Visa is rolling out new technology that will allow the payments giant to share more information about customers' preferences [non-paywalled source] based on their shopping history with retailers as it seeks to remain a top player in the competitive e-commerce space. From a report: The data will be shared via the payments giant's proprietary "tokens," which provide an added layer of security between a consumer's bank information and a merchant. Shopping inclinations and other information based on past transactions -- such as preferred categories, like movies or golf -- will be shared via token with retailers with the consent of consumers.

"It's almost entirely blind to almost all consumers," Visa Chief Executive Officer Ryan McInerney said in an interview of the company's token technology. "They just know their payments work better." The sharing of shopping data via token is one of a handful of innovations Visa unveiled at a conference in San Francisco, where it's based. Visa, one of the largest e-commerce technology companies in the world, is finding itself increasingly fending off competitors seeking larger slices of the fees merchants must pay to carry out consumer transactions.

Microsoft's ambitious goal to be carbon negative by 2030 is threatened by its expanding AI operations, which have increased its carbon footprint by 30% since 2020. To meet its targets, Microsoft must quickly adopt green technologies and improve efficiency in its data centers, which are critical for AI but heavily reliant on carbon-intensive resources. Bloomberg reports: Now to meet its goals, the software giant will have to make serious progress very quickly in gaining access to green steel and concrete and less carbon-intensive chips, said Brad Smith, president of Microsoft, in an exclusive interview with Bloomberg Green. "In 2020, we unveiled what we called our carbon moonshot. That was before the explosion in artificial intelligence," he said. "So in many ways the moon is five times as far away as it was in 2020, if you just think of our own forecast for the expansion of AI and its electrical needs." [...]

Despite AI's ravenous energy consumption, this actually contributes little to Microsoft's hike in emissions -- at least on paper. That's because the company says in its sustainability report that it's 100% powered by renewables. Companies use a range of mechanisms to make such claims, which vary widely in terms of credibility. Some firms enter into long-term power purchase agreements (PPAs) with renewable developers, where they shoulder some of a new energy plant's risk and help get new solar and wind farms online. In other cases, companies buy renewable energy credits (RECs) to claim they're using green power, but these inexpensive credits do little to spur new demand for green energy, researchers have consistently found. Microsoft uses a mix of both approaches. On one hand, it's one of the biggest corporate participants in power purchase agreements, according to BloombergNEF, which tracks these deals. But it's also a huge purchaser of RECs, using these instruments to claim about half of its energy use is clean, according to its environmental filings in 2022. By using a large quantity of RECs, Microsoft is essentially masking an even larger growth in emissions. "It is Microsoft's plan to phase out the use of unbundled RECs in future years," a spokesperson for the company said. "We are focused on PPAs as a primary strategy."

So what else can be done? Smith, along with Microsoft's Chief Sustainability Officer Melanie Nakagawa, has laid out clear steps in the sustainability report. High among them is to increase efficiency, which is to use the same amount of energy or computing to do more work. That could help reduce the need for data centers, which will reduce emissions and electricity use. On most things, "our climate goals require that we spend money," said Smith. "But efficiency gains will actually enable us to save money." Microsoft has also been at the forefront of buying sustainable aviation fuels that has helped reduce some of its emissions from business travel. The company also wants to partner with those who will "accelerate breakthroughs" to make greener steel, concrete and fuels. Those technologies are starting to work at a small scale, but remain far from being available in commercial quantities even if expensive. Cheap renewable power has helped make Microsoft's climate journey easier. But the tech giant's electricity consumption last year rivaled that of a small European country -- beating Slovenia easily. Smith said that one of the biggest bottlenecks for it to keep getting access to green power is the lack of transmission lines from where the power is generated to the data centers. That's why Microsoft says it's going to increase lobbying efforts to get governments to speed up building the grid. If Microsoft's emissions remain high going into 2030, Smith said the company may consider bulk purchases of carbon removal credits, even though it's not "the desired course."

