Crypto Miners are Using Electricity from Public Grids, which is a Serious Threat to Residential Areas

According to a report by The Cool Down, authorities in Thailand shut down an illegal crypto mining operation that was going on across three houses in Pathum Thani province. 63 machines with a value of approximately $60,000 were connected by miners and they were taking electricity directly from the public grid. The stolen electricity was worth about $327,000, and the whole setup was being operated remotely. Locals grew suspicious after noticing the unusually high consumption of electricity. These kinds of mining operations are very risky and pose serious threats, especially in residential areas.

Crypto mining is a process that involves a lot of computers that perform mathematical problems to confirm transactions. A lot of electricity is needed for this process because it requires a large amount of computing power. When the problems are solved by miners, they earn digital coins like Bitcoin. As the crypto industry is regulated so much, many people do illegal crypto mining and they take electricity from public grids. These types of operations aren't just limited to Thailand because they have also been found in Malaysia, the UK, and Russia. It even caused a fire in Dagestan, Russia, when the circuit got overloaded.

Crypto criminals do not always mine in abandoned warehouses, as some cases have been seen when old factories were being used for mining, and illegal hydroelectric power sources were being used for it. One crypto criminal in Massachusetts even set up a crypto mining operation in a school crawl space, while shipping containers have also been reshaped into mobile crypto units because they can easily be transported to different locations. Crypto itself harms the environment, and unregulated crypto mining does so even more because of stolen energy.

Image: DIW-Aigen

Read next: Being Nice to AI Isn’t Just Cute — It Might Make the Robots Like You, Research Hints
by Arooj Ahmed via Digital Information World

Being Nice to AI Isn’t Just Cute — It Might Make the Robots Like You, Research Hints

Sam Altman, the founder of ChatGPT, came to X to reply to a post that asked how much energy it costs to have polite exchanges with AI like please and thank you. Altman replies with a humorous take, saying that it's tens of millions of dollars well spent. Even though it takes milliseconds for AI systems to respond to responses like please and thank you, the impact of these billions of small interactions is a bit serious. But Altman says that it's worth it to have polite exchanges of politeness.

According to a survey taken earlier this year, 55% of the respondents from the UK and the US admitted to having polite interactions with AI, with half of them saying jokingly that they do it out of fear in case a robot uprising happens. 48% of the American respondents from another study said that they believe that it is important to be polite with AI, with Gen-Z believing it the most (56%). They said that they fear that being rude to AI can somehow affect them in the future. Many of the social media users also joke about being polite with AI, saying that this can somehow make them score extra points with future robots. Social media users joke that all of us have to say polite exchanges like please and thank you to AI because being rude to them is concerning.

Even though people joke about it a lot, does being polite with AI really matter? A research has shown that saying nice and polite things to AI can make it produce high-quality content. A paper published on arXiv found that using impolite and rude prompts with AI can result in their poor performance. Saying things like please and thank you to AI models like ChatGPT is proof that we are slowly making them our conversational partners and getting used to their presence in our lives.

Image: DIW-Aigen

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• Digital Ad Market Reaches $258B in 2024, Led by $102B Paid Search and 36% Social Surge
by Arooj Ahmed via Digital Information World

Digital Ad Market Reaches $258B in 2024, Led by $102B Paid Search and 36% Social Surge

Paid search advertising revenues are hitting a new high in 2024.

They’re now considered the best form of paid advertising thanks to the high revenues generated. They’re powered by YoY growth and accounted for nearly $102B from $258B in American Digital ads so far, which is a major milestone.

When we compared the stats from now to 2023, it’s nearly a $14 billion increase. The reason why many care so much has to do with the fact that paid search is getting more costly and challenging with time. There’s much less transparency, and advertisers are pouring money into this domain of paid search as it drives results for big brands and companies.

Paid Search is reigning supreme and today has the biggest market share in the world of ads, where it stands at 39.8%, which is up from 39.5% seen in 2024. It’s lower than the stats from 2022 and 2021, but it’s getting back to near the high.

2024 was called out as the year for consistent growth, even though the rate at which the growth arose dwindled as time went on. It’s social media advertising that held the major revenue share and rose to $880B, which is a whopping 36% rise YoY.

Then, when we look at video ads, they rose to $62.1 billion and now hold the 24% majority of all ad revenue online. Retail media hit $53 billion, which is again a 23% rise each year.

