All posts tagged: competitor

Half a Million Users Flooded to Twitter Competitor After Elon Musk Handed Creeps the Keys

Half a Million Users Flooded to Twitter Competitor After Elon Musk Handed Creeps the Keys

Published by José

Surprise, surprise. X-formerly-Twitter owner Elon Musk is implementing yet another brain-meltingly dumb change to his social media platform by rendering the block function completely pointless and opening the floodgates for even more harassment. In its new form, “blocking” someone still allows them to view your posts and your profile, tearing down an important way for some users to protect themselves against abuse on the site. And it appears that for many users on the fence about staying on the site, this was the last straw. Right after the changes were announced, BlueSky, a competing platform founded by former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, proclaimed that it had received more than 100,000 new users. Barely twelve hours later, that tally climbed to half a million, the company said Thursday — and it’s not showing signs of slowing down. In fact, the influx of signups grew so feverish that the website temporarily experienced an outage. Bluesky, for its part, is relishing in rubbing in Musk’s blunder. “At Bluesky, we take online safety seriously,” the social media platform’s official …

Microsoft Reportedly Building a GPT-4 Competitor Despite Billion OpenAI Partnership

Microsoft Reportedly Building a GPT-4 Competitor Despite $10 Billion OpenAI Partnership

Published by skeptic

The call’s coming from inside the house. MAI, MAI, MAI Microsoft is said to be building an OpenAI competitor despite its multi-billion-dollar partnership with the firm — and according to at least one insider, it’s using GPT-4 data to do so. First reported by The Information, the new large language model (LLM) is apparently called MAI-1, and an inside source told the website that Microsoft is using GPT-4 and public information from the web to train it out. MAI-1 may also be trained on datasets from Inflection, the startup previously run by Google DeepMind cofounder Mustafa Suleyman before he joined Microsoft as the CEO of its AI department earlier this year. When it hired Suleyman, Microsoft also brought over most of Inflection’s staff and folded them into Microsoft AI. In a LinkedIn post responding to The Information‘s reporting, Microsoft CTO Kevin Scott suggested that news of MAI-1 wasn’t that big of a deal. “I’m not sure why this is news, but just to summarize the obvious: we build big supercomputers to train AI models; our partner Open …

Quora CEO Adam D’Angelo talks about AI, chatbot platform Poe, and why OpenAI is not a competitor

Quora CEO Adam D’Angelo talks about AI, chatbot platform Poe, and why OpenAI is not a competitor

Published by skeptic

Last November, Adam D’Angelo found himself at the epicenter of one of the biggest controversies in the tech industry. The board of OpenAI — the $80 billion startup leading the AI bandwagon — had abruptly booted its CEO, Sam Altman, only to reinstate him just days later. D’Angelo was on the board that dismissed Altman… and he was (and remains) on the board that brought him back in. In fact, he was the only person who kept his seat amidst the ensuing restructuring that saw a lot of the original board leave. It was certainly a rocky time for OpenAI, but it was perhaps doubly so for D’Angelo, since the drama was playing out while his own company, Quora, was taking big steps towards AI. Quora, the crowdsourced Q&A site D’Angelo co-founded and leads as CEO, had been building an AI platform of its own while also fundraising (a $75 million round that valued it at $425 million, per PitchBook). The company in February 2023 had launched Poe (short for Platform for Open Exploration), which …

Starlink competitor unveils new internet satellite

Starlink competitor unveils new internet satellite

Published by skeptic

Satellite internet startup Astranis is on a mission to help everyone in the world get online — and it just unveiled the satellite that could be the key to its success. The digital divide: An internet connection means access to jobs, education, entertainment, and more, but nearly 3 billion people aren’t online, and many others still don’t have fast, reliable service. “They have smartphones just like we do, but those smartphones are still stuck on a 2G internet connection,” John Gedmark, co-founder and CEO of satellite internet company Astranis, told Freethink. “You know, the equivalent of dial-up.” Though cost is a barrier for some people, others live in remote or rural places where they couldn’t get high-speed internet even if they could afford it — the infrastructure simply isn’t in place, and internet providers aren’t interested in building it. Satellite internet:Thanks to the falling cost of rocket launches, the cheapest way to close this digital divide may be through satellites, which can beam high-speed internet down to any location on Earth as long as there’s a direct line of …

CesiumAstro claims former exec spilled trade secrets to upstart competitor AnySignal

CesiumAstro claims former exec spilled trade secrets to upstart competitor AnySignal

Published by skeptic

CesiumAstro alleges in a newly filed lawsuit that a former executive disclosed trade secrets and confidential information about sensitive tech, investors and customers to a competing startup. Austin-based Cesium develops active-phased array and software-defined radio systems for spacecraft, missiles and drones. While phased-array antenna systems have been used on satellites for decades, Cesium has considerably advanced and productized the tech over its seven years in operation. The startup has landed more than $100 million in venture and government funding, which it has used to develop a suite of products for commercial and defense customers. The technology is niche: Only a handful of companies work at the cutting edge of space-based radio technology, and Cesium no doubt pays close attention to any new entrant in this field. AnySignal, a startup that came out of stealth last October but was formally incorporated in 2022, certainly caught the company’s eye, not least because it allegedly edged out Cesium in a sales bid to a major customer and by attempting to solicit the interest of one of Cesium’s early …

