Jean-Paul Thorbjornsen is a leader of THORChain, a blockchain that is not supposed to have any leaders--and is reeling from a series of expensive controversies. We can do whatever we want," Jean-Paul Thorbjornsen tells me from the pilot's seat of his Aston Martin helicopter. As we fly over suburbs outside Melbourne, Australia, it's becoming clear that doing whatever he wants is Thorbjornsen's MO. Upper-middle-class homes give way to vineyards, and Thorbjornsen points out our landing spot outside a winery. "They're going to ask for a shot now," he says, used to the attention drawn by his luxury helicopter, emblazoned with the tail letters "BTC" for bitcoin (the price tag of $5 million in Australian dollars--$3.5 million in US dollars today--was perhaps reasonable for someone who claims a previous crypto project made more than AU$400 million, although he also says those funds were tied up in the company). Thorbjornsen is a founder of THORChain, a blockchain through which users can swap ...

Valve's Steam Machine: Everything we know The Crypto.com guy bought AI.com (and a Super Bowl ad) Kris Marszalek's new website will let users create their own AI agents. In this case it's AI.com, valued at one point at $100 million, which will serve as the online home for his new company of the same name. The website launch is being paired with a Super Bowl ad that will air this Sunday. AI.com's main offering is an AI agent that operates on the user's behalf -- organizing work, sending messages, executing actions across apps, building projects, and more. It's a similar concept to what companies like OpenAI, Anthropic and Google are promising with their own agents and agentic features, and notably lacking in hard details.

Not long into his new documentary, Oobah Butler tells the cofounder of his newly minted company, Drops, that they should create a piece of luxury luggage that "looks like a bomb" and will sell for $200,000. Immediately, I'm thinking his quest to get £1 million in 90 days might have come to an early end. Butler is a British prankster documentarian who is known for his stunts, like managing to get Amazon to sell its drivers' urine as energy drinks or creating a fake restaurant called the Shed and gaming TripAdvisor to make it the top-rated London restaurant on the platform. His latest documentary, made for the UK's Channel 4, is called How I Made £1 Million in 90 Days Set in London and New York, it takes on the worlds of startups, venture capital, crypto, and what ultimately comes across as a lot of bullshitting, in the name of striking it rich quick. Butler opens the film by saying, as someone who didn't grow up with money and isn't particularly motivated by it, he's fascinated by the fact that people "idolize" wealthy entrepreneurs.

After serving a federal prison sentence for violating anti-money-laundering laws and US sanctions, former crypto exchange CEO Changpeng Zhao has been pardoned by US president Donald Trump. US president Donald Trump has pardoned Changpeng Zhao, founder of the world's largest crypto exchange, Binance. Zhao, widely known as CZ, pled guilty in November 2023 to violating anti-money-laundering laws and US sanctions. The plea formed part of a sweeping deal with the US Department of Justice, under which Binance was required to pay a record-breaking $4.3 billion penalty. Zhao ultimately spent four months in federal prison.

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated exceptional capabilities when trained within executable runtime environments, notably excelling at software engineering tasks through verified feedback loops. Yet, scalable and generalizable execution-grounded environments remain scarce, limiting progress in training more capable ML agents. We introduce CTF-Dojo, the first large-scale executable runtime tailored for training LLMs with verifiable feedback, featuring 658 fully functional Capture-The-Flag (CTF)-style challenges containerized in Docker with guaranteed reproducibility. To enable rapid scaling without manual intervention, we develop CTF-Forge, an automated pipeline that transforms publicly available artifacts into ready-to-use execution environments in minutes, eliminating weeks of expert configuration traditionally required. We trained LLM-based agents on just 486 high-quality, execution-verified trajectories from CTF-Dojo, achieving up to 11.6% absolute gains over strong baselines across three competitive benchmarks: InterCode-CTF, NYU CTF Bench, and Cybench. Our best-performing 32B model reaches 31.9% Pass@1, establishing a new open-weight state-of-the-art that rivals frontier models like DeepSeek-V3-0324 and Gemini-2.5-Flash. By framing CTF-style tasks as a benchmark for executable-agent learning, CTF-Dojo demonstrates that execution-grounded training signals are not only effective but pivotal in advancing high-performance ML agents without dependence on costly proprietary systems.