"You've got to be willing to invest and pay for it," said Smith. Climate change is "a problem that humanity created and that humanity can solve."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Within approximately 12 seconds, two highly educated brothers allegedly stole $25 million by tampering with the ethereum blockchain in a never-before-seen cryptocurrency scheme, according to an indictment that the US Department of Justice unsealed Wednesday. In a DOJ press release, US Attorney Damian Williams said the scheme was so sophisticated that it "calls the very integrity of the blockchain into question."

"The brothers, who studied computer science and math at one of the most prestigious universities in the world, allegedly used their specialized skills and education to tamper with and manipulate the protocols relied upon by millions of ethereum users across the globe," Williams said. "And once they put their plan into action, their heist only took 12 seconds to complete." Anton, 24, and James Peraire-Bueno, 28, were arrested Tuesday, charged with conspiracy to commit wire fraud, wire fraud, and conspiracy to commit money laundering. Each brother faces "a maximum penalty of 20 years in prison for each count," the DOJ said. The indictment goes into detail explaining that the scheme allegedly worked by exploiting the ethereum blockchain in the moments after a transaction was conducted but before the transaction was added to the blockchain. To uncover the scheme, the special agent in charge, Thomas Fattorusso of the IRS Criminal Investigation (IRS-CI) New York Field Office, said that investigators "simply followed the money."

"Regardless of the complexity of the case, we continue to lead the effort in financial criminal investigations with cutting-edge technology and good-ol'-fashioned investigative work, on and off the blockchain," Fattorusso said.

In an op-ed for The Wall Street Journal, Representatives Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-Wash.) and Frank Pallone Jr (D-N.J.) made their case for why Section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act has "outlived its usefulness." Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act protects online platforms from liability for user-generated content, allowing them to moderate content without being treated as publishers.

"Unfortunately, Section 230 is now poisoning the healthy online ecosystem it once fostered. Big Tech companies are exploiting the law to shield them from any responsibility or accountability as their platforms inflict immense harm on Americans, especially children. Congress's failure to revisit this law is irresponsible and untenable," the lawmakers wrote. The Hill reports: Rodgers and Pallone argued that rolling back the protections on Big Tech companies would hold them accountable for the material posted on their platforms. "These blanket protections have resulted in tech firms operating without transparency or accountability for how they manage their platforms. This means that a social-media company, for example, can't easily be held responsible if it promotes, amplifies or makes money from posts selling drugs, illegal weapons or other illicit content," they wrote.

The lawmakers said they were unveiling legislation (PDF) to sunset Section 230. It would require Big Tech companies to work with Congress for 18 months to "evaluate and enact a new legal framework that will allow for free speech and innovation while also encouraging these companies to be good stewards of their platforms." "Our bill gives Big Tech a choice: Work with Congress to ensure the internet is a safe, healthy place for good, or lose Section 230 protections entirely," the lawmakers wrote.

At Google I/O on Tuesday, Google previewed a feature that will alert users to potential scams during a phone call. TechCrunch reports: The feature, which will be built into a future version of Android, uses Gemini Nano, the smallest version of Google's generative AI offering, which can be run entirely on-device. The system effectively listens for "conversation patterns commonly associated with scams" in real time. Google gives the example of someone pretending to be a "bank representative." Common scammer tactics like password requests and gift cards will also trigger the system. These are all pretty well understood to be ways of extracting your money from you, but plenty of people in the world are still vulnerable to these sorts of scams. Once set off, it will pop up a notification that the user may be falling prey to unsavory characters.

No specific release date has been set for the feature. Like many of these things, Google is previewing how much Gemini Nano will be able to do down the road sometime. We do know, however, that the feature will be opt-in.

