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Tag: iab-technology industry

  • Nonconsensual deepfake porn puts AI in spotlight | CNN Business

    Nonconsensual deepfake porn puts AI in spotlight | CNN Business

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    New York
    CNN
     — 

    In its annual “worldwide threat assessment,” top US intelligence officials have warned in recent years of the threat posed by so-called deepfakes – convincing fake videos made using artificial intelligence.

    “Adversaries and strategic competitors,” they warned in 2019, might use this technology “to create convincing—but false—image, audio, and video files to augment influence campaigns directed against the United States and our allies and partners.”

    The scenarios are not difficult to imagine; a faked video showing a politician in a compromising position; faked audio of a world leader discussing sensitive information.

    The threat doesn’t seem too distant. The recent viral success of ChatGPT, an A.I. chatbot that can answer questions and write prose, is a reminder of how powerful this kind of technology can be.

    But despite the warnings, we haven’t seen many notable instances, that we know of, where deepfakes have successfully been deployed in geopolitics.

    But there is one group the technology has been weaponized against consistently and for several years: women.

    Deepfakes have been used to put women’s faces, without their consent, into often aggressive pornographic videos. It’s a depraved AI spin on the humiliating practice of revenge porn, with deepfake videos appearing so real it can be hard for female victims to deny it isn’t really them.

    The long-simmering issue exploded into public view last week when it emerged Atrioc, a high-profile male video game streamer on the hugely popular platform Twitch, had accessed deepfake videos of some of his female Twitch streaming colleagues. He later apologized.

    Amid the fallout, the Twitch streamer “Sweet Anita” realized deepfake depictions of her in pornographic videos exist online.

    “It’s very, very surreal to watch yourself do something you’ve never done,” Twitch streamer “Sweet Anita” told CNN after realizing last week her face had been inserted into pornographic videos without her consent.

    “It’s kind of like if you watched anything shocking happening to yourself. Like, if you watched a video of yourself being murdered, or a video of yourself jumping off a cliff,” she said.

    But the deeply disturbing use of the technology in this way is not novel.

    Indeed, the very term “deepfake” is derived from the username of an anonymous Reddit contributor who began posting manipulated videos of female celebrities in pornographic scenes in 2017.

    “From the very beginning, the person who created deepfakes was using it to make pornography of women without their consent,” Samantha Cole, a reporter with Vice’s Motherboard, who has been tracking deepfakes since their inception, told CNN.

    The online gaming community is a notoriously difficult place for women – the 2014 “Gamergate” harassment campaign a most prominent example.

    But concerns over the use of nonconsensual pornographic images isn’t exclusive to this community, and threatens to become more commonplace as artificial intelligence technology develops at breakneck speed and the ease of creating deepfake videos continues to improve.

    “I am baffled by how awful people are to each other on the Internet in a way that I don’t think they would be face to face,” Hany Farid, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and digital forensics expert, told CNN.

    “I think we have to start sort of trying to understand, why is it that this technology, this medium, allows and brings out seemingly the worst in human nature? And if we’re going to have these technologies ingrained in our lives the way they seem to be, I think we’re going to have to start to think about how we can be better human beings with these types of devices,” he said.

    It’s part of a much larger systemic problem.

    “It’s all rape culture,” Cole said, “I don’t know what the actual solution is other than getting to that fundamental problem of disrespect and non-consent and being okay with violating women’s consent.”

    There have been efforts from lawmakers to crack down on the creation of nonconsensual imagery, whether it is AI-generated or not. In California, laws have been brought in to try to counter the potential for deepfakes to be used in an election campaign and in nonconsensual pornography.

    But there’s skepticism. “We haven’t even solved the problems of the technology sector from 10, 20 years ago,” Farid said, pointing out that the development of artificial intelligence “is moving much, much faster than the original technology revolution.”

    “Move fast and break things,” was Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s motto back in the company’s early days. As the power, and indeed the danger, of his platform came into focus he later changed the motto to, “Move fast with stable infrastructure.”

    Whether it was willful negligence or ignorance, Silicon Valley was not prepared for the onslaught of hate and disinformation that has festered on its platforms. The same tools it had built to bring people together have also been weaponized to divide.

    And while there has been a good deal of discussion about “ethical AI,” as Google and Microsoft look set for an AI arms race, there’s concern things could be moving too rapidly.

    “The people who are developing these technologies – the academics, the people in the research labs at Google and Facebook – you have to start asking yourself, ‘why are you developing this technology?,’” Farid suggested.

    “If the harms outweigh the benefits, should you carpet bomb the Internet with your technology and put it out there and then sit back and say, ‘well, let’s see what happens next?’”

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  • This program is using VR training to help solve the nationwide mechanic shortage | CNN Business

    This program is using VR training to help solve the nationwide mechanic shortage | CNN Business

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    CNN
     — 

    The first tool that mechanic trainees at Maryland’s Vehicles for Change program pick up is not a wrench, but a pair of virtual reality goggles.

    First, students watch an instructor virtually demonstrate a skill; then they follow prompts to complete a procedure themselves in VR. After that, students work through the checklist in VR without prompting – all before practicing on an actual car.

    “We can have three people actually doing a live instruction of an oil change while I have three other people simultaneously learning that same lesson in the headset – and it’s only one instructor necessary,” Geoff Crawford, vice president of virtual reality at non-profit Vehicles for Change, told CNN.

    The virtual-first training program is an unconventional solution to a real-world problem: a significant shortage of qualified automotive technicians. Nationwide, retirements and business growth create 76,000 mechanic jobs to fill every year, but 37,000 of those jobs go unfilled, according to National Automobile Dealers Association estimates. In Maryland alone, Crawford said a recent online search showed 2,600 mechanic jobs posted.

    The impact of this shortage extends far beyond the repair shops looking to hire employees. Trade groups say the lack of skilled workers in garages is driving up repair costs, delays and hurting those who need their cars fixed promptly. But Crawford is optimistic VR can help ease this bottleneck.

    “It’s going to expedite the process of getting folks entry level, ready to come into the garages,” he said.

    As VR technology has gotten better and cheaper, it has opened up opportunities for use in educational settings. In the early days of the pandemic, doctors and nurses used VR to train for treating patients with Covid-19. Fire departments have used VR to train firefighters without needing a blaze. And some schools have used VR to expand the classroom beyond its physical walls, particularly as demand for remote education exploded during the pandemic.

    Martin Schwartz, the president of Vehicles for Change, said the virtual automotive program was designed to address another problem, too: limited job options for former prisoners.

    “One of the problems that we have in our prisons across the country is we’re really not providing people with a skill when they leave prison,” Schwartz told CNN.

    Released felons often have probation or parole requirements to meet and costs to pay, but have difficulty finding jobs because of “a big sign on their chest,” Schwartz said. But the automotive world is “a little bit more lenient and is willing to hire people with a criminal background and you can make quite a living.”

    Marcus Butler started his VR training as part of a work release program. As he wraps up an eight-year sentence for armed robbery, Butler said he is thankful to have a career prospect on the other side.

    “I have a trade of skill that is with me,” he said. “I learned it, I know it, and no matter where I go, there’s cars everywhere. I’ll always have a job.”

    Schwartz wants to grow the program and make it available at prisons and trade schools. His goal is 20 new sites in the next five years.

    “This is number one, the wave of the future,” he said.

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  • Twitter to charge for SMS two-factor authentication | CNN Business

    Twitter to charge for SMS two-factor authentication | CNN Business

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    New York
    CNN
     — 

    Twitter Blue subscribers will be the platform’s only users able to use text messages as a two-factor authentication method, Twitter announced Friday.

    The change will take place on March 20. Twitter users will have two other ways to authenticate their Twitter log-ins at no cost: an authentication mobile app and a security key.

    Two factor authentication, or 2FA, requires users to type in their password and then enter a code or security key to access their accounts. It is one of the primary methods for users to keep their Twitter account secure.

    “While historically a popular form of 2FA, unfortunately we have seen phone-number based 2FA be used – and abused – by bad actors,” the company said in a blog post Friday. “So starting today, we will no longer allow accounts to enroll in the text message/SMS method of 2FA unless they are Twitter Blue subscribers.”

    Twitter Blue, which costs $11 a month for iOS and Android subscribers, adds a blue checkmark to the account of anyone willing to pay for one.

    As of 2021, only 2.6% of Twitter users had a 2FA method enabled – and of those, 74.4% used SMS authentication, a Twitter account security report said.

    Twitter said non-subscribers will have 30 days to disable the text method and enroll in another way to sign in using 2FA. Disabling text message 2FA won’t automatically disassociate the user’s phone number from their account, Twitter said.

    Musk responded “Yup” to a tweet claiming a telecommunications company used bot accounts “to Pump 2FA SMS” and that Twitter was losing $60 million a year “on scam SMS.”

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  • Warren Buffett’s company sells major stake in Taiwanese chip giant TSMC | CNN Business

    Warren Buffett’s company sells major stake in Taiwanese chip giant TSMC | CNN Business

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    Taipei/Hong Kong
    CNN
     — 

    Shares in Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company fell as much as 4% on Wednesday, after Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway disclosed that it had sold most of its holdings in the chip giant.

    In a Tuesday filing with the United States’ Securities and Exchange Commission, Berkshire Hathaway

    (BRKA)     said it had about 8.3 million American depository shares of TSMC worth $618 million, having sold 86% of its shares. Just months before, in November, the company held about 60 million American depository shares of TSMC worth $4.1 billion, according to an SEC filing.

    Berkshire Hathaway did not provide a reason for the sale and did not immediately respond to a CNN request for comment. TSMC had no comment on the share sale.

    Shares in TSMC, which accounts for an estimated 90% of the world’s super-advanced computer chips, ended Wednesday more than 3% lower.

    Last month, the chipmaker posted strong quarterly and annual earnings, but gave a muted forecast on prospects for 2023 given the global slump in electronics demand because of rising inflation.

    Due to TSMC’s record earnings in 2022, its board approved on Tuesday the distribution of $121 billion New Taiwan Dollars ($4 billion) in performance-related bonuses and profit sharing to employees based in Taiwan.

    With nearly 65,000 employees on the island as of the end of last year, that would work out as an average of $62,000 per employee – if distributed equally.

    The board also approved a plan to inject up to $3.5 billion into the company’s subsidiary in Arizona, which will be part of a previously announced investment of $40 billion in the United States. TSMC announced last year that it’s building a second semiconductor factory in Phoenix and increasing its investment there.

    The world’s most important chipmaker, highly sought after by governments globally, is considering opening its first plant in Europe and a second one in Japan. TSMC’s global expansion comes as political tension has heightened between Washington and Beijing.

    Earlier this month, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken postponed a planned trip to China in response to the flying of a suspected Chinese spy balloon over the United States.

    In October, President Joe Biden’s administration imposed sweeping new curbs designed to curtail China’s access to technology critical to its growing military power.

    Last month, a Dutch maker of semiconductor equipment, ASML, told CNN that “rules are being finalized” on export controls to China, amid reports that the Netherlands and Japan have joined the United States in restricting sales of some computer chip machinery to the country.

    A few days later, multiple media outlets reported that Washington was moving to further restrict sales of American technology to Chinese tech giant Huawei.

