For protestors rising up against the data centers undergirding the AI boom, the math is simple: wherever they sprout, the facilities make frightfully poor neighbors — inflating utility prices, discharging hazardous waste, and blasting horrid noise at all hours of the night.
For data center developers, there’s a different calculation to be made: namely, one of supply and demand around the seemingly infinite drive for computing power.
Against the backdrop of an industry measured in the trillions of dollars, a few scattered protests at city hall may seem inconsequential. Yet as more and more local campaigns arise in opposition to data centers, the collective financial implications are becoming impossible to ignore.
According to new reporting by Reuters, which indexed data compiled by the research firm Data Center Watch, there are now hundreds of billions of dollars exposed to the growing risk of local opposition.
In the first three months of 2026 alone, at least 75 separate data center projects faced some kind of organized opposition at the local level. Together, those 75 developments represent a combined $130 billion worth of investments.
The funders of those data centers include major banks, but also more than a few private equity firms, which are sure to notice as the social risk to their data center investments climb.
Simply put, the potential that any given data center could be cancelled due to local opposition is rising, a sign that organized efforts against data centers are becoming more than the sum of their parts.
Yet despite growing costs, opposition alone may not be enough to slow the behemoth industry. As one anonymous senior official at a foreign lending firm told Reuters, investors are now becoming more comfortable pricing in cancellation risks as the demand for AI compute grows — like frogs adjusting to boiling water.
More on data centers: Google Data Center Announces Plans to Pave Over Protected Wetlands
The post Protests Against Data Centers Are Now Threatening $130 Billion of Big Tech’s Crucial Investments appeared first on Futurism.
German AI researcher and hedge fund manager Leopold Aschenbrenner became the poster child for the hubris of an AI-obsessed Wall Street last month.
Some $35 billion of investors’ money, in the form of leveraged bets on AI infrastructure stocks, evaporated in front of the 24-year-old’s eyes as tech shares were hit by yet another major sell off.
The humbling couldn’t have come at a worse time. The funds vanished days before his wedding with Anthropic chief of staff Avital Balwit. According to the New Yorker, the two had to cancel their honeymoon as a result.
Aschenbrenner isn’t alone. According to new data from Hedge Fund Research, tech funds dropped by seven percent in July, the worst period for the investments since the depths of the 2008 global financial crisis, the Telegraph reports.
A separate hedge fund, called value Aligned Research Advisors, which shares a similar portfolio to Aschenbrenner’s, similarly slid 44 percent in July as tech stocks reeled from major volatility.
The bruising month has further compounded fears over a massive surge in AI spending with no clear path to profitability in sight. Investors have become wary of big tech companies’ ever-higher capital expenditure forecasts as concerns over an AI bubble continue to mount.
Staying on track and maintaining high profit margins has become a high risk high reward game.
“When valuations are elevated, and positioning is concentrated, the difference between being on the right and wrong side of a trade can become unusually large — and very quickly,” Erlen Capital Management managing partner Bruno Schneller told the Telegraph. “Specialist technology strategies can generate exceptional returns when momentum and narrative are aligned, but they can also experience abrupt, leverage-amplified reversals when those conditions change.”
The game is far from over. Even Aschenbrenner’s fund has since recovered and his making new investments after being forced to unwind trades and sell major chunks of its holdings last month.
Yet how much longer the highly AI-leveraged stock market can sustain itself is anybody’s guess. In a blog post on Friday, Apollo chief economist Torsten Slok pointed out that those who reap the biggest profits, including companies making AI models, are massively depending on profits being “funded by investors rather than earned from customers.”
Put simply, AI companies aren’t making any significant amount of money from providing a worthwhile product, but from “capital raised by the layer losing money,” per Slok.
“Capital can bridge the gap for a while, but not indefinitely,” Slok argued. “And therein lies the risk: will the ROI show up for AI’s end customers fast enough to sustain the spending that is generating those upstream margins?”
More on AI: VC-Funded Startups Linked to Persistent Fraud
The post AI Investors Are Suddenly Quaking in Their Boots appeared first on Futurism.
In terms of demoralizing the federal workforce and demolishing the public sector, Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency was a success.
In terms of actually saving money, though — its ostensible raison d’être — it was a dismal failure.
Musk vowed to slash $2 trillion in government “waste and fraud.” Then he lowered that target to $1 trillion, and behind the scenes reportedly promised Trump to save just a tenth of that figure. In the end, DOGE boasted on its website’s “Wall of Receipts” that it had saved around $215 billion — peanuts compared to its original promise.
But the actual amount of spending it slashed may be even lower than that. In a sweeping audit, the Government Accountability Office looked through the $110 billion that DOGE claimed it saved between January and July 2025, and found a trail of staggering incompetency that let loads of supposedly saved money fall through the cracks. That framing, though, could be too generous to Musk and his pimple-faced lackeys. You could also take the view that DOGE, in all likelihood, was deliberately cooking the books.
Per the GAO’s new report, released this month, DOGE claimed it terminated 13,476 contracts, but nearly 2,000 of them weren’t actually terminated. Spending-wise, about $27.4 billion of the purported savings came from these contracts that DOGE botched the terminations of.
The clumsy — or deceptive — bookkeeping didn’t end there. The receipts “includes leases identified for termination before [the group] was established,” the report states, as quoted by The Washington Post. And 108 of 264 of the leases it claimed it nixed “were already in process for termination.”
In all, the GAO found that over half of DOGE’s claimed $61 billion in contract savings couldn’t be verified or came from contracts that weren’t actually terminated. Similarly, 96 percent of the savings that it claimed came from grants couldn’t be verified by the accountability office, either.