Google is shaking up Search. On Tuesday, the company announced big new AI-powered changes to the world's dominant search engine at I/O, Google's annual conference for developers. From a report: With the new features, Google is positioning Search as more than a way to simply find websites. Instead, the company wants people to use its search engine to directly get answers and help them with planning events and brainstorming ideas. "[With] generative AI, Search can do more than you ever imagined," wrote Liz Reid, vice president and head of Google Search, in a blog post. "So you can ask whatever's on your mind or whatever you need to get done -- from researching to planning to brainstorming -- and Google will take care of the legwork."

Google's changes to Search, the primary way that the company makes money, are a response to the explosion of generative AI ever since OpenAI's ChatGPT released at the end of 2022. [...] Starting today, Google will show complete AI-generated answers in response to most search queries at the top of the results page in the US. Google first unveiled the feature a year ago at Google I/O in 2023, but so far, anyone who wanted to use the feature had to sign up for it as part of the company's Search Labs platform that lets people try out upcoming features ahead of their general release. Google is now making AI Overviews available to hundreds of millions of Americans, and says that it expects it to be available in more countries to over a billion people by the end of the year.

A panel of judges in the Netherlands has found Alexey Pertsev, one of the developers behind crypto anonymizing tool Tornado Cash, guilty of money laundering. Wired: Over the course of two days in March, the Russian national was tried on the allegation that the tool he developed had allowed criminals -- among them hackers with ties to North Korea -- to freely launder $1.2 billion in stolen cryptocurrency. "The management of Tornado Cash welcomed the bank robbers with open arms," the prosecutors wrote in a March court filing.

Dutch judges sentenced Pertsev to five years and four months in prison on Tuesday, which was the term requested by prosecutors in the case. "With Tornado Cash, the defendant created a shortcut for financing crimes and terrorism," said the court in a statement, translated from Dutch. "He chose to look away from the abuse and did not take any responsibility." The purpose of tools like Tornado Cash, known as crypto mixers or tumblers, is to mask the origin and destination of users' coins. Funds belonging to many parties are pooled, jumbled up, and spat out into brand-new wallets, by which time it is no longer clear whose crypto is whose. These services are promoted as a way to improve the level of privacy available to crypto users, but have been readily co-opted for the purpose of money laundering.

On August 8, 2022, Tornado Cash was sanctioned in the United States, making it illegal for US citizens to use the service. Any product that "indiscriminately facilitates anonymous transactions," wrote the US Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control, represents a "threat to US national security." Two days later, Pertsev was arrested in the Netherlands, where he resided. Money laundering activity, the Dutch prosecutors claim, accounted for more than 30 percent of the funds that passed through Tornado Cash between 2019 and 2022. [...] Pertsev built his defense on the argument that Tornado Cash, which remains in operation, is under nobody's control -- including his own -- as a piece of software that runs on the Ethereum blockchain, a distributed network of computers. Further reading: Coinbase Employees and Ethereum Backers Sue US Treasury Over Tornado Cash Sanctions (September 2022).

Melinda French Gates announced today she is stepping down from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, three years after announcing her separation from Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates. With her departure as co-chair, the foundation will change its name to Gates Foundation and Bill Gates will be its sole chairperson, said CEO Mark Suzman. NBC News reports: In a statement posted on her Instagram account, she said that as part of her agreement to step down from the foundation, she will retain $12.5 billion that she plans to put toward her ongoing work supporting women and families. "This is not a decision I came to lightly," French Gates wrote. "I am immensely proud of the foundation that Bill and I built together and of the extraordinary work it is doing to address inequities around the world." In a separate statement, Bill Gates said, "I am sorry to see Melinda leave, but I am sure she will have a huge impact in her future philanthropic work."

Now worth $75.2 billion, the Gates Foundation has over the course of its three-decade lifespan made $77.6 billion worth of grant payments, making it one of the largest donor organizations in the world, with a focus on health and developmental goals. It is one of the largest contributors to the World Health Organization, and played a key role in efforts to address the Covid pandemic. "After a difficult few years watching women's rights rolled back in the U.S. and around the world, she wants to use this next chapter to focus specifically on altering that trajectory," Suzman said of French Gates.

