Snippings

xxx

TECHNOLOGY
Jan 5, 2024
Analyst shares views on AI stocks amid downgrades
Ben Cousins, BNN Bloomberg
Now Showing 7:06
‘Growth-at-all-costs’ no longer – it’s now profits and generative…
Up Next 8:14
AI is going to make a productivity revolution says Peapack privat…
6:43
Artificial intelligence is only going to accelerate in 2024: Wate…
6:26
Microsoft is in charge of its AI destiny as OpenAI former CEO joi…
As investors downgrade some top artificial intelligence firms, an analyst covering the sector says he believes people are realizing revenue from the technology may not come as quickly as previously thought.
In the past week, analysts downgraded expectations for AI firms MongoDB and Palantir, citing overhyped AI prospects.
Rishi Jaluria, managing director of software equity research RBC Capital Markets, said he believes analysts are realizing that many AI firms might not generate substantial revenue until 2025.

From: Analyst shares views on AI stocks amid downgrades – BNN Bloomberg.

xxx

xxx

The YouTubers’ faked letter of engagement for the whistleblower included a clause stating that the palace had a right to amputate one of his limbs should he fail his probation period.

Carlson’s people did not spot the preposterous faked document and Manners was sent to a London studio with a hotline to Carlson for the interview.

From: Tucker Carlson Duped By Kate Middleton Whistleblower YouTube Prank.

xxx

Michael J. Totten

Artificial intelligence is like nothing that humans have ever created.

From: Something Like Fire | City Journal.

xxx

Respected futurist Andrew Curry delivers a very intereting perspective on the paradigm shift. He says that the more he looks at AI, the more it looks like the kind of technology adaptation you get at the end of one of Carlota Perez’ technology waves, not the beginning, signalling the long run problems left behind by a mature technology. Effectively in the fourth quarter of the wave, markets become saturated, and returns start to fall, and companies that led the way during the period of rapid market development during the third quarter of the surge start looking and behaving like “conventional mature businesses” (a process that some commentators of more robust opinion have labelled “enshitiffication”.

xxx

Several executives, product managers and salespeople at the major cloud providers, such as Microsoft, Amazon Web Services and Google, also privately said most of their customers are being cautious or “deliberate” about increasing spending on new AI services, given the high price of running the software, its shortcomings in terms of accuracy and the difficulty of determining how much value they’ll get out of it.

From: Amazon, Google Quietly Tamp Down Generative AI Expectations — The Information.

xxx

 

xxx

In February, Mastercard pulled Still’s reporting, with an attorney stating in a letter that the data CipherTrace had relied on was itself “unverifiable and unauditable,”

From: Mastercard-owned CipherTrace tells clients it is shutting down key products.

xxx

xxx

Banks must currently process payments by the end of the following business day in most cases even if they suspect wrongdoing, which limits their chances of halting transactions involving fraudsters.

The government’s draft legislation, which ministers intend to pass into law by October 7, will allow banks and payment groups to delay processing transactions by a further 72 hours if they have reasonable grounds to suspect fraud or dishonesty.

From: UK banks to be given more time to investigate fraudulent payments.

xxx

xxx

all of the pilots and trials that have been done to date are largely worthless because we don’t really know what we want the digital currency to do.

From: MPE 2024: What will be the impact of a digital euro?.

xxx

xxx

It’s an obvious point, but credit cards in America generate a lot of cash for banks. In 2022, I wrote up how the business works, with the observation that there’s something on the order of a quarter trillion dollars a year in revenue. This revenue comes from fees for connecting merchants and banks, as well as fees charged to consumers for access to credit.

Every credit card network is also a data sieve, connected to advertising data brokers, anti-fraud features, and analytics firms. In addition, being able to reject someone from the payments system is a core sovereign power, and the stated reason the right is so afraid of a central bank digital currency.

From: The Fed Is Behind the Capital One/Discover Merger.

xxx

Here are a couple of stories taken from a local news site in the last few days with details omitted to protect the privacy of the individuals involved. The first concerns a women who went to a local bank branch (astonishingly, we still have one) to draw out cash to “pay bills”. She was given the cash in an envelope which was snatched from her hand by a boy in a hoodie as she left the branch, never to be seen again. The second concerns a women from the same area who withdrew £2,000 in cash to “pay builders” and put it in her shopping bag but found the cash was missing from her bag when she got home.

Now, setting to one side why they were paying bills in cash (just to be clear, the last time I engaged builders to do some work, I paid them by bank transfer and it worked fine) I think these stories provide an interesting perspective on the “access to cash” argument. Is it responsible to spend money on increasing access to cash when people are trapped in the cash economy are the people who are most vulnerable? Surely it would be better to find ways.

xxx

She had no idea she was being hit with a $7.80 surcharge – 10 per cent of the bill – until she checked the invoice emailed to her.

From: Cashless risk exposed as Aussie mum slugged with ‘ridiculous’ surcharge to pay with card.

xxx

analysis by Canstar found Australians were paying an average of $140 a year in surcharges for opting to use electronic payments over cash.

 

That adds up to $4 billion – a $400 million increase on the year before.

xxx

Musk’s program is revealed as profoundly conservative. He’s about as far from being an original or innovative thinker as it’s possible to get. He’s fighting the intellectual battles of the last century, a 1900s hero dropped into the 2000s with an unlimited budget to reshape the future to fit the era he’s from.

From: The Science Fiction of the 1900s – by Karl Schroeder.

xxx