>> building a better bay area. moving forward. finding solutions. this is abc 7 news. kristen: you are watching "getting answers." every week, we talk about issues important to the bay area.

today, ai making it possible to translate the books into the earth's rarest languages. usc researchers are making it possible, beginning with the bible. we will talk with the lead researcher. also, is san francisco government so big and unwieldy that no one, not even tops city officials, know how many departments and advisory boards there are? that is a question the san francisco standard tried to answer. reporter josh kane will tell us what he found. but first, metta's social media platform is up and running following its launch last night. reena roy gives us a quick look at the new alternative to twitter. reena: it is one of the top trends on twitter, and ironically, some are calling it twitter killer. the new social media platforms threads launched thursday night, and users have been joining in droves, over 5 million in the first four hours. from celebrities like shakira to jennifer lopez, to the backstreet boys posting the plan

"oh my god, we are back again." the parent company of facebook and instagram looking to rival elon musk's twitter platform. >> you can repost. it looks just like twitter. reena: mark zuckerberg writing, the vision is to create an open public space for conversation. there is a 500 character limit and five-minute video limit. accounts for those 16 and under automatically private. threads has a similar interface to twitter, where you can post, have conversations, and respond to others. once you download the app, you can sign in with your instagram account, which carries over your username, verification, and users you know. even though there are twitter rivals, threads seems to be the most viable because it has a big company behind it, it is usually friendly, and you can use your instagram account. kristen: twitter is so about threats joining the social media fray they are taking legal

action today. abc news news is reporting that sources say twitter sent meta a cease and desist order for their platform. your letter accuses misappropriating trade secrets. joining us is a cyb expert and san jose state university. think for joining us. you are not surprised by cease letter, are you? >> no. i was wondering, when are you going to see that letter? it is basically that threads is a success when you receive a letter like that. kristen: yes, and it does seem like there's -- i don't want to se say jealousy come up a personal feelings between these two leaders. i want to show folks this back-and-forth. musk suggesting instagram is trash. he tweeted, it is infinitely

preferable to be attacked by strangers on twitter than indulge in the false happiness of hide the pain instagram. zuckerberg, whose company meta also includes instagram, facebook, and threads, clapped back with this spider-man meme, one pointing at the other. i am competing with you. how about that? what do you make of this? >> by the end of the day, the users are really the winners here in this kind of competition. this kind of fight between them it is not coming from nothing. it is eight months of chaotic management style by elon musk, and a lot of things he had done that has hurt the brand and hurt the users, and most importantly out of this one, the revenue, the advertisers. they left that platform. just to make sure this is the timing, last week, we have the

limits that elon musk had on us, saying you cannot watch, you cannot tweet. there is a limit. that was basically the last straw for so many people. kristen: you are saying that people are primed for another entry, and threads having instagram as its automatic boost, you can connect through instagram, is giving it a head start, like maybe the post and blue skies. they don't have that. >> keep in mind that meta has the engineering and the ability for scaling up very quickly. if you look at the other small competitors for twitter, they could not handle that much influx of people moving from twitter to their platforms. sometimes they just stop it. fro meta, -- for meta, the last number i read was 40 million people joined the platform. it is working.

i looked at it before our interview and that is fine. it is just missing some of the major features. for example, you talk about the search, the trends, the hash tags. instagram knows about that. kristen: i joined this morning and i am seeing a lot of asks for following. but like you said, the functions seem pretty similar with the likes, the reposts. i wonder terms of the length of video and how long the message can be. >> cracked. 500 characters and five minutes of video. you can upload 10 pictures compared to four.pictures they know the limitation , and they give people more than that. they have to work on what is missing here. there are few things like translation, if you're reading a tweet with a different language, you need some translation for

that. but there is a problem here, which i hope they cancel very quickly. i am talking that threads, if i would like to delete my threads account, i have to delete mayans to graham account -- i have to delete my instagram account, too. kristen: ic. that connection helps threads at the start, but it could prove to be a problem later. in terms of the cease-and-desis letter, the accusation that basically you copied us or took some of our engineers, i think meta said that is not true at all. do you think there is something there? for the average user like me, they do seem very similar. >> they have to prove that they own the design and the shape and the forms, like the courts will decide that. it is a distraction that elon

