Twitter’s future looks fuzzy under Elon Musk. But could things be coming into focus for crypto Twitter?

Musk now owns a social network used by a large and dynamic online community of crypto supporters, in which he himself has been one of the loudest and quirkiest voices. The ongoing health of Twitter and its direction under Musk could have a significant impact on a service where crypto promoters tout tokens, developers coordinate software updates, and investors seek information.

The self-appointed “chief twit,” who has more than 112 million followers on Twitter, is known for triggering wild movements in the price of dogecoin by endorsing — or even just mentioning — the token. He triggered a sell-off by jokingly dismissing it as “a hustle” on “Saturday Night Live.”

At his direction, Tesla purchased $1.5 billion worth of bitcoin and announced that it would take the crypto token as payment before selling a huge chunk of that investment and saying bitcoin payments had been halted due to environmental worries.

Despite Musk’s idiosyncratic posturing, crypto fans on Twitter seem excited by the notion of someone they view as one of their own running the place. Dogecoin, for example, has been rallying again, its price boosted not by any tweets by Musk but simply by the idea that one of its leading cheerleaders is in charge.

There could be more concrete changes to Twitter’s business from the crypto world, though. The deal itself was made possible in part by backing from a crypto powerhouse, Binance, giving the world’s biggest crypto marketplace a say in reshaping a major social network.

CEO Changpeng Zhao said in a statement that Binance’s hope is to “play a role in bringing social media and Web3 together in order to broaden the use and adoption of crypto and blockchain technology.”

Patrick Hillman, the company’s chief strategy officer, called the investment “a great R&D opportunity.”

“We see this as a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to use what is one of the most prestigious platforms from the Web 2.0 era as a laboratory or a sandbox to be able to test out whether Web3 solutions might be able to solve some of the problems that are plaguing Web 2.0 platforms today,” he told Protocol.

He said Binance hopes to play a role in solving problems plaguing crypto Twitter, led by the proliferation of AI-driven bots that have “completely debased the entire conversation,” he said. Musk himself has said spam bots — many of them pushing crypto scams — were a motivation to take over Twitter, and at one point vowed to “defeat the spam bots or die trying!”

Some ideas are already being considered, such as using a microtransaction system that “would result in unimaginable costs for these bot farms,” Hillman said. Another proposal is to attach an NFT to an account or a cluster of accounts to “ensure there was an actual user behind that account,” he said.

These potential fixes will take time, though Musk has shown he wants to move quickly on the product front, rapidly launching plans to charge verified users and explore a relaunch of Twitter’s defunct short-video service, Vine.

Musk is currently focused on reorganizing Twitter, “doing all that work right now that you would expect any new executive who's just taken over a prestigious company that's been in existence for over a decade,” Hillman said. “Once that starts to come around, then we'll start to talk about, OK, how do we begin to launch some of these projects?” he said.

Rob Siegel, a management lecturer at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, said Twitter under Musk could mean that “Web3 technology finally gets a commercially interesting application at scale that is more than financial speculation.”

“I think that is the most interesting thing that I see right now” in the potential impact of a Musk-led Twitter on crypto, he told Protocol.

Then there are the downbeat scenarios, he said.

One is the “potential risk for more volatility [and] meme exploitation. Depending on what happens with Twitter, it could devolve into more chaos, which would encourage bad actors,” he said.

Another risk factor is Musk himself.

Marc Fagel, a former SEC regional director for San Francisco, said “Musk’s promises of a barely moderated free-for-all” could easily attract “racist and anti-Semitic” tweets as well as “unfounded crypto evangelism and pitches for NFT and crypto scams, particularly given Musk’s own predilection for doge-touting and the like.”

Melody Brue of Moor Insights & Strategy agreed. Twitter “will have to figure out how to balance Musk's ‘free speech absolutist’ stance and human responsibility around hate and misinformation, or it will lose users and more advertisers,” she told Protocol.

Musk tried to reassure advertisers that the service would not become a “hellscape.” But he did not help his case when he shared a baseless conspiracy theory about the attack on Paul Pelosi, the husband of Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi.

Musk later deleted the tweet, which “probably means he thought it was a mistake,” said Binance’s Hillman.

“Everybody says stupid things on social media, things they regret, things they delete,” he added. “People should be allowed to do that. And it's not going to go into the calculus of our business and what our objective is right now.”

And that objective is turning around Twitter’s stagnant product development, slow-growing user base, and weak financials. Though the members of crypto Twitter obviously want to know how the Musk regime will benefit them, their needs are likely on the back burner as Twitter reels from the turmoil caused by the takeover.

Siegel said Musk “has bigger problems,” including building “the right internal and online culture,” as well as “navigating political minefields and also paying back his financial supporters.

“Dealing with crypto Twitter might be a low priority,” he said.

Indeed, Musk has barely tweeted about crypto since he started accumulating his stake in Twitter. In a message to advertisers after completing the Twitter deal, Musk appeared to acknowledge, in his own peculiar way, the gargantuan task ahead. “I didn’t do it because it would be easy. I did it to try to help humanity whom I love. And I do so with humility, recognizing that failure in pursuing this goal despite our best efforts is a very real possibility. “ Crypto Twitter might love him. But Musk has a lot of people to love.

Speaking last week at The Wall Street Journal’s Tech Live conference, Microsoft Gaming CEO Phil Spencer made a proclamation that has over the last couple of years become a common belief among the biggest names in the game industry.

