Prediction Markets Surge in Popularity

I'm not giving up. I am selling the building. The final season of FX is the Bear. The restaurant is flooded.. Everything's either gonna be okay? No stop Or not We are out guns and we are out manned, but we have each other FX is the Bear, the final season, All episodes now streaming on Disney pllus. Welcome to the Tech We Right home for Thursday, june twenty fifth, twenty six. I'm Braman M Celllla Today, Apple hiked Mac and iPad prices fifteen to twenty five percent. And Tropic accused Alibaba of distilling Claud twenty eight million times. IBM detailed a.zo point seven nanometer chip. Facebook revived its creator studio app and Kelsy continues to prove that the big story this year in tech beyond AI is prediction markets. Here's what you miss today in the world of tech I'm getting to the age where I might pull a muscle just by thinking about stretching. 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Apple has raised Mac, iPad and other product prices by fifteen to twenty five percent, saying it has never seen a component price increase this much This quickly Notable that at least for now the pricing of the iPhone remains unchanged. oting the journ Among the price increases, the Base MacBook Air rose two hundred dollars to tw thousand two hundred and ninety nine dollars. The Base MacBook Pro increased three hundred dollars. to ninetine hundred and ninety nine cents. The entry level MacBook No increased one hundred dollars to six hundred and ninety nine dollars. The iPad Air increased one hundred and fifty dollars to seven hundred forty nine dollars and the iPad Pro Increased two hundred dollars to eleven hundred and ninety nine cents. iPhone prices were unchanged, though the company hinted at more increases in a statement. We have now reached a point where we need to begin raising prices. It said, We have never seen a component price increase this much of this quickly Apple's price hikes arrived. The day after Micron technology, the big American maker of memory and storage chips reported blowout quarterly earnings Touting gross profit margins that topped eighty percent. Shares in Micron jumped sixteen percent after the close and appeared likely to power a Thursday rally among seven conductor stocks Micron executives who typically offer cautious projections about the boom bust memory business said on their earnings call that tight conditions will persist beyond twenty twenty seven Just three months ago, they had projected tight conditions going only beyond this year In an interview Wednesday night, Micron Chief businessus offfficer Sumit Sadana. said the company couldn't make investments during the memory market's last downturn when Micron's gross profits went negative in part because Certain customers took advantage to pay rock bottom prices. quote We told a couple of the customers who were being very aggressive with pricing at that time that this is not constructive, he said, without naming Apple, specifically, adding that low prices discouraged capital investments. A lot of the industry investments got shut down in twenty twenty three because of really poor pricing and really poor margins, end quote Apple, the iPhone maker is well known for using its huge memory and storage purchases as leverage to secure the lowest prices, say analysts and former memory company executives, end quote So I guess the suggestion here is that this is a bit of chickens coming home to roost for Apple, at least according to Micron and quoting Mark Germman Apple added it has, quote, shielded our customers from these increases so far, but we have now reached a point where we need to begin raising prices on a number of products, including today's increases for iPad and Mac Pice increases are largely unprecedented with no equivalent in Apple's modern history of sweeping hikes across much of its product line The company has raised prices on individual models before, including a one hundred dollar increase for the iPhone seventeen Pro last year, but not across several product categories at once We know this is not welcome news and we are working tirelessly to find solutions, Apple said. The higher end MacBook No with more storage and touch ID is now seven hundred and ninety nine dollars up from do sixll ninet nine cents a full loaded sixteen inch MacBook Pro with the highest amount of memory and storage is now priced at nine thousand nine hundred and ninety nine dollars A fifteen inch MacBook air is now fourteen do ninety nine cents up from twelve do ninety nine cents. We're not at the point where we're saying this is going to end anytime soon, Tim Cook said in April, adding that the constraints will likely last quote several months John Ternus will inherit the memory crisis on september first when he steps into the CEO role, succeeding Cook The shortage has also had an impact on Apple's ability to roll out new products with the problem holding back key releases like an updated Max stududio In April, Cook said that the iPhone has been less affected by the memory issue than the Mac and has been instead facing shortages related to its main device processors, end quote In a letter to U. S. officials, Anthropic has accused Alibaba of adversarial distillation U Claude twenty eight point eight million times from April to June via almost twenty five thousand accounts Cotingloomberg Anthropics said that a campaign by operators linked to Alibaba's Qen AI lab targeted Claud's most prized capabilities, including software engineering and agentic reasoning, according to a letter that the AI startup sent to several U. Senators and White House officials The company said it was the biggest attempt so far by a Chinese company to piggyback on the work of top US labs In its letter, Anthropics said that the effort involved twenty eight point eight million exchanges with Claude between April and June through almost twenty five thousand fraudulent accounts, according to people familiar with the document and a copy seen by Bloomberg News. The company said the Alibaba campaign resembled past efforts by other Chinese developers that anthropic flagged in a blog post earlier this year Anthropic warn that Alibaba and other Chinese labs are making systemic and unauthorized use of results from leading US models to develop a rival generation of chatbots at a fraction of the cost via a practice known as adversarial distillation It cautioned that AI systems built using this method often lacked