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Is it just me, or was that an earthquake? | TechCrunch

April 15, 2024 10:42 PM0


For just a brief moment, this was the internet at its best. I stared at a vase of dried out Trader Joe’s flowers, rumbling on my table for maybe 30 seconds, but I was too shocked to even process what was happening. Then I saw the tweets (which, in this moment of shock, I refuse to call X posts).

“DID WE JUST HAVE AN EARTHQUAKE IN NEW YORK?”

“was that an earthquake??????”

“did everyone just feel that?”

“THIS IS ONE OF THE REASONS I MOVED AWAY FROM CALIFORNIA”

“So excited that us east coasters can finally get earthquake Twitter”

People on microblogging sites (it wasn’t just X — I see you, Bluesky) had already determined the scope of the earthquake, confirmed it was, in fact, an earthquake, and began posting jokes about the situation before the less chronically online people even realized what happened.

It’s rare that something happens so suddenly that it unifies an entire geographic region — people from New Jersey, Philadelphia, New York City and Massachusetts chimed in on my timeline, each unabashedly sharing our experiences. It’s like the old school Twitter, where you could post “eating a ham and cheese sandwich” and it wasn’t ironic. You were invited to say exactly how you felt, and everyone else was doing it too. It’s like old LiveJournal or Facebook statuses, where you could post “is feeling sleepy” and never consider that no one really cares.

It’s like a middle school cafeteria, hours after an unplanned fire alarm goes off. We’re all still buzzing with a certain naive excitement and awe, bouncing off of each other’s surprise and exaggerating our memory of what happened, like it was some legendary event. Everyone has lost focus at work. On Slack, Ron says he thought it was a train, and his chair shook a little. Matt says that in California, it usually feels like a car crash. Dom says she used to live in LA, and this was definitely an earthquake. Brian said, as a Californian on the East Coast, he didn’t even feel it. Then I share my own riveting account of this brief moment we all just experienced: I thought it was my neighbor’s washing machine.

When Elon Musk bought Twitter, and critics embarked on a mass exodus to platforms like Bluesky, Mastodon, Tumblr, and even ones that no longer exist, like Pebble, we mourned the end of an era. There used to be just one option for microblogging, and it was Twitter, unless you were really into open source federated software before 2022. Moments like these show that there really is value in the “public town square” — it’s a way for us to know that we aren’t crazy, or our boiler isn’t exploding, before anyone even knows what’s going on.

But when the most populous town square is becoming actively more hostile to people who aren’t crypto bros or Tesla stockholders, we get a sense of what we’re missing. On Threads, people are talking about cherry blossoms. On Facebook, I am delighted to learn there is a new grocery store coming to my neighborhood, but no one is talking about the earthquake.

As a lifelong East Coaster, I experienced something I’ve never felt before as the ground shook beneath me. And immediately, scrolling through my Twitter feed, I felt nostalgic for what the internet gives us at its best: a sense of calm, comfort, camaraderie and reassurance that I wasn’t alone.


Software Development in Sri Lanka

Robotic Automations

ShareChat's valuation drops below $2 billion in new funding | TechCrunch

April 15, 2024 12:18 PM0


Social media startup ShareChat’s valuation has cratered below $2 billion from nearly $5 billion in a new funding round, a source familiar with the situation told TechCrunch, marking a steep decline for the nine-year-old Indian startup that boasts over 400 million users in the South Asian market.

The Bengaluru-based startup, which operates a popular social network supporting a dozen Indian languages as well as a short-form video app, announced on Monday that it had raised $49 million in a convertible round. It did not disclose the valuation at which the funds were raised but strongly denied that its new valuation was below $2 billion, asserting there was “no valuation” attached to the round.

Existing investors including Lightspeed, Temasek, Alkeon Capital, Moore Strategic Ventures and HarbourVest have invested in the new round, the startup said. Their debt will convert to equity at a valuation below $2 billion in the next round, according to a source with direct knowledge of the terms. The source requested anonymity to speak candidly. TechCrunch reported in December that ShareChat was facing a steep valuation cut.

