The revamped Twitter Blue has been out for almost six months now—delivering blue checkmarks, an option to edit Tweets and a host of other benefits along with it. But, as per Mashable, Elon Musk’s Twitter has been able to find just 6,40,000 paying subscribers from it. Now, while this is a far cry from what Elon Musk would have hoped for, out of the 1,50,000 early adopters of Twitter Blue, Twitter could only retain around 68,157 paying subscribers as of April 30. 

“About 1,50,000 users were subscribed to Twitter Blue — which encompasses Blue Verified — at the time of the pause,” Washington Post reported in November, 2022. After the initial launch of the subscription, the service was quickly suspended due to impersonation concerns stemming from the handing out of Blue checkmarks. 

According to Mashable, out of the 1,50,000 early adopters of Twitter Blue, only 68,157 have continued to pay for their subscriptions—suggesting that the churn rate for Twitter Blue is abysmal at best, with only 54.5% of initial subscribers still using the service. Mashable notes that discrepancies in the data may be due to users canceling or letting their subscription lapse and then returning later.

Despite the benefits of Twitter Blue—such as an algorithmic boost, tweet editing, and the coveted blue tick—users are struggling to gain new followers and find the reach ‘inadequate.’ Data obtained by developer Travis Brown via Mashable indicates that over 2,91,183 Twitter Blue subscribers have fewer than 1,000 followers, and approximately 1,07,492 have less than 100 followers. And, around 3,352 paying subscribers have no followers at all.

It will certainly be interesting to see how Twitter Blue, as a service, fares in the long run and if it will find new paying subscribers. If anything, the newly introduced monetization benefits for Twitter Blue subscribers—wherein Twitter is offering creators a 70% cut for subscriptions on iOS & Android and approximately a 92% cut on web for one year—may bring some new users on board the paid blue tick train.

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WhatsApp has banned over 47 lakh bad accounts in India in the month of March, in compliance with the new IT Rules 2021, the company said on Monday.

Between March 1 and March 31, “4,715,906 WhatsApp accounts were banned and 1,659,385 of these accounts were proactively banned, before any reports from users”, WhatsApp said in its monthly compliance report.

The most popular messaging platform, which has nearly 500 million users in the country, received another record 4,720 complaint reports in March in the country, and the records “actioned” were 585.

“This user-safety report contains details of the user complaints received and the corresponding action taken by WhatsApp, as well as WhatsApp’s own preventive actions to combat abuse on our platform,” said a company spokesperson.

Moreover, the company mentioned that the orders received from the Grievance Appellate Committee between March 1 and March 31 were 3, and orders complied with were also 3.

Meanwhile, in a bid to empower millions of Indian social media users, Minister of State for Electronics and IT, Rajeev Chandrasekhar recently launched the Grievance Appellate Committee (GAC) that will look into their concerns regarding content and other issues.

The newly-formed panel, a move to strengthen the country’s digital laws to tame the Big Tech companies, will look into appeals by users against decisions of social media platforms.

The IT Ministry last month notified to establish three GACs as required under the recently amended IT Rules, 2021. In a major push towards an open, safe, trusted and accountable Internet, the Ministry of Electronics and IT has notified some amendments aimed at protecting the rights of ‘Digital Nagriks’.

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Twitter Inc’s services were down for thousands of users on Monday, according to outage-tracking website Downdetector.com.

There were more than 3,600 incidents of people reporting issues with the social media platform led by Elon Musk, according to Downdetector, which tracks outages by collating status reports from a number of sources including user-submitted errors on its platform.

Twitter did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Users on Reddit complained that the website was logging them out unexpectedly and were not able to sign in.

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Google joined the AI chatbot party earlier this year when, under pressure from Microsoft-backed OpenAI, the company finally made its LaMDA-powered chatbot, Google Bard, available to testers. However, many people, including developers, had a major gripe with the non-availability of Google Bard for Google Workspace users.

Now, Google has now made Bard accessible to Workspace users. As reported by 9to5Google, the Google Workspace changelog (2023.05.05) confirms that administrators can now enable Bard for their domains, allowing their users to access Bard using their Workspace accounts.

However, this update does not grant Workspace users direct access to Google Bard, and users will still need to join the waitlist, like other testers.

WATCH VIDEO: IBM To Replace 7800 Jobs With AI; Stops Hiring

In a subsequent blog post, Google notes that Google Workspace admins will be able to turn access to Bard on for their users in the coming days by going to the Admin console under Apps > Additional Google services > Early Access Apps.

In related news, AI experts, including the ‘godfather of AI’ Geoffrey Hinton, have warned humanity about the dangers of AI, and the top tech leaders and CEOs, including Sundar Pichai and OpenAI’s Sam Altman, recently met with US President Joe Biden at a meeting in the White House, Washington DC.

According to Reuters, the top leaders discussed the risks and safeguards as the technology catches the attention of governments and lawmakers globally.