safety guardrails The firm urged the Trump administration to step up efforts to halt the practice These distillation attacks are carried out illicitly, systematically, and at industrial scale to harvest U. S. AI capabilities across frontier labs and repackage them as their own without incurring the training and R and D costs required to train U S. frontier models Anthropic wrote in its letter Alibaba had no comment. An anthropic spokesperson declined to enter into specifics on the letter but emphasized the importance of combating distillation through coordinated action between government and industry Anthropicss letter marked the latest call from top AI American companies to reign in some kinds of distillation where developers train systems using results from another AI model to create similar capabilities and a new one at a far lower cost Tolerated for training smaller, less advanced systems, distillation violates AI Lab's terms of use when it's employed to replicate a cutting edge AI model without permission practice has alarmed US developers to the point that Anthropic, OpenAI, and Alphabets Google have joined forces to share information about distillation attempts that violate their terms of service Anthropic and open Aye have each warned that Chinese AI startups, including Deep Sek and Mimacs have employed distillation to develop their own models. end quote IBM has revealed azo point seven nanometer chip manufacturing process that utilizes what it calls nanoSack three D transistor architecture which it says, continue chip innovations for at least the next ten years accoting the Times For decades, the tech industry has relied on the ability of semiconductor companies to ring more power out of computer chips, making the smartphones that fit in a hand today more capable than the computers that filled entire rooms forty years ago Some experts worry that era of increased miniaturization is ending. IBM is saying not so fast. The big tech company on Thursday released details of its next advance in chip manufacturing technology, which it says could keep that innovation going for another ten years Using a novel approach to making smaller transistors that act as tiny switches in microprocessors and other chips IBM said the new production process can squeeze nearly twice as many transistors on a fingernail sized chip as the last technology it introduced in twenty twenty one. That will offer fifty percent greater computing performance and seventy percent better energy efficiency, the company said Both attributes are in hot demand, particularly in the race to build data centers for artificial intelligence Power is a particularly severe constraint, with energy hungry AI chips in some cases causing construction delays for builders that can't secure affordable electricity Everyone demands more performance, but no one wants to pay for the power. Hang Ming Boo, and IBM vice president who leads ChIip research and development said in a briefing with reporters IBM, though a pioneer in semiconductors, doesn't make or sell chips anymore, but engineers at its laboratory in Albany, New York still develop new technology for turning silicon wafers into chips, which it typically licenses to manufacturers Mister Booz said the technology should be ready in the next five years, but he declined to disclose potential users Past licensees have included Samsung and Rapidus, a Japanese company. Industry analysts briefed on the IBM announcement were impressed while noting that the approach would face competition. This is a big deal, said Dan Hutchisson, an analyst at Tch Insights. It basically puts another ten or fifteen years on the roadmap The chip roadmap is a shorthand for Moore's law, an often cited tenant about progress in chIips attributed to the Intel co founder Gordon Moore. It projects that compompanies will pack twice as many transistors on a chip every year or two Boosting performance while lowering the cost per transistor. Chip manufacturing has become so expensive that the cost benefits of making transistors smaller have vanished leading industry leaders like Jensen Wuang, chief executive of the Chip Giant NvIidia to declare Moore's laaw dead. But computing speed and data storage capacity have continued to improve thanks to tinier transistors Miniaturization gains are frequently described in nanometers or billionionss of a meter though that nomenclature is now less a precise measurement than a marketing term to distinguish technology generations. Taiwan semiconductor manufacturing company, for example, is making ships rated at roughly two nanometers, and Intel has a comparable technology described as one point eight nanometers IBM described its new production process as zero point seven nanometers, the first to break the one nanometer threshold The underlying innovation, which IBM first described a year ago, is what the company calls a nanostack transistor is the latest example of building transistors from three dimensional structures akin to tiny skyscrapers rising from the surface of the chip rather than simply shrinking transistors in lateral directions TSMC and Intel recently adopted a new three D structure called a nanoheet transistor, which was also pioneered partly by IBM. IBM's latest approach takes two wafers with nanoheet style transistors and effectively glues one upside down on top of the other, creating a structure that vertically links two types of transistors in a compact space, IBM said, and quote When inspiration strikes, you're usually not sitting at your desk ready to take notes. And honestly, some ideas are easier to say out loud than to type into your phone That's where Plaod Noteepin S comes in. It's a small wearable AI powered device about the size of a AA battery that lets you capture ideas and conversations completely hands free So in those in between moments when pulling out your phone just feels like too much, you can just tap once and keep going Claud automatically turns what you record into searchable notes, summaries, and mind maps you can actually use later Pls also designed with privy in mind, with enterprise grade standards, including SC to, HIPA and GDPR compliance. Check it out at plod d. Ai slash TBrH. 