Tech
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Essential tech industry news & intel to start your day.
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April 20, 2023
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Twitter Gaining Trust With Republicans Since Elon Musk’s Involvement
In the year since Elon Musk became the top shareholder and ultimately the owner and chief executive of Twitter Inc., the platform has lost trust and favorability among Democrats but has seen the same metrics increase with Republicans, according to data from Morning Consult Brand Intelligence. Among the findings:
- Favorability for Twitter among Democrats fell from 47% in December 2021 to as low as 33% in November 2022, after Musk officially became owner of the platform.
- Just 1 in 4 Republicans said they trusted Twitter in December 2021. That improved to 3 in 10 by November 2022 and currently sits at 35%.
To see more, read the story here: Twitter Is Gaining Trust With Republicans, but Losing It With Democrats in the Musk Era.
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Today’s Top News
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Meta Platforms Inc. started its latest round of layoffs Wednesday, informing employees in technical roles such as user experience, software engineering and graphics programming that they lost their jobs, as part of what Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg declared would be a “year of efficiency” for the company. Workers in business-facing roles including finance, legal and human resources are expected to be subject to layoffs starting next month, according to one employee impacted by the cuts. (CNBC)
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The news could worsen public perception of the U.S. job market. New Morning Consult data published today finds 75% of Americans are worried about widespread job loss, with nearly 2 in 5 adults worried about losing their own job.
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Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida said international rules need to be created to regulate advanced artificial intelligence systems and generative AI tools like ChatGPT, and members of the Group of Seven plan to discuss such measures when they come together for the G-7 summit set to be held in Hiroshima next month. (Reuters)
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Nearly 3 in 5 U.S. adults support an international agreement on the use of AI, and a similar share backs the idea of an international agreement on governance of the advanced systems, according to Morning Consult data.
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Google employees who were asked to test the company’s AI chatbot Bard prior to its public launch in March warned that the tool was “cringe-worthy” and a “pathological liar” that presented incorrect answers and low-quality information, according to 18 current and former workers at the company and internal documentation reviewed by Bloomberg. Despite this, Google launched the service to keep up with its competition while reportedly deprioritizing its ethical commitments.. (Bloomberg)
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A U.S. appeals court ruled that Amazon.com Inc. must face a nationwide class-action lawsuit over allegations that the company illegally monitored the online activity of its delivery drivers in order to preempt strikes and unionization efforts. The court determined that driver Drickey Jackson’s legal challenge to Amazon is not subject to a clause in his contract that required all work-related disputes to be settled in arbitration rather than court. (Reuters)
Happening today:
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The Information will host the 2023 Creator Economy Summit in Hollywood, Calif., with conversations focusing on what the future holds for online creators. Speakers include Sandie Hawkins, general manager of U.S. e-Commerce at TikTok; Kim Larson, global head of YouTube creators at YouTube; and Hank Green, CEO of Complexly and one-half of the Green Brothers.
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The Federal Communications Commission will hold its monthly Open Commission Meeting. The agency will consider a policy statement to promote efficient spectrum use between new and incumbent services, take up a proposed rule to improve the security of the nation’s telecommunications infrastructure and consider rules around spectrum sharing among new satellite broadband constellations.
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| A MESSAGE FROM MORNING CONSULT |
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What Else You Need to Know
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Antitrust and Competition
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Artificial Intelligence/Automation
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The global elite is excited and terrified by AI
Ina Fried, Axios
When the TED audience was asked Tuesday whether they were excited by artificial intelligence, most people raised their hands. When asked whether they were scared about AI, most people also raised their hands.
Google to deploy generative AI to create sophisticated ad campaigns
Cristina Criddle and Hannah Murphy, Financial Times
Big tech groups are racing to incorporate the groundbreaking new technology into their products.
Inside the secret list of websites that make AI like ChatGPT sound smart
Kevin Schaul et al., The Washington Post
Tech companies have grown secretive about what they feed the AI. So The Washington Post set out to analyze one of these data sets to fully reveal the types of proprietary, personal, and often offensive websites that go into an AI’s training data.
Atlassian taps OpenAI to make its collaboration software smarter
Jordan Novet, CNBC
Atlassian on Wednesday said it will draw on technology from startup OpenAI to add artificial intelligence features to a slew of the collaboration software company’s programs.
