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This week, President Trump adviser Elon Musk’s newly formed Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) seems to have gained full access to the Department of Treasury’s payments system responsible for processing trillions of dollars of spending, and containing sensitive personal data about hundreds of millions of Americans including bank accounts, tax data, Social Security numbers, tax refunds, Medicare benefits, and home address. If this concerns you, you’re not alone. Judging from social media, many Americans are overwhelmed with the sheer volume of changes coming from the Trump administration, and are worried about what is happening with our federal government. In short, “people are creeped out,” according to Senator Ron Wyden, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Finance Committee, who along with Senator Elizabeth Warren called on the Government Accountability Office (GAO) to investigate Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessents decision to grant Musk and DOGE access to sensitive government payment systems. “It is difficult to know all the things that Elon Musk is doing inside the Treasury Department because of a lack of transparency,” Barbara McQuade, who served as U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Michigan under President Barack Obama, told Fast Company. Now, DOGE, whose staff has largely operated in secret, communicating through encrypted messages on Signal, according to the Wall Street Journal, is starting to rack up legal challenges. On Monday, a coalition of labor unions and the Alliance for Retired Americans filed a lawsuit suing the Treasury Department, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, and the Bureau of the Fiscal Service to halt the “unlawful ongoing, systematic, and continuous disclosure of personal and financial information” to Elon Musk and other members of DOGE, or to any other person. The lawsuit alleges all three defendants illegally allowed the coalition’s members’ records to be shared with Musks DOGE. The Alliance for Retired Americans and the labor unions, which include the American Federation of Government Employees and the Service Employees International Union, are represented by lawyers from Public Citizen Litigation Group and State Democracy Defenders Fund. What is DOGE and what kind of authority does it have? Trump created DOGE through an executive order on his first day in office, creating a temporary government organization with a mandate to moderniz[e] Federal technology and software to maximize governmental efficiency and productivity. But there are many questions about who actually works for DOGE, if the agency is hiring existing government employees or employees from Musk’s various companies, and if DOGE staff are overstepping their legal authority. (Wired recently reported a 25-year-old engineer at DOGE now has administrative privileges over the code that controls Social Security payments, tax returns, and more.) DOGE was originally a joint project that Musk would run with Vivek Ramaswamy (who ran against Trump in the Republican presidential primary before endorsing him), along with Bill McGinley, who was named DOGEs legal counsel. Both Ramaswamy and McGinley have since left, which some have suggested could signal infighting and perhaps a disagreement over how DOGE would function among the group. Musk, meanwhile, was recently classified as a special government employee, which basically allows him to work at the White House for some 130 days before he’s required to file the necessary financial disclosure forms required of White House employees. This is concerning for a number of reasons, as he hasn’t been properly vetted yet, and because as CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, which both rely on government contracts, Musk potentially has a number of conflicts of interest.
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The AI search firm Perplexity routinely lets users try out state-of-the-art large language models on its site, but the company moved quickly to put Chinese company DeepSeeks new R1 model front and center in its user interface. That offers users a chance to find out what the buzz is all about, without sending their data through the DeepSeek app, which is hosted in China. While some AI thought leaders such as Thrive Capitals Josh Kushner, Scale AIs Alexander Wang, and Andurils Palmer Luckey hurried to debunk or downplay DeepSeeks achievements, Perplexitys CEO Aravind Srinivas believes the Chinese companys models are something special. In the past few years, there have been a handful of revolutionary moments in AI that have transformed the landscape, Perplexity cofounder and CEO Aravind Srinivas wrote in a subscriber email Tuesday. I wholeheartedly believe that this is yet another moment. Users of Perplexitys free and premium tiers can now choose to use DeepSeek via a menu button within the search bar. (Users can also select OpenAIs o3 mini model.) Its one of the core models, says Perplexity chief business officer Dmitry Shevelenko. And what’s really neat about it is we’ve also developed a user interface . . . where you can actually see the chain of thought, so you can actually see how the model is thinking in real time, and that’s something that was never possible before. Because DeepSeek operates within the Peoples Republic of Chinas regulatory framework, the company had to prevent its models from talking about politically sensitive topics, such as the Tiananmen Square protests. Perplexity was able to remove those guardrails from the open-source version of DeepSeek-R1. Perplexity also says any user data shared with the chatbot stays with the companys servers in the U.S. and Canada; nothing is shared with DeepSeek or China. Of the models available on Perplexity, DeepSeek R1 is unique in that it shows the chain of thought the LLM followed to reach an answer. Some of the innovations the DeepSeek researchers put into its models were driven by a need to economize on computing power. The company said it trained its models, for example, using less-powerful Nvidia H800 chips after the U.S. chip bans cut off access to Nvidias most powerful GPUs. The end result was the creation of models that show state-of-the-art intelligence while requiring far less computing power than comparable models to run. Thats good for Perplexity. There are efficiencies, says Shevelenko. I mean, I think we’re still too early to know the exact inference cost breakdown, but just the fact that it’s open-source and you’re not paying the private model provider, that’s already the major efficiency.
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E-Commerce
A record $1.39 billion will be legally wagered in the United States on Sunday’s Super Bowl match-up between the two-times defending champion Kansas City Chiefs and Philadelphia Eagles, the American Gaming Association (AGA) said on Tuesday. In years past, the trade group representing the U.S. casino industry did not break out an estimate solely for legal bets but rather one for all wagers, including those placed online, with a sportsbook, unlicensed bookmaker or casually with friends. But with years of legal operations in several U.S. states, the AGA said it now analyzes historical revenue data and other trends to develop a legal wager estimate for major U.S. sports betting moments. The AGA’s estimate for Super Bowl bets is up 11.2% from the $1.25 billion that gambling and research firm Eilers & Krejcik predicted would be legally bet on last year’s NFL championship in Las Vegas between the Chiefs and San Francisco 49ers. “No single event unites sports fans like the Super Bowl, and that excitement extends to sports betting, with this year’s record legal handle reflecting its widespread appeal,” AGA President and CEO Bill Miller said in a news release. “This figure underscores the positive impact of the legal marketfrom protecting consumers to generating tax revenue that benefits communities across the countrywhile enhancing the game experience for all.” In 2018, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down federal ban on sports betting. Since the ruling, 38 states and the District of Columbia have now legalized sports betting in some form. The NFL’s championship game creates an annual betting bonanza and this year’s edition will be played in New Orleans for a record-tying 11th time. The Chiefs, appearing in the Super Bowl for the fifth time in six years and seeking an unprecedented third consecutive NFL championship, are slight favourites to beat the Eagles in a rematch of the February 2023 title clash. Frank Pingue, Reuters
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