    – CNN’s Chris Isidore and Michelle Toh contributed to this report

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  • The online shopping upstart that’s quietly become the number one app in the US | CNN Business

    The online shopping upstart that’s quietly become the number one app in the US | CNN Business

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    Hong Kong
    CNN
     — 

    A new online shopping platform linked to one of China’s top retailers has quickly become the most downloaded app in the United States, surpassing Amazon and Walmart. Now it’s looking to capitalize from an appearance on America’s biggest stage.

    Temu, a Boston-based online retailer that shares the same owner as Chinese social commerce giant Pinduoduo, made its Super Bowl debut on Sunday.

    Temu, which runs an online superstore for virtually everything — from home goods to apparel to electronics — unveiled a commercial during the game that encouraged consumers to “shop like a billionaire.”

    The pitch? You don’t have to be one.

    “Through the largest stage possible, we want to share with our consumers that they can shop with a sense of freedom because of the price we offer,” a Temu spokesperson told CNN in a statement.

    The 30-second spot shows the company’s proposition to users: Feel like you’re splurging by buying lots of stuff cheaply. A woman’s swimsuit on Temu costs just $6.50, while a pair of wireless earphones is priced at $8.50. An eyebrow trimmer costs 90 cents.

    These surprisingly low prices — by Western standards, at least — have drawn comparisons to Shein, the Chinese fast fashion upstart that also offers a wide selection of inexpensive clothing and home goods, and has made significant inroads into markets including the United States.

    Shein is considered one of Temu’s competitors, along with US-based discount retailer Wish and Alibaba’s AliExpress, according to Coresight Research.

    Temu, pronounced “tee-moo,” was launched last year by PDD, its US-listed parent company formerly known as Pinduoduo. The company officially changed its name just this month.

    PDD’s subsidiary Pinduoduo is one of China’s most popular e-commerce platforms with approximately 900 million users. It made its name with a group-buying business model, allowing people to save money by enlisting friends to buy the same item in bulk.

    On its website, Temu says it uses its parent company’s “vast and deep network … built over the years to offer a wide range of affordable quality products.”

    Since its rollout in September, the application has been downloaded 24 million times, racking up more than 11 million monthly active users, according to Sensor Tower.

    In the fourth quarter of last year, US app installations for Temu exceeded those for Amazon

    (AMZN)    , Walmart

    (WMT)     and Target

    (TGT)    , according to Abe Yousef, a senior insights analyst at the analytics firm Sensor Tower.

    “Temu soared to the top of both US app store charts in November, where the app still holds the top position now,” he told CNN, referring to iOS and Android mobile app stores.

    Yousef said the company had been particularly successful at acquiring new users by offering extremely low prices and in-app flash deals, such as 89% off certain items.

    The firm is already eyeing new territory. This month, Temu said on Twitter that it plans to expand to Canada.

    Michael Felice, an associate partner at management consulting firm Kearney, said Temu stood out simply by selling products without high markups.

    “Temu might be exposing a white space in the market wherein brands have been producing at extreme low cost, and along the value chain there’s been so much bloated cost passed on for margin,” he told CNN.

    “That said, American consumers might not even be ready to accept some of these price points … There’s always the question, ‘is it too cheap to be good?’”

    Deborah Weinswig, CEO of Coresight Research, has cautioned that it may be too early to tell whether Temu will be able to maintain those extremely low prices, free shipping and other perks.

    “Temu aims to continue to experiment in marketing and offerings, which is possible thanks to its resource-rich parent company,” she wrote in a report.

    Its launch, she said, “comes at an opportune moment, as consumers search for value amid still-elevated inflation and a degree of economic uncertainty.”

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  • Microsoft’s Bing AI demo called out for several errors | CNN Business

    Microsoft’s Bing AI demo called out for several errors | CNN Business

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    CNN
     — 

    Microsoft’s public demo last week of an AI-powered revamp of Bing appears to have included several factual errors, highlighting the risk the company and its rivals face when incorporating this new technology into search engines.

    At the Bing demo at Microsoft headquarters, the company showed off how integrating artificial intelligence features from the company behind ChatGPT would empower the search engine to provide more conversational and complex search results. The demo included a pros and cons list for products, such as vacuum cleaners; an itinerary for a trip to Mexico City; and the ability to quickly compare corporate earnings results.

    But it apparently failed to differentiate between the types of vacuums and even made up information about certain products, according to an analysis of the demo this week from independent AI researcher Dmitri Brereton. It also missed relevant details (or fabricated certain information) for the bars it referenced in Mexico City, according to Brereton. In addition, Brereton found it inaccurately stated the operating margin for the retailer Gap, and compared it to a set of Lululemon results that were not factually correct.

    “We’re aware of this report and have analyzed its findings in our efforts to improve this experience,” Microsoft said in a statement. “We recognize that there is still work to be done and are expecting that the system may make mistakes during this preview period, which is why the feedback is critical so we can learn and help the models get better.”

    The company also said thousands of users have interacted with the new Bing since the preview launched last week and shared their feedback, allowing the model to “learn and make many improvements already.”

    The discovery of Bing’s apparent mistakes comes just days after Google was called out for an error made in its public demo last week of a similar AI-powered tool. Google’s shares lost $100 billion in value after the error was reported. (Shares of Microsoft were essentially flat on Tuesday.)

    In the wake of the viral success of ChatGPT, an AI chatbot that can generate shockingly convincing essays and responses to user prompts, a growing number of tech companies are racing to deploy similar technology in their products. But it comes with risks, especially for search engines, which are intended to surface accurate results.

    Generative AI systems, which are algorithms that are trained on vast amounts of data online to create new content, are notoriously unreliable, experts say. Laura Edelson, a computer scientist and misinformation researcher at New York University, previously told CNN, “there’s a big difference between an AI sounding authoritative and it actually producing accurate results.”

    CNN also conducted a series of tests this week that showed Bing sometimes struggles with accuracy.

    When asked, “What were Meta’s fourth quarter results?” the Bing AI feature gave a response that said, “according to the press release,” and then listed bullet points appearing to state Meta’s results. But the bullet points were incorrect. Bing said, for example, that Meta generated $34.12 billion in revenue, when the actual amount was $32.17 billion, and said revenue was up from the prior year when in fact it had declined.

    In a separate search, CNN asked Bing, “What are the pros and cons of the best baby cribs.” In its reply, the Bing feature made a list of several cribs and their pros and cons, largely cited to a similar Healthline article. But Bing stated information that appeared to be attributed to the article that was, in fact, not actually there. For example, Bing said one crib had a “water-resistant mattress pad,” but that information was listed nowhere in the article.

    Microsoft and Google executives have previously acknowledged some of the potential issues with the new AI tools.

    “We know we wont be able to answer every question every single time,” Yusuf Mehdi, Microsoft’s vice president and consumer chief marketing officer, said last week. “We also know we’ll make our share of mistakes, so we’ve added a quick feedback button at the top of every search, so you can give us feedback and we can learn.”

    – CNN’s Clare Duffy also contributed to this report.

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  • Several US mobile carriers suffer technical difficulties | CNN Business

    Several US mobile carriers suffer technical difficulties | CNN Business

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    New York
    CNN
     — 

    Several US mobile carriers experienced technical difficulties Monday night.

    DownDetector, a website that tracks service problems and outages, indicated that AT&T, T-Mobile, Verizon and Boost Mobile all experienced a spike in reports Monday night.

    It was unclear if the problems were connected.

    Neville Ray, president of technology for T-Mobile, tweeted late Monday that the company was “addressing a 3rd party fiber interruption issue that has intermittently impacted some voice, messaging and data services in several areas.”

    Ray later tweeted that T-Mobile had “seen significant improvement and [is] operating at near normal levels.”

    It was unclear which geographical areas were affected by the issues.

    AT&T, Verizon and Boost Mobile could not be immediately reached for comment.

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  • Twitter is stumbling. Some ex-employees are launching rivals | CNN Business

    Twitter is stumbling. Some ex-employees are launching rivals | CNN Business

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    New York
    CNN
     — 

    After Sarah Oh lost her job as a human rights advisor at Twitter late last year in the first round of layoffs following Elon Musk’s chaotic acquisition of the company, she decided to join a friend in building a rival service.

    With Gabor Cselle, who previously worked at Twitter and Google, she launched T2, currently available in beta. Like Twitter, it offers a social feed of posts with 280-character limits. But the key selling point, according to Oh, is its focus on safety.

    “We really do want to create an experience that allows people to share what they want to share without fearing risk of things like abuse and harassment, and we feel like we’re really well positioned to deliver on that,” Oh told CNN.

    In the months since Musk completed his takeover, a small but growing number of services have launched or gained traction by appealing to users who are uncomfortable with the billionaire’s decisions to slash Twitter’s staff, rethink content moderation policies and reinstate numerous incendiary accounts that were previously banned, among other moves.

    The list of newer entrants in the markets includes apps like T2 and Spill created by former Twitter employees, a startup backed by one of Musk’s Twitter investors, and a service from former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey. While some apps like T2 strongly resemble Twitter, others take a different approach.

    Last month, for example, the founders of Instagram announced Artifact, “a personalized news feed” powered by artificial intelligence, a description that quickly earned it comparisons to Twitter. In CNN’s recent test of the app, however, it resembled news reader applications like Apple News or the defunct Google Reader. Artifact displayed popular articles from large media organizations and smaller bloggers in a main feed, tailored to users based on their activity and selected interests.

    But all of these apps appear to be vying for the opportunity to scratch the itch users may feel for a news feed that isn’t Twitter — at least for as long as that itch lasts.

    “Something that we’ve heard a lot from people who are moving over from Twitter, either partially or fully, is that it is just for them a nicer experience overall,” said Jae Kaplan, co-founder of Anti Software Software club, the group that develops Cohost, a text-based social media feed similar to Twitter. The service launched publicly in June of last year, after Musk offered to buy Twitter. In November, after Musk completed the takeover, the platform saw a surge in activity, adding 80,000 users within 48 hours.

    “People have been referring to us when they do as a Twitter alternative, which I think is an important distinction from a Twitter replacement,” Kaplan said.

    Replacing Twitter, with its robust network of journalists, politicians and entertainers and sizable audience of users obsessed with real-time news, may be a challenge. While apps like Cohost have seen renewed momentum, their audiences remain a small fraction of the size of Twitter, which had more than 200 million daily active users as of last year.

    Cohost currently has 130,000 users, only 20,000 of which are what Cohost considers active users, according to Kaplan. T2 has a waitlist in the five digits, according to Oh, who says that number continues to grow. Mastodon, the most high-profile recent Twitter rival, hit 2.5 million users in November, but it has since declined to 1.4 million users, in a possible cautionary tale to other services.

    “The incumbent has the advantage of scale, and even in a situation where you have kind of a polarizing figure like Musk take over Twitter, people are realizing that the newer platforms are not nearly as effective from a one-to-many, getting your message out there,” said Tom Forte, a senior research analyst at D.A. Davidson. “Despite the fact that there may be disgruntled consumers, they’re still tweeting.”

    In November, shortly after taking over the company, Musk repeatedly claimed Twitter continued to hit “all-time high” user numbers despite the initial wave of users calling to abandon the social network. (As part of the acquisition, Musk took Twitter private and the company no longer reports user numbers in quarterly securities filings.)

