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Your family's 300 stake in OpenAI
Sam Altman wants Americans to share in AI's wealth. The proposal may be more revealing as a political narrative than as a policy plan. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman's oft-discussed promise that Americans will share in the wealth AI creates was in the news again last week. On Thursday, the reported that Altman is in talks with President Trump about giving the US government a 5% stake in OpenAI. In some ways, Altman's plan is old news. He wrote about a more radical version of this back in 2021, proposing that companies above a certain valuation (not just AI companies) pay 2.5% of their market value each year into a fund that sends Americans annual disbursements.
Traditional Home Insurance Is Collapsing. Here's What Could Fill the Gap
Traditional Home Insurance Is Collapsing. A new, AI-assisted model of insurance is quietly exploding in disaster-prone areas--and may be coming for FEMA too. Is it the answer to climate change, or a trap? In 2019, when the worst flooding in recorded history spread across the entire Mississippi River basin, Colin Wellenkamp's phone rang for weeks. Wellenkamp runs a nonprofit called the Mississippi River Cities & Towns Initiative, which coordinates between mayors' offices in more than 100 river communities from northern Minnesota to southern Louisiana. As he describes it, his headquarters served as "one big virtual situation room" for relief agencies and municipalities up and down the central US.
What to Know About Sony's 7.85 Million PlayStation Settlement
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.
The Morning After: Elon Musk wants a 134 billion payout from OpenAI and Microsoft
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.
Elon Musk is looking for a 134 billion payout from OpenAI and Microsoft
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.
Quick-Draw Bandits: Quickly Optimizing in Nonstationary Environments with Extremely Many Arms
Everett, Derek, Lu, Fred, Raff, Edward, Camacho, Fernando, Holt, James
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.
Apple to pay out nearly 100m over claims phones listened in on users' conversations... how to get a payout
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.
SWE-Lancer: Can Frontier LLMs Earn $1 Million from Real-World Freelance Software Engineering?
Miserendino, Samuel, Wang, Michele, Patwardhan, Tejal, Heidecke, Johannes
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 will pay DotDash Meredith at least 16 million per year to license its content
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.