Lifeboat Foundation

In the dynamic and fast-paced world of private equity, AI integration is not just a passing trend; it’s a transformative force reshaping the landscape of the industry. As firms navigate the complexities of investments, market analysis, and financial predictions, AI emerges as a beacon of efficiency, insight, and innovation.

Currently, AI’s integration in private equity is impressive but not expansive. Most firms primarily focused on data analysis, deal sourcing, and risk assessment. Firms like KKR & Co. and Blackstone pioneered this industry revolution, leveraging AI to analyze market trends, evaluate potential investments, and enhance decision-making processes. For instance, consider how AI algorithms process vast amounts of data to identify promising investment opportunities. By sifting through global financial reports, news, and company data, AI provides a deeper understanding of risks and rewards, at level of volume and understanding that most human analysts would find overwhelming.

Additionally, private equity firms find AI-driven risk assessment models indispensable. These models predict market fluctuations, assess potential investment hazards, and offer a more nuanced understanding of various sectors. This predictive power allows firms to make more informed decisions, balancing risks with potential returns more effectively.

It’s possible the OnlyFake owner is exaggerating, and it’s also worth noting that counterfeiting documents is nothing new. The difference here, though, is that the firm’s software is capable of cranking out hundreds of fake, but very real looking, IDs. It feels like it’s a matter of time before both banks and crypto firms alike are swamped by a wave of bots seeking to open accounts that possess convincing fake IDs.

You can add to this an impending wave of AI-based tools that will be used to overcome the anti-fraud measures, such as voice-based authentication, used by banks and others. We are also seeing AI being used to carry out audacious new forms of robbery—including the jaw-dropping story this week of a criminal gang that persuaded some poor employee in Hong Kong to transfer $25 million of company funds during a Zoom meeting. It turned out that all the members on the Zoom call were AI-generated replicas of the employee’s boss and coworkers.

A finance worker at a multinational firm was tricked into paying out $25 million to fraudsters using deepfake technology to pose as the company’s chief financial officer in a video conference call, according to Hong Kong police.

The elaborate scam saw the worker duped into attending a video call with what he thought were several other members of staff, but all of whom were in fact deepfake recreations, Hong Kong police said at a briefing on Friday.

“(In the) multi-person video conference, it turns out that everyone [he saw] was fake,” senior superintendent Baron Chan Shun-ching told the city’s public broadcaster RTHK.

Mastercard has announced that it has developed an in-house generative AI to help combat fraud on its payment processing network.

Instead of relying on textual inputs, Mastercard’s algorithm uses a cardholder’s merchant visit history as a prompt to determine whether a transaction involves a business that the customer would likely visit. The algorithm generates pathways through Mastercard’s network, akin to heat-sensing radar, to provide a score as an answer.

Continue reading “Mastercard’s new anti-fraud AI has a success rate of up to 300%” »

Global decision-makers and the world’s leading financial body predict that artificial intelligence will result in dramatic job losses in 2024 and beyond.

During the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, a survey of CEOs revealed that a quarter intend to cut their headcounts by at least five percent “due to generative AI,” per a press release from PwC, the firm that conducted it.

Translation: 25 percent of CEOs are aiming to replace human workers with AI because they think it’ll be cheaper. Vive la future!

WASHINGTON — Quindar has raised an additional $6 million to further development of software to automate operations of satellite constellations.

The company announced Jan. 30 that it closed $6 million in funding as an extension to a $2.5 million seed round it announced a year ago. Venture capital firm Fuse led the round with participation from existing investors Y Combinator and Founders Fund.

Quindar has developed software designed to automate satellite operations. The company says it has validated that system with an unnamed customer who is using it to manage a growing fleet of spacecraft.

A research team has succeeded in implementing a distributed quantum sensor that can measure multiple spatially distributed physical quantities with high precision beyond the standard quantum limit with few resources. Their findings are published in the journal Nature Communications.

Sharing the exact time between distant locations is becoming increasingly important in all areas of our lives, including finance, telecommunications, security, and other fields that require improved accuracy and precision in sending and receiving data.

Quantum phenomena such as superposition and entanglement can be used to more precisely measure the time of different clocks in two distant spaces. Similarly, if you have two physical quantities, one in Seoul and one in Busan, you can share the entanglement state in Seoul and Busan and then measure the two physical quantities simultaneously with greater precision than if you measure the physical quantities in Seoul and Busan separately.

Two tech titans are now duking it out in the headset wars. Apple’s Vision Pro and Meta’s Quests offer different price points, different specs, and most importantly, different visions of the future of virtual reality. And both have big hurdles to clear. This week on TechCheck, why the headset battle is Apple’s to lose.

Chapters:
0:00 – Who will win the headset wars?
0:42 – The case for Apple.
5:35 – The case for Meta.
7:56 – The case for both… or neither.

Continue reading “The headset wars: Why it’s Apple’s to lose” »

Authored by James Rickards via DailyReckoning.com,

I’ve covered a wide variety of potential crises over the years.

These include natural disasters, pandemics, social unrest and financial collapse. That’s a daunting list.