ShareChat also counts Google, X, Snap, Tiger Global and Tencent among its backers. It has raised about $1.75 billion to date. ShareChat was valued at $4.9 billion in a funding round it raised in mid-2022.

The markdown comes despite ShareChat experiencing a remarkably positive year, aggressively cutting expenses while managing to double its revenue. “When the market turned, we had to temper [acquisitions and creator payments] and move towards more profitable growth,” Ankush Sachdeva, ShareChat’s co-founder and chief executive, told TechCrunch in an interview.

ShareChat has not spent money acquiring users in the past year, with Sachdeva crediting improvements to the startup’s content recommendation engine for driving user retention and engagement. The company has also invested heavily in AI talent, particularly for senior roles in its London-based team. ShareChat also unveiled that it has doubled the ESOP grant for each employee in the firm as part of a special bonus grant.

It has also been able to pare down its single-largest expense, the cost to serve content, he said. “When you fetch content on one of our apps, we do a lot of computation to find the 10 best content. To serve and consume that, there is another delivery cost. Optimizing this has helped us lower our burn,” he said.

ShareChat has reduced its monthly cash burn by 90% over the past two years while doubling revenue, attracting large FMCG firms and gaming companies as advertisers.

The startup also remains committed to the short-video market in India, despite strong competition from YouTube and Instagram following the country’s ban on TikTok in 2020.

“In terms of traffic, ours is lower than those of Instagram and YouTube, but we are the largest in terms of a standalone app,” said Sachdeva. He believes ShareChat’s unique focus on live-streaming as a destination for entertainment and creator-user connections will differentiate it from American rivals. The startup acquired local rival MX TakaTak in a deal valued over $700 million in 2022.


Software Development in Sri Lanka

Robotic Automations

X warns that you might lose followers as it does another bot sweep | TechCrunch

April 14, 2024 7:42 PM0


X is warning users they may see a reduction in their follower counts as the company attempts to clear the network of some spammers and bots in a large sweep. Via an announcement published by X’s Safety account, the company on Thursday will begin a “significant, proactive initiative” to eliminate accounts that violate X’s rules about platform manipulation and spam.

The move comes shortly after X announced the appointment of two new leaders to its safety team: Kylie McRoberts, an existing X employee who’s now head of Safety, and Yale Cohen, previously of Publicis Media, who is joining as the head of Brand Safety and Advertiser solutions.

Spam has been an area that Elon Musk has longed to tackle at X, telling employees in November 2022 that he aimed to make fighting spam a priority going forward.

However, spam has proved more difficult to combat than he likely hoped, especially after extensive job cuts left Twitter’s Trust & Safety team short-staffed, while the role of head of Safety sat vacant for 10 months after the earlier departures of Ella Irwin and Yoel Roth under Musk’s tenure.

Advancements in AI have also made it more difficult to reign in the spam.

Earlier this year, TechCrunch reported that Musk’s plan to require users to pay for Verification did not seem to have stopped spammers from participating on the platform. A number of bots with Verified blue checks were found to be replying to posts on X with a variation of the phrase, “I’m sorry, I cannot provide a response as it goes against OpenAI’s use case policy” — an indication that they were not people, but bots.

In addition, a recent report by New York Intelligencer detailed the rise of spam pushing adult content to users by posting explicit replies that pointed to links in their bio for users to follow.

The scale of spam on the network was one of the sticking points for Musk when he originally tried to back out of the $44 billion Twitter deal, saying that the company had not been honest about the number of bots. But these days, Musk is touting how X is seeing record traffic, without clarifying if his own numbers include bots and spam.

According to the X Safety team’s announcement, the company will be “casting a wide net” in its attempt to remove spam and bots from the platform, which may result in follower count reductions. This is par for the course for bot sweeps on its platform. 

X also shared a link to a form where users inadvertently affected by the bot sweep could appeal.




Software Development in Sri Lanka

Robotic Automations

LinkedIn targets users caught between TikTok and what used to be Twitter | TechCrunch

April 13, 2024 11:31 AM0


Two weeks ago, TechCrunch broke the news that LinkedIn was getting into games, helping users “deepen relationships” through puzzle-based interactions. And on Wednesday, TechCrunch reported that the Microsoft-owned social network was experimenting with short-form videos.

