1 big thing: FCC takes long-delayed step against spam text surge

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2. VC excesses face blame for rising tech layoffs 

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3.  U.S. eases Iran net rules as protests rise

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Scott Rosenberg here, guest-newslettering for Ina and happy as always to be your host! 

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Thanks to Peter Allen Clark for editing and Bryan McBournie for copy editing today's Login. 

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1 big thing: NBA's revamped mobile app pushes boundaries

2. D.C.'s push to limit cryptocurrency anonymity 

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3. How the tech industry discounts security

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Don't freak out, but it's exactly six weeks till the midterm elections, with control of Congress in the balance. 

🛑 Situational awareness: Meta said that it has taken down two large "covert influence" networks that spread disinformation about Russia's invasion of Ukraine.

Today's newsletter is 1,153 words, a 4-minute read. 

Thanks to Peter Allen Clark for editing and Bryan McBournie for copy editing today's newsletter.

Editor’s note: The first story has been corrected to show that the NBA’s content parter is Turner Sports, not Warner Sports.

1 big thing: Supreme Court's high-stakes online speech case

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2. Musk's plan to turn Twitter into a "super app" 

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3. Exclusive: Firms pledge not to weaponize robots

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Ina's out for Yom Kippur and I am happy to bring you this news-packed edition of Login.

🔧 Situational awareness: IBM told Axios that it will invest $20 billion over 10 years throughout New York’s Hudson Valley region in R&D on semiconductors, artificial intelligence, quantum computing and other critical technologies.

Today's newsletter is 1,236 words, a 5-minute read.

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1 big thing: Tech's moonshots fizzle and crash

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2. Twitter's checkmark chaos

3. Musk's SpaceX buys ads on Musk's Twitter 

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Happy Monday. Ina's out for a couple of days, so I'm here once again as your back-up host, with a whole lot of Twitter news to catch up on after the long weekend, so let's get right to it.

💰 Situational awareness: Amazon founder Jeff Bezos told CNN he plans to donate the majority of his $124 billion net worth to charity over his lifetime.

Today's Login is 1,217 words, a 5-minute read.

Thanks to Peter Allen Clark for editing and Nick Aspinwall for copy editing this newsletter. 

1 big thing: Web3 in FTX's blast radius 

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2. Tech layoffs are soaring this month

3. Qualcomm sees upside to glut of chips

Good morning. Join Axios tomorrow at 8am ET in Washington, D.C., for an event about closing the U.S.'s economic equity gaps with Council of Economic Advisers member Jared Bernstein, 1863 Ventures founder and managing partner Melissa Bradley, and National Bankers Association CEO Nicole A. Elam. Register here to attend in person or virtually.

Today's newsletter is 1,241 words, a 5-minute read.

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National

Twitter announced late Monday night it would shut off free access to its API Feb. 9 and start charging outside developers and other companies whose apps and software need access to its services.

Why it matters: Twitter got big in part by offering its code and data as infrastructure to others for user authentication, news aggregation and other kinds of third-party uses — but in the Elon Musk era the company's top priority is revenue.

Catch up quick: An API is a software program's service entrance, where programs written by others can ask for data and submit requests directly without going through the consumer-facing front door.

Twitter had already changed the terms of its API to effectively shut down access for third-party Twitter apps. 

What they're saying: The announcement kicked off a firestorm of criticism on Twitter itself, with protests from small software firms who'd built products on the assumption that Twitter's API would remain free. 

"A week's notice is cruel," industry veteran Jason Shellen responded to the announcement on Twitter. "In what world do you think solo developers have the time to make changes on your whims in a week's time?"

Be smart: Musk's Twitter has a record of announcing big changes and then modifying its plans on the fly, so don't be surprised if the API policies change again.

The company has not yet said what it intends to charge API users. 

Twitter will charge outside developers for API access

The sudden move is part of Elon Musk's effort to boost revenue but could reduce Twitter's profile and usage.

Illustration of the Twitter logo cut out of a hundred dollar bill. 

