- Jack Dorsey used to think that Twitter was "the closest form of global consciousness."
- But not anymore. The platform's co-founder and ex-CEO thinks AI has taken its place.
- "They have far more access to public and private thoughts and questions," he said.
X, formerly Twitter, isn't the "closest form of global consciousness" anymore, says the platform's co-founder and ex-CEO Jack Dorsey.
"I once thought Twitter was the closest form of global consciousness," Dorsey, 47, said in an X post on Wednesday.
"Now it seems the corporate AI models have become that," he added. "They have far more access to public and private thoughts and questions."
Dorsey co-founded the text-based social media platform back in March 2006. He also served as the company's CEO on two separate occasions — his first stint ran from 2007 to 2008, and he also had the top job from 2015 to 2021.
Twitter was eventually sold to billionaire Elon Musk in October 2022, a move that was fervently supported by Dorsey himself.
"I love Twitter. Twitter is the closest thing we have to a global consciousness," Dorsey said of the company's sale in April 2022. "Elon is the singular solution I trust. I trust his mission to extend the light of consciousness."
Though Dorsey would go on to criticize Musk's management, he appears to have come round to Musk's changes. Earlier this month, Dorsey praised X, calling it a form of "freedom technology."
Representatives for Dorsey and X didn't immediately respond to requests for comment from BI sent outside regular business hours.
Dorsey isn't the only social media titan who has recognised the immense potential and importance of AI.
On May 15, Amazon-backed AI startup Anthropic announced that Instagram co-founder and former CTO Mike Krieger was coming on board as the company's chief product officer.
"The potential for AI to positively impact the world is immense, and I believe Anthropic has the talent, principles, and technology to help realize that potential," Krieger said of his new role.
The same can be said of Instagram's owner Meta. The social media giant's founder Mark Zuckerberg has frequently telegraphed his ambitions to turn the company into an AI leader.
"In terms of investment priorities, AI will be our biggest investment area in 2024 for both engineering and compute resources," Zuckerberg said in an earnings call last year.
In January, Zuckerberg told The Verge that Meta would own more than 340,000 Nvidia H100 GPUs by the end of this year. The chips are highly coveted by tech companies, who can use them to train and deploy their AI models.
"We have built up the capacity to do this at a scale that may be larger than any other individual company. I think a lot of people may not appreciate that," Zuckerberg said.