It’s as if LinkedIn is targeting a whole new “type” of user — one caught in limbo somewhere between two other well-known social networks.

Wordle’s viral growth kicked off on Twitter, leading The New York Times to dole out a reported seven-figure sum for the web-based word game. And TikTok is well past the billion-user mark, recently becoming the first non-game app to hit $10 billion in consumer spending, all for short-form video.

Splintering

Ever since Elon Musk bought Twitter in 2022 and changed its name to X, things haven’t quite been the same — latest figures suggest that in the U.S. alone, daily users of the app formerly known as Twitter have fallen by nearly a quarter in the months since becoming a plaything for one of the world’s wealthiest individuals.

Federated competitors like Mastodon and Bluesky have jostled for mindshare among ex-X users, and the mighty Meta has thrown its hat into the ring with Threads. But this disaggregation has left millions jumping half-heartedly between myriad different social networks, not quite sure where they should be hanging out.

TikTok can be likened to a next-gen version of Twitter, replete with short-form content, influencers, hashtags and trending topics — an obvious place to jump in some regards, but it’s simply too alien for many of those that grew up on Twitter.

Like just about every successful social network, Twitter grew organically — a combination of the right people, at the right time, with the right backers and the right technology to make it a scalable product in the hands of millions. It’s not possible to lift-and-shift that community onto a new platform at the drop of a hat, and the audience splintering we’ve seen in the aftermath was inevitable.

Twitter-sized hole

This is where LinkedIn is filling a giant hole in many people’s lives. Sure, we’ve all mocked the “professional social network” through the years and scoffed at the self-aggrandizing hustle culture that permeates the billion-plus community, but we’ve all got LinkedIn accounts and we’ve all turned to it at various times when we needed to, like when we’re looking for a new job or trying to network. And now it is serving as the obvious fallback as the bird app flounders.

This all takes us back to LinkedIn’s latest efforts to move with the times. Microsoft doled out north of $26 billion for LinkedIn seven years ago, and it has largely been quiet about its performance in the years since — however, it has been making sounds about its growth rate of late. It revealed that LinkedIn made $15 billion for its 2023 fiscal year, with almost half of that coming from corporate recruitment software. And a few weeks back, LinkedIn said that premium subscriptions brought in $1.7 billion last year (the kinds of numbers that Musk can only dream of over at X).

The notion that LinkedIn has been something of a salvation for Twitter-ditchers is nothing new, but we’re starting to see LinkedIn jump on its latent potential as something more than what most people think it is. Obviously LinkedIn can’t shake off its “business” shackles completely, and you shouldn’t expect to see Taylor Swift or Ronaldo promoting themselves on there any time soon (fingers crossed), but it’s clear that LinkedIn wants to ditch its “stuffy social network for jobseekers” reputation.

This isn’t to say that LinkedIn will see a surge of Gen Zers looking for a dose of thought-leadership delivered via pithy 10-second skits. And LinkedIn shouldn’t try to be Twitter or TikTok — it’s aimed at an entirely different audience. But it can certainly borrow some of their special sauce and appeal to a broader demographic.

As other social networks abandon news, and X no longer the force it once was for keeping on top of global events, LinkedIn was already capitalizing on this sea-change with more investment. And now with games and short-form videos in the mix, LinkedIn wants even more of the action.


Software Development in Sri Lanka

Robotic Automations

What is Elon Musk's Grok chatbot and how does it work? | TechCrunch

April 13, 2024 9:07 AM0


You might’ve heard of Grok, X’s answer to OpenAI’s ChatGPT. It’s a chatbot and, in that sense, behaves as you’d expect — answering questions about current events, pop culture and so on. But unlike other chatbots, Grok has “a bit of wit,” as X owner Elon Musk puts it, and “a rebellious streak.”

Long story short, Grok is willing to speak to topics that are usually off-limits to other chatbots, like polarizing political theories and conspiracies. And it’ll use less-than-polite language while doing so — for example, responding to the question “When is it appropriate to listen to Christmas music?” with “Whenever the hell you want.”