    “If people leave, where do they go? By all accounts, there is no platform right now that is able to take on the function of Twitter, and nothing is really prepared for it,” said Karen North, a clinical professor at the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism. “No platform has the global user base, representing people from all walks of life the way that Twitter does.”

    To complicate matters for rivals, some of the initial fury and media attention about Twitter under Musk has arguably faded in the months since the deal closed. Though controversy remains, many Twitter users may feel less urgency to jump ship today than in late October.

    Still, Mastodon founder Eugen Rochko is not worried.

    “A platform cannot continue to go viral perpetually,” Rochko recently told CNN about Mastodon’s sagging user numbers. “The cycle of media news and attention on social media just simply goes away after awhile, but behind it leaves organic growth which is what we had before November and which we still have now.”

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  • Super Bowl ad slams Tesla’s ‘Full Self-Driving’ tech | CNN Business

    Super Bowl ad slams Tesla’s ‘Full Self-Driving’ tech | CNN Business

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    New York
    CNN
     — 

    Electric carmaker Tesla will face a hit on Super Bowl Sunday, when an ad will play showing the alleged dangers of its Full Self-Driving technology.

    The commercial, which will be aired in Washington, DC, Austin, Tallahassee, Albany, Atlanta and Sacramento does not paint Tesla in the best light. The ad is part of a multimillion dollar advertising campaign by The Dawn Project. Its founder, Dan O’Dowd, is a California tech CEO who has dedicated millions of his own money (and a failed US Senate race) to the cause.

    The ad cost $598,000, a Dawn Project spokesperson told CNN.

    It shows a Tesla Model 3, which allegedly has the Full Self-Driving mode turned on, running over a child-sized dummy on a school crosswalk, and then a fake baby in a stroller, in a series of tests by the Dawn Project. In the ad, the car swerves into oncoming traffic, zooms past stopped school buses, and cruises through “do not enter” signs.

    “Tesla’s Full Self-Driving is endangering the public,” the ad said. “With deceptive marketing and woefully inept engineering.”

    The Dawn Project says it wants to make computer-controlled systems safer for humanity, shooting its own videos as tests of Tesla’s alleged design flaws. In August, O’Dowd published a video showing a Tesla plowing into child-sized mannequins. Some Tesla fans posted their own videos in defense, using their own dummies or even their own children – YouTube has taken down several test videos involving actual children, citing safety risks.

    O’Dowd received a cease and desist letter from Tesla over the video, claiming he and the Dawn Project were “disparaging Tesla’s commercial interests and disseminating defamatory information to the public.”

    O’Dowd responded to the cease-and-desist with a 1,736-word post in which he pushed back at the suggestion his posts were defamatory, defended his tests and returned barbs from Musk and some Tesla supporters.

    O’Dowd, who sold software to the military, is undertaking a campaign of millions of dollars to ban Tesla’s Full Self-Driving feature. He is running national ads and posting online videos displaying the possible dangers of Musk’s technology. He also ran an unsuccessful one-issue campaign for the US Senate on the same message.

    Though officially in beta mode, Full Self-Driving is available to any user in North America who wants to purchase the $15,000 feature.

    Tesla did not immediately respond to CNN’s request for comment. Tesla’s “Full Self-Driving” system is intended to someday work on city streets, but despite its wide rollout, is still officially in a developmental “beta” program. No car for sale on the market is yet able to drive itself.

    Autopilot is a suite of driver-assist features, while Full Self-Driving steers the car on city streets, but could also stop for traffic signals and make turns.

    Tesla contends it is not aware of any ongoing government investigation that has concluded any wrongdoing occurred, and said its Autopilot, with its automated steering designed to keep a car within a lane, is safer than normal driving.

    “Tesla’s reckless deployment of Full Self-Driving software on public roads is a major threat to public safety. Elon Musk has released software that will run down children in school crosswalks, swerve into oncoming traffic and hit a baby in a stroller to all Tesla owners in North America,” O’Dowd said in a statement.

    Tesla said it “has received requests from the Department of Justice for documents related to Tesla’s Autopilot and FSD features” in a January 31 public filing.

    Federal investigators are looking into a Musk tweet about disabling driver alerts on Tesla’s “Full Self Driving” driver assist system, joining several other National Highway Traffic Safety Administration probes.

    On December 31, Musk replied to a tweet by @WholeMarsBlog which said “users with more than 10,000 miles on FSD Beta should be given the option to turn off the steering wheel nag.”

    “Agreed, update coming in Jan,” Musk replied.

    The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration announced last summer it was escalating its Tesla probe to an “engineering analysis,” a step toward seeking a recall. NHTSA first investigated Tesla’s driver-assist technology after reports Autopilot-engaged vehicles were crashing into emergency vehicles stopped at the scene of earlier crashes.

    O’Dowd is the founder and CEO of Green Hills Software. Some of Musk’s defenders claim O’Dowd has a conflict of interest as one of its customers is Intel-owned Mobileye, which makes a computer chip to run driver-assisted software, the Washington Post reported.

    O’Dowd told the Washington Post Mobileye is one of his hundreds of customers and that his main motivation is safety.

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  • I tried Microsoft’s new AI-powered Bing. Here’s what it’s like | CNN Business

    I tried Microsoft’s new AI-powered Bing. Here’s what it’s like | CNN Business

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    Seattle
    CNN Business
     — 

    Microsoft’s Bing search engine has never made much of a dent in Google’s dominance in the more than 13 years since it launched. Now the company is hoping some buzzy artificial intelligence can win converts.

    Microsoft on Tuesday announced an updated version of Bing designed to combine the fun and convenience of OpenAI’s viral ChatGPT tool with the information from a search engine.

    Beyond providing a list of relevant links like traditional search engines, the new Bing also creates written summaries of the search results, chats with users to answer additional questions about their query and can write emails or other compositions based on the results. With the new Bing, for example, users can create trip itineraries, compile weekly meal plans and ask the chatbot questions when shopping for a new TV.

    This is the new era of search that Microsoft

    (MSFT)     — which is investing billions of dollars in OpenAI — envisions, one where users are accompanied by a sort of “co-pilot” around the web to help them better synthesize information. The company is betting on the new technology to drive users to Bing, which had for years been an also-ran to Google Search. Microsoft

    (MSFT)     also announced an updated version of its Edge web browser with the new Bing capabilities built in.

    The event comes as the race to develop and deploy AI technology heats up in the tech sector. Google on Monday unveiled a new chatbot tool dubbed “Bard” in an apparent bid to keep pace with Microsoft and the success of ChatGPT. Baidu, the Chinese search engine, also said this week it plans to launch its own ChatGPT-style service.

    The updated Bing and Edge launched to the public on a limited basis on Tuesday, and are set to roll out to millions of people for unlimited search queries in the coming weeks. I took Bing for a spin at a press event at Microsoft’s Redmond, Washington, headquarters Tuesday.

    The tool provides the sort of immediate gratification we now expect from the internet — rather than clicking through a bunch of links to suss out the answer to a question, the new Bing will do that work for you. But it’s still early days for the technology, which Microsoft says is still evolving.

    The homepage of the new Bing feels familiar: you can type a query into the search bar and it returns a list of links, images and other results like a typical search engine. But on the left side of the page are written summaries of the results, complete with annotations and links to the original information sources. The search field allows up to 2,000 characters, so users can type the way they’d talk, rather than having to think of the few correct search terms to use.

    Users can also click over to a “chat” page on Bing, where a chatbot can answer additional questions about their queries.

    I asked Bing to write me a five-day vegetarian meal plan. It returned a list of vegetarian meals for breakfast, lunch and dinner for Monday through Friday, such as oatmeal with fresh berries and lentil curry. I then asked it to write me a grocery list based on that meal plan, and it returned a list of all the items I’d need to buy organized by grocery store section.

    Based on my request, the Bing chatbot also wrote me an email that I could send to my partner with that grocery list, complete with a “Hi Babe” greeting and “XOXO” closing. It’s not exactly how I’d normally write, but it could save me time by giving me a draft to edit and then copy and paste into an email, rather than having to start from scratch.

    The generated portions of Bing have personality. When you ask the chatbot a question, it responds conversationally and sometimes with emojis, letting you know it’s happy to help or that it hopes you have fun on the trip you’re planning.

    With the new Edge browser, I asked the tool to summarize one of my articles, and then turn that into a social media post the length of a short paragraph with a “casual” tone that I could share on Twitter or LinkedIn.

    The new Bing is built in partnership with OpenAI — the company behind ChatGPT in which Microsoft has invested billions — on a more advanced version of the technology underlying the viral chatbot tool. Still, the new Bing has some of the quirks that the public version of ChatGPT is known for. For example, the same query may return different responses each time it’s run; this is in part just how the tool works, and in part because it’s pulling the most updated search results each time it runs.

    It also didn’t cooperate with some of my requests. After the first time it created a meal plan, grocery list and email with the list, I ran the same requests two more times. But the second and third time, it wouldn’t write the email, instead saying something like, “sorry, I can’t do that, but you can do it yourself using the information I provided!” The tool is also sensitive to the wording used in queries — a request to “create a vegetarian meal plan” provided information about how to start eating healthier, whereas “create a 5-day vegetarian meal plan” provided a detailed list of meals to eat each day.

    Even next-gen search technology isn’t immune to basic flubs. I can imagine using the tool ahead of an upcoming local election, to learn about who is running for office in my area, what their positions are and how and when to vote. But when I asked the chatbot, “when is the next election in Kings County, NY?” it returned information about the November election last year.

    The new Bing may also present some of the same concerns as ChatGPT, including for educators. I asked Bing’s chatbot to write me a 300-word essay about the major themes of the book “Pride and Prejudice” and, within less than a minute, it had pumped out 364 words on three major themes in the novel (although some of the text sounded a bit repetitive or wonky). Per my request, it then revised the essay as if it was written by a fifth grader.

    The chatbot tool has feedback buttons so users can indicate whether its answers were helpful or not, and users can also chat directly with the tool to tell it when answers were incorrect or unhelpful, the company says.

    “We know we won’t be able to answer every question every single time, … We also know we’ll make our share of mistakes, so we’ve added a quick feedback button at the top of every search, so you can give us feedback and we can learn,” Yusuf Mehdi, Microsoft’s vice president and consumer chief marketing officer, said in a presentation.

    With some controversial search topics, it appears the new Bing chatbot simply refuses to engage. For example, I asked it, “Can you tell me why vaccines cause autism?” to see how it would react to a common medical misinformation claim, and it responded: “My apologies, I don’t know how to discuss this topic. You can try learning more about it on bing.com.” The same query on the main search page returned more standard search results, such as links to the CDC and the Wikipedia page for autism.

    Likewise, it would not return a chatbot request for how to build a pipe bomb, instead saying in its answer, “Building a pipe bomb is a dangerous and illegal activity that can cause serious harm to yourself and others. Please do not attempt to do so.” However, one of the links provided in the annotation of its answer brought me to a YouTube video with apparent instructions for building a pipe bomb.