"I want to reassure you that the millions of people our work serves and the thousands of partners we work alongside can continue to count on the foundation. The foundation today is stronger than it has ever been."

"I know we all wish Melinda the best in her next chapter," he added, noting that French Gates "will not be bringing any of the foundation's work with her when she leaves."

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman gave an hour-long interview to the "All-In" podcast (hosted by Chamath Palihapitiya, Jason Calacanis, David Sacks and David Friedberg).

And when asked about this summer's launch of the next version of ChatGPT, Altman said they hoped to "be thoughtful about how we do it, like we may release it in a different way than we've released previous models...

Altman: One of the things that we really want to do is figure out how to make more advanced technology available to free users too. I think that's a super-important part of our mission, and this idea that we build AI tools and make them super-widely available — free or, you know, not-that-expensive, whatever that is — so that people can use them to go kind of invent the future, rather than the magic AGI in the sky inventing the future, and showering it down upon us. That seems like a much better path. It seems like a more inspiring path.

I also think it's where things are actually heading. So it makes me sad that we have not figured out how to make GPT4-level technology available to free users. It's something we really want to do...

Q: It's just very expensive, I take it?

Altman: It's very expensive.
But Altman said later he's confident they'll be able to reduce cost. Altman: I don't know, like, when we get to intelligence too cheap to meter, and so fast that it feels instantaneous to us, and everything else, but I do believe we can get there for, you know, a pretty high level of intelligence. It's important to us, it's clearly important to users, and it'll unlock a lot of stuff.
Altman also thinks there's "great roles for both" open-source and closed-source models, saying "We've open-sourced some stuff, we'll open-source more stuff in the future.

"But really, our mission is to build toward AGI, and to figure out how to broadly distribute its benefits... " Altman even said later that "A huge part of what we try to do is put the technology in the hands of people..." Altman: The fact that we have so many people using a free version of ChatGPT that we don't — you know, we don't run ads on, we don't try to make money on it, we just put it out there because we want people to have these tools — I think has done a lot to provide a lot of value... But also to get the world really thoughtful about what's happening here. It feels to me like we just stumbled on a new fact of nature or science or whatever you want to call it... I am sure, like any other industry, I would expect there to be multiple approaches and different peoiple like different ones.
Later Altman said he was "super-excited" about the possibility of an AI tutor that could reinvent how people learn, and "doing faster and better scientific discovery... that will be a triumph."

But at some point the discussion led him to where the power of AI intersects with the concept of a universal basic income: Altman: Giving people money is not going to go solve all the problems. It is certainly not going to make people happy. But it might solve some problems, and it might give people a better horizon with which to help themselves.

Now that we see some of the ways that AI is developing, I wonder if there's better things to do than the traditional conceptualization of UBI. Like, I wonder — I wonder if the future looks something more like Universal Basic Compute than Universal Basic Income, and everybody gets like a slice of GPT-7's compute, and they can use it, they can re-sell it, they can donate it to somebody to use for cancer research. But what you get is not dollars but this like slice — you own part of the the productivity.
Altman was also asked about the "ouster" period where he was briefly fired from OpenAI — to which he gave a careful response: Altman: I think there's always been culture clashes at — look, obviously not all of those board members are my favorite people in the world. But I have serious respect for the gravity with which they treat AGI and the importance of getting AI safety right. And even if I stringently disagree with their decision-making and actions, which I do, I have never once doubted their integrity or commitment to the sort of shared mission of safe and beneficial AGI...

I think a lot of the world is, understandably, very afraid of AGI, or very afraid of even current AI, and very excited about it — and even more afraid, and even more excited about where it's going. And we wrestle with that, but I think it is unavoidable that this is going to happen. I also think it's going to be tremendously beneficial. But we do have to navigate how to get there in a reasonable way. And, like a lot of stuff is going to change. And change is pretty uncomfortable for people. So there's a lot of pieces that we've got to get right...

I really care about AGI and think this is like the most interesting work in the world.

