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In countries with slow, unreliable, and in some cases censored internet service, SpaceXs Starlink satellite internet terminals are reportedly being used and traded on the black market even in places where Elon Musks space company has no agreement to operate.

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Starlink terminals are being used and traded illegally in countries including Yemen, Sudan, and Venezuela, Bloomberg reports. Amid the civil war in Yemen, people are dependent on Starlink for business and personal communications, a government official told the news outlet. In war-torn Sudan, Western diplomats told Bloomberg that the Rapid Support Forces a paramilitary group that has been accused of war crimes and crimes against humanity have used Starlink for logistics. A Starlink trader in Kazakhstan told Bloomberg that the price for the internet terminals went up on the black market after a government crackdown on illegal sales. And in Venezuela, which has faced U.S. sanctions under its authoritarian President Nicolas Maduro, Starlink terminals are reportedly being sold and promoted on social media ads.

It is deeply concerning because its unregulated and headed by a private company, Emma Shortis, a senior researcher in international and security affairs at the Australia Institute, told Bloomberg. Theres no accountability on who has access to it and how its being used.

SpaceX did not immediately respond to a request for comment Tuesday morning.

In February, Ukraines military agency said intercepted radio indicated that Russian troops in occupied parts of the country were using Starlink satellites. Andriy Yusov, a Defense Intelligence agency spokesperson, said the use of Starlink terminals by Russian troops is growing and starting to become systemic. Ukraine received thousands of Starlink terminals in March 2022 after Russias invasion.

Both Musk, SpaceXs CEO, and the Kremlin denied Ukraines claims. Musk called the reports categorically false, writing on his social media site X that, To the best of our knowledge, no Starlinks have been sold directly or indirectly to Russia. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said there is not a certified system with us; accordingly, it cannot be officially supplied here and is not officially supplied and therefore cannot be used officially in any way.

After the denials by Musk and the Kremlin, Ukraines military agency released an audio recording that it said was an intercepted radio transmission of Russian soldiers discussing buying Starlink terminals from Arab countries.

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Elon Musk's Starlink terminals are showing up in Yemen, Sudan, and other hotspots: 'No accountability' - Quartz

Premium subscribers of all tiers for the X social media platform will soon gain access to its generative AI chatbot, Grok. Previously, the chatbot was only accessible to users who subscribed to the most expensive subscription tier, Premium+, for $16 a month (approximately 12 or AU$25). Thats set to change, with Xs owner Elon Musk announcing the expansion of availability to the large language model (LLM) to Basic Tier and Premium Tier X users in a post.

Grok has been made open-source, reportedly to allow researchers and developers to leverage Groks capabilities for their own projects and research. If youre interested in checking out its code, you can check out the Grok-1 repository on GitHub. Its the first major offering from Musks own AI venture, xAI.

As Dev Technosys, a mobile app and web development company, explains, Grok is Musks head-on challenge to ChatGPT, with the billionaire boasting that it beat ChatGPT 3.5 on multiple benchmarks. Musk describes the chatbot as having a focus on deep understanding and humor, and replying to questions with a rebellious streak. The model is trained on a massive dataset of text and code, including real-time text from X posts (which is what Musk points to as giving the bot a unique advantage), and text data scraped from across the web such as Wikipedia articles and academic papers.

Some industry observers think that this could be a push to boost X subscriber numbers, as analysis performed by Sensor Tower and reported by NBC indicates that visitors to the platform and user retention have been dropping. This has seemingly spooked many advertisers and hit the platforms revenues, with apparently 75 of the top 100 US advertisers cutting X from their ad budgets entirely from October 2022 onwards.

It does look like Musk is hoping that an exclusive perk like access to such a well-informed and entertaining chatbot as Grok will convince people to become subscribers, and to keep those who are already subscribed.

Earlier this year, Musk leveled a lawsuit against what is undoubtedly Groks largest competitor and the current industry leader in generative AI, OpenAI. He was an early investor in the company but departed after disagreements about several aspects, including the mission and vision for OpenAI, as well as control and equity in the company. Now, Musk asserts that OpenAI has diverted from its non-profit goals and is prioritizing corporate profits, particularly for Microsoft (a key investor and collaborator), above its other objectives - violating a contract called the Founding Agreement.

