A controversial cryptocurrency started by the founder of ChatGPT has surged in price in the days following its launch, with market commentators referring to it as both “outlandish” and “revolutionary”. Worldcoin, launched last week by OpenAI boss Sam Altman, offers people a free share of the crypto token WLD in exchange for their biometric data. More than 2 million people have signed up through an iris-scanning orb, which is currently operating in 35 cities across 20 countries. The biometric data collected by Worldcoin is used to verify an individual’s “unique personhood” to ensure noone signs up more than once. It also offers a way to differentiate humans from AI bots, which Worldcoin claims is a core offering of its technology. Regulatory and legal challenges mean people are unable to sign up in certain markets, however Mr Altman claimed shortly after its launch that one person every eight seconds was signing up for the crypto project. A spokesperson for Worldcoin told The Independent that 1,500 orbs were being distributed around the world to meet demand, including to London, New York and Paris. Crypto market commentators have said that a 50 per cent price surge in the day following its launch showed the level of interest and demand in the WLD token despite concerns surrounding its rollout. “OpenAI co-founder Sam Altman’s Worldcoin project might just be one of the most ambitious cryptocurrency projects in recent years,” Louis Schoeman, a managing director at Forex Suggest, told The Independent. “The main aim of this global digital identification is to connect your World ID to websites and apps rather than traditional logins, proving you’re a real person without having to share personal data like names and emails. This sort of digital ID will be necessary in the development of AI, in order to tell the difference between humans and AI bots online. “A global digital ID enabling private identity verifications is undeniably revolutionary, however, it’s certain to stir up controversy, with many already calling the exchange of biometric data for crypto tokens an outlandish bribe.” The Worldcoin cryptocurrency spiked from $1.90 to $3.15 on the day of its launch, before dropping back below $2. It has since surged again and was trading above $2.30 on Tuesday, bucking broader market trends. Read More ChatGPT creator launches bitcoin rival that scans people’s eyeballs Meta is secretly building an AI chatbot with the personality of Abraham Lincoln Google Assistant to be ‘supercharged’ with AI like ChatGPT and Bard ChatGPT will now know who you are and what you want

By Sheila Dang Social media platform X recorded high single-digit percentage revenue growth in the third quarter compared

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David Balogun is a normal kid who competes in paper airplane races with his younger sister, Eliana and struggles to sit still, but he is also one of the youngest people in the United States to receive a high school diploma. In late January, Balogun graduated from Reach Cyber Charter School, which is a tuition-free online school in Pennsylvania. This month he will be starting classes at Southern New Hampshire University as a full-time student. Balogun and his parents, Ronya and Henry, spoke about what it was, and still is, like raising someone with a high intellect on CNBC Make It. The couple said they first tested their son’s intelligence when he was six years old. After that, they began to rethink any parenting philosophies they previously had. “There’s no book on it,” Ronya said. “You’ve got to develop a different mindset as a parent,” Henry added. “It’s not always easy when your son is asking you questions constantly. You have to keep answering the questions, because you don’t want to say, ‘Just leave me alone.’” Because of David’s unique circumstances, they’ve developed their own number one rule: When a system isn’t built for your child, don’t try to fix your child. Try to fix the system. Ronya said when David was in first grade, a regular classroom wasn’t working anymore, noting that sometimes his peers would listen to him more than the teacher. So they looked into their state’s gifted programs, which also proved to not be rigorous enough for their nine year old. In 2020, his parents enrolled him in Reach which allowed him to individualise his curriculum and take high school level classes. Although that didn’t come without challenges, including multiple calls to The College Board because David’s birthdate was too young to enroll in advanced placement exams. As for deciding on college, Ronya said she had to put her foot down mentioning she didn’t want David in a class filled with 20 year olds. “It’s a different adaptation that we don’t have in the United States of America yet. It’s very scary, you can’t find this,” she said. “Sometimes I can’t fix the system, but there are other unconventional choices and solutions to help lead my son through his journey to fulfill his dreams.” Trust is also a big part in parenting David, his parents said. They mentioned that, when he was learning specific skills like adding and subtracting negative numbers before he was taught, they had to believe he knew how. “I can’t tell him, ‘This is what you know,’ because I’m not in his brain,” Ronya said. “I have to trust him to be partially leading the way.” Although there are some boundaries in this trust, as David came home one day claiming he now knew where babies came from. His mother was able to briefly give him some information on reproductive anatomy before putting the conversation to a stop. “Mind you, at this moment, I’m talking to a six year old,” Ronya said. In terms of what happens to David beyond college, his parents are unsure and are just figuring it out as they go along. “There is no frame of reference,” Ronya said. “So you know how sometimes when there is no path, you start a new path? Yep, that’s what we’re doing.” The Independent has contacted Ronya and Henry for comment. Read More TikToker urges parents to save old clothes for their children after inheriting mother’s wardrobe Mother criticises ‘double standard’ after husband is praised for taking toddlers to grocery store Mother sparks viral debate for ‘shaming’ parent who refused to give her daughter a slice of cake TikToker urges parents to save all their old clothes for children to inherit Gen X mother goes viral for attack on ‘tired’ American Dream Couple discovers why their child thought ‘mums foam at the mouth while having babies’