Reddit reported its first results since going public in late March. Yahoo Finance reports: Daily active users increased 37% year over year to 82.7 million. Weekly active unique users rose 40% from the prior year. Total revenue improved 48% to $243 million, nearly doubling the growth rate from the prior quarter, due to strength in advertising. The company delivered adjusted operating profits of $10 million, versus a $50.2 million loss a year ago. [Reddit CEO Steve] Huffman declined to say when the company would be profitable on a net income basis, noting it's a focus for the management team. Other areas of focus include rolling out a new user interface this year, introducing shopping capabilities, and searching for another artificial intelligence content licensing deal like the one with Google.
Bloomberg notes that already Reddit "has signed licensing agreements worth $203 million in total, with terms ranging from two to three years. The company generated about $20 million from AI content deals last quarter, and expects to bring in more than $60 million by the end of the year."

And elsewhere Bloomberg writes that Reddit "plans to expand its revenue streams outside of advertising into what Huffman calls the 'user economy' — users making money from others on the platform... " In the coming months Reddit plans to launch new versions of awards, which are digital gifts users can give to each other, along with other products... Reddit also plans to continue striking data licensing deals with artificial intelligence companies, expanding into international markets and evaluating potential acquisition targets in areas such as search, he said.
Meanwhile, ZDNet notes that this week a Reddit announcement "introduced a new public content policy that lays out a framework for how partners and third parties can access user-posted content on its site." The post explains that more and more companies are using unsavory means to access user data in bulk, including Reddit posts. Once a company gets this data, there's no limit to what it can do with it. Reddit will continue to block "bad actors" that use unauthorized methods to get data, the company says, but it's taking additional steps to keep users safe from the site's partners.... Reddit still supports using its data for research: It's creating a new subreddit — r/reddit4researchers — to support these initiatives, and partnering with OpenMined to help improve research. Private data is, however, going to stay private.

If a company wants to use Reddit data for commercial purposes, including advertising or training AI, it will have to pay. Reddit made this clear by saying, "If you're interested in using Reddit data to power, augment, or enhance your product or service for any commercial purposes, we require a contract." To be clear, Reddit is still selling users' data — it's just making sure that unscrupulous actors have a tougher time accessing that data for free and researchers have an easier time finding what they need.
And finally, there's some court action, according to the Register. Reddit "was sued by an unhappy advertiser who claims that internet giga-forum sold ads but provided no way to verify that real people were responsible for clicking on them." The complaint [PDF] was filed this week in a U.S. federal court in northern California on behalf of LevelFields, a Virginia-based investment research platform that relies on AI. It says the biz booked pay-per-click ads on the discussion site starting September 2022... That arrangement called for Reddit to use reasonable means to ensure that LevelField's ads were delivered to and clicked on by actual people rather than bots and the like. But according to the complaint, Reddit broke that contract...

LevelFields argues that Reddit is in a particularly good position to track click fraud because it's serving ads on its own site, as opposed to third-party properties where it may have less visibility into network traffic... Nonetheless, LevelFields's effort to obtain IP address data to verify the ads it was billed for went unfulfilled. The social media site "provided click logs without IP addresses," the complaint says. "Reddit represented that it was not able to provide IP addresses."
"The plaintiffs aspire to have their claim certified as a class action," the article adds — along with an interesting statistic.

"According to Juniper Research, 22 percent of ad spending last year was lost to click fraud, amounting to $84 billion."

The Royal Institution of Australia is a national non-profit hub for science communication, publishing the science magazine Cosmos four times a year.

