With "X" aka Twitter, Elon Musk has blown a billion dollar hole in his finances. Can he plug it with the AI currency "data"?
As Alex Ivanos first reported for Stackdiary, X, aka Twitter, has updated its terms of service to utilize user data for AI training.
The terms of service state that X reserves the right to use data published on Twitter to operate and improve its products and services.
This collected data and "publicly available information" could also be used to train machine learning or artificial intelligence systems.
According to Musk, only public information will be used for AI training, not the content of private messages. For a newly planned job service on X, the platform also wants to collect information about previous jobs and education, writes Bloomberg.
Exclusive Twitter data for Musk's AI company
The beneficiary of this change could be Elon Musk's AI startup xAI, which he unveiled in mid-April. xAI is a standalone company that aims to use AI to "understand the true nature of the universe." Despite its scientific focus, Musk says xAI will also create AI offerings for consumers and businesses, similar to OpenAI.
This includes the development of large AI models, which require as much and as good data as possible, which in the best case is free of copyright. Twitter could help generate this data and also make it available exclusively to xAI. Meta also trains AI models with data from its social media platforms.
On its website, xAI writes that it is not part of Musk's "X Corp," but that it plans to work closely with X (Twitter), Tesla, and other companies. The xAI team is made up of experts who formerly worked at OpenAI, Google Research, Microsoft Research, and Deepmind.
Is Twitter's real value measured in data?
Since Musk took over Twitter, he has worked to make it harder for data to flow off the platform while improving the quality of data on it.
For example, Musk has ended free access to Twitter's API. Now he charges prices ranging from $100 to $5,000 per month, depending on the package. Enterprise packages start at $42,000 per month.
In addition, Musk rewards those with more visibility who pay for Twitter, presumably not bots, and publish content exclusively on the platform, meaning they may forgo links to the open web or citation of sources to gain more visibility. Social media platforms such as LinkedIn, Twitter or Instagram use similar incentives.
Musk also rewards successful content creators by giving them a share of the ad revenue they generate. For example, he promises journalists "more freedom to write and a higher income" if they publish directly on X.