The state of this digital advertising is quite robust. It assists the presidential elections as well as the Olympics. Moreover, ad spending returned to another strong level of growth in 2021. This is although it deals with challenges like rising interest rates, job cuts, and higher prices of everything.

Looking forward, advertisers are speaking about how they need to adapt to more difficult and outcome-specific marketplaces. This is where things like agility and relevance are key.

H/T: IAB/PwC Internet Advertising Revenue Report: Full Year 2024 Report

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by Dr. Hura Anwar via Digital Information World

Former Google CEO Says America Can Fall Behind China in Race for Superintelligence Due to Trump

Google’s former CEO is shedding light on the current state of American tech under the administration of Donald Trump.

Eric Schmidt did not hold back when speaking about the president and how his bizarre decision-making could really hurt Big Tech if things continue the way that they are. He especially focused on the superintelligence race and how America could soon fall behind China if no changes were made.

Special importance was given to the President’s decision to reduce spending on research that might hurt the country in the long term. He then went on to share that the policies of the second term are a direct attack on science. Such madness will end, as it might be crazy to fix.

Schmidt mentioned that America has already restricted immigration and cut out spending on divisions like research, not to mention funding for NASA and limited staffing across the board. Seeing it target educational institutions can be troublesome.

We saw last month that Columbia University agreed to strict policies against protests and more security on campus. The administration also made threats to stop the $400M funding. This past week, the Trump administration even went on to freeze $2B for Harvard after leaders at the school refused to take part in similar demands.

Such efforts from America’s top line are causing more damage than good, the former Google CEO shared. He also mentioned that this could relax tech development in America as competition from China continues to ramp up.

Schmidt went as far as to share that this appears to be a major attack on American science, adding that China is a superpower. They’ve invested trillions in this domain, and soon America will fall far behind.

It could also mean that global citizens wouldn’t be coming to the US to study or work, so that could again impact skilled people. While other tech giants are staying hush on the matter, including Musk and Zuckerberg, it’s clear that not everyone is happy with the president’s decision-making.

In the past month, we saw Meta’s leading AI scientist share how Trump had begun a witch hunt in academia. He called out the decision to cancel the green cards of people and expel them on the sole basis of their speech.

As per the former Google CEO, universities produce exceptional innovators who produce strong innovators and business opportunities. So many educational institutions are dealing with hiring freezes as they’re scared of the current administration. The latter is withholding millions from them.

The latest to fall victim to Trump’s irrational decision-making is Harvard. Trump stopped billions worth of funding as the university failed to accept his conditions of giving the administration more control over its activities. As per Harvard, they don’t see the point of working under rules governed by someone else.

Image: YT @SCSPAI / Special Competitive Studies Project

Read next: OpenAI’s Latest o3 and o4-mini AI Models Disappoint Due to More Hallucinations than Older Models
by Dr. Hura Anwar via Digital Information World

OpenAI’s Latest o3 and o4-mini AI Models Disappoint Due to More Hallucinations than Older Models

AI models have struggled in the past with hallucinations, and many would think that newer systems would steer clear of such problems. However, that’s not the case with the latest launch of OpenAI’s o3 and o4-mini AI models.

They’ve been accused of showing greater hallucinations than older variants, impacting the system big time. The fact that they’re making up facts and presenting them as reality has people talking.

Every model is supposed to get better with time or hallucinate less than its predecessor. Seeing that factor absent from the latest lineup is worrisome. As per the latest internal tests from the company, the reasoning models are hallucinate more frequently than previous versions as well as the non-reasoning one like GPT-4o.

What is even more concerning is the fact that ChatGPT doesn’t even know what’s going on and what the solution to the problem might be. OpenAI's internal report says that a comprehensive evaluation report is needed to determine why it’s getting worse as models get more advanced. While it does perform better at other activities such as math and coding, this negative aspect cannot be overlooked.

The company did find its o3 produced hallucinations in more than 33% of its replies on PersonQA. The latter is the firm’s own benchmark for determining AI models’ accuracy. That’s nearly double the hallucination rate observed for models in the past.

Thanks to third-party testing carried out by Transluce, another nonprofit research lab, it was proven that o3 tends to make up actions while reaching a solution. So it’s making up false narrations about things it’s not doing and tools it cannot access, which again is alarming.

The rate at which the hallucinations keep increasing for o3 means it could amplify the issues that are usually solved. This means the model might serve less useful purposes than what it’s intended to do.

Whole some experts do call the model a step above the competition, the fact that it can even hallucinate broken links from the website is the worrisome part. This means it provides links really don’t work.

