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The New York Stock Exchange’s parent company, Intercontinental Exchange (ICE), said on Tuesday it will invest up to $2 billion into the crypto-based betting platform Polymarket. The move marries the more traditional, regulated NYSE with the riskier prediction markets, and is generally seen as a move by the iconic 233-year-old exchange to keep up with its competitors by capitalizing on the growing popularity of betting on all kinds of things. “Our partnership with ICE marks a major step in bringing prediction markets into the financial mainstream,” Shayne Coplan, CEO of Polymarket, told Fast Company. Together, were expanding how individuals and institutions use probabilities to understand and price the future. . . . Realizing the potential of new technologies, such as tokenization, will require collaboration between established market leaders and next-generation innovators.” Launched in 2020, Polymarket allows users to bet on the outcome of real-world events, including hot topics such as political elections, sporting events, weather patterns, awards (this year’s Nobel Peace Prize winner), predictions in the finance market (“Will Bitcoin hit above $120,000 today?”), and random pop-culture questions (“What will be the highest-grossing movie in 2025?“). A look at the platform on Tuesday shows some of the biggest bets going were around questions like: “When will the government shutdown end?” (68% said October 15 or later); “Who will win the New York City Mayoral Election?” (Zohran Mamdani at 89%, Andrew Cuomo at 10%); and “Who is going to be the World Series Champion 2025?” (so far, the Los Angeles Dodgers are edging out the Toronto Blue Jays, 36% to 19%). And those predictions, while seemingly fun, are big businessvalued at roughly $8 billion, according to a statement from Intercontinental Exchange to Bloomberg, which also noted that ICE will distribute Polymarkets event-driven data and has also agreed to partner on future tokenization initiatives. The ICE investment also provides good optics for the betting platform, which is trying to boost its credibility and reestablish its presence in the United States following a probe by the Department of Justice and Commodity Futures Trading Commission, which was dropped back in July. The Justice Department had been investigating whether Polymarket allowed U.S. users onto the site when they were banned from doing so.
Category:
E-Commerce
Bernie Sanders says in a new ChatGPT-assisted report released Monday that AI and automation could eliminate nearly 100 million jobs over the next decade. Titled Big Tech Oligarchs War Against Workers: AI and Automation Could Destroy Nearly 100 Million U.S Jobs in a Decade, the report estimates that AI will automate away the jobs of 89% of fast food and counter workers, 64% of accountants, and 47% of truck drivers. The artificial intelligence and robotics being developed by . . . today will allow corporate America to wipe out tens of millions of decent-paying jobs, cut labor costs and boost profits, Sanders, an Independent from Vermont and ranking member of the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee, wrote in an op-ed on Fox News. The result? The wealthiest people in the world will get even richer, while working people lose their jobs and their income. The report was compiled by Sanders and committee staffers, who derived their job loss estimates by asking ChatGPT how completely AI can automate various job tasks that are considered core or supplemental to more than 700 job types identified by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Congress and the American people must stand up and fight back Its unlikely that ChatGPT would have a reliable view of AIs effects on the workforce today, much less in the next decade. The reports estimates fail to contemplate what kinds of new hybrid human/AI jobs (such as prompting or model training) might be created. Sanders also oversimplifies the real mix of tasks involved in a specific job type: A task to which a worker devotes 10% of their time might stubbornly resist automation, and save the workers job. There is tremendous uncertainty about the real capabilities of AI and automation, their effects on the rest of the economy, and how governments and markets will respond, the report states. The reports estimate represents one potential future in which corporations decide to aggressively push forward with artificial labor, the staffers write. But Sanders and his staff cite some (arguably) more reliable data points, including Anthropic CEO Dario Amodeis prediction that “AI could wipe out half of all entry-level white-collar jobsand spike unemployment to 10-20% in the next one to five years. They also cite Ford CEO Jim Farleys prediction that AI could eliminate literally half of all white-collar jobs in the U.S. within the next decade. The report also takes aim at the Trump administration, which has essentially abdicated any oversight of the AI industry, while taking steps to speed the arrival of the new technology. The Trump administration is poised to only entrench the power of [Silicon Valley] executives, the authors write. That must end. Congress and the American people must stand up and fight back to make sure workers benefit from AI and automation. The approaching storm Notably, Sanders chose to his op-ed the right-leaning Fox News, which has traditionally portrayed him as a far left progressive. But AIs impact on the workforce could be a rare issue that crosses partisan lines, especially when the benefactors of the new technology are identified as oligarchs and tech elites, as Sanders does. Sanders isnt the only one who seems to be sensing this. Arizona Democrat Mark Kelly recently released an AI for America plan, which proposes ways for AI companies like Google and OpenAI to help pay for the downside costs of the AI transformation, namely the necessary upgrades to the power grid (to support new data centers) and to expand the social safety net for workers who might be put out their jobs by automation. While the HELP reports 100-million-jobs number is provocative and contestable, the tech industry is working hard to suppress meaningful AI legislation — Sanders and Kelly are right to sound the alarm that a widespread disruption of the workforce is very likely coming. The real question is how soon.
