Twitter - X

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 Now the NYPD has withdrawn the administrative subpoena rather than try and justify it in a court.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.

Premium users on iOS will see the feature first, according to X designer Andrea Conway. The feature will let you sort through posts based on the date, language, location, and more.

Two changes spotted by app researchers show how the platforms are testing tweaks — X with carousel-style image galleries instead of grids, and Threads with buttons spaced apart.

Nima Owji shared the change on X and Alessandro Paluzzi pointed out the Threads update. Meta insisted that Threads isn’t an X clone — but at least in terms of look and feel, the two are getting closer and closer.

This time it involves not Taylor Swift, but comedian Bobbi Althoff, who’s become a target for users chasing clout with nonconsensual faked nudes under X’s anemic moderation:

One of the most popular posts directing viewers to the video remained online after more than 30 hours. Another post, which promised to “send full Bobbi Althoff leaks to everyone who like and comment,” was online for 20 hours — X removed it after The Washington Post sought comment on the fakes. By the time it was removed, the video post had been viewed more than 5 million times.

Yulia accused Vladimir Putin of killing her husband, opposition leader Alexei Navalny, and vowed to continue her husband’s fight against Putin’s “crazy regime.” Then, on Tuesday morning, her X account was abruptly suspended for a short time.

A message from the @Support account followed up saying, “Our platform’s defense mechanism against manipulation and spam mistakenly flagged @yulia_navalnaya as violating our rules. We unsuspended the account as soon as we became aware of the error, and will be updating the defense.”

Dittmann has found media attention before due to sounding almost identical to the Tesla CEO, but after appearing on Alex Jones’s Infowars podcast, people now suspect that he may actually be Musk masquerading under a false name.

It's an uncanny vocal likeness, and it’s not like Musk doesn’t have a history of allegedly using burner accounts.

Nitter, the open-source, tracker-free Twitter front end, joins the other great third-party apps in the API afterlife.

Activist IT collective NoLog, which ran one of the largest Nitter instances, has shut it down, three weeks after Nitter’s developer said the project was dead.

Elon Musk’s revamped X ad business has included a “revenue sharing” program that requires payment to have the potential of getting paid and shown ads alongside white nationalist profiles.

X, as it attempts to become a YouTube alternative, says it has over 80,000 creators monetizing their posts and is trying to address brand safety issues with Creator Targeting:

This means giving advertisers more control to be able to use the self-serve X Ads Manager to run pre-roll video ads against the video content of their chosen creator(s) in both the home timeline and profile.

Soon we’ll add the ability to serve ads only on an individual creator’s profile – completely eliminating the unlikely event of unwanted adjacencies while aligning your brand to creators you love most. 

It didn’t say how big of a cut creators will get if their profile is targeted or if they can choose which advertisers are shown.

Besides its arrangement for weekly 5-minute WWE matches, X is partnering with BetMGM to slap gambling odds at the top of event pages for sporting events, starting with the Super Bowl.

The platform formerly known as Twitter is far from the only one suddenly flooded with odds and gambling promos (see ESPN Bet). A recent 60 Minutes report dug into how the services use data to target when someone’s most likely to place a bet.

In addition to the WWE’s 2025 switch to Netflix, it will also broadcast timed matches via the platform formerly known as Twitter.

Like Tucker Carlson’s two-hour interview with Vladimir Putin, these will be produced live to tape exclusively for the platform, but they’ll only be five minutes long and will feature “your favorite WWE Superstars.” THR notes their agreement is for two years of weekly episodes.