A net art NFT project called Bonkler will soon launch an experiment where bidders on a big NFT will win smaller NFTs, even if they lose the auction for the larger work.
Zoom in: Buyers are dropping an average of 14 ETH (about $24,000) each day for the latest Bonkler NFT, and that's likely to pop if every bid also gets an asset.
Generative AI has already lowered the bar for cybercriminals looking to clone someone's voice and use it in their schemes.
Why it matters: Cybercriminals now need as little as three seconds of someone's voice to successfully clone it and make it usable in a scam call thanks to generative AI tools, researchers at McAfee have found.
A series of video game showcases over the last two weeks has filled out much of the release calendar for late 2023 and roughly sketched out 2024, with some notable exceptions.
Driving the news: Last Wednesday’s live Summer Game Fest stage show in Los Angeles and a well-received, prerecorded cascade of trailers by Microsoft on Sunday filled in a lot of blanks.
SEC communications known as the Hinman documents dropped Tuesday, evidence crypto firm Ripple hopes is a smoking gun in a whodunnit called "What is a Security."
Why it matters: The internal SEC communications from 2018 show that senior SEC officials explicitly acknowledged that a speech from a fellow director could sow confusion in how the U.S. classifies digital assets.
Salesforce Monday pitched its new AI Cloud product as a one-stop shop for nervous CEOs looking to take advantage of large language models “without their data ever leaving Salesforce,” per CEO Marc Benioff.
Why it matters: Salesforce has upped the ante on AI privacy and security — with Benioff zeroing in on demand for AI in regulated industries, and delivering thinly-veiled snark aimed at market leader OpenAI wrapped in the message that “data is not our product.”
Twitter's new CEO Linda Yaccarino wrote up some inspirational comments for her new staff in an e-mail on Monday, exhorting them to "reach across aisles, create new partnerships, celebrate new voices, and build something together that can change the world."
Yes, but: The man who hired her, the company's billionaire owner Elon Musk, spent the weekend posting sophomoric messages that reeked at times of misogyny and transphobia.
Health care’s labor shortage is adding new urgency to the need for new tech.
Why it matters: Americans 65 and older, those most in need of health care services, are expected to outnumber children in the U.S. for the first time by 2030 — just as the health care sector is expected to have a shortfall of more than 200,000 physicians and nurses.
Thousands of Reddit communities restricted user access Monday as part of a coordinated effort to protest the company's new policy to charge developers for access to its backend interface.
Why it matters: The huge influx of subreddits, or channels on the site dedicated to specific topics, shifting to private mode caused the entire site to temporarily crash Monday.
People use computers despite not knowing how they work — so if web3 could be made that useful and that simple, maybe it could be as ubiquitous.
Zoom in: That's Magic's mission — to make web3 useful and easy. Its business is effectively abstracting away the complexities of crypto and NFT ownership for other businesses with software.
The Federal Trade Commission plans to seek a temporary restraining order from a federal district court to block Microsoft from completing its $68.7 billion proposed acquisition of Activision Blizzard, per a source familiar with the situation.
Why it matters: Microsoft wants to close the acquisition before a July 18 termination deadline, and the FTC seeks to prevent a closing because deals are a lot harder to unwind after they're completed. An August trial is set for the FTC's challenge of the deal.
Generative AI will experience explosive growth in coming years, but the cash the core technology generates for its inventors will pale in comparison to revenue from Big Tech's existing services and hardware, per a new S&P Global report.
Why it matters: Generative AI is blowing our minds and changing our jobs, but the companies driving that innovation will struggle to join the household name ranks of Apple, Google and Microsoft.
Technological singularity — a theory that AI can reach an irreversible point that transcends human intelligence — is having a new moment as AI upends business and society.
Why it matters: Any rewiring of humanity warrants discussion, however remote the prospect.
Silicon Valley is hatching new futures faster than the rest of the world can digest them.
The big picture: The artificial-intelligence wave, driven by the astonishing new capacity of AI to mimic human conversation and generate images, is only just coming into view — But last week Apple sent up an impossible-to-ignore flare: Wait, there's more!
