Zuckerberg Launching Twitter Rival Called ‘Threads’

This combination of file photographs created on June 22, 2023, shows SpaceX, Twitter and electric car maker Tesla CEO Elon Musk during his visit at the Vivatech technology startups and innovation fair at the Porte de Versailles exhibition center in Paris on June 16, 2023, (right) and Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg testifying before the House Financial Services Committee in the Rayburn House Office Building in Washington on Oct. 23, 2019. (Mandel Ngan, Alain Jocard/AFP via Getty Images)

The rivalry between Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg has just heated up as Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, has teased that it’s launching a platform to rival Twitter.

Called “Threads,” the Meta-backed microblogging platform is billed as “Instagram’s text-based conversation app,” according to a listing on Apple’s App Store.

The listing indicates that Threads will released on Thursday, July 6.

“Threads is where communities come together to discuss everything from the topics you care about today to what’ll be trending tomorrow,” the app description reads.

Meta did not respond to a request from The Epoch Times for more details about the rollout.

But Meta chief product officer Chris Cox said during a companywide meeting earlier this month that the app was a direct response to Twitter, adding that the company has been “hearing from creators and public figures who are interested in having a platform that is sanely run, that they believe that they can trust and rely upon for distribution,” The Verge reported.

Before it became clear that Thread would be the name of Meta’s challenger to Twitter, there were reports in early June that the Zuckerberg-led company was working on a Twitter competitor code named Project 92 or P92.

Musk–Zuckerberg Cage Fight?

Musk, who bought Twitter last October, reacted to news of the emergence of P92 by challenging Zuckerberg to a mixed martial arts (MMA) cage match.

Zuckerberg, who’s been training in Brazilian jiu-jitsu since 2022 and has already won medals in a tournament, promptly accepted.

While no date has been set for the potential fight, UFC President Dana White has already started hyping the Musk versus Zuckerberg matchup.

“Talked with Mark and Elon last night, both guys are absolutely dead serious about this,” White said in a June 22 interview with TMZ. “They both said, ‘Yeah, we’ll do it.’ They both want to do it.”

Dana White, president of the UFC, speaks at a news conference after the UFC 229 mixed martial arts event in Las Vegas on Oct. 6, 2018. (AP Photo/John Locher, File)

White said he expects Musk vs. Zuckerberg fight “would be the biggest fight ever in the history of the world.”

“It would break all pay-per-view records. These guys would raise hundreds of millions of dollars for charity. You don’t have to be a fighting fan to be interested in this fight. Everybody would want to see it,” the UFC president added.

Musk accepted an offer from decorated UFC veteran Georges St-Pierre to train him in MMA and the Twitter chief has already notched a session with the Canadian fighter.

“Had a great training session with Elon Musk, Georges St-Pierre, and John Danaher last night,” Lex Fridman, a podcaster and Brazilian jiu-jitsu black belt, said in a tweet. “Everything about this was epic!”

Musk replied: “Really fun! The obvious conclusion is that I need a *lot* more training.”

Elon Musk attends an event during the Vivatech technology startups and innovation fair at the Porte de Versailles exhibition centre in Paris on June 16, 2023. (Joel Saget/AFP via Getty Images)

Twitter Turbulence

The announcement of Threads also comes as Twitter has imposed temporary limits on the amount of tweets that users can see.

Musk said on Saturday that the move was in response to “extreme” levels of system manipulation and data scraping.

Initially, Musk said that that new unverified accounts would be limited to reading just 300 posts per day, though he has since raised that to 500.

The limits rise to 1,000 posts per day for existing unverified accounts, meaning ones without a blue checkmark, while verified accounts enjoy ten times the volume, 10,000 posts, per day.

Musk said earlier that hundreds of organizations or more were scraping Twitter data “extremely aggressively,” with a negative impact on user experience.

The Twitter chief had earlier expressed displeasure with artificial intelligence firms like OpenAI, which owns ChatGPT, for using Twitter’s data to train their large language models.

Musk Threatens to Sue Microsoft

In April, Musk threatened to sue Microsoft, which has invested billions in OpenAI, after accusing the company of using Twitter data for training.

“They trained illegally using Twitter data. Lawsuit time,” Musk wrote on Twitter on April 19, without providing further details regarding the allegations.

While Musk did not elaborate on Microsoft’s alleged “illegal training” and did not state what the training was for, ChatGPT is trained using reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) and large bodies of text from various sources across the internet, including human conversations.

Musk’s tweet came shortly after Microsoft announced it was removing Twitter from one of its advertising platforms.

Microsoft did not respond to a request for comment from The Epoch Times on Musk’s lawsuit threat.

Earlier, the Twitter chief joined more than 1,100 individuals, including experts and industry executives such as Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, in signing an open letter calling on all artificial intelligence labs to pause training of systems more powerful than Chat GPT-4 for at least six months.

Musk, along with other signatories of the letter, cited concerns over AI’s possible “risks to society and humanity.”

By contrast, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates said that calls to pause the development of AI won’t “solve the challenges” ahead, that a stoppage would be hard to implement globally, and that the rationale for doing so isn’t clear.

Gates recommended a more surgical approach to addressing the risks of AI by identifying the biggest risks and working on ways to mitigate them.