In the paper, we consider multilevel multitask analysis of cryptocurrency news using a fine-tuned Mistral 7B large language model with retrieval-augmented generation (RAG). On the first level of analytics, the fine-tuned model generates graph and text summaries with sentiment scores as well as JSON representations of summaries. Higher levels perform hierarchical stacking that consolidates sets of graph-based and text-based summaries as well as summaries of summaries into comprehensive reports. The combination of graph and text summaries provides complementary views of cryptocurrency news. The model is fine-tuned with 4-bit quantization using the PEFT/LoRA approach. The representation of cryptocurrency news as knowledge graph can essentially eliminate problems with large language model hallucinations. The obtained results demonstrate that the use of fine-tuned Mistral 7B LLM models for multilevel cryptocurrency news analysis can conduct informative qualitative and quantitative analytics, providing important insights.

Counter-terrorism authorities have, for years, characterized keeping up with terrorist organizations and their use of digital tools and social media apps as a game of Whac-a-Mole. Jihadist terrorist groups such as Islamic State and its predecessor al-Qaida, or even the neo-Nazi group the Base, have leveraged digital tools to recruit, covertly finance via crypto, download weapons for 3D printing and spread tradecraft to its followers, all while leaving law enforcement and intelligence agencies playing catch up. Over time, thwarting attacks and maintaining the technological advantage over these types of terror groups has evolved, as more and more open source resources become available. Now, with artificial intelligence – both on the horizon as a rapidly developing technology and in the here and now as free, accessible apps – agencies are scrambling. Sources familiar with the US government's counterterrorism efforts told the Guardian that multiple security agencies are very concerned about how AI is making hostile groups more efficient in their planning and operations.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent responds to economic uncertainty, breaking down President Donald Trumps fiscal and cryptocurrency goals on My View with Lara Trump. A new government relations firm led in part by a former Trump lawyer has launched in Washington, D.C., with the aim of advocating for clients in the crypto and artificial intelligence space that has gained momentum since Trump's election and inauguration. NexusOne Consulting, founded by attorney Jeff Ifrah of Ifrah Law, former Trump administration attorney Jim Trusty and former Trump Commerce Department official Ross Branson, opened its doors this week, marketing itself as a firm "focused on shaping federal policy and regulatory frameworks for clients in the emerging technologies sector, including AI, cryptocurrency and social media." Fox News Digital spoke to Ifrah, who outlined what he believed was a gap in the crypto and AI consulting space heading into the next four years of the Trump administration. "I think primarily before the Trump administration, there wasn't really a need. It wasn't like the industry was searching out D.C.-based advocates on a federal level," Ifrah said.

A Bangladeshi worker was eager to get started at their new OpenAI job--completing basic online tasks in exchange for consistent income, while getting into cryptocurrency investing at the same time. After connecting with the startup on Telegram and creating an account through a ChatGPT-branded app, they invested crypto into the platform and began a months-long job working for "Aiden" from "OpenAI." The work was performed through the website "OpenAi-etc," and internal conversations were held on Telegram. It was simple: Invest some crypto, complete a few tasks, and earn daily profits based on what was invested. Over the course of this worker's time with the company, mentors continuously encouraged them to invest more money into the fund and recruit more Bangladeshi people to the team.

There was a lot of news last week. The Guardian's journalism is independent. We will earn a commission if you buy something through an affiliate link. Donald Trump, Sam Altman, Masayoshi Son and Larry Ellison announced a 500bn initiative to expand infrastructure supporting artificial intelligence dubbed Stargate. On its heels came a press release from Meta vowing to expand its capital expenditure to 65bn in the coming year to expand its data centers.