Last August, an investigation by Politico found that of the $52.8 billion that DOGE had claimed to save by cancelling contracts at the time, its actual savings were closer to just $1.4 billion. To calculate how it saved money, DOGE dubiously used the maximum spending limit listed on the contracts it axed, figures that in practice are much higher than what the government ends up spending.
At the time, government procurement expert Jessica Tillipman told the outlet that the practice was akin to “taking out a credit card with a $20,000 credit limit, cancelling it and then saying, ‘I’ve just saved $20,000.'”
More on Elon Musk: Columbia Economist Baffled as to Why the Masses Aren’t Rising Up Against Elon Musk
The post Elon Musk’s Efforts to Cut Spending in the Government Were So Incompetent That It’s Shocking, Internal Analysis Finds appeared first on Futurism.
It turns out the venture capital industry doesn’t just merely fund junky AI startups — it also systematically breeds the conditions for fraud.
A new joint study from researchers at the UK’s Imperial College and France’s Emlyon Business School analyzed 12 companies involved in 27 court cases related to civil or criminal cases related to securities fraud. The cases totaled around $688 million in financial losses, and resulted in 73 years of cumulative prison sentences.
After analyzing the individual cases, the researchers identified a persistent pattern of “façading,” in which startup entrepreneurs hide their flailing businesses from scrutiny through an assorted mix of fraudulent behavior.
The research, first reported by TechCrunch, identified three various types of façading: surface, reinforced, and deep façading, which are “contingent on the severity of the gap that entrepreneurs face between audiences’ performance expectations and ventures’ performance reality,” the paper explains.
The first form, surface façading, happens when startup founders create fictional stories of “imminent venture success,” like the kind of AI-washing that hit its stride in 2024, embodied by companies like Builder.ai that went on to collapse like a billion-dollar houses of cards.
This escalates into “reinforced façading” when founders begin to cook up things like bank statements or customer contracts to sell the surface story, and take pains to centralize the flow of information around the startup’s performance. One example of this might be the company iLearning Engines, a $1.5 billion AI startup which was found to be faking “virtually all its customer relationships and revenues” by a Department of Justice probe earlier this year.
Deep façading, the final and most severe form, encompasses broad forms of market manipulation, like faking product demonstrations, sabotaging internal efforts at due diligence, and manipulating regulation. This last form, one could argue, is embodied by the current front-runners of the tech industry’s AI boom, which have engaged in significant political lobbying, sabotaged their own internal research on AI safety, and routinely dress up human labor to appear like autonomous AI.
Ultimately, the line between criminality and free market innovation is thin, especially where seemingly-magical and proprietary new technologies like AI are involved (a technology which currently represents a $1.6 trillion gap between investor expectations and practical reality.)
“By engaging in façading, entrepreneurs effectively decouple the venture’s externally projected appearance from its operational reality, making it appear to audiences as if no expectation-reality gap exists, despite the venture’s actual (subpar) performance,” reads the paper. “Entrepreneurs transgress from dramatized discourse into criminal deception when their stories become unhinged from reality and involve increasingly sophisticated organizing efforts to fabricate material evidence, data, and information about their ventures’ performance.”
More on startups: We Are Mildly Horrified by This AI Startup That Coerced People Into Getting Tattoos of Its Logo in Exchange for a Job Interview
The post VC-Funded Startups Linked to Persistent Fraud appeared first on Futurism.
Few things are as mortifying to a youngster than their parents trying to butt in on their behalf: a dad berating the coach for not playing his kid more, for instance, or a mom showing up unannounced to their dorm and embarrassing them in front of your roommates.
So-called “helicopter” parents have always existed, but they’re now sticking their nose into their kid’s professional lives in ways that sound vaguely ludicrous.
At least, that’s according to bosses and recruiters that the Wall Street Journal spoke to, who complain that their Gen Z new hires are coming with the hefty baggage of overbearing parents.
These not-so-genial genitors are hounding hiring managers, shadowing their kid’s Zoom calls off-camera, and even applying for jobs on their behalf, per the paper’s reporting, leaving their employers flabbergasted. One said that some parents are even calling in sick for their adult children.
Steven Clark, CEO of an Alaska-based staffing firm, said he’s gotten calls from parents demanding to know why their child didn’t get a job.
“The first time it happened, I was appalled,” he told the WSJ. “Since then it’s become more of a here-we-go-again reaction.”
When he fired a 24-year-old who kept showing up late on his first week at a construction job, the kid’s mother called to confront him.
“I said, ‘Look, you know, this is between us and your son. He’s the employee,'” Clark recalled.
Per the reporting, Clark’s experience has become such a recurring phenomenon that it was discussed at the human resources group SHRM’s conference, the largest HR group in the world, earlier this summer. More than half of the 250 professionals in the room raised their hands when asked if a parent had called them on behalf of a young employee or job candidate, per the WSJ.
Jasmine Escalera, head career coach at the résumé service Zety, called the phenomenon “co-piloting.” In a recent survey of 1,000 Gen Zers, the company found that a mind-boggling 20 percent had a parent come with them to a job interview.
Again, helicopter parents aren’t new, and there’s a risk that this gets turned into even more Gen Z bashing. But maybe in an age when smartphones keep them in constant contact with their children, helicopter parents have become more extreme and emboldened. (Just ask the teachers who had to deal with parents freaking out when their kid’s phones were taken away.) And maybe some Gen Zers are undersocialized and under-prepared after their education was disrupted by a global pandemic. There’s also the small matter of their corhort entering what’s one of the worst job markets in decades. Anxieties are high for young jobseekers and their parents alike.
This all may be true, but sometimes moms and dads just need to let their baby birds leave the nest.
