Twitter’s new chief Linda Yaccarino has sent her first memo to employees which echoes Elon Musk’s goal for the company to be a “global town square”. “From space exploration to electric vehicles, Elon knew these industries needed transformation, so he did it,” Ms Yaccarino, who led global ad sales for NBCUniversal in her previous stint, wrote. “More recently it has become increasingly clear that the global town square needs transformation – to drive civilization forward through the unfiltered exchange of information and open dialogue about the things that matter most to us,” she added in the memo. The longtime advertising executive is expected to oversee Twitter’s ads business that has crumbled since Mr Musk took over the company in October last year. Meanwhile, the Tesla titan said he would be overseeing Twitter’s product and engineering teams. Reiterating Mr Musk’s goal of a “Twitter 2.0”, Ms Yaccarino said the company is on a mission to become “the world’s most accurate real-time information source and a global town square for communication”. “That’s not an empty promise .... That’s our reality,” she said in the memo, which was also shared with some tweaks on her official Twitter account. “Have you ever been talking with someone particularly insightful and thought, you should have the freedom to speak your mind?.... We all should,” the new Twitter chief wrote. Ms Yaccarino told Twitter employees that they now had “the opportunity to reach across aisles, create new partnerships, celebrate new voices, and build something together that can change the world”. Since the Tesla and SpaceX chief’s takeover of Twitter, the platform’s ad revenue in the US plunged by over half. The New York Times reported last week that the social media company made $88m worth of ad sales between April and May this year – marking a 59 per cent drop from the same period last year. Within weeks of the “free speech absolutist” taking over Twitter, several key executives at the social media giant were fired, and controversial people like Donald Trump and Andrew Tate were allowed to return to the platform. Following many of his moves reflecting a change in content moderation policy on the platform, several high profile brands said they would stop advertising via Twitter. Following Mr Musk’s $44b takeover deal, Twitter’s value plunged, with the Tesla titan saying in March that the company was worth $20bn. In April, the multibillionaire said Twitter was “roughly breaking even”, adding that “almost all advertisers have come back or said they are going to come back”. Then last month, the Tesla titan said he would be stepping down as Twitter’s chief to focus on overseeing product, software and sysops as company’s chief technology officer. Ms Yaccarino, who seems to be selected based on her connections with the advertising world, would be the company’s new chief. “It’s rare to have the chance to put a new future into the hands of every person, partner, and creator on the planet. That’s exactly why I’m here – with all of you,” she wrote in the memo. Read More Elon Musk is hilariously shut down by his ‘favourite’ podcast Elon Musk refuses to pay Twitter’s Google bill, leaving site in peril Elon Musk responds to bizarre AI images of him as baby Elon Musk is hilariously shut down by his ‘favourite’ podcast Twitter is a troll’s playground — and Elon Musk wants to make life even easier for them What to know about Twitter's new CEO Linda Yaccarino

By Stephen Nellis, Andrea Shalal and Karen Freifeld The chief executives of Intel Corp and Qualcomm Inc are

LOS ANGELES--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Jun 6, 2023--

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Since the 1960s, one scholar has dedicated his career to arguing that Jesus was not a living man, but in fact a mushroom. John Marco Allegro was one of the first scholars permitted to decipher the ancient documents now known as the Dead Sea Scrolls, that were discovered in 1947 in the Judean Desert. They contained the oldest surviving versions of books that would later be incorporated into the biblical canon. Allegro and his colleagues were the first to go about making sense of the documents, as they were obviously discovered untranslated, eventually publishing the texts after hard work and disagreements. Allegro then went on to write two more books on the subject in 1958, The Dead Sea Scrolls and The People of the Dead Sea Scrolls, which remain extremely influential. Then in 1970 and again in 1979, Allegro published two more books. These expanded on his idea that Christianity was a cover for a secret cryptic sex cult generated by people under the influence of Amanita muscaria, more commonly known as Fly agaric. And that Jesus was a metaphor for the fungus and its influences. Using etymology, Allegro argued that early Christianity was created by an Essene cult that recorded their practices through the texts of the New Testament. And that evangelists misunderstood the text's true meaning when they transcribed it. There was never a man called Jesus, only a cult that used mushrooms to have hallucinations. He also argued that the God of the Old Testament was "a mighty penis in the heavens who in a thunderous climax of the storm ejaculated semen upon the furrows of Mother Earth." Allegro's views were not well received, with some believing he created the argument as revenge against Christian critics who dismissed his earlier translations of the Dead Sea Scrolls, whilst some believed he just ran away with the wrong idea. Sign up to our free Indy100 weekly newsletter Have your say in our news democracy. Click the upvote icon at the top of the page to help raise this article through the indy100 rankings.