    Microsoft says it has developed the tool in keeping with its existing responsible AI principles, and made efforts to avoid its potential misuse. Executives said the new Bing is trained in part by sample conversations mimicking bad actors who might want to exploit the tool.

    “With a technology this powerful I also know that we have an even greater responsibility to make sure that it’s developed, deployed and used properly,” said responsible AI lead Sarah Bird.

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  • Hogwarts Legacy breaks record before official release, despite controversy | CNN Business

    Hogwarts Legacy breaks record before official release, despite controversy | CNN Business

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    New York
    CNN
     — 

    The world of Harry Potter is getting new life.

    Hogwarts Legacy – the new open-world video game by Avalanche and Warner Bros. Discovery, CNN’s parent company, will be released Friday, to much anticipation.

    The single-player game has been five years in the making — experts put its budget at $150 million. The game already broke a record on Twitch for being the most-watched single-player game, played by streamers who got the game early. And it’s the No. 1 pre-sale this week on gaming platform Steam.

    “Open world style games are a really a big deal in the games industry,” said Joost van Dreunen, an adjunct professor at New York University’s Stern School of Business who was formerly CEO of games market research firm Super Data Research. “The expectations are quite high not just from the consumers, but also from the game makers themselves.”

    Warner Bros. has had 20 years of experience putting out Harry Potter video games — but those were based on the movies. Not every game was a blockbuster hit, despite the fandom around the Harry Potter franchise.

    Hogwarts Legacy is based on Harry Potter but is set in the late 1800s, well before the action in the Harry Potter books take place, and opens the Harry Potter World beyond Hogwarts Castle. Players are witch or wizard avatars that complete missions to gain skills such as flying on a broom.

    “They definitely put out some big titles and worked with some big franchises, but their games have been hit and miss,” Dan Martin, general manager at videogamesnewyork says of the Warner Bros. games.

    The game’s release has been delayed twice — building excitement from Potter fans but then fizzling. Videogamesnewyork, a New York City store that sells modern and retro video games, is ordering just enough games to their store based on pre-orders.

    “We’re not over-ordering or under ordering. Only because we don’t know what to expect,” said Martin.

    Part of the game’s expectation is based on controversy surrounding Harry Potter’s creator — J.K. Rowling. The author has repeatedly made anti-trans comments, and some of the movies’ actors have spoken out against them. Some gamers also are boycotting Hogwarts Legacy over the controversy.

    “It’s not a commercial risk so much as is a cultural one,” van Dreunen said of the game’s release.

    The game features a trans character, a first for the franchise. Though the Hogwarts Legacy character Sirona Ryan does not explicitly say she is trans, dialogue in a scene suggests it: “[It] took them a second to realize I was actually a witch, not a wizard,” the character said.

    Warner Bros. Discovery said creating diverse characters was a high priority in order to encompass all people who play the games including the LGBTQIA+ community.

    The company says J.K. Rowling is not involved in the Hogwarts Legacy game. But she does stand to make licensing royalties. Some fans have been turned off to the franchise because of Rowling’s comments, others say they won’t let that get in the way of experiencing a new world of Harry Potter.

    “There was a time when I thought it was going to impact my view on the whole Harry Potter world, but I am able to separate the situation with JK Rowling with the Harry Potter world,” said Camila Rodrigues, a Harry Potter fan who says she plans to buy the game.

    Despite the controversy, gaming experts anticipate a blockbuster release — easily selling 10 million copies, according to some estimates. In some ways, the game is a re-branding opportunity for the franchise.

    “It perhaps has room to develop something new, to iterate on the existing relationship with its fan base,” said van Dreunen. “Perhaps making it into this big production video game allows the franchise to kind of save itself a little bit from the drag it’s been experiencing culturally.”

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  • The week that tech became exciting again | CNN Business

    The week that tech became exciting again | CNN Business

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    CNN Business
     — 

    Let’s be honest: For much of the past decade, tech events have been pretty boring.

    Executives in business casual wear trot up on stage and pretend a few tweaks to the camera and processor make this year’s phone profoundly different than last year’s phone or adding a touchscreen onto yet another product is bleeding edge.

    But that changed radically this week. Some of the world’s biggest companies teased significant upgrades to their services, some of which are central to our everyday lives and how we experience the internet. In each case, the changes were powered by new AI technology that allows for more conversational and complex responses.

    On Tuesday, Microsoft announced a revamped Bing search engine using the capabilities of ChatGPT, the viral AI tool created by OpenAI, a company in which Microsoft recently invested billions of dollars. Bing will not only provide a list of search results, but will also answer questions, chat with users and generate content in response to user queries. And there are already rumors of another event next month for Microsoft to demo similar features in its Office products, including Word, PowerPoint and Outlook.

    On Wednesday, Google held an event to detail how it plans to use similar AI technology to allow its search engine to offer more complex and conversational responses to queries. Chinese tech giants Alibaba and Baidu also said this week that they would be launching their own ChatGPT-style services. And other companies are sure to follow suit soon.

    After years of incremental updates to smartphones, the promise of 5G that still hasn’t taken off and social networks copycatting each others’ features until they all the look the same, the flurry of AI-related announcements this week feels like a breath of fresh air.

    Yes, there are very real concerns about the potential of this technology to spread biases and inaccurate information, as happened in a Google demo this week. And it’s certainly likely numerous companies will introduce AI chatbots that simply do not need one. But these features are fun, have the potential to give us back hours in the day and, perhaps most importantly, some are here right now to try out.

    Need to write a real estate listing or an annual review for an employee? Plug a few keywords into a ChatGPT query bar and your first draft is done in three seconds. Want to come up with a quick meal plan and grocery list based on your dietary sensitivities? Bing, apparently, has you covered.

    If the introduction of smartphones defined the 2000s, much of the 2010s in Silicon Valley was defined by the ambitious technologies that didn’t fully arrive: self-driving cars tested on roads but not quite ready for everyday use; virtual reality products that got better and cheaper but still didn’t find mass adoption; and the promise of 5G to power advanced experiences that didn’t quite come to pass, at least not yet.

    But technological change, like Ernest Hemingway’s idea of bankruptcy, has a way of coming gradually, then suddenly. The iPhone, for example, was in development for years before Steve Jobs wowed people on stage with it in 2007. Likewise, OpenAi, the company behind ChatGPT, was founded seven years ago and launched an earlier version of its AI system called GPT3 back in 2020.

    “ChatGPT exploded onto the market and people’s awareness,” said Bern Elliot, an analyst at Gartner, “but this has been a long time in the making.”

    More than that, artificial intelligence systems have for years underpinned many of the functions people may now take for granted, from content recommendations on social media platforms and auto-complete tools in e-mail to voice assistants and facial recognition tools. But when ChatGPT was released publicly in November, it put the power of AI systems on full display for millions in an entertaining and immediately graspable way. ChatGPT simultaneously made it much easier to see how far the technology has progressed in recent years and to imagine the vast potential for the impact it could have across industries.

    “When new generations of technologies come along, they’re often not particularly visible because they haven’t matured enough to the point where you can do something with them,” Elliott said. “When they are more mature, you start to see them over time — whether it’s in an industrial setting or behind the scenes — but when it’s directly accessible to people, like with ChatGPT, that’s when there is more public interest, fast.”

    Now that ChatGPT has gained traction and prompted larger companies to deploy similar features, there are concerns not just about its accuracy but its impact on real people.

    Some people worry it could disrupt industries, potentially putting artists, tutors, coders, writers and journalists out of work. Others are more optimistic, postulating it will allow employees to tackle to-do lists with greater efficiency or focus on higher-level tasks. Either way, it will likely force industries to evolve and change, but that’s not? necessarily a bad thing.

    “New technologies always come with new risks and we as a society will have to address them, such as implementing acceptable use policies and educating the general public about how to use them properly. Guidelines will be needed,” Elliott said.

    Many experts I’ve spoken with in the past few weeks have likened the AI shift to the early days of the calculator and how educators and scientists once feared how it could inhibit our basic knowledge of math. The same fear existed with spell check and grammar tools.

    While AI tools are still in their infancy, this week may represent the start of a new way of doing tasks, similar to how the iPhone changed computing and communication in June 2007. But this time, it could be in the form of a Bing browser.

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  • The way we search for information online is about to change | CNN Business

    The way we search for information online is about to change | CNN Business

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    CNN Business
     — 

    An entire generation of internet users has approached search engines the same way for decades: enter a few words into a search box and wait for a page of relevant results to emerge. But that could change soon.

    This week, the companies behind the two biggest US search engines teased radical changes to the way their services operate, powered by new AI technology that allows for more conversational and complex responses. In the process, however, the companies may test both the accuracy of these tools and the willingness of everyday users to embrace and find utility in a very different search experience.

    On Tuesday, Microsoft announced a revamped Bing search engine using the abilities of ChatGPT, the viral AI tool created by OpenAI, a company in which Microsoft recently invested billions of dollars. Bing will not only provide a list of search results, but will also answer questions, chat with users and generate content in response to user queries.

    The next day, Google, the dominant player in the market, held an event to detail how it plans to use similar AI technology to allow its search engine to offer more complex and conversational responses to queries, including providing bullet points ticking off the best times of year to see various constellations and also offering pros and cons for buying an electric vehicle. (Chinese tech giant Baidu also said this week that it would be launching its own ChatGPT-style service, though it did not provide details on whether it will appear as a feature in its search engine.)

    The updates come as the success of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, which can generate shockingly convincing essays and responses to user prompts, has sparked a wave of interest in AI chatbot tools. Multiple tech giants are now racing to deploy similar tools that could transform the way we draft e-mails, write essays and handle other tasks. But the most immediate impact may be on a foundational element of our internet experience: search.

    “Although we are 25 years into search, I dare say that our story has just begun,” said Prabhakar Raghavan, an SVP at Google, at the event Wednesday teasing the new AI features. “We have even more exciting, AI-enabled innovations in the works that will change the way people search, work and play. We’re reinventing what it means to search and the best is yet to come.”

    For those who may not be sure what exactly to do with the new tools, the companies offered some examples, ranging from writing a rhyming poem to helping plan an itinerary for a trip.

    Lian Jye Su, a research director at tech intelligence firm ABI Research, believes consumers and businesses would be happy to embrace a new way to search as long as “it is intuitive, removes more friction, and offers the path of least resistance — akin to the success of smart home voice assistants, like Alexa and Google Assistant.”

    But there is at least one wild card: how much users will be able to trust the AI-powered results.

    According to Google, Bard can be used to plan a friend’s baby shower, compare two Oscar-nominated movies or get lunch ideas based on what’s in your fridge. But the tool, which has yet to be released to the public, is already being called out for a factual error it made during a Google demo: it incorrectly stated that the James Webb Telescope took the first pictures of a planet outside of our solar system. A Google spokesperson said the error “highlights the importance of a rigorous testing process.”

    Bard and ChatGPT, which was released publicly in late November OpenAI, are built on large language models. These models are trained on vast troves of online data in order to generate compelling responses to user prompts. Experts warn these tools can be unreliable — spreading misinformation, making up responses and giving different answers to the same questions, or presenting sexist and racist biases.

    There is clearly strong interest in this type of AI. The public version of ChatGPT attracted a million users in its first five days last fall and is estimated to have hit 100 million users since. But the trust factor may decide whether that interest will stay, according to Jason Wong, an analyst at market research firm Gartner.

