The U.S. Federal Reserve’s steady rise in interest rates has pulled inflation down to 3 percent in June, close to the central bank’s 2-percent target rate—but the economy may pay a price in a rising number of bad corporate loans.
Category: 1 August 2023
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STOCK MARKETS SEND MIXED SIGNALS ABOUT THEIR FUTURE
In June, the Standard & Poor’s 500 index ended its longest bear market since the 1940s, The Wall Street Journal noted, and has leaped up 28 percent since then, ending 26 July at its highest close since April 2022.
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BLOCKCHAIN BATTLES
Blame it on the Bahamas.
Sam Bankman-Fried, founder and CEO of the FTX crypto exchange, won’t be prosecuted for a campaign finance violation, as part of a case involving embezzlement and fraud involving the company.
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HOUSE COMMITTEE PASSES TWO SIGNIFICANT CRYPTO BILLS
The House Financial Services Committee marked a historic first this past week, approving several crypto focused bills that will now be considered by the full House.
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COMPETITION OR COMPLEMENTARY? SURPRISING DATA SURROUNDING CRYPTO EXCHANGES
Large Crypto exchanges are serving to complement, and not just compete with smaller crypto exchanges in ways that have proven mutually beneficial.
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GOOGLE USES AI TO GIVE ROBOTS THEIR OWN “BRAINS”
In a recent demonstration, a Google engineer showed a visually-equipped robotic arm three figurines on a table: a dinosaur, a lion, and a whale. The engineer told the arm to “pick up the extinct animal.” The arm reached across and plucked up the dinosaur, even though the robot had not been programmed to know what a dinosaur is.
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USING AI TO TRAIN AI
ChatGPT, Google’s Bard, and other “generative” AIs have been trained by filling them with the contents of the Internet—poems, legal analyses, scientific papers, travel guides, and any other items the trainers can find.
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AI ROILS THE VIDEO GAME INDUSTRY
Video game producers are among AI’s most eager adopters, with employees paying the price.
In the $200-billion-a-year industry, costs have risen faster than revenues and players are always demanding something new and more exciting. Recent best-sellers “The Last of Us Part II” and “Horizon Forbidden West” cost Sony Group Corp. more than $200 million each and took hundreds of workers several years to produce.
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FOUR KEY AI DEVELOPERS FORM AI OVERSIGHT PARTNERSHIP
Google, Microsoft, OpenAI, and Anthropic, an AI startup created by former OpenAI employees, are collaborating in an effort to promote responsible development and use of AI.
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MAKING CHATGPT SOCIALLY ACCEPTABLE WAS SOUL-DESTROYING WORK FOR HUMAN TRAINERS
Beneath ChatGPT’s ability to converse easily on an Internet’s worth of subjects lies the psychological wreckage of scores of Kenyan trainers: employed by a contract labor firm, squads of low-wage workers in this East African country spent thousands of hours teaching the chatbot to not talk about subjects such as bestiality, child rape, and torture.