The Department of Justice announced Thursday that it arrested Gannon Ken Van Dyke, an enlisted member of the US Army’s special forces, for allegedly using “classified, nonpublic” information about the capture of Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro to notch more than $400,000 in profits on Polymarket trades. A grand jury indicted him on five counts, including multiple violations of the Commodity Exchange Act.Van Dyke is the first person to be charged with insider trading on a prediction market in the United States. Lawmakers have been voicing concerns for months about the high likelihood that politicians and public servants could use nonpublic…
As the first week of trial in Musk v. Altman comes to a close, one person has emerged as a critical behind-the-scenes manager of communications and egos in OpenAI’s early years: Shivon Zilis.A longtime employee of Musk and the mother to four of his children, Zilis joined OpenAI as an…
Sam Altman’s eyeball-scanning startup, Tools for Humanity, announced last week that a new product called Concert Kit—designed to give verified humans a way to purchase concert tickets—would first roll out on Bruno Mars’ world tour of his latest studio album, The Romantic.However, Bruno Mars Management and Live Nation, the producer…
Kalshi announced Wednesday that it had taken action against three US politicians for violating the prediction market platform’s rules on insider trading. One of the candidates, Mark Moran, a former investment banker and contestant on the reality dating show FBoy Island, is running a long-shot campaign for US Senate in…
On Tuesday, the nonprofit Consumer Federation of America filed a lawsuit against Meta, alleging that the way the social networking giant handles scammers on its platforms violates Washington, DC’s consumer protection laws.While many online scams involve direct outreach to victims by scammers (who are often themselves human trafficking victims trapped…
Two of Big Tech’s most influential billionaires, Sam Altman and Elon Musk, will go head-to-head in a highly anticipated trial beginning April 27. In Musk v. Altman, a judge, advised by a jury, will ultimately determine whether OpenAI has strayed from its founding mission to ensure that artificial general intelligence…
Peptides are, quite literally, the key building blocks of life. They are essentially short chains of amino acids, which come together to create proteins. They are akin to hormones, or chemical messengers produced by specific glands throughout the body to signal key complex processes. Notably, the body produces many natural…
The advent of AI hacking tools has raised fears of a near future in which anyone can use automated tools to dig up exploitable vulnerabilities in any piece of software, like a kind of digital intrusion superpower. Here in the present, however, AI seems to be playing a more mundane,…
When a Series A funding round gets extended four months after closing, it usually means that the company that raised the round is so hot they essentially have investors begging to put their money in. I’m not sure if that’s happening here, but Quantum Art, the trapped-ion quantum computing startup…
If you could travel back in time, what year would you choose? What would you change about history? For a surprising number of Chinese people, their answer turns out to be the same: Use what they know today to save China from its unglorious past.In a new book titled Make…
The U.S. government is offering companies $24 million to prototype and test projects that retrieve rare earth critical minerals from scrap materials to make into advanced magnets.The grants are being offered in the first part of the U.S. Department of Energy’s “Critical Minerals and Materials Accelerator” funding notice. Applications are…
As thousands of influencers descended on southern California earlier this month for the annual Coachella Music Festival, a very Silicon Valley program dubbed “AI Coachella” was taking shape a few hundred miles north in Palo Alto. The class, CS 153, is one of Stanford’s buzziest offerings this semester, and like…
In a fight that was as wild and non-technical as one might expect, reality-TV star Chrisean Rock scored a knockdown, and shook off a controversial knockdown to defeat Zenith Zion via split decision in a three-round, crossover boxing match in Chester, Pennsylvania on Saturday night. This fight and event had…
I recently witnessed how scary-good artificial intelligence is getting at the human side of computer hacking, when the following message popped up on my laptop screen:Hi Will,I’ve been following your AI Lab newsletter and really appreciate your insights on open-source AI and agent-based learning—especially your recent piece on emergent behaviors…
The final weekend of April is here, my dearest Wordlers. Soon, the chilly days and evenings of early spring will melt into the month of May. April showers beget May flowers, and all that jazz. We have a Wordle to solve this final Saturday of April. Let’s solve it!Looking for…
Spotlight
Luis von Ahn could have retired to a beach somewhere years ago.…
Under a new state regulation, venture capital firms operating in California were…
Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps warned Tuesday that it plans to begin…
OpenAI announced Thursday that it had acquired the online business talk show…