“Parents should not be calling employers to check on their application status or ask questions on behalf of their child,” Lynne Alba, a director of talent acquisition and physician recruitment at a large health system on Long Island, told the WSJ.
More on generational trends: Gen Z Appears to Be Reversing No-Drinking Trend, Now Lurching Toward Alcoholism
The post Gen Z Helicopter Parents Are So Intense That They’re Calling Hiring Managers to Interfere appeared first on Futurism.
Google’s notorious AI Overview just handed would-be Flock vandals a perfect excuse to carve into the company’s controversial AI-integrated license plate readers (ALPRs).
ALRPs are wildly unpopular, especially online, where privacy-minded communities trade memes and videos cheering on destruction of the surveillance equipment. One of the more popular bits in this space centers on the idea that Flock’s ALPR’s are supposedly packed with valuable metals like gold, copper, and zinc — so, the tongue-in-cheek riffing goes, why not crack one open and cash in at the nearest scrapyard?
Clever or not, the meme hinges on a spurious claim. ALPRs do contain trace amounts of gold and other metals, just not enough to be worth the trouble. Unless you’re well versed in breaking down circuit boards, you’d be hard pressed to earn enough to buy a Big Mac, let alone recoup your labor costs.
Google, itself an exemplar of AI-enabled surveillance, apparently missed the joke.
Search “how much gold does a Flock camera have” and Google’s AI Overview doesn’t even push back a little bit. Instead, it flatly asserts that a “Flock safety camera contains about 1 to 5 grams of gold used in its internal circuit boards and wiring.” (At today’s gold prices, that would mean each Flock camera contained up to $650 of gold.)
Google goes on to claim that Flock’s ALPRs hold anywhere from two to 23 pounds of copper, which would be an engineering marvel considering the whole device only weighs three pounds.
Google’s AI Overview cites two sources to back up its summary, and neither holds up.
The first is an anonymous Substack post from an account called do.not.obey.do.not.comply, claiming the “rough scrap value of these metals per camera is estimated to be $150 to $500.” Google’s summary skips the fine print, however: that figure comes from “estimates based on scrap-value discussions” — vibes, in other words, as opposed to actual reporting or financial information.
The second is an AI-generated Instagram post riffing on the same meme, egging vandals on to gut the camera to access their supposedly precious innards. The account behind that post seems to belong to a weed grower, with most other posts about plant cloning, hydroponics, and fully grown cannabis flower.
There’s a real irony buried in all this AI slop: one AI-surveillance company’s search engine is quietly manufacturing an excuse to destroy another AI-surveillance company’s product. If that doesn’t sum up the current state of the AI-obsessed tech industry, nothing will.
Google didn’t respond to a request for comment.
More on Flock: Flock Employee Quits In Disgust, Saying the Company Is Silencing Protestors
The post Google’s AI Is Telling Users That Flock Cameras Are Filled With Valuable Gold and Copper appeared first on Futurism.
When you’re a scientist relying on government funding to conduct your research, and that government suddenly yoinks all your money in the name of “efficiency,” you have to get creative to keep the lights on.
Such has been the experience of Daniel Blumstein, a biologist at the University of California, Los Angeles, renowned for his work on studying the ground-dwelling rodents known as marmots. After the Trump administration cancelled billions of dollars in federal research grants last year, he and his colleagues decided to start creating content dedicated to the charming mammals — on OnlyFans.
As SFGate reports, their account, called “OnlyMarms,” promises near-daily “unfiltered yellow-bellied marmot content from the Rockies.” Subscribing is free, but users can leave tips on the cute photos and videos they post, which goes towards funding the research.
It’s a win for everyone: shy gooners have a convenient explanation for all the OnlyFans transactions in their bank accounts, and the scientists get to keep doing the work they’re doing. Thank you, marmots, for being so adorable.
“Sometimes I’m just posting the videos I think will get the most ‘aws,'” Emily Renkey, a student in Blumstein’s lab who started the account, told SFGate. “But my favorite is when I find footage of a particular behavior and I can use that to educate people.”
The Trump administration’s cost-cutting regime has crippled scientific research in the US. In efforts led by Elon Musk’s now defunct Department of Government Efficiency, it cancelled more than 1,700 grants worth some $1.4 billion at the National Science Foundation in 2025. In 2026, the NSF has so far awarded just a fraction of the $9 billion grant money it has typically distributed in recent years, and the White House has proposed slashing its budget by nearly half for the 2027 fiscal year.
Many of the grant cancellations were clearly politically motivated, targeting research into climate change — and even research that simply contains the word “climate” — something Trump has called a “hoax.” Even more flagrantly, the administration recently admitted in court documents that it canceled research grants in certain states “based solely” on whether they supported Trump in the 2024 election.
Why marmot research ended up in the administration’s crosshairs is anyone’s guess, but it’s invaluable work. Blumstein and his colleagues have spent years closely tracking the charming rodents, forming what is one of the longest-running studies of free-living mammals in the world, according to SFGate.
These long-term projects ask “some of the most important questions in our time,” Blumstein said, providing our best window into studying evolution in real-time. But their value may not be immediately obvious to the people in charge of crunching the numbers. Historically, this hasn’t been a problem for Blumstein, as his program had received funding from the NSF for over a decade. But now, under the new regime, he’s applied to renew the grant three times, before the agency told him to stop applying at all.
“After the third time, our program officer told my colleague… that they will never fund us because they think we have too much data,” Blumstein told SFGate. “I don’t even know how to parse that sentence. It’s nuts.”
Blumstein’s marmot program, as it stands, is running on fumes. OnlyMarms has only brought in a few hundred dollars, and the lab is looking for more traditional sources of funding, too.
