It didn’t just give them a cold shoulder, but recommended some trusted news sources like Reuters and the Associated Press. ChatGPT gave this type of “I’m just an AI, go read the actual news” response over 2 million times on Election Day and the day after, OpenAI explained in an update to a blog post on its elections approach.

In the month leading up to election, ChatGPT sent around a million people to CanIVote.org when they asked questions specific to voting. And interestingly, it also rejected some 250,000 requests to generate images of the candidates over the same period.

For comparison, Perplexity, the AI search engine, made a major push to promote its own election information hub, resulting in some 4 million page views, the company claimed (per Bloomberg).

It’s difficult to say whether these numbers are low or high. Certainly they are nowhere near leaders in the news: CNN’s digital properties saw around 67 million unique visitors on Election Day and a similar amount the day after.

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That's crazy. How might ChatGPT's approach to handling election-related content impact future elections?

How should these platform handle it?

Upstart's revenue jumped 20% in the third quarter to $162 million, easily beating analyst estimates. CEO David Girouard said on the company's earnings call that, "we're in growth mode."

Toast is still well off its pandemic highs of 2021, but the stock has now more than doubled this year. The company's adjusted earnings forecast of $90 million to $100 million for the current quarter sailed past estimates.

The two stocks were part of a huge rally on Wall Street this week that followed Donald Trump's election victory on Tuesday night. All three major indexes closed at records, with the tech-heavy Nasdaq finishing the week up 5.7%, its second-best week of the year.

Within fintech, companies tied to crypto were some of the top performers, after candidates funded by the crypto industry won races up and down the ballot.

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Do you have any thought on how might Upstart’s AI lending model impact the future of fintech in the lending space?
Will any defi platform look at similar solutions?

"Tesla's X (Twitter) account has re-posted or endorsed postings that exhibit disengaged driver behavior," Gregory Magno, the head of the NHTSA, wrote to Tesla's board in an email in May that was made public on Friday. "Tesla's postings conflict with its stated messaging that the driver is to maintain continued control over the dynamic driving task."

Magno warned that viewers of Tesla's online communications, including posts on X, may expect a car with the company's Full Self-Driving Supervised, or FSD, system to have the capabilities of a robotaxi even though they require human supervision, meaning a driver ready to steer or brake at any time.

Tesla has until Dec. 18 to respond to NHTSA's letter, which also included requests for extensive information about the company's cars and FSD-related technology. A failure to respond could result in a maximum of $135.8 million in penalties. The company can also ask for an extension.

The NHTSA is investigating possible safety defects in Tesla's FSD option, a partially automated driving system. The latest probe followed a series of Tesla collisions that involved the use of FSD within 30 seconds of impact. In one instance, a Tesla driver using FSD fatally struck a pedestrian.

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What actions could NHTSA take if Tesla continues to make these claims on social media?
Dont know what type of mandate they have

In other words, even the cream of the crop of recently announced large language models (LLMs) is far more likely to provide an outright incorrect answer than a right one — a concerning indictment, especially as the tech is starting to pervade many aspects of our everyday lives.

Competing models, like Anthropic's, scored even lower on OpenAI's SimpleQA benchmark, with its recently released Claude-3.5-sonnet model getting only 28.9 percent of questions right. However, the model was far more inclined to reveal its own uncertainty and decline to answer — which, given the damning results, is probably for the best.

Worse yet, OpenAI found that its own AI models tend to vastly overestimate their own abilities, a characteristic that can lead to them being highly confident in the falsehoods they concoct.

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According to an archived version of the site, it previously hosted video chats in rooms with names like "Sexy," "Fantasy," "Tease," and "Foot Fetish."

"Unlike other free chat sites, all you have to do is click the Enter button and start chatting immediately," a read a notice on the now-defunct service, with "no registration required and no need to download or install any software."

Instead of allowing people to show each other their private parts, the domain now sends visitors straight to ChatGPT — an unsurprising development, given its new owner.

From OpenAI's point of view, the acquisition does make a certain amount of sense; the company has an abysmal track record when it comes to catchy or memorable branding, so Chat.com is — in theory, at least — a savvy buy.

It's unclear exactly what OpenAI paid for the domain, but it sounds like a lot. In a LinkedIn post, its previous owner Dharmesh Shah, who bought the domain for $15.5 million in 2023, revealed only that he got a lot more than what he had originally purchased it for.

