A U.S. government advisory board is pushing Washington to reckon with an unpleasant reality: Teenagers are increasingly participating in underground cybercrime.
Driving the news: This month, the Department of Homeland Security's Cyber Safety Review Board recommended that Congress explore funding juvenile cybercrime prevention programs that could help steer young people away from illegal hacking and other online crimes.
Despite widely attended events, including last Sunday's LCS Summer Finals at the Prudential Center in Newark, New Jersey, Riot Games' long-running League of Legends esports league is not breaking even, Raul Fernandez, Riot's senior director of esports in the Americas, told Axios in Newark last weekend.
Why it matters: Tencent-owned Riot runs some of the world's most popular multiplayer games, including League and the first-person shooter Valorant, but running a thriving sports business around them is still a work in progress.
Salary negotiations — among the most high-stakes, emotionally fraught and psychologically complex processes many employees will ever experience — could soon get the artificial-intelligence treatment.
What's happening: Pactum AI, the world's largest provider of automated procurement negotiation, has been using AI chatbots to negotiate the packages of its employees since 2021.
Electronic Arts' Madden NFL is one of the most popular video game franchises in the United States, but when this year's edition came out last week, there were few online reviews of the game from critics — just four — to indicate if it was any good.
Why it matters: The lack of reviews for Madden NFL 24 is unusual, but may in fact not matter, which would prove the series is review-proof.
Why it matters: The new ransomware gang alleges it stole more than 500,000 Social Security numbers and photocopies of employees' driver's licenses and passports, along with other legal and financial documents.
Hugging Face, a provider of open-source tools for developing AI, raised $235 million in Series D funding at a $4.5 billion post-money valuation led by Salesforce Ventures.
Why it matters: Climate intelligence company Tomorrow.io is aiming to drastically expand the data available over the world's data gaps, including the oceans and many developing countries.
Tomorrow.io plans to use the satellite constellation, which now numbers two but may total more than 30, to improve its weather forecast models, and help other countries improve their warning systems.
Chipmaker Nvidia's blowout earnings report late Wednesday is a strong sign that we're still only at the starting gate of Silicon Valley's artificial intelligence boom.
Why it matters: The billions of dollars in cash that companies are laying out for Nvidia's AI chips show that there is more than stock speculation or vaporware products at play in the current frenzy.