SAN FRANCISCO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--May 8, 2023--

A trading platform that raised millions of dollars in a round backed by Steve Cohen’s Point72 Ventures is

ATLANTA--(BUSINESS WIRE)--May 17, 2023--

It started like any other outage: unexplained error messages that told users they had hit their “rate limit”, and Twitter posts refusing to load. But as the weekend progressed, it became clear that these weren’t just any old technical problems, but rather issues that could define the future not only of Twitter but of the internet. Elon Musk took to Twitter on Saturday and announced that he would be introducing a range of changes “to address extreme levels of data scraping [and] system manipulation”. Users would only be able to see a limited number of posts, and those who are not logged in wouldn’t be able to see the site at all. That decision triggered those error messages, since users were hitting the “rate limit” that meant they were requesting too many posts for Twitter to be able to handle. The new limits – apparently temporary, though still in effect – meant that users were being rationed on how many tweets they were able to see, and would see frustrating and unexplained messages when they actually hit that limit. In many ways it was yet another perplexing and worrying decision by Mr Musk, whose stewardship of Twitter has lurched from scandal to scandal since he took over the company in October last year. (He appointed a chief executive, Linda Yaccarino, last month, but is still seemingly deciding, executing and communicating the company’s strategy.) But something seems different about the chaos this time around. For one, it is not one of the many content policy issues or potentially hostile ways of encouraging people to sign up for Twitter’s premium service that have marked Mr Musk’s leadership of Twitter so far; for another, it seemed to be part of a broader issue that is rattling the whole internet, and which Twitter might only be one symptom. It remains unclear whether Mr Musk’s latest decision really has anything to do with scraping by artificial intelligence systems, as he claimed. But the explanation certainly makes sense: AI systems require vast corpuses of text and images to be trained on, and the companies that make them have generated that by scraping and regurgitating the text that can be easily found across the web. Every time someone wants to load a web page, their computer makes a request to that company’s servers, which then provide the data that can be reconstructed on the user’s web browser. If you want to load Elon Musk’s Twitter account, for instance, you direct your browser to the relevant address and it will show his Twitter posts, pulled down from the internet. That comes with costs, of course, including the price of running those servers and the bandwidth required to be sending vast amounts of data quickly across the internet. For the most part on the modern internet, that cost has been covered by also sending along some advertising, or requiring that people sign up for a subscription to see the content they are asking for. AI companies that are scraping those sites make frequent requests for that data, however, and quickly. And since the system is automated, they are not able to look at ads or pay for subscriptions, meaning that companies are not paid for the content they are providing. That issue looks to be growing across the internet. Companies that host text discussions, such as Twitter, are very aware that they might be serving up the same data that could one day render them obsolete, and are keen to at least make some money from that process. It also looks to be some of the reason behind the recent fallout on Reddit, too. That site is especially useful for feeding to an AI – it includes very human and very helpful answers to the kinds of questions that users might ask an AI system – and the company is very aware that it is, once again, giving up the information that might also be used to overtake it. To try and solve that, it recently announced that it would be charging large amounts of access to its API, which serves as the interface through which automated systems can hoover up that data. It was at least partly intended as a way to generate money from those AI companies, though it also had the effect of making it too expensive for third-party Reddit clients – which also rely on that API – to keep running, and the most popular ones have since shut down. There is good reason to think that this will keep happening. The web is increasingly being hoovered up by the same AI systems that will eventually be used to further degrade the experience of using it: Twitter is, in effect, being used to train the same bots that will one day post misleading and annoying messages all over Twitter. Every website that hosts text, images or video could face the same problems, as AI companies look to build up their datasets and train up their systems. As such, all of the internet could become more like Mr Musk’s Twitter did over the weekend: actively hostile to actual users, as it attempts to keep the fake users away. But just as likely is that it is Mr Musk’s explanation for why the site went down conveniently chimes with the zeitgeist, and helpfully shifts blame to the AI companies that he has already voiced significant skepticism about. The truth may be that Twitter – which has fired the vast majority of its staff, including those in its engineering teams – might finally be running into problems with infrastructure that happen when fewer people are around to keep the site online. Twitter’s former head of trust and safety, Yoel Roth, is perhaps the best qualified person to suggest that is the case. He said that Mr Musk’s argument for the new limits “doesn’t pass the sniff test” and instead suggested that it was the result of someone mistakenly breaking the rate limiter and then having that accident passed off by Mr Musk as being intentional, whether he knows that or not. “For anyone keeping track, this isn’t even the first time they’ve completely broken the site by bumbling around in the rate limiter,” Mr Roth wrote on Twitter rival Bluesky. “There’s a reason the limiter was one of the most locked down internal tools. Futzing around with rate limits is probably the easiest way to break Twitter.” Mr Roth also said that Twitter has long been aware that it was being scraped – and that it was OK with it. He called it the “open secret of Twitter data access” and said the company considered it “fine”. And he too suggested that the events of the weekend could be a hint about what is coming to the internet, offering an entirely different alternative. It’s not Twitter, Reddit and other companies who should really be upset about what is going on, he suggested. “There’s some legitimacy to Twitter and Reddit being upset with AI companies for slurping up social data gratis in order to train commercially lucrative models,” Mr Roth said. “But they should never forget that it’s not *their* data — it’s ours. A solution to parasitic AI needs to be user-centric, not profit-centric.” Read More Twitter to stop TweetDeck access for unverified users Meta’s Twitter alternative Threads to be launched this week – report Twitter rival Bluesky halts sign-ups after huge surge in demand Twitter is breaking more and more Twitter rival sees huge increase in users as Elon Musk ‘destroys his site’ What does Twitter’s rate-limiting restriction mean?