“There’s no way that you succeed as a gaming company without access to mobile players,” Spencer said in defending the company’s proposed acquisition of Activision Blizzard. In its last fiscal quarter, Activision Blizzard made more revenue from its mobile games like Candy Crush and Call of Duty Mobile than it did on console and PC gaming combined.

Spencer said it was “imperative” Microsoft improve its position in the mobile gaming market to better compete with rivals and expand its audience. “This opportunity is really about mobile for us,” Spencer said of the Activision deal. “When you think about 3 billion people playing video games, there's only about 200 million households on console."

That notion — that the console gaming audience has hit a ceiling — is not a new development, though it is rarely so bluntly said aloud. The combined install bases of Microsoft, Nintendo, and Sony amount to roughly 330 million. Yet, to Spencer’s point, many of those console owners own more than one device, while many new buyers of the PS5 and Xbox Series consoles are not fresh customers but returning ones replacing old hardware.

Mobile gaming, on the other hand, accounts for roughly $100 billion — more than half of all spending on gaming globally, according to market researcher Newzoo. This year, as other parts of the business have started to contract following the pandemic-era gaming boom, mobile is still expected to grow by more than 5%, Newzoo estimates.

Now, as the biggest names in gaming seek new revenue streams and consumers, they’re quickly realizing the biggest and most lucrative untapped market is the smartphone. Microsoft is far from alone here. FIFA publisher Electronic Arts, Grand Theft Auto maker Take-Two Interactive, and PlayStation owner Sony have all laid out ambitious plans on mobile over the past two years, often through strategic acquisitions and investments in the business models that work best on Apple and Google’s platforms.

“Mobile phones are becoming more powerful and mobile games are becoming more sophisticated,” said Dennis Yeh, the gaming insights lead at mobile analytics firm Sensor Tower. Yeh cited two other major developments that have made mobile now impossible to ignore. “Cross-platform or multiplatform play is becoming more viable and desirable, so mobile is important to reach the largest audience, especially in developing markets,” he said, while “free-to-play monetization and live [operations] are largely where the industry is moving, and mobile gaming was the original pioneer of those.”

Yeh pointed to the success of Genshin Impact, a live service game available on consoles, mobile, and PC where the experience is “largely the same” across platforms. “The game is also free to play and relies on optional in-game purchases and a ‘gacha’ system. While this itself isn’t necessarily new in Asian markets, Genshin demonstrated the viability and appetite for this in Western markets,” Yeh said.

In two years, Genshin Impact, developed by Chinese studio miHoYo, has earned more than $3.7 billion in lifetime revenue, making it one of the fastest-growing games of all time. It is so successful in both Asian and Western markets that Microsoft is using it as a template to court China-based mobile developers to build games for its Game Pass subscriptions platform, Reuters reported last week. Microsoft passed on the chance to publish Genshin Impact on Xbox, a decision Reuters says Xbox executives “regretted.”

“In developed markets like the U.S. and Western Europe, overall mobile spend is growing, and consumers are increasingly willing to spend on mobile games,” Yeh said. “In developing markets like Latin America and Southeast Asia, mobile represents access to a wide audience, especially consumers who don’t have the ability to buy a console or PC or don’t have access to stable bandwidth.”

Live service dreams

Microsoft’s interest in finding the next Genshin Impact is part of a broader industry transition to live service gaming — a model that, as Yeh points out, is dominant and thriving on mobile. Electronic Arts spent close to $4 billion last year acquiring mobile studios to strengthen its position in the free-to-play and live service sectors. Take-Two spent close to $13 billion to buy FarmVille developer Zynga in the second-largest ever gaming acquisition behind only Microsoft’s proposed purchase of Activision Blizzard for $69 billion.

“We’re excited that there are 3.5 billion players in our addressable market. It brings accessibility to our brand,” said EA mobile chief Jeff Karp in an interview with Protocol earlier this year. “It’s really an opportunity to expand our overall ecosystem for the brand, and it creates practicable recurring revenues. It also brings the opportunity to bring our games across platforms.”

Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick echoed those comments in a recent interview with The Wrap. “We were already a leader in the console and PC space, and we believe we had already the best collection of intellectual property in the space,” Zelnick said. “However, mobile is the fastest-growing part of the interactive entertainment business.” Take-Two plans to use Zynga’s expertise and resources to help develop mobile versions of its biggest games, including Grand Theft Auto.

In August, Sony acquired its first ever mobile studio, Savage Game Studios, and created an all-new PlayStation Studios Mobile division separate from its console game development unit. PlayStation Studios chief Hermen Hulst described the move as “additive,” saying it will help Sony provide “more ways for more people to engage with our content.” The goal, Hulst added, will be to “reach new audiences unfamiliar with PlayStation and our games.”

PlayStation head Jim Ryan has also cited an expansion to mobile as central to its growth strategy, including a plan to release 20% of all titles by 2025 on smartphone platforms. “By expanding to PC and mobile, and it must be said … also to live services, we have the opportunity to move from a situation of being present in a very narrow segment of the overall gaming software market to being present pretty much everywhere,” Ryan said during an investor presentation in May.

“Whether it be League of Legends or Fortnite, mainstream gaming has already demonstrated the lucrativity, viability, and longevity of free-to-play, live service games,” Yeh said. “Meanwhile, mobile is just a different avenue to access gamers and gain more audience attention share in different settings, such as on commutes.”

The cloud gaming opportunity

Mobile also presents opportunities for all-new business models like cloud gaming and subscriptions, something Microsoft has invested considerable resources into exploring with its Game Pass service. While native mobile games have become more sophisticated, so, too, have streaming platforms that can let you beam console and PC titles from a remote server to your phone screen.

