TechMixtape #4 Edition: Bye Bye, Blue Bird.

A decent chunk of the discourse around the web this year has been dominated by two products: ChatGPT and Twitter.?

Every week - heck, every day - there’s a new story on one or the other (or both) that captures the headlines and makes the front page of Reddit.?

But while one - ChatGPT - is built on generative AI, a technology category on the rise, the other, Twitter, is of a kind that is slowly dying (at least as we know it): social media.?

In this edition, we share a few stories that caught our eye on both these categories, stories that we think illustrate where each is heading.?

We then round up this month’s edition with a few other great ones that we think are worth a read.

Enjoy!

-The TechFinitive Team

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At Twitter, the month started with content being locked behind log-in, then views limited per user, then threads limited to 25 posts, a deluge of changes that broke the platform for many, with Twitter’s SEO rankings immediately declining by 30%.?

Not the only thing to break that week; Twitter also launched TweetDeck 2.0 to almost universal disdain.

As if Twitter wasn’t self-destructing quickly enough, it then had to watch as Meta, seemingly effortlessly, launched Threads driving more than 30 million sign-ups (whether that’s a good or a bad thing is up for debate as this brilliant article from Claire Reilly covers).?

AND! Because the month was not over yet… Elon Musk decided to abandon the iconic blue bird and rebrand as X. Step one was to remove the old logo from San Francisco’s headquarters, which was promptly halted by local authorities.?

Seriously, you can’t make this stuff up.

That’s enough for Twitt… sorry, X. We mentioned at the top that we had a few good ones on the topic of generative AI, so let’s head there next.

Mastercard is selling an AI-powered tool (soft paywall) to major UK banks to help detect and prevent "authorised push payment scams," which involve tricking victims into transferring money to fraudulent accounts. The tool has shown promising results in detecting such fraud, and Mastercard plans to expand its use to the US, India and Australia.

Another promising initiative in the generative AI field is that of Google’s Med-PaLM 2, a tool designed to answer medical questions. Originally reported on the WSJ, the Verge does a great job (as usual) to break it down here.

Finally, Associated Press announced a partnership with OpenAI granting it access to archives all the way back to 1985; the expectation is that access to that kind of fact-based data will be invaluable in training the language models powering ChatGPT.?

We are coming to the end of the edition. Mind the gap.

A few more good ones before you go:

• Take a minute to read this LinkedIn post on the “hype” for quantum computing… and why it’s ok to know nothing about it.
• James O’Malley picks a fight with transport experts and surprises himself by writing 3,000 words on buses.
• India wants to join the hyper-competitive market for microchips and is aiming to begin manufacturing them by the end of 2024
• The world is ageing - here’s why that matters for economic growth.

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