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Elon Musk Said to Ramp Up Purge of Engineers Over Alleged Criticism After Twitter Takeover
What began as the firing of two longtime Twitter engineers after they criticized their new boss has turned into a purge, as Elon Musk clamps down on internal and external dissent. In the past 24 hours, an estimated dozen or so employees have been let go after openly rebuking Musk, who has called himself a “free speech absolutist,” according to two people familiar with the matter. Musk and Twitter haven’t confirmed the firings, but employees have been monitoring the situation through public tweets and private messages.
In one case, Musk announced a firing in a tweet. Engineer Eric Frohnhoefer, who worked on Twitter‘s app for the Android mobile operating system, on Sunday reposted one of Musk’s tweets with a comment, saying that Musk’s understanding of a technical part of Twitter’s app was “wrong.” Musk replied and asked Frohnhoefer to elaborate, before writing, “Twitter is super slow on Android. What have you done to fix that?”
After attempting to explain his thinking in a number of tweets, Frohnhoefer was asked by another user why he hadn’t shared his feedback with his new boss privately. The engineer, who has worked at Twitter for more than eight years, replied, “maybe he should ask questions privately. Maybe use Slack or email.”
On Monday morning, Musk wrote that Frohnhoefer had been fired. Frohnhoefer retweeted that post, and included a saluting emoji that many employees used when they were laid off earlier this month. Twitter and Frohnhoefer didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment on his status.
Another engineer, Ben Leib, also lost his job following a public posting critical of Musk. He commented on the same post about load times from Musk, writing, “As the former tech lead for timelines infrastructure at Twitter, I can confidently say that this man has no idea wtf he’s talking about.” Leib, who worked at Twitter for a decade, confirmed to Bloomberg that he was fired on Sunday.
Sasha Solomon, a software engineer, posted Monday night that she was fired for a critical post. “I said it before and I’ll say it again,” she tweeted. “Kiss my a– elon.” Another engineer, Nick Morgan, tweeted a screenshot of the email sent from Twitter HR that said he was fired after his “recent behaviour violated company policy.”
“My Twitter account was protected at the time, so I can only assume this was for not showing 100 percent loyalty in Slack,’ he tweeted, referring to Twitter’s internal company communications. Morgan and Solomon could not be reached for comment.
Twitter has been thrown into chaos since Musk took over late last month. Many workers remain upset that Musk fired half of the company’s 7,000-plus employees, including most of the senior managers, within about a week of his $44 billion (roughly Rs. 3.6 lakh crore) buyout.
The billionaire also rapidly changed the corporate culture. While it wasn’t previously routine for employees to challenge leadership publicly at Twitter, workers often spoke out on internal Slack channels and by email before Musk showed up, sometimes posting criticism or concerns to the entire company.
Musk’s changes have led to a lack of communication internally in terms of who is in charge and what the company’s priorities are, current and former staffers say.
The moves have also led to concerns that San Francisco-based Twitter is vulnerable to product breakdowns or technical outages. On Monday, Twitter implemented another coding freeze, halting product updates to the app, and employees say they weren’t given a clear reason why.
Part of Musk’s motivation for purchasing Twitter was to loosen content restrictions, and make it a destination for “free speech” where people can say “outrageous” things. So far, employees say, that sentiment doesn’t extend to his corporate policies.
© 2022 Bloomberg L.P.
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Meta Platforms used public Facebook and Instagram posts to train parts of its new Meta AI virtual assistant, but excluded private posts shared only with family and friends in an effort to respect consumers’ privacy, the company’s top policy executive told Reuters in an interview.
Meta also did not use private chats on its messaging services as training data for the model and took steps to filter private details from public datasets used for training, said Meta President of Global Affairs Nick Clegg, speaking on the sidelines of the company’s annual Connect conference this week.
“We’ve tried to exclude datasets that have a heavy preponderance of personal information,” Clegg said, adding that the “vast majority” of the data used by Meta for training was publicly available.