According to Musk, the Founding Agreement laid down specific principles and commitments that OpenAI had agreed to follow. OpenAI has responded to this accusation by denying such a contract, or any similar agreement, existed with Musk at all. Its overall response to the lawsuit so far has been dismissive, characterizing it as frivolous and alleging that Musk is driven by his own business interests.

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Apparently, it was established from early on by OpenAI that the company would transition into being a for-profit organization, as it wouldnt be able to raise the funds necessary to build the sorts of things it was planning to as a non-profit company. OpenAI claims Musk was not only aware of these plans and was consulted when they were being made, but that he was seeking to have majority equity in OpenAI, wanted to control the board of directors at the time, and wanted to assume the position of CEO.

Musk didnt give an exact date for Groks wider rollout, but according to Tech Crunch, its due sometime at the end of this week. Having seen what Musk considers funny, many people are morbidly curious about what sort of artificial intelligence Grok offers. One other aspect of Grok that might concern (or please, depending on your point of view) people is that it will respond to queries and topics that have been made off-limits for the most part with other chatbots, including controversial political ideas and conspiracy theories.

The sourcing from X in real-time is one unique advantage that Grok has, although before Musks takeover, this would have arguably been a much bigger prize.

Despite my misgivings, Grok does give users another option of chatbot to choose from, and more competition in this emerging field could spur on more innovation as companies battle to win users.

Original post:

Elon Musk brings controversial AI chatbot Grok to more X users in bid to halt exodus - TechRadar

The Shaadi.com Founder was speaking on the Barbershop podcast.

Anupam Mittal, the founder of Shaadi.com and 'Shark Tank India' judge has become a household name. Mr Mittal has made a significant impact in the business world with his remarkable achievements. The entrepreneur spoke to Bombay Shaving Company CEO Shantanu Deshpande on his Barbershop podcast and stated that billionaire Elon Musk is a "great and the worst" example for founders.

Discussing the reason, Mr Mittal highlighted Mr Musk's vast business empire. He said, "A lot of people believe they can do what he's doing- run 10 companies at the same time. And we know it's very hard."

He added, "It's understandable if a founder says that it has been five years- I want to buy a house and all that. But if you are going to create wealth for yourself while your investors have not, that is a big no. It becomes tough. Then your incentives will not align."

On the podcast, Mr Mittal also recalled starting as an entrepreneur and going from living in a small Mumbai apartment with 20 people to becoming a multimillionaire in his 20s. Mr Mittal clarified that his father had a successful business in textile but there was a time when they were not well-off.

He told Mr Deshpande, "We wouldn't realise it as kids, but 20 of us were living in a 1,000-square-foot house at the time. People were sleeping on the dining table, under the dining table. But as kids, you don't think of that. You enjoy having so many kids around".

After struggling for a few years, Mr Mittal's father became successful, and Anupam Mittal moved to the US for studies. However, he couldn't find a job there and he decided not to share it with his parents as they would insist him return. He revealed he had no money.

He continued, "Now the situation was such that I had no money, and if I asked them for money they say, 'Where's your salary?' I had no money. It was the first time I experienced hunger. This is something everybody should do in life once because experiencing hunger teaches you a lot. There was a time when I didn't eat for two or three days because I couldn't eat. How long could friends help? They would've helped, but you also feel bad after a while... Credit cards are maxed out, everything is finished. It wasn't like I was out on the streets, but I did experience some level of lack of resources".

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Elon Musk "Great And Worst" Example For Founders, Says Anupam Mittal. Here's Why - NDTV

Another Elon Musk-led company has moved its home base from Delaware as the tech billionaire continues to criticize the state after a judge there voided his nearly $56 billion payday at Tesla.

Moving the incorporation of SpaceX, Musks privately held rocket giant, to Texas will help bolster the Lone Star States standing with business. But it remains unclear whether Tesla itself will be able to make the same journey.

