April 2023 Tech Business Quiz: WTF is Google’s Bard?

Google released its conversational AI bot Bard on March 21, 2023, as a stand-alone webpage featuring a question box. Google’s Bard is a chatbot trained to be informative and comprehensive, while Microsoft’s Bing is a chatbot optimized for search results. This makes Bard a noticeably less effective tool than Bing at surfacing useful information from the internet. However, it is supposedly better at answering questions that require a conversational approach. Google now allows limited public access to its Bard AI chatbot in some territories, granting access to tens of thousands of users who join a waiting list.

Elon Musk, a co-founder of OpenAI and CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, was one of the signatories of an open letter published by the Future of Life Institute, a nonprofit backed by Musk, on March 29, 2023. The letter urged AI labs to stop training AI systems more powerful than GPT-4, OpenAI’s latest large-language model. It suggested a six-month pause or government suspension to jointly allow independent experts to develop and implement shared safety protocols for AI systems.

Who co-signed the AI-stopping letter?

The letter was also signed by Steve Wozniak, co-founder of Apple; Yuval Noah Harari, historian and author; Andrew Yang, entrepreneur, and former US presidential candidate; and more than 1,000 other tech leaders.

Elon Musk gave his AI project that he says will try to understand the nature of the universe (and avoid annihilating humans) the name TruthGPT. He announced his plan to create his own rival to OpenAI’s Chat-GPT in an interview with Fox News’s Tucker Carlson on April 17, 2023. Musk also said he created the X.AI company in Nevada and approached AI researchers to join his team. Optimus is the name of Musk’s humanoid AI bot that he revealed at Tesla’s AI Day event in August 2022, which aims to replace workers at routine, repetitive jobs. No connection to Donald Trump’s Truth Social.

Elon Musk values Twitter at $20 billion, according to an internal memo reported by the Information on March 25, 2023. Musk paid $44 billion for Twitter in October 2022, meaning Twitter lost more than half its value in just half a year. However, Musk acknowledged it as an overpayment at the time of the deal. The company’s value dropped throughout the year as advertisers pulled out of the platform.

China’s commerce ministry declared it opposed a TikTok sale just hours before Shou Zi Chew, TikTok’s CEO, testified before Congress about TikTok’s ties to China on March 23, 2023.

What was his testimony about?

During the five-hour testimony, Republican and Democratic lawmakers repeatedly asked Chew if TikTok was spying on Americans on behalf of the Chinese government, which he strongly denied. Chew also said that ByteDance is not owned or controlled by the Chinese government – a notion undermined by China’s commerce ministry’s earlier statement.

Montana passed a bill that makes it illegal for app stores to offer TikTok in the state. The bill was motivated by concerns about potential Chinese spying through the app. It specifies that the ban would be lifted if TikTok is sold to a non-Chinese company or Congress passes a law banning TikTok nationwide. Gov. Greg Gianforte signed the unprecedented law on May 17, 2023, making Montana the first state to ban TikTok from app stores starting Jan. 2024. Nonetheless, it will face legal challenges from TikTok and other groups claiming it violates free speech rights.

In 2021, Sam Bankman-Fried instructed those working for him to pay a bribe of $40 million to one or more Chinese officials to help unfreeze trading accounts maintained by FTX’s sister company, Alameda Research, that held up to $1 billion in cryptocurrencies. Bankman-Fried was charged with 13 criminal counts, including foreign bribery, on March 28, 2023.

On March 17, 2023, YouTube allowed Former President Trump back on the platform. The announcement came after similar decisions by Twitter and Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram. It’s one of the first significant content decisions YouTube has taken under its recently appointed chief executive, Neal Mohan, who assumed the top job in February 2023. Ten days earlier, YouTube loosened its profanity rules so that creators who used swear words at the start of a video could still profit from the content.

Sega Sammy Holdings Inc, the Japanese gaming giant behind Sonic the Hedgehog, officially announced on April 17, 2023, that it planned to acquire Rovio Entertainment Oyj, the Finnish company behind Angry Birds, for 706 million euros ($776 million) in cash. Sega Sammy said the deal would boost its mobile gaming business. Rovio’s board unanimously backed the takeover offer, as did its major shareholders. The deal is expected to be launched on May 8, 2023.

Market fact: Rovio had previously received a 683 million euro takeover bid from Israel-based Playtika Holding Corp in January 2023, but the talks were called off in February 2023. China’s Tencent already owns a 5% stake in Rovio.

According to JB Perrette, president, and CEO, of global streaming and games for Warner Bros. Discovery, HBO stands for “edgy, groundbreaking entertainment for adults” and is unsuitable for the upcoming Max service’s full range of content offers. This includes kids and family programming from Warner Bros., Discovery, and DC Comics. The company announced the name change at a press event on April 12, 2023. The updated service will launch on May 23 with three price tiers: Max Ad-Lite ($9.99/month), Max Ad Free ($15.99/month), and Max Ultimate Ad Free ($19.99/month), which will offer 4K content, offline downloads, and Dolby Atmos sound quality.

Fun Fact: Warner Bros. Discovery acquired the domain name “max.com” in 2023 from a nutritional supplement products company. Does that mean Max will also offer a free vitamin bottle with every subscription? We’re unsure.

Netflix announced that it would end its DVD-by-mail service on Sept. 29, 2023, after shipping more than 5 billion discs over 25 years. Launched in 1998, the service was once Netflix’s biggest money maker but became obsolete in the video streaming era. Netflix split its DVD and streaming services in 2011, creating a separate website called DVD.com for its mail-order business. They stopped disclosing the number of DVD subscribers in 2018 as the service declined in popularity and profitability.