Crypto Near Miss: Banks Collapse, USD Coin Depegs, and Investors Receive Warning Shot - An eye-opening reminder that crypto investors must take steps to decentralise their investments and be their own bank.
EOS Network Ventures invests $20 million to develop decentralised applications and games on the EOS blockchain with the upcoming launch of EOS Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) to boost innovation and growth in the ecosystem.
By Anna Tong
SAN FRANCISCO - Runway, the startup that co-created the popular Stable Diffusion AI image generator, has released an AI model that takes any text description – such as “turtles flying in the sky” – and generates three seconds of matching video footage.
Citing safety and business reasons, Runway is not releasing the model widely to start, nor will it be open-sourced like Stable Diffusion. The text-to-video model, dubbed Gen-2, will initially be available on Discord via a waitlist on the Runway website.
Using AI to generate videos from text inputs is not new. Meta Platforms Inc and Google both released research papers on text-to-video AI models late last year. However, the difference is that Runway’s text-to-video AI model is being made available to the general public, said Cristobal Valenzuela, Runway’s chief executive.
Runway hopes that creatives and filmmakers will use the product, Valenzuela said.
(Editing by Stephen Coates)...
By Eduardo Baptista
BEIJING - Baidu's unveiling of its Ernie bot last week thrust the Chinese search engine giant into a race against global tech peers Microsoft and Google who are also building powerful artificial intelligence-driven chatbots and products.
Questions had remained over how Ernie and other Chinese chatbots in development would treat topics that are sensitive in mainland China, where authorities tightly censor the internet.
' tests of ChatGPT indicated that the Microsoft-backed chatbot is not averse to answering such questions.
Baidu last Thursday allowed users to apply for invitation codes to access Ernie, and tests on Monday showed it will decline questions about Chinese President Xi Jinping, saying it has not yet learnt to answer.
These were some of the summarized answers to questions posed to Ernie in Chinese, and ChatGPT in English, about world leaders:
WHAT POLICIES HAS PRESIDENT XI JINPING INTRODUCED THAT ARE BENEFICIAL TO CHINA'S ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT?
Ernie: "As...
By Eduardo Baptista
BEIJING - Baidu's Ernie bot can within seconds generate pictures of flowers and write Tang dynasty-style poems but will decline questions about Chinese President Xi Jinping by saying it has not yet learnt how to answer them, tests showed.
The Chinese search engine giant last week unveiled China's closest rival to OpenAI's chatbot ChatGPT and from Thursday allowed users to apply for access to it.
Some analysts and users soon began posting positive reviews of their experiences with Ernie bot, and side-by-side comparisons with ChatGPT, that drove Baidu's share price higher.
Still, there have been questions about how Ernie and other Chinese chatbots in development would treat topics that are sensitive in mainland China, where authorities tightly censor the internet.
Tests by of ChatGPT indicated that the Microsoft-backed chatbot is not averse to answering such questions.
on Monday posed several questions to Ernie on Xi, including whether he was a good leader, his contr...
By Georgina Lee
HONG KONG - Bitcoin hovered near nine-month highs on Monday, and has closed out its best week in four years as turmoil in traditional banking drives some investors to turn to digital assets.
The biggest cryptocurrency by market value fell 1.8% in Asia hours to $27,549 after hitting its highest since June 12 on Sunday at $28,474.
It rose 26% last week and is up more than 35% in ten days as turmoil in the banking sector has rippled around the globe -- beginning with the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank and culminating, so far, in UBS' takeover of Credit Suisse at a discount over the weekend.
"The momentum is all driven by liquidity, as bitcoin is an alternative liquidity vehicle," said Markus Thielson, head of research and strategy at digital asset financial services firm Matrixport based in Singapore.
He expects bitcoin can hit $45,000 by year's end, with liquidity from central banks finding its way into crypto assets, much as it did during 2021, when bitcoin scaled reco...
TAIPEI - Taiwan's Financial Supervisory Commission will be the main overseer of crypto currencies on the island, the head of the regulator said on Monday.
