Snippings

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.

From: A Minecraft town of AI characters made friends, invented jobs, and spread religion | MIT Technology Review.

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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.

From: Deutsche Bank invests in Partior.

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The Swedish fintech Klarna provide an interesting case study on the deployment of AI. According to Sebastian Siemiatkowski, Klarna’s CEO, their sales and marketing expenses fell 16% compared with the same period in 2023, while customer service and operations expenses shrank 14%. Notably, it achieved those cost savings — much of which are credited to the use of AI — while generating 23% higher revenues. AI is not free, of course. Klarna’s technology and product development expenses climbed 17% over the same period. The figures show that Klarna’s cost savings more than offset the higher technology costs. Overall operating expenses fell 2% and the company posted a small profit on a net income basis in the third quarter. 

(The value of the AI cost savings is highlighted by substantial increases in other non-operating expenses. For instance, Klarna reported a 44% increase in losses from people not paying their loans back while funding costs rose 67%.)

The company has trimmed its workforce down from 5000 to 3800 over the last year, and claims that nine out of 10 employees already use AI in their daily work, but is aiming to hire over 100 engineers by 2025 in Poland. Siemiatkowski says that the new Warsaw hub will play a pivotal role in the company’s broader strategy to lead AI adoption.

Overall then Klarna was able to use AI to help to manage processing and servicing costs, which rose more slowly than revenue.

 

 

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he Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity, led by the Linux Foundation, is an open standards body working to establish trust in digital media. By embedding metadata and watermarks into images, videos, and audio files, the C2PA specification makes it possible to track and verify the origin, creation, and any modifications of digital content.

From: How Apple, Google, and Microsoft can save us from AI deepfakes | ZDNET.

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A digital euro would strengthen Europe’s financial sovereignty and resilience because it would be built with European technology and infrastructure. It would empower Europe to independently develop and manage digital payment solutions, supporting the further deepening of the Single Market.[
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From: From dependency to autonomy: the role of a digital euro in the European payment landscape.

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A study from Juniper Research found that the money lost to online fraud will rise from $44bn in 2024 to $107bn in 2029, an increase of 141%.

The research, Global Merchant Fraud Prevention Market 2024-2029, cites the role of AI in making attacks on the ecommerce ecosystem more sophisticated. In particular, the report credits the use of deepfakes to defeat verificatio systems as “a key threat”.

From: Ecommerce fraud to exceed $100bn by 2029.

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Key among the strategies that central banks may consider is addressing those factors that drive CBDC adoption. We identify three potential drivers – design alignment with consumer preferences, effective information dissemination, and leveraging network effects from emerging payment technologies.

From: Consumer demand for central bank digital currency as a means of payment.

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