As Shah put it in a tweet responding to Altman's unceremonious announcement, the new owner of the domain is "exactly who you'd think."

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Haha didnt know that. Can this taint OpenAI somehow or is it to unknown for the general public to react?

The message comes in response to concerns that during Trump's second presidency, abortion bans that followed the overturn of Roe v. Wade in 2022 will worsen and states will attempt to increase menstrual surveillance in order to further restrict access to terminations.

Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin has blocked a bill in the state that would have banned law enforcement from enforcing search warrants for menstrual data stored in tracking apps on mobile phones or other electronic devices, according to the Houston Chronicle. And other states have passed or attempted to pass bills that would require medical care facilities and providers to report why women received abortions, as well as other personal information.

Newsweek has reached out to Clue, the Trump campaign and Youngkin for comment via email.

In a statement on TikTok, female and male staff members at Clue, based in Berlin, stand together with arms crossed, along with a text on screen that reads: "We have never and will never disclose any member's private health data to any authority. If we are ever subpoenaed, we will not comply."

Clue's video has since gone viral on TikTok and gained 160,000 likes, more than 6,000 bookmarks, and nearly 1,500 comments.

In a statement online yesterday from Clue, CEO Rhiannon White said, "Clue was created to give you the ability to build your own cycle health record and to be able to use it to gain invaluable insights to help give you agency when it comes to your menstrual and reproductive health.

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The leading cryptocurrency hit a record high of $77,239 at approximately 3:00 PM on Friday. According to crypto tracking website CoinGecko, the top cryptocurrency has surged 113,011% since 2013. This means a $1000 investment in Bitcoin back then would now be worth over $1 million.

Bitcoin’s price is expected to rise further, showing heightened optimism and enthusiasm among investors due to recent political developments. The momentum shows no signs of slowing — among seasoned traders and newcomers alike. Some even anticipate when the top cryptocurrency will cross the $100,000 level.

Investors poured over $1B into Bitcoin ETFs in one day
Following Trump’s reelection, investors are pouring funds into the spot Bitcoin ETFs (exchange-traded funds). On November 7th alone, U.S. Bitcoin ETFs recorded unprecedented inflows of $1.3 billion. BlackRock (BLK
+0.27%
), the world’s largest asset manager, led with over $1 billion directed into its Bitcoin ETF, while Fidelity’s FBTC saw an inflow of $190 million, according to data from Farside.

What specific policies or factors associated with Trump’s presidency might be driving the crypto community’s support for Bitcoin, do you think?
Is it mostly hype or is there something else also?

Bitcoin’s rise proves how political events can give investors confidence. Trump’s policies may attract support no doubt but Bitcoin is still volatile, how will they encourage people in spite of that

And Here I am awaiting the $100K bull run in 2025. I believe it Bitcoin will surpass 100K it's 2025 because politics around it is good although crypto doesn't need a president anyways. It's good for adoption I think

In the business world, AI advocates tell companies and workers that they will fall behind if they fail to integrate generative AI into their operations. In the sciences, AI advocates promise that AI will aid in curing hitherto intractable diseases.

In higher education, AI promoters admonish teachers that students must learn how to use AI or risk becoming uncompetitive when the time comes to find a job.

And, in national security, AI’s champions say that either the nation invests heavily in AI weaponry, or it will be at a disadvantage vis-à-vis the Chinese and the Russians, who are already doing so.

One great story every day
The argument across these different domains is essentially the same: The time for AI skepticism has come and gone. The technology will shape the future, whether you like it or not. You have the choice to learn how to use it or be left out of that future. Anyone trying to stand in the technology’s way is as hopeless as the manual weavers who resisted the mechanical looms in the early 19th century.

In the past few years, my colleagues and I at UMass Boston’s Applied Ethics Center have been studying the ethical questions raised by the widespread adoption of AI, and I believe the inevitability argument is misleading.

History and hindsight
In fact, this claim is the most recent version of a deterministic view of technological development. It’s the belief that innovations are unstoppable once people start working on them. In other words, some genies don’t go back in their bottles. The best you can do is harness them to your good purposes.

This deterministic approach to tech has a long history. It’s been applied to the influence of the printing press, as well as to the rise of automobiles and the infrastructure they require, among other developments.

vintage cars mix with traffic in a small city street
The dominance of automobiles and the infrastructure that supports them over many decades only seems inevitable in hindsight. Bbeachy2001/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY
But I believe that when it comes to AI, the technological determinism argument is both exaggerated and oversimplified.

