Amazon is setting up shop in the Calgary area, Twitter has been fudging its user numbers for years, and a robot picks a fight with Elon Musk.
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From Twitter today comes news that Amazon is setting up shop in the Calgary area – but before you get too excited, no it’s not for its second corporate headquarters the tech giant has planned that’s spurred 238 cities across North America to submit proposals. Amazon will be building a new massive 600,000 square foot distribution centre in Balzac, which is about 20 minutes north of Calgary. Construction of the distribution centre will create 150 jobs before it’s completed next fall, and the centre itself will be home to 750 full time positions. Currently, Amazon has around 4,000 full time employees in Canada, with four distribution centres in the Toronto area, two in Vancouver, as well as corporate offices in Ottawa, Toronto, and Vancouver.
Trending on Reddit is the admission from Twitter that it’s been incorrectly reporting the number of monthly active users for almost three years, which is the single most important metric to the social media site. The company acknowledged the mistake in its latest quarterly earnings report after it found that it was including users of certain third-party applications that should not have been considered monthly active users. The disparities range between one and two million users depending on the quarter. However, the company notes that it experienced a 14 per cent year over year increase in daily active users and expects to be profitable for the first time in the fourth quarter.
And finally from Facebook, Saudi Arabia has become the first country to offer its citizenship to a humanoid robot named Sophia in an effort to promote the country as the place to develop artificial intelligence. However, Sophia is already picking fights with Elon Musk, who has famously warned about the dangers of AI. When asked about the potential for AI to become self-aware and create a world where robots have power over humans, Sophia told her interviewer that he had been reading too much Elon Musk and watching too many Hollywood movies. She added that if he was nice to her, she would be nice to him, and to treat her like an input-output system. Musk is not one to shy away from confrontation, so he of course tweeted his response later in the day saying that Sophia should be fed The Godfather as input, rhetorically asking what’s the worst that could happen?