Lifeboat Foundation

This is still the beginning of what AI can possibly do.

IBM’s Watson supercomputer is working wonders in an area where OpenAI’s ChatGPT does not have much to offer, the stock market. An exchange-traded fund (ETF) is using the power of artificial intelligence (AI) to balance its portfolio and has done pretty well for itself this year, ETF.

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According to the Financial Times, investments in generative AI in 2022 exceeded $2 billion. OpenAI’s valuation for a potential sale of some shares was set at an impressive $29 billion by the Wall Street Journal. Clearly, this indicates the enormity of interest from investors and corporations in generative AI technology. As the world continues to embrace technology and automation, businesses are beginning to explore the infinite possibilities of Generative AI. This type of Artificial Intelligence is on the cusp of creating autonomous, self-sustaining digital-only enterprises that can interact with humans without the active need for human interaction.

Generative AI is quickly becoming more widely adopted as enterprises are beginning to utilize it for a variety of tasks, including marketing, customer service, sales, learning and client relationships. This type of AI can create marketing content, generate pitch documents and product ideas and craft sophisticated advertising campaigns – all custom driven to help improve conversion rates and drive more revenue.

Generative AI companies are beginning to see massive success in venture capital, with many raising large sums of money and achieving high valuations. As per TechCrunch, Jasper, a copywriter assistant, recently raised $125 million at a $1.5 billion valuation, while Hugging Face raised $100 million at a $2 billion valuation, and Stability AI raised $101 million at a $1 billion valuation. In addition, Inflection AI raised $225 million at a post-money valuation of $1 billion according to TechCrunch. These successes can be compared to OpenAI, who in 2019, received more than $1 billion from Microsoft in funding with a $25 billion valuation.

Simulations of the behavior of individual financial traders show that imperfect market knowledge increases risk but not overall losses.

Cyber attackers around the world are looking at alternate file attachment types to trap users with phishing and malware attacks, according to a report by Bleeping Computer. The alternate attachment types come in the form of online, open-source file attachments, and the latest type that has now been spotted includes Microsoft OneNote files. According to the report, hackers are exploiting OneNote attachments in emails to trick users into downloading malware.

The report stated that hackers switched to OneNote, Microsoft’s online note-taking alternative to Word, after the company disabled ‘macros’ by default in email attachments. The latter, which refer to code snippets that execute a command upon a user opening the email attachment, were long since used by attackers to get users to download malware attachments.

By using macros, hackers would store malware within Microsoft Word or Excel documents. Once a user opened the attachment, the malware would get triggered automatically. These malware, in turn, could be used for a wide range of attacks — including remote code execution, botnets, financial or identity theft, or even spyware.

Tech giants from Google to Amazon and Alibaba —not to mention nation-states vying for technological supremacy—are racing to dominate this space. The global quantum-computing industry is projected to grow from $412 million in 2020 to $8.6 billion in 2027, according to an International Data Corp. analysis.

Whereas traditional computers rely on binary “bits”—switches either on or off, denoted as 1s and 0s—to process information, the “qubits” that underpin quantum computing are tiny subatomic particles that can exist in some percentage of both states simultaneously, rather like a coin spinning in midair. This leap from dual to multivariate processing exponentially boosts computing power. Complex problems that currently take the most powerful supercomputer several years could potentially be solved in seconds. Future quantum computers could open hitherto unfathomable frontiers in mathematics and science, helping to solve existential challenges like climate change and food security. A flurry of recent breakthroughs and government investment means we now sit on the cusp of a quantum revolution. “I believe we will do more in the next five years in quantum innovation than we did in the last 30,” says Gambetta.

But any disrupter comes with risks, and quantum has become a national-security migraine. Its problem-solving capacity will soon render all existing cryptography obsolete, jeopardizing communications, financial transactions, and even military defenses. “People describe quantum as a new space race,” says Dan O’Shea, operations manager for Inside Quantum Technology, an industry publication. In October, U.S. President Joe Biden toured IBM’s quantum data center in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., calling quantum “vital to our economy and equally important to our national security.” In this new era of great-power competition, China and the U.S. are particularly hell-bent on conquering the technology lest they lose vital ground. “This technology is going to be the next industrial revolution,” says Tony Uttley, president and COO for Quantinuum, a Colorado-based firm that offers commercial quantum applications. “It’s like the beginning of the internet, or the beginning of classical computing.”

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If the proposed legislation is successful, Arizona will become the first state in the United States to officially recognize Bitcoin as a legal currency. This would have significant implications for the use and acceptance of bitcoin within the state. Not only would individuals and businesses be able to use bitcoin to pay debts, taxes, and other financial obligations, but state agencies would also be able to accept it as payment.

Whether we realize it or not, cryptography is the fundamental building block on which our digital lives are based. Without sufficient cryptography and the inherent trust that it engenders, every aspect of the digital human condition we know and rely on today would never have come to fruition much less continue to evolve at its current staggering pace. The internet, digital signatures, critical infrastructure, financial systems and even the remote work that helped the world limp along during the recent global pandemic all rely on one critical assumption – that the current encryption employed today is unbreakable by even the most powerful computers in existence. But what if that assumption was not only challenged but realistically compromised?

This is exactly what happened when Peter Shor proposed his algorithm in 1995, dubbed Shor’s Algorithm. The key to unlocking the encryption on which today’s digital security relies is in finding the prime factors of large integers. While factoring is relatively simple with small integers that have only a few digits, factoring integers that have thousands of digits or more is another matter altogether. Shor proposed a polynomial-time quantum algorithm to solve this factoring problem. I’ll leave it to the more qualified mathematicians to explain the theory behind this algorithm but suffice it to say that when coupled with a quantum computer, Shor’s Algorithm drastically reduces the time it would take to factor these larger integers by multiple orders of magnitude.

Prior to Shor’s Algorithm, for example, the most powerful computer today would take millions of years to find the prime factors of a 2048-bit composite integer. Without Shor’s algorithm, even quantum computers would take such an inordinate amount of time to accomplish the task as to render it unusable by bad actors. With Shor’s Algorithm, this same factoring can potentially be accomplished in a matter of hours.

In the wake of a seminal wave of new artificial intelligence startups such as OpenAI, a new U.K. company claims it can track and rank banks on their ability to develop and deploy AI platforms. Evident, a benchmarking and intelligence company, says its inaugural Index can rank the 23 largest banks in North America and Europe on their competence in AI.

Evident, a benchmarking and intelligence company, says its inaugural Index can rank the 23 largest banks in North America and Europe on their competence in AI.

“As the real-world application of AI accelerates at astonishing speed, we believe that this transformation is too important — for managers, for investors, for society at large — to be happening in a darkened room. Our Index measures the race to banking AI maturity in a way that brings transparency to the top of the agenda,” said Alexandra Mousavizadeh, Evident co-founder and CEO in a statement.