AI in the field(s)
Consider the contention that businesses can’t afford to stay out of the AI game. In fact, the case has yet to be made that AI is delivering significant productivity gains to the firms that use it. A report in The Economist in July 2024 suggests that so far, the technology has had almost no economic impact.

AI’s role in higher education is also still very much an open question. Though universities have, in the past two years, invested heavily in AI-related initiatives, evidence suggests they may have jumped the gun.

The technology can serve as an interesting pedagogical tool. For example, creating a Plato chatbot that lets students have a text conversation with a bot posing as Plato is a cool gimmick.

But AI is already starting to displace some of the best tools teachers have for assessment and for developing critical thinking, such as writing assignments. The college essay is going the way of the dinosaurs as more teachers give up on the ability to tell whether their students are writing their papers themselves. What’s the cost-benefit argument for giving up on writing, an important and useful traditional skill?

In the sciences and in medicine, the use of AI seems promising. Its role in understanding the structure of proteins, for example, will likely be significant for curing diseases. The technology is also transforming medical imaging and has been helpful in accelerating the drug discovery process.

But the excitement can become exaggerated. AI-based predictions about which cases of COVID-19 would become severe have roundly failed, and doctors rely excessively on the technology’s diagnostic ability, often against their own better clinical judgment. And so, even in this area, where the potential is great, AI’s ultimate impact is unclear.

In retrospect, using AI to help diagnose COVID-19 patients was problematic.
In national security, the argument for investing in AI development is compelling. Since the stakes can be high, the argument that if the Chinese and the Russians are developing AI-driven autonomous weapons, the United States can’t afford to fall behind, has real purchase.

But a complete surrender to this form of reasoning, though tempting, is likely to lead the U.S. to overlook the disproportionate impact of these systems on nations that are too poor to participate in the AI aRMs race. The major powers could deploy the technology in conflicts in these nations. And, just as significantly, this argument de-emphasizes the possibility of collaborating with adversaries on limiting military AI systems, favoring arms race over arms control.

One step at a time
Surveying the potential significance and risks of AI in these different domains merits some skepticism about the technology. I believe that AI should be adopted piecemeal and with a nuanced approach rather than subject to sweeping claims of inevitability. In developing this careful take, there are two things to keep in mind:

First, companies and entrepreneurs working on artificial intelligence have an obvious interest in the technology being perceived as inevitable and necessary, since they make a living from its adoption. It’s important to pay attention to who is making claims of inevitability, and why.

Second, it’s worth taking a lesson from recent history. Over the past 15 years, smartphones and the social media apps that run on them came to be seen as a fact of life – a technology as transformative as it is inevitable.

Then data started emerging about the mental health harms they cause teens, especially young girls. school districts across the United States started to ban phones to protect the attention spans and mental health of their students. And some people have reverted to using flip phones as a quality of life change to avoid smartphones.

After a long experiment with the mental health of kids, facilitated by claims of technological determinism, Americans changed course. What seemed fixed turned out to be alterable. There is still time to avoid repeating the same mistake with artificial intelligence, which potentially could have larger consequences for society.

Article submitted under creative common license.

i believe it's inevitable. Rushing into widespread use without fully understanding the risks could lead to unforeseen problems for all of us. Just like what happened with smartphones.

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Los Angeles is going to have to do something since it is seeing the death of Hollywood.

Many cities are going to start throwing their hats into the ring.

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AI safety team.

LOL that is like an honesty team under a politician.

Statistics from Similarweb indicate that ChatGPT saw a 17.2% month-over-month (MoM) growth and a 115.9% year-over-year (YoY) traffic growth. Some highlights that spurned the ChatGPT growth during 2024 include its parent company, OpenAI, updating its web address from a subdomain, chat.openai.com, to a main domain, chatgpt.com. The tool especially saw a surge of traffic in May 2024, when it hit a 2.2-billion-visit milestone, and has been growing ever since, according to Similarweb researcher David F. Carr.

While ChatGPT has had an infamous presence in the technology industry since November 2022, OpenAI, continues to flesh out its product with new versions, features, and supplementary applications, or GPTs, to keep users interested. Recently, the company introduced ChatGPT Search, an in-house search engine feature that allows users to receive real-time answers to queries, such as sports scores, breaking news, and stock quotes.

