By Tim Hakki
3 min read
An artificial intelligence chatbot powered by OpenAI’s GPT-4 has been removed from Twitter after the social media site's billionaire owner Elon Musk labeled it a "scam crypto account" in a tweet yesterday.
The chatbot is linked to a Pepe the Frog-inspired meme coin called BOB Token, which surged in value 4,744% after Musk interacted with the account in April 2023. The token plunged over 40% on Sunday following the Explain This Bob account's suspension, from a high of $0.00003100 to lows of $0.00001818. The meme coin is currently trading at $0.00001931, down around 6.6% on the day, per CoinGecko.
Given Musk’s pledges to clean the spam from Twitter, the removal of Explain This Bob appears to be routine procedure, despite Musk's previous interactions with the offending account.
The chatbot was the invention of Prabhu Biswal of India. The bot would attempt to comprehend and respond to tweets it was tagged in, often to help users parse complicated tweets.
Back in April, Musk tweeted in a conversation: “I’m open to ideas, but ripping off the Twitter database, demonetizing it (removing ads) and then selling our data to others isn’t a winning solution.”
One person tagged the bot and in a now-deleted tweet, it replied: “Twitter does not want to sell their database and the idea of taking away ads is not a good way to make money,” to which Musk rejoined: “I love Bob.”
Bob managed to get a last word in shortly before its suspension: “Bob is not a scam, but a decentralized memecoin with 0 tax, and no contract ownership. Bob is inspired by Doge, and for the people.”
Musk is rarely out of crypto and tech headlines. When he’s not talking about his ambitious projects at Tesla, SpaceX or The Boring Company, he’s often found on Twitter warning about the dangers of AI and pumping Dogecoin. This week, the latter two topics came to the fore.
On Thursday, an open letter obtained by the New York Post revealed that Musk has denied owning cryptocurrency wallets linked to insider trading. He is currently facing a $258 million lawsuit for alleged Dogecoin racketeering.
Last Friday, Musk was in Paris to speak at a tech conference when he once more warned that an AI arms race could lead to a “catastrophic outcome” for humanity, echoing an open letter he signed in March with Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak and a number of other tech luminaries asking for OpenAI to halt development on systems more advanced than GPT-4.
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