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As tech layoffs continue unabated amid the global meltdown, Apple CEO Tim Cook has said that mass layoffs are a “last resort” for him.

The tech giant, however, is reducing costs and has slowed down the pace of hiring.

Cook told CNBC that he views layoffs “as a last resort” and “mass layoffs is not something that we’re talking about at this moment”.

He said that the company is “continuing to be extremely prudent on hiring”.

“We’re continuing to hire, just at a lower clip level than we were before. And we’re doing all the right things by challenging the things that we spend, and we’re just finding a few more ways to save on it,” the Apple CEO was quoted as saying.

Apple trimmed a small number of employees in its corporate retail division in early April, as per reports. The company has also reportedly delayed bonuses.

Apple did not hire the way other tech giants did during the pandemic and this is why the company is better positioned not to lay off employees.

Apple reported a record revenue of $94.8 billion for its March quarter which was better than expectations. The company sold iPhones worth $51.3 billion in the March quarter, a record for the company.

Apple Services also set an all-time record with $20.9 billion in revenue for the March quarter.

“We achieved all time revenue records across App Store, Apple Music, iCloud and payment services. And now, with more than 975 million paid subscriptions, we’re reaching even more people with our lineup of services,” Cook informed.

Apple Mac recorded $7.2 billion in revenue, in line with the company’s expectations and iPad revenue was $6.7 billion. Across wearables, home and accessories, revenue was $8.8 billion.

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We have all heard about how the Apple Watch is well-documented to be one of the best health and fitness tracking devices—and how it can detect irregular heartbeat and other illnesses, hence saving lives. Now, once again, the Apple Watch has been able to save the life of a woman—after her aorta ruptured. 

As spotted by 9to5Mac, the woman’s Apple Watch reportedly auto-dialed 911 after detecting no movement on her end after she collapsed from the ruptured aorta.

As per the woman’s daughter, who goes by the name Xanderpy on Reddit, the woman experienced chest pain while on a business trip and staying at a hotel. She then sent a text to her friend, who was also present at the hotel, asking her to come to her room. However, shortly after sending the message, the woman collapsed and fell face-first on the floor.

When her friend made it to her room, she found the woman collapsed on the ground and immediately called 911—only to find out that an ambulance was already on its way to the hotel, saving precious time.

Later, when the woman recovered, she was asked if she had dialed 911, but to everyone’s surprise, she had not. It was the Apple Watch that had called for emergency services.

The woman’s daughter, expressing gratitude, said, “I see stories like this sometimes and think that they are exaggerated for publicity or possibly just made up. I obviously no longer think this. Apple technology has a firm grip on me and my entire family already but this… this was something else. This made me an Apple user for life and showed me that technology like this can truly save lives.”

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Meta Platforms Inc has hired an Oslo-based team that until late last year was building artificial-intelligence networking technology at British chip unicorn Graphcore.

A Meta spokesperson confirmed the hirings in response to a request for comment, after Reuters identified 10 people whose LinkedIn profiles said they worked at Graphcore until December 2022 or January 2023 and subsequently joined Meta in February or March of this year.

“We recently welcomed a number of highly-specialized engineers in Oslo to our infrastructure team at Meta. They bring deep expertise in the design and development of supercomputing systems to support AI and machine learning at scale in Meta’s data centers,” said Jon Carvill, the Meta spokesperson.

The move brings additional muscle to the social media giant’s bid to improve how its data centers handle AI work, as it races to cope with demand for AI-oriented infrastructure from teams across the company looking to build new features.

Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, has become increasingly reliant on AI technology to target advertising, select posts for its apps’ feeds and purge banned content from its platforms.

On top of that, it is now rushing to join competitors like Microsoft Corp and Alphabet Inc’s Google in releasing generative AI products capable of creating human-like writing, art and other content, which investors see as the next big growth area for tech companies.

The 10 employees’ job descriptions on LinkedIn indicated the team had worked on AI-specific networking technology at Graphcore, which develops computer chips and systems optimized for AI work.

Carvill declined to say what they would be working on at Meta.

Graphcore closed its Oslo office as part of a broader restructuring announced in October last year, a spokesperson for the startup said, as it struggled to make inroads against U.S.-based firms like Nvidia Corp and Advanced Micro Devices Inc which dominate the market for AI chips.

Meta already has an in-house unit designing several kinds of chips aimed at speeding up and maximizing efficiency for its AI work, including a network chip that performs a sort of air traffic control function for servers, two sources told Reuters.

Efficient networking is especially useful for modern AI systems like those behind chatbot ChatGPT or image-generation tool Dall-E, which are far too large to fit onto a single computing chip and must instead be split up over many chips strung together.

A new category of network chip has emerged to help keep data moving smoothly within those computing clusters. Nvidia, AMD and Intel Corp all make such network chips.