musk is trying to distract meta from going ahead because they are full speed. it is incredible to see how many people joined the new platform. it is an average of 2 million every hour. that is unheard of, especially for social media platforms. kristen: how quickly are people abandoning twitter? >> so far, over twitter, 32 million people left twitter. they left it, but there is no place to go. they either say, i am going to take a break. now, there is an alternative. this kind of exodus will accelerate as we go in the coming weeks. kristen: mark zuckerberg said he wanted to create a friendlier place, a town square that is not so hostile. and i wonder if you think that is even possible, and what he would have to do to police that? >> that is the biggest question. if you notice that threads does

not have any advertisements so far, the companies are waiting for some kind of policies to moderate the contents. what are you going to do if there is some kind of hate message, some kind of bigotry, or some kind of violence? what are you going to do about it? this is one of the biggest things why they left twitter, because of what is going on when it comes to those kinds of questions. until we have those policies they can invite the advertisers to join threads. kristen: do you think that meta 's self policing has gotten better since the days of the 2016 election? >> in december 2022, the court ordered them to pay $725 because of cambridge analytical, so that is a big number.

that is a big message for them. you cannot leave it 100% for the companies because it is conflicting with the bottom line. more profit, more people. kristen: you also had the court ruling that tried to limit the administration's contact with the social media companies over content, so we will have to see where that goes. what do you think will be the next shoe to drop in this war over social media? >> we will see what is going on with the next move with twitter, because the news that we have here is the ceo, the new ceo of twitter, she is respected and known in the industry, she is trying to take control. today, she has a tweet. it is a very nice tweet, saying we are the original, other people are imitating us. it is telling people to stay with the platform. the more she is on the front

end, the better the situation for twitter. but if elon musk is still running the show, the future is not good for twitter. i can see the same story twitter and threads, like myspace and facebook and yahoo! and google. the latest one came and took over the market. kristen: i know my space as well.we are both dating ourselves here. cybersecurity expert. thank you for your time. we have seen all kinds of applications for ai. but when we come back, how two usc researchers are using it to translate the bible into the earth's rarest

kristen: ai has so many uses, and one of them may be translating books into the world rarest languages. two usc researchers driven by their shared faith in technology skills have come together to use ai to translate the holy bible. joining us archewell dr. jakub. thank you both for your time. you may need to turn your microphone on. i suspect it may be off. what is your goal with regard to translating the bible? >> can you hear us? kristen: now i can. >> ok. so, we have a desire to produce a project to support bible translators on the field to help

them improve their speed and quality for bible translation. kristen: how many linkages -- i believe the bible is one of the most translated pieces of work, and it has been translated to over 700 languages. how many more are there? >> there are about 7100 languages, approximately. the full bible is only available in 10% of the linkages, and the new testament in a few more thousand. there is a huge need to really provide bible translation to communities where there may be more than 100,000 speakers, air or even one million. kristen: matthew, your were bible translators. historically, who did the translations, and what were the problems? >> my parents have been involved with the bible translation process. i grew up seeing on the field most of the technical issues they were facing that i felt

were things technology could help. not fully replace them, but support them as an assistant. that is what led us to come together and work on this project together. historically, there was always missionaries who would go to a far-off country and laid out his or her own life translating the bible. now it has transitioned to having the local church take up more of the responsibility to translate the bible. kristen: tell us how ai steps in here. i am not sure i can fully understand how greekroom does it. what can it do that humans cannot do? i think of calculations that we simply cannot do that many. how does it work here? >> there are a number of tools we are trying to help with. one is a spellchecker. something we take for granted for english and the major link

which is of the world, but commercial companies typically do not provide spellcheckers for these low resource languages. there typically are not spelling standards. we use an ai technique where we combine phonetic similarity even across scripts and languages with alignment where we words that have a similar spelling are often translated to the same name. and another bible transition which might be kristen: can you give us examples of languages that might need these resources? i assume these are livelink ridges, not deadly ridges. >> these might be languages with over 3000 speakers, but no major

publications. the bible would often be the first major book written in a new language. you have to start from scratch with spelling standards, literacy programs, and more. kristen: i kind of assumed everything is translatable these days. google translate does seem to cover a lot of languages, does it not? >> it does cover about 100 languages. this is 100 out of 7100. it does cover the major languages of the world, but it neglects a majority link witches. kristen: i know you are starting with the bible, but what comes next? works like the koran or the sacred text of buddhism, or perhaps nonreligious texts? , >> the technology would work for any texts, but we are dedicated to the bible in particular. when we are expanding looking at more languages to support, so

there's still years and decades ahead of us. kristen: finally, where is greekroom to be found? is it available for anyone who wants to use it? how do they go about it? >> they can contact us. we have an initial small website available. there is one tool already available online, which does a lot of character cleaning and encoding normalization. we have an alignment tool in progress right now where we have a prototype that basically checks how easily words are translatable. it marks things up that are untranslatable or where words are missing. >> the website is greekroom.org. kristen: thank you for giving us that information.