When combined, as Microsoft does with Game Pass and its Xbox Cloud Gaming add-on, mobile presents an opportunity to tap new customer bases. Those include people who have no intention of ever buying a console, but might be interested in streaming console games on their phone — as well as people who might not be able to afford everything required of console or PC gaming, like TVs, monitors, and accessories.

“You’re faced with two larger trends. One of them is macroeconomic — inflation, to put it simply. People are going to start cutting their entertainment budget, which is not essential compared to food and heat. That’s a big transition for the industry,” Joost van Dreunen, an assistant professor at New York University and former game analyst, told Protocol.

“The second piece is that gaming has gone through this moment of transitioning from the fringes. This is not the core gamer that wants to shell out $60 to $70 [per game],” van Dreunen said. “[Game companies] have to necessarily lower the price point to reach average consumers, in the same way Spotify and Netflix do that.”

“Even with the recent shutdown of Google Stadia, accessibility in developing markets will be a key aspect for potential viability [of cloud gaming],” Yeh said. He pointed to accessory makers like Backbone, which produces controllers for smartphones apt at playing both ported games and cloud games without needing to rely on the touchscreen, as evidence the mobile market is now accommodating a far wider breadth of players.

Netflix, a relatively new entrant in the gaming industry, has found success by focusing not on costly console or PC game development — as streaming rival Amazon did to mixed results — but instead exclusively targeting the mobile market. The streaming platform, which has 55 games in the pipeline and now offers 35 titles on smartphones, said this month it was now exploring cloud gaming as a way to reach even more customers.

“We'll approach this the same way as we did with mobile — start small, be humble, be thoughtful — but it is a step we think we should take," Netflix’s gaming chief Mike Verdu said onstage at TechCrunch Disrupt. "The extension into the cloud is really about reaching the other devices where people experience Netflix.”

Mobile isn’t just a money-printing machine. Companies need expertise and teams willing to move fast, update at breakneck speeds, and also maneuver the increasingly byzantine platform structures of Apple and Google, which make a bulk of their app store revenues by collecting fees from mobile games.

Cloud gaming, for instance, is not native to mobile, and instead must be accessed through browsers — a less-than-ideal compromise of working around app store restrictions. But the opportunities, and the existential necessity of diversifying how games make money and survive in an ever-changing industry, have made mobile key to survival.

“We have to break that duopoly of only two storefronts on the largest platforms. We’ve also invested a lot in our cloud streaming,” Spencer said at WSJ Live. “But if you take a long-term bet, which we’re doing, that we will be able to get access to players on the largest platforms that people play on … we want to be in a position with content and players and storefront capability to take advantage of it.”

“Gaming is the largest form of monetization on mobile,” Spencer added, “and we’re a gaming company.”

Good afternoon! In today's edition, we asked the experts to tell us about the best ways to bring developer experience closer to a company's overall mission. Questions or comments? Send us a note at braintrust@protocol.com

Marco ArgentiGoldman Sachs

CIO at Goldman Sachs

Developers must feel empowered to drive business outcomes. No matter what your company does, software is playing a central role — in a world that’s rapidly shifting to fully digital. It’s crucial to attract and retain world-class developer talent, focus on developer experience, and give them complex problems to solve, involving them in the “why” of your business.

Ensure your developers are embedded within your business objectives from the start. Historically, developers asked “how” questions, but if they start with “why,” they understand the end goal from the beginning and connect the business purpose to their work. This process of “working backwards” empowers developers to be engaged with business goals from the beginning of projects and see their work come to fruition with the end customer or client. Instead of being asked to code a product defined by another team, developers and business teams can establish goals together and work backwards in lockstep to solve the problem.

Beyond internal developers, we recently announced a new business called Platform Solutions that has developers as our primary clients. We focus on building and providing cloud-based, developer-centric financial products and services that our corporate and institutional clients can embed in their processes and applications, helping them better serve their own clients and customers.

Improving developer experience both internally and externally — focusing on the developer as a customer externally and tying them to the “why” internally — can have tremendous impact on the quality and market fit of your products, ultimately giving you competitive advantage over those who implement a more traditional approach.

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Dana LawsonNetlify

SVP of engineering at Netlify

Make developer experience a top-level company priority. If you want your developers to be productive and happy, don't bury the goal or objective. Most companies tie developer experience to engineering goals, but if your business is driven by your engineering team, developer happiness should be a company-level goal.

Make a positive developer experience one of the outcomes across many company goals (hiring, retention, GTM, etc.) For instance, if you have a goal to increase shipping velocity or tighten delivery times, a positive developer experience should be a KPI.

There are many ways to impact a positive developer experience, especially for digitally driven companies. Start with data to determine how you can improve your digital business, and use that insight to drive change at a human level.

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Rajeev RajanAtlassian

CTO at Atlassian

While developer experience is often equated to developer productivity, I think it's also about developer joy. Building a world-class engineering team is about creating a frictionless environment where developers enjoy writing code, learning, and creating new things. It’s important that we don’t lose sight of what makes this craft fun for engineers, especially as a company that creates products that most developers rely on every day, like Jira Software, Confluence, Bitbucket, and Compass, our developer experience platform.

The key to prioritizing the developer experience across the organization is to incorporate it as a measurable company objective and key result (OKR), rather than piling it on as a mandate. For example, at Atlassian one of our company objectives is to ensure a solid foundation as we scale and become a 100-year enterprise. For our CTO organization, which includes engineering, IT, trust, and security, this means that our key results include improving our developer experience as we triple our engineering team. Example measures include output and input metrics such as developer satisfaction scores, reducing wait times within development cycles, and increasing documentation.