Twitter

Twitter <a class="gtmContentClick" data-vars-link-text="announced" data-vars-click-url="https://twitter.com/TwitterDev/status/1621026986784337922" data-vars-content-id="4f6900f6-014a-414c-af36-bd8628063c35" data-vars-headline="Twitter will charge outside developers for API access" data-vars-event-category="story" data-vars-sub-category="story" data-vars-item="in_content_link" href="https://twitter.com/TwitterDev/status/1621026986784337922" target="_blank">announced</a> late Monday night it would shut off free access to its API Feb. 9 and start charging outside developers and other companies whose apps and software need access to its services.Why it matters: Twitter got big in part by offering its code and data as infrastructure to others for user authentication, news aggregation and other kinds of third-party uses — but in <a class="gtmContentClick" data-vars-link-text="the Elon Musk era" data-vars-click-url="https://www.axios.com/economy-business/elon-musk" data-vars-content-id="4f6900f6-014a-414c-af36-bd8628063c35" data-vars-headline="Twitter will charge outside developers for API access" data-vars-event-category="story" data-vars-sub-category="story" data-vars-item="in_content_link" href="https://www.axios.com/economy-business/elon-musk" target="_self">the Elon Musk era</a> the company&#x27;s top priority is revenue.

From the Valley to D.C., Big Tech players like Facebook, Google and Amazon are under more scrutiny than ever as new technology develops and privacy and antitrust concerns grow in lockstep with companies’ ambitions.

Technology

OpenAI announced Wednesday it's starting to sell $20 a month subscriptions to ChatGPT, its trendy AI-driven chatbot that answers questions, write poems and has taken the tech world by storm.

Why it matters: ChatGPT seized a powerful spotlight. Now, the monetization begins.

Details: ChatGPT will still be available for free to users who don't subscribe, but paying customers will get priority access, faster response times, and early use of new features.

The big picture: ChatGPT's popularity came at a high operating cost to OpenAI.

The AI service uses tons of computing power and experts estimate it's costing OpenAI $100,000 a day or more to run it.

The company has also recently won a big new investment from Microsoft, which intends to incorporate OpenAI's basic generative AI models into a range of its products, including the Bing search engine. 

Those models include both GPT-3 (which underlies ChatGPT) and the forthcoming GPT-4, which is reported to be speedier and more accurate than its predecessors.

What they're saying: "We are actively exploring options for lower-cost plans, business plans, and data packs for more availability," OpenAI said in a blog post.

OpenAI starts selling subscriptions to its ChatGPT bot

The $20-a-month service will give paying users better access and speed.

Illustration of a robot with a dollar sign screen on its face

ChatGPT

Automation and AI

OpenAI announced Wednesday it&#x27;s starting to sell $20 a month subscriptions to ChatGPT, its <a class="gtmContentClick" data-vars-link-text="trendy AI-driven chatbot" data-vars-click-url="https://www.axios.com/2023/01/24/chatgpt-openai-iphone-boom" data-vars-content-id="97c437f9-2dae-43f8-a622-8a6457772254" data-vars-headline="OpenAI starts selling subscriptions to its ChatGPT bot" data-vars-event-category="story" data-vars-sub-category="story" data-vars-item="in_content_link" href="https://www.axios.com/2023/01/24/chatgpt-openai-iphone-boom" target="_self">trendy AI-driven chatbot</a> that answers questions, write poems and has taken the tech world by storm.Why it matters: ChatGPT seized a powerful spotlight. Now, the monetization begins.

The explosion of interest in ChatGPT and generative AI has tech giants scrambling to rethink and rewrite their product plans to capitalize on the trend.

What's happening: Every major tech company has been investing in AI for years, but the overnight ChatGPT craze that kicked off at the end of 2022 has given the industry a ravenous appetite for one specific flavor of AI — generative programs that produce text, images and other content in response to user prompts.

Driving the news: ChatGPT went from zero to millions of users on a trajectory that left observers agape. Estimates have suggested ChatGPT has topped 100 million monthly active users and is seeing roughly 5 million users a day, per the New York Times.