just ahead, the incredible lengths one reporter had to jump through to get an answer to the simple question, how many departments, commissions, advisory boards are ther

kristen: critics of san francisco government operations often cite the huge bureaucracy it has come with somatic commissions, advisory boards, and departments. could there be so many that even top city officials have lost count? that is the question at the heart of a new article with the san francisco standard. the headline, "only one person at s.f. city hall knows the answer to the simple question." joining us is josh kane. good to see you. >> good to see you. kristen: you always have questions. but what was the simple question you wanted the answer to this time? >> i was writing a story about the mayor, and it was a profile

for life. i talked with the folks about this story a couple weeks ago. in the process of reporting it, i had a fact check. i said, how many departments and commissions and advisory boards are there in the city? somebody was light, let me get back to you. then it was a protracted question. then they told me to talk to this person, maybe go to that department, read this report. before you knew it, it became almost comical how i was getting the runaround, and weeks were going by. it was only until i finally circled back to one of the first stops where the spokesperson for the city attorney's office was able to confirm there are 53 departments, 56 boards and commissions, and 74 advisory bodies, meaning that there are 183 different government entities, not including informal groups, in just the city and county of san francisco. kristen: so the winner is the

spokesperson at the city attorney's office? >> i will give her a shout out. she is a hero in my book. kristen: way to go. but who didn't know that bounced you around that surprised you? >> actually, supervisors. people who are hashing out the budget as of this past month. they are in charge of knowing everything going on in the city. and obviously trying to make sure every dollar counts. it is not that they didn't know if these organizations, but the fact that nobody could say this is how many we have, it is a bit troubling. in my story, i joke it is like a parent who doesn't know how many kids they have. kristen: then you know you probably have too many kids. [laughter] how does this compare to other cities? >> it is so many more than most major cities. even in los angeles, which has almost 4 million people, their advisory bodies are actually

almost 25 less than san francisco, and we are a quarter of the size of l.a. when you look at other major cities, we have a framework of participatory democracy, and we want citizen oversight, we want people to be engaged. but it has become unwieldy where we have expanded out on obvious ones like preserving historic landmarks or the police commission to make sure citizen oversight is created. then, there's these different committees that have been formed. kristen: what were some of the obscure ones? >> one that i think is kind of funny is the sugary drinks committee. i am going to butcher the name. but it is basically a soda tax from 2016, and there is a whole committee dedicated to this ballot measure that passed. that is something that one city hall told me, they could this. we have created all these extra boards. i went to the board president,

and he was saying, these commissions and groups do have real value when people ask good questions and check authority, but they can also be a little bit of grandstanding and people trying to build up their name for a potential run for office in the future. he agreed that it might be time to take a look and cut some of the superfluous bodies. kristen: with some of san francisco's major issues, there critics who say nothing ever gets done because it takes a long. are there some who tie the number of these advisory boards, commissions, etc. to things not getting done? >> yeah, and the ironic about these committees is they are supposed to create more transparency, and in essence they are making things more opaque, and they are slowing down the process. what happens is most residents and voters don't really know why things aren't working, th

know it is a process and they don't actually know who is responsible. really, the people who are responsible are the mayor, the supervisors, and department heads. but you have these that is in commissions and boards that are coming up the process. you have to give them. kristen: and that costs money. what is the reaction? >> the reaction has been a bit incredulous. i think people are like, it is like when you laugh at something that happens in your home, like you drop a jar of fruit platters everywhere and you laugh and then you are like, great, now i have to clean this up. kristen: i hope folks will check out your article. it is at the ss standards website. there is a lot of original reporting. abc 7 will continue to bring you

segments. look for that twice a week here at 3:00 p.m.. we thrilling thing in the world. there's an abundance of reasons to get started. how far we take an idea is a question of willpower. because progress... is a matter of character.

kristen: thank you for joining us for "getting answers." we will be here every weekday at play clock, asking questions. world news tonight is next. tonight, that deadly cargo ship inferno in new jersey still burning, after nearly 24 hours. two veteran firefighters killed, trapped by the fire onboard the ship. five others injured. flames erupted as vehicles were being moved. fire crews pausing the battle against the