Twitter - X

I mean, what could go wrong? A new video conferencing feature in the style of Zoom, Meet and Microsoft Teams is coming soon to X, according to X user/Elon whisperer DogeDesigner and X Daily News.

X Conferences will be hosted on the the platform’s existing live audio platform X Spaces (which added video earlier this year), according to a screenshot of the beta version.

Jason Parham’s 2021 Wired article about Black Twitter detailed quite a bit about what made the community such an enriching space for Black people. But Hulu’s new docuseries based on the piece looks like going to be focused on detailing how Black Twitter became a broader cultural phenomenon. The series premieres on May 9th.

The app now has 150 million monthly users, Mark Zuckerberg said Wednesday during Meta’s earnings call. There were almost 100 million monthly Threads users in October.

The metric I’d really like to see, however, is daily users. Meta is juicing the visibility of Threads posts in the Instagram feed, and I’ve heard that a lot of user growth has been coming from that drive-by traffic. If it really wants to kill X, Meta still needs to build a sticky experience that more people come to daily.

Tesla paid X $280,000 for advertising and other services, according to the company’s proxy statement. X paid Tesla $1.02 million for unspecified work. SpaceX paid Tesla $2.9 million for “certain commercial, licensing and support agreements.” Tesla paid SpaceX $800,000 for use of its corporate jet. And Tesla paid the Boring Company $1.2 million.

No one paid Neuralink anything.

After experimenting with its $1-ish annual “Not A Bot” subscriptions in New Zealand and the Philippines, Elon Musk suggests that a broader rollout is coming to the service built upon freely contributed content. Only question is when?

While the fee might curtail bot creation, it will definitely curtail new user signups.

Elon Musk’s lawyers have reportedly undercut his free-speech theatrics related to ye old Twitter’s refusal to block accounts as ordered by the country’s highest court. According to Reuters, X’s lawyers said the following in a letter addressed to Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes on Monday:

“As already communicated to the federal police, X Brasil informs that all orders issued by this Supreme Court and the Superior Electoral Court will continue to be fully complied with by X Corp.”

US District Court Judge Amit Mehta granted a preliminary injunction (PDF) against Texas AG Ken Paxton’s investigation of left-leaning nonprofit Media Matters, writing that there was “evidence of retaliatory intent” in Paxton’s actions.

Media Matters had sued Paxton for his investigation, which launched the same day Elon Musk’s X sued the nonprofit over its report that X displayed ads on pro-Nazi content.

While the platform’s influence has waned, your dormant Twitter account could still have embarrassing or dire consequences if hijacked. So it’s probably worthwhile to setup a more secure passwordless passkey on your iPhone just in case.

The company said Grok 1.5, the first release since open-sourcing the model, performed significantly better in coding and math-related reasoning than its previous version. xAI’s testing showed Grok 1.5 outdid models like Claude 2, Gemini Pro 1.5, and GPT-4 in some problem-solving benchmarks.

Grok 1.5 will be available to early users of the model on X soon.

Elon's X Premium package pitches have included forcing them on celebrities, bundling access to an AI bot of uncertain value, and a chance at a slice of ad revenue generated by other paying customers, in addition to an edit button, blog posts, and fewer ads.

Now he's offering Premium or Premium Plus (normally $8 or $16 per month) as a free sweetener for accounts with at least 2,500 "Verified subscriber" followers (5,000 for Plus) that presumably also pay for access.

Earlier this month, a Fortune story reported that one of X’s latest moves since Twitter entered its Musk era involves whipping up a video app for smart TVs, with one source calling it “identical” to YouTube’s own.

Assuming this video posted by app researcher Nima Owji is what Fortune’s source saw... yeah, I’d reckon there’s some resemblance.

Elon Musk’s AI company, xAI, has open-sourced the “base model weights and network architecture of Grok-1,” the model that underpins the Grok chatbot on X. xAI’s blog says Grok-1 is a 314 billion parameter pre-training model that’s “not fine-tuned for any particular task.”

VentureBeat notes that while the model’s Apache license 2.0 means it can be freely used (with some minor conditions), it won’t have live access to X content by default.

According to Hellgate the organization sent the subpoena to X in an effort to gather as much information about the X user and his account as possible and asked the company not to tell the guy about the subpoena.

X told him anyways and also suggested he get a lawyer, which he promptly did. Now the NYPD has withdrawn the administrative subpoena rather than try and justify it in a court. It’s unclear how frequently the NYPD has gone after watchdogs and reporters using these subpoenas but this is at least the second time in four years.

Yikes.

Match runs Tinder, Hinge, OkCupid, and many other popular dating platforms. Yoel Roth eventually left Twitter in the wake of Elon Musk’s takeover — and received death threats after Musk tweeted about him — and tells Wired in an interview that he’ll work on improving spam detection, removing underage users, and protecting users in marginalized groups in dating apps.

If you pay for the platform formerly known as Twitter, then you can post Articles on X. Better known as blog posts, they can feature stylized text, embedded images, and videos.

They’ll show up on the timeline with other tweets, but to publish one, you must belong to a Verified Organization or pay $16 monthly for the Premium Plus package. $8 Premium or $3 Basic subscribers will have to live without it, post regular tweets, or use Tumblr.

They are discussing options that may make the debt less risky to hold. After the events of 2022, when Musk bought Twitter, it was difficult for these banks to offload the debt; they’ve agreed — for now anyway — to coordinate a sale together when X is “on firmer financial footing.”

The parties held a conference call to argue about whether the nonprofit’s anti-hate speech researchers illegally scraped data from Elon Musk’s social network, and a judge seems dubious.

U.S. District Judge Charles Breyer was skeptical that when the nonprofit entered the standard user contract governing all Twitter and X users, it could have foreseen that Musk would buy Twitter for $44 billion in 2022 and welcome back users it had banned for posting hateful content. [...] “I am trying to figure out, in my mind, how that’s possibly true, because I don’t think it is.”

Judge Breyer didn’t indicate when we might get a ruling, Reuters says.

The platform started rolling out passkey support on its iOS app last month, but now it’s available to all iPhone users in the US. That means you can use Face ID, Touch ID, or your device’s passcode to log in to your account instead of entering a password. You can learn how to enable passkeys on X from this support page.