Image: Julien Deveaux / Protocol
AI comes to life with GPT-3

Good morning! This Monday, Twitter tries to figure out how to move on from its hack, GPT-3 might have some ideas for that, and Mark Zuckerberg needs to work on his surfer-guy face.
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Matt Mullenweg hires people in a chat window, and thinks you should, too:
On Protocol: What failed product would you want to bring back? Kleiner Perkins' Bucky Moore has one:
Don't pitch like you're going to take over the world immediately, Autotech Ventures' Jeff Peters advises:
On Protocol: What will diverse companies look like? Code2040's Karla Monterroso said we don't know yet:
There's this strange dance you have to do when your company's been hacked. You want to tell the truth, to be (or at least appear to be) honest with users and regulators and whoever else wants to know. But you also don't want to overshare and risk causing yourself irreparable damage or giving hackers clues on how to do better next time.
Twitter's on that roller coaster right now, and it's fascinating to watch:
There's a lot more Twitter still needs to work out and communicate to us. Did hackers get access to DMs? More specifically, all of our DMs? And when it comes to security, what's the plan? There's so much it could do: change permissioning, encrypt more of the platform, improve internal tools for detecting suspicious employee activity, on and on. As it sorts through it all, the company needs to balance a forensic investigation with keeping people up-to-date. Not easy.
@realdonaldtrump may be an interesting test case for what comes next. In 2017, after a Twitter employee deleted Trump's account, the company said that it had "implemented safeguards to prevent this from happening again." Those safeguards seem to have worked: Trump's account wasn't breached last week.
Whatever happens, the stakes are high for Jack Dorsey when it comes to figuring out what to do. Last week, I made a bet with Protocol's Tom Krazit: I said the whole Twitter-hack story was going to go away relatively soon, without much further incident; Tom said it was going to be big, and could reignite the conversation about Jack Dorsey's future as CEO. Winner gets $5.
I think Tom might win.
Last year, OpenAI built an AI text-generating system that it said was almost too good to release, because it was dangerous to create computer-generated text that was indistinguishable from something a human would write. So, of course, the organization made it even better and shipped it!
OpenAI's latest toy is GPT-3, and you've probably seen it all over the internet already. It's the most powerful text-prediction machine I've ever seen.
The best stuff I've seen so far from GPT-3, though, comes from the genre I'd call botchatting. Take a bunch of your tweets, drop them into the system, and see what comes out.
GPT-3 is still young, and still weird, and still more fun than anything else — and don't forget, the system doesn't actually understand what it's writing, which will be the key to AI actually being useful in the future. But it is further evidence that this kind of tech is going to work eventually. And maybe sooner than we thought.
(In case you were wondering, GPT-3 didn't write this newsletter. Although it probably could. Very meta-thoughtful.)
Join us on July 30 at 12PM ET for a conversation on why there's no 'digital' in transformation. Protocol's transformation editor Mike Murphy will dive into specific industry case studies — some that were born digital, others that have moved there — and discuss how companies are managing transformation initiatives. Speakers to be announced. This conversation is presented by AlixPartners.
I continue to believe that rocket launches are the perfect use of live-streaming technology. I watched another one yesterday, as a Japanese rocket carrying a UAE spacecraft took off for Mars.
As we've talked about here before, the space industry is quickly becoming big business. Right now, there's plenty of work and money to go around — but the global space race is still very much on. And as of now, there's another big, deep-pocketed player on the scene.
TechCrunch's Early Stage virtual conference starts tomorrow, with a big crew of panels and speakers talking to new companies.
Microsoft, Twitter, IBM and Snap all report earnings this week.
We're a week out from the big tech-CEO hearing in DC, so look out for a lot of discussion — and bluster — about what's going to happen.
Mark Zuckerberg isn't someone you'd accuse of being … tan. And the New York Post published a picture that might hint why, as Zuckerberg boards through Hawaii waters with approximately 46 tubes of zinc slathered onto his face. But more importantly, I wondered: What's that cool board he's on? I'm pretty sure it's a Lift eFoil, one of those electric surfboards tech billionaires tend to like. And it turns out, Zuckerberg has a history of looking like a goofus while riding one.
Join us on July 30 at 12PM ET for a conversation on why there's no 'digital' in transformation. Protocol's transformation editor Mike Murphy will dive into specific industry case studies — some that were born digital, others that have moved there — and discuss how companies are managing transformation initiatives. Speakers to be announced. This conversation is presented by AlixPartners.
Today's Source Code was written by David Pierce, with help from Shakeel Hashim. Thoughts, questions, tips? Send them to david@protocol.com, or our tips line, tips@protocol.com. Enjoy your day, see you tomorrow.
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