CATL unveils Tesla Megapack competitor, claims zero degradation and more capacity

CATL unveils Tesla Megapack competitor, claims zero degradation and more capacity

Published by skeptic

CATL has unveiled Tener, a new large scale energy storage system to compete with Tesla Megapack. The system has almost twice the energy capacity of the Megapack, and CATL claims zero degradation after 5 years. Tesla Megapack is the poster boy of large-scale energy storage. The energy storage device has been used in most of the world’s largest energy storage projects, and it is expanding fast. Now, it is about to get some serious competition and from a partner: CATL. CATL is the world’s largest battery cell manufacturer and Tesla’s biggest supplier. The massive Chinese company unveiled today Tener, a massive new energy storage device: Featuring all-round safety, five-year zero degradation and a robust 6.25 MWh capacity, TENER will accelerate large-scale adoption of new energy storage technologies as well as the high-quality advancement of the sector. 6.25 MWh in the seemingly small form-factor is truly impressive. In comparison, Tesla Megapack has a 3.9 MWh energy capacity. However, Tesla’s Megapack includes the inverter, which doesn’t seem to be case for CATL’s Tener, according to this image: …

Elon Musk vows to make ChatGPT competitor Grok open source

Elon Musk vows to make ChatGPT competitor Grok open source

Published by skeptic

Join leaders in Boston on March 27 for an exclusive night of networking, insights, and conversation. Request an invite here. Today, Elon Musk, the billionaire behind Tesla, SpaceX and many other companies, announced that his AI startup xAI will open-source its Grok large language model this week. The move would be a significant symbol of Musk putting his “money where his mouth is,” rhetorically speaking, after filing a lawsuit against his former company OpenAI and its leadership for failing to live up to the “open” implications of its name. It would also add a new option to the growing open source generative AI community, alongside Google, Meta and Mistral — all of which have released powerful open source AI models, and to the increasing number of companies relying on open source generative AI to power products as a cheaper and potentially more customizable option, though less powerful, than OpenAI’s closed GPT-4. The exact date or the detail to which Grok will be open-sourced remains unclear (whether it is fully open source for commercial purposes, research …

NIO revenues up in 2023, Alps to launch Model Y competitor

NIO revenues up in 2023, Alps to launch Model Y competitor

Published by skeptic

Chinese EV automaker NIO shared its Q4 2023 report today, followed by an analyst call that included some interesting updates about its plans for the year, expansion to new global markets, and the launch of not one but two EV sub-brands, including Alps. NIO ($NIO) will be celebrating ten years of business this fall and, during that time, has trended upward as one of the leading EV automakers in China. In addition to developing luxury EVs like the ET7 and incoming ET9 (with the ability to shimmy), NIO has expanded to other adjacent technologies like chargers, battery swap stations, and even smartphones. From a market perspective, NIO continues to expand out of its native China to markets in Europe and possibly the US in a year or two. After garnering billions in fresh funding in 2023, NIO sat poised to continue such expansions, including two new sub-brands, codenamed “Alps” and “Firefly.” Earlier today, NIO shared its Q4 report, detailing the ups (and downs) of a challenging year, followed by a call with analysts that shared …

Twitter / X competitor Bluesky officially opens to everyone, no invite code needed

Twitter / X competitor Bluesky officially opens to everyone, no invite code needed

Published by skeptic

Still looking for somewhere to take your short, text-based social media posts now that Elon Musk has sculpted the platform formerly known as Twitter in his own image? Well, if the only thing holding you back from the X-competitor Bluesky was the lack of an invite code, you are in luck. On Tuesday, social media platform Bluesky finally ditched the invite-only system and opened registration to everyone.  SEE ALSO: On Threads, users say they’re flooded with pro-life and transphobic posts Now, anyone who wants to open a Bluesky account can do so. Can an open Bluesky compete with Twitter? Shortly after Elon Musk acquired Twitter, since rebranded as X, many of the social networks users flocked to various competing social media alternatives. Among the many competitors, two basically stood out from the pack: The Meta-backed Instagram-companion app, Threads, and a scrappy new service called Bluesky. Bluesky may have seemed like an odd contender at the time. The platform faces off against two established giants in the space. Bluesky was brand new at the time too, …

Lucid cuts ribbon at AMP-1, teases mid-size Tesla competitor

Lucid cuts ribbon at AMP-1, teases mid-size Tesla competitor

Published by skeptic

During a ribbon-cutting ceremony celebrating the opening of Phase 2 at its AMP-1 production facility in Arizona, Lucid Motors CEO Peter Rawlinson briefly teased the automaker’s third model in the works – a mid-size EV that will arrive as a direct competitor to the Tesla Model 3 and Model Y. Electrek was on location this morning in Casa Grande, AZ, home to Lucid Motor’s AMP-1 production facility, which now houses Phase 2 of the American automaker’s four-phase expansion plan. Since we last visited during the start of Air production two years ago, AMP-1 has expanded from approximately 800,000 square feet in size to over 3.8 million sq. ft. Phase 2, which will be home to production of Lucid’s second flagship EV – the Gravity SUV, also includes a stamping machine and a second body shop and provides enough room to bring supply chain storage and powertrains in-house rather than building them up the road and trucking the parts over. To celebrate the massive (on schedule) expansion, Lucid Motors held a ribbon-cutting ceremony mere feet away …