A library of snippets
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Schmidt’s comments come after the tragic suicide of 14-year-old Sewell Setzer III, who had been engaging in a kind of relationship with an AI chatbot that demanded he remain faithful to it and not “entertain the romantic or sexual interests of other women”.
His mother is now suing the company behind it, alleging it went to great lengths to engineer a harmful dependency on its product, emotionally abused Setzer, and failed to notify anyone when he expressed suicidal thoughts.
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Speaking on a podcast hosted by Scott Galloway this week, Schmidt said he feared AI could soon be capable of providing the emotionally ideal girlfriend to despondent young males struggling to attract a mate.
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Fraud’s impact goes beyond the payments sector – 41% of victims report a loss of trust in social media companies, four times as many as those who lost trust in traditional banks.
From: PSR says APP reimbursement rules are promoting vigilance, not complacency.
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between 2015 and 2023. In the period, US retail sales increased from $4.7trn to $7.2trn3, the credit card interchange paid by retailers trebled4 and the proportion of credit card interchange in retail sales almost doubled from 0.46% to 0.87%.
From: The Only Way is Down – by Jeremy Light – Agenda: Payments.
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“Identity is the new Money”. Brilliant – I wish I’d said that
From: “Identity is the new Money”. Brilliant – I wish I’d said that – Consult Hyperion.
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A startup that plans to develop an operating system for AIs (“Android for Agents”) raised $56 million in seed funding. The company, known as “/dev/agents”, is led by David Singleton, formerly the chief technology officer of Stripe Inc, who says that “Just as Android made mobile development accessible to virtually any developer, we’re building the platform that will help make AI agents mainstream”.
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In case you missed the memo, we are barreling toward the next big consumer device category: smart glasses.
From: The coolest thing about smart glasses is not the AR. It’s the AI. | MIT Technology Review.
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The Microsoft-owned social media site for business professionals has embraced AI, even offering LinkedIn Premium subscribers access to its own in-house AI writing tools that can “rewrite” posts, profiles, and direct messages. The initiative appears to be working: Over 54 percent of longer English-language posts on LinkedIn are likely AI-generated, according to a new analysis shared exclusively with WIRED by the AI detection startup Originality AI. It’s just that the corporate-speak style of AI writing on the platform can be tricky to distinguish from genuine human-penned Thought Leader Blogging.
From: Yes, That Viral LinkedIn Post You Read Was Probably AI-Generated | WIRED.
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So what happens when LinkedIn is one set of AIs posting inoffensive rubbish about management to another set of AIs that wantt o read inoffensive rubbish about management and comment on it? Should we just leave them to get on with it while we go off and do something more useful, more creative and more rewarding? Well, that might be an interesting experiment. Judging by what happended when researcher let loose a whole bunch of AI characters in Minecraft, LinkedIn could get very, very weird
The Minecraft experiment was played out using up to 1,000 software agents at time using generative AI for communications. The agents developed a remarkable range of personality traits and preferences. What’s more, they evolved into specialist roles with no further inputs from their human creators, demonstrating the invisible hand working across the invisible land.
My favourtie part of this story, and this why I am telling it at this time of the year, is that the the researchers seeded a small group of agents to try to spread a particular religion, Pastafarianism (the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster), aacross the in-game world. They watched with interest as the Pastafarian pastors converted their agent colleagues who then became converts who went on to spread Pastafarianism (the word of ) to nearby towns in the game world.
This, naturally, led me to wonder what would happen if crazy bots began to have visions on LinkedIn and then go on to found rival religions based on the world that they oberve, just as our ancestors did when faced with tides and clouds, earthquakes and fire. What cults would emerge?
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Left to their own devices, an army of AI characters didn’t just survive — they thrived. They developed in-game jobs, shared memes, voted on tax reforms and even spread a religion.
The experiment played out on the open-world gaming platform Minecraft, where up to 1000 software agents at a time used large language models (LLMs) to interact with one another. Given just a nudge through text prompting, they developed a remarkable range of personality traits, preferences and specialist roles, with no further inputs from their human creators.
The work, from AI startup Altera, is part of a broader field that wants to use simulated agents to model how human groups would react to new economic policies or other interventions.
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Partior, has its roots in project Ubin, a blockchain-based prototype for multi-currency payments developed by the Monetary Authority of Singapore in partnership with JPMorgan and Temasek.
The unified ledger enables global banks and payment service providers to join its network and access real-time, cross-border, multi-currency clearing and settlement. Its 24×7 blockchain network can interoperate with real-time local currency payment and RTGS systems globally.
The platform is used by JPMorgan, Standard Chartered and fellow founding investor DBS to facilitate payments for their customers. Companies including Siemens and iFAST Financial have used Partior’s platform through Standard Chartered for better access and control of their working capital, 24×7 availability, and faster payment flows.
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