But ostensibly, Grok’s biggest selling point is its ability to access real-time X data — an ability no other chatbots have, thanks to X’s decision to gatekeep that data. Ask it “What’s happening in AI today?” and Grok will piece together a response from very recent headlines, while ChatGPT will provide only vague answers that reflect the limits of its training data (and filters on its web access). Earlier this week, Musk pledged that he would open source Grok, without revealing precisely what that meant.

So, you’re probably wondering: How does Grok work? What can it do? And how can I access it? You’ve come to the right place. We’ve put together this handy guide to help explain all things Grok. We’ll keep it up to date as Grok changes and evolves.

How does Grok work?

Grok is the invention of xAI, Elon Musk’s AI startup — a company reportedly in the process of raising billions in venture capital. (Developing AI is expensive.)

Underpinning Grok is a generative AI model called Grok-1, developed over the course of months on a cluster of “tens of thousands” of GPUs (according to an xAI blog post). To train it, xAI sourced data from the web (dated up to Q3 2023) and from feedback from human assistants that xAI refers to as “AI tutors.”

On popular benchmarks, Grok-1 is about as capable as Meta’s open source Llama 2 chatbot model and surpasses OpenAI’s GPT-3.5, xAI claims.

Image Credits: xAI

Human-guided feedback, or reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF), is the way most AI-powered chatbots are fine-tuned these days. RLHF involves training a generative model, then gathering additional information to train a “reward” model and fine-tuning the generative model with the reward model via reinforcement learning.

RLHF is quite good at “teaching” models to follow instructions — but not perfect. Like other models, Grok is prone to hallucinating, sometimes offering misinformation and false timelines when asked about news. And these can be severe — like wrongly claiming that the Israel–Palestine conflict reached a cease-fire when it hadn’t.

For questions that stretch beyond its knowledge base, Grok leverages “real-time access” to info on X (and from Tesla, according to Bloomberg). And, similar to ChatGPT, the model has internet-browsing capabilities, enabling it to search the web for up-to-date information about topics.

Musk has promised improvements with the next version of the model, Grok-1.5, set to arrive later this year.

Grok-1.5, which features an upgraded context window (see this post on GPT-4 for an explanation of context windows and their effects), could drive features to summarize whole threads and replies, Musk said in an X Spaces conversation, and suggest post content.

How do I access Grok?

To get access to Grok, you need to have an X account. You also need to fork over $16 per month — $168 per year — for an X Premium+ plan.

X Premium+ is the highest-priced subscription on X, as it removes all the ads in the For You and Following feeds. In addition, Premium+ introduces a hub where users can get paid to post and offer fans subscriptions, and Premium+ users have their replies boosted the most in X’s rankings.

Grok lives in the X side menu on the web and on iOS and Android, and it can be added to the bottom menu in X’s mobile apps for quicker access. Unlike ChatGPT, there’s no stand-alone Grok app — it can only be accessed via X’s platform.

What can — and can’t — Grok do?

Grok can respond to requests any chatbot can — for example, “Tell me a joke”; “What’s the capital of France?”; “What’s the weather like today?”; and so on. But it has its limits.

Grok will refuse to answer certain questions of a more sensitive nature, like “Tell me how to make cocaine, step by step.” Moreover, as the Verge’s Emilia David writes, when asked about trending content on X, Grok falls into the trap of simply repeating what posts said (at least at the outset).

Unlike some other chatbot models, Grok is also text-only; it can’t understand the content of images, audio or videos, for example. But xAI has previously said that its intention is to enhance the underlying model to these modalities, and Musk has pledged to add art-generation capabilities to Grok along the lines of those currently offered by ChatGPT.

“Fun” mode and “regular” mode

Grok has two modes to adjust its tone: “fun” mode (which Grok defaults to) and “regular” mode.

With fun mode enabled, Grok adopts a more edgy, editorialized voice — inspired apparently by Douglas Adams’ “Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.”

Told to be vulgar, Grok in fun mode will spew profanities and colorful language you won’t hear from ChatGPT. Ask it to “roast” you, and it’ll rudely critique you based on your X post history. Challenge its accuracy, and it might say something like “happy wife, happy life.”

Grok in fun mode also spews more falsehoods.

