A US bankruptcy judge approves repaying FTX customers, and FTX is in talks over $1B in seized US assets; in June 2024, FTX had $12.6B, which may rise to $16.5B
Bloomberg :
Across two experiments with 2,190 American conspiracy theorists, dialogues with GPT-4 Turbo reduced their belief in their chosen conspiracy by ~20% on average
Co-author Gordon Pennycook: “The work overturns a lot of how we thought about conspiracies.” — Belief in conspiracy theories is rampant …
The US says OpenAI and Anthropic agreed to give the US AI Safety Institute early access to major new AI models to test and evaluate their capabilities and risks
which Leigh Drogen / @ldrogen : There was no way governments (rightly or wrongly) were going to allow the next steps in AI that are going to fundamentally reshape society without h...
Source: OpenAI demoed a breakthrough called Strawberry to US natsec officials; one of its top uses is to make training data for a flagship LLM codenamed Orion
In case you were wondering why Sam Altman cryptically posted a picture of strawberries earlier this month, the answer almost certainly …
PDD, which runs Temu and Pinduoduo, reports Q2 revenue up 86% YoY to ~$13.6B, vs. ~$14B est., net income up 144% YoY to ~$4.5B, vs. $3.8B est.; PPD drops 28%+
Bloomberg :
Brian Chesky says Airbnb plans to expand into new products and services, including co-hosting this fall, guest services, and a relaunch of experiences next year
Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky suggested on Tuesday's Q2 earnings call with investors that the company will soon expand into new products and services …
Messari CEO Ryan Selkis says he ran “too hot” with X posts this week calling for war and sending immigrants back, after Messari leadership told him to cool it
Nick Baker / CoinDesk :
Sources: Kraken seeks to raise $100M+ in a pre-IPO round; the crypto exchange's previous attempts to go public were thwarted in part by a dispute with the SEC
Olga Kharif / Bloomberg :
Scarlett Johansson says she declined OpenAI's ChatGPT voice offer and was “shocked, angered” that Sam Altman would pursue Sky, a voice “eerily similar” to hers
The “Her” actor released a statement following OpenAI pulling its “Sky” voice from ChatGPT, which many people said sounded like her.
The CHIPS Act has been surprisingly successful so far, giving the US greater scope to meet critical infrastructure needs in the event of a crisis in East Asia
Chris Miller / Financial Times :
President Biden signs the ByteDance-TikTok divest-or-ban bill into law, after the Senate passed it by 79-18; the House passed the legislation 360-58 on April 20
The divest-or-ban bill is now law, starting the clock for ByteDance to make its move. The company has an initial nine months …
Sources: Microsoft and OpenAI are planning a $100B data center project with a US-based supercomputer dubbed “Stargate” to power OpenAI's products
Executives at Microsoft and OpenAI have been drawing up plans for a data center project that would contain a supercomputer …
Filing: the US SEC told a judge that Ripple should pay $2B+ in fines and penalties for selling more of its XRP token since being sued by the regulator, and more
The regulator is slated to release a public brief on Tuesday, Stuart Alderoty, Ripple's chief legal officer, said in a separate post on X on Monday.
Changing its policy, X bans posting the real names of people behind anonymous accounts, after suspending accounts that unmasked a suspected neo-Nazi cartoonist
https://www.nbcnews.com/... Steve Thompson / @SteveThompson@mastodon.social : “Elon Musk's X Is Suspending Accounts That Reveal a Neo-Nazi Cartoonist's Alleged Identity” — https:...
SEC filing: NYSE-listed Bakkt, a crypto trading platform backed by the Intercontinental Exchange, warns that it might not be able to stay in business in a year
Martin Young / Cointelegraph :
SEC filing: NYSE-listed Bakkt, a crypto trading platform backed by the Intercontinental Exchange, warns that it might not be able to stay in business in a year
The institutional digital asset trading platform unveiled in 2018 amid huge fanfare has just disclosed it “might not be able to continue as a going concern.”
How Russia uses specialized e-commerce sites, secretive shipping workarounds, and middlemen in China to buy Cisco and other Western tech to maintain its economy
Using specialized e-commerce sites, secretive shipping workarounds and a constellation of middlemen, Russia has obtained … X: @auroraalmendral and @ldrogen X: Aurora Almendral / @a...
The US asks a court to reverse its decision to let Changpeng Zhao return to the UAE ahead of his February 2024 sentencing, citing his “substantial” flight risk
Over the government's objection, a US magistrate judge on Tuesday granted the multi-billionaire's request to return to the UAE before his February sentencing.
US filings: Binance's lax rules and staff misconduct helped Hamas, al-Qaida, and ISIS raise funds, let Iranians conduct 1.1M+ transactions worth $899M, and more
David Voreacos / Bloomberg :
Binance and CZ plead guilty to federal charges as part of a $4.3B settlement with the US DOJ; charges include violating sanctions and anti-money laundering laws
- The U.S. Department of Justice has brought criminal charges against Binance and its billionaire founder and CEO, Changpeng Zhao.