The Google parent’s moonshot factory X this week officially unveiled Project Bellwether, its latest bid to apply technology to some of our biggest problems.
Here that means using AI tools to identify natural disasters like wildfire and flooding as quickly as possible.
“Right now, our analysts have to spend time sorting through images to find the ones that cover the areas most affected by natural disasters,” the Guard’s Col. Brian McGarry notes.
Google has been exploring the use of machine learning models and AI to predict natural disasters for some time now.
Project Bellwether’s partnership with the National Guard could well prove an important validation of that work.
Despite its similarities, Instagram Threads is no X.
The traffic surge drove #earthquake to the top of X’s Trends section, followed by other areas of impact, like “East Coast,” “Long Island,” “Philly,” “Manhattan” and “Brooklyn.” Meanwhile, earthquake-related terms didn’t register on Threads’ trends section until closer to 2 p.m.
That’s not to say people weren’t discussing the earthquake on Threads — many were.
Around 1 p.m. on Friday, TechCrunch reached out to Instagram to ask why the earthquake didn’t make it into Threads’ top trends.
The phone kept buzzing, and there was, ‘earthquake, earthquake, earthquake.
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.
Check out the latest updates and improvements for X Communities.👇 Updates (With the latest version of the app):– [All] Admins can now add topics to their Communities, and you can see topics linked to Communities on all devices.
– [All] Soon, NSFW content will… — Dongwook (@DongWookChung2) March 28, 2024Now, 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 X executives had not shared any plans for NSFW Communities at that time.
X.ai, Elon Musk’s AI startup, has revealed its latest generative AI model, Grok-1.5.
Grok-1.5 benefits from “improved reasoning,” according to X.ai, particularly where it concerns coding and math-related tasks.
One improvement that should lead to observable gains is the amount of context Grok-1.5 can take in compared to Grok-1.
Context, or context window, refers to input data (in this case, text) that a model considers before generating output (more text).
The announcement of Grok-1.5 comes after X.ai open sourced Grok-1, albeit without the code necessary to fine-tune or further train it.
Elon Musk says xAI will open-source Grok this weekElon Musk said Monday he will open-source Grok, X’s AI chatbot rivaling ChatGPT, this week, days after suing OpenAI and complaining that the Microsoft-backed startup had deviated from its open roots.
Musk’s AI startup xAI released Grok, featuring “real-time access” to information, last year.
The service is available to customers paying for X’s subscription.
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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.
Elon Musk’s X marks the spot of the first confirmed investigation opened by the European Union under its rebooted digital rulebook, the Digital Services Act (DSA).
Its earlier actions were focused on concerns about the spread of illegal content and disinformation related to the Israel-Hamas war.
So the Commission’s official scrutiny of X could have real world implications for how the platform operates sooner rather than later.
However the Commission obviously has doubts X has gone far enough on the transparency front to meet the DSA’s bar.
The investigation may also test Musk’s mettle for what could be an expensive head-on clash with EU regulators.
What X needs most now is for Snap to post a solid Q4Not a day goes by without some drama involving Twitter X.
According to a recent report by Bloomberg, X’s ad revenue is expected to fall to $2.5 billion in 2023, and X is disputing the news, calling it incomplete.
Still, the report’s numbers line up neatly with what X’s owner said earlier this summer.
We’ll also revisit our previous look at Snap, another social network that is close-ish to X in scale and worth, to compare the two companies.
The question today is whether or not X’s revenues and valuation square up, so let’s dive in!