Their (often literal) blood feud is a relatively modern creation. So how did vampires and werewolves end up at each other’s throats?

MIAMI & TORONTO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Jul 5, 2023--

A mind-boggling video has shown people just how far down the deepest place on Earth is, and it is utterly terrifying. The jaw-dropping video came from a trailer for a film that features Titanic director James Cameron, who seems to have a thing about the deep ocean. In the documentary, Long Way Down: Mariana Trench for National Geographic, Cameron took part in what was called the Deepsea Challenge which saw him dive to the bottom of the Mariana Trench in the western Pacific Ocean. The Mariana Trench is some 7 miles down and is deeper than Mount Everest would be if it were pointing down into the Earth. The bottom of the trench is called the Challenger Deep and is the deepest point known on our planet. For the attempt, a submersible was built to withstand the pressure in the deepest part of the ocean and trailers for the documentary terrifyingly showed just how far down the trench is. The video revealed it took Cameron around 90 minutes to reach the bottom of the 7-mile deep trench. In a condensed 1-minute video summarising the descent, the clip continued to give facts about the ocean in a graphic. Sign up to our free Indy100 weekly newsletter Long Way Down: Mariana Trench | National Geographic www.youtube.com 90 per cent of all ocean life lives between the depths of 0 and 660ft. A depth of 800ft is the dive depth of a nuclear submarine. Continuing on from that, 1,044ft down is the deepest ever recorded scuba dive, while at 3,300ft the last trickle of sunlight begins to fade. As has been in the headlines recently following the implosion of the OceanGate submersible, the Titanic sits at a depth of 12,467ft – just over one-third of the depth of the Mariana Trench. At 36,070ft, the bottom of the Mariana Trench has been visited by only a handful of people, one of whom is Hamish Harding, the British billionaire who died onboard the Titan submersible in June 2023. Have your say in our news democracy. Click the upvote icon at the top of the page to help raise this article through the indy100 rankings.

NEW YORK--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Jun 15, 2023--