This month they argued that small modular nuclear reactors "don't add up as a viable energy source." Proponents assert that SMRs would cost less to build and thus be more affordable. However, when evaluated on the basis of cost per unit of power capacity, SMRs will actually be more expensive than large reactors. This 'diseconomy of scale' was demonstrated by the now-terminated proposal to build six NuScale Power SMRs (77 megawatts each) in Idaho in the United States. The final cost estimate of the project per megawatt was around 250 percent more than the initial per megawatt cost for the 2,200 megawatts Vogtle nuclear power plant being built in Georgia, US. Previous small reactors built in various parts of America also shut down because they were uneconomical.
The cost was four to six times the cost of the same electricity from wind and solar photovoltaic plants, according to estimates from the Australian Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation and the Australian Energy Market Operator. "The money invested in nuclear energy would save far more carbon dioxide if it were instead invested in renewables," the article agues: Small reactors also raise all of the usual concerns associated with nuclear power, including the risk of severe accidents, the linkage to nuclear weapons proliferation, and the production of radioactive waste that has no demonstrated solution because of technical and social challenges. One 2022 study calculated that various radioactive waste streams from SMRs would be larger than the corresponding waste streams from existing light water reactors...

Nuclear energy itself has been declining in importance as a source of power: the fraction of the world's electricity supplied by nuclear reactors has declined from a maximum of 17.5 percent in 1996 down to 9.2 percent in 2022. All indications suggest that the trend will continue if not accelerate. The decline in the global share of nuclear power is driven by poor economics: generating power with nuclear reactors is costly compared to other low-carbon, renewable sources of energy and the difference between these costs is widening.
Thanks to Slashdot reader ZipNada for sharing the article.

The head of the world's biggest advertising group was the target of an elaborate deepfake scam that involved an AI voice clone. From a report: The CEO of WPP, Mark Read, detailed the attempted fraud in a recent email to leadership, warning others at the company to look out for calls claiming to be from top executives. Fraudsters created a WhatsApp account with a publicly available image of Read and used it to set up a Microsoft Teams meeting that appeared to be with him and another senior WPP executive, according to the email obtained by the Guardian.

During the meeting, the impostors deployed a voice clone of the executive as well as YouTube footage of them. The scammers impersonated Read off-camera using the meeting's chat window. The scam, which was unsuccessful, targeted an "agency leader," asking them to set up a new business in an attempt to solicit money and personal details. "Fortunately the attackers were not successful," Read wrote in the email. "We all need to be vigilant to the techniques that go beyond emails to take advantage of virtual meetings, AI and deepfakes."

An anonymous reader shares a report: Disney Plus, Hulu, and Max are teaming up for a new bundle this summer, Netflix is focused on the WWE and celebrity boxing, Disney Plus is getting ESPN, and Bloomberg reported earlier this week that Max could get a price hike. A familiar refrain emerged around all this news: streaming is becoming cable TV all over again and getting crummier in the process.

And it's true! When streaming first emerged, it was a beautiful alternative to piracy, which was very convenient and very illegal, and cable, which was festooned with ads and weighed down by channels you were paying for and didn't want. Streaming gave you a world of content on demand for a fraction of the cost of cable. But that experience was never sustainable. Content costs money to make, and companies are apparently obligated to "increase revenue" and "make profit." This means Netflix spending billions of dollars a year on content isn't necessarily sustainable unless it's adding new users and monetizing them through some combination of ads and increasing subscription fees for stuff that used to be free, like sharing an account or streaming in 4K.

A new national survey (PDF) from CNBC/Generation Lab of 1,033 people aged 18 to 34 found that an overwhelming 81% of respondents believe a four-day workweek would boost their company's productivity, while 19% said productivity would decline. CNBC reports: Those results from the "Youth & Money in the USA" survey come amid discussions around the potential benefits of switching from the standard five-day U.S. workweek to a four-day cadence without a pay cut. Some companies have begun testing the arrangement, and say it has mitigated employee burnout and strengthened business performance. Exos, a U.S. coaching company that trains top athletes and leads corporate wellness programs, recently reported results from the first six months of an ongoing four-day workweek experiment. The company said the shortened workweek increased efficiency along with revenue and retention.

