Elon Musk sues law firm that defeated his bid to walk away from $44b Twitter deal

Welcome to another round of global roundup.

The tech space has been nothing short of remarkable and eventful, especially for social media users who have found themselves in new but familiar terrains because of the arrogance of their previous landlords.

A new Twitter policy that limited the number of views users can see per day was introduced by Elon Musk on Monday, kicking off an exciting week. He claimed that since the platform’s users were becoming fixated on it, they needed to go out and spend time with their friends and loved ones.

That singular act caused quite a stir and a ripple effect. one of which is the launching of Threads by Instagram, a microblogging platform that Instagram users can seamlessly be onboarded. Threads has since crossed over 30 million registered users since its launch according to reports.

Elon Musk has come out to “take shots” at the app, and its logo and even accused Meta of cheating and stealing its data and property. Twitter is threatening legal action against Meta, accusing the social media giant of poaching former employees to create a “copycat” application.

But that’s not all, Elon Musk has now sued the elite law firm Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz to recover most of a $90 million fee it received from Twitter for defeating his bid to walk away from his $44 billion buyout of the social media company.

Well, this week is not all about Elon Musk and Twitter. Check out the other stories making the rounds below.

Here is a summary of the bulletin

• Elon Musk sues law firm that defeated its bid to walkout on Twitter bid
• Goldman Sachs eyeing an exit from Apple partnership
• Spotify looking to add full-length music videos to its app
• ChatGPT facing low user traffic
• OpenAI makes GPT-4 generally available

Read also: Apple becomes first publicly traded company to hit $3 trillion cap

Musk suing law firm that defeated his walkout lawsuit

Elon Musk has sued the elite law firm Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz, the law firm that used to represent Twitter, to recover most of a $90 million fee it received from Twitter for defeating his bid to walk away from his $44 billion buyout of the social media company.

In 2022, the law firm Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz represented Twitter in a high-profile legal dispute with Elon Musk, who was trying to backtrack on an agreement to buy the social media company.

The complaint by Musk’s X Corp, which owns Twitter, was filed on Wednesday in the California Superior Court in San Francisco. Musk accused Wachtell of exploiting Twitter by accepting, in the final days before Oct. 27, 2022, buyout closed, huge “success” fees doled out by departing Twitter executives who were grateful that Musk would be forced to close.

“Wachtell exploited a corporate client left unprotected by lame duck fiduciaries who had lost their motivation to act in Twitter’s best interest pending its imminent sale to Elon Musk,” according to lawyers for X Corp., Twitter’s new parent company under Musk’s ownership.

The complaint also quoted former Twitter director Martha Lane Fox who, upon learning how much lawyers would be paid, emailed general counsel Sean Edgett: “O My Freaking God.”

Wachtell did not immediately respond to requests for comment. Gadde, Fox and Edgett are not parties to the lawsuit.

Goldman Sachs eyeing an exit from Apple partnership

Apple has developed a deep relationship with Goldman Sachs through Apple Card, but apparently, it’s an unhappy marriage. Four years after partnering with Apple on the launch of the Apple Card, Goldman Sachs may be eyeing an exit.

The Wall Street Journal reports that Goldman is “looking for a way out” of its high-profile deal with Apple, which recently expanded to include savings accounts for Apple Card holders. 

Goldman Sachs is in talks with American Express about transferring its Apple partnership. This comes after Goldman revealed in January that it had lost over $1 billion on the Apple Card deal so far.

The report explains that Goldman is “in talks to offload those businesses and its credit-card partnership to Amex.” Goldman has already significantly scaled back its efforts to break into the consumer finance industry.

A deal with Amex isn’t imminent or assured, people familiar with the conversations said, and it could take a while to transfer the partnership in any case. Apple would have to agree to a transfer. The tech company is aware of the talks, which have been ongoing for months, the people said.

Spotify looking to add full-length music videos to its app

Spotify Technology is mulling adding full-length music videos to its app, which could help the music streaming platform compete with TikTok and Alphabet Inc’s YouTube, Bloomberg News reported on Friday, citing people familiar with the matter.

Spotify, which already has more than 100,000 podcasts with videos, has begun talks with partners about the product, the report said. It is looking to attract more Gen Z audiences away from YouTube and TikTok’s short-form video platforms. YouTube already has a music streaming service dubbed YouTube Music, with music videos.

Recently, the streaming giant said it was planning a higher and more expensive subscription option than the premium subscription which is the highest currently. The new package is to be called ‘Supremium’ and is expected to include high-fidelity audio, Bloomberg News reports.

More recently, Spotify announced the launch of Afrobeats: Journey of a Billion Streams, a dedicated one-of-its-kind site to capture the essence of Afrobeat and its cultural significance from its origin to its present-day growth.

ChatGPT facing low user traffic

It seems the frenzy around AI, and ChatGPT in particular is starting to wear off, as reports show a decline in monthly visits to the site. The popular AI chatbot launched in November, saw monthly traffic to its website and unique visitors decline for the first time ever in June, according to analytics firm Similarweb.

Worldwide desktop and mobile traffic to the ChatGPT website decreased by 9.7% in June from May, while unique visitors to ChatGPT’s website dropped 5.7%. The amount of time visitors spent on the website was also down 8.5%, the data show.

Decreasing traffic is a sign of the chatbot’s novelty wearing off, said Similarweb’s Senior Insights Manager David Carr, while RBC Capital Markets analyst Rishi Jaluria explained the data points to more demand for generative AI with real-time information.

The report follows several conversations around the safety and regulation of generative AI globally. The platform is also facing several copyright lawsuits against it for using content and citing sources without obtaining proper consent from the owners.

This week, Two authors, Paul Tremblay, author of “The Cabin at the End of the World,” and Mona Awad, author of “Bunny” and “13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl,” filed a lawsuit against OpenAI alleging that their copyrighted books were used to train ChatGPT, without their consent.

OpenAI makes GPT-4 generally available

This week, OpenAI the makers of ChatGPT, has announced the general availability of GPT-4, its latest text-generating model, through its API.

Now, all existing OpenAI API developers “with a history of successful payments” can access GPT-4. The company plans to open up access to new developers by the end of this month, and then start raising availability limits after that “depending on compute availability.”

“Millions of developers have requested access to the GPT-4 API since March, and the range of innovative products leveraging GPT-4 is growing every day,” OpenAI wrote in a blog post. “We envision a future where chat-based models can support any use case. ”

GPT-4 can generate text (including code) and accept image and text inputs — an improvement over GPT-3.5, its predecessor, which only accepted text — and performs at a “human level” on various professional and academic benchmarks. Like previous GPT models from OpenAI, GPT-4 was trained using publicly available data, including from public web pages, as well as data that OpenAI licensed.

The image-understanding capability isn’t available to all OpenAI customers just yet. OpenAI’s testing it with a single partner, Be My Eyes, to start with. But it hasn’t indicated when it’ll open it up to the wider customer base. You can read more here.