Elon Musk threatens to sue Microsoft over using Twitter data for its A.I.

Twitter CEO Elon Musk threatened to sue Microsoft on Wednesday, accusing the software program big of illegally utilizing the social media firm’s knowledge to coach its synthetic intelligence mannequin.

Musk’s risk by tweet got here after Mashable and different publications reported that Microsoft would drop Twitter from its promoting platform, which allows advert patrons to handle all of their social media accounts in a single place.

“They trained illegally using Twitter data,” Musk tweeted. “Lawsuit time.”

Musk, who can also be CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, typically tweets about plans that by no means come to fruition, and no lawsuit seems to have been filed. Twitter’s press line did not reply meaningfully to a request for remark, and a Microsoft consultant declined to remark.

Musk’s risk is the most recent indication that knowledge possession is shortly changing into a fraught battleground within the generative AI rush. Big Tech corporations are working to develop cutting-edge AI fashions like OpenAI’s GPT, and knowledge house owners are looking for to cease them or cost to be used of their content material.

Microsoft develops its personal so-called massive language fashions (LLMs) and sells entry to OpenAI’s fashions. Microsoft invested $10 billion in OpenAI final yr in an unusually structured deal. Musk was a co-founder of OpenAI earlier than leaving its board in 2018, and has complained not too long ago of the corporate’s transfer from a nonprofit mannequin to a extremely helpful business influenced by Microsoft.

LLMs like GPT require terabytes of knowledge for coaching, a lot of which is scraped from web sites like Reddit, StackOverflow, and Twitter. Training knowledge from social networks is efficacious as a result of it captures casual, back-and-forth conversations.

As these new AI fashions transfer from analysis labs and universities into the company world, the house owners of the info are beginning to make calls for.

For instance, Reddit stated earlier this week that it will cost corporations for entry to its programming interface used to feed the conversations amongst Redditors into AI coaching software program. Universal Music Group additionally stated this week that such coaching of artists’ music would symbolize “both a breach of our agreements and a violation of copyright law” in response to a viral video of a music that claimed to make use of AI to mimic the rapper Drake.

And inventory photograph database Getty Images is suing Stable Diffusion, alleging that the corporate copied its content material to coach its AI picture generator.

Musk stated in December that Twitter would “pause” OpenAI’s entry to its database. He’s additionally introduced plans to construct his personal massive language mannequin in certainly one of his corporations known as TruthGPT.

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