Економіка

Jurors on Friday cleared Elon Musk of liability for investors’ losses in a fraud trial over his 2018 tweets falsely claiming that he had funding in place to take Tesla private.

The tweets sent the Tesla share price on a rollercoaster ride, and Musk was sued by shareholders who said the tycoon acted recklessly in an effort to squeeze investors who had bet against the company.

Jurors deliberated for barely two hours before returning to the San Francisco courtroom to say they unanimously agreed that neither Musk nor the Tesla board perpetrated fraud with the tweets and in their aftermath.

“Thank goodness, the wisdom of the people has prevailed!” tweeted Musk, who had tried but failed to get the trial moved to Texas on the grounds jurors in California would be biased against him.

“I am deeply appreciative of the jury’s unanimous finding of innocence in the Tesla 420 take-private case.”

Attorney Nicholas Porritt, who represents Glen Littleton and other investors in Tesla, had argued in court that the case was about making sure the rich and powerful have to abide by the same stock market rules as everyone else.

“Elon Musk published tweets that were false with reckless disregard as to their truth,” Porritt told the panel of nine jurors during closing arguments.

Porritt pointed to expert testimony estimating that Musk’s claim about funding, which turned out not to be true, cost investors billions of dollars overall and that Musk and the Tesla board should be made to pay damages.

But Musk attorney Alex Spiro successfully countered that the billionaire may have erred on wording in a hasty tweet, but that he did not set out to deceive anyone.

Spiro also portrayed the mercurial entrepreneur, who now owns Twitter, as having had a troubled childhood and having come to the United States as a poor youth chasing dreams.

No joke

Musk testified during three days on the witness stand that his 2018 tweet about taking Tesla private at $420 a share was no joke and that Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund was serious about helping him do it.

“To Elon Musk, if he believes it or even just thinks about it then it’s true no matter how objectively false or exaggerated it may be,” Porritt told jurors.

Tesla and its board were also to blame, because they let Musk use his Twitter account to post news about the company, Porritt argued.

The case revolved around a pair of tweets in which Musk said “funding secured” for a project to buy out the publicly traded electric automaker, then in a second tweet added that “investor support is confirmed.”

“He wrote two words ‘funding secured’ that were technically inaccurate,” Spiro said of Musk while addressing jurors.

“Whatever you think of him, this isn’t a bad tweeter trial, it’s a ‘did they prove this man committed fraud?’ trial.”

Musk did not intend to deceive anyone with the tweets and had the connections and wealth to take Tesla private, Spiro contended.

During the trial playing out in federal court in San Francisco, Spiro said that even though the tweets may have been a “reckless choice of words,” they were not fraud.

“I’m being accused of fraud; it’s outrageous,” Musk said while testifying in person.

Musk said he fired off the tweets at issue after learning of a Financial Times story about a Saudi Arabian investment fund wanting to acquire a stake in Tesla.

The trial came at a sensitive time for Musk, who has dominated the headlines for his chaotic takeover of Twitter where he has laid off more than half of the 7,500 employees and scaled down content moderation. 
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Excitement around ChatGPT — an easy to use AI chatbot that can deliver an essay or computer code upon request and within seconds — has sent schools into panic and turned Big Tech green with envy.

The potential impact of ChatGPT on society remains complicated and unclear even as its creator Wednesday announced a paid subscription version in the United States.

Here is a closer look at what ChatGPT is (and is not):

Is this a turning point?  

It is entirely possible that November’s release of ChatGPT by California company OpenAI will be remembered as a turning point in introducing a new wave of artificial intelligence to the wider public.  

What is less clear is whether ChatGPT is actually a breakthrough with some critics calling it a brilliant PR move that helped OpenAI score billions of dollars in investments from Microsoft.

Yann LeCun, Chief AI Scientist at Meta and professor at New York University, believes “ChatGPT is not a particularly interesting scientific advance,” calling the app a “flashy demo” built by talented engineers.

LeCun, speaking to the Big Technology Podcast, said ChatGPT is void of “any internal model of the world” and is merely churning “one word after another” based on inputs and patterns found on the internet.

“When working with these AI models, you have to remember that they’re slot machines, not calculators,” warned Haomiao Huang of Kleiner Perkins, the Silicon Valley venture capital firm.

“Every time you ask a question and pull the arm, you get an answer that could be marvelous… or not… The failures can be extremely unpredictable,” Huang wrote in Ars Technica, the tech news website.

Just like Google

ChatGPT is powered by an AI language model that is nearly three years old — OpenAI’s GPT-3 — and the chatbot only uses a part of its capability.  

The true revolution is the humanlike chat, said Jason Davis, research professor at Syracuse University.

“It’s familiar, it’s conversational and guess what? It’s kind of like putting in a Google search request,” he said.

ChatGPT’s rockstar-like success even shocked its creators at OpenAI, which received billions in new financing from Microsoft in January.

“Given the magnitude of the economic impact we expect here, more gradual is better,” OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said in an interview to StrictlyVC, a newsletter.

“We put GPT-3 out almost three years ago… so the incremental update from that to ChatGPT, I felt like should have been predictable and I want to do more introspection on why I was sort of miscalibrated on that,” he said.

The risk, Altman added, was startling the public and policymakers and on Tuesday his company unveiled a tool for detecting text generated by AI amid concerns from teachers that students may rely on artificial intelligence to do their homework.

What now?

From lawyers to speechwriters, from coders to journalists, everyone is waiting breathlessly to feel disruption caused by ChatGPT. OpenAI just launched a paid version of the chatbot – $20 per month for an improved and faster service.

For now, officially, the first significant application of OpenAI’s tech will be for Microsoft software products.  

Though details are scarce, most assume that ChatGPT-like capabilities will turn up on the Bing search engine and in the Office suite.

“Think about Microsoft Word. I don’t have to write an essay or an article, I just have to tell Microsoft Word what I wanted to write with a prompt,” said Davis.

He believes influencers on TikTok and Twitter will be the earliest adopters of this so-called generative AI since going viral requires huge amounts of content and ChatGPT can take care of that in no time.

This of course raises the specter of disinformation and spamming carried out at an industrial scale.  

For now, Davis said the reach of ChatGPT is very limited by computing power, but once this is ramped up, the opportunities and potential dangers will grow exponentially.

And much like the ever imminent arrival of self-driving cars that never quite happens, experts disagree on whether that is a question of months or years.

Ridicule

LeCun said Meta and Google have refrained from releasing AI as potent as ChatGPT out of fear of ridicule and backlash.

Quieter releases of language-based bots – like Meta’s Blenderbot or Microsoft’s Tay for example – were quickly shown capable of generating racist or inappropriate content.

Tech giants have to think hard before releasing something “that is going to spew nonsense” and disappoint, he said.
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Zimbabwe plans to build “Zim Cyber City,” a modern capital expected to cost up to $60 billion in raised funds and include new government buildings and a presidential palace. Critics are blasting the plan as wasteful when more than half the population lives in poverty and the government has let the current capital, Harare, fall apart. Columbus Mavhunga reports from Mount Hampden, Zimbabwe. Camera: Blessing Chigwenhembe
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Zimbabwe plans to build “Zim Cyber City,” a modern capital expected to cost up to $60 billion in raised funds and include new government buildings and a presidential palace. Critics are blasting the plan as wasteful when more than half the population lives in poverty and the government has let the current capital, Harare, fall apart. Columbus Mavhunga reports from Mount Hampden, Zimbabwe. Camera: Blessing Chigwenhembe
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