We are big on transparency, which is why our OKRs are openly documented on Confluence, and our progress is tracked on Atlas, our team directory platform. We also build this transparency into the insights feature in Jira Software so developers can see how their work connects to team-level improvements and soon, other upcoming product offerings will allow organizations to see how work connects to top-level company goals.

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Chris MurphyThoughtworks

CEO, North America at Thoughtworks

Tech talent is, arguably, an organization’s biggest competitive differentiator — and cost. Leaders must create satisfying developer experiences (DX). Try treating your developers like internal customers: Provide the right tooling, empowerment, and support; nurture a culture of experimentation; and ensure corporate values are aligned with developers’ own. Leaders should:

• Remove friction from developers’ lives. Learn firsthand what affects your developers’ work. Developers strive for compelling onboarding, self-service, and automation. Well-enabled tech tooling and delivery infrastructure will unblock developers and help them stay meaningfully engaged.
• Let developers shape your strategy. By building developers’ skills into your strategic decisions, leaders can improve experiences, effectiveness, and the quality of their digital products.
• Foster a culture where developers feel safe to experiment. Leaders who create a healthy environment empower developers to innovate and create business value. Studies show that teams with higher psychological safety are less likely to leave, are more likely to bring in more revenue, and are rated "effective" by executives twice as often.
• Deliver on your employer-brand promises. If top developers don’t feel like you’re adhering to pre-employment promises, they’ll move to another employer who will. Walk the talk.

Better DX leads to better talent, which leads to better business results. Paying top salaries is a start, but if you really want the best tech talent long-term, you need to deliver a superior developer experience.

Learn more.

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Ashley KramerGitLab

Chief marketing and strategy officer at GitLab

Developer burnout is real, and when you take into account the economic climate and intense competition, it can take a heavy toll on everyone’s teams. To improve the developer experience, it’s important to provide the right environment to navigate this uncertainty and keep them energized. And it starts with transparency.

We know that when employees receive transparent, direct communication at work, they engage better. And this is measurable. Employees who perceive their companies to be transparent report 12 times greater satisfaction than those who feel the opposite according to Future Forum Pulse Summer Snapshot 2022.

There are many opportunities to improve your company’s transparency. You can be transparent by building a strong value system; being open about as many things as possible; explaining “why,” not just “what”; and ensuring a constant feedback loop.

Ultimately, transparency improves business outcomes by reducing burnout, increasing productivity, and attracting recruits who value transparency and therefore will thrive in your culture. By providing an environment for all voices to be heard, team members feel more connected, supported, and empowered.

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Saju PillaiKong

SVP of engineering at Kong

A good developer experience requires three ingredients: communicating a strong sense of mission, ensuring the “why” behind any key feature is crystal clear, and demonstrating the impact on business metrics.

When developers understand the mission, reasoning, and impacts, they should feel empowered to pick their journey and make their own microdecisions to garner results. Technology leaders can set the parameters and “checkpoints” for the development team to reach along the way, but each individual developer will have their own coding methodology to complete the task. When developers are invested in the mission, they feel driven to make a positive impact on business metrics.

Every employee, developers included, loves to see their personal work impact the business. Developers nowadays are directly working on creating the next digital experience for their audiences, whether they are employees, customers, suppliers or vendors, patients, citizens, or even investors. Developers take pride in building great applications where the code is their main focus. But the code they create still needs to be secure, compliant, tested, and integrated in the flow of development from the larger engineering team. Developers who have the right development platform and environment can focus on building the best application without wasting time reinventing the wheel or redoing work to comply with corporate standards. The better they are enabled to work efficiently, the faster they release products that add to the company top line.

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Pratik WadherIntuit

SVP of product development at Intuit

It must be a declared priority from the top. Several years ago, Intuit made a big bet that our investment in creating a world-class modern development environment and providing our technologists with development experiences so they can do the best work of their lives would be pivotal to our company’s success in fueling innovation and catalyzing business growth.

That decision has led to a six-fold increase in development velocity since FY20. At the foundation of Intuit’s financial technology platform is a modern SaaS development environment that enables our team to deliver code fast, with quality, security, and compliance built in. Because of our investment in cloud-native technologies, such as Kubernetes, Argo, and many other Cloud Native Computing Foundation projects, our teams are creating new products and services for our consumer and small business customers at an unparalleled speed. We are also able to accelerate innovation by open-sourcing technologies we create with the broader cloud-native community.

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When Ben Wu, an engineer in China, wanted to install Facebook’s open-source AI framework PyTorch in 2017, he visited its online community on GitHub and asked for some pointers.

Soumith Chintala, a Facebook AI research engineer based in New York, showed him how he could download it quickly.

PyTorch has become a foundational component of AI technology, thanks in large part to knowledge-sharing exchanges like the one between Wu and Chintala that happen every day. And although it’s become increasingly corporatized, the borderless, open-source software movement has risen above geopolitical tensions between China and the U.S., which have centered on concerns over China’s use of AI to carry out repressive surveillance, its plans to transfer civilian tech for military applications, and Chinese government espionage and intellectual property theft.

“I’m definitely surprised at how much [of the] general global considerations you would have from a business angle don’t really come in when you’re talking about open-source collaboration, especially with AI,” Chintala told Protocol in September when Facebook parent company Meta handed over PyTorch to the nonprofit open-source software consortium Linux Foundation.