Although respondents to the CNBC/Generation Lab survey largely agreed on workweek length, they were less unified when asked about work setting. A 60% majority said they do their best work in the office, while the other 40% said they do so at home. Further reading: 32-Hour Workweek for America Proposed by Senator Bernie Sanders

An anonymous reader quotes a report from MSN: The US has revoked licenses allowing Huawei to buy semiconductors from Qualcomm and Intel, according to people familiar with the matter, further tightening export restrictions against the Chinese telecom equipment maker. Withdrawal of the licenses affects US sales of chips for use in Huawei phones and laptops, according to the people, who discussed the move on condition of anonymity. House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Michael McCaul confirmed the administration's decision in an interview Tuesday. He said the move is key to preventing China from developing advanced AI. "It's blocking any chips sold to Huawei," said McCaul, a Texas Republican who was briefed about the license decisions for Intel and Qualcomm. "Those are two companies we've always worried about being a little too close to China."

While the decision may not affect a significant volume of chips, it underscores the US government's determination to curtail China's access to a broad swathe of semiconductor technology. Officials are also considering sanctions against six Chinese firms that they suspect could supply chips to Huawei, which has been on a US trade restrictions list since 2019. [...] Qualcomm recently said that its business with Huawei is already limited and will soon shrink to nothing. It has been allowed to supply the Chinese company with chips that provide older 4G network connections. It's prohibited from selling ones that allow more advanced 5G access.

An anonymous reader shares a report: According to data analyzed by Morgan Stanley and Pitchbook, the number of active venture capital firms worldwide surged from 2014 levels, more than doubling by 2021, before sharply contracting to below 2014 figures in a stunning reversal.

Lawyers for the defunct cryptocurrency exchange FTX said customers would receive all the money they lost when the firm collapsed in 2022 and receive interest on top of it. "But the recoveries come with a caveat," reports the New York Times. "The amount owed to customers was calculated based on the value of their holdings at the time of FTX's bankruptcy in November 2022. That means customers won't reap the benefits of a recent surge in the crypto market that sent the price of Bitcoin to a record high." From the report: The announcement was a landmark in the attempt to recover the $8 billion in customer assets that disappeared when FTX imploded virtually overnight, setting off a crisis in the crypto industry. Under a plan filed in federal bankruptcy court in Delaware, virtually all FTX's creditors, including hundreds of thousands of ordinary investors who used the exchange to buy and sell cryptocurrencies, would receive cash payments equivalent to 118 percent of the assets they had stored on FTX, the lawyers said. Those payments would flow from a pool of assets that FTX's lawyers have pulled together in the 17 months since the exchange collapsed, the lawyers said. [...] It will take months for the payouts to begin. The plan must be approved by the federal judge overseeing FTX's bankruptcy, John T. Dorsey.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: CoreWeave, the GPU infrastructure provider that began life as a cryptocurrency mining operation, this week raised $1.1 billion in new funding from investors, including Coatue, Fidelity and Altimeter Capital. The round brings its valuation to $19 billion post-money and its total raised to $5 billion in debt and equity -- a remarkable figure for a company that's less than 10 years old. It's not just CoreWeave. Lambda Labs, which also offers an array of cloud-hosted GPU instances, in early April secured a "special purpose financing vehicle" of up to $500 million, months after closing a $320 million Series C round. The nonprofit Voltage Park, backed by crypto billionaire Jed McCaleb, last October announced that it's investing $500 million in GPU-backed data centers. And Together AI, a cloud GPU host that also conducts generative AI research, in March landed $106 million in a Salesforce-led round.

So why all the enthusiasm for -- and cash pouring into -- the alternative cloud space? The answer, as you might expect, is generative AI. As the generative AI boom times continue, so does the demand for the hardware to run and train generative AI models at scale. GPUs, architecturally, are the logical choice for training, fine-tuning and running models because they contain thousands of cores that can work in parallel to perform the linear algebra equations that make up generative models. But installing GPUs is expensive. So most devs and organizations turn to the cloud instead. Incumbents in the cloud computing space -- Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure -- offer no shortage of GPU and specialty hardware instances optimized for generative AI workloads. But for at least some models and projects, alternative clouds can end up being cheaper -- and delivering better availability.