More on science funding: Trump Orders Construction of Powerful Quantum Computer
The post Scientists Forced to Go on OnlyFans After Their Funding Was Cut appeared first on Futurism.
As unpopular as SpaceX and Tesla CEO Elon Musk has become in the popular eye, some say the vitriol doesn’t go nearly far enough.
In an episode of his podcast Ones and Tooze, Columbia University economic historian Adam Tooze picked apart the increasingly expensive AI arms race and its consequences for humanity. Among Tooze’s observations: the AI boom is completely upending the long-standing social contract under capitalism, a shift embodied most dramatically by Musk.
During the podcast, co-host Cameron Abadi asked what a “best case scenario” for AI might look like — where a human-level superintelligence emerges that can automate the world’s jobs. In response, Tooze pointed to a report from the Bank of International Settlements: under that scenario, labor’s share of income could collapse from an already paltry 54 percent to just 20 percent, meaning workers would be forced to fight over the remaining crumbs that drop from billionaires’ tables.
“The share in the total pie collapses, and that’s obviously a huge transformation in political power,” Tooze explained. And though that’s a future projection, the economic historian notes we’re already seeing symptoms of this extreme reversal of fortunes today, chiefly in the extreme wealth accumulation of Musk.
“I don’t understand frankly why the event of Musk’s enrichment isn’t more of a scandal, isn’t more a historic moment,” Tooze said. “Like this — to have a trillionaire in our midst ruptures the social bargain in such a — just such a dramatic way, like how can we even be any longer talking about being in the same society as this group of individuals who’ve unleashed this technology on the world.”
“It goes beyond Luddism,” Tooze continued, referring to the 19th-century labor movement that saw workers smash textile looms to fight back against economic exploitation. “It’s not about resisting the technology per se, it’s about asking ‘which social contract this belongs to?'”
Though it remains to be seen how severe an impact AI actually has on the labor market, one scenario keeps surfacing: superintelligent AI fuels a drastic rise in economic inequality, with tech billionaires on one end, and the working class on the other.
Comparing the current “AI arms race” to the actual nuclear arms race, Tooze asks the listener to imagine a “private Manhattan Project, developing a thermonuclear weapon,” calling superintelligent AI “kind of like a labor-market neutron bomb.”
And where the Manhattan Project was funded, organized, and staffed by the US government, the current AI boom takes almost the exact opposite approach, following the whims of the ultra-rich.
“Clearly, government money has gone into Silicon Valley in various ways,” Tooze caveats. “But nevertheless, the contrast between the Manhattan Project… and the realities of the current moment, spearheaded by a figure like Elon Musk, who literally has eviscerated the state apparatus of that first [nuclear] race… it strikes me that it’s really a regression away from the mid-century arms race model to something that’s much more like the ‘Merchants of Death’ vision.” (The Merchants of Death was a moniker for 1930s-era war profiteers.)
“We’re back in that space” Tooze continues, “of private, unfettered, oligarchic — but global — arms race… to my mind, the [AI arms race] analogy is interesting not because of the similarities, but because of the differences it reveals.”
More on Musk: Suddenly, as His Empire Crumbles, Elon Musk Admits He Made a Huge Mistake With DOGE
The post Columbia Economist Baffled as to Why the Masses Aren’t Rising Up Against Elon Musk appeared first on Futurism.
Suddenly, things ain’t looking great for the AI industry. Or at least for the people pouring loads of money into it.
Situational Awareness, a much-hyped AI hedge-fund whose 24-year-old founder Leopold Aschenbrenner preached endless AI gains, basically imploded over this month amid a mass tech sell-off.
The Wall Street Journal reported that it’s now down 67 percent in July, forcing Aschenbrenner to desperately seek clients to buy its shares on the cheap to cover its losses.
“We let you down this month,” the fund wrote in a letter to clients, per the WSJ.
Aschenbrenner, a former OpenAI researcher who had zero investment experience before launching the fund, has been hailed as the “Nostradamus of AI.” He apparently didn’t predict his rapid reversal of fortunes, though.
The Financial Times reported that his fund returned 439 percent for the year through June, and was up 1,551 percent since its founding.
Then came July. According to CNBC, the fund assets reached a peak of $45 billion, before beginning a precipitous decline this month. Pretty much everything went against its way. Its commitments to AI infrastructure tanked when the likes of the semiconductor manufacturer SK Hynix dropped off a cliff. And it shorted software companies — which investors once feared would be outmoded by AI labs — like Adobe, which instead continued to steadily climb.
Other companies it invested in, including Sandisk, Micron, and CoreWave, are all down more than 35 percent this month, CNBC noted.
As the dominoes fell, Aschenbrenner sent a letter to investors to quell their fears, highlighting how well it had performed until this point. Boldly, he also said that the mass tech sell off was a “particularly good time to add funds,” the FT reported.
But when the assets kept tanking — and more money didn’t come in — Aschenbrenner started frantically calling investors trying to get them to sell assets or pour in fresh capital, according to the reporting. When it got even worse, his clients couldn’t reach him.
“Leopold just stopped taking calls,” one investor told the FT.
With nowhere to turn to, Situational Awareness sold the majority of its public assets to the investment firm Citadel, though it hung onto its stake in Anthropic. The FT reported that Citadel’s vulturous purchase of Situational Awareness’s shares “marks one of the largest and most sudden stock transactions in Wall Street history.”
Situational Awareness, despite commanding billions in assets, operated with a skeleton staff of only four investment professionals and eight employees overall, the FT found in a regulatory filing. The fund used borrowed money to buy shares, which helped boost its returns, but made its losses far worse when those assets declined.