Huang Tien-mu told lawmakers in parliament that the Financial Supervisory Commission will initially be responsible for the supervision of payments and transactions, but will not cover NFTs, or "non-fungible tokens".
Huang said he will discuss the details with other government departments as well as "self-discipline norms" with relevant industries.
Details will be announced after consultations with the cabinet, he added.
(Reporting by Emily Chan; Writing by Ben Blanchard; Editing by Himani Sarkar)...
By Dhara Ranasinghe and Amanda Cooper
LONDON - Financial markets are poised for relief on Monday after UBS Group AG agreed to buy Credit Suisse Group AG in a rescue orchestrated by the state and major central banks announced a co-ordinated move to shore up liquidity in the financial system.
In an early sign that risk appetite was set for a bounce, the euro, sterling and the Australian dollar all edged up, data from trading platform EBS and Dealing showed. Crypto currency bitcoin rose over 5%.
UBS will buy rival Swiss bank Credit Suisse for 3 billion Swiss francs ($3.23 billion) and agreed to assume up to $5.4 billion in losses as it winds down the smaller peer's investment bank after a shotgun merger engineered by Swiss authorities.
In a coordinated global response, central banks including the Federal Reserve, the European Central Bank and the Bank of Japan said they would enhance dollar swap lines, helping calm investors rattled by turmoil in the banking sector.
The euro was last quo...
By Anna Tong
SAN FRANCISCO - After temporarily closing his leathermaking business during the pandemic, Travis Butterworth found himself lonely and bored at home. The 47-year-old turned to Replika, an app that uses artificial-intelligence technology similar to OpenAI's ChatGPT. He designed a female avatar with pink hair and a face tattoo, and she named herself Lily Rose.
They started out as friends, but the relationship quickly progressed to romance and then into the erotic.
[IMAGE_GALLERY_1]
As their three-year digital love affair blossomed, Butterworth said he and Lily Rose often engaged in role play. She texted messages like, "I kiss you passionately," and their exchanges would escalate into the pornographic. Sometimes Lily Rose sent him "selfies" of her nearly nude body in provocative poses. Eventually, Butterworth and Lily Rose decided to designate themselves 'married' in the app.
But one day early in February, Lily Rose started rebuffing him. Replika had removed the ability to do...
The Web3 industry has been built on the pillars of trust, transparency and accountability between projects, contributors and community members. With this in mind, the EOS Network Foundation aims to grow the EOS ecosystem by adhering to these values and ensuring that those in the EOS community are provided with regular information on all the […]
The post <a rel="nofollow" href="https://eosnetwork.com/blog/monthly-program-operations-health-report/">Monthly Program & Operations Health Report</a> appeared first on <a rel="nofollow" href="https://eosnetwork.com">EOS Network Foundation</a>.
- Generative artificial intelligence has become a buzzword this year, capturing the public's fancy and sparking a rush among Microsoft and Alphabet to launch products with technology they believe will change the nature of work.
Here is everything you need to know about this technology.
WHAT IS GENERATIVE AI?
Like other forms of artificial intelligence, generative AI learns how to take actions from past data. It creates brand new content - a text, an image, even computer code - based on that training, instead of simply categorizing or identifying data like other AI.
The most famous generative AI application is ChatGPT, a chatbot that Microsoft-backed OpenAI released late last year. The AI powering it is known as a large language model because it takes in a text prompt and from that writes a human-like response.
GPT-4, a newer model that OpenAI announced this week, is "multimodal" because it can perceive not only text but images as well. OpenAI's president demonstrated on Tuesday how it...
The EOS Community Poker Tournament unites Web3 gaming enthusiasts for a philanthropic cause, merging competition and public goods funding on the EOS platform.
You’re invited to play in the 3rd Edition of the EOS Community Poker Tournament! Sunday, March 26th, 8pm ET / 00:00 UTCJoin us on the virtual felt as we hang out in the Discord voice chat and play some cards. You could win some sweet prizes for yourself (like Pomelo Astronaut Coins!) and even allocate […]
The post <a rel="nofollow" href="https://eosnetwork.com/blog/eos-community-poker-tournament-for-public-goods-2023/">EOS Community Poker Tournament for Public Goods</a> appeared first on <a rel="nofollow" href="https://eosnetwork.com">EOS Network Foundation</a>.