Microsoft's close relationship with and longstanding investments in ChatGPT creator OpenAI insured that the business-software giant would take a lead in deploying generative AI-based services.

Last week Microsoft rolled out a premium version of its Teams groupware integrating ChatGPT-based tools for summarizing meeting notes, organizing personal tasks and translating texts.

"We’re bringing the power of large language models, including OpenAI’s GPT, to Teams Premium, as we make meetings more intelligent, personalized, and protected," Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella tweeted.

The company is also widely expected to use ChatGPT-style AI to reshape its Bing search engine in an attempt to outflank Google. Many observers also assume the company intends to find ways to integrate ChatGPT with Word, email and other programs.

Google has been working for years on the same kind of large language model-based generative AI that powers ChatGPT, and the company pioneered a key element of the technology. One of its projects, LaMDA, even inspired a Google engineer to claim that the program had achieved sentience. 

But Google moved cautiously to open up its research out of concerns over applications' accuracy, trustworthiness and potential for bias — problems that ChatGPT and every similar program share.

The advent of ChatGPT reportedly led Google CEO Sundar Pichai to declare a "code red," consult with company founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, and fast-track a number of generative-AI-related projects.

In late January Google showed off demos of a new generative AI project that can generate a wide range of music from a user's text prompt.

Facebook parent Meta has sunk fortunes into AI, using it to rank News Feed items, moderate content, translate text and perform many other tasks.

It has detailed a number of efforts in the generative space, including text-to-image and text-to-video.

But two recent public demos by Meta of generative-AI projects went awry, with the ChatGPT-like Blenderbot drawing criticism for its low-quality output and ready embrace of conspiracy theories, and the academic research-focused Galactica getting panned for its inaccuracies. 

AI and generative AI were mentioned many more times on the company's earnings call last week than "metaverse," the emerging technology CEO Mark Zuckerberg has bet the company on.

"The two major technological waves driving our roadmap are AI today, and over the longer term, the metaverse," Zuckerberg said.

Experts see potential for Meta to use AI to generate and populate the virtual worlds it aims to build — but first it has to provide reasons for users to want to visit them.

Amazon uses AI for Alexa's voice recognition, to optimize its warehouse operations, and for other purposes, but it has not yet raced to hop on the generative AI bandwagon.

Reports that some software developers inside Amazon were using ChatGPT as a coding aid led a lawyer to order employees not to share corporate information with the bot over fears that company secrets could leak, per Business Insider.

ChatGPT "is not concerned about the truth, but just about putting words together convincingly," Amazon CTO Werner Vogels tweeted last week.

CEO Tim Cook spoke during Apple's earnings call last week about the potential of AI to change just about everything that the company does. However, the examples he offered — detecting heart rhythms and car crashes — don't appear to be tied to the generative AI trend.

Yes, but: Apple remains a profoundly secretive company. If it has a product that makes use of generative AI in the works, we aren't likely to hear about it until it is ready to launch.

Be smart: AI is already deeply integrated into much of the tech we use every day, from Google Search to Facebook's News Feed to your email spam filters to your phone's voice-to-text function. ChatGPT has shown the industry there's a public hunger for the specific capabilities of generative AI to simulate human conversation and creativity.

Our thought bubble: Tech's chase-the-hotness herd mentality almost always overshoots the mark, and that's likely to be the case with ChatGPT mania. AI has a huge future — but we still don't know what creative and economic uses generative AI will serve, what harms it will cause and what failures it may encounter.

Tech giants rush to put chatbot to work

The ChatGPT craze has industry leaders scrambling to show they're on top of the trend.

Animated gif of a computer screen that reads "A.I" with the "I" as a blinking cursor

Illustration of a laptop screen showing the characters "A.I." with the I represented by a blinking insert cursor.

The explosion of interest in ChatGPT and generative AI has tech giants scrambling to rethink and rewrite their product plans to capitalize on the trend.What&#x27;s happening: Every major tech company has been investing in AI for years, but the overnight ChatGPT craze that kicked off at the end of 2022 has given the industry a ravenous appetite for one specific flavor of AI — generative programs that produce text, images and other content in response to user prompts.