“Within open-source software, the political doesn’t even start entering into play [until] much later,” Chintala said. “People are mostly trying to learn from each other, build the best thing they can.”

There’s no shortage of Cold War and space race themes tossed around when people discuss the politics of economic, national security, and human-rights implications of China’s AI advancements. But the distance between how yesterday’s energy and space-related technologies were built and how today’s AI-related tech is produced is striking.

People are mostly trying to learn from each other, build the best thing they can.”

In fact, the way modern AI technologies are developed shows there is no race for one country to win. Quite the contrary, the AI industry has skyrocketed because a global community has constructed it, together, brick by digital brick.

“I don’t think we’d have the kind of machine learning boom we are having without open source. I just don’t think it would have been possible,” said Kevin Goldsmith, chief technology officer at Anaconda, a company that provides software tools based on the Python programming language — considered the lingua franca of AI — along with other open-source components used to build machine learning and AI-based projects. “If this was all proprietary solutions being sold, it never would have happened,” he said.

Listen: Kate Kaye talks with Kevin Goldsmith about global, open-source AI collaboration.

For decades, researchers working on these challenges have disseminated their technical achievements in scientific papers. A March 2022 report from the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence showed the largest number of international AI research and development collaborations between 2010 and 2021 were among people from the U.S. and China working together.

China’s tech advancements pose some legitimate concerns when it comes to human rights and the potential to supercharge the country’s military capabilities. However, as the U.S. government makes drastic moves to stall China’s AI progress, broad restrictions on technical components of AI could have unintended consequences affecting global AI research and business.

“The U.S. policy community doesn’t understand how radically open AI research is today,” said Matt Sheehan, a fellow in the Asia Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and author of “The Transpacific Experiment,” a book about the connections between Silicon Valley and China.

“Most of the biggest AI advances aren’t closely guarded secrets that the Chinese government could steal — they’re already out there for use by anybody with data, compute, and machine learning skills,” Sheehan said.

Still, as global open-source AI projects between the U.S. and China remain active, efforts from both governments to thwart technical collaborations between the two countries could have a dampening effect on the vibrant ecosystem.

Most of the biggest AI advances aren’t closely guarded secrets that the Chinese government could steal — they’re already out there for use by anybody with data, compute, and machine learning skills.”

For instance, NASA plans to use semiconductors incorporating open-source tech built by collaborators in the U.S. and China including Google, Meta, Alibaba, and Huawei for missions to the moon and Mars. But at the same time, the U.S. government is cracking down on sales of AI-enabling semiconductor technology to China in hopes of damaging the growth of its nascent chip-manufacturing industry.

If there is a more deliberate tech disentanglement on the horizon, the global knots of open-source AI will not come apart easily.

“There’s no definition of open source that talks about national boundaries. It’s either open or it’s not open,” Goldsmith said.

The stateless mashups advancing AI

Modern AI technologies are a melting pot of shared foundational elements including free bundles of code, data sets, data architectures, and pre-built machine learning models that when cobbled together and customized, create AI tools and products. This movement has fostered machine learning, deep learning, computer vision, object and speech recognition, natural-language processing, and semiconductor chip technology.

“If you think of the epicenters around some of this, it’s not all in the U.S. There are strong pockets of really advanced work coming out of Europe, coming out of Canada, [and] coming out of China as well,” Goldsmith said. “And it’s all cross-border collaboration.”

China’s government appears to recognize this. The China Academy of Information and Communications Technology, a think tank under China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, published a paper in February assessing the evolution of AI frameworks including TensorFlow, PyTorch, PaddlePaddle, and Huawei’s MindSpore through what the paper refers to as the “budding stage,” “growth stage,” and “stability stage” of each.

It recognized TensorFlow and PyTorch as a “duopoly” among “foreign” AI frameworks that “provide ecosystem-level output capabilities for Chinese AI applications.” It also recognized the growth of homegrown frameworks such as PaddlePaddle and MindSpore.

There’s no definition of open source that talks about national boundaries. It’s either open or it’s not open.”

“The AI framework is the operating system of the smart economy era,” the paper stated, according to a translation by Jeff Ding, an assistant professor of political science at George Washington University, who publishes a newsletter focused on AI in China.

“The next ten years will be a golden period for the global development of the digital economy and the entry of an intelligent economy and society. Focusing on the development of artificial intelligence infrastructure will provide strong traction for the development of China’s AI industry and the vigorous development of the digital economy,” the paper said.

“The [Chinese Communist Party] wants self-sufficiency. They don’t want to be dependent on Western technology,” said Alex Capri, a researcher and consultant studying U.S.-China trade flows and tech competition who teaches at the National University of Singapore Business School.

But China is not simply building applications on top of open-source AI frameworks created by U.S. technologists. Its AI researchers are combining open-source components from the U.S., China, and around the world to produce new technologies.

For instance, China’s search giant Baidu contributed a deep learning project to The Linux Foundation in 2018 that blends its open-source AI framework PaddlePaddle with TensorFlow and Kubernetes, both technologies developed and open-sourced by Google.

Meanwhile, Alibaba released open-source code for a recommendation engine based on Google’s TensorFlow and crafted with help from Intel and AI chipmaker Nvidia.

^{AI is a melting pot of shared foundational elements including free open-source bundles of code, data sets, data architectures, and prebuilt machine learning models that when cobbled together and customized, create AI tools and products. Here are a few examples of these cross-border AI mashups.}

As open-source projects gain adoption, other software companies are investing in building ways to support them. Take Huawei’s Volcano, an open-source data processing technology built for machine and deep learning. In June, Apache Spark — the popular data tool built and open-sourced by Databricks — chose Volcano as its default scheduler for batch data processing. Contributors from Apple, Cloudera, Databricks, Huawei, and Netflix all worked on the project.