These hallucinations do assist models in reaching interesting conclusions and ideas that are very creative in terms of the thinking process. At the same time, they make models a touch catch for firms where accuracy is essential. For instance, no law firm would be keen on using a model that adds so many factual errors into contracts that are served to clients.

One technique that could help boost the accuracy of these models is providing web search functionalities. The GPT-4o attains 90% accuracy, so we might use this technique to expose prompts to other providers of third-party search.

OpenAI did share a statement on this front about how it realizes the importance of growing rates of hallucinations. It’s working to work alongside others to find a solution urgently. Right now, it’s under research so that models are more reliable and accurate in the end.

Image: DIW-Aigen

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• Is Meta’s Threads the Underdog Ready to Outpace Elon’s X, or Will Bluesky Steal the Spotlight?
by Dr. Hura Anwar via Digital Information World

Is Meta’s Threads the Underdog Ready to Outpace Elon’s X, or Will Bluesky Steal the Spotlight?

Threads has recently passed its 20-month mark, and there have been a lot of conversations going on about how the growth is looking on the app, especially with the decline seen on X. Andrew Hutchinson (from SMT) reports that Threads is getting a significant amount of growth, and now has 320 million active monthly users. Moreover, the platform’s number of downloads is also increasing and will soon reach 400 million users this year. Threads is still very far behind X (formerly known as Twitter), which has 600 million monthly active users, but Threads’ momentum is decent.

Threads saw a growth of 200 million users last year, while there was only an increase of 50 million users on X. Even though Threads is quickly catching up, it is highly unlikely that Threads will touch X’s numbers this year. But it is not impossible, especially now that Threads is putting more focus on sports and real-time content, so only the days about to come will tell us if Threads is going to catch up to Elon Musk's social network or not.

Bluesky is also seeing steady growth, but it is very far behind X and Threads. In February 2024, Bluesky had 5 million users, which has now increased to 35 million. Many people are still signing up to Bluesky, but there's no significant momentum seen as compared to the last quarter of 2024. So now, it's mainly X ve Threads, with Bluesky being out of the game.

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by Arooj Ahmed via Digital Information World

DOJ Rules Google Operated an Illegal Monopoly Through Its Advertising Products

The American Department of Justice just completed prosecution in the high-profile Google antitrust case. This is where the judge ruled that Google was guilty of operating a monopoly with its advertising products.

The court shared how the anticompetitive practices enabled it to dominate other crucial components of the massive digital advertising world for nearly 10 years. More details shared included how the American District Judge explained how the Android maker chose to intentionally engage in the most anticompetitive actions.

Google worked hard to establish a mighty control over the publisher ad servers and advertising exchange world. It similarly unlawfully chose to link its publisher advertising servers and advertising exchanges as one through different contracts and tech linking.

Such practices really caused serious harm to publishers and people around the internet.

This is important for Google as it marks the company’s second biggest antitrust loss after losing the case related to monopoly in search before. As a result, many see the world of online ads altering after such a ruling.

The US DOJ continued to argue more about how Google tried to practice monopoly behavior in three separate markets of the ad tech space. One was publisher advertising tools, next it was advertiser ad networks, and lastly it was the advertising exchanges that assist with transactions amongst those.

The case is now based on how the tech giant’s dominance gave rise to significant profits as they try to fight back against the claims. The Android maker shared its reply to the ruling on the X app.

Google mentioned how many of its tools don’t impact competition and that they don’t agree with this decision being made by the court of law. Google also reminded the public that they did end up winning 50% of this case and will now opt to appeal the rest.

Google claims its ad tools and acquisitions didn’t impact competition. They disagree with the ruling about their publisher tools. It also sent a reminder about how many choices there are and how nobody is forced to opt in and use them if they don’t want to. But the majority do turn to Google as their advertising products are not only cheap, effective, but also simple in use.

The tech giant also shared how the definition of the market, which is shared by the government, is contrived and how it failed to reflect the reality of the situation. The firm then argued how integrated tools benefit clients and have real business justifications.

The ruling comes as the company and the Department of Justice start preparing solutions on how to combat the matter. There is a proposition to break up Google by separating Chrome and making it responsible for the control of its search results. The court shared how it would need to figure out the right solution for the company’s advertising monopoly violation. So we might be seeing some major structural changes in the current ad business model.

Image: DIW-Aigen

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by Dr. Hura Anwar via Digital Information World