Author: Thamer Alnajadat

📷 Image Credits: TechCrunch

The social media platform Elon Musk’s X is getting ready to make “likes” private. This move might make it difficult for users to distinguish between content they’ve bookmarked and content they’ve favorited. Employees of the corporation have posted fresh content, claiming that the purpose of hiding likes is to safeguard people’s reputations and encourage interaction by letting them favorite content that strikes them as “edgy.”

It’s unclear if this is the ideal way to address the issues X is attempting to resolve, including giving its system more signal so it can more accurately tailor its material to your interests.

Given that X, the corporation that was formerly known as Twitter, already offered a private option to save posts on the platform—bookmarks—the adjustment seems a little pointless. Although X’s bookmarks are designed to save topics or threads you might wish to read later, they also functioned as a more discreet option to “like.”

Users will be able to view who liked their posts and the total number of likes for all of their answers and posts, which further adds to the confusion. Put otherwise, a private “like” is only semi-secret because the poster is aware of it and could potentially reveal someone’s likes if they so choose. Given that it’s not a fully private system, people might still be reluctant to “like” postings that contain explicit content or take extreme political stances, for example, if X is attempting to encourage “edgy” engagement.

Instead, people might keep saving those favorite posts they don’t want to take the chance of exposing using X’s bookmarks or even third-party link-saving software.

Employees of X have posted that users would no longer be able to explore someone’s likes through a tab on their profile or see the likes connected to other people’s postings. This takes away a helpful function for discovery but may also help stop others from spying.

For example, if you’re new to X, you may look through the profiles of people you follow to see who else they would find intriguing. Alternatively, you may use someone else’s likes to gain an idea of the kinds of stuff they typically enjoy when looking through their profile to decide whether or not to follow them.

The true issue with likes is that their introduction changed the purpose of the bookmarking function. The feature was more of a “favorite” than a show of support before it was rebranded—as was popular at the time—from a star to a heart icon. It was theoretically possible for users to favorite anything, as doing so did not imply that they genuinely liked or agreed with the content.

Instead, it might have been something they were just recording, like a politician’s remarks you strongly disagreed with but wanted to keep in mind, a post that needed more investigation, a collection of posts you were gathering to eventually compile in Moments (RIP), the most disturbing or absurd posts made by a billionaire, and more. You have plausible deniability since no one could legitimately claim that you were “liking” the content because you weren’t clicking the heart icon.

Users were furious when Twitter changed from stars to hearts. They realized that hearts meant something completely different, and that changed their behaviour on the social network.

The Favourite feature, on the other hand, might indicate a variety of things, such a “thank you, a handshake, a tip of the hat, or even a Robert De Niro stare down,” according to TechCrunch at the time. At the time, TechCrunch predicted that switching from stars to hearts wouldn’t address Twitter’s more significant problems with increasing user numbers and engagement, and in most cases, it didn’t. After nearly constant growth for several quarters, the corporation had to find a way out.

Twitter later introduced Bookmarks to bring back the ability to save private content, including postings you didn’t necessarily agree with and ones you meant to refer to again in response to the criticism over the change.

Now that X is once more rearranging the functionality surrounding the “like,” a lot of people are expressing their displeasure. Many alternatives to this proposed change are being discussed on X, such as making private likes an option rather than a default and allowing anonymous “likes” via long-pressing the heart icon. Others cautioned that since artists used legions of bots to promote their material and help them make money, privatizing likes could lead to manipulation.

Additionally, there is a different approach, which former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey hinted at. Even while we disagree with a lot of what Dorsey says these days—that Nostr is the social media of the future, for example, or that Bluesky is a platform for censorship—he makes sense when it comes to the likes vs. stars argument.

In a post on X, Dorsey wrote: “‘like’/❤️ was once a ⭐️. We ought never to have strayed from that.

More than 700 people have liked his post, and numerous comments have echoed his thoughts.

X doesn’t need to hide likes if its goal is to add additional signals for its algorithm rather than more privacy surrounding user engagement features. To achieve the same result, a much less drastic alteration would be to simply replace the heart icon with a star.