Microsoft, which has operated an important research lab in China for decades, has an AI collaboration agreement with ByteDance, the parent company of China’s massively popular social media export TikTok. In August, software engineers from the two companies discussed an open-source machine learning project incorporating Kubernetes and Ray, an AI platform from San Francisco-based Anyscale.

“We’re not from the same company, but we meet every week. We collaborate every week,” said Microsoft principal software engineer Ali Kanso, about his work with ByteDance software engineer Jiaxin Shan.

Microsoft’s GitHub, undoubtedly the world’s most populated online public square for the exchange of AI tech ideas, is the home for many of these collaborations.

While GitHub is a source of knowledge and tech support for China’s AI researchers and industry developers, China’s government has indicated it wants to untether the country’s tech developers from the site. China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology began backing a GitHub alternative for open-source tech sharing, Gitee, in 2020. Previously, in 2013, it blocked access to GitHub temporarily.

“In the past two or three years there [have been] a lot of connection resets and connection issues on GitHub,” an AI researcher based in Beijing who asked not to be named for fear of government retaliation told Protocol. However, the researcher said people use VPNs to circumvent blockades. “Even if they shut down connections, there is always another way around,” said the researcher.

China appears to want to steer people to Gitee for both self-sufficiency and control. The government would prefer not to rely on a U.S. company and its technology to host its code. And the site’s free sharing of uncensored ideas — including occasional nontechnical content — represents a threat to China’s authoritarian government. (When people in China used GitHub to post information about the COVID-19 pandemic that included criticisms of the government, they were arrested as dissidents.)

Already, Gitee users have seen government intervention that some worry amounts to censorship. In May, developers in China were blocked from accessing Gitee, and its operators notified users that code posted to the site would be reviewed from then on before being published.

“It seems that the government there is very supportive of open source, but whether that becomes kind of open source within China for China, versus being more globally present as a contributor, is unclear,” Goldsmith said.

Google schools the U.S. Commerce Department

Increasingly, the U.S. government and advocates for stronger AI tech protections for the U.S. want to block the flow of advanced AI-related technologies to China. Among their chief concerns is development of “dual use” AI created by China for civilian use that may have potential military or criminal applications.

“Since about 2019 going forward, AI is very much a technology that is in the midst of this U.S.-China tech competition because of its potential dual uses and its potential misuses,” said Paul Triolo, senior vice president focused on China at global strategic consultancy Albright Stonebridge Group.

The AI framework is the operating system of the smart economy era.”

The White House published a list of critical and emerging technologies in February that could be used to inform national security-related activities, such as new export controls or cross-border investment reviews. But when the U.S. Commerce Department included AI on a similar list of tech that could be subject to export controls, purveyors of open-source AI technologies including Google — which in addition to TensorFlow and Kubernetes, has open-sourced large language machine learning models such as BERT — balked.

“There was interestingly a lot of pushback because of all of the things that they mentioned around AI, a lot of it was identifying algorithms that were open source. So the industry [questioned], ‘Why would we want to control these, how could you control open-source algorithms?’” Triolo said.

In a lengthy letter sent to the Commerce Department in 2019, Google mentioned PyTorch, Baidu’s PaddlePaddle, Microsoft’s Cognitive Toolkit, and its own TensorFlow as openly available machine learning libraries.

“These examples point to the fact that the information-sharing ecosystem for AI development is inherently international, with joint development occurring simultaneously across borders, and with a significant open-source culture. U.S. persons in the United States, working for companies with U.S. offices only, do not have a monopoly on such technology,” the company wrote.

Chip Switzerland

No discussion about the ingredients of AI would be complete without mentioning semiconductors, the hardware behind the high-performance computing necessary to train machine and deep learning models. While AI software that’s been assembled from multiple open-source components could prove difficult for governments to monitor or restrict, some semiconductor technologies may be easier for governments to wrangle.

The U.S. government has severely restricted sales of advanced U.S. semiconductor technology to China, for example, in an effort to curtail China’s AI research, development, and business opportunities as well as its use of AI for surveillance and military applications.

The people who need advanced chips to process data and train large machine learning models will feel the effects of the ban, possibly before others will. “That will have a big impact on the researchers and engineers in China,” said Yang You, founder of open-source AI optimizing software company HPC-AI Tech. “Nvidia GPUs in China will be older than the Nvidia GPUs in the U.S. Basically, they are using a worse product,” You said.

However, there is a borderless collaboration effort dedicated to building open-source semiconductor architecture gaining some steam. The RISC-V project involves large tech companies in the U.S. and China including Google, Meta’s Oculus, IBM, Nvidia, Intel, Alibaba, and Huawei.

Chipmaker SiFive said in September it will build RISC-V chips in the U.S. for NASA, and U.S. chip giant Intel has begun building RISC-V chips and supporting the RISC-V architecture. Some inside China see the project as one that could help the country become more self-sufficient in regards to its semiconductor supply; however, at this early stage, RISC-V is not mature enough for it to replace chips based on hardware tech outside of China.

RISC-V declined to comment for this story or to provide any updates regarding its partnerships. The group makes a point on its website to state that it “does not take a political position on behalf of any geography.” The RISC-V Foundation is incorporated as RISC-V International Association in Switzerland.