Many note how the generative AI tool has come full circle to offer services very similar to the industry its intended to displace, Google Search. Overall, the web-based versions of ChatGPT would still rely on browsers to exist. In comparison, Google’s Chrome browser has a solid market share of 35.4 billion users in 2024. It has seen minimal growth YoY but has grown 45.35% in the last 5 years, according to Statscounter.

Other recent news indicates that OpenAI has purchased the domain name Chat.com; however, there is no word on what the company plans to do with this product.

Meanwhile, other AI tools continue to see traffic and growth, despite not being at the same level as ChatGPT. Despite recent plagiarism claims, the Perplexity chatbot has seen 90.8 million visits in October, a 25.5% MoM growth and 199.2% YoY growth. Google’s Gemini Chatbot saw 291.6 million visits in October, a 6.2% MoM growth and 19% YoY growth after the company introduced a new ChromeOS update that brought new AI features to its Chromebooks.

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damn people are really Using AI😳 look how quickly it's catching up to tools like Google Chrome. The future is pure Gold with AI

I am not surprised about this at all, the moment I heard Search GPT I knew Google was toast. If Google doesn't respond fast with something way more innovative, OpenAI will keep taking more of its revenue

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Everyone is doing it. They are going have to out of necessity.

That was a big deal. He says building it for manufacturing scale is the hardest part. I read that to mean building for utility capabilities is easier.

Doing well. Just filling up the database.

I attended a Johns Hopkins University panel where researchers specialized in this area predicted that, in large part thanks to LLMs, autonomy is poised to become “a ubiquitous part of surgery” in the near or at least mid-term future. Similar to how vehicle autonomy began with automating some capabilities, they said autonomous robots will initially take on select tasks that support human surgeons. They also had no doubt we’ll see surgeries routinely performed fully autonomously by robots in our lifetime.

LLMs change the game
After hitting a wall with its previous approach of trying to pre-program robots to make specific movements, the robotics field has found a way forward with the same approach that’s made LLMs so successful. Axel Krieger, a mechanical engineering researcher focused on the development of surgical systems, spoke on the panel about new research he and his associates would be sharing this week about how the Transformer—the same one that powers tools like ChatGPT, only with robot action as the output—can be used to overcome limitations surrounding how a surgical robotic system called Da Vinci learns tasks via imitation learning. The team demonstrated its findings through the successful execution of three fundamental surgical tasks: tissue manipulation, needle handling, and knot-tying.

Overall, robotic surgery research has followed the trends of AI, moving from a “model-based approach” to a “learning-based approach” that enables surgical robots to learn via demonstrations rather than be designed with specific domain expertise. These models also improve over time with more data and can scale to accomplish different kinds of tasks.

The downside of the learning approach, however, is that it’s more opaque and unpredictable than the model approach. Russell Taylor, another researcher on the panel, argued that the introduction of these capabilities into actual clinical use will have to be gradual, with clear assurances that the robot will not harm the patient. He also argued that robots should only be used if they have a clear advantage, either enabling surgeons to perform tasks better and more safely, or making it possible to do something that wasn’t possible before. If these robots are further proven to be more consistent and precise, it could be a game-changer for safety and better surgery outcomes: human surgeons are human after all, which means they get fatigued and make mistakes.

The future of surgery
Already, surgeries like lasik eye surgery are performed with a high degree of autonomy, but research is starting to show promise for even more complicated surgeries. In another study, Krieger and team found that a Smart Tissue Autonomous Robot (STAR), which is designed for complex soft tissue surgeries, can actually outperform expert surgeons on some key metrics.

“We have fewer of these hesitancy events when we misplace a needle and have to pull it back out, so significantly better in these errors. And also in the spacing (of the sutures)—much more consistent,” he said.

The goal behind AI-powered robotic surgery is two-fold: make surgery less invasive for patients and meet the growing demand. According to data shared during the panel, there is already a shortage of surgeons and the caseload is expected to double as the aging population grows. Robots could augment critical portions of surgery with better precision and increasing autonomy. Each year, 310 million major surgeries are performed. In 2023, about four million were performed with robotic assistance, and this rate is expected to grow by 18% annually.

This doesn’t mean surgeons will be out of work anytime soon, but their role will likely change.

“The more likely scenario is that the surgeon will remain in overall strategic control while delegating specific tasks to the robot while the surgeon supervises,” said Taylor. “As AI algorithms become more powerful, the delegated tasks will become more sophisticated.”