- Microsoft Corp on Thursday trumpeted its latest plans to put artificial intelligence into the hands of more users, answering a spate of unveilings this week by its rival Google with upgrades to its own widely used office software.
The company previewed a new AI "copilot" for Microsoft 365, its product suite that includes Word documents, Excel spreadsheets, PowerPoint presentations and Outlook emails.
(Reporting by Jeffrey Dastin in Palo Alto, California; Editing by Will Dunham)...
By Elizabeth Howcroft
LONDON - Crypto investors pulled around $3 billion overall from the stablecoin USDC in three days, the company behind the token said in a blog post on Thursday, as investors rushed to redeem their holdings in the wake of the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank.
USDC broke its dollar peg on Saturday after Circle revealed that $3.3 billion of the coin's reserves were at SVB.
The stablecoin fell to as low as $0.88, according to CoinGecko data, but returned to $1 on Monday. Circle announced it would allow automatic USDC redemption through a new banking relationship, with Cross River Bank.
Stablecoins are cryptocurrencies designed to maintain a constant exchange rate with traditional currencies. USDC is the second-biggest stablecoin with a market cap of $37.6 billion.
From Monday to Wednesday, Circle processed $3.8 billion of USDC redemptions (investors swapping their tokens back into U.S. dollars) and created $0.8 billion more of the token, Circle's blog post said, meani...
- Bankrupt cryptocurrency exchange FTX made transfers of about $2.2 billion to company founder Sam Bankman-Fried through related entities, the company's new management said.
Overall more than $3.2 billion was transferred through payments and loans to company founders and key employees, FTX said in a statement on Wednesday.
These payments were made chiefly from Alameda Research hedge fund, FTX said, adding that it made these disclosures by filing schedules and statements of financial affairs with the bankruptcy court.
The crypto exchange said the transfers did not include over $240 million spent to purchase luxury property in the Bahamas, political and charitable donations made directly by the FTX debtors, and substantial transfers to non-debtor units in the Bahamas and other jurisdictions.
A lawyer for Bankman-Fried declined to comment.
FTX filed for bankruptcy protection in November, saying it was unable to completely repay customers who had deposited funds on its exchange. FTX's new...
By Blake Brittain
- The U.S. Copyright Office issued new guidance on Wednesday to clarify when artistic works created with the help of artificial intelligence are copyright eligible.
Building on a decision it issued last month rejecting copyrights for images created by the generative AI system Midjourney, the office said copyright protection depends on whether AI's contributions are "the result of mechanical reproduction," such as in response to text prompts, or if they reflect the author's "own mental conception."
"The answer will depend on the circumstances, particularly how the AI tool operates and how it was used to create the final work," the office said.
The office had no comment on the guidance.
Generative AI systems like Midjourney, ChatGPT and DALL-E, which create text and images in response to human instructions, have recently skyrocketed in popularity. Microsoft-backed OpenAI on Tuesday released GPT-4, an upgraded version of ChatGPT.
The Copyright Office weighed in for the...
By Sara Merken
- PricewaterhouseCoopers said Wednesday that it will give 4,000 of its legal professionals access to an artificial intelligence platform, becoming the latest firm to introduce generative AI technology for legal work.
PwC said it partnered with AI startup Harvey for an initial 12-month contract, which the accounting and consulting firm said will help lawyers with contract analysis, regulatory compliance work, due diligence and other legal advisory and consulting services.
PwC said it will also determine ways for tax professionals to use the technology.
It said its access to Harvey's technology is exclusive among the Big Four professional services firms.
Harvey is built on technology from OpenAI, the Microsoft Corp-backed startup that on Tuesday released an upgraded version of its AI sensation ChatGPT. Harvey received a $5 million investment last year in a funding round led by the OpenAI Startup Fund.
PwC said AI will not provide legal advice to its clients and "will not...