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Twitter to Test Longed-for Edit Button

The Twitter App loads on an iPhone. Reuters file photo
The Twitter App loads on an iPhone. Reuters file photo
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Twitter to Test Longed-for Edit Button

The Twitter App loads on an iPhone. Reuters file photo
The Twitter App loads on an iPhone. Reuters file photo

Twitter announced Tuesday it will soon start experimenting with an edit button, but only on its monthly subscription service at first.

The inability to tweak tweets after firing them off has been a key complaint among users of the one-to-many messaging platform.

Word that the company would start testing an edit feature on Twitter Blue came after newly-named board member Elon Musk conducted an online poll.

In a tweet, Musk asked if people wanted an edit button at Twitter. Nearly 4.4 million votes were cast, some 73 percent of them saying "yes."

"Now that everyone is asking... yes, we've been working on an edit feature since last year," Twitter posted on its communications account.

"No, we didn’t get the idea from a poll," it added, poking fun at the Tesla boss.

According to Jay Sullivan, the company's head of consumer product, "Edit" has been the most requested Twitter feature "for many years."

"People want to be able to fix (sometimes embarrassing) mistakes, typos and hot takes in the moment. They currently work around this by deleting and tweeting again," Sullivan said in a tweet-thread.

The San Francisco-based internet firm said it will kick off testing in coming months to figure out what works when it comes to letting users tinker with posts after they have gone live.

Twitter Blue lets people pay a monthly subscription fee of $3 to access special content or features.

Blue is available on the Twitter application for Apple or Android smartphones in Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the United States, according to the company.

Twitter also announced Tuesday that Musk will join its board, boosting hopes the eccentric entrepreneur will lift the social media company's prospects -- although some observers expressed wariness of the billionaire's influence.

Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal called Musk "a passionate believer and intense critic of the service which is exactly what we need," while Musk said he looked forward to soon making "significant improvements to Twitter."

Musk, who also leads the SpaceX venture and is the world's richest man, on Monday had announced his purchase of 73.5 million Twitter shares, or 9.2 percent of the company's common stock.

Jack Dorsey, the co-founder of Twitter who stepped down as CEO last year, had long opposed an "edit" button on the basis that users could change a tweet that had already been widely shared, changing its meaning or context.

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Technology

Job Threats, Rogue Bots: Five Hot Issues in AI

A Delhi police officer outside the venue of the 'India AI Impact Summit 2026'. Arun SANKAR / AFP
A Delhi police officer outside the venue of the 'India AI Impact Summit 2026'. Arun SANKAR / AFP
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Job Threats, Rogue Bots: Five Hot Issues in AI

A Delhi police officer outside the venue of the 'India AI Impact Summit 2026'. Arun SANKAR / AFP
A Delhi police officer outside the venue of the 'India AI Impact Summit 2026'. Arun SANKAR / AFP

As artificial intelligence evolves at a blistering pace, world leaders and thousands of other delegates will discuss how to handle the technology at the AI Impact Summit, which opens Monday in New Delhi.

Here are five big issues on the agenda:

Job loss fears

Generative AI threatens to disrupt myriad industries, from software development and factory work to music and the movies.

India -- with its large customer service and tech support sectors -- could be vulnerable, and shares in the country's outsourcing firms have plunged in recent days, partly due to advances in AI assistant tools.

"Automation, intelligent systems, and data-driven processes are increasingly taking over routine and repetitive tasks, reshaping traditional job structures," the summit's "human capital" working group says.

"While these developments can drive efficiency and innovation, they also risk displacing segments of the workforce," widening socio-economic divides, it warns.

Bad robots

The Delhi summit is the fourth in a series of international AI meetings. The first in 2023 was called the AI Safety Summit, and preventing real-world harm is still a key goal.

In the United States, families of people who have taken their own lives have sued OpenAI, accusing ChatGPT of having contributed to the suicides. The company says it has made efforts to strengthen its safeguards.

Elon Musk's Grok AI tool also recently sparked global outrage and bans in several countries over its ability to create sexualized deepfakes depicting real people, including children, in skimpy clothing.

Other concerns range from copyright violations to scammers using AI tools to produce perfectly spelled phishing emails.