AI stocks will likely weather this storm. The real warning sign is that investors are so blinded by AI that they’re entrusting their billions to someone who had no idea what they were doing.
More on AI: Microsoft CEO Warns That Companies Embracing AI Could Drive Themselves Out of Business
The post A Prominent AI Investor Is Now Crumbling, in What Could Be a Sign of Things to Come appeared first on Futurism.
After years of facilitating a surge in gambling addiction by allowing users to make dubious bets on anything from the outcome of the World Cup to deadly conflict, trading platform Kalshi is finally facing a serious regulatory challenge.
New York Governor Kathy Hochul and Attorney General Letitia James announced that the state is suing the company for running an illegal gambling operation. An investigation by state authorities concluded that Kalshi was running an “illegal, unlicensed gambling operation” in the state.
Officials also pointed out that Kalshi was offering its services to “those under the legal gambling age of 21,” putting them at “serious personal and financial risk.” In New York, a person has to be at least 21 to participate in mobile sports betting.
The lawsuit is seeking to shut down Kalshi in New York and is requiring it to pay a $100,000 penalty for each attempt to offer sports betting and fees three times its gains in the state, which could saddles the company with paying an estimated $36 billion.
“Kalshi has chosen to ignore New York’s gaming laws, which exist to protect consumers, prevent problematic gambling, deliver funding for critical public services, and ensure that every company plays by the same rules,” said Hochul in a statement.
The news comes as state regulators continue to ponder what rules to set for prediction markets, which have seen a massive surge in popularity over the past year or so. On the federal level, the Trump administration appears unlikely to jump into action, especially considering the president’s close personal ties to the prediction markets industry. His son, Donald Trump Jr, serves as an advisor to both Polymarket and Kalshi.
Kalshi and Polymarket continue to bristle at being associated with the gambling industry and argue they’re effectively a predictions-based stock exchange. Unlike Polymarket, Kalshi is regulated by the US Commodity Futures Trading Commission.
However, some officials vehemently disagree with that assessment.
“No matter what they call themselves, prediction markets like Kalshi are gambling platforms, plain and simple,” said James. “By ignoring our laws, Kalshi is running an illegal operation and harming New Yorkers in the process.”
Researchers continue to warn that gambling addicts are betting their entire incomes away on prediction markets, a growing crisis perfectly dovetailing a massive surge in sports betting in the United States following a 2018 Supreme Court decision.
Worse yet, rampant insider trading and other differentials in information means that the vast majority of users on Kalshi and Polymarket are being left holding the bag while a select few are getting away with big winnings.
The brashness of certain crimes linked to the markets is hard to fathom. Earlier this month, president Donald Trump’s longtime teleprompter operator was accused of making tens of thousands of dollars by placing bets on Kalshi about what the president would say, leading to his removal.
In short, the latest lawsuit shouldn’t come as a surprise to anybody who’s been following along.
Predictably, Kalshi has since shot back, accusing the government of making it all up.
“It’s sad to see this type of political theater from the leadership in our own state,” a spokesperson told CNBC in a statement. “States can’t just shut down a federally licensed exchange… We love New York, we love New Yorkers, and New Yorkers love our product.”
More on prediction markets: OpenAI Strikes Bold Deal With Kalshi to Mix Together the Most Hated Technologies in Existence: AI and Prediction Markets
The post Kalshi Sued for Running Illegal Gambling Operation appeared first on Futurism.
BC Card is partnering with database platform provider MongoDB to strengthen the competitiveness of its artificial intelligence (AI) services by upgrading its data platform.
The two companies have signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) to jointly develop an AI-ready data platform. Under the agreement, they will collaborate on building AI-dedicated infrastructure, implementing natural language search and AI-powered recommendation services, enhancing existing AI capabilities, and establishing a common data foundation for future AI services.
BC Card plans to leverage MongoDB's document-based data platform to create a data storage and management environment optimized for AI applications while improving its ability to process and utilize unstructured data. The company expects the platform to enable faster processing and integration of diverse data types, including text, images and product information.
The upgraded platform will be applied progressively to BC Card's existing AI services. The company's commercial district analytics platform, eat.pl, will enhance its natural language search capabilities, allowing users to search sales and merchant data using conversational queries and receive more detailed information.
BC Card will also enhance its AI-powered shopping curation service, AI Hot Deal, by introducing automatic summaries of promotional offers, personalized product recommendations based on user interests and keyword alert functions, further strengthening its recommendation engine.
The two companies will also establish a shared data foundation that can centrally manage information used across multiple AI services, enabling faster development of new AI applications and tighter integration between services. BC Card said the initiative will accelerate its transformation into an AI-native enterprise.
MongoDB said its platform provides the core technologies required to deploy AI agents in production environments, including a real-time database, full-text and vector search, memory capabilities, embeddings and reranker models, all within a single integrated platform.
Laptops, phones and documents seized as information commissioner acts on messages about mis-selling scandal
Laptops, mobile phones and documents have been seized after officials carried out search warrants in a crackdown on claims companies plaguing people with spam text messages about the car finance mis-selling scandal.
The UK’s Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) executed warrants at homes and businesses linked to five companies in London, Liverpool, Bolton, Burnley and Swansea on Wednesday.
Continue reading...
© Photograph: Information Commissioner's Office
© Photograph: Information Commissioner's Office
© Photograph: Information Commissioner's Office
The US and European stock markets might be numb to the enormity of the AI bubble at this point, but in East Asia it’s a different story.