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In a new study, the researchers discovered that tweaking the texture of any surface and adding a thin layer of graphene oxide prevents 100% frost from forming on surfaces for one week or potentially even longer. This is 1,000 times longer than current, state-of-the-art anti-frosting surfaces.

As an added bonus, the new scalable surface design also is resistant to cracks, scratches, and contamination.

By incorporating the textured surface into infrastructure, the researchers imagine companies and government agencies could save billions of dollars per year in averted maintenance costs and energy inefficiencies.

The research was recently published in the journal Science Advances.

Unwanted frost accumulation is a major concern across industrial, residential, and government sectors,” said Northwestern’s Kyoo-Chul Kenneth Park, who led the study. “For example, the 2021 power crisis in Texas cost $195 billion in damages, resulting directly from frost, ice, and extreme cold conditions for more than 160 hours. Thus, it is critical to develop anti-frosting techniques, which are robust for long periods of time in extreme environmental conditions. It is also necessary to develop anti-frosting methods which are easy to fabricate and implement. We designed our hybrid anti-frosting technique with all of these needs in mind. It can prevent frosting for potentially weeks at a time and is scalable, durable, and easily fabricated through 3D printing.”

Park is an assistant professor of mechanical engineering at Northwestern’s McCormick School of Engineering and a faculty affiliate of the Paula M. Trienens Institute for Sustainability and Energy and the International Institute for Nanotechnology.

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This could save a lot of money and energy during cold climates. It feels like soon science will have a solution for all problems, the only thing is if I'll live long enough to see all that

That would change everything, but I really don’t see it happening anytime soon, like in the first 100 years…

🧵 2/ AI and outsourcing are seen as solutions to bridge the talent gap, though AI is not expected to fully replace human expertise. Cyber professionals are upskilling in AI to stay relevant, with 66% viewing AI as a career opportunity.

Link --> https://computersweden.se/article/3600652/saknas-48-miljoner-cybersakerhetsproffs.html

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It will take them a little while to improve. Perplexity was at the game a bit longer. This is something that we can build into Leo.

Of course, as always, we just need the data.

The lion's share of Nvidia's revenue is derived from companies like Microsoft, Meta Platforms, and Amazon. The tech giants use its hardware to build gargantuan server farms that run their consumer-facing AI products like Gemini and Meta AI. These companies have poured billions of dollars into Nvidia's coffers and have no plans to stop in the near future. While they are great customers to have, there is always risk in relying on a relatively small customer base. Any one of them could decide to switch to another provider, like AMD, or develop their own chips in-house, as many are reported to be doing. Nvidia would be smart to greatly expand its reach beyond them.

That seems to be the aim of Nvidia's partnership with Lenovo. The two companies are teaming up to create a new platform called "Lenovo Hybrid AI Advantage with Nvidia," aimed at enterprise clients of all sizes, large and small. It is essentially a custom AI solution tailored to each individual business. If Huang's promise holds true, it will help businesses vastly improve their efficiency and, most importantly, their profitability.

Given that this platform will be comprised of Nvidia products at every level -- from its flagship Blackwell chips to its networking hardware to its custom software -- the platform could be a boon to Nvidia's bottom line if it takes off.

A key component here is what is known as "agentic AI." Up to this point, the generative AI we've seen is great at creating content, analyzing content, and relies heavily on direct human guidance. Agentic AI, on the other hand, can reason in more complex environments, and, critically, it can actually do things. Think of an AI marketing tool that could not only craft a whole marketing plan and the creative materials involved, but also deploy it across the company's media channels. It could continue to monitor the campaign, adjusting it in real time to be more effective.

The platform Nvidia and Lenovo are launching will focus on providing this sort of agentic AI. The possibilities for increased efficiency and cost-cutting are pretty profound, making it an extremely valuable product and a real potential moneymaker for Nvidia.

The product's success will be directly tied to agentic AI being able to deliver the value it promises to. If it does, this could be a massive new chapter in the AI story.

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Nvidia's new partnership with Lenovo could change how businesses use AI. If it works, this could be huge for both companies. Now most companies are trying to adopt AI in some way even Meta with WhatsApp and it's other platforms

🧵 2/ CIOs are also ramping up spending on security, which is expected to reach $47 billion in 2024. 2025 is forecast to be the year with the highest IT spending growth since the post-pandemic boom of 2021. #ITspending #AI #Cloud #Security

Link --> https://computersweden.se/article/3600822/it-utgifterna-i-europa-okar-rejalt-nasta-ar.html

🧵 2/ To qualify for protection, the person must intend to identify a vulnerability and report it to the responsible party. The law also allows exceptions for data eavesdropping and modification if done legitimately.

