We all know that Elon Musk is a little sensitive when it comes to Twitter, which we all saw when rumors about Apple withholding Twitter from the App Store floated around. Predictably, the Twitter CEO reacted to Microsoft's announcement by saying "Lawsuit time."
Musk's Grudge Against OpenAI
The tech billionaire's threat may very well be just that, and it's quite possible that he will not go through with it. However, his reason behind the potential legal action is his claims of the company using Twitter to train illegally.
They trained illegally using Twitter data. Lawsuit time.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 19, 2023
There were previous incidents where the Tesla CEO threatened legal action, such as the issue with @ElonJet tracking his jet's whereabouts. Nothing really came out of that except a new anti-doxxing policy for Twitter.
He did not provide specifics, but it may be directed at OpenAI, which uses various data from the internet to train its large language models which are used for its products like ChatGPT. Of course, there's the issue of OpenAI not being Microsoft, as pointed out by The Verge.
Elon Musk co-founded OpenAI back in 2015, but stepped down from the board after three years. Rumor has it that it was due to disagreements when it came to the development of artificial intelligence, although reports say that it was so the Musk focus on his other companies.
The software giant has invested quite a lot into OpenAI and then did so again for the second time to extend its multibillion-dollar partnership with the AI-developing company, which has resulted in the integration of AI features in Microsoft's products like Bing, Edge, and more.
Microsoft is dropping its support for Twitter effective by April 25th, 2023. It's due to the social media platform removing its free API. Basically, Microsoft is simply a customer who doesn't want to pay, and Elon Musk took that decision personally.
Upon implementation, users can no longer use the Microsoft platform to access Twitter accounts through the social management tool, create and manage drafts for tweets, new past tweets, and engagements, as well as scheduled tweets.
This will affect the company's Smart Campaigns with Multi-platform. Microsoft will continue its support for other social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn. The change will gradually roll out to all users soon.
Twitter's API Behind a Paywall
The announcement comes as a shock to third-party developers as Twitter announced that they will be required to pay to access its API. It will also be in the form of monthly fees instead of just a single payment, and the price has caused some developers to cut ties with the platform.
Twitter has released three tiers for its API. One's free, the second is the Basic tier, and the third is the Enterprise tier. The basic tier, which has a 50,000 posting limit at the app level and a 10,000 read-limit rate cap per month, will cost $100 monthly.
The Enterprise tier, which big companies will have to use, completes streams such as replay, engagement metrics, backfill, and more. It can be managed by a dedicated account team, but the commercial-level access may cost up to $42,000 a month.
While Microsoft can afford to pay that kind of amount per month ten times over, it could still be a bit much for API access, which is why it decided to remove support for Twitter instead. Smaller developers like Tweetbot Maker and Tapbots have done the same.