He cited LinkedIn as an example of a website whose content Meta deliberately chose not to use because of privacy concerns.
Clegg’s comments come as tech companies including Meta, OpenAI and Alphabet’s Google have been criticized for using information scraped from the internet without permission to train their AI models, which ingest massive amounts of data in order to summarize information and generate imagery.
The companies are weighing how to handle the private or copyrighted materials vacuumed up in that process that their AI systems may reproduce, while facing lawsuits from authors accusing them of infringing copyrights.
Meta AI was the most significant product among the company’s first consumer-facing AI tools unveiled by CEO Mark Zuckerberg on Wednesday at Meta’s annual products conference, Connect. This year’s event was dominated by talk of artificial intelligence, unlike past conferences which focused on augmented and virtual reality.
Meta made the assistant using a custom model based on the powerful Llama 2 large language model that the company released for public commercial use in July, as well as a new model called Emu that generates images in response to text prompts, it said.
The product will be able to generate text, audio and imagery and will have access to real-time information via a partnership with Microsoft’s Bing search engine.
The public Facebook and Instagram posts that were used to train Meta AI included both text and photos, Clegg said.
Those posts were used to train Emu for the image generation elements of the product, while the chat functions were based on Llama 2 with some publicly available and annotated datasets added, a Meta spokesperson told Reuters.
Interactions with Meta AI may also be used to improve the features going forward, the spokesperson said.
Clegg said Meta imposed safety restrictions on what content the Meta AI tool could generate, like a ban on the creation of photo-realistic images of public figures.
On copyrighted materials, Clegg said he was expecting a “fair amount of litigation” over the matter of “whether creative content is covered or not by existing fair use doctrine,” which permits the limited use of protected works for purposes such as commentary, research and parody.
“We think it is, but I strongly suspect that’s going to play out in litigation,” Clegg said.
Some companies with image-generation tools facilitate the reproduction of iconic characters like Mickey Mouse, while others have paid for the materials or deliberately avoided including them in training data.
OpenAI, for instance, signed a six-year deal with content provider Shutterstock this summer to use the company’s image, video and music libraries for training.
Asked whether Meta had taken any such steps to avoid the reproduction of copyrighted imagery, a Meta spokesperson pointed to new terms of service barring users from generating content that violates privacy and intellectual property rights.
© Thomson Reuters 2023
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WhatsApp, Instagram and Messenger to Get AI Assistants; Meta Shows Off Image Generation Tool Emu
Meta showcased a host of new products and services, including the Meta Quest 3 mixed reality headset and a pair of smart glasses made in collaboration with Ray-Ban, at its Meta Connect annual conference on Wednesday. Alongside the hardware, the company also announced its own AI assistant, Meta AI, and a variety of AI experiences across Meta’s suite of apps and devices, including AI stickers in Meta apps and AI editing tools for Instagram. Meta AI, a conversational generative AI assistant much like OpenAI’s ChatGPT or Microsoft’s Bing, will be available on WhatsApp, Messenger, and Instagram.
Meta AI will be powered by the company’s custom model that borrows from Meta’s large language model, Llama 2. The AI assistant, Meta said, will provide real-time information in response to text-based queries, trawling the internet via Bing search. Meta AI will also generate images based on text prompts. The AI assistant can help plan hiking trips with your friends in a group chat, prepare recipes, or help with your shopping list. Users can type in “@MetaAI /imagine” inside their chat box and follow it up with descriptive text prompts for what they want the AI assistant to do. Meta AI is also coming to the company’s latest devices, the Meta Quest 3 and the Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses.
In addition to its default AI assistant, the company also showed off AI avatars with distinct personalities. Meta is bringing 28 AI characters, each with a unique backstory and behaviour. These AI characters can be conversed with in WhatsApp, Instagram, and Messenger, and will also include some public figures and influencers that Meta has partnered up with for their likenesses. Famous people coming as AI characters include Dwayne Wade, Kendall Jenner, Mr. Beast, Snoop Dogg and more.