Energy demands

Tech giants are spending hundreds of billions of dollars on AI infrastructure, building data centers packed with cutting-edge microchips, and also, in some cases, nuclear plants to power them.

The International Energy Agency projects that electricity consumption from data centers will double by 2030, fueled by the AI boom.

In 2024, data centers accounted for an estimated 1.5 percent of global electricity consumption, it says.

Alongside concerns over planet-warming carbon emissions are worries about water use to cool the data centers servers, which can lead to shortages on hot days.

Moves to regulate

In South Korea, a wide-ranging law regulating artificial intelligence took effect in January, requiring companies to tell users when products use generative AI.

Many countries are planning similar moves, despite a warning from US Vice President JD Vance last year against "excessive regulation" that could stifle innovation.

The European Union's Artificial Intelligence Act allows regulators to ban AI systems deemed to pose "unacceptable risks" to society.

That could include identifying people in real time in public spaces or evaluating criminal risk based on biometric data alone.

'Everyone dies'

More existential fears have also been expressed by AI insiders who believe the technology is marching towards so-called "Artificial General Intelligence", when machines' abilities match those of humans.

OpenAI and rival startup Anthropic have seen public resignations of staff members who have spoken out about the ethical implications of their technology.

Anthropic warned last week that its latest chatbot models could be nudged towards "knowingly supporting -- in small ways -- efforts toward chemical weapon development and other heinous crimes".

Researcher Eliezer Yudkowsky, author of the 2025 book "If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies: Why Superhuman AI Would Kill Us All" has also compared AI to the development of nuclear weapons.

Technology

OpenAI Hires Creator of 'OpenClaw' AI Agent Tool

FILE PHOTO: OpenAI logo is seen in this illustration taken May 20, 2024. REUTERS/Dado Ruvic/Illustration/File Photo
FILE PHOTO: OpenAI logo is seen in this illustration taken May 20, 2024. REUTERS/Dado Ruvic/Illustration/File Photo
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OpenAI Hires Creator of 'OpenClaw' AI Agent Tool

FILE PHOTO: OpenAI logo is seen in this illustration taken May 20, 2024. REUTERS/Dado Ruvic/Illustration/File Photo
FILE PHOTO: OpenAI logo is seen in this illustration taken May 20, 2024. REUTERS/Dado Ruvic/Illustration/File Photo

OpenAI has hired the Austrian creator of OpenClaw, an artificial intelligence tool able to execute real-world tasks, the US startup's head Sam Altman said on Sunday.

AI agent tool OpenClaw has fascinated -- and spooked -- the tech world since researcher Peter Steinberger built it in November to help organize his digital life.

A Reddit-like pseudo social network for OpenClaw agents called Moltbook, where chatbots converse, has also grabbed headlines and provoked soul-searching over AI.

Elon Musk called Moltbook "the very early stages of the singularity" -- a term for the moment when human intelligence is overwhelmed by AI forever, although some people have questioned to what extent humans are manipulating the bots' posts.

Steinberger "is joining OpenAI to drive the next generation of personal agents," Altman wrote in an X post.

"He is a genius with a lot of amazing ideas about the future of very smart agents interacting with each other to do very useful things for people," AFP quoted him as saying.

"We expect this will quickly become core to our product offerings," Altman wrote, saying that OpenClaw would remain an open-source project within a foundation supported by OpenAI.

"The future is going to be extremely multi-agent and it's important to us to support open source as part of that."

Users of OpenClaw download the tool, and connect it to generative AI models such as ChatGPT.

They then communicate with their AI agent through WhatsApp or Telegram, as they would with a friend or colleague.

Many users gush over the tool's futuristic abilities to send emails and buy things online, but others report an overall chaotic experience with added cybersecurity risks.

Only a small percentage of OpenAI's nearly one billion users pay for subscription services, putting pressure on the company to find new revenue sources.

It has begun testing advertisements and sponsored content in the massively popular ChatGPT, spawning privacy concerns as it looks for ways to start balancing its hundreds of billions in spending commitments.