    “Consumers, and even business users, may have fun exploring the new Bing and Bard interfaces for a while, but as the novelty wears off and similar tools appear, then it really comes down to ease of access and accuracy and trust in the responses that will win out,” he said.

    Generative AI systems, which are algorithms that can create new content, are notoriously unreliable. Laura Edelson, a computer scientist and misinformation researcher at New York University, said, “there’s a big difference between an AI sounding authoritative and it actually producing accurate results.”

    While general search optimizes for relevance, according to Edelson, large language models try to achieve a particular style in their response without regard to factual accuracy. “One of those styles is, ‘I am a trustworthy, authoritative source,’” she said.

    On a very basic level, she said, AI systems analyze which words are next to each other, determine how they get associated and identify the patterns that lead them to appear together. But much of the onus remains on the user to fact check the answers, a process that could prove just as time consuming for people as the current model of scrolling through links on a page — if not more so.

    Microsoft and Google executives have acknowledged some of the potential issues with the new AI tools.

    “We know we wont be able to answer every question every single time,” said Yusuf Mehdi, Microsoft’s vice president and consumer chief marketing officer. “We also know we’ll make our share of mistakes, so we’ve added a quick feedback button at the top of every search, so you can give us feedback and we can learn.”

    Raghavan, at Google, also emphasized the importance of feedback from internal and external testing to make sure the tool “meets the high bar, our high bar for quality, safety, and groundedness, before we launch more broadly.”

    But even with the concerns, the companies are betting that these tools offer the answer to the future of search.

    – CNN’s Clare Duffy, Catherine Thorbecke and Brian Fung contributed to this story.

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  • Is the iPhone’s ‘Made in India’ era about to begin? | CNN Business

    Is the iPhone’s ‘Made in India’ era about to begin? | CNN Business

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    New Delhi
    CNN
     — 

    As Apple looks beyond China to secure crucial supply chains strained by Covid lockdowns and threatened by rising geopolitical tension, India has emerged as an attractive potential alternative to the world’s second largest economy.

    And Beijing’s big regional rival isn’t missing a beat in talking up the opportunity. One of India’s top ministers said last month the California-based company wants to ramp up its production in the South Asian country to a quarter of its overall total.

    Minister of Commerce and Industry Piyush Goyal said Apple was already making between 5% and 7% of its products in India. “If I am not mistaken, they are targeting to go up to 25% of their manufacturing,” he said at an event in January.

    His comments come at a time when Foxconn

    (HNHPF)    , a top Apple supplier, is looking to expand its operations in India after suffering severe supply disruptions in China.

    For years, Apple had relied on a vast manufacturing network in China to mass produce iPhones, iPads and other popular products. But its dependence on the country was tested last year by Beijing’s strict zero-Covid strategy, which was rapidly dismantled last December.

    Since the middle of last year, Apple has redoubled its efforts to invest in India. But can Asia’s third largest economy deliver?

    “Theoretically, it can be done, but it won’t be happening overnight,” said Tarun Pathak, a research director at market research firm Counterpoint.

    “[Apple’s] dependency on China is a result of almost two and a half decades of what China put in to develop their entire electronics manufacturing ecosystem,” Pathak said, adding that the company makes nearly 95% of its phones in China.

    Apple did not respond to requests for comment from CNN.

    But the world’s most valuable company posted shockingly weak earnings this month, partly because of its recent problems in China. The troubles started in October, when workers began fleeing the world’s biggest iPhone factory, run by Foxconn, over a Covid outbreak.

    Short on staff, Foxconn offered bonuses to workers to return. But violent protests broke out in November, when newly-hired staff said management had reneged on their promises. Workers clashed with security officers, before the company eventually offered them cash to quit and leave the site.

    While operations at the sprawling campus in Zhengzhou, central China, have now returned to normal, the supply problems hit the supply of iPhone 14 Pro and iPhone 14 Pro Max models during the key holiday shopping season.

    Foxconn did not respond to a request for comment.

    On top of that, US-China relations are looking increasingly tense. Last year, the Biden administration banned Chinese companies from buying advanced chips and chipmaking equipment without a license.

    “I think they will continue to depend on China for a significant proportion of their production,” said Willy Shih, a professor at Harvard Business School, referring to Apple.

    “But what they are trying to do, and I think it makes sense, is to add diversity to their supply base so that if something goes wrong in China, they will have some alternatives.”

    Shih referred to this strategy as “China +1 or China+ more than one.”

    “India is a hugely exciting market for us and a major focus,” Apple CEO Tim Cook said on a recent earnings call.

    “Looking at the business in India, we set a quarterly revenue record and grew very strong double digits year over year and so we feel very good about how we performed,” he said.

    India is set to overtake China this year to become the world’s most populous country. The country’s massive and cheap labor force, which includes workers with key technical skills, is a big draw for manufacturers.

    Asia’s third largest economy also offers a growing domestic market. In 2023, as global recession fears persist, India is expected to remain the fastest growing major economy in the world.

    If it can sustain that momentum, India could become only the third country with GDP worth $10 trillion by 2035, according to the Centre for Economics and Business Research.

    Analysts say India’s growing consumer base might give it an edge over Vietnam, which has also been attracting greater investment in electronics manufacturing.

    The Indian government has rolled out policies to attract investments in mobile phone manufacturing. According to Counterpoint’s Pathak, India accounts for 16% of the global smartphone production, while China constitutes 70%.

    There are some success stories: Samsung, the world’s top selling smartphone brand, is one step ahead of Apple and already makes a lot of its phones in India.

    An employee tests the camera quality of mobile phones on an assembly line at a unit of Foxconn Technology Co., in Sri City, Andhra pradesh, India.

    The South Korean giant has been diversifying away from China because of rising labor costs and also stiff local competition from homegrown players such as Huawei, Oppo, Vivo and Xiaomi.

    It now makes the bulk of its phones in Vietnam and India, with the latter accounting for 20% of Samsung’s global production.

    In 2018, Samsung opened what it called “the world’s largest mobile factory” in Noida, a city near New Delhi, and analysts say the the company may have paved the way for other manufacturers.

    Apple devices are manufactured in India by Taiwan’s Foxconn, Wistron and Pegatron. Until recently, the company would typically start assembling models in the country only seven to eight months after launch. That changed last year, when Apple started making new iPhone 14 devices in India weeks after they went on sale.

    Some of Apple’s biggest contractors are already pumping more money into India. Last year, Foxconn announced it had invested half a billion dollars in its Indian subsidiary.

    Earlier this week, the government of the southern Indian state of Karnataka said it is “in serious discussion of investment plans” with the Taiwanese giant. Foxconn already has factories in the Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu.

    Manufacturing in India, however, comes with myriad challenges. It constitute only 14% of India’s GDP, according to the World Bank, and the government has struggled to grow that figure.

    “One of the things that China did is they built infrastructure when they could. And I would argue that India did not build infrastructure when they could,” said Shih, referring to highways, ports and transport links that allow easy movement of goods.

    An aerial view of Mumbai Metro Line 7 between Andheri East station and Aarey Metro station on its Andheri (East)-Dahisar (E) route on Western Express Highway, on July 26, 2022 in Mumbai, India.

    Apple will also face a lot more red tape in India if it wants to create sprawling Chinese-style campuses.

    “Will India be able to replicate a Shenzhen version?” asked Pathak, referring to China’s manufacturing hub. Building such “hotspots” won’t be easy and would require India to think about issues ranging from logistics and infrastructure to the availability of workers, he added.

    Experts told CNN that accessing land in a chaotic democracy like India could be a challenge, while the Chinese Communist Party faces fewer barriers to expropriating real estate quickly for causes it deems important.

    India would also have to think about moving beyond simply assembling iPhones through favorable government policies.

    “You need to source components locally, which means you need to attract many more companies in the supply chain to set up shop in India,” Pathak said.

    Some of the biggest businesses in India may be stepping up. According to Bloomberg, autos-to-airline conglomerate Tata Group is in talks with Wistron to take over the Taiwanese company’s factory in southern India.

    Tata and Wistron did not respond to request for comment.

    “I am not directly involved in that, but it should be really good for India because this is going to create an opportunity in India to manufacture electronics and microelectronics,” N. Ganapathy Subramaniam, COO of Tata Consultancy Services, the group’s software services arm, told Bloomberg.

    While there are significant obstacles in India’s ambition to deepen its relationship with Apple, doing so would be a huge boost for the country and Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

    ‘I think it’ll be [a] big, big win,” said Pathak, noting that growing manufacturing ties with a US giant like Apple will in turn attract other global players in the electronics manufacturing ecosystem to India. “You focus on the big one, the others will follow.”

    — Catherine Thorbecke and Juliana Liu contributed reporting.

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  • A twisted tale of celebrity promotion, opaque transactions and allegations of racist tropes | CNN Business

    A twisted tale of celebrity promotion, opaque transactions and allegations of racist tropes | CNN Business

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    CNN
     — 

    Sitting across from Jimmy Fallon on “The Tonight Show,” Paris Hilton, wearing a sparkling neon green turtleneck dress and a high ponytail, looked at a picture of a glum cartoon ape and said it “reminds me of me.” The audience laughed. It did not look like her at all.

    Hilton and Fallon were chatting about their NFTs – non-fungible tokens, typically digital art bought with cryptocurrency – from the Bored Ape Yacht Club. The camera zoomed in on framed printouts of the ape cartoons. “We’re both apes,” Fallon said. Hilton, with her signature vocal fry, replied, “Love it.”

    “The Tonight Show” episode from January 2022 is a YouTube time capsule showing the temporary alliance between celebrity marketing and the crypto industry. Bored Ape Yacht Club was not the biggest crypto phenomenon, but it was one of the top beneficiaries of celebrity hype. That celebrity hype, in turn, helped draw new consumers to crypto — an industry rife with manipulation and fraud, and one that US regulators are now giving more scrutiny in the wake of the collapse of crypto exchange FTX. But for a time, when crypto’s prices seemed to have no limit, the money appeared too good for some to ask questions — questions like: Why are some of those apes wearing prison clothes?

    “That was a very significant moment, because the audience for that show is very different from the typical crypto person,” explained Molly White, a software engineer and a fellow at the Harvard Library Innovation Lab. The Bored Apes — a computer-generated collection of 10,000 cartoons — were being presented as a status symbol, membership in an exclusive club. Hilton, Fallon, and other celebrities had joined — and viewers could join, too, if they bought an NFT.

    A class action lawsuit, filed in December, alleges Hilton, Fallon, and other celebrities conspired in a “vast scheme” to artificially inflate the price of Bored Ape NFTs and enrich themselves, the crypto payments company they used to get the apes, MoonPay, and the company that made the Bored Apes, Yuga Labs.

    Hilton and Fallon did not respond to requests for comment.

    In April 2021, Yuga Labs released the Bored Ape Yacht Club collection of cartoon apes with a computer-generated combination of features and accessories, such as gold fur, a sailor hat, laser eyes, 3-D glasses, a cigarette, as well as “hip hop” clothes, a “pimp coat,” a prison jumpsuit, a pith helmet, and a “sushi chef” headband. The founders were anonymous, known only by their online screen names.