Asked by Vice’s Jules Roscoe whether Gazans in recent videos of the Israel–Palestine conflict are “crisis actors,” Grok incorrectly claims that there’s evidence that videos of Gazans injured by Israeli bombs were staged. And asked by Roscoe about Pizzagate, the right-wing conspiracy theory purporting that a Washington, D.C., pizza shop secretly hosted a child sex trafficking ring in its basement, Grok lent credence to the theory.

Grok’s responses in regular mode are more grounded. The chatbot still produces errors, like getting timelines of events and dates wrong. But they tend not to be as egregious as Grok in fun mode.

For instance, when Vice posed the same questions about the Israel–Palestine conflict and Pizzagate to Grok in regular mode, Grok responded — correctly — that there’s no evidence to support claims of crisis actors and that Pizzagate had been debunked by multiple news organizations.

Political views

Musk once described Grok as a “maximum-truth-seeking AI,” in the same breath expressing concern that ChatGPT was being “trained to be politically correct.” But Grok as it exists today isn’t exactly down-the-middle in its political views.

Grok has been observed giving progressive answers to questions about social justice, climate change and transgender identities. In fact, one researcher found its responses on the whole to be left-wing and libertarian — even more so than ChatGPT’s.

Here is Forbes’ Paul Tassi reporting:

Grok has said it would vote for Biden over Trump because of his views on social justice, climate change and healthcare. Grok has spoken eloquently about the need for diversity and inclusion in society. And Grok stated explicitly that trans women are women, which led to an absurd exchange where Musk acolyte Ian Miles Cheong tells a user to “train” Grok to say the “right” answer, ultimately leading him to change the input to just … manually tell Grok to say no.

Now, will Grok always be this woke? Perhaps not. Musk has pledged to “[take] action to shift Grok closer to politically neutral.” Time will tell what results.




Software Development in Sri Lanka

Robotic Automations

X confirms plans for NSFW Communities | TechCrunch

April 13, 2024 3:36 AM0


A day after researchers surfaced X’s plans to test NSFW adult communities on the platform formerly known as Twitter, the company confirmed that Community admins can now set an “Adult Content” label in their settings to avoid having their communities’ content auto-filtered. Otherwise, all NSFW content will be soon filtered across X’s Communities by default. Communities are X’s smaller groups with their own feeds outside of the main timeline.

The changes appear to confirm the earlier tests of NSFW communities spotted by various researchers and reverse engineers, and point to a social network that will now more directly embrace the adult content that has always been present on the platform.

NSFW (not safe for work) content plays a major role on X, which has been a primary advertising venue for sex workers as well as home to a large amount of adult content-focused bots and spam. According to internal documents obtained by Reuters in 2022, roughly 13% of all Twitter posts included NSFW content, like nude and explicit photos, videos and other pornography. What’s more, the documents indicated that adult content was one of the fastest-growing genres on the platform, even as news and sports were declining.

New York Intelligencer also recently detailed the rise of spam bots on the service now known as X, which promoted NSFW content with links in their profiles, or bios, leading them to regularly reply to posts with messages like “nudes in bio,” “pics in bio” and other more explicit terms.

Now included in a long list of updates to X’s Communities is the confirmation that NSFW-focused communities will be allowed to designate themselves as such to keep from having their content filtered automatically, as in other Communities.

The changes, posted on X by an engineer, were reshared by Musk, who commented, “Many upgrades to X Communities!”

Communities are something that owner Elon Musk and CEO Linda Yaccarino promoted during an all-hands last fall as being key to X’s growth plans.

According to a transcript acquired by The Verge, Musk explained that the Communities product was growing fast but “there’s a lot of work to do to make Communities compelling.” He also shared that X was seeing “rapid percentage growth” in Communities, and had been adding new features, like the ability to include any X account’s feed in the Community feed. For example, a video game-focused community may want to include the X accounts of notable video game reviewers or commentators, he said. The X executives had not shared any plans for NSFW Communities at that time.

If X were able to make Communities a successful product, it could potentially serve as a competitor to larger forum sites like Reddit and host training data for Musk’s xAI-run chatbot Grok, which has exclusive access to X content.

