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The leaked news regarding the intentions of Baidu, the most important Chinese search engine, to adopt a system similar to ChatGPT is only the latest concerning the world of search engines after the OpenAI machine learning system was launched. Earlier this month, Microsoft revealed it invested $10 billion in OpenAI and plans to add ChatGPT to its Bing search engine. Google answered with Google Sparrow, another machine learning system. The launch of ChatGPT immediately rekindled discussions about the nature of this alleged artificial intelligence, its possibilities, and its limits, and the competitors’ new systems will further increase them.

Elon Musk with the sink (Image courtesy Elon Musk)

In the end, Elon Musk managed to buy Twitter! After what had become a clash with the social network’s executives that led Musk to blow the deal last July, the deal was completed. The first act as owner was to fire several executives, starting with CEO Parag Agrawal. Last Wednesday, Musk walked into the San Francisco office with a sink joking about the pun between the English word sink and his statement “Let that sink in!”.

The letter sent to the SEC

Elon Musk announced that he terminated the deal to buy Twitter he signed at the end of April 2022 for a value of approximately $44 billion. The billionaire claims that the social network executives didn’t provide the data required by the agreement, in particular those relating to the fake profiles used by spammers. His position was explained in a letter sent on his behalf by a lawyer to the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), the authority that oversees the American stock exchange. Twitter executives have announced plans to sue Elon Musk, so the story is far from over.

Elon Musk's tweet about free speech

Twitter’s board of directors accepted Elon Musk’s offer to buy the social network for $54.2 a share in a $44 billion deal. One consequence will be that Twitter will be a private company again leaving the Wall Street Stock Exchange. In early April, Musk bought 9.2% of the social network but decided not to join its board. Now, his stated goal is to change Twitter to ensure free speech, which he sees as a bedrock of democracy.

Linus Torvalds in 2014

On August 25, 1991, Linus Torvalds (photo ©Krd) announced in a message on the comp.os.minix newsgroup the project of a new operating system that actually diverged considerably from Minix. Unhappy with the Minix license, Torvalds adopted a license from the GNU project, the GPL, which seemed to him free enough. After a few weeks, the first Linux kernel was released. The availability of various components released by the GNU project and the contributions of several people who joined the project helped to spread it. Thirty years later, Linux is being used by virtually everyone in one way or another, even if only a small minority realize it.