Government and company accounts should also count as verified, though companies need to fork out $1,000 per month for it.

A screenshot of Musk’s tweet, since he has a tendency to delete things. You can find it here while it remains available.

Though Twitter has toyed with the idea of adding government ID-based verification, at the time of writing, the company hasn’t actually done so. At this point, anyone with a phone number and credit card can get a Blue verified Twitter account. Moreover, ID-based verification would still be tied to Blue, meaning users would need to pay for the privilege of giving Musk more of their personal data.

Per Musk’s tweet, all this is in an effort to “address advanced AI bot swarms taking over.” However, if Twitter isn’t performing real verification of users, it’s not going to solve the bot problem Musk keeps talking about.

Besides, Musk acknowledged in a follow-up tweet that verified bots were fine as long as they followed the rules and didn’t impersonate people. In other words, Musk doesn’t have a problem with bots on Twitter as long as he can make money off them.

And really, that’s what this whole thing is — another way to try and wring cash out of the platform. After all, Musk just admitted that Twitter’s value has dropped to half of what he paid for it (and Musk previously said he overpaid for Twitter).

Coupled with Twitter’s recent security issues and other problems, it seems like a really bad idea to pay for any part of the service, no matter how badly you want your tweets to show up on the For You page. But if you really want to make a monthly donation to Musk pay for Twitter Blue, it costs $10/mo or $105/year on the web or $15/mo or $154.99/year on iOS and Android.

Image credit: Shutterstock

Source: Elon Musk Via: 9to5Mac

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Twitter’s valuation has fallen by more than 50 percent since Musk acquisition

Elon Musk took over Twitter in October 2022 for $44 billion USD (about $60.2 billion CAD). Five months in, and the company’s valuation has dropped by more than 50 percent.

In a recent memo sent to staff, which was viewed by Platformer’s Zoë Schiffer, via The Verge, Musk said that Twitter is valued at $20 billion USD (about $27.4 billion CAD) and that employees would receive stock grants based on that valuation.

Musk believes that Twitter could one day reach a $250 billion USD (about $342.1 billion CAD) valuation. He says that reaching that valuation is a “clear but difficult path,” which would make the current employee stock grants worth ten times as much as they are now. Musk also views Twitter as an “inverse startup” due to the significant changes he made to the platform to save it from bankruptcy. However, the changes introduced, such as the new Blue with verification subscription and Twitter’s “general amnesty” policy that brought back some of Twitter’s worst users, have caused challenges for the social media company. Twitter has lost some of its biggest advertisers, and its revenue dipped by about 40 percent year over year in December.

Last year, Musk stated that he was overpaying for Twitter at $54.20 per share, and attempted to back out of the deal, claiming that the company made false and misleading statements about the presence of bots on the platform. Constant legal pressure from Twitter meant that Musk had to abide by his initial acquisition offer, and ended up taking over the social media company for $44 billion. Only time will tell whether Musk’s ambitious plans for Twitter will pay off in the long run.

Header image credit: Shutterstock

Source: Platformer’s Zoë Schifferesla, Via: The Verge

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Man-child Musk sets Twitter’s press email to auto-reply with poop emoji

We already know that Tesla CEO Elon Musk says that he doesn’t believe in “manipulating public opinion,” and hence he disbanded Tesla’s Public Relations (PR) department back in October 2020.

Now, with his new venture Twitter, Elon Musk is taking a different route. Instead of completely disbanding its press email, Musk Tweeted that any emails sent to press@twitter.com will now be auto-responded with the poop emoji.

MobileSyrup can confirm that the development is true, and sending an inquiry email to the press account does indeed lead to an auto-reply with the poop emoji.

It’s worth noting that Twitter’s PR team was dedicatedly active until Musk took over the social media company in October last year. He then decided to lay off more than half of Twitter’s employees in a bid to cut costs and the social media company’s communication team was one of the first to go.

The same is true for Musk’s other companies, including Starlink.  Company investors have begged Musk to reinstate a PR team for Tesla and Starlink, but he doesn’t think such a department is necessary.

The best way to get word from the company is to spray and pray Musk on Twitter, and hope he replies.

In other Twitter-related news, the company is forcing users to switch from SMS 2FA to other authentication methods like a dedicated authentication application.

Source: @elonmusk

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Starlink to begin testing satellite-to-cellular service ‘this year’

Elon Musk’s Starlink has been working on its satellite-to-cellular offering, and the company is now reportedly ready to test the service.

Last summer, Musk and T-Mobile CEO Mike Sievert had announced “Coverage Above and Beyond,” a joint initiative that aimed to bring Starlink satellite coverage compatible with T-Mobile devices. Now, during a panel at the Satellite Conference and Exhibition 2023, Jonathan Hofeller, the vice president of Starlink enterprise sales said that the company plans to “start getting into testing.”

“We’re going to learn a lot by doing — not necessarily by overanalyzing — and getting out there, working with the telcos,” said Hofeller.

While Hofeller did not mention which carrier service it plans to work with, the timeline does match Musk’s original vision for the T-Mobile partnership. In August last year, Musk announced that Starlink and T-Mobile are joining forces to connect smartphones to satellites and eliminate dead zones “worldwide.”

At the time, T-Mobile said the satellite-to-cell service will be available “everywhere in the continental U.S, Hawaii, parts of Alaska, Puerto Rico and territorial waters” and is expected to launch by the end of next year [2023] in “select areas.” Read more about the partnership here.

Via: Engadget