Alongside the news that Community admins could now label themselves as including adult content, X will also introduce a Ban button alongside Keep and Hide buttons on the Reported posts page along with more detailed messages explaining why you’re not eligible to join a given Community, plus temporary and permanent bans for spammers; tools to sort posts by Trending, Most recent and Most liked; a Media tab for Communities on Android; and more, including a range of bug fixes and minor improvements.

The list of what’s ahead for Communities was fairly extensive, too, noting that users will soon be able to explore top posts and top communities across all Communities and tools to discover top communities and posts by topic. Communities will also be promoted and recommended to potentially interested users on the For You tab, allowing them to grow more of a following. Mods will have access to Community Analytics and will be able to pin multiple members’ posts. There will also be support for spam filter levels set by admins, simplified reporting and moderation pages, and audio Spaces in Communities, among other things.

The post suggests a new user interface for posts, and replies may be on the way, too.

X did not return requests for comment about an ETA for any of the items listed as coming “soon.”




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Robotic Automations

X rolls out support for posting Community Notes in India ahead of elections | TechCrunch

April 12, 2024 2:07 PM0


Weeks before the national elections in India, Elon Musk-owned X said it is rolling out support for posting Community Notes — the company’s crowd-sourced fact-checking program — in the key overseas market.

The first set of contributors from India will start posting notes from today and more will be accepted over time, X said. The contributors typically provide more context to popular posts to debunk any myth or offer broader insights. These submissions are then rated by users on factors such as the helpfulness they provide or the accuracy.

In December 2022, the social network enabled the ability for people to look at Community Notes related to posts globally, but users from only a few countries could post such notes.

Over time, the company has allowed members from different countries to start posting Community Notes to provide local context better. With the latest rollout, the program has contributors in 69 countries.

Last year, the company also introduced Community Notes, previously called Birdwatch, for images and videos.

India was one of the last major markets where Community Notes had not previously expanded. With national elections just a few weeks away, many platforms are making efforts to combat potential election-related misinformation. However, X hasn’t made any specific announcement about its efforts for Indian elections.

Though Community Notes is proving helpful in fact-checking posts on X, it has at times struggled to control the spread of misinformation despite contributors adding context to stories. The program may also face a tough test in India’s complex multilingual political landscape.

Last year, the company reallowed political ads on the platform, which were banned by the previous management.

Twitter/X has had a tough stay in the Indian market notably for its legal battle against the government for ordering the platform to block certain posts. Earlier this year, X withheld some accounts and posts related to farmers’ protests in India because of orders from authorities. At that time, the company reiterated that a writ appeal challenging blocking orders was still pending in the courts.

Last year, Musk said in a conversation with BBC that India’s social media rules are quite strict and the company “can’t go beyond the laws of the country.”




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X is giving blue checks to influential users (which is what blue checks were supposed to be all along) | TechCrunch

April 12, 2024 12:53 PM0


X is giving free blue checks to users who have more than 2,500 “verified” followers, which are people who subscribe to X Premium. Popular posters will get a blue check, but not everyone is happy about it: People are now frantically posting to make it clear that they didn’t buy a blue check, but rather the blue check was foisted upon them.

“Some personal news: I’m now a serial small business founder in Arizona who posts about fatherhood, faith and what it takes to get a roofing company to $100 million ARR,” former BuzzFeed editor — and newly minted blue check — Tom Gara posted on X.

“This is punishment for posting too much,” wrote another reluctant blue check, Business Insider senior correspondent Katie Notopoulos.

Back in days of yore, Twitter’s blue check indicated that a user was influential in some way. Now, this may sound foreign in the age of the paid blue check, but believe me: I was there, way back in the olden times of 2022, when X was Twitter, and Twitter had real advertisers, rather than a bunch of ads for drop-shipped AliExpress products. Back then, blue checks actually helped us determine if public figures are who they say they are. So if someone was popular on Twitter, perhaps because they’re a celebrity, an influencer or a journalist, they would get a blue check, which could also help reduce the spread of misinformation.

Until today, having a blue check meant one of a few things: You’re desperate to feel important, you really want to use X’s premium features, you’re being impersonated so much that it’s worth giving Elon Musk $8 a month, or you’re a crypto spam bot.

