Stability AI founder and chief executive Emad Mostaque has stepped down from the top role and the unicorn startup‘s board, the buzzy firm said Friday night, making it the second hot AI startup to go through major changes this week.
Stability AI, which has lost more than half a dozen key talent in recent quarters, said Mostaque is stepping down to pursue decentralized AI.
In a series of posts on X, Mostaque opined that one can’t beat “centralized AI” with more “centralized AI,” referring to the ownership structure of top AI startups such as OpenAI and Anthropic.
“We should have more transparent & distributed governance in AI as it becomes more and more important.
“The payoffs on proper generative AI R&D are clearer and faster to market than just about anything we’ve seen.
Threads, the Twitter-like app from Instagram, is adding live scores for sports games.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced on Friday that Threads has started testing live scores for NBA games, and that the platform plans to add support for additional leagues in the future.
The launch of the feature comes as Threads continues to take on X, which has had live scores for sports games for around a decade now.
Threads isn’t just adding live scores — users will also be able to tap a team’s logo to be redirected to the conversation about that team, and connect with other users who follow them.
The addition of live scores marks Threads’ latest effort in building out a platform to rival X.
Social network X (formerly Twitter) launched new top-up packs for its developer API program on Tuesday.
Last year, Elon Musk curtailed free API access and released new paid tiers with the basic level starting at $100 per month.
With the new top-up launch, the social network said that there are also limits to the number of upgrades developers can purchase.
Developers with basic tier are capped at 10 top-ups and developers with pro tier are capped at 5 top-ups per month.
The company’s alternations to its API rules also impacted researchers and their ability to study the platform’s data.
Threads, the Twitter-like app from Instagram, is rolling out its “trending now” feature widely to all users in the U.S.
Trending topics are available on the search page and in the app’s For You Feed.
The feature is somewhat limited, as Threads only display five trending topics at a time, while X shows you multiple.
It’s possible that Threads may be limiting the number of trending topics to prevent issues around safety and spam.
During President Biden’s State of the Union address earlier this month, Threads’ trending topics were dominated by political chatter.
Elon Musk’s xAI has open-sourced the base code of Grok AI model, but without any training code.
In a blog post, xAI said that the model wasn’t tuned for any particular application such as using it for conversations.
Last week, Musk noted on X that xAI intended to open-source the Grok model this week.
Some AI-powered tool makers are already talking about using Grok in their solutions.
Yep, thanks to @elonmusk and xAI team for open-sourcing the base model for Grok.
Don Lemon announced on Wednesday that X owner Elon Musk has canceled the deal for his upcoming talkshow on the platform.
Lemon, a former CNN anchor, says Musk terminated the partnership hours after he interviewed the multibillionaire for the first episode of the show.
“Elon Musk has canceled the partnership I had with X, which they announced as part of their public commitment to amplifying more diverse voices on their platform,” Lemon wrote in a statement.
“He informed me of his decision hours after an interview I conducted with him on Friday.”Despite the canceled deal with X, The Don Lemon Show will live on.
The interview with Musk will remain the premiere episode of the show and is scheduled to air on March 18 on YouTube, podcast channels and X.
X announced a new long-form post format called Articles today.
The feature, which is only available to Premium+ subscribers and verified organizations, lets users publish posts with text formatting, other X posts, and embedded videos and images — akin to a post on a WordPress-like content management system or an article on Medium.
Last year, the Elon Musk-owned social network increased the limit for long posts to 25,000 characters for paying users.
And yet, in July 2023, Musk noted that the company is working on a way for creators to post long-form articles with mixed media.
Musk has long pushed creators like MrBeast and former Fox News host Tucker Carlson to post on X directly.
Where Loon relied on balloons, however, the newer project utilizes Zephyr solar-powered drones.
“[Loon] got really good customer engagement,” AALTO CEO Samer Halawi told TechCrunch in a sit-down interview last week at Mobile World Congress.
Airbus acquired the technology for the fixed-wing drones from U.K. Ministry of Defence and Space spinoff QinetiQ in 2022.
Every six months or so, the system will land for a battery swap, as these still have a limited shelf life.
Like Loon before it, the company is also exploring temporary deployment for downed cell towers following natural disasters.
Threads, the Twitter-like app from Instagram, is rolling out the ability for users to save a draft and take photos within the app.
The new features shape Threads into more of a competitor to X (formerly Twitter), which has had drafts and a camera shortcut for as long as we can remember.
However, Threads only lets you save one draft at a time, whereas X lets you save multiple.
Threads users can now start writing out a post that they may want to share later, and then swipe down to save it as a draft.
The launch of the camera shortcut comes as app researcher Nima Owji indicated that X might be looking to adopt Threads’ carousel format for displaying images.
We looked at X’s official help center page and ran tests of the feature to analyze how the calling feature works and to understand the risks associated with it.
Because of these privacy risks, we recommend switching off the calling feature completely.
When the test account sends a DM to the real account, the message is received but neither account sees the phone icon.
When the real account accepts the DM, the test account can then call the real account.
When the real account follows the test account back, both can contact each other.