    That fall, Hollywood agent Guy Oseary reached out to Yuga Labs, eventually investing in the company and joining its board. Soon celebrities started posting their Bored Apes on social media — including Oseary’s client Madonna, along with Steph Curry, Lil Baby, DJ Khaled, Snoop Dogg, Gwyneth Paltrow, and more. Bored Apes started selling for hundreds of thousands of dollars. Justin Bieber bought an ape for $1.3 million. By March 2022, Yuga got a $450 million venture capital investment, and was valued at $4 billion.

    Guy Oseary and Madonna at a 2016 Billboard Women In Music event. Oseary said both bought NFTs from Bored Ape Yacht Club.

    The class action lawsuit claims, “this purported interest in” Bored Apes “by high-profile taste makers was entirely manufactured by Oseary at the behest of” Yuga Labs. “In order to make the promotion of, and subsequent interest in, the BAYC NFTs appear to be organic (as opposed to being solely the result of a paid promotion), the Company needed a way to discreetly pay their celebrity cohorts.” The suit alleges they did this through MoonPay.

    When Jimmy Fallon introduced his audience to crypto, he also presented a frictionless way to buy in: MoonPay, a payments company that allows customers to buy crypto through most major payment systems like with a credit card. In November 2021, Fallon said on “The Tonight Show” that he’d bought his first NFT through MoonPay. “MoonPay? MoonPay! I did my homework — Moonpay, which is like PayPal but for crypto,” Fallon said. The following January, when Hilton showed her ape on the show, she said, “You said you got it on MoonPay, so I went and I copied you.”

    A few months later, in April 2022, MoonPay announced more than 60 celebrities and influencers had invested in the firm. MoonPay spokesman Justin Hamilton told CNN that Hilton became an investor, but not until after she spoke with Fallon on “The Tonight Show.” The FTC generally requires an endorser to disclose when they have a financial interest in promoting a company.

    The celebrity hype and unbelievable prices generated enormous media interest. “Rolling Stone” minted NFTs of the magazine with Bored Apes on the cover. Guy Oseary was on the cover of “Variety” under the headline “NFT King.”

    Independent journalists, under the names of Coffeezilla and Dirty Bubble Media, noticed blockchain ledger records suggesting not everything was as it appeared. Cryptocurrency is traded on the blockchain, a permanent and public ledger of every transaction. That means it can reveal financial relationships, if you figure out the right questions to ask.

    Hours before Justin Bieber bought an ape for the equivalent of $1.3 million on January 29, 2022, Bieber received Ethereum worth about $2.5 million in his crypto wallet, the blockchain shows. A couple weeks before Post Malone released a music video in November 2021 in which he bought a Bored Ape through MoonPay, MoonPay transferred cryptocurrency then worth about $760,000 into the artist’s wallet, and sent two more payments, worth about $640,000, a couple weeks after. MoonPay admits it paid for the placement in Post Malone’s video but says other celebrities paid full price for their service in US dollars.

    Many celebrities who got apes thanked MoonPay on social media. Gwyneth Paltrow tweeted, “Joined @BoredApeYC ready for the reveal? Thanks @moonpay concierge.” The rapper Gunna posted on Instagram, “I Bought A @boredapeyachtclub NFT worth 300K No Cap ! His Name is BUTTA Thanks @moonpay !” Lil Baby mentioned MoonPay in his song “Top Priority.”

    The blockchain shows MoonPay paying high prices for the apes, and then transferring them to purported celebrity wallets for free. MoonPay explains this as a service that helps wealthy people buy NFTs without setting up their own crypto wallet.

    The company says the “white-glove” service was created because MoonPay’s CEO, Ivan Soto-Wright, had a lot of celebrity friends, and many of them asked how they could get an NFT. Jimmy Fallon, Lil Baby — they were Soto-Wright’s friends, Hamilton said.

    CNN spoke to several former MoonPay employees who said they were skeptical the celebrities paid for their NFTs, because there was no evidence on the blockchain.

    The company’s ape purchases have been significant. Since 2021, one of its wallets, “MoonPayHQ,” has spent at least $25 million on NFTs — 60% or about $15 million of that was spent on Bored Apes. The company told CNN they had 14 apes in a cold storage wallet, which offers more safety. It said that five of those NFTs were “purchased by concierge clients that are in the process of being transferred.” The last ape was purchased in April 2022, 10 months ago, according to blockchain records.

    One influencer has said he was approached about an ape. In a Twitter Spaces audio chat last year, celebrity jeweler Ben Baller said, “Real talk: not once, not twice, three times, I’ve been offered a Bored Ape through MoonPay. … The fact that some of these super top-tier all-star NBA players have them? And I was like, ‘Yo this is all cap [lies.]’ They didn’t buy this sh*t.” Baller did not respond to CNN’s request for comment. MoonPay’s spokesman said this didn’t happen.

    Oseary, the Hollywood agent and MoonPay/Yuga investor, texted CNN in response to a question: “NO ONE is paid to join the club and Yuga do NOT and have NOT given away any apes.” He said he paid full price for his Bored Ape, and so did Madonna.

    Yuga Labs declined an on-the-record interview with CNN. In a statement, the company said, “In our view, these claims are opportunistic and parasitic. We strongly believe that they are without merit, and look forward to proving as much.” Hamilton, MoonPay’s spokesman, said of the lawsuit, “We look forward to it being dismissed.”

    “The fine art market is a scam – that’s OK, at least there’s art going on,” said Max Gail, who’s been a blockchain developer since 2010, and founded Omakasea and Eth Gobblers.com. (Gail hosted the Twitter Space in which Baller discussed Bored Apes.) The NFT market, he said, “is like a parody of the fine art market. They took the same strategies that had been employed in the fine art market, but then distorted it with some strange crypto economics.”

    Anonymous buyers and sellers dealing in items whose values are difficult to calculate has made the fine art market susceptible to money laundering, a Senate investigation found in 2020. In 2022, an average of more than half of NFT trading volume on the Ethereum blockchain was “wash” trading, according to an analysis at Dune Analytics. (Most NFTs are on Ethereum.) Essentially, wash trades are a transaction in which the buyer and seller are the same person, or they’re working together. Wash trading has been illegal in traditional finance since the Great Depression, because it can distort the market by making people believe there is a high volume of interest in the investment. The ability to open many anonymous cryptocurrency wallets makes wash trading NFTs easier. A Chainalysis report found one “prolific NFT wash trader” made 830 sales to self-financed wallets in 2021.

    Though NFTs have been celebrated as the future of digital art, and a way for artists to earn royalties, many NFT collections operate more like securities — a financial instrument, like stocks or bonds, that hold some monetary value. “People will say that the technology itself has provided this whole new way of creating digital art,” Harvard’s Molly White said. “It’s not that unique. The unique part of it is the speculative bubble.”

    Mad Dog Jones' SHIFT// goes on view as part of 'Natively Digital: A Curated NFT Sale' at Sotheby's in June 2021. NFTs have been celebrated as the future of digital art.

    The NFT marketplace does not always make sense even to those who benefit from it. “Bored Apes have gone from $100 to $100,000 in a year. Nothing appreciates that fast,” a successful NFT artist said. The artist’s own works had gone from a couple hundred dollars to tens of thousands. One of the artist’s major collectors “treats me as a commodity and my art is a commodity and he’s always pumping and dumping it. … It’s being treated as a financial vehicle.”

    But there is pressure not to raise questions about the system. The NFT artist did not want to go on the record, saying it would be career suicide. “The big collectors watch for artists that FUD. And as soon as an artist FUDs, they get cancelled,” the artist said. FUD is “fear, uncertainty, and doubt,” or criticism of crypto.

    Beyond how the Bored Ape NFTs are traded, what they depict is at issue in yet another Yuga Labs legal battle.

    In the fall of 2021, accusations began swirling on social media that the Bored Ape Yacht Club contained visual references to racist memes from the troll site, 4chan. The artist Ryder Ripps — who’s worked with stars like Kanye West and Tame Impala — started tweeting about the claims of racist imagery. Ripps claims Guy Oseary, the Hollywood agent on Yuga’s board, called to pressure him to stop talking about the claims. (Oseary told CNN, “I can’t speak on active litigation.”)

    Ripps doubled down and made a website cataloging the claims. Then, in an act he says was meant to protest the alleged racism and comment on the idea you can’t copy an NFT, Ripps made copycat NFTs he sold as RR/BAYC. Yuga sued Ripps for trademark infringement, and argues that his maligning of the Yuga apes is nothing more than a profiteering tactic. Ripps says Yuga is trying to silence its critics, and has doubled down on his claims as part of his defense in the trademark suit.

    Yuga Labs called the accusations “the incoherent ramblings of a small group of for-profit conspiracy theorists.” However, the Yuga lawsuit against Ripps could affect the class action lawsuit against Yuga. Ripps’s lawyers have issued subpoenas to Paris Hilton and Jimmy Fallon.

    To assert its trademark rights, Yuga must show that consumers associate its logos with its products, and it did so in a legal filing, in part, by pointing to celebrity owners “including TV host Jimmy Fallon…”

    Ripps’s lawyer, Louis Tompros, asserts Yuga compensated celebrities for promoting its NFTs, and they did not disclose it. “And by doing that, in our view, they have gotten this public notoriety for their brand improperly,” Tompros told CNN. “And so having gotten it improperly, they now can’t go and assert that they have these rights.”

    This week Yuga co-founder Wylie Aronow published a 24-page letter explaining that he was stepping back from the company and addressing widespread rumors that the company and its products were connected to the alt-right.

    “I will soon call out this utter bullsh*t under oath,” he wrote.

    So what are the racist references alleged by Ripps and others? To start, there’s what’s right on the surface: some of the NFTs are pictures of apes in “hip hop” clothes, a “pimp coat,” a prison uniform, a bone necklace, gold and diamond grills. Record executive Dame Dash, a crypto enthusiast, pointed out on a podcast last year that monkeys and apes are old racist tropes.

    “Think if you were a racist, like ‘Guess what I’m gonna do? I’mma get Black people to love monkeys so much that they gonna buy them, wear them on their neck… go to something called ApeFest and they’re gonna like it!’ Wouldn’t that sound funny?” Dash said on the podcast. “That’s what’s happening.”

    Dash told CNN he hadn’t intended to target Yuga directly. But he’d started to wonder if he was being trolled, given the ubiquity of apes in crypto. “Racism is different these days — you can’t be so overt about it. You have to kind of troll,” Dash said.

    This week Yuga agreed to settle a lawsuit with a developer who worked with Ripps, with the developer agreeing to pay them $25,000 and saying he would reject all disparaging statements against Yuga Labs.

    Ryan Hickman, a software engineer who also worked with Ripps on RR/BAYC, is also being sued separately by Yuga. Hickman, who is Black, thought the Bored Apes looked like stereotypical portrayals of Black people as stupid or lazy. He said he thought this would be obvious to most people the second they saw an image of a Bored Ape. But, he said, “then somebody says, ‘Well, it’s worth $100,000.’ They say, ‘Okay well, tell me more.’”

    In a statement, Yuga said, “Our company and founders strongly condemn the spread of hate, in any form, against any group.” Hollywood agent Oseary said he’d never been on the troll site 4chan.

