Nick Pickles, the head of global affairs at X, announced his resignation on Thursday, citing a decade-long tenure with the social media platform that was formerly known as Twitter.
TakeAway Points:
- Head of worldwide affairs at X, Nick Pickles, said on Thursday that he is leaving the social media business after ten years, formerly known as Twitter.
- Pickles, who joined the company in 2014, said he had decided to leave X several months ago and was working with the Chief Executive Linda Yaccarino through the transition.
- OpenAI said on Thursday it has more than 1 million paying users across its business products, ChatGPT Enterprise, Team, and Edu, as the AI firm’s chatbot continues to see strong adoption owing to its advanced large language model.
Nick Pickles resigns from X
Pickles, who joined the company in 2014, said he had decided to leave X several months ago and was working with the Chief Executive Linda Yaccarino through the transition.
“After more than ten years, tomorrow will be my last day at X. It’s been an incredible journey,” he said.
It was not immediately clear what his next plans were or why he made the decision to quit.
In June, X’s head of business operations, Joe Benarroch, left the company, the Wall Street Journal reported, citing people familiar with the matter.
Pickles had started at X as a senior manager in their London office and was appointed the Vice President of Global Affairs for X in 2023 after serving in multiple roles, his LinkedIn profile showed.
The Financial Times reported that he was the company’s spokesperson in battles with multiple governments, including in Brazil, which said last week it was suspending access to the social network in the country.
The popular social media platform missed a court-imposed deadline to name a legal representative in Brazil, triggering the suspension.
Musk has argued that Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes was trying to enforce unjustified censorship, while the judge has insisted that X needs hate speech regulations.
OpenAI exceeds 1 million paid business users
OpenAI said on Thursday it has more than 1 million paying users across its business products, ChatGPT Enterprise, Team, and Edu, as the AI firm’s chatbot continues to see strong adoption owing to its advanced large language model.
The figure is a rise from the 600,000 users it had in April, indicating that CEO Sam Altman’s push to get enterprises to adopt ChatGPT for corporate use is paying off.
Separately, the Information reported on Thursday that OpenAI executives have discussed higher-priced subscriptions for upcoming large-language models such as its reasoning-focused Strawberry and a new flagship LLM dubbed Orion.
OpenAI subscription range
In early internal talks at OpenAI, subscription prices ranging up to $2,000 per month were discussed, the report said, citing one person with direct knowledge of the numbers.
ChatGPT Plus currently costs $20 a month. The free tier of the model is used by hundreds of millions of users every month.
OpenAI, backed by Microsoft, is working on “Strawberry” with the aim of enabling AI models to perform deep research reported earlier in July.
Strawberry includes a specialized way of what is known as “post-training” OpenAI’s generative AI models, or adapting the base models to hone their performance in specific ways after they have already been “trained” on reams of generalized data, the report said.
The reported pricing discussions come after media reports said Apple and chip giant Nvidia were in talks to invest in OpenAI as part of a new fundraising round that could value the ChatGPT maker above $100 billion.
The AI startup behind the wildly popular ChatGPT application last week said the chatbot had amassed more than 200 million weekly active users, doubling from the number it had in the last fall season.