In South Korea, the AI bubble appears to be bursting — at least partially — with the Korea Composite Stock Price Index (Kopsi) plummeting by over 40 percent from its June highs after the Korean chipmaker SK Hynix failed to impress investors despite reporting a sixfold increase in quarterly earnings.
Across July 28 and 29, Seoul Economic Daily reports widespread panic triggered not just one but two “circuit breakers” on the Korea Exchange, a sort of automated kill switch that halts regular trading for 30 minutes so panic-stricken traders can gather their thoughts.
The recent panic marks the first time the Kopsi has ever triggered two consecutive circuit breakers, and only the 14th and 15th Kopsi activations in the Korean Exchange’s history. The tech-heavy Korea Securities Dealers Automated Quotations, or Kosdaq, also reached circuit-breaker-tripping levels two days in a row for the third time ever — the previous incidents coming in 2020 and 2008, if that’s any indication of the amount of turbulence roiling Korean financial markets.
In response, the South Korean government has scrambled to implement cooling measures and prevent an all-out financial crisis. The government already moved to ban new listings of single-stock leveraged ETFs — a high-risk, high-reward kind of financial product bearing some of the blame for the panic — though it clearly wasn’t enough to prevent billions of dollars from fleeing the Korean stock market.
According to Bloomberg, government officials are now convening an emergency meeting to discuss additional measures.
“We’ve already put in place a package of measures, but if it’s needed we’ll introduce additional steps to help normalize the market,” Finance Minister Koo Yun Cheol told lawmakers, per Bloomberg.
Korea’s conservative People Power Party seized on the chance to blast their opponents’ handling of the financial panic, with lawmaker Lee Jongwook declaring that the “country has turned into a casino.”
More on AI: The AI Bubble Has Become So Surreal That It’s Now Propping Up the Toilet Industry
The post South Korean Authorities Scrambling to Save Stock Market From AI Bubble appeared first on Futurism.
The business world has quickly learned that there’s such a thing as using too much AI, as they get slammed with outrageous token bills.
Now, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella is warning of another way that embracing AI could doom a business.
In an interview Sunday, Nadella cautioned against sharing too much information, ranging from proprietary data to the prompts entered, with a third-party AI model.
Instead, he recommended that businesses should make sure they retain all the data on how employees use AI tools so they can eventually train or fine-tune their own open-weight model. This can be accomplished by using AI gateways, which serve as a protective intermediary.
“Any firm that doesn’t have this control, I will claim will not remain a firm because you’ve essentially outsourced your thinking,” Nadella said on an episode of CNN‘s Fareed Zakaria GPS, as spotted by TechCrunch.
That’s a striking claim — and an ironic one, since outsourcing your thinking is arguably exactly the point of using AI, of which Microsoft is a leading vendor. Nadella, in a nutshell, is saying that heavily relying on proprietary AI software could also be a company’s undoing.
He may have an angle in pushing these claims, though. Microsoft hosts the cloud infrastructure that businesses can run their open weight models on. The more people run to hosting their own models, the better for its bottom line.
There’s been a lot of hype lately around open-weight models as a cheaper alternative to those offered by the top AI labs. In AI, “weights” are the numerical values that determine how a model processes information. The models are “open” because these weights are publicly accessible and free to download.
Agentic AI tools like Anthropic’s Claude Code, by contrast, are closed-source. They also come in a “harness,” which is essentially the software the underlying model is couched in. Nadella thinks companies should ditch AI harnesses and instead use a custom AI platform that allows you to recruit multiple AI models — like a cheaper, open-weight one.
“By keeping the harness separate from the model and the context and memory separate from the model, you absolutely can use multiple models for what they’re great at,” Nadella said in the interview, per TechCrunch. “At the same time, any one model can go away, and you can still continue to be in control of your own destiny.”
Getting mixed signals from Nadella here? TechCrunch also notes how he suggests, in pretty hypocritical fashion, that while businesses should be stingy about the data they share with AI models, regular users shouldn’t.
“To some degree there’s got to be some value exchange in the consumer space where you’re getting something for free, maybe for your data,” he mused. “That’s sort of how the advertising business model has worked.”
More on AI: Sam Altman Says Even the Power of AI Will Never Lead to a Shorter Work Week
The post Microsoft CEO Warns That Companies Embracing AI Could Drive Themselves Out of Business appeared first on Futurism.
In Nasdaq trading today, shares of Apple Inc. (AAPL) rose $3.17 to $340.08 to hit a new all-time closing high. Apple’s all-time intraday high was also set today at $342.89.
Apple’s 52-week low stands at $201.50.
Today’s trading volume for AAPL shares was 50,765,695 versus Apple’s average trading volume of 55,539,493 shares.
Apple’s PE Ratio currently stands at 41.22.
Apple currently has a market value of $4.995 trillion, making it the world’s most valuable company.
The top five U.S. publicly-traded companies, based on market value:
Selected companies’ current market values:
• SpaceX (SPCX): $1.534T
• Meta Platforms (META): $1.506T
• Tesla (TSLA): $1.214T
• Berkshire Hathaway (BRK-A): $1.100T
• Walmart (WMT): $900.059B
• Advanced Micro Devices (AMD): $741.304B
• Intel (INTC): $435.297B
• Cisco (CSCO): $455.551B
• Netflix (NFLX): $301.428B
• Dell (DELL): $253.594B
• IBM (IBM): $214.326B
• SoftBank (SFTBF): $176.724B
• Disney (DIS): $171.741B
• Sony (SONY): $130.897B
• Spotify (SPOT): $104.260B
• Adobe (ADBE): $99.025B
• Nokia (NOK): $49.992B
• Hewlett-Packard (HPQ): $25.858B
• SiriusXM (SIRI): $10.562B
• BlackBerry (BB): $4.721B
• Sonos (SONO): $2.001B
• Liquidmetal (LQMT): $0.249B
• RealNetworks (RNWK) was delisted from U.S. exchanges on December 21, 2022 and is no longer publicly traded.
