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Perhaps the surest sign that artificial intelligence really is taking over the world will come the day it wins your favorite March Madness bracket pool. The day could be coming soon. In an experiment that a) was bound to happen, b) might actually make us all look smarter and c) should probably also scare the daylights out of everyone, a successful CEO-turned-disruptor is running a $1 million March Madness bracket challenge that pits his AI programmers’ picks against those belonging to one of the world’s best-known sports gamblers. We’re not a crystal ball, says Alan Levy, whose platform, 4C Predictions, is running this challenge. But it’s going to start to get very, very creepy. In 2025, we’re making a million-dollar bet with a professional sports bettor, and the reason we feel confident to do that is because data, we feel, will beat humans. Levy isn’t the only one leveraging AI to help people succeed in America’s favorite pick ’em pool one that’s become even more lucrative over the past seven years, after a Supreme Court ruling led to the spread of legalized sports betting to 38 states. ChatGPT, a chatbot developed by OpenAI, is hawking its services to help bracket fillers more easily find stats and identify trends. Not surprisingly, it makes no promises. With upsets, momentum shifts, and basketballs inherent unpredictability, consistently creating a perfect bracket may still come down to luck, said Leah Anise, a spokesperson for OpenAI. Also making no promises, but trying his hardest, is Sheldon Jacobson, the computer science professor at Illinois who has been trying to build a better bracket through science for years; he might have been AI before AI. Nobody predicts the weather, he explained in an interview back in 2018. They forecast it using chances and odds. $1 million on the line in AI vs. Sean Perry showdown Levy’s angle is he’s willing to wager $1 million that the AI bracket his company produces can beat that of professional gambler Sean Perry. Among Perry’s claims to fame was his refusal to accept a four-way split in a pot worth $9.3 million in an NFL survivor pool two years ago. The next week, his pick, the Broncos, lost to New England and he ended up with nothing. But Perry has wagered and won millions over his career, using heaps of analytics, data and insider information to try to find an edge that, for decades, has been proprietary to casinos and legal sports books, giving them an advantage that allows them to build all those massive hotels. Levy says his ultimate goal is to bring that advantage to the average Joe either the weekly football bettor who doesn’t have access to reams of data, or the March Madness bracket filler who goes by feel or what team’s mascot he likes best. The massive thesis is that the average person are playing games that they can never win, they’re trading stocks where they can never win, they’re trading crypto where they can never win, Levy said. 4C gives people the chance to empower themselves. It’s a great equalizer. It’s going to level the playing field for everyone. But can AI predict the completely unexpected? It’s one thing to find an edge, quite another to take out every element of chance every halfcourt game-winner, every 4-point-a-game scorer who goes off for 25, every questionable call by a ref, every St. Peter’s, Yale, FAU or UMBC that rises up and wins for reasons nobody quite understands. For those who fear AI is leading the world to bad places, Levy reassures us that when it comes to sports, at least, the human element is always the final decider and humans can do funny and unexpected things. That’s one of many reasons that, according to the NCAA, there’s a 1 in 120.2 billion chance of a fan with good knowledge of college basketball going 63 for 63 in picking the games. It’s one of many reasons that almost everyone has a story about their 8-year-old niece walking away with the pot because she was the only one who picked George Mason, or North Carolina State, or VCU, to make the Final Four. You can’t take the element of fun and luck out of it, Levy said. Having said that, as AI develops, it’s going to get creepier and creepier and the predictions are going to get more and more accurate, and it’s all around data sets. Levy suggests AI is no three-headed monster, but rather, an advanced version of Moneyball the classic book-turned-movie that followed Oakland A’s GM Billy Beane’s groundbreaking quest to leverage data to build a winning team. Now, it’s all about putting all that data on steroids, trying to minimize the impact of luck and glass slippers, and building a winning bracket. We’ve got to understand that this technology is meant to augment us, Levy said. It’s meant to make our lives better. So, let’s encourage people to use it, and even if it’s creepy, at least it’s creepy on our side. The AI’s side in this one: Houston to win it all. Perry, the gambler, is going with Duke. Eddie Pells, AP national writer