🧵 3/ Malicious data espionage could lead to prison sentences ranging from three months to five years. #Cybersecurity #Legislation #DataProtection

Link --> https://computersweden.se/article/3600807/tysk-lag-ska-skydda-personer-som-upptacker-sakerhetsbrister.html

🧵 2/ Alternatively, adjusting the Windows registry to increase the process quota is possible, but Microsoft warns this may cause system instability. #Outlook #TechIssues #Microsoft

link --> https://computersweden.se/article/3600828/microsoft-bekraftar-outlook-kraschar-om-du-oppnar-for-manga-mejl.html

🧵 2/ However, this decision does not ban the popular app for the general public, though government employees are prohibited from installing TikTok on their devices. TikTok's Canadian office will close, leading to the loss of local jobs.

🧵 3/ ByteDance plans to appeal the decision. #TikTok #Canada #NationalSecurity

link --> https://computersweden.se/article/3600751/kanada-kastar-ut-tiktok-ur-landet.html

Well in my opinion, because of what Elon did to help, he will not put as much sanctions as he wanted to. But China will still dominate since they've got resources

I think EV growth will slow since he supports fossil fuels. Tesla may benefit from fewer rules, but the EV market might grow slower without government help and support.

Give it a year. If the US passes a law making Bitcoin part of the strategic reserve holdings, we will see massive inflows into the ETFs.

It’s a plot twist for the embattled, Chinese-owned social media company. During Trump’s last presidency, the president-elect had been the one to initiate the calls to ban TikTok, which only petered out because he didn’t win his first attempt at re-election in 2020. But during his 2024 campaign, Trump took a different approach. He wrote in all-caps on his platform Truth Social, “FOR ALL OF THOSE THAT WANT TO SAVE TIK TOK IN AMERICA, VOTE TRUMP!”

President Biden signed off on a bill in April that gives ByteDance, the Chinese parent company to TikTok, nine months to sell the platform. If ByteDance fails to complete a sale — which is a likely outcome — it will be banned on January 19, 2025, the day before Trump’s inauguration. However, ByteDance has the option of pursuing a 90-day extension, which would put the ball in Trump’s court.

Trump’s reasoning for his support of a TikTok ban in 2020 echoes the current bipartisan sentiment among legislators who pushed for this legislation. At the time, Trump raised concerns about the Chinese Communist Party potentially gaining access to Americans’ data (while there has not been public evidence of the CCP accessing American TikTok users’ data, there has been proof that ByteDance accessed TikTok user data). Now, the president-elect appears more concerned with how a TikTok ban would benefit Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta.

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In its third quarter of 2024, SkyWater Technology reported record revenues of $93.8 million, marking a 31% year-over-year increase, alongside improved gross margins and a notable shift to profitability.

Key highlights from the report include a significant 847% increase in tools revenue, contributing to the overall revenue surge. The company’s operational efficiencies and strategic execution on a major aerospace and defense program boosted gross margins to 21.6% on a GAAP basis. Additionally, the company reported a GAAP net income of $1.5 million, reversing a loss from the previous year, with an adjusted EBITDA of $11.0 million, up 33% year-over-year.

SkyWater continues to expand its capabilities through customer-funded capital expenditures and strategic partnerships, as demonstrated by a new supply agreement with NanoDx and involvement in the Microelectronics Commons projects under the CHIPS Act.

Looking forward, SkyWater Technology anticipates sequential growth in its Advanced Technology Services business in Q4 2024, with a positive outlook for 2025, including expected growth in wafer services and continued margin improvements.

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Around 35 employees were cut this week by the Livermore, California-based autonomous electric tractor startup that has raised a total of $220 million since it was founded in 2018. Some Monarch workers told TechCrunch they were let go without severance. It’s the second cut this year; Monarch previously laid off around 15% of its workforce in July.

CEO Praveen Penmetsa told TechCrunch in an interview the company decided to restructure after a slower-than-expected third quarter, and despite raising $133 million in July from the likes of Foxconn and agri-food tech impact firm Astanor. Penmetsa said he was uncertain if employees were let go without severance, but that the company has been trying to help out laid-off workers on a case-by-case basis.