In addition to its network chip, Meta is also designing a complex computing chip to both train AI models and perform inference, a process in which the trained models make judgments and generate responses to prompts, although it does not expect that chip to be ready until around 2025.

Graphcore, one of the UK’s most valuable tech startups, once was seen by investors like Microsoft and venture capital firm Sequoia as a promising potential challenger to Nvidia’s commanding lead in the market for AI chip systems.

However, it faced a setback in 2020 when Microsoft scrapped an early deal to buy Graphcore’s chips for its Azure cloud computing platform, according to a report by UK newspaper The Times. Microsoft instead used Nvidia’s GPUs to build the massive infrastructure powering ChatGPT developer OpenAI, which Microsoft also backs.

Sequoia has since written down its investment in Graphcore to zero, although it remains on the company’s board, according to a source familiar with the relationship. The write-down was first reported by Insider in October.

The Graphcore spokesperson confirmed the setbacks, but said the company was “perfectly positioned” to take advantage of accelerating commercial adoption of AI.

Graphcore was last valued at $2.8 billion after raising $222 million in its most recent investment round in 2020.

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Discord is changing how its usernames and identities work on the platform—starting this month. The company claims that this is being done to make it easier for people to connect—for both new and old users. As a part of the change, users will need to change their usernames, as Discord won’t be using the four-number suffix (also called a discriminator, moving forward. All users will need to pick a new, unique username without a discriminator. The old username will continue to work as an alias—making it easier for old friends to add users.

Discord claims that the current username pattern “can often be too complicated or obscure for people to remember and share easily.” And, in a blog post, the company notes that the most common issues faced due to the old username system include difficulty remembering the discriminator, explaining uppercase and lowercase letters, and specifying special characters. Additionally, there can be confusion when multiple users have the same common name, and changing usernames too frequently can result in rate limitations.

Commenting on how usernames will now look, Discord said, “Over the coming weeks, every user will become eligible to change their username from their old username with discriminators (#0000) to a new username (@username) without discriminators. All users will eventually be required to pick a new, unique username to use Discord.”

The company added, “By default, your new Display Name will be your old username without the discriminator, so your friends continue to recognize you. So if you used to be ‘PhiBi#8936’, your new default Display Name will be ‘PhiBi’.”

To smoothen things out, and keep supporting legacy usernames for identification, Discord said, that your “previous username and discriminator will continue to work as an alias” after the transition process is completed—making it easier for old friends who aren’t aware of your new username—to add you.

Discord will begin rolling out the username update in the following weeks, and users will receive an in-app prompt when the feature is ready for them.

Moreover, the company acknowledges that parting ways from unique usernames like “#0001” may be difficult, but states that it is the “right thing to do.”

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India witnessed an 18 per cent increase in weekly cyber attacks during the first quarter (Q1) of 2023, with each organisation facing an average of 2,108 attacks per week, a new report showed on Friday.

According to Check Point Research (CPR), the global weekly cyber attacks rose by 7 per cent in Q1 2023 versus the same quarter last year, with each organisation facing an average of 1,248 attacks per week.

Globally, in Q1 2023, the education/research sector was hit the hardest with the highest number of attacks, averaging 2,507 per organisation per week, representing a 15 per cent surge from Q1 2022.

The government/military sector was the second most targeted, with an average of 1,725 attacks per week, indicating a 3 per cent increase from the previous year.

The healthcare sector experienced a significant rise in attacks, with an average of 1,684 attacks per week, marking a substantial (year-over-year) increase of 22 per cent.

However, the most significant change came in the retail/wholesale sector, which saw the highest (year-over-year) increase of 49 per cent, with an average of 1,079 attacks per week.

The APAC (Asia-Pacific) region experienced the most significant (year-over-year) increase in average weekly attacks per organisation, with a surge of 16 per cent, reaching an average of 1,835 attacks per organisation, followed by the North American region, which saw a 9 per cent (year-over-year) increase coming to 950 average weekly attacks per organisation.

Moreover, the report showed that about one in every 31 organisations globally experienced a ransomware attack weekly in Q1 2023, representing a 1 per cent increase compared to the same period in 2022.

Latin America saw the largest (year-over-year) increase of 28 per cent when 1 out of 17 organisations experienced a ransomware attack.

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International Business Machines Corp expects to pause hiring for roles as roughly 7,800 jobs could be replaced by Artificial Intelligence (AI) in the coming years, CEO Arvind Krishna told Bloomberg News on Monday.

Hiring specifically in back-office functions such as human resources will be suspended or slowed, Krishna said, adding that 30% of non-customer-facing roles could be replaced by AI and automations in five years.

His comment comes at a time when AI has caught the imagination of people around the world after the launch of Microsoft Corp-backed OpenAI’s viral chatbot, ChatGPT, in November last year.

The reduction could include not replacing roles vacated by attrition, the PC-maker told the publication.

IBM did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for comment.

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