Microblogging site, X, has confirmed plans to charge new users on the platform a fee before they can post.
According to the owner of the platform, Elon Musk, he said that this has become the only solution to tackle the issue of bots on the platform. The billionaire indicated that several other measures being put in place by X to address the issue have failed.
Replying to an X account that posted about the X policy on new accounts, Musk said:
Unfortunately, a small fee for new user write access is the only way to curb the relentless onslaught of bots. Current AI (and troll farms) can pass “are you a bot” with ease
Nevertheless, Musk refrained from disclosing the specifics regarding the timeline for implementation and the exact amount that will be charged to new users.
In October of last year, X implemented a policy where new unverified users from New Zealand and the Philippines were required to pay $1 annually. Users from these regions who signed up for the platform for free were able to view posts but were unable to engage with them.
A fee was required to post content, like, repost, reply, bookmark, and quote posts. Musk may consider implementing a fee that is comparable to fees in other regions.
Putting A Stop To Bots On X
Elon Musk recently made an announcement stating that the process of eliminating bot accounts and trolls from the social media platform has commenced, resulting in the suspension of numerous accounts.
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Also, Musk emphasized that the corporation will not only halt the operations of any identified bot accounts but will also diligently track down the individuals behind them and take legal action against them.
The occurrence of this action followed closely after receiving complaints from users and advertisers regarding the prevalence of bots on the social media platform, indicating that the presence of genuine human accounts is negligible.
Bots are non-human users on X that do not need any supervision to perform actions such as liking posts of other users, reposting (formerly retweeting) tweets, following and unfollowing other accounts, and even sending direct messages.
- “System purge of bots & trolls underway. Please reply to me or @Xeng. if legitimate accounts are suspended.
- “X Corp will be tracing the people responsible and bringing the full force of the law to bear upon them,” Musk had said.
Musk, who previously criticized Twitter as a breeding ground for bots and even accused the former owners of artificially inflating their user count with bots before acquiring the company in 2022, has recently been expressing joy over the growing user base on X. Nevertheless, the mounting grievances regarding bot activities on the platform have compelled him to implement measures that could potentially diminish the numbers he once celebrated.
Introducing Elon Musk’s xAI
Elon Musk’s xAI has officially introduced its first-generation multimodal model that can understand documents, translate code, and process real-world situations.
The tool, named Grok -1.5V, is said to have ‘strong text capabilities’ and will soon be available to early testers and existing Grok users.
The update comes just a week after the open release of Grok-1 which concluded its pre-training phase in October 2023.
“Grok-1.5 comes with improved reasoning capabilities and a context length of 128,000 tokens,” the company said in a blog post on the xAI website.
This long context understanding is a new feature that will allow Grok to have an increased memory capacity of up to 16 times the previous context length. This means it’ll be able to utilize information from longer documents, along with more complex prompts.
The model will still work in an instruction-following capacity but will now be able to understand documents, science diagrams, charts, screenshots, and photographs. It can also translate diagrams into Python code.
Grok-1.5V Can Understand The Real World
“In order to develop useful real-world AI assistants, it is crucial to advance a model’s understanding of the physical world. Towards this goal, we are introducing a new benchmark, RealWorldQA,” said the team behind Grok-1.5V.
The benchmark will be used to evaluate the real-world spatial understanding capabilities of multimodal models. The team has provided some examples including asking Grok which way can a car turn and which object is the largest in a flat-lay photo.
The initial release of the benchmark includes more than 700 photos, all with a question or easily verifiable answer.
Looking into the future, the team described the need to upgrade multimodal models: “Advancing both our multimodal understanding and generation capabilities are important steps in building beneficial AGI that can understand the universe.
“In the coming months, we anticipate making significant improvements in both capabilities, across various modalities such as images, audio, and video.”
