In his trademark style of using his personal Twitter account – his social network – to make announcements, Elon Musk warned that he would now limit the number of tweets or trills that paid or unpaid users can view per day.

He explained that the measure, which is temporary, was taken “to deal with extreme levels of data extraction and system manipulation.”

“Sorry, you have reached the query frequency limit. Please wait a few minutes and try again” That’s the message that thousands of users have been experiencing since July 1, which appears to be an outage in the platform’s services.

However, in this tweet Musk shows why and for verified (or paid) accounts you can consult up to 6,000 tweets per day; for unverified (or free to use, no payment) accounts the number drops to 600 and for new unverified accounts the highest limit applies: 300 tweets per day.

The official reason given by Twitter’s owners is that artificial intelligence (AI) companies, such as OpenAI, use the platform to analyze and feed systems of generative capacities.

However, in the face of backlash from the network’s millions of followers, at dawn on July 2, Musk moderated his initial message, ensuring it was an “exercise of irony” and extending the limit to 10,000 tweets for verified accounts. ; 1,000, not verified; and 500 on new unverified accounts.

Musk and his aversion to AI, a legitimate concern?

The billionaire and co-founder of companies such as Tesla, SpaceX, Neuralink and The Boring Company criticized the development of artificial intelligence (AI).

In fact, in March 2023, Musk and more than a thousand tech geeks, including Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, signed an open letter calling for an “immediate pause” on developing “more powerful” AI. , from OpenAI.

However, the South African entrepreneur co-founded with Sam Altman, the current CEO of OpenIA, the company that operates ChatGPT. Based on NY timethe multi-million dollar donation to founding this company was made with the aim of mitigating the risk that only tech giants like Google or Microsoft can access the development of this technology.

For this reason it was proposed that the company’s operations be “open innovation” so that everyone has access to developments. However, Elon Musk stepped down from this, according to the NYTimes, due to increasing conflicts of interest related to his other business activities.

Interestingly, despite its publicly expressed criticism, the company’s car uses AI technology, primarily to develop accident prevention patterns in autonomous vehicles, which the New York newspaper said was not without controversy given the crash. that produces vehicles Tesla, Model Y, in November 2022 in China, which killed two people.

Another theory states that Musk will be interested in entering the race for the development of artificial intelligence, as revealed by The Wall Street Journalbecause last April the billionaire registered a company in the state of Nevada under the name X.AI.

One purchase, a thousand controversies

Since the businessman acquired Twitter, controversy surrounds the ‘blue bird’. In October 2022, he tried to cancel the purchase agreement, citing multiple accounts bots or managed automatically to mimic human behavior.

He later reinstated the accounts of Donald Trump and other figures accused of hate speech such as comedian Theo Von, whom he interacted with from his personal account; or comedian Kathy Griffin and actor Jordan Peterson.

It also readjusted Twitter’s verification policies so that those who are interested will have to pay a certain amount of money. What caused disgust among users back then.

Also, some media like NPR national Public Radio, in the United States, and BBCin the UK, it is labeled by Twitter as “government-funded media” or media financed by the government, a fact that also arouses the sensitivity of the media.

With AP, EFE and international media