Snippings

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Citigroup (C.N), opens new tab erroneously credited $81 trillion, instead of $280, to a customer’s account and took hours to reverse the transaction, a “near miss” that shows up the bank’s operational issues it has sought to fix

From: Citigroup mistakenly credits customer account $81 trillion in “near miss”, FT reports | Reuters.

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Please arrest year-old man and don’t

 

This did of course lead me to wonder what I would do if I discovered that there was $81 trillion in my bank account in the morning. I think what I probably do is convert it to bitcoin and move it to a bitcoin called wallet for safekeeping. Of course, when Citibank turned up to ask for the cold wallet or the bitcoin, I would undoubtedly be in the unfortunate situation of having accidentally thrown away the cold wallet in the garbage and have forgotten the pass sprays.

 

Of course if I discovered that there was $81 trillion in my bank account in the morning then I would immediately start converting it to bitcoin and a variety of other cryptocurrencies and move it via a series of mixes into a collection of cryptocurrency account where I would hold it

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The Tony Blair Institute for Global Change has unveiled an ambitious proposal for a digital ID-linked National Data Library (NDL) in the United Kingdom, representing one of the most comprehensive data integration initiatives proposed for the nation to date.

A key component of the proposed system is a universal digital identity scheme, which would create unique identifiers for all UK residents. This approach aligns with recent trends in public-private cooperation in AI and identity management, suggesting a shift toward more integrated digital governance systems.

From: UK’s Blair Institute Proposes National Digital ID System Linked to Public Data.

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Apple has released a white paper that lays out its position on age assurance and outlines new tools it will roll out to “help parents protect their kids in a way that is designed around privacy.” It also formally and firmly states its belief that the responsibility for age assurance measures should be on apps offering age-restricted content – and not app stores that offer them for download.
Its publication has drawn a response from Meta, which is among the loudest firms saying that age assurance should be handled by app stores, continuing a back-and-forth that has also drawn in the porn industry and digital rights activists.

From: Apple volleys age verification question back to sites and apps | Biometric Update.

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Bitcoin and major cryptocurrencies Ripple’s XRP, solana and cardano have rocketed higher after Donald Trump revealed plans to create a U.S.-focused crypto reserve.

From: Trump Reveals U.S. ‘Crypto Reserve’ Price Bombshell—Sending XRP, Solana, Cardano And Bitcoin Soaring.

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Bitcoin and major cryptocurrencies Ripple’s XRP, solana and cardano have rocketed higher after Donald Trump revealed plans to create a U.S.-focused crypto reserve.

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The bitcoin price shot toward $90,000 per bitcoin following Trump’s post, despite not being named as being included in the planned U.S. crypto reserve.

Ripple’s XRP and ethereum rivals solana and cardano—all regarded as U.S.-made cryptocurrencies—each rose between 20% and 50%.

From: Trump Reveals U.S. ‘Crypto Reserve’ Price Bombshell—Sending XRP, Solana, Cardano And Bitcoin Soaring.

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Mow also criticized the selection of assets in the reserve, arguing it was designed to enrich specific projects rather than serve a national purpose.

From: Bitcoiners slam Trump’s crypto strategic reserve, call it a ‘sh*tcoin reserve’ – TheStreet Crypto: Bitcoin and cryptocurrency news, advice, analysis and more.

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We also said in the consultation that we would issue a government trust mark to services that are on the register. You’ll be familiar with trust marks from lots of other places; symbols like the Red Tractor for food,

From: Making it easy to find trustworthy digital identity and attribute services – Enabling digital identity.

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Why do large language models hallucinate?

You may have heard that LLMs sometimes “hallucinate.” That’s a polite way to say they make stuff up very convincingly. A model sometimes generates text that fits the context and is grammatically correct, yet the material is erroneous or nonsensical. This bad habit stems from LLMs training on vast troves of data drawn from the Internet, plenty of which is not factually accurate. Since the model is simply trying to predict the next word in a sequence based on what it has seen, it may generate plausible-sounding text that has no grounding in reality.

From: What Is Generative AI? – IEEE Spectrum.

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Multinational companies in regulated industries like pharmaceuticals and insurance have been somewhat reluctant to adopt generative artificial intelligence to handle legally sensitive documents due to the risk of AI-generated mistakes.

That seems to be changing. Take Novo Nordisk, the Danish drugmaker behind Ozempic. The company for years has tested chatbots such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT and models such as Meta Platforms’ Llama to help write documents it files to regulators when submitting a drug for approval, but the technology has been prone to errors, said Louise Lind Skov, who leads the company’s tech strategy. Sometimes it could take employees more time to correct the AI errors than if they’d done everything by hand in the first place, she said.

It wasn’t until Novo started testing Anthropic’s Claude 3.5 Sonnet model last fall that the company found the number of errors fell significantly, said Waheed Jowiya, a strategy director overseeing its use of AI. Novo Nordisk now uses Claude to draft clinical study reports based on data that human researchers collected during a study. These documents, which describe the results of a drug trial, can be hundreds of pages apiece.

Humans still oversee Claude as it drafts the report, essentially by pointing and clicking at data and asking Claude to describe it in plain English, Jowiya said. Novo uses Claude through an interface that it built using Amazon Web Services software, he said.

And Novo used a common method for reducing AI mistakes: retrieval-augmented generation. For instance, when Claude generates a clinical definition of obesity that a human expert determines is good, the human will tell Claude to reuse the description in any future documents that concern trials on obesity.

From: Ozempic Maker Says AI Is Finally Reliable Enough to Produce Sensitive Documents — The Information.

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Customers want to be able to prove their identity without constantly submitting the same data over and over again. Hence the appeal of bank ID systems such as ConnectID and Visa, which work on the principle that large institutions like banks already have most of the data people need to prove their identity.

From: ConnectID, Visa, ID.me illustrate central place digital ID plays in digital economy | Biometric Update.

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