Twitter CEO Elon Musk unveiled plans over the weekend to limit the number of posts each user can view each day in order to address what he called "extreme levels of data scraping & system manipulation" on the micro-blogging website.
The limits, Musk said, would be temporary and would restrict nonverified users to viewing 600 posts per day. Verified accounts, which pay $8 a month, can view 6,000 posts per day.
The totals were later lifted to 1,000 and 10,000 respectively following a series of user complaints and outages on various Twitter-linked platforms.
Musk later tweeted that "almost every company doing AI" is taking "vast amounts of data" from the website, adding significant costs to Twitter as it added more servers to manage the increased traffic.
U.K.-based comparison service CasinoAlpha, in fact, reported that "Delete Twitter" searches rose 131% from last week, based on Google search data.
A spokesperson for the German government, meanwhile, said officials is "trying or looking at other channels" for its communication in light of the new viewing restrictions and changes to the platform brought in by Musk last year.
The billionaire Tesla (TSLA) CEO ceded day-to-day control of Twitter last month, following the appointment of former NBCUniversal executive Linda Yaccarino.
Earlier this spring, Musk wrote a letter to Microsoft (MSFT) claiming the tech giant had violated an agreement by using more data than it was permitted, and sharing some of that data with government officials.' Microsoft, in a response reported by Reuters, said it would review the letter and "looks forward to continuing our long term partnership with the company."
Prior to that, Musk severed OpenAI's access to Twitter data, according to a New York Times report that suggested he was unhappy with the $2 million annual license agreement.
Musk, who purchased the company late last year for $44 billion, has reportedly been planning to use Twitter data to train a large language model used by the AI startup X.AI, which could provide a near-term challenge to Microsoft's ChatGPT.
Musk, who has spoken at length about the “profound risks to society" he says are linked to the unchecked spread of Artificial Intelligence, told Fox News in April that he plans to start "something which I call 'TruthGPT,' or a maximum truth-seeking AI that tries to understand the nature of the universe."
"And I think this might be the best path to safety, in the sense that an AI that cares about understanding the universe, it is unlikely to annihilate humans because we are an interesting part of the universe," Musk said.