Emu can generate stickers based on user prompts
Photo Credit: Meta
Meta is calling its image generation tool ‘expressive media universe’, or Emu. The tool can also quickly generate AI stickers based on a user’s text prompts inside apps like WhatsApp or Instagram to share with friends. “It’s high-quality, photorealistic,” Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said during the presentation. “But, one of the coolest things is the Emu generates that fast. It’s not a minute. It takes five seconds to generate one of these,” he added. This custom sticker generation feature will roll out to select English-language users over the next month in WhatsApp, Messenger, Instagram, and Facebook Stories.
The Facebook parent is also bringing new AI-powered image editing tools, specifically two new features — Restyle and Backdrop — that utilise technology from the Emu tool. Restyle acts as a kind of custom filter that works based on user prompts. Based on single descriptor or a more detail prompt, Restyle will edit your images to reflect a particular mood. And as the name suggests, Backdrop will let users change the background of their images based on custom prompts. Images created using both tools will carry markers that indicate the image is AI-generated. Meta said that Restyle and Backdrop were coming soon to Instagram but did not provide a concrete release date for the same.
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Meta Smart Glasses in collaboration with Ray-Ban were introduced on Wednesday alongside the Meta Quest 3 and other products. Users can livestream videos to Facebook and Instagram using the smart glasses, hands-free. The frame comes with a 12-megapixel camera sensor and an LED unit. This smart wearable succeeds the Ray-Ban stories, which were the company’s first smart glasses and was released in September 2021. However, unlike AR/VR headsets, the Ray-Ban Meta Smart Glasses do not feature a display unit.
Ray-Ban Meta Smart Glasses with standard lenses start at $299 (roughly Rs. 24,999), while Polarized lenses and transition lenses are priced at $329 (roughly Rs. 27,400) and $379 (roughly Rs. 31,500), respectively. It is offered in 150 different custom frame and lens design combinations.
The Ray-Ban Meta Smart glasses are currently available for pre-orders in 15 countries, including the US, Canada, Australia, and European markets. The sale of the smart glasses will start from October 17 in these regions. Meta has not revealed the India launch date of the Ray-Ban Meta Smart Glasses.
Ray-Ban Meta Smart Glasses specifications, features
A 12-megapixel sensor and an LED light, which doubles as a recording indicator are placed within two circular cutouts on either side of the Ray-Ban Meta Smart Glasses frame. Users can use the camera to take photos with a resolution of 3,024 x 4,032 pixels and 1080p videos of up to 60 seconds. With the Meta View app, the users can then share these media files to any other image/ video sharing apps.
The Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses also enable first person perspective livestreaming in which a user can stream whatever they are looking at with the glasses on in real time, to their respective Instagram and Facebook profiles. Users can also use the ‘Hey Meta’ prompt to enable handsfree functions.
Even though the Ray-Ban Meta Smart Glasses do not come with a display, the company claims, that compared to Ray-Ban Stories, the dual open-ear speakers in the new glasses offer less audio leakage and is said to bring up to 50 percent louder sound, deeper bass, and more clarity.
The Ray-Ban Meta Smart Glasses are powered by the new Qualcomm Snapdragon AR1 Gen1 Platform SoC and packs 32GB of inbuilt storage. Claimed to be sleeker in design than its preceding model, Meta says that the glasses come with up to four hours of battery life, and an additional 32 hours with the charging case. One full charge is claimed to take 75 minutes. The glasses also come with an IPX4 rating.
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Enabling developers to create innovative AIs on Messenger and WhatsApp
Meta Used Public Instagram, Facebook Posts to Train Its New AI Assistant
WhatsApp, Instagram and Messenger to Get AI Assistants; Meta Shows Off Image Generation Tool Emu
Meta Smart Glasses in Collaboration With Ray-Ban Launched, Allows Hands-Free Livestreaming
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