Category:
E-Commerce
Dozens of Social Security Administration offices across the country are slated to close this year due to actions taken by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency as part of the Trump administrations unprecedented effort to shrink the size of government. DOGE has published a list of nearly 800 federal real estate leases that it is seeking to cancel. The Associated Press has obtained an internal planning document from the General Services Administration, which manages federal real estate, which shows when nearly two-thirds of those cancellations are expected to go into effect. The offices are closing despite a new requirement that tighter identity-proofing measures be put in place to prevent fraud and abuse. These steps will require millions of recipients and applicants to visit agency field offices rather than interact with agency employees over the phone. The AP also obtained more information about each lease on DOGEs list through other publicly available datasets, including their addresses, the dates the leases had started and were originally expected to expire, and the landlords who own the properties. Of the 47 Social Security Administration offices listed for closure, only some had anticipated dates for when those lease cancellations would take effect. Here’s a state-by-state breakdown of the 26 offices listed as expected to close this year, along with the termination date for each lease, according to the General Services data: Alabama 634 Broad St., Gadsden: Sept. 30 Arkansas 965 Holiday Drive, Forrest City: April 25 4083 Jefferson Ave., Texarkana: May 25 Colorado 825 N. Crest Drive, Grand Junction: June 21 Florida 4740 Dairy Road, Melbourne: May 16 Georgia 1338 Broadway, Columbus: Sept. 30 Kentucky 825 High St., Hazard: April 24 Louisiana 178 Civic Center Drive, Houma: April 25 Mississippi 4717 26th St., Meridian: June 1 604 Yalobusha St., Greenwood: June 1 2383 Sunset Drive, Grenada: May 1 Montana 3701 American Way, Missoula: June 21 North Carolina 730 Roanoke Ave., Roanoke Rapids: Aug. 1 2123 Lakeside Drive, Franklin: June 23 2805 Charles Blvd., Greenville: June 24 1865 W. City Drive, Elizabeth City: June 24 North Dakota 1414 20th Ave. SW, Minot: June 21 Nevada 701 Bridger Ave., Las Vegas: June 1 New York 75 S. Broadway, White Plains: May 31 332 Main St., Poughkeepsie: July 31 Ohio 30 N. Diamond St., Mansfield: May 17 Oklahoma 1610 SW Lee Blvd., Lawton: April 25 Texas 1122 N. University Drive, Nacogdoches: May 7 8208 NE Zac Lentz Parkway, Victoria: May 25 West Virginia 1103 George Kostas Drive, Logan: April 30 Wyoming 79 Winston Drive, Rock Springs: June 20 Meg Kinnard, Associated Press
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E-Commerce
A senior official at Elon Musks Department of Government Efficiency is taking a leadership role at the U.S. Agency for International Development, giving DOGE direct authority over an agency that it has worked to dismantle, according to an email obtained by The Associated Press. Pete Marocco, a Trump administration political appointee who was serving as deputy head of USAID, disclosed the change in the email to State Department staff. It comes after Marocco and DOGE oversaw the gutting of 83% of USAID contracts, shifting the remaining programs under the State Department. Marocco said in his email that he will serve as the State Department’s head of foreign assistance. Marocco wrote that Secretary of State Marco Rubio will effective immediately designate Jeremy Lewin as deputy administrator for policy and programs at USAID and as chief operating officer. Lewin is a DOGE official who has worked with Musk’s government-cutting efforts at USAID and other federal agencies. Rubio also designated Kenneth Jackson as administrator for management and resources who will also serve as the agencys chief financial officer. President Donald Trump also appointed Jackson as acting president of the U.S. Institute for Peace, a government think tank meant to promote conflict resolution. The email outlining the DOGE team member’s appointment came the same day a federal judge ruled that Musk and DOGE appeared to have no constitutional authority for their two-month effort helping the Trump administration shut down State and USAID foreign assistance funding, fire staffers and terminate humanitarian and development contracts. U.S. District Judge Theodore Chuang in Maryland, in a ruling Tuesday, indefinitely blocked DOGE from making further cuts to the agency. The ruling came in a lawsuit filed by USAID employees and contractors, who argued that Musk and DOGE are wielding power that the Constitution reserves only for those who win elections or are confirmed by the Senate. Their lawyers said the ruling effectively halts or reverses many of the steps taken to dismantle the agency. Matt Brown and Ellen Knickmeyer, Associated Press
Category:
E-Commerce
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