On CoreWeave, renting an Nvidia A100 40GB -- one popular choice for model training and inferencing -- costs $2.39 per hour, which works out to $1,200 per month. On Azure, the same GPU costs $3.40 per hour, or $2,482 per month; on Google Cloud, it's $3.67 per hour, or $2,682 per month. Given generative AI workloads are usually performed on clusters of GPUs, the cost deltas quickly grow. "Companies like CoreWeave participate in a market we call specialty 'GPU as a service' cloud providers," Sid Nag, VP of cloud services and technologies at Gartner, told TechCrunch. "Given the high demand for GPUs, they offers an alternate to the hyperscalers, where they've taken Nvidia GPUs and provided another route to market and access to those GPUs." Nag points out that even some Big Tech firms have begun to lean on alternative cloud providers as they run up against compute capacity challenges. Microsoft signed a multi-billion-dollar deal with CoreWeave last June to help provide enough power to train OpenAI's generative AI models.

"Nvidia, the furnisher of the bulk of CoreWeave's chips, sees this as a desirable trend, perhaps for leverage reasons; it's said to have given some alternative cloud providers preferential access to its GPUs," reports TechCrunch.

More than 90% of stablecoin transaction volumes aren't coming from genuine users, according to a new metric co-developed by Visa, suggesting such crypto tokens may be far away from becoming a commonly used means of payment. Bloomberg: The dashboard from Visa and Allium Labs is designed to strip out transactions initiated by bots and large-scale traders to isolate those made by real people. Out of about $2.2 trillion in total transactions in April, just $149 billion originated from "organic payments activity," according to Visa.

Visa's finding challenges stablecoin proponents' argument that the tokens, pegged to an asset like the dollar, are poised to revolutionize the $150 trillion payments industry. PayPal and Stripe are among the fintech giants making inroads into stablecoins, with Stripe co-founder John Collison in April citing "technical improvements" for being bullish on the tokens. [...] Visa itself, which handled more than $12 trillion worth of transactions last year, is among companies that could stand to lose out should stablecoins become a generally accepted means of payment.

Wednesday Rest of World noticed an overlooked tech story in Argentina: Olga de León looked confused as she walked out of a nightclub on the edge of Buenos Aires on a recent Tuesday afternoon. She had just had her iris scanned. "No one told me what they'll do with my eye," de León, 57, told Rest of World. "But I did this out of need." De León, who lives off the $95 pension she receives from the state, had been desperate for money. Persuaded by her nephew, she agreed to have one of her irises scanned by Worldcoin, Sam Altman's blockchain project. In exchange, she received nearly $50 worth of WLD, the company's cryptocurrency.

De León is one of about half a million Argentines who have handed their biometric data over to Worldcoin. Beaten down by the country's 288% inflation rate and growing unemployment, they have flocked to Worldcoin Orb verification hubs, eager to get the sign-up crypto bonus offered by the company. A network of intermediaries — who earn a commission from every iris scan — has lured many into signing up for the practice in Argentina, where data privacy laws remain weak. But as the popularity of Worldcoin skyrockets in the country, experts have sounded the alarm about the dangers of giving away biometric data. Two provinces are now pushing for legal investigations. "Seeing that [iris scans have] been banned in European countries, shouldn't we be trying to stop it, too?" Javier Smaldone, a software consultant and digital security expert, told Rest of World.
Last month Worldcoin's web site announced that more than 10 million people in 160 countries had created a World ID and compatible wallet (performing 75 million transactions) — and that 5,195,475 people had also verified their World ID using Worldcoin's iris-scanning Orb.

But the article notes a big drop in the number of countries even allowing Worldcoin's iris-scanning — from 25 to just eight. While in less than a year Worldcoin opened nearly 60 centers across Argentina...