Musk is making good on his threat to pull out of the state. If your company is still incorporated in Delaware, I recommend moving to another state as soon as possible, he wrote in his announcement of SpaceXs shift. It comes shortly after he relocated the incorporation of Neuralink, his brain implant company, to Nevada.

Dozens of states have sought in recent years to lure companies away from Delaware which became the home base for much of corporate America because of its extensive business-friendly court system by pitching themselves as being even friendlier. Musk endorsed that view, writing that having a Delaware incorporation is a guarantee of spurious litigation.

All eyes are on Tesla now. Its up to the carmakers board and, more important, its shareholders to approve such a move. Those same investors were the focus of the decision last month by the Delaware chancellor Kathaleen McCormick to reject Musks pay package: She found that Teslas board didnt sufficiently look out for investor interests in recommending the compensation scheme, and that it was unfair to other shareholders.

That said, Musk can exert significant pressure. He has already demanded a bigger voting stake in Tesla, threatening to move new artificial intelligence ventures into other parts of his business empire if he didnt get his way. (All this is increasing the scrutiny on Teslas chair, Robyn Denholm, whom McCormick accused of having a lackadaisical approach to her oversight obligations.)

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Elon Musk Extends His Anywhere-but-Delaware Campaign - The New York Times

While the finer points of running a social media business can be debated, one basic truth is that they all run on attention. Tech leaders are incentivized to grow their user bases so there are more people looking at more ads for more time. Its just good business.

As the owner of Twitter, Elon Musk presumably shared that goal. But he claimed he hadnt bought Twitter to make money. This freed him up to focus on other passions: stopping rival tech companies from scraping Twitters data without permissioneven if it meant losing eyeballs on ads.

Data-scraping was a known problem at Twitter. Scraping was the open secret of Twitter data access. We knew about it. It was fine, Yoel Roth wrote on the Twitter alternative Bluesky. AI firms in particular were notorious for gobbling up huge swaths of text to train large language models. Now that those firms were worth a lot of money, the situation was far from fine, in Musks opinion.

In November 2022, OpenAI debuted ChatGPT, a chatbot that could generate convincingly human text. By January 2023, the app had over 100 million users, making it the fastest growing consumer app of all time. Three months later, OpenAI secured another round of funding that closed at an astounding valuation of $29 billion, more than Twitter was worth, by Musks estimation.

OpenAI was a sore subject for Musk, whod been one of the original founders and a major donor before stepping down in 2018 over disagreements with the other founders. After ChatGPT launched, Musk made no secret of the fact that he disagreed with the guardrails that OpenAI put on the chatbot to stop it from relaying dangerous or insensitive information. The danger of training AI to be wokein other words, lieis deadly, Musk said on December 16, 2022. He was toying with starting a competitor.

Near the end of June 2023, Musk launched a two-part offensive to stop data scrapers, first directing Twitter employees to temporarily block logged out view. The change would mean that only people with Twitter accounts could view tweets.

Logged out view had a complicated history at Twitter. It was rumored to have played a part in the Arab Spring, allowing dissidents to view tweets without having to create a Twitter account and risk compromising their anonymity. But it was also an easy access point for people who wanted to scrape Twitter data.

Once Twitter made the change, Google was temporarily blocked from crawling Twitter and serving up relevant tweets in search resultsa move that could negatively impact Twitters traffic. Were aware that our ability to crawl Twitter.com has been limited, affecting our ability to display tweets and pages from the site in search results, Google spokesperson Lara Levin told The Verge. Websites have control over whether crawlers can access their content. As engineers discussed possible workarounds on Slack, one wrote: Surely this was expected when that decision was made?

Then engineers detected an explosion of logged in requests, according to internal Slack messages, indicating that data scrapers had simply logged in to Twitter to continue scraping. Musk ordered the change to be reversed.

On July 1, 2023, Musk launched part two of the offensive. Suddenly, if a user scrolled for just a few minutes, an error message popped up. Sorry, you are rate limited, the message read. Please wait a few moments then try again.

Excerpt from:

The Story Behind Elon Musk's Tweet Restriction Fiasco - WIRED