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Remember, goats only trust goats because they're built different, and Messi only trusts Duracl Facebook is trying to put AI in everything, but by that, I kind of mean AIing their existing money making stuff first First, Facebook is bringing back Facebook Creator Studio as a standalone app with a built in AI chatbot to help creators grow their audiences through personalized guidance By giving creators access to this AI companion app, Meta is looking to keep creators active on Facebook as it competes for their attention against rivals like TikTok and YouTube The company also likely hopes that the app will eliminate the need for creators to turn to third party tools like chat GBT when brainstorming content, ideas and analyzing performance The new app, which is currently being tested with select creators will have Facebook's recently launched AI Creator assistant built into it The assistant provides creators with personalized recommendations based on their content style, performance, audience engagement, and goals Crreaters often have to sift through charts and dashboards to understand their performance, but with the AI assistant, they can get quick answers to questions like when should I post? And what are people saying in my comments Since the AI assistant is conversational, they can also ask follow up questions like how their audience has shifted over time Beyond the built in AI assistant, the Creator Studio app will include a set of several new features such as an AI powered comment tool that will help surface the most important comments and draft replies in the creator's own tone Creators can edit and approve the drafted replies before posting them, Facebook says When creators open the app each day, they will see a feed of Daily priorities reviewing their newest post performance, tracking progress toward goals, and flagging comments in need of a reply, and quote. And then on the other side of the equation, there's this. from the FT Meta is racing to replace human moderation with generative artificial intelligence as it undergoes a broader cost cutting drive to offset Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg's vast spending on AI Already, Meta has replaced about fifty percent of human review requests with LLMs this year Sveral of the people said The company is aiming to reduce that figure even further. by the end of the year, the people added, potentially by more than ninety percent for certain types of content Meta has long relied on a mixture of automated systems and human reviewers, including third party contractors to assess whether a post or an advert breaches its rules. Appeals by users have typically been handled by human reviewers Meta said the shift toward AI moderation was to use a rapidly evolving technology more effectively rather than for cost savings Since March, it said, its initial tests have shown that on average, LLMs make thirteen percent fewer mistakes than humans when enforcing against violating content while finding ten percent more actual violations. The point of this work is to improve our enforcement efforts and we're deploying these more advanced AI systems once we're sure they're consistently performing better than our current methods of content enforcement, it added Meta has been using Google's Gemini lararge language model for most of its moderation and customer support, but staff have recently been told to switch to Meta's new foundational model, Muse Spark, the people said Regular AI moderation, which typically relies on traditional machine learning classifiers to flag rule breaking material can struggle with nuances such as satire or evolving language Meta has argued that rapidly advancing LLMs train on large amounts of text and data have the potential to improve efficiency, accuracy, and the speed at which violations are responded to while also increasing the coverage of more languages, end quote And finally today, even as AI is all over the news, if you step back The real big story in tech this year Other than AI has been the explosion of the prediction markets Coting the FT again Kasi is in talks to raise funds at a valuation of about forty billion dollars as the rapidly growing predictions market steps up efforts to offer new products and challenge the biggest players in the derivatives and gambling industries. The U.S. based company could close a fresh funding round as soon as the third quarter of this year, according to people familiar with the matter, Kaussi's financing discussions, which come after it raised one billion dollars at a twenty two billion dollars valuation just last month highlight how the group and rivals like Polymarket are swiftly growing their customer bases and threatening the dominance of major companies like derivatives exchange operator, CME Group The group's last funding round included well known Wall Street firms, including Philippe Lafantces, investment firm, Co two as well as Sequia Capital, Andreon Horowitz and Morgan Stanley The twenty two billion dollars valuation compares with eleven billion dollars in December and five billion dollars earlier last year. Kasy attracted more than seventeen billion dollars in trading volume last month up from less than five billion a year ago Kaussy's rapid rise has been helped by US. regulators' light touch approach to prediction market companies and President Trump's de facto blessing. The president last month branded several prominent critics of the platforms as, quote, scum in a post on social media. His eldeston Donald Trump Jr. joined Kaschciy as a strategic advisor in early twenty twenty five CME last week sued the Commodities Futures Trading Commission, the US derivatives regulator for approving Caelci's so called perpetual futures contracts that allow for wagers on cryptocurrency prices. The product competes with CME's futures contracts, which are widely traded on Wall Street Sports bets dominate the platform, accounting for about sixty five percent of Kelshci's volume, multi leg combo wagers, similar to parlays or accumulators have proved wildly popular since they were rolled out on the platform last September, end quote Nothing more for you today. T talk tomorrow. This episode is brought to you by Google Chrome. You think you know a browser, but Gemini and Chrome, that's new. It can help you with practically anything on the web, like restoring a vintage motorcycle from a fifty page restoration block or finally break down that long article you've had open for weeks. Gemini and Chrome is here for it. Ready to make anything online makes sense? There's no place like Chrome. Check responssees setup required compatibility and availability varies eighteen plus