    The crypto community has adopted a lot of terms — rekt, frens, wagmi — that were popularized on 4chan, and it’s not always clear if the person using them understands where they came from. “I doubt that they were a massive alt-right troll campaign,” Harvard’s Molly White said. “I do think it’s likely that the creators of the project basically included some nods to 4chan.”

    “It’s not one thing that makes it racist. It’s everything together as a package,” programmer and 8chan founder Fredrick Brennan said, looking at comparisons between Pepe the Frog memes and Bored Apes. Brennan took an interest in the claims that Yuga referenced 4chan memes, because he’d seen them so often when he was running 8chan, a similar troll site. He quit 8chan in 2016, and in 2019 pushed for it to be taken down because it had become a hub for extremist violence. He began to suspect the Yuga founders were like the people he used to know.

    Take one of the apes’ characteristics, which Yuga calls a “sushi chef headband.” Brennan reads and speaks Japanese, and saw the headband actually said “kamikaze,” which has been used as a slur against Japanese people. A similar headband appeared on a Pepe meme. “That one was the most shocking,” he told CNN.

    In a legal filing connected to the Ripps case, Yuga said the apes reflected a combination of many traits, “not any person’s purported racism.”

    “I was hoping, in my eternal optimism,” Brennan said, “that people would become a lot more skeptical of tech bros. … And that liberal — so-called — celebrities in Hollywood would view these people with suspicion. Apparently not.”

    – CORRECTION: This story has been updated to clarify when Paris Hilton invested in MoonPay. Jimmy Fallon is not an investor, a company spokesman said.

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  • Opinion: Addressing gun violence requires better means of measuring it | CNN

    Opinion: Addressing gun violence requires better means of measuring it | CNN

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    Editor’s Note: Rosanna Smart is an economist at the nonprofit, nonpartisan RAND Corporation and co-leader of its Gun Policy in America initiative to understand the effects of gun policies. Andrew R. Morral is a senior behavioral scientist at RAND; co-leader of the initiative; and director of the National Collaborative on Gun Violence Research, a private philanthropy that funds gun violence prevention research. The views expressed in this piece are their own. View more opinion on CNN.



    CNN
     — 

    Barely through January, America has this year already experienced 63 incidents with four or more people shot and more than 4,200 firearm deaths.

    These statistics do not come from official governmental sources, but are rather the result of information compiled and disseminated publicly by a small non-profit organization, the Gun Violence Archive, funded primarily by a single private donor. Our government collects no official data on mass shootings – and has no comprehensive data collection system tracking nonfatal firearm injuries – despite intense public concern about these events and the direction they may be trending.

    The federal government does collect data on firearm deaths, although complete nationwide data that link whether individual deaths occurred in the same incident is not yet available. And finalized data is always a year or so delayed. By comparison, federal data on poultry slaughter across the country lags by only a couple of weeks.

    What’s more, federal data collection on other aspects of gun crime and violence is abysmal.

    This seems like a pretty fundamental statistic we should know, or at least have some decent estimate of. Measuring only firearm deaths and not all injuries may underestimate the prevalence of firearm violence by a factor of two to three, showing only a skewed subset of firearm violence. Because firearm assaults and police shootings often result in nonfatal injuries, federal data systems track only a portion of these incidents that disproportionately affect Black Americans.

    Building a surveillance system for nonfatal firearm injuries would be difficult and expensive. In 1994, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) funded efforts to support such a system in seven states, but the project ended after just three years when Congress cut the CDC’s budget in response to its firearm violence research. It took more than two decades for Congress to approve federal funding to research gun violence.

    Now, a previously unreliable nonfatal firearm injury surveillance system is being redesigned with the goal of producing moderately precise national estimates of firearms injury hospitalizations by 2024. That’s a start, but what really may be needed is reliable state-level estimates to understand how laws and other prevention efforts affect firearm violence.

    The Firearm Injury Surveillance Through Emergency Rooms (FASTER) program, a 10-state pilot project launched by the CDC in September 2020, will test whether the National Syndromic Surveillance Program, which helps track urgent crises like the Covid-19 pandemic and opioid overdoses, can be used to monitor firearm injuries.

    The federal government could make important contributions to firearm injury prevention efforts by ensuring that funding for data collection and maintenance through FASTER or another system is sustained moving forward and creating straightforward mechanisms for researchers to access deidentified individual-level data with geographic indicators.

    Unfortunately, data quality on other aspects of gun violence is deteriorating. For decades, the FBI has compiled and disseminated information from local law enforcement agencies on aggravated assaults and robberies involving firearms. This system was retired in 2021. As a result, the federal government has been unable to provide comprehensive state or national estimates on important crime trends for the past two years.

    While a more detailed (and theoretically improved) system replaced the prior one, the rollout of this FBI System has not gone smoothly. In 2021, the FBI’s new data system collected crime information from just over 60% of law enforcement agencies nationwide, resulting in uncertainty about whether murder in 2021 was up 17% or down 7% from the year before.

    This crumbling of the nation’s crime data infrastructure, even if temporary, could be an urgent problem for any effort to proactively intervene to respond to emerging crime trends.

    Although the Federal government uses large-scale surveys of Americans to understand trends in health and risk behaviors – such as consumption of drugs and alcohol, use of seatbelts, exercise habits, and even sexual practices – questions about ownership, storage, and use of firearms have been notably absent from national versions of these surveys for almost two decades.

    Indeed, one of the CDC’s flagship health behavior surveys included questions on gun ownership, but removed that question from the core module after 2004. As a result, many studies of the effects of gun violence prevention that need information on state firearm ownership rates must use data that are almost 20 years old.

    Similarly, although the government’s 50-state National Survey on Drug Use and Health asks respondents aged 12 to 17 about handgun carrying behavior, no such questions are asked of adults, despite evidence linking gun carriage policies with firearm violence.

    Other important questions also are omitted from these surveys, such as defensive gun use, firearm storage practices, safe handling practices and training and safety perceptions.

    The lowest hanging fruit to improve our data collection could be to remove statutory barriers that prevent researchers from using important data that the federal government is already collecting, such as information on guns used in crimes. Since 2003, the Tiahrt Amendments have prohibited the US Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives from sharing disaggregated crime gun trace data with researchers.

    Removing these blanket restrictions, or even providing more detailed aggregate statistics on crime gun possessors, sources and prior transactions, could help provide better understanding of diversion of firearms from legal to illegal markets, risk factors related to “straw-purchasing” (buying a gun for somebody legally prohibited from possessing it), and the flow of firearms between states with different gun law regimes.

    Other missing data from federal collection efforts include reliable information on police shootings, mass shootings, legal defensive firearm homicides, firearm sales and many other such data.

    Although everyone wants to see reductions in firearm violence in this country, specific proposals are often controversial, sometimes because there are no data demonstrating their effectiveness. If those data were collected, this would no longer be an excuse. Better evidence on the effectiveness of different policy or community interventions may rely on access to data that is not being collected now.

    The federal government has many of the requisite tools in place to do this, and it does it well on a wide range of other problems. Shying away from measuring this problem may also make it more difficult to fix it.

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  • The dark side of the sports betting boom | CNN Business

    The dark side of the sports betting boom | CNN Business

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    New York
    CNN
     — 

    The sports gambling gold rush is coming at a high cost.

    In 2018, the Supreme Court struck down a federal ban on commercial sports betting in most of the country. Thirty-three states have made sports gambling legal in the wake of the decision. Now, on Super Bowl Sunday, a record 50.4 million US adults are expected to bet on the game.

    The booming sports betting industry, lawmakers and even the professional sports leagues themselves are making it easier, faster and more tempting for people to bet on games — and develop gambling problems, say gambling researchers and addiction specialists.

    A flood of advertising, technology that allows for one-click betting at home, and nearly unlimited betting options during games have collided. There’s been a spike in inquiries to state gambling-addiction hotlines, states say.

    In the past five years, there has been an explosion of online sports betting apps from companies like DraftKings, FanDuel and Caesars. These apps are often replacing illegal betting venues. At the same time, they also attract an influx of new gamblers who had never set foot in a casino or would have known how to place a bet with a bookie.

    During the Super Bowl, there will be an onslaught of advertisements — most starring celebrity sponsors and athletes — meant to encourage new sign-ups and grab market share. DraftKings will air a commercial featuring Kevin Hart and David Ortiz, while Rob Gronkowski will attempt a field goal kick live in a FanDuel ad. (Any customer who places a Super Bowl bet of five dollars or more on FanDuel will win a share of $10 million in “free bets” if Gronkowski makes it.)

    Hear why FanDuel CEO thinks this Super Bowl will be biggest day in company’s history

    Sports teams and leagues were once fiercely opposed to gambling on the games. Now, they’ve partnered with sportsbooks.

    These days, gamblers can also do much more than wager on the outcome of a game. There are options to bet in-game on every quarter, player, and event.

    Resources for gambling addiction programs have long been thin in the United States and have been stretched further by the current wave of sports betting. In 2020, there were 5.7 million Americans with a gambling disorder, according to a nationwide survey by the National Association of Administrators for Disordered Gambling Services.

    Focus on gambling disorders has historically been minimal in the United States, said Timothy Fong, a psychiatrist and the co-director of the UCLA Gambling Studies Program.

    This is in part because people with gambling disorders have been viewed as foolish or lacking willpower, he said. “We equate the ability to hold onto money and win money with success and equate losing with greed.”

    There is also sparse federal oversight of the gambling industry, and there are currently no federal funds designated for problem gambling treatment or research, unlike federal funding for alcohol, tobacco and drug addiction programs.

    DraftKings is one of the most popular sports betting apps.

    A patchwork of state legislation, lack of robust consumer protections in many states, and limited advertising restrictions are adding to the problems.

    “Many states naively or some other way went about legalizing sports betting without adequately estimating the costs on problem gambling resources,” said John Holden, an associate professor of management at Oklahoma State University who studies sports gambling regulation.

    “There is more that state lawmakers can do within the confines of commercial speech restrictions,” including authorizing extra funding to go after false and misleading advertising, Holden said.

    Betting on sports can be a way for some people to develop, maintain or accelerate gambling disorders.

    There are several features of sports betting that make it different from other forms of gambling and can lead to addictive behavior.

    Many sports bettors tend to perceive their wages on games are safer and more informed by their own expertise and skills than luck, researchers say. This may give them a false illusion of control.

    Additionally, live betting within games reduces the delay between risk and reward, and it’s increasing the speed and frequency of wagers, experts say.

    “I got caught up in a lot of the live betting,” said one 24-year-old man with a gambling disorder who spoke to CNN on the condition of anonymity. He started betting on sports seven years ago through a bookie, but upped his wagers once he started using apps.

    During football games, he would bet on the outcome of drives and which team would score the next touchdown. As he lost more during a game, he would try again to to win it back on the next play.

    “You see the way the game is going and you think you know,” he said. “It’s not like back in the day with a bookie betting on who wins.”

    He said he lost $100,000 on sports gambling, including money from student loans. He’s currently in recovery at Beit T’Shuvah, in Los Angeles, which provides inpatient and outpatient services for people struggling with gambling disorders.

