A recently updated help page for the Microsoft Advertising platform states that the service’s Twitter integration will no longer be supported as of April 25. Facebook, Instagram Business, and LinkedIn will all still be accessible through Microsoft’s unified dashboard for ad management, content creation, and audience engagement metrics. However, Twitter is no longer included. This would create a new front in the war between Musk and OpenAI, a business he co-founded.
This update comes just days before Twitter is set to end support for its older API tiers, which were used by many third-party apps and services to connect to the platform and post and retrieve data. If Microsoft wants to keep servicing advertisers at the same level as before, it will need to upgrade to the more expensive Enterprise tier, which may cost anywhere from $42,000 to $210,000 per month, depending on the number of tweets each month that you require access to.
Elon Musk, Twitter’s CEO, reportedly disagrees with Microsoft’s choice. Musk said that Microsoft has “illegally” used Twitter data to train AI models in response to a post about the news, and that he intends to take legal action as a result.
To file a lawsuit against Microsoft , Musk wrote his statement
In his legal threat, Musk combines three of his ongoing endeavours. One goal is to increase the number of Twitter users who pay a monthly or annual price to access the service. The second is to maintain Twitter’s advertiser base, which is a significant source of income even while subscription fees remain low. Third, there is persistent opposition to cutting-edge generative AI models, such as those created by Microsoft’s OpenAI (Musk was a co-chair in the founding of OpenAI in 2015, but he resigned from the board in 2018 due to a “conflict of interest” with Tesla’s self-driving AI efforts).
A letter urging a “pause” in AI development was signed by Musk a few weeks ago. Two weeks later, he announced that he had purchased 10,000 GPUs to provide the computing power necessary to create a “maximum truth-seeking AI that tries to understand the nature of the universe” because he thinks “politically correct” and “woke” chatbots with content filters and other safeguards “lie” to their users. For example, on April 18, Musk replied, “wait for it…” to a tweet proposing he “sue OpenAI for defrauding him.”
Whether it’s suggested Twitter improvements, self-imposed deadlines like the one for eliminating legacy verification checkmarks, or potential business partnerships, Musk is known for tweeting about things that never materialise.
Twitter’s API is available for free, although it has very few features and is therefore not recommended. You can send up to 1,500 tweets each month and view an unlimited number of tweets if you upgrade from the free tier, but you can’t read tweets. In an apparent effort to prevent the development of third-party Twitter clients, the $100/month tier for “hobbyists” enables reading up to 10,000 tweets per month and writing up to 3,000 tweets per user or 50,000 tweets per app.
Microsoft declined to comment to Ars when asked about Musk’s remark.
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