Technology

India Plans AI 'Data City' on Staggering Scale

As India races to narrow the AI gap with the US and China, it is planning a vast new "data city" to power digital growth on a staggering scale. Arun SANKAR / AFP
As India races to narrow the AI gap with the US and China, it is planning a vast new "data city" to power digital growth on a staggering scale. Arun SANKAR / AFP
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India Plans AI 'Data City' on Staggering Scale

As India races to narrow the AI gap with the US and China, it is planning a vast new "data city" to power digital growth on a staggering scale. Arun SANKAR / AFP
As India races to narrow the AI gap with the US and China, it is planning a vast new "data city" to power digital growth on a staggering scale. Arun SANKAR / AFP

As India races to narrow the artificial intelligence gap with the United States and China, it is planning a vast new "data city" to power digital growth on a staggering scale, the man spearheading the project says.
"The AI revolution is here, no second thoughts about it," said Nara Lokesh, information technology minister for Andhra Pradesh state, which is positioning the city of Visakhapatnam as a cornerstone of India's AI push.
"And as a nation... we have taken a stand that we've got to embrace it," he told AFP ahead of an international AI summit next week in New Delhi.
Lokesh boasts the state has secured investment agreements of $175 billion involving 760 projects, including a $15 billion investment by Google for its largest AI infrastructure hub outside the United States.
And a joint venture between India's Reliance Industries, Canada's Brookfield and US firm Digital Realty is investing $11 billion to develop an AI data center in the same city.
Visakhapatnam -- home to around two million people and popularly known as "Vizag" -- is better known for its cricket ground that hosts international matches than cutting-edge technology.
But the southeastern port city is now being pitched as a landing point for submarine internet cables linking India to Singapore.
"The data city is going to come in one ecosystem... with a 100 kilometer (60 mile) radius," Lokesh said. For comparison, Taiwan is roughly 100 kilometers wide.
- 'Whole nine yards' -
Lokesh said the plan goes far beyond data connectivity, adding that his state had "received close to 25 percent of all foreign direct investments" to India in 2025.
"It's not just about the data centers," he explained while outlining a sweeping vision of change, with Andhra Pradesh offering land at one US cent per acre (three per hectare) for major investors.
"I'm chasing the companies that make those servers that go sit in those data centers, the companies that make the entire air conditioning, the water-cooling system -- the whole nine yards."
The 43-year-old, Stanford-educated minister is the son of Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister N. Chandrababu Naidu, who helped turn Hyderabad into a major technology hub that is dubbed "Cyberabad".
They are allies of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who will host the AI Impact Summit from Monday.
India is now third in a global AI power ranking -- sitting above South Korea and Japan -- based on more than 40 indicators from patents to private funding calculated by Stanford University's Institute for Human-Centered AI.
With more than a billion internet users, India has seen a surge of investment as generative AI players seek inroads to the world's most populous country.
Microsoft said in December it will invest $17.5 billion to help build the country's artificial intelligence infrastructure, with CEO Satya Nadella calling it the firm's "largest investment ever in Asia".
But critics say India lags in access to high-end computing power or commercial AI deployment, and remains more a consumer than creator of the cutting-edge technology.
Some question whether data centers will create meaningful employment when up and running, but Lokesh rejects that.
"Every industrial revolution has always created more jobs than it has displaced," he said.
"But it has created those jobs in countries that have embraced the industrial revolution."
- 'Learned from China' -
Lokesh argues that the jobs and economic benefits would more than compensate for the giveaway cost of land.
He said the state government had accounted for the vast electricity and water demands for the energy-hungry industry, and would tap "surplus water" that drains into the Bay of Bengal to cool the massive data centers.
"It's a crime that so much water during monsoons goes into our oceans," he said.
He cited China as an inspiration -- admiring how India's rival had "been able to systematically bring people out of poverty" at speed.
The state's plan to create industrial clusters was something he had "learned from China".
With a target of six gigawatts of data center capacity -- three already signed and another three in the pipeline -- Andhra Pradesh is betting that speed and scale will give it an edge.
New Delhi last year agreed to "in-principle approval" for six 1.2 GW nuclear power plants at Kovvada in Andhra Pradesh.
"We are on a journey," Lokesh said. "We will execute these projects at a pace that the country has never seen".