Apple all-time high (AAPL) via NASDAQ here.
MacDailyNews Take: To the moon, Alice. To the moon!
On April 20, when Apple announced Tim Cook would be kicked upstairs to be replaced by product guy John Ternus as CEO, AAPL closed at $273.05 after being range-bound all year. Since that announcement, AAPL has surged as high as today’s $342.89. That 25.58% leap in under 90 days highlights just how favorably Apple investors view John Ternus.
Please help support MacDailyNews — and enjoy subscriber-only articles, comments, chat, and more — by subscribing to our Substack: macdailynews.substack.com. Thank you!
Support MacDailyNews at no extra cost to you by using this link to shop at Amazon.
Like or dislike this post below!
The post Apple shares hit new all-time closing and intraday highs appeared first on MacDailyNews.
If you were looking for even more ways to give Elon Musk your hard-earned cash, you’re in luck!
His social media platform X has officially rolled out a new banking service, uninspiredly called X Money, to its Premium and Premium Plus users — who are already shelling out up to $40 a month for a blue checkmark and more prominent tweet replies.
The service allows users to store their money in a deposit account and withdraw cash via ATMs using a physical Visa debit card. The microblogging platform is also enticing users with three percent cash-back and six percent annual percentage yield (APY).
But you’re not alone if you’re having second thoughts about handing over a company primarily known for the dissemination of misinformation, child sexual abuse material, and hate speech — while providing a depressing echo chamber to its broadly loathed CEO — your life savings.
As senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) pointed out in a letter directly addressed to Musk earlier this year, X Money could pose a risk to “consumers, our national security, and the stability of the financial system,” while citing Musk’s “track record operating X.”
“Your failure to operate X in a safe and responsible manner does not breed confidence in your ability to safely expand into consumer finance,” she wrote.
Musk’s desire to launch a banking app goes way back. In 1999, he cofounded e-commerce payment system X.com, which merged with another company in 2000 to eventually form PayPal. However, the company’s board ousted Musk and replaced him with Peter Thiel at the time over major disagreements, a clear source of frustration and anger for the SpaceX CEO.
X Money is part of Musk’s broader goal of transforming X into what he calls “the everything app,” which, in the timeless words of former CEO and Musk’s mouthpiece Linda Yaccarino, “can deliver, well… everything.”
It’s an ambitious dream that evokes the Chinese app WeChat. But considering Musk’s standing in today’s society — his behavior has quickly turned him into one of the most hated people on the planet — convincing the public of going all-in on X might be more difficult than he anticipated, especially when it comes to personal finance.
Besides, even just getting the feature off the ground has seemingly been far more difficult than Musk anticipated. He originally promised it would launch by the end of 2024.
“It would blow my mind if we don’t have that rolled out by the end of next year,” Musk told then-Twitter employees in October 2023.
Considering he missed his deadline by over two and a half years, chances are his mind has been blown several times over by now.
More on X: Elon Musk Is Having One of His All-Time Meltdowns
The post Elon Musk Launches New Service Where You Can Send Him All Your Money and Hope for the Best appeared first on Futurism.
The West Pacific has swung back into an El Niño phase, bringing nearly unprecedented heat to vast swaths of the globe.
Some of El Niño’s impacts are immediately apparent, or will be in the months to come: blistering high temps, of course, but also major amounts of rainfall for some, and extreme drought for others. Unfortunately, those weather patterns don’t just come and go. They also have a major impact on agricultural production, from the plains of the American Midwest to the rice paddies of Southeast Asia — and, as a result, a huge influence on the global economy.
As Reuters observes, El Niño conditions will likely have an inflationary effect on the economies of developing countries, as the ensuing weather flips typical rainfall totals on their head.
In Asia, for example, rainfall totals are likely to be much lower than usual, a situation expected to wreak havoc on countries like India and Vietnam. With India’s weather bureau projecting the driest conditions in over a decade, this year’s rice harvest is at risk. Lower rice yields would tighten supply, raising food prices for millions.
Central banks, in turn, could be forced to keep borrowing rates high, in order to keep rising prices in check.
“People are forecasting rate hikes for the second half of the year, especially for the South Asian countries, which are kind of the most impacted by El Niño such as India, Indonesia, Vietnam, Thailand,” equity portfolio manager at Allspring Global Investments Gary Tan told Reuters. “El Niño is just going to make inflation more sticky.”
A similar situation is possible across Africa, Reuters warns, as agricultural sectors in countries like Kenya are particularly susceptible to weather disruptions.
In today’s incredibly connected economy, in other words, it doesn’t take a butterfly flapping its wings to make waves half a world a way — just some warm ocean water in the middle of the Pacific.
More on El Niño: Scientists Propose Dimming Sun to Combat El Niño
The post El Niño Set to Upend the World Economy appeared first on Futurism.
In Nasdaq trading today, shares of Apple Inc. (AAPL) rose $3.89 to $336.91 to hit a new all-time closing high. Apple’s all-time intraday high was also set today at $339.57.
Apple’s 52-week low stands at $201.50.
Today’s trading volume for AAPL shares was 45,246,885 versus Apple’s average trading volume of 55,382,396 shares.
Apple’s PE Ratio currently stands at 40.79.
Apple currently has a market value of $4.948 trillion, making it the world’s most valuable company.