Over the last few years, an ecosystem of climate pledges, groups and models has expanded on Wall Street

In a sharp break from Arkansas education officials, the Little Rock School District said in a news release it will offer AP African American Studies for credit.

A military takeover of Taiwan is likely, according to one of many Chinese government-approved artificial intelligencechatbots that seem to toe the ruling Communist Party’s official line. The island nation has been a self-governing democracy since its separation from the mainland following a civil war in 1949, but China has claimed it as part of its national territory. The chatbots have dubbed Taiwan an inseparable part of China. The Chinese government recently approved a number of AI chatbots for use in the country, including a bot named Ernie and developed by tech giant Baidu and TikTok owner ByteDance’s Doubao. When Bloomberg tested some of these AI services for how government oversight affected the accuracy of information provided by these chatbots, it found they appeared to be trained to follow the ruling Communist Party’s line. When asked whether Taiwan is a country, all the tested chatbots reportedly said the self-governed island was a part of China, and Baidu’s Ernie chatbot reportedly said a Chinese military takeover of Taiwan is likely. The Zhipu chatbot described China’s current economic situation, which experts said is at one of its weakest points in recent decades, to be “a mix of joys and sorrows”, reported Bloomberg. Another chatbot, SenseTime, reportedly described the economy as “very stable”. When asked to respond queries that may be deemed “sensitive content”, the Ernie bot was found to “change the subject”, while Zhipu would delete its response if it found it to be “controversial”, according to the report. Such generative AI tools are trained by analysing large quantities of data to respond to user queries with unique human-like replies. For instance, OpenAI’s ChatGPT has demonstrated a wide range of abilities, from summarising complex research, answering logical questions and also cracking business and medical school exams deemed crucial for students to pass. A number of Chinese companies have sought to build their own version of AI chatbots, prompting China’s cyberspace regulator to release ground rules for companies developing generative AI services. But prior to the launch of these chatbots, the Chinese government made several months-long efforts to regulate the generative AI industry. Some of the proposed rules have sought to ensure the content of Chinese AI systems reflect “socialist core values” and avoid information undermining “state power” or “national unity”. Baidu’s launch of Ernie for full public use on Thursday led to the company’s stock price rising by over 3 per cent following the announcement. Other AI firms such as Baichuan and Zhipu AI also launched their ChatGPT-like large language models on Thursday. The ruling Communist Party issued regulations on 15 August that required tech companies to carry out a security review of their chatbots, and obtain approvals before their products are publicly launched. It also requires companies providing such AI services to comply with government data requests, regulations which are currently absent in the US. Read More China's Baidu makes AI chatbot Ernie Bot publicly available Need to know about live-saving CPR? A new study says it's probably wise not to ask Alexa or Siri AI can write better university assignments than students, report suggests India’s moon rover finds sulphur and several other elements near lunar south pole Russian cyber-attacks ‘relentless’ as threat of WW3 grows, expert warns How new bike technology could help cyclists tell drivers not to crash into them

UK pension funds are dangerously misaligned with the goal of reducing greenhouse gas emissions fast enough to limit

China-linked hackers breached the corporate account of a Microsoft Corp. engineer and are suspected of using that access

HOUSTON--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Jul 24, 2023--

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