As the tech world embraces ChatGPT and other generative AI programs, the industry's longstanding pledges to deploy AI responsibly could quickly be swamped by beat-the-competition pressures. 

Why it matters: Once again, tech's leaders are playing a game of "build fast and ask questions later" with a new technology that's likely to spark profound changes in society.

Social media started two decades ago with a similar rush to market. First came the excitement — later, the damage and regrets.

Catch up quick: While machine learning and related AI techniques hatched in labs over the last decade, scholars and critics sounded alarms about potential harms the technology could promote, including misinformation, bias, hate speech and harassment, loss of privacy and fraud.

In response, companies made reassuring statements about their commitment to ethics reviews and bias screening.

High-profile missteps — like Microsoft Research's 2016 "Tay" Twitterbot, which got easily prompted to repeat offensive and racist statements — made tech giants reluctant to push their most advanced AI pilots out into the world.

Yes, but: Smaller companies and startups have much less at risk, financially and reputationally.

That explains why it was OpenAI — a relatively small maverick entrant in the field — rather than Google or Meta that kicked off the current generative-AI frenzy with the release of ChatGPT late last year.

Both companies have announced multiple generative-AI research projects, and many observers believe they've developed tools internally that meet or exceed ChatGPT's abilities — but have not unveiled them for fear of offense or liability.

ChatGPT "is nothing revolutionary," and other companies have matched it, Meta chief AI scientist Yann LeCun said recently.

In September, Meta announced its Make-a-Video tool, which generates videos from text prompts. And in November, the company released a demo of a generative AI for scientific research called Galactica.

 But Meta took Galactica down after three days of scorching criticism from scholars that it generated unreliable information.

What's next: Whatever restraint giants like Google and Meta  have shown to date could now erode as they seek to demonstrate that they haven't fallen behind.

Google, responding to widespread speculation that its search dominance may be at risk, has reportedly declared a "code red" to ship AI projects more aggressively. 

Last weekend, Google posted a paper with samples showing the work of MusicLM, which can generate pieces of music from text prompts (here are some samples).

Microsoft is an investor in OpenAI and is expected to incorporate ChatGPT and other OpenAI tech into many of its products.

How it works: The dynamics of both startup capitalism and Silicon Valley techno-optimism create potent incentives for firms to ship new products first and worry about their social impact later.

In the AI image-generator market, OpenAI's popular Dall-E 2 program came with some built-in guardrails to try to head off abuse. But then a smaller rival, Stable Diffusion, came along and stole Dall-E's thunder by offering a similar service with many fewer limits.

Meanwhile, the U.S. government's slow pace and limited capacity to produce legislation means it rarely keeps ahead of new technology. In the case, of AI, the government is almost entirely in the "making voluntary recommendations" stage right now.

Be smart: Tech leaders are haunted by the idea of "the innovator's dilemma," first outlined by Clayton Christensen in the 1990s.

The innovator's dilemma says that companies lose the ability to innovate once they become too successful. Incumbents are bound to protect their existing businesses, but that leaves them vulnerable to nimbler new competitors with less to lose.

Our thought bubble: The innovator's dilemma accurately maps how the tech business has worked for decades. But the AI debate is more than a business issue. The risks could be nation- or planet-wide, and humanity itself is the incumbent with much to lose.

In AI arms race, ethics may be the first casualty

Competitive threats could lead big firms to abandon restraint and shed their scruples fast.

Artificial intelligence

As the tech world embraces <a class="gtmContentClick" data-vars-link-text="ChatGPT and other generative AI programs" data-vars-click-url="https://www.axios.com/2023/01/24/chatgpt-openai-iphone-boom" data-vars-content-id="bee37a8f-4554-4ed4-9ec8-5ae037b64183" data-vars-headline="In AI arms race, ethics may be the first casualty" data-vars-event-category="story" data-vars-sub-category="story" data-vars-item="in_content_link" href="https://www.axios.com/2023/01/24/chatgpt-openai-iphone-boom" target="_self">ChatGPT and other generative AI programs</a>, the industry&#x27;s longstanding pledges to deploy AI responsibly could quickly be swamped by beat-the-competition pressures. Why it matters: Once again, tech&#x27;s leaders are playing a game of &quot;build fast and ask questions later&quot; with a new technology that&#x27;s likely to spark profound changes in society.