Semiconductor technology can heavily influence how AI is built and which components companies invest in, said Davis Sawyer, co-founder and chief product officer of Canada’s Deeplite, which provides software that compresses AI so it can work in devices such as phones or vehicles. “If the chip doesn’t support something, you can’t build [with] it,” Sawyer said.

A bad breakup?

If tensions between the U.S. and China continue to escalate, a slow, arduous process of U.S.-China technology and business detachment may be ahead — one that Capri said will be “messy.”

“It’s not a zero-sum outcome,” he said. “After three-plus decades of entanglement and integration, it’s very difficult to disentangle. It’s not like pulling the plug on something overnight and the light goes off.”

And if the U.S. government were to demand broader detachment from China’s technology economy, it might not work, said Ding, who studies AI in China and how it affects China’s power balance with the U.S.

“From a high level, decoupling as a broad brush, overall strategy — the fact that AI development is so globalized — renders that broad brush overall strategy relatively infeasible,” Ding said.

Whether tech research and development collaborations that take place on GitHub would be subject to future laws remains to be seen, but such an approach could backfire.

“There are thoughtful people looking into situations where that openness can be harmful or dangerous. But if the U.S. government comes in and tells AI scientists they can’t publish like this anymore, we’re going to see a huge backlash that could do major damage to U.S. competitiveness,” Sheehan said.

Protocol data researcher AJ Caughey assisted with data analysis on this story.

Scrolling through Twitter is very meta right now as many of the posts are about the platform itself. Since Elon Musk bought the damn thing after a monthslong showdown, all hell has broken loose. Musk has actively pushed out or pushed the majority of Twitter’s top executives to resignation, laid off half of the staff (and then asked some to return), and paused a paid verification feature he forced engineering teams to launch after the site, predictably, became ripe with impersonators.

Musk tried desperately to get out of the deal but succumbed after legal pressures. Now he seems to have fully committed himself to making the most out of the $44 billion dollar deal, sink in hand. Musk continues to tweet cryptic messages about the future of moderation and deplatforming and has called for broader “free speech” on Twitter, which many people worry could include hate speech, misinformation, calls for violence, and other harmful content on the site. While bare-bones moderation could be bad for users and democracy, advertisers hate it, and it's money from advertisers (and not the current or future paying subscribers) that keeps the lights on. Musk addressed advertisers directly on Twitter on Oct. 27, attempting to assure them he means well.

But so far, Musk's assurances havcen't done enough to convince companies like General Motors and Pfizer, which have already left, at least temporarily. Major ad agencies like Omnicom Media Group recommended pausing advertising posts on Twitter. In recent weeks, Twitter Blue subscribers have wreaked havoc by impersonating brands and celebrities with their newly minted check marks.

As for the future of Twitter internally, Musk has created a leaner, meaner team, achieved through layoffs and a voluntary Twitter exodus.

We want to keep you in-the-know on all the chaos unfolding at the bird site. This page will update as the news keeps rolling in. Maybe someday cycle will stop, but unfortunately the Musk-Twitter saga has burrowed into the collective tech brain for seven months now. So no promises.

Nov. 12

Platformer's Casey Newton reported that Twitter has let go of around 4,400 of its 5,500 contractors in the U.S. and abroad, affecting people working in content moderation, real estate, marketing and other departments. Apparently, they received no notification from managers and simply lost access to Slack and email.

Nov. 11

Twitter temporarily paused Twitter Blue subscriptions to address the rise in impersonation and misinformation on the platform, The Washington Post reported.

Nov. 10

Musk sent an email to Twitter employees late Wednesday night ending the remote work benefit and ordering everyone to return to the office the next day. He also emphasized Twitter’s financial vulnerability. An attorney on the company’s privacy team told employees in the company’s New York City office Slack channel they didn't think that anyone is obligated to return to office — especially not on short notice — as the mandate represented a fundamental change to their employment contracts, according to screenshots reviewed by Protocol. The attorney also encouraged employees to use Twitter's unlimited PTO policy to take the day off.

The attorney’s Slack message revealed that Twitter's CISO, chief privacy officer, and chief compliance officer also all resigned from the company late Wednesday. Former CISO Lea Kissner and former CPO Damien Kieran confirmed their departures from the company on Twitter the following day.

Head of trust and safety Yoel Roth and head of sales Robin Wheeler were reported to be leaving the company, according to an employee Protocol spoke with and other media reports. Wheeler later tweeted "I'm still here," indicating she was still employed at Twitter.

The New York Times reported that human resources leader Kathleen Pacini also resigned.

Elon Musk sent an email to Twitter employees Thursday night emphasizing that Twitter will do “whatever it takes” to adhere to the Federal Trade Commission’s consent decree. The consent decree requires Twitter to consider and document the risks of potential products before launch, have a senior leader or team of senior leaders who are personally accountable for making security decisions, and have a senior officer who certifies compliance with the FTC annually.

Protocol has confirmed the identity of the attorney who said the legal department will have to “shift the burden to engineers” to self-certify compliance with FTC requirements. The Verge spoke to another employee familiar with the matter.

The email, which was reviewed by Protocol, addresses earlier claims from an attorney on Twitter’s privacy team that because of tight product deadlines, legal may have to “shift the burden to engineers” to self-certify compliance with FTC requirements.

The attorney had sent an internal Slack message, reviewed by Protocol, on Thursday morning claiming to have heard Alex Spiro, Twitter’s current head of legal, say “Elon puts rockets into space, he’s not afraid of the FTC.” The attorney urged employees to call Twitter’s Ethics Helpline or reach out to Whistleblower Aid if they’re asked to do anything they’re uncomfortable with. Protocol was not able to confirm that any engineers had actually been asked to “self-certify” legal compliance, and Spiro did not respond to Protocol’s request for comment.

