❗Musk U-Turns on Crypto
AirTag review are in, a crazy interview an AI avatar, and the end of passwords?
So, what happened this week in the Tech & Startup world? 🌍 The government cracks down on crypto, a Facebook moderator tells us what the job is really like, and a new book on Bezos is out!
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The Grapevine Newsflash 🔥
11 tech & startup stories in 139 super-duper short seconds.
🚗 Tesla’s Bitcoin U-Turn? Having recently bought (and sold) £1bn of Bitcoin, Tesla was seen as super bullish on the cryptocurrency. However, Musk tweeted this week that the electric car giant would no longer be accepting Bitcoin as payment for its vehicles due to environmental concerns. Bitcoin fell 10% on the news. Read more here.
💱 Binance Bashed The world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange Binance is now being investigated by both the Internal Revenue Service and Department of Justice for enabling money laundering and tax offenses. A report by Chainalysis in 2019 found that $756m out of $2.8bn worth of criminal transactions using Bitcoin went through Binance. Will they look at other exchanges too?
💰 Saving for the Future Pensions aren’t usually sexy… but somehow one startup has made them so: Penfold. They create pensions without the jargon, while helping you figure out how much they need to stash away using this calculator. They just raised $4.3m in 8 hours from crowdfunding platform Crowdcube.
🔒 The End of Passwords? Some good info from Google on how they keep passwords safe and how they might ‘end’ passwords. Read more here.
🏠 Ex-Monzo Employees Invest in ex-Monzo employees! UK based Fronted is a new fintech that lends renters their rental deposits. It was started by some ex-Monzo folk and recently raised over £1m from Monzo’s old Co-CEO and CFO. Read more here.
🗺️ How Good is AirTag tracking? You may have seen that Apple recently released AirTag, a small dongle that can be placed inside a wallet or bag to track items! How good is the tracking? This YouTuber mailed himself an AirTag to see if he could track its journey. Watch the video here.
🌳 Green AI? Sifted has written a short article on the impact of AI on the environment, you can read it here.
🖥️ Day in the Life of an Internet Moderator A Facebook moderator has given evidence to a parliamentary committee for the first time. She described how they review posts containing graphic violence, exploitation, extremism, abuse, and suicide. Many moderators end up suffering mental health issues, particularly PTSD, and she told the committee that AI was far away from replacing humans in the process.
💡 What is Bezos? A new book has come out about Jeff Bezos and the last decade or so at Amazon called ‘Amazon Unbound’. It comes as Bezos is set to step down as CEO in the next few months. The book highlights his ‘relentless pursuit of ideas’ which have led to both great successes e.g. Alexa, and huge failures e.g. the Fire smartphone. When he leaves will anything change?
🤖 AI Overlord Ever wondered what it’s like to interview a computer? Well, check out this video of a 1-on-1 with the most advanced language model in the world GPT-3 and its avatar. It makes jokes and even says it is able to lie ‘when it is in my best interest to do so’. Spooky.
🧠 Biases & The Human Brain We all have cognitive biases, regardless of how hard we try to avoid them. It’s also really difficult to know all 200+ of the known biases. However, this cheat sheet is the best aid by reducing them into 4 categories. Check it out here.
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Over & Out,
Nick, Louis, & Patrick Star