Category:
E-Commerce
Nintendo has filed a lawsuit against an individual it says is a moderator on Reddit, accusing him of piracy and facilitating a network of websites that offered pirated Nintendo Switch games. The video game publisher is seeking $4.5 million in damages from James C. Williams, who went by the username “Archbox” on the social media site. (That account has since been suspended.) “Williams not only copied and distributed Nintendo game files without authorization; he actively promoted their distribution and copying to thousands of others across a variety of websites and online ‘communities,’ and knowingly trafficked in unlawful software products aimed at circumventing Nintendos technological measures protecting against unauthorized access,” Nintendo alleges in the lawsuit. The filing claims Williams used Reddit to send thousands of messages, steering people to piracy websites and to help people modify their Switch consoles. In exchange for his services, he asked for “donations” of Nintendo eShop gift cards, the company alleges. Nintendo says it initially sent a cease-and-desist order to Williams in March of 2024, telling him to “shut down his pirate shops.” But Williams ultimately denied involvement with the sites and became “combative,” eventually deleting his posts, many of which were on the subreddit “SwitchPirates,” where Williams was cited as a moderator, the suit alleges. Williams is alleged to have made “hundreds or thousands of copyrighted Nintendo Switch Games” available for download. In its filing, Nintendo lists 30 specific titles that were pirated. While $4.5 million is a significant sum, Nintendo says in the filing that it could easily have demanded more. It based the amount it is seeking on other piracy cases, including one in which Bungie Software, creators of the Halo franchise, were awarded millions in damages for piracy sales. “Here, the amount of money sufficient to remedy NOAs injury would be extremely difficult to quantify; but it is indisputable that such an amount would be large,” the filing reads. Nintendo is serious about piracy Nintendo has taken an aggressive stance against piracy for years. Dolphin, an open-sourced emulator for the Nintendo Wii and GameCube, was a target of the gaming giant in 2023 when its developers announced plans to put its emulator on the Steam game distribution platform. Nintendo sent a cease-and-desist order to Valve, which pulled the listing. Days later, Dolphins developers announced, with much disappointment, that it had postponed the Dolphin release indefinitely. Nintendo is committed to protecting the hard work and creativity of video game engineers and developers, a spokesperson for Nintendo told the gaming news website Kotaku in May of 2023. Last year, Nintendo successfully shut down the Yuzu emulator, saying the team behind it had “facilitate[d] piracy at a colossal scale. The Yuzu team agreed to pay $2.4 million and ended all operations. Earlier this year, Nintendo updated its user agreement, informing Switch owners that if that console is found to contain pirated games or modifications, Nintendo has the right to remotely render the system useless. Should users “bypass, modify, decrypt, defeat, tamper with, or otherwise circumvent any of the functions or protections of the Nintendo Account Services,” the update read, Nintendo might make that “applicable Nintendo device permanently unusable in whole or in part.”
Category:
E-Commerce
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