Impressive as ChatGPT is, its current version has some severe limitations, as even its creators acknowledge.

The big picture: The AI tool can put together answers to a lot of questions, but it doesn't actually "know" anything — which means it has no yardstick for assessing accuracy, and it stumbles over matters of common sense as well as paradoxes and ambiguities. 

OpenAI notes that ChatGPT "sometimes writes plausible-sounding but incorrect or nonsensical answers ... is often excessively verbose ... [and] will sometimes respond to harmful instructions or exhibit biased behavior."

Details: ChatGPT can't distinguish fact from fiction. For sure, humans have trouble with this too — but they understand what those categories are.

As a result, it confidently asserts obvious inaccuracies, like "it takes 9 women 1 month to make a baby."

It "hallucinates" — that is, makes stuff up — at a rate that one expert pegs at 15%–20% of the time.

If we want to assess its reliability, it can't tell us where its information comes from.

Its information is outdated. Today ChatGPT's knowledge of the world ends sometime in 2021, though this is probably one of the easier problems to fix.

It tries not to provide biased, hateful or malicious responses, but users have been able to defeat its guardrails. 

According to Time, OpenAI used Kenyan workers to label violent or explicit content, including child sexual abuse material, so ChatGPT could learn not to repeat such content.

It can't intuit what users really want from it, so its responses can vary widely in response to small differences in how questions are phrased.

What's next: Although OpenAI and other AI companies will keep pushing to improve accuracy, reduce bias and eliminate other problems, no one knows whether the technology's drawbacks can be overcome — or whether ChatGPT and its successors might ever become truly dependable.

Yes, but: It doesn't look like anyone in the industry is going to let that slow them from widely deploying the technology.

Newsrooms reckon with AI following CNET saga

What ChatGPT can't do

The bot doesn't actually know anything — and has no way to distinguish between fact and fiction.

Illustration of an exclamation point with radial circles, arrows, and circles surrounding it

Impressive as<a class="gtmContentClick" data-vars-link-text=" ChatGPT" data-vars-click-url="https://www.axios.com/2023/01/24/chatgpt-openai-iphone-boom" data-vars-content-id="ebdca3d1-f6cf-4bfa-860c-a9b386d98995" data-vars-headline="What ChatGPT can&#x27;t do" data-vars-event-category="story" data-vars-sub-category="story" data-vars-item="in_content_link" href="https://www.axios.com/2023/01/24/chatgpt-openai-iphone-boom" target="_self"> ChatGPT</a> is, its current version has some severe limitations, as even its creators acknowledge.The big picture: The AI tool can put together <a class="gtmContentClick" data-vars-link-text="answers to a lot of questions" data-vars-click-url="https://www.axios.com/2022/12/05/chatgpt-scary-good-ai-chatbot" data-vars-content-id="ebdca3d1-f6cf-4bfa-860c-a9b386d98995" data-vars-headline="What ChatGPT can&#x27;t do" data-vars-event-category="story" data-vars-sub-category="story" data-vars-item="in_content_link" href="https://www.axios.com/2022/12/05/chatgpt-scary-good-ai-chatbot" target="_self">answers to a lot of questions</a>, but it doesn&#x27;t actually &quot;know&quot; anything — which means it has no yardstick for assessing accuracy, and it stumbles over matters of common sense as well as paradoxes and ambiguities.

Scott Rosenberg

Stories

Tech giants rush to put chatbot to work

Twitter will charge outside developers for API access

OpenAI starts selling subscriptions to its ChatGPT bot

In AI arms race, ethics may be the first casualty

What ChatGPT can't do

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