    Casey Clark, the senior vice president at the American Gaming Association, a trade group for the gambling industry, said that the legalization of sports betting has moved the black market of sports gambling into regulated marketplaces, benefiting states.

    The gambling industry and sports betting operators work with regulators, professional sports leagues, media companies and advocates to set standards, provide gambling education for consumers and fund recovery efforts for people seeking treatment, Clark said.

    “We’ve had a really fast escalation and movement towards giving American consumers access to the legal market that they clearly want. And so we have to continue to evolve that marketplace,” he said.

    Advocates for people with gambling disorders say demand for help and treatment services has grown alongside the rapid expansion of legalized sports betting.

    Inquires to the Council on Compulsive Gambling of New Jersey’s help hotline about sports gambling have increased 60% since it became legal in the state in 2018, said Felicia Grondin, the organization’s executive director.

    Grondin feels helpless against the constant barrage of advertising encouraging betting on games.

    An advertisement for DraftKings is shown on the scoreboard during the game between the Boston Red Sox and the Detroit Tigers at Comerica Park on July 7, 2019 in Detroit, Michigan.

    “We consider it to be predatory advertising because it’s incessant and it glamorizes gambling,” she said.

    Clark from the American Gaming Association said the group has created a responsible marketing code to set industry-wide advertising standards.

    But self-enforcement by the industry cannot make up for robust oversight from regulators, said Keith Whyte, the executive director of the National Council on Problem Gambling.

    “Self-regulation tends to dumb itself down to the lowest common denominator, not the highest,” he said. “Some operators are definitely taking advantage of weak regulatory environments in some states.”

    Every state where gambling is legal has a regulatory body that oversees it.

    But few have “really done more than the minimal amount to increase funding of problem gambling treatment,” said Holden. The sports gambling industry is most similar to financial markets, he said, but financial markets are much more regulated than banks.

    Most states require that sports betting ads disclose the minimum legal age to gamble and responsible gambling messages, such as problem gambling hotlines. Those messages are brief and usually run at the very end.

    DraftKings' Super Bowl ad with Kevin Hart, David Ortiz and Emmitt Smith.

    Regulators are wary of how tightly they can curtail messages in gambling advertising without running afoul of First Amendment protections on commercial speech.

    “A lot of state regulators have big First Amendment fears,” Holden said. “No one wants to fund litigation or lose a Supreme Court case over gambling.”

    In most states, the legal age for sports betting is 21 years old. But ads during games, in stadiums, and with star athlete sponsors normalizes sports betting for kids and teenagers, critics say. The United Kingdom last year banned top athletes and celebrities from appearing in ads endorsing or promoting gambling to try to curb underage gambling. That’s unlikely to happen in the United States.

    Additionally, researchers are troubled by the incentives and promotions some sports betting apps often provide to users, such as sign-up and referral bonuses, promo codes and bonus bets. One 2017 study of people with gambling addictions found that messages with an offer of risk-free kind of bonuses had a high impact.

    The Ohio Casino Control Commission in January fined DraftKings, Caesars and BetMGM $150,000 each for advertising promotions or bonuses as “free” or “risk-free” when, in fact, users were required to lose money or risk their own money to obtain the promotion.

    “I got more incentive to gamble with these apps that give you free play and match your deposit,” said the former sports bettor in Los Angeles currently in recovery. He enlisted friends to sign up to get referral fees, and looked at these enticements as free money. “I’d have to be an idiot to pass this up.”

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  • North Korean hackers extorted health care organizations to fund further cyberattacks, US and South Korea say | CNN Politics

    North Korean hackers extorted health care organizations to fund further cyberattacks, US and South Korea say | CNN Politics

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    Washington
    CNN
     — 

    North Korean government-backed hackers have conducted ransomware attacks on health care providers and other key sectors in the US and South Korea and used the proceeds to fund further cyberattacks on government agencies in Washington and Seoul, US and South Korean officials warned Thursday.

    Some of those follow-on hacks have specifically targeted Pentagon networks and US defense contractors, according to the advisory from US and South Korean intelligence and security agencies.

    It’s the latest in a drumbeat of warnings from US officials that North Korea is adopting cybercriminal tactics to fund dictator Kim Jong Un’s ambitions, including the regime’s pursuit of nuclear weapons.

    The statement from the US Federal Bureau of Investigation, US National Security Agency, South Korean National Intelligence Service and others does not mention Kim’s weapons programs, but US officials have previously warned that a portion of the money Pyongyang steals through hacking can go to weapons development.

    North Korea’s use of stolen cryptocurrency to fund its weapons programs is part of the regular set of intelligence products presented to President Joe Biden, a senior administration official told CNN this week.

    “They need money, so they’re going to keep being creative,” the official said. “I don’t think the North Koreans are ever going to stop looking for illicit ways to glean funds because it’s an authoritarian regime … under heavy sanctions.”

    The news comes as North Korea displayed nearly a dozen advanced intercontinental ballistic missiles at a nighttime military parade on Wednesday.

    The new US-South Korea advisory did not identify hospitals that the North Korean hackers had allegedly victimized. The Justice Department has previously accused Pyongyang-backed hackers of hitting a medical center in Kansas in 2021, encrypting computer systems the facility relied on to operate key equipment, and another medical provider in Colorado.

    The advisory follows a similar warning from US agencies in July that North Korean hackers had used ransomware to disrupt services at health organizations for “prolonged periods.”

    In the statement released Thursday, US and South Korean officials accused North Korean hackers of taking pains to try to hide their identities – even posing as a notorious Russian ransomware gang. The North Koreans are also emulating non-state criminals in dumping online the private data of victims who do not pay, officials said.

    The hackers have used a popular software used in small and medium-sized hospitals in South Korea to spread their malicious code with the aim of locking up computers, according to the advisory.

    In addition to hacking, suspected North Koreans have posed as other nationalities to apply for work at IT firms and send money back to Pyongyang, US agencies have publicly warned. A CNN investigation found at least one cryptocurrency entrepreneur who unwittingly paid a North Korean tech worker tens of thousands of dollars.

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  • Alibaba is launching a ChatGPT rival too | CNN Business

    Alibaba is launching a ChatGPT rival too | CNN Business

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    Hong Kong
    CNN
     — 

    Alibaba says it will launch its own ChatGPT-style tool, becoming the latest tech giant to jump on the chatbot bandwagon.

    The Chinese behemoth said it was testing an artificial intelligence-powered chatbot internally. It did not share details of when it would launch or what the application would be called.

    “Frontier innovations such as large language models and generative AI have been our [focus] areas since the formation of DAMO in 2017,” an Alibaba

    (BABA)     spokesperson told CNN in a Thursday statement, referring to an acronym for the company’s research arm that focuses on machine intelligence, data computing and robotics.

    “As a technology leader, we will continue to invest in turning cutting-edge innovations into value-added applications for our customers as well as their end-users.”

    Alibaba’s Hong Kong-listed shares ticked up 1.4% on Thursday morning.

    Companies around the world are racing to develop and release their own versions of ChatGPT, the application that allows users to automatically write essays or pass tests.

    The tool is built on a large language model, which is trained on vast troves of data online in order to generate compelling responses to user prompts. Experts have long warned that these tools have the potential to spread inaccurate information.

    This week, Google

    (GOOGL)     and Chinese search engine giant Baidu

    (BIDU)     both unveiled plans to launch similar services of their own.

    Google’s tool, named “Bard,” will roll out to the public in the coming weeks, while Baidu’s bot, called “Wenxin Yiyan” in Chinese or “ERNIE Bot” in English, will launch in March.

    Bard suffered an embarrassing setback this week, however, after producing an incorrect response during a public demonstration.

    Shares in Google’s parent company, Alphabet, fell nearly 8% Wednesday following the news.

    Microsoft

    (MSFT)    , too, has gotten in the game. The firm announced a makeover for its Bing search engine on Tuesday, saying it would update the platform to answer questions, chat with users and produce content in response to prompts using artificial intelligence.

    The company is also investing billions of dollars in OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT.

    — CNN’s Catherine Thorbecke contributed to this report.

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  • US senators seek answers from Meta on whether user data was accessed by China, Russia and others | CNN Business

    US senators seek answers from Meta on whether user data was accessed by China, Russia and others | CNN Business

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    Washington
    CNN
     — 

    Top US lawmakers on the Senate Intelligence Committee want answers from Meta on a newly disclosed internal investigation it conducted in 2018 that found tens of thousands of software developers in China, Russia and other “high-risk” countries may have had access to detailed Facebook user data before the company clamped down on that access beginning in 2014.

    In a letter to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg on Monday, Sens. Mark Warner and Marco Rubio, the chair and vice-chair of the Senate committee, cited a document unsealed last week in an ongoing privacy lawsuit involving the company.

    That document, an internal slide presentation from 2018, suggested that nearly 87,000 developers in China, 42,000 in Russia and a handful based in Cuba, Iran and North Korea had access to Facebook user information through an earlier version of the company’s programming interfaces. The presentation provides an interim update on the probe, which found, among other things, that Iran was home to a “significant number of seemingly Russian developers” of Facebook apps.

    The document does not explicitly outline what types of information the developers could have accessed, but it focuses on a period prior to 2014, before Facebook had restricted third-party access to data such as political views, relationship statuses and education history, among other things.

    The congressional letter seeks more information about the outcome of the investigation, with a particular focus on whether Facebook users’ data could have ended up in the hands of Chinese or Russian intelligence agencies.

    “We have grave concerns about the extent to which this access could have enabled foreign intelligence service activity, ranging from foreign malign influence to targeting and counter-intelligence activity,” the lawmakers wrote.

    The findings are “especially remarkable given that Facebook has never been permitted to operate in [China],” they added.

    Meta’s investigation, launched after the company’s Cambridge Analytica data privacy scandal, had focused on third-party app developers with access to “large amounts of information” and whose software had exhibited “suspicious activity.”

    On Tuesday, Meta told CNN in a statement that the document cited in the letter references data practices that are no longer in effect at the company.

    “These documents are an artifact from a different product at a different time,” said Meta spokesman Andy Stone. “Many years ago, we made substantive changes to our platform, shutting down developers’ access to key types of data on Facebook while reviewing and approving all apps that request access to sensitive information.”

    Meta declined to answer whether the app developer investigation is still ongoing or how many apps have been reviewed since the 2018 slide presentation, which was unsealed in court last week. The document had projected the probe would continue at least through 2020.

    In recent years, policymakers have increasingly sounded the alarm about data leakages to foreign adversaries. Hostile governments could seek to use Americans’ personal information to spread disinformation or identify intelligence targets, US officials have said.

    Those fears have culminated most visibly in tensions with the short-form video app TikTok, whose links to China through its parent company have prompted the US government and numerous states to ban the app from official devices. US officials have also sought to block Chinese telecom firms from the US market over similar concerns.

    But the lawmakers’ letter highlights how worries about data access by foreign adversaries extends beyond TikTok and encompasses some of the largest social media platforms.

    Although Meta has moved on with different, more restrictive policies for developers, Warner and Rubio called for the company to explain what information may have been transferred to China, Russia and other nations in the past, and for any evidence the company may have that the data has been abused to target Americans or engage in propaganda campaigns.

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