“All of this happened pretty quickly,” Penmetsa said, referring to the recent crash of California’s vineyards, which made up a bulk of Monarch’s early customers. That development, plus an ongoing pullback in agri-tech investing, left Penmetsa and his team looking at other options.

“The industry has slowed down on acquisition of new equipment and new solutions, especially in the core farming sectors,” Penmetsa said. “But in the meantime, as a platform company, we also have some very exciting non-agriculture opportunities that started sprouting because of our success in ag.”

What Happened: According to a new note from Geoffrey Kendrick, Head of Research at Standard Chartered, this growth forecast is based on anticipated regulatory shifts following a projected Republican sweep in the recent election cycle, which could lead to mainstream adoption and real-world use cases for digital assets.

Don’t Miss:

“For me, the Trump-ublican sweep means Digital Assets are finally going to come of age,” Kendrick commented, expressing confidence that favorable regulatory policies will drive adoption across the asset class. He added, "I look for the entire asset class to 4X by the time of the US mid-terms in late 2026."

Standard Chartered highlight several factors contributing to this growth projection.

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“Although the founders and team still believe in the need/desire for quiet supersonic flight and supersonic drones for the US Department of Defense, without further customer support for either concept, the company cannot sustain the cash needs to make further advancements,” the update says.

Exosonic was founded in 2019 by Norris Tie, a propulsion engineer who cut his teeth at primes like Northrop Grumman and Lockheed Martin; at the latter company, he reportedly worked on the low-boom X-59 aircraft for NASA. Exosonic joined Y Combinator’s Winter 2020 cohort and went on to raise over $4.5 million from venture investors, including Soma Capital, Psion Capital, and Stellar Solutions. The startup also bagged several small grants from the U.S. Air Force under its Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) program.

The company was making progress: It hit a major milestone earlier this year when it flew its first aircraft, a subscale variant of its supersonic UAV called EX-3M Trident, in a test flight in California. It also had two other vehicles under development: a supersonic airliner called Horizon and a larger UAV called Revenant.

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AI technology is expected to create massive advances in the sector in the area of AI inference, the capability of AI systems to make a prediction or draw some conclusion without specific outcomes previously determined to be achievable. For instance, this inference lets self-driving cars detect stop signs, which infers the real-world use of AI inference in self-driving automobiles, even though the automobiles have not been through specific routes before.

As a result, financial analysts have set higher stock price targets for Broadcom to demonstrate higher investor confidence in the company, particularly due to its new AI business venture. Furthermore, Broadcom is developing a new AI chip in partnership with OpenAI to enhance the deployment efficiency of AI models after training, which has put Broadcom in the radical vanguard of AI.

However, there are concerns with this growth, such as data sovereignty and another concern about the readiness of the world for semiconductors, where Taiwan alone accounts for 60% of the world's semiconductors and 90% of the advanced ones. These issues express the geopolitical and logistical risks associated with the semiconductor supply chain, something inherently important for Broadcom's growing AI endeavors.

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The FBI’s public notice filed this week is a rare admission from the federal government about the threat from fraudulent emergency data requests, a legal process designed to help police and federal authorities obtain information from companies to respond to immediate threats affecting someone’s life or property. The abuse of emergency data requests is not new, and has been widely reported in recent years. Now, the FBI warns that it saw an “uptick” around August in criminal posts online advertising access to or conducting fraudulent emergency data requests, and that it was going public for awareness.

“Cyber-criminals are likely gaining access to compromised US and foreign government email addresses and using them to conduct fraudulent emergency data requests to US based companies, exposing the personal information of customers to further use for criminal purposes,” reads the FBI’s advisory.

Police and law enforcement in the U.S. generally need some kind of legal justification to seek and obtain access to private data that companies store on their servers. Typically for a person’s private content, like their files, emails, or messages, police need to provide enough evidence of a possible crime before a U.S. court will issue a search warrant allowing the police to request that information from a private company. Police can issue subpoenas — which don’t require going to a court — requesting companies to access limited amounts of information about a user, such as their basic account information, like their username, account logins, email addresses, and phone numbers, and sometimes their approximate location.

There are also emergency requests, a procedure in which law enforcement can urgently seek a person’s information from a company in the event of an immediate risk, where there is no time to seek a court order.

It’s these emergency requests that federal authorities say some cybercriminals are abusing.