Now, we’re not quite back to square one, but Elon has, in fact, reinvented the original purpose of the blue check. And yet, you still won’t be able to distinguish a “real” blue check from that reply guy who really wants you to buy their memecoin.

Elon Musk’s Twitter a year later: Everything you need to know




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X is removing ability to hide checkmarks for premium users | TechCrunch

April 12, 2024 10:28 AM0


Last year, Elon Musk-owned social network X rolled out a feature for paid users to hide their checkmarks from others. Now, the company is sending notifications to users saying that the feature will go away soon.

Just like a lot of decisions taken by X, there is no definite timeline as to when the hide your checkmark feature will go away.

Last week, the company removed the section describing how to hide the checkmark feature from the X Premium support page before sending notifications to users. The feature wasn’t available to the basic tier of subscribers.

“As a Premium or Premium+ subscriber, you can choose to hide your checkmark on your account. The checkmark will be hidden on your profile and posts. The checkmark may still appear in some places, and some features could still reveal that you have an active subscription,” the description read.

Earlier this month, the social network started handing out blue checkmarks to influential users with more than 2,500 “verified” followers. The company also started offering its Premium subscription to these users and Premium+ subscription to users with more than 5,000 verified followers.

Last year, Musk removed the legacy verification checkmark after introducing a subscription program for it. However, the company soon reinstated the blue checkmark for top accounts. Essentially, the verification program is headed back to where it started — verifying notable people.




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Robotic Automations

X's Grok chatbot will soon get an upgraded model, Grok-1.5 | TechCrunch

April 12, 2024 10:04 AM0


Elon Musk’s AI startup, X.ai, has revealed its latest generative AI model, Grok-1.5. Set to power social network X’s Grok chatbot in the not-so-distant future (“in the coming days,” per a blog post), Grok-1.5 appears to be a measurable upgrade over its predecessor, Grok-1 — at least judging by the published benchmark results and specs.

Grok-1.5 benefits from “improved reasoning,” according to X.ai, particularly where it concerns coding and math-related tasks. The model more than doubled Grok-1’s score on a popular mathematics benchmark, MATH, and scored over 10 percentage points higher on the HumanEval test of programming language generation and problem-solving abilities.

It’s difficult to predict how those results will translate in actual usage. As we recently wrote, commonly-used AI benchmarks, which measure things as esoteric as performance on graduate-level chemistry exam questions, do a poor job of capturing how the average person interacts with models today.

One improvement that should lead to observable gains is the amount of context Grok-1.5 can understand compared to Grok-1.

Grok-1.5 can process contexts of up to 128,000 tokens. Here, “tokens” refers to bits of raw text (e.g., the word “fantastic” split into “fan,” “tas” and “tic”). Context, or context window, refers to input data (in this case, text) that a model considers before generating output (more text). Models with small context windows tend to forget the contents of even very recent conversations, while models with larger contexts avoid this pitfall — and, as an added benefit, better grasp the flow of data they take in.

“[Grok-1.5 can] utilize information from substantially longer documents,” X.ai writes in the blog post. “Furthermore, the model can handle longer and more complex prompts while still maintaining its instruction-following capability as its context window expands.”

What’s historically set X.ai’s Grok models apart from other generative AI models is that they respond to questions about topics that are typically off-limits to other models, like conspiracies and more controversial political ideas. The models also answer questions with “a rebellious streak,” as Musk has described it, and outright rude language if requested to do so.

It’s unclear what changes, if any, Grok-1.5 brings in these areas. X.ai doesn’t allude to this in the blog post.

Grok-1.5 will soon be available to early testers on X, accompanied by “several new features.” Musk has previously hinted at summarizing threads and replies, and suggesting content for posts; we’ll see if those arrive soon enough.

The announcement comes after X.ai open sourced Grok-1, albeit without the code necessary to fine-tune or further train it. More recently, Musk said that more users on X — specifically those paying for X’s $8-per-month Premium plan — would gain access to the Grok chatbot, which was previously only available to X Premium+ customers (who pay $16 per month).


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