Author: Toby Shapshak

After inexplicably firing CEO Sam Altman, the board of OpenAI has proved one thing: AI can easily be smarter than humans. Last Friday, the artificial intelligence (AI) firm that rocked the world a year ago when it launched its ChatGPT chatbot, made the sudden announcement it was firing Altman because it “concluded that he was not consistently candid in his communications with the board, hindering its ability to exercise its responsibilities”. Sam Altman, who co-founded the AI firm in 2015 with backing from Elon Musk and Microsoft, was shown the door for these nebulous reasons – causing a sudden crisis…

Sam Bankman-Fried is not the only guilty person involved in crypto’s fall from grace. There are many others who have made small fortunes off of the rapid rise and just as rapid fall of this new form of money and people’s lust for lucre. For some, it might just have been a hope for a better return on investment, for others a weird middle finger to the establishment. Investors in the FTX Exchange that Bankman-Fried built and ran were assured of many things when placing their bets – er, investing their bitcoin – but not that a backdoor to these…

It’s been a year since Elon Musk bought Twitter promising to rejuvenate the “digital town square”. By all measures, it has been an obscene failure. After paying an inflated $44 billion, Twitter is now worth half that, Musk has admitted. Most of its advertisers have fled – in no small part because the self-proclaimed “free-speech absolutist” retrenched the actual human beings doing the moderation and it’s now a disinformation quagmire. Last month the European Union launched an investigation into X over “the alleged spreading of terrorist and violent content and hate speech” relating to the Hamas-Israel war. Musk is suing…

As the Springboks celebrated their astounding Rugby World Cup win on Saturday, 28 October, President Cyril Ramaphosa was standing next to Siya Kolisi as the captain held the Web Ellis Cup aloft. A few moments later, Ramaphosa held one side of the trophy and then both – holding it to the sky like one of the jubilant players. As the camera panned up and over the crowd of excited Springboks in that Paris stadium, was the man who had engineered all of it. From installing Kolisi as the country’s first black Springbok captain, to winning the World Cup in Japan…

South African startup Bank Zero says it’s still going to charge you nothing to bank with it. “We see our promise of Zero bank fees as central to our brand’s unique value proposition, as shown by our four-year track record,” says chair Michael Jordaan. “Some believed this was a gimmick, but in fact, it’s fundamental to who we are. There’s one pricing structure for all our customers, and those fees that are Zero will stay Zero.” Jordaan says Bank Zero offers free core banking, with only extras being charged. Another key innovation, he adds, is the same pricing structure for…

Every year I have a little conversation with myself about whether to pay the SABC’s absurd annual licence fees for owning a television. It’s not a lot of money I tell myself, and I am legally (and therefore ethically) required to pay it. This is despite me not being a consumer of the SABC in any way. Like many South Africans, I haven’t been a SABC TV watcher for decades. Like many South Africans (who can afford it) my primary news and entertainment source has been DStv. Since Netflix and Showmax arrived and streaming services became the de facto form…

After posting a video on X/Twitter supposedly showing armed Hamas fighters going to the homes of Israelis, Ian Miles Cheong wrote: “Imagine if this was happening in your neighbourhood, to your family”. Except the video clearly showed Israeli police, according to a community note on the post. But the video posted by Cheong, a right-wing commentator, was viewed, liked and shared on Twitter (the social network formerly known to have decent content moderation) over 50 million times and it’s still up (I won’t link to any war-related disinformation posts). Another post – from an anonymous premium account – claimed that…

Africa can get as much as a 50% boost in its economy if it can capture only 10% of the global Artificial Intelligence (AI), says Lilian Barnard, the president of Microsoft Africa. “We are excited and optimistic, because it brings hope to Africa. In health, education, sustainability and more it will help to solve challenges,” she told Microsoft South Africa’s ‘A New Era with AI’ event in Sandton this week. “We believe this technology can give us an upward trajectory when it comes to the African economy. In fact, analysts predict we can increase the African economy by 50% if…

Facebook’s decades-long disregard for its users’ mental health is coming back to bite it in the form of a major lawsuit by several states in the US. The attorneys general of 42 States have sued Instagram owner Meta – or Facebook as we all still call it – for the callous and cynical way they have profited from the world’s youth while damaging their mental health. “Meta has harnessed powerful and unprecedented technologies to entice, engage, and ultimately ensnare youth and teens,” according to the 233-page lawsuit. “Its motive is profit.” And that is exactly why Facebook did it. Money,…

Only Google would have the chutzpah to call an invasive new way to track people online “Privacy Sandbox”. This feature, found in its Chrome browser is supposed to be a move away from the intrusive tracking of what has become of the once-useful cookies. This little piece of software was a clever idea when it first emerged in Netscape in 1994. It was a way for a website to store your login details and other pertinent information and these first-party cookies were private. But as search and advertising emerged as the new default business model of the internet, this software…