The top five U.S. publicly-traded companies, based on market value:
Selected companies’ current market values:
• Taiwan Semi (TSM): $2.070T
• Tesla (TSLA): $1.221T
• SpaceX (SPCX): $1.495T
• Meta Platforms (META): $1.507T
• Walmart (WMT): $889.236B
• Berkshire Hathaway (BRK-A): $1.069T
• Advanced Micro Devices (AMD): $807.066B
• Intel (INTC): $462.383B
• Cisco (CSCO): $451.570B
• Netflix (NFLX): $293.141B
• SoftBank (SFTBF): $181.397B
• IBM (IBM): $203.765B
• Disney (DIS): $167.816B
• Dell (DELL): $275.606B
• Sony (SONY): $130.897B
• Adobe (ADBE): $94.506B
• Spotify (SPOT): $101.724B
• Nokia (NOK): $51.750B
• Hewlett-Packard (HPQ): $24.281B
• SiriusXM (SIRI): $10.031B
• BlackBerry (BB): $5.005B
• Sonos (SONO): $1.866B
• Liquidmetal (LQMT): $0.248B
• RealNetworks (RNWK) was delisted from U.S. exchanges on December 21, 2022 and is no longer publicly traded.
Apple all-time high (AAPL) via NASDAQ here.
MacDailyNews Take: The natural order has been restored, thanks to growing optimism over incoming CEO John Ternus*. Onward and upward, Cupertino soldiers!
*On April 20, when Apple announced Tim Cook would be kicked upstairs to be replaced by product guy John Ternus as CEO, AAPL closed at $273.05 after being range-bound all year. Since that announcement, AAPL has surged as high as today’s $339.57. That ~24% leap in under 90 days highlights just how favorably Apple investors view John Ternus.
Please help support MacDailyNews — and enjoy subscriber-only articles, comments, chat, and more — by subscribing to our Substack: macdailynews.substack.com. Thank you!
Support MacDailyNews at no extra cost to you by using this link to shop at Amazon.
Like or dislike this post below!
The post Apple again the World’s Most Valuable Company as shares hit new all-time closing and intraday highs appeared first on MacDailyNews.
Was SpaceX’s recent Starship flight test a success or a failure? Many are hailing it as a victory, but several of the megarocket’s booster’s engines failed after re-entry, causing it to explode.
SpaceX has had many similarly ambiguous tests before. But this was the first one since its much-hyped IPO earlier this summer — and it’s already clear that it wasn’t a convincing enough display to reverse the company’s fortunes on the stock market.
After hitting an all time low before the weekend and closing at $115, SpaceX shares endeavored to plummet even further on Monday, briefly dipping to $108.66 — a new nadir since going public — before stabilizing around $110. The new low is over 20 percent below its opening IPO price of $135, and less than half of its all time high of more than $225 per share.
It’s a sign of the scrutiny the company will be put through now that it’s a public entity, and comes despite certain predictions that a successful flight would help buoy the company’s shares. When Starship ran into trouble in the past, SpaceX mainly had to weather a storm of media coverage. Now, nervous investors represent yet another liability.
“One of the benefits of being private is that there wasn’t a market to weigh in on and evaluate business decisions,” David Meier, senior investment analyst at the Motley Fool, told The Washington Post.
“Being publicly traded means everything will be evaluated and information transmitted through market prices,” he added. “So every SpaceX launch, every Starlink decision and every xAI decision will be scrutinized by the market.”
Spaceflight, at least currently, isn’t an ideal match for the make-a-quick-buck capitalism that Musk extolls. SpaceX has never been profitable, losing $5 billion last year alone. As Starship’s woes illustrate, rocket development is messy and complicated; there’s no guarantee that progress will be linear, if there’s any made at all. Investors are essentially being asked to keep pouring money into an incredibly lengthy and expensive science experiment.
Meanwhile, Musk has made outrageously lofty promises that SpaceX will eventually use Starship to deploy so many data centers in space that it’d create a “sentient sun,” and establish colonies on the Moon and eventually Mars. Every failure will be compared against those outsized benchmarks, which is almost certainly part of Musk’s enduring schtick.
The thirteenth test flight on Friday was a mixed-bag. The spacecraft’s upper stage successfully made its way to suborbital space and deployed a payload of Starlink internet satellites, which briefly went online before burning up as planned. This was a first for Starship, as previous tests only used dummies. Then the ship re-entered the atmosphere and landed in the Indian Ocean in one piece without exploding.
But the booster was a different story. Though it performed flawlessly on the journey up, only ten of out the thirteen engines fired up on its return to Earth, failing to slow the massive object down in time. Instead of making a planned “soft” splashdown, it slammed into the Gulf of Mexico and appeared to explode on impact.
On the one hand, the flight test validated that SpaceX is making progress with its latest V3 iteration of its spacecraft. In the first V3 flight test in May, the upper stage lost several of its engines on its way to space, and this time it didn’t. The upper stage also survived the splash down instead of exploding, with SpaceX engineers calling it Starship’s best reentry yet.
But the failed booster landing is hard to overlook. Unless the booster is reliably recoverable, then Starship won’t be reusable, an indispensable part of making the behemoth vehicle an economically viable means to ferrying large payloads into orbit and beyond.
Most coverage around the recent test has been positive. Arguably, that makes it all the more concerning that the stock continues to perform so poorly.
“The future of the company is riding on the ability to make Starship work,” Clayton Swope, deputy director of the Aerospace Security Project, told WaPo. “What they’re trying to do is switch to a freight train and get the economies of scale [of] something of that magnitude.”
More on SpaceX: SpaceX Investors in Meltdown Over All the Money They’ve Lost
The post SpaceX Stock Hammered After Starship Booster Fails in First Launch Since IPO appeared first on Futurism.
Login