The explosion of generative artificial intelligence is like a gift that keeps on giving for chip designer Nvidia (NVDA.O), which opens a new tab.
Nvidia anticipates increased demand for its graphics processors as a result of new AI models that can produce video and have human-like voice interactions, following a spike in demand for the company’s products caused by Big Tech’s haste to launch chatbots.
“A lot of the information in life needs to be supported by physics and visuals. Thus, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang told Reuters on Wednesday that “is the next big thing.”

“You have access to a tonne of material that you are learning from, along with 3D video. Thus, those systems will be fairly big.”
Demand for Nvidia’s Grace Hopper chips, such as the H200, which was originally utilized in OpenAI’s GPT-4o, a multimodal model capable of realistic speech dialogue with the capacity to interact across text and image, has increased due to the necessity for additional processing power to train and run complex AI systems.

Other Nvidia clients have also created AI picture or video generation platforms, such as Google DeepMind (GOOGL.O), which opens a new tab, and Meta Platforms (META.O), which opens a new tab.
After recording a five-fold increase in sales at its data center division in the first quarter, the chipmaker predicted quarterly revenue on Wednesday that was far higher than expected.
On Thursday, Nvidia surged 9% as the chipmaker’s impressive revenue prediction helped to boost stocks in the semiconductor industry as a whole.

According to Derren Nathan, head of equity analysis at Hargreaves Lansdown, “the large language models need to be increasingly multimodal, understanding not just video but also text, speech, 2D, and 3D images.” The demand is widespread.
Another significant factor driving demand for Nvidia chips is the emergence of AI video models for the automobile sector.
In an effort to pursue autonomous driving, Tesla (TSLA.O) has increased the number of processors in its AI training cluster to roughly 35,000 H100s, according to Nvidia’s finance head Colette Kress on a call following the company’s results on Wednesday.

According to Kress, Nvidia’s data center division is likely to have the top enterprise vertical this year being the automobile sector.
“It (video generation) is certainly one of the strong and already proven use cases for AI and it is extending beyond just content production,” Hargreaves Lansdown’s Nathan said.

The potential acquisition of HubSpot (HUBS.N), a $31 billion U.S. marketing software maker, by Google parent Alphabet (GOOGL.O) would strengthen the company’s position against Microsoft (MSFT.O) and expand its ability to provide cloud-based applications to businesses.
According to Reuters last month, Google was considering making a deal for HubSpot. According to analysts and investment bankers cited in interviews, this would be Google’s largest transaction to date, boosting its offerings in terms of business-serving apps and goods.

Google is already posing a threat to Microsoft Office’s hegemony with its collaborative tools, Google Workspace. According to Cowen analyst Derrick Wood, Google would become a rival in the “customer relationship management” space, which Microsoft serves with its Dynamics 365 products if it were to acquire HubSpot.
“It does appear that Google has aspirations to try to take market share from Microsoft in the productivity suite, and they can use HubSpot to bundle applications together for clients,” Wood stated.

Requests for comments from Google, HubSpot, and Microsoft representatives went unanswered.
Amidst a broader economic downturn, HubSpot, a company that provides marketing tools for small and medium-sized enterprises, is looking for strategies to sustain its sales growth.
During this month’s first-quarter earnings call, HubSpot CEO Yamini Rangan stated that customer demand has decreased as small businesses worried about the financial effects of rising interest rates.

Despite customers cutting back on their spending, HubSpot has continued to thrive, announcing a 23% increase in sales and a 15% operating profit in the first quarter. Equity analysts have cautioned, meanwhile, that if Google hadn’t expressed interest in acquiring the company, its shares would have suffered.
After HubSpot’s most recent earnings release, the majority of analysts that follow the company cut their price targets for the shares. Some have cautioned that the company’s focus on smaller firms, which distinguishes it from larger enterprise rivals like Salesforce (CRM.N), opens new tab, and Oracle (ORCL.N), opens new tab, might turn into a liability if a downturn makes it more difficult for those clients to acquire funding.