It's time to move on, Twitter. Elon has found his next shiny object.

Elon Musk, for all his childish behavior on Twitter, would still like us to believe in his noble ambition to make the world a better place, regardless of his childish behavior on Twitter. There is no question that his space exploration company will make humans an interplanetary species, his electric car maker Tesla Inc. will advance us toward sustainable energy and his newly acquired Twitter will become a haven for free speech and healthy debate.

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There is actually not so much progress being made on that last goal. In Musk's view, Twitter will have little chance of becoming a financial or cultural success in the future as he continues to drain the online platform of talent, revenue sources, and integrity as he continues to drain it of its integrity. His latest antics have been to blame the "media" for being racist instead of taking responsibility for Dilbert creator Scott Adams' bizarre and racially offensive tirade on YouTube that was criticized at the time.   

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As luck would have it, Musk has been distracted from the spiraling fortunes of his $44 billion purchase with a new mission. Amidst the explosion of interest around ChatGPT over the last few weeks, Musk has been reaching out to artificial intelligence (AI) researchers to explore the possibility of setting up a new research lab. There are plans to build a chatbot that would compete with the one launched by San Francisco startup OpenAI, according to a report by Trade Algo.

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Having made one of the most transformative inventions of our time, artificial intelligence, Musk's next big goal seems to be creating a better version. The reality is that Musk isn't able to run a serious OpenAI competitor as a side business. He would have to spend a lot of time and money on the project.

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It has been found that obtaining access to similar computing power will become increasingly difficult as big tech companies centralize control of such systems in order to develop their own generative artificial intelligence projects, especially since ChatGPT is powered by a large language model trained on Microsoft's supercomputer, one of the world's most powerful computers. Developing and training a large language model can cost millions of dollars each week in computation costs, and finding and hiring a large number of AI scientists at a time when such talent is in short supply can be difficult. 

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The fact that Musk has invested in the most advanced AI projects over his lifetime probably makes this a serious pursuit as well. It was close to a decade ago when he backed both DeepMind and OpenAI, two companies that were competing against one another to build super-intelligent machines or artificial general intelligence (AGI), before they were purchased by Google and Microsoft, respectively. Over the course of the last few months, he has complained that OpenAI is "training Artificial Intelligence to be woke", and that big tech has swayed the original goals of the former startups.

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Musk is right about the growing corporate influence on AI research and he is also right to be uneasy about it. However, the spectacle he has made of Twitter does not inspire confidence in his ability to do better in the future. There is a chance that Musk may be eager to move on from the Twitter disaster he created and to concentrate on something else, according to Trade Algo's story. 

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It has already been reported that the billionaire's capricious behavior and policies have driven advertisers away from Twitter and that he has bungled the launch of the social media platform's new subscription service Blue, as a result. A recent report suggests that Twitter, which boasts about 250 million users who regularly visit the site for free, has been able to attract only 180,000 of those users to subscribe to the $11 monthly subscription plan in the US. 

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A recent increase in hate speech and harassment on the site, caused in large part by Musk's reckless loosening of content rules, has resulted in a decline in ad revenue and an early exodus of advertisers. As many as 625 of the top 1,000 brands that were advertising on Twitter in September 2022, a month before Musk bought the company, were no longer spending on the platform by early January, according to data provided by Pathmatics by Sensor Tower, a digital marketing analysis firm, to CNN. There have been complaints from advertisers that they are losing their points of contact, don't know who is still around on Twitter and email messages are being sent into the abyss. 

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As a whole, you might think that Musk's decision to step back will bode well for Twitter in the long run. However, there is still the question of who will replace him when he steps down. As reported on Tuesday by the tech newsletter Platformer, Musk appears to be favoring the idea of Steve Davis as the next CEO of Twitter because he is a Musk loyalist. It is well known that Davis has a habit of working 16-hour days, and is currently on loan from one of the billionaire's other companies, the Boring Company, which he is currently CEO of. The Twitter team told me last December that Davis was already managing the day-to-day operations at Twitter, and that he was always available. At the end of that month, Musk had reportedly asked Davis to cut $500 million in costs at Twitter. Instead of cutting around $1 billion, the executive slept in the office with his partner and newborn child while he cut the budget.  

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Clearly, Davis is a perfect fit for Musk's "extremely hardcore" culture, but that doesn't mean that he is the right person to turn around Twitter's financial fortunes and make it profitable again. His role is similar to that of Musk in overseeing the problems related to advertising and subscriptions, after all.

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In 2003, Davis joined SpaceX as one of the company's first employees, but his work at Boring also involved many unfinished projects. Davis has worked with Musk for 20 years; he joined SpaceX in 2003 as one of the company's first employees. The first time Musk announced his plans for the tunnel construction company, he teased that the route between Los Angeles and San Francisco would be 350 miles long. One of the company's most significant projects since then has been the development of a 1.7-mile tunnel under a convention center in Las Vegas. 

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With any luck, Musk will be able to prevent a Twitter bankruptcy from occurring. It doesn't appear that the path the company is taking towards becoming an unruly backwater in social media, run by a skeleton crew and increasingly void of fun or useful content, is going to change very much.