What to Know About Sony's $7.85 Million PlayStation Settlement Are you eligible for a payout? Probably, but it might take a while and will likely be pretty small. Sony, owner of the PlayStation brand, has been accused of antitrust practices. The lawsuit was originally settled in 2024 but was rejected twice during the approval process. Last week, a judge approved a preliminary reopening of the settlement.

How to claim Verizon's $20 outage credit He gave millions in seed funding. Part of a lawsuit accusing OpenAI of abandoning its non-profit status claims Musk is owed anywhere from $79 billion to $134 billion in damages for the "wrongful gains" of OpenAI and Microsoft. Musk claims in the filing that he's entitled to a chunk of the company's recent $500 billion valuation, after contributing $38 million in "seed funding" during the AI company's early years. It wasn't just money -- according to the filing, Musk helped advise on key employee recruitment, introductions with business contacts and startup advice. If this sounds familiar, it's because the lawsuit dates back to March 2024.

How to claim Verizon's $20 outage credit The latest filing in the lawsuit claims that Musk deserves anywhere from $79 billion to $134 billion from wrongful gains. We now have some idea of what's at stake in the longstanding feud between Elon Musk and OpenAI. As first reported by, the latest filing, as part of a lawsuit that accuses the AI giant of abandoning its non-profit status, claims that Musk is owed anywhere between $79 billion and $134 billion in damages from the wrongful gains of OpenAI and Microsoft. Musk claimed in the filing that he's entitled to a portion of OpenAI's recent valuation at $500 billion, after contributing $38 million in seed funding during the AI company's startup years. Along with providing roughly 60 percent of the nonprofit's seed funding, Musk offered recruiting of key employees, introductions with business contacts and startup advice, according to the filing.

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Canonical algorithms for multi-armed bandits typically assume a stationary reward environment where the size of the action space (number of arms) is small. More recently developed methods typically relax only one of these assumptions: existing non-stationary bandit policies are designed for a small number of arms, while Lipschitz, linear, and Gaussian process bandit policies are designed to handle a large (or infinite) number of arms in stationary reward environments under constraints on the reward function. In this manuscript, we propose a novel policy to learn reward environments over a continuous space using Gaussian interpolation. We show that our method efficiently learns continuous Lipschitz reward functions with $\mathcal{O}^*(\sqrt{T})$ cumulative regret. Furthermore, our method naturally extends to non-stationary problems with a simple modification. We finally demonstrate that our method is computationally favorable (100-10000x faster) and experimentally outperforms sliding Gaussian process policies on datasets with non-stationarity and an extremely large number of arms.

Anyone who owned an Apple device over the last decade may be able to claim part of a 95 million class action lawsuit against the tech giant. According to the lawsuit, iPhones, iPads, Apple Watches, and MacBooks dating back to 2014 may have secretly recorded their users' private conversations after the devices unintentionally activated Apple's voice assistant Siri. A notice about the case, Lopez v. Apple, has advised anyone who believes Siri spied on their confidential or private calls between September 17, 2014 and December 31, 2024 to submit a claim for damages. Apple's iMacs, Apple TV streaming boxes, HomePod speakers, and iPod Touches are also included in the lawsuit. Although Apple has denied that their devices spied on users, the 3 trillion company reached a settlement in the case, agreeing to give users up to 20 per Siri device in their claim.

We introduce SWE-Lancer, a benchmark of over 1,400 freelance software engineering tasks from Upwork, valued at \$1 million USD total in real-world payouts. SWE-Lancer encompasses both independent engineering tasks--ranging from \$50 bug fixes to \$32,000 feature implementations--and managerial tasks, where models choose between technical implementation proposals. Independent tasks are graded with end-to-end tests triple-verified by experienced software engineers, while managerial decisions are assessed against the choices of the original hired engineering managers. We evaluate model performance and find that frontier models are still unable to solve the majority of tasks. To facilitate future research, we open-source a unified Docker image and a public evaluation split, SWE-Lancer Diamond (https://github.com/openai/SWELancer-Benchmark). By mapping model performance to monetary value, we hope SWE-Lancer enables greater research into the economic impact of AI model development.

OpenAI is paying the digital media company Dotdash Meredith at least 16 million per year to license its content, according to public financial documents reviewed by Adweek. We already knew about this burgeoning partnership, but we didn't have a financial figure. The actual payout could rise above 16 million per year, as it only reflects the "fixed" component of the payment. The "variable" component will be calculated in the future, according to a recent earnings call led by the chief operating and financial officer of Dotdash Meredith's parent company IAC. "If you look at Q3 of 2024, licensing revenue was up about 4.1 million year over year. The lion's share of that would be driven by the OpenAI license," CFO Chris Halpin said.

Musicians have long criticized streaming services for their abysmal revenue sharing programs. In 2021, for example, as much as 97 percent of Spotify's over 6 million listed artists earned less than 1,000. Last year, the company announced a new system offering fractions of a cent per track, all of which is now based on even more stringent rules. But there was apparently a way to earn some real dividends from those songs--provided you have access to thousands of bots, hundreds of thousands of AI-generated songs, and are willing to risk receiving a federal grand jury indictment for wire fraud and money laundering. That's what a man named Michael Smith in North Carolina is currently facing, according to a DOJ announcement on September 4. Unsealed filings from US prosecutors accuse Smith of scamming digital streaming platforms including Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Music, and YouTube Music of over 10 million in royalty payouts between 2017 and 2024.

Spotify is going through something right now. On Monday morning, the industry-defining audio streaming service announced that it would be hiking its Premium subscription prices for users in the United States, effective next month. The individual plan is rising by 1, the Duo plan by 2, and the family subscription by 3. These shifts arrive almost a year after Spotify raised U.S. subscription rates for the first time ever, upping the individual plan to 10.99 a month to match with competitors' price points. That increase was meant to mollify music-industry executives (who demanded better royalty payouts) and investors (who demanded that Spotify squeeze out regular profits).