Elon Musk Says US Government Had Access to Private Twitter DMs

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In a recent interview with Tucker Carlson, Elon Musk revealed that the US government had full access to people’s private Twitter direct messages (DMs).

In an interview with Carlson that will air tonight, Musk admitted that he was surprised at the level of penetration the federal government had on Twitter, which he discovered after purchasing the social media platform.

“The degree to which government agencies effectively had full access to everything that was going on on Twitter blew my mind,” Musk told Tucker Carlson of Fox News in an interview that will air in two separate segments on Monday and Tuesday evening.

“I was not aware of that,” Musk told Carlson. A snippet of the interview was posted to Twitter.

“Would that include people’s DMs?” Carlson asked.

“Yes,” Musk replied without elaborating.

While it has been suspected that individual Twitter employees had access to private messages, it is shocking that branches of the federal government also had access.

In the months following his purchase of Twitter last October, Musk has worked with journalists to release files exposing the previous regime’s egregious censorship policies.

The cozy relationship between social media networks, NGOs, and the US government was described by Matt Taibbi as the “censorship-industrial complex.”

Taibbi further expounded on that assertion by saying that the system worked as “a bureaucracy willing to sacrifice factual truth in service of broader narrative objectives,” acting as an insult to the principles of a free press.

Musk warned of the dangers of artificial intelligence in a separate portion of his interview with Carlson, saying the technology might threaten civilization.

“AI is more dangerous than, say, mismanaged aircraft design or production maintenance or bad car production,” he said. “In the sense that it has the potential — however small one may regard that probability, but it is non-trivial — it has the potential of civilization destruction.”

WATCH:

The full interview will air on Monday at 8pm EST on Fox News:

The Guardian reports that Musk has founded X.AI, an artificial intelligence company:

Elon Musk is reportedly planning to launch an artificial intelligence company to compete with OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT, as Silicon Valley battles for dominance in the rapidly developing technology.

The billionaire boss of Tesla and Twitter is in the process of bringing together a team of AI researchers and engineers and is in talks with several investors about the project, according to the Financial Times.

“A bunch of people are investing in it …  it’s real and they are excited about it,” a person with knowledge of the talks told the newspaper, which cited Nevada business records showing that on 9 March Musk incorporated a company called X.AI of which he is the company’s sole director.

Is it possible that Elon Musk will be able to prevent the ‘forces’ that are trying to use AI to do evil with his technology?

According to CNBC, Musk has been building a team of researchers and engineers and has been in conversation with multiple investors, the Financial Times reported, citing sources familiar with the matter. He has also reportedly been recruiting from other top AI firms, including Alphabet
-owned DeepMind.

“It’s real and they are excited about it,” a source familiar with the matter told the Financial Times.

Musk has secured thousands of Nvidia GPU processors, according to the report. Those chips are an integral part of building a large language model, or LLM, to compete with OpenAI’s GPT. Musk said he was acquiring the processors for his companies in a Twitter Spaces interview with the BBC this week.

“It seems like everyone and their dog is buying GPUs at this point,” Musk said. “Twitter and Tesla are certainly buying GPUs.”

Musk was once a major financial backer at OpenAI, committing $1 billion over multiple years, according to an earlier report from Semafor. But Musk backed out of his financial and operational commitments to the artificial intelligence firm at the same time OpenAI added a for-profit business segment. Microsoft invested $1 billion in OpenAI shortly after Musk ruptured with the group and, earlier this year, committed to a new multibillion-dollar investment.

Of his push to prevent the destruction of society through nefarious use of AI, Cointelegraph reports:

While tech giants worldwide work on materializing the idea of having a generative artificial intelligence (AI) to aid humans in their daily lives, some believe the risk of the nascent technology going rogue remains imminent. Considering this possibility, Tesla and Twitter chief Elon Musk reminded people of AI’s potential to destroy civilization.

On March 15, Musk’s plan to create a new AI startup surfaced after the entrepreneur reportedly assembled a team of AI researchers and engineers. However, Musk continues to highlight the destructive potential of AI — just like any other technology — if it falls into the wrong hands or is developed with ill intentions.

According to Musk, AI can be dangerous. In a FOX interview, he said AI could be more dangerous than mismanaged aircraft design or production maintenance, for example. While acknowledging the low probability, he stated:

“However small one may regard that probability, but it is non-trivial — it has the potential of civilizational destruction.”

As Crypto Twitter picked up on the discussion, Musk followed up with strong support for his statement:

“Anyone who thinks this risk is 0% is an idiot.”

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