Snippings

Hogwarts Legacy just grossed $850M in its first two weeks. Biggest launch ever for Warner Bros Games.  

 

By comparison, Warner Bros’s biggest *movie* ever, the last Harry Potter movie, brought in $295M in its first two weeks.

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Regulators have told major Chinese tech companies not to offer ChatGPT services to the public amid growing alarm in Beijing over the AI-powered chatbot’s uncensored replies to user queries.

From China tells big tech companies not to offer ChatGPT services – Nikkei Asia:

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Two-thirds of the cars stolen in 2021 were Kias or Hyundais, despite the two companies accounting for just 7% of all cars owned in America.

From The Kia Boy Crime Wave – by Nick Russo – Pirate Wires:

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In the super-app world, it’s the platform owner that decides and controls all this. Short term, of course, this is a great. These super-apps are doing very well, thank you very much.

But zooming out a bit, this platform model and control presents a limit. To the growth. To the value.

From It’s time for a new breed of super-app – by Jamie Smith:

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In their fascinating paper on “The Data Economy: Market Size and Global Trade” for the Economic Statistics Centre of Excellence (part of the UK’s National Institute of Economic and Social Research), Diane Coyle and Wendy Li talk about the growing data gap between global Big Tech and potential competitors, disruptors and innovators.

(Diane co-directs the Bennett Institute for Public Policy at the University of Cambridge. She has held a number of public service roles including Vice Chair of the BBC Trust, member of the Competition Commission, the Migration Advisory Committee and the Natural Capital Committee. She was awarded a CBE in the 2018 New Year Honours List. This was, surprisingly, for her contribution to the public understanding of economics and not, as most people would imagine, for persuading me to write “Identity is the New Money”.)

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Diane and Wendy argue (convincingly) that this data gap is a a barrier to entry that affects not only businesses but also aggregate innovation, investment and trade:

Large data holdings, rich in volume and variety, thus give large online platforms a significant competitive advantage, powered by network effects and the virtuous cycle between data and the AI algorithms improving the services and increasing revenues.

This advantage means that platforms obtain insights about adjacent sectors and can then enter them more easily. Potential new competitors without access to that data and the advantages it confers therefore struggle to enter new markets. This has been obvious for some time.

From Open Banking? Open Everything! – by David G.W. Birch:

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Banks across the U.S. and Europe use this sort of voice verification to let customers log into their account over the phone. Some banks tout voice identification as equivalent to a fingerprint, a secure and convenient way for users to interact with their bank. But this experiment shatters the idea that voice-based biometric security provides foolproof protection in a world where anyone can now generate synthetic voices for cheap or sometimes at no cost. I used a free voice creation service from ElevenLabs, a powerful AI-voice company that has already been used to dox and harass specific people.

Now, that abuse can extend to fraud and hacking. Some experts I spoke to after doing this experiment are now calling for banks to ditch voice authentication altogether, although real-world abuse at this time could be rare.

From How I Broke Into a Bank Account With an AI-Generated Voice:

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If you wonder why VISA and Mastercard are fixated on USDC settlements, just look at the billions that have settled on-chain over the past 3 years and you will never wonder again.

Source: Coinmetrics
In 2020, $1Trillion of stablecoins settled. In 2021, the year that USDC grew 100 times and Tether 3.5 times, the amount settled on-chain was 6 times higher, $6 Trillion and Tether accounted for c. 66% of it. In 2022, stablecoin settlements reached $7Trillion but Tether accounted for 57% of the volume settled as USDC continued to grow.

To put things in perspective, in 2022 AMEX processed $1 trillion, Mastercard $2.2 Trillion and VISA $12Trillion. Already, Stablecoins have settled on-chain more than the Mastercard, American Express, and Discover networks.

Incumbents like Visa and MasterCard are both integrating USDC (as it is the more regulated) into their offerings. The Big 2 card networks will work with USDC so that end consumers and merchants in international e-commerce benefit without them needing any major tech changes.

From Stablecoin Showdown: The USD-Pegged Battlefield | by Efi Pylarinou | Feb, 2023 | Medium:

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But I see another problem. There will be hundreds of social and professional situations where it will be necessary to prove that we ourselves wrote the words being sent rather than outsourcing them to ChatGPT. And – that Turing Test again – the only way to do this will be to use words ChatGPT won’t. As it explains: ‘I adhere to ethical and legal standards, and I will not generate content that is harmful, discriminatory, or offensive in nature or otherwise unethical.’

This means that, to send a letter or write an article without the suspicion it has been machine-generated, we’ll need to fill it with xenophobic right-wing profanities.

From How to outperform ChatGPT | The Spectator:

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Kenyans spent Sh169.1 billion to place bets through Safaricom’s M-Pesa in the year to March, underlining the gambling craze that has become a national pastime.
The telecoms operator’s disclosures show that the value of bets jumped 23.8 percent from Sh136 billion a year earlier, defying a government clampdown on gambling through the imposition of higher taxes both on the companies and punters.
Safaricom, the Kenya Revenue Authority (KRA) and betting firms are the biggest beneficiaries of the growth and intensity of betting activities, pocketing billions.
The telco’s revenue from betting rose 40 percent to Sh5.98 billion last year, beating sales of more than a third of firms listed at the Nairobi bourse.

From Betting via M-Pesa hits Sh169.1bn in one year – Business Daily:

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Digital Jersey has established the first ‘data trust’ under Jersey Trust Law, through a pilot project that forms part of the organisation’s strategy to position Jersey as a leading jurisdiction for data stewardship.

The concept involves the innovative use of a trust structure to hold personal data so that it can be stored, managed and shared safely, lawfully, in accordance with the trust parameters and applying fiduciary duties to the stewardship of data within a highly regulated environment.

To test the data trust concept, data will be collected by cyclists in Jersey through special bike light sensors and held in the trust. Whilst the primary focus of the pilot is to test the viability of using a trust structure to explore the data stewardship concept, a secondary aim is to generate useful data and intelligence around safe cycling. Digital Jersey will now look to recruit cyclists to join the project.

From Digital Jersey launches a world first data trust | Digital Jersey:

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Images in a graphic novel that were created using the artificial-intelligence system Midjourney should not have been granted copyright protection, the U.S. Copyright Office said in a letter seen by Reuters.

From AI-created images lose U.S. copyrights in test for new technology | Reuters:

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