Snap rolls out AI chatbot and augmented reality services
Hannah Murphy, Financial Times
Evan Spiegel’s social networking company bets on new features in bid to recover from a bruising stock sell-off.
OpenAI’s hunger for data is coming back to bite it
Melissa Heikkilä, MIT Technology Review
The company’s AI services may be breaking data protection laws, and there is no resolution in sight.
German authors, performers call for tougher ChatGPT rules amid copyright concerns
Foo Yun Chee, Reuters
Forty-two German associations and trade unions representing more than 140,000 authors and performers on Wednesday urged the European Union to beef up draft artificial intelligence rules as they singled out the threat to their copyright from ChatGPT.
Stability AI releases ChatGPT-like language models
Kyle Wiggers, TechCrunch
Stability AI, the startup behind the generative AI art tool Stable Diffusion, today open sourced a suite of text-generating AI models intended to go head to head with systems like OpenAI’s GPT-4.
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Telecom, Wireless and Internet Access
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Telecom groups talk permitting reform, ACP extension with Congress
Diana Goovaerts, Fierce Telecom
Officials from several broadband groups as well as former Federal Communications Commission (FCC) member Michael O’Rielly urged Congress to reform federal permitting processes and allocate more money to the Affordable Connectivity Program (ACP). They argued both actions are necessary to ensure the country can achieve its goal of universal broadband access.
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Microsoft is working on an ARM-powered Surface Go 4 and new 11-inch Surface Pro
Zac Bowden, Windows Central
Microsoft is readying a new Surface Go for release this year that will feature an ARM processor for the first time. According to my sources, the Surface Go 4 is codenamed Tanta and will ship with a Snapdragon 7c-based SoC in the entry-level model and offer similar performance to the current Surface Go but with better power efficiency for longer-lasting battery life.
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Cybersecurity and Privacy
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Britain sounds alarm on spyware, mercenary hacking market
James Pearson and Raphael Satter, Reuters
British officials are sounding the alarm over the widespread abuse of surveillance software and hackers-for-hire, saying that thousands of people were being targeted each year by an industry they described as posing an increasingly unpredictable threat.
US, UK warn of govt hackers using custom malware on Cisco routers
Lawrence Abrams, Bleeping Computer
The US, UK, and Cisco are warning of Russian state-sponsored APT28 hackers deploying a custom malware named ‘Jaguar Tooth’ on Cisco IOS routers, allowing unauthenticated access to the device.
The iPhone Setting Thieves Use to Lock You Out of Your Apple Account
Nicole Nguyen and Joanna Stern, The Wall Street Journal
The recovery key was designed to make Apple IDs safer. Instead, these victims permanently lost family photos and other precious digital possessions.
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Social Media and Content Moderation
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How to apply for your share of Facebook’s $725 million settlement in privacy suit
Rohan Goswami, CNBC
Facebook users have until August to claim their share of a $725 million class-action settlement of a lawsuit alleging privacy violations by the social media company, a new website reveals.
Imgur will ban explicit images on its platform this month
Ivan Mehta, TechCrunch
Image hosting platform Imgur is set to ban explicit images on its platform from May 15. The company updated its terms of service and said that the company will focus on removing “nudity, pornography, & sexually explicit content” from the site later this month.
The Future of Social Media Is a Lot Less Social
Brian X. Chen, The New York Times
Facebook, TikTok and Twitter seem to be increasingly connecting users with brands and influencers. To restore a sense of community, some users are trying smaller social networks.
Snap Invests in Large-Scale Augmented Reality With ‘Mirror’ Tool
Alex Barinka, Bloomberg
Snap Inc., after some trouble in its advertising business, is focusing on an area it sees major growth potential: augmented reality.
Elon Musk Threatens to Sue Microsoft After it Drops Twitter From Ad Platform
Michael Kan, PCMag
Microsoft is winding down support for Twitter on its advertising platform, likely because the social media platform wants to charge clients at least $42,000 for enterprise API access.
Bluesky, a decentralized Twitter alternative, is now on Android
Jay Peters, The Verge
Bluesky, the Jack Dorsey-backed decentralized Twitter alternative, now has an Android app. The launch follows the release of the service’s iOS app, which came out in late February.
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Opinions, Editorials and Perspectives
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