Musk rebutted the statements on Thursday night, saying “anything employees read to the contrary is absolutely false.” Spiro also sent an email saying that Twitter, not an individual employee, would be liable if the company were not in compliance with the FTC. “We spoke to the FTC today about our continuing obligations and have a constructive ongoing dialogue,” he wrote.

Nov. 7

Musk encouraged "independent-minded" American voters to vote for a Republican Congress because the president is a Democrat. "Shared power curbs the worst excesses of both parties," he wrote.

Nov. 6

Twitter told some laid-off employees, "wait, never mind!" According to Bloomberg and Casey Newton of Platformer, Twitter reached out to dozens of laid-off employees and asked them return.

The New York Times reported that Twitter will not give blue check marks to members of its $7.99/month subscription plan until after the U.S. midterm elections. The company had announced the new feature as part of a Twitter app update: "Blue checkmark: Power to the people: Your account will get a blue checkmark, just like the celebrities, companies, and politicians you already follow."

Nov. 4

Thursday night, a companywide email went out to employees instructing them not to go to the offices on Friday. Some employees who expected the cuts to come Friday were surprised to see themselves locked out of company accounts earlier than expected. “Has it already started? Happy layoff eve!” tweeted Rumman Chowdhury, who led Twitter’s META team focused on ethical AI, the entirety of which appeared to be dismantled in the layoffs, according to tweets from members of the team.

According to a copy of the companywide memo obtained by Insider, the email said cuts were necessary “in an effort to place Twitter on a healthy path.”

Former Twitter employees set up a Twitter list to help laid-off workers transition.

Nov. 2

Twitter canceled its developer conference, Chirp, which was slated to take place in San Francisco on Nov. 16. “We’re currently hard at work to make Twitter better for everyone, including developers!” Twitter’s dev account tweeted.

Musk planned to cut half of Twitter’s workforce, roughly 3,700 jobs, starting Friday, Bloomberg reported. Twitter’s laid-off employees will face a brutal job market, with tech companies imposing hiring freezes and layoffs left and right. Employees told The Washington Post they’ve received no official communications about any of the changes inside Twitter, relying instead on news reports, Musk’s tweets, and Blind.

Nov. 1

More execs announced their departures, like ad sales chief Sarah Personette and Chief People and Diversity Officer Dalana Brand. Given Musk’s need to appease advertisers, the resignation of Personette was particularly significant given her role as the company’s top ad executive. (And she apparently resigned the day after tweeting that she had “had a great discussion” with Musk, that Twitter’s “commitment to brand safety for advertisers remains unchanged,” and that she was “Looking forward to the future!”)

Musk suggested an $8/month Twitter subscription plan that would include verification, priority in replies, mentions and search, ability to post long video and audio, and half the ads. He said it will “destroy the bots” and “give Twitter a revenue stream to reward creators.”

Musk continued to tweet memes, even though Jason Calacanis is the company’s “Chief Meme Officer,” according to his recently updated Twitter bio.

Oct. 31

Musk wanted to bring back Vine. Is Periscope next?

Weekend, Oct. 29 and 30

Responding to a tweet from Hillary Clinton, Musk linked to an opinion article on Sunday from the Santa Monica Observer containing misinformation about Paul Pelosi. He deleted it hours later.

Musk’s inner circle and the remaining Twitter executives met to discuss content moderation and laying off 25% of Twitter’s workforce, The Washington Post reported. All departments will be impacted, but especially sales, product, engineering, legal, and trust and safety, according to The Post.

The Musk-Twitter brain trust appeared to include longtime allies Jason Calacanis, VC, and David Sacks, political donor and founding chief operating officer of PayPal. Musk’s additional helpers include his personal lawyer, Alex Spiro, and Andreessen Horowitz partner Sriram Krishnan. Musk brought in talent from his other companies as well, apparently asking Tesla engineers to check out Twitter’s code and consulting with his relative and a Neuralink engineer Andrew Musk as well as Jehn Balajadia, COO of The Boring Company.

Musk wanted Twitter to charge $20 per month for verification, The Verge reported. He tweeted on Sunday that “The whole verification process is being revamped right now.” Calacanis recently asked his followers how much they would pay for a blue check mark. As of Oct. 31, the answer is overwhelmingly nothing.The plan is to change premium subscription Twitter Blue into a more expensive service that also verifies users. Musk apparently told employees to figure out how to implement the feature by Nov. 7 or he will fire them.

Thursday, Oct. 27 and Friday, Oct. 28

Musk completed his Twitter purchase on Oct. 27.

He promptly fired CEO Parag Agrawal, CFO Ned Segal, Sean Edgett, general counsel, and Vijaya Gadde, head of legal, policy, trust, and safety. He dissolved the board of directors. Twitter filed to pull its shares from the public market.

Musk tweeted that Twitter will form a moderation council with “widely diverse viewpoints.” “No major content decisions or account reinstatements will happen before that council convenes,” he wrote.

Engineers were told to print out their last 30 to 60 days of code to review with Musk, then told to shred it, Platformer reported.

General Motors, a Tesla rival, temporarily halted paid advertising on Twitter. “We are engaging with Twitter to understand the direction of the platform under their new ownership,” GM told CNBC.

This story is developing.

Correction: An earlier version of this story misstated Dalana Brand's title. This story was updated on Nov. 1, 2022.