Author: admin
When Jeff and Angelo talk about Camp Nakamoto, they don’t start with ticket sales or big-name speakers. They talk about family. About meaningful conversations. About an island in the middle of a lake where Bitcoiners and their families can disconnect from technology to reconnect with each other. “I went all in when Saylor made his initial investment in August of 2020,” Jeff explains. “Read every book possible, every podcast possible, all that junk. And I’m fully down the rabbit hole, I’m continuing down the deep rabbit hole.” For Angelo, the journey was strikingly similar. “It was definitely COVID in March…
Financial investment giant Charles Schwab has announced plans to offer spot bitcoin trading to its clients within the next 12 months. This is a big move into the digital asset space by a company with over $10 trillion in assets under management (AUM). Rick Wurster, who became CEO of Charles Schwab in 2025, confirmed the plans during several recent public appearances including the 2025 Spring Business Update and various media interviews. Wurster said: “… We are hopeful and likely to be able to launch direct spot crypto. Our goal is to do that in the next 12 months, and we’re…
Hotels.com is relaunching its brand and unveiling a new mascot in a bid to get its name “back out there.” Hotels.com is relaunching its brand with a new campaign and mascot in a bid to get its name “back out there” after a tumultuous post-Covid period. Senior vice-president, general manager and global brand lead, Hari Nair, says it “made sense” to relaunch the brand after experiencing a dip in bookings during the pandemic. Long term the goal of the new campaign, which will run in the UK on TV, OOH, digital, audio and social media over the summer, is to…
A discrepancy between first- and third-party benchmark results for OpenAI’s o3 AI model is raising questions about the company’s transparency and model testing practices. When OpenAI unveiled o3 in December, the company claimed the model could answer just over a fourth of questions on FrontierMath, a challenging set of math problems. That score blew the competition away — the next-best model managed to answer only around 2% of FrontierMath problems correctly. “Today, all offerings out there have less than 2% [on FrontierMath],” Mark Chen, chief research officer at OpenAI, said during a livestream. “We’re seeing [internally], with o3 in aggressive…
“I wonder how much money OpenAI has lost in electricity costs from people saying ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ to their models.” It was a seemingly random question posed by a user on X (formerly Twitter), but OpenAI CEO Sam Altman jumped in to reply that typing those words has added up to “tens of millions of dollars well spent — you never know.” Judging from Altman’s tongue-in-cheek tone, it’s probably safe to assume he didn’t do a precise calculation. But his response prompted Futurism to speculate about whether it’s actually a waste of time and electricity to be polite to…
Spar has just made bitcoin a part of everyday life by starting to accept BTC payments at one of its supermarkets in Zug, Switzerland. Spar is one of the first major supermarket chains in Switzerland to allow customers to pay for their groceries with bitcoin, thanks to the Lightning Network. SPAR is a Dutch multinational franchise founded in 1932. Headquartered in Amsterdam, it helps independently owned food retail stores sell their products by providing branding, supplies, and services. As of 2024, SPAR operated 13,900 stores across 48 countries. The payment system was implemented by DFX Swiss, a Switzerland-based digital-asset-to-fiat payment…
Every now and then, a Silicon Valley startup launches with such an “absurdly” described mission that it’s difficult to discern if the startup is for real or just satire. Such is the case with Mechanize, a startup whose founder — and the non-profit AI research organization he founded called Epoch — is being skewered on X after he announced it. Complaints encompass both the startup’s mission, and the implication that it sullies the reputation of his well-respected research institute. (A director at the research institute even posted on X, “Yay just what I wanted for my bday: a comms crisis.”)…
OpenAI’s recently launched o3 and o4-mini AI models are state-of-the-art in many respects. However, the new models still hallucinate, or make things up — in fact, they hallucinate more than several of OpenAI’s older models. Hallucinations have proven to be one of the biggest and most difficult problems to solve in AI, impacting even today’s best-performing systems. Historically, each new model has improved slightly in the hallucination department, hallucinating less than its predecessor. But that doesn’t seem to be the case for o3 and o4-mini. According to OpenAI’s internal tests, o3 and o4-mini, which are so-called reasoning models, hallucinate more…
South Korea kicked off 2025 with political chaos, regulatory heat and a crypto market finally brought to heel — or at least forced to grow up.The nation closed 2024 in disarray following then-President Yoon Suk Yeol’s botched martial law stunt in December.In the aftermath, authorities spent the first quarter drawing lines in the sand as financial watchdogs slapped cryptocurrency exchanges with probes and lifted the ban on corporate trading accounts. Meanwhile, crypto adoption hit record highs as trading volume cooled.Here’s a breakdown of the key developments that shaped South Korea’s crypto sector in Q1 of 2025.South Korea’s economy limped into…
Meta, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger, is facing antitrust proceedings that could limit its ability to develop AI amid a field of competitors.First filed in 2021, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) alleges that Meta’s strategy of absorbing firms — rather than competing with them — violates antitrust laws. If the court rules against Meta, it could be forced to spin out its various messenger services and social media sites into independent companies.The loss of its stable of social media companies could harm Facebook’s competitiveness not only in the social media industry but also in its ability…