Tether reports $700 million Q4 net profit in latest attestation report — link

First-ever legal trial on NFTs – "NFTs aren't art"

Hermès won its lawsuit against the digital artist behind “MetaBirkin” NFTs.

The jury found that Rothschild had infringed on Hermès trademark rights and awarded the company $133k in damages, arguing that the NFTs were similar to commodities and not protected by the First Amendment as art.

This ruling could set a precedent for other big brands seeking to protect their trademarks in the NFT

eCommerce is the biggest Metaverse

All Metaverse market segments are experiencing immense growth.

The entire Metaverse market is expected to surge by an impressive 759% between 2022 and 2027, shooting up from US$39 billion to a worth of US$335 billion.

eCommerce is currently the biggest Metaverse market segment with a volume of US$16 billion.

Although it is going to lose some of its market share within the Metaverse market in the future, eCommerce is expected to stay as one of the most important Metaverse pillars through 2030.

A growth of 375% secures the eCommerce segment the top spot in the market through 2027, with a market volume of US$76 billion.

By 2030, Virtual Assets will overtake eCommerce as the biggest Metaverse market segment. In general, the Metaverse opens up a huge world of new opportunities for brands and retailers to attract and satisfy customers.

The AI Chatbots war is on

- Microsoft: ChatGPT
- Google: LamBDA
- YouSearchEngine: YouChat
- Baidu: ErnieBot
- Perplexity AI: Perplexity Chat
- AnthropicAI: Claude (GOOGLE)
- Jasperai: Jasper Chat

Theory of Mind emerged in GPT
Children get it at 9yo

No, it doesn't read minds (yet) but,
It can empathize and imagine what you know
separately from what it or others knows

Microsoft Kills Its Industrial Metaverse Team After 4 Months

In a surprising reversal,Microsoft has killed a team it formed four months ago to help customers use the metaverse in industrial settings.

The group’s roughly 100 employees have all been laid off.

Microsoft created its Industrial Metaverse Core team in October to help build software interfaces for operating the control systems behind electrical power plants, industrial robotics and transportation networks.

The team, primarily composed of a group known internally as Project Bonsai, fell victim to Microsoft’s plan announced last month to lay off 10,000 employees, or about 4.5% of its workforce.

Crawling the Internal Knowledge-Base of LLMs

- Given a seed entity, expand knowledge-graph around it
- Crawling decomposed into sub-tasks, w/ prompts that control for both:
precision (no wrong facts generated) &
recall (number of facts generated)

Paper

Data decoding and Deserialization issues can easily became the #1 API security risk for 2023. Log4j, spring4shell, Text4Shell are just a few remarkable, among hundreds of others.

PayPal held $291 million of Bitcoin and $250 million of Ether — link

"Are Deep Neural Networks SMARTer than Second Graders?"

Experiments reveal that while powerful deep models offer reasonable performances on puzzles that they are trained on, they are not better than random accuracy when.

LLMs (and big curves in general) can store and reuse human-generated abstractions that they're exposed to, but cannot generate their own abstractions when faced with a new problem.

Fundamentally, this is the crux of the issue. We see systems that rehash human output, and we're keen to attribute human abilities to them. But what makes humans intelligent is that they *invented* this stuff in the first place. Humans aren't sponges, they're creators.

Restrictive crypto rules for EU banks confirmed in published legal draft — link

HM Treasury and Bank of England released the consultation for a Digital Pound by 2030.

Smart Money provides:
- Roaming bank accounts like roaming mobile phones
- Programmability to automate complex business workflows
- Businesses and consumers the ability to add transaction rules when you pay -eg split payments, automate VAT
- Safe - 100% backed by the central bank

Primary Motivations:
- Ensuring the role of the UK central bank is an anchor for confidence and safety in our monetary system
- Promoting innovation, choice and efficiency

Fostering stability and growth with access, innovation & choice.

- The digital GBP could improve resilience as an additional payment rail
- It could also complement existing financial inclusion initiatives
- Using the digital pound to improve cross-border payments is an opportunity but would take time and require int'l co-operation to deliver.

Now the technical bit of a CBDC.

Functional requirements needed to integrate with the existing financial system and payment rails and design considerations needed for a CBDC:
• Privacy
• Security
• Resilience
• Performance
• Extensibility
• Energy usage

One of the most important topics and concerns for CBDCs has been Privacy.

The law and the same approach will still apply to CBDCs.
It will be the same as today's AML/KYC regulation where commercial banks are responsible for compliance and managing the relationship with their customers. Complying with the same rules and regulations as today with non-CBDC money.

Google Research dropped the code and paper for MetNet-2, a neural net that can predict rain up to 12 hours in advance. This beats current weather forecast models which are instead huge physics simulations run on supercomputers.

ChatGPT runs 10K Nvidia training GPUs with potential for thousands more

Samsung and SK Hynix have seen orders for high bandwidth memories (HBM) surge thanks to ChatGPT, and other AI chatbots that require faster processing speeds, media report. HBM has been a tough sell as price is 3x more than DRAM, but AI is a killer app for HBM.

TSMC will start mass producing Google server chips by the 2nd half of 2024, media report. Google has worked for 2-years on Arm-based server chips in order to catch up with Amazon's Graviton chips. The result, 2 Google server chips.

Rihanna's “Bitch Better Have My Money” has been streamed 673M times on Spotify alone

Now, NFT owners will get streaming royalties of the song:

1/ 300 NFTs were minted (and sold out) for $210 each on Feb 9

2/ Each NFT represents 0.0033% ownership of future digital streaming royalties

3/ Payouts start Feb 16

Siemens issues first digital bond on blockchain — link

Language processing takes place in a dedicated set of brain regions, known as the Language Network.

Neural computations in this network iteratively link successive words to build sentences and ultimately produce compositional meaning.

How exactly it is done remains unknown.

Report: No standards for handling mental health data 

Data brokers don't have a standard set of best practices for handling consumers' sensitive mental health information — and a new report out from Duke's Technology Policy Lab details how some brokers sell that data.

Among the findings by Duke researcher Joanne Kim: Some data brokers are shopping around the vast amounts of information they have on consumers' mental health conditions "on the open market, with seemingly minimal vetting of customers and seemingly few controls on the use of purchased data." One broker advertised a dataset to Kim that included names and addresses of people with depression, bipolar disorder and OCD, as well as data on some people's races and ethnicities. 

Kim calls for a more comprehensive national privacy law, or at least an expansion of federal rules governing health data to include consumer information to guard against misuse by brokers.