Polymarket reportedly paid creators to post deceptive videos about fake bets | TechCrunch
The WSJ said that it analyzed 1,100 videos about Polymarket and also viewed instructional materials that the company provided to creators. Many of those videos were reportedly filmed on 'near-perfect copies' of the Polymarket website, while featuring trades and winnings that were not real. The creator videos were then amplified by a 'social-media army' deployed by a marketing contractor. The WSJ said the company also told those creators not to specify that they'd been paid by Polymarket, although the creators started adding '@polymarket partner' to their bios after journalists began asking questions. Razeen Khan, a college student and creator who worked with Polymarket until March, compared the practice to commercials that make fast food look more appealing than it is in real life: 'We're depicting what actually happens.' Get an inside look at what it takes to scale and succeed from leaders at Mach Industries, Founders Fund, and Shinkei Systems. Through candid fireside chats and high-impact networking, you'll walk away with valuable insights and new connections....
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Nuvei's $2.75B Payoneer M&A completes Advent's quiet payments empire ''; Is Cursor SpaceX's Instagram Moment' ''; Robinhood cut 10% of jobs without mentioning AI once ''
' Hey, Linas here! Welcome back to a ' weekly free edition ' of my daily newsletter. Each day, I focus on 3 stories that are making a difference in the financial technology space. Coupled with things worth watching & most important money movements, it's the only newsletter you need for all things when Finance meets Tech. Loop Engineering: How to Design AI Loops That Build, Ship, and Improve While You Sleep ' [From a three-line bash script to multi-day Claude Fable 5 autonomy ' everything founders, builders, and investors need to stop prompting agents and start designing the systems that prompt them] How to Pre-Mortem Any Decision With AI: The Future Failure Audit Skill for Claude ' [The highest-leverage Claude skill most founders are missing. It assumes your plan has already failed, finds the hidden assumption that kills it, and rewrites it before you commit a single dollar] Coinbase is replacing the crypto exchange model with a Financial OS built for AI Agents ''' [Coinbase's System Update with a focus on key products & launches, what does it all tell us & which competitors should worry the most + bonus deep dive into Coinbase's latest financials & how Anthropic wants to be the AI OS for Wall Street inside]...
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The Sequence Radar #880: Last Week in AI: A $60B Cursor Deal, Google's Brain Drain, and Midjourney's Body Scanner
I keep a mental map of where AI 'lives.' For most of the last decade it lived in a box: a model, an API, a chat window. This week the box broke open in four directions at once, and the interesting part is that none of the breakouts rhyme with each other. They only rhyme structurally. Start with the one that reads like a typo. SpaceX agreed to acquire Cursor for $60 billion in stock. Sit with the category error for a second. A rocket company is buying a code editor. The clean story is that SpaceX absorbed Cursor to feed its struggling xAI division, but the deeper signal is that AI tooling has become strategic infrastructure on par with launch capacity. Industrial conglomerates no longer partner for AI; they annex it. When the people who build reusable rockets decide that an autocomplete-for-engineers is worth the GDP of a small country, the implied claim is that the model layer is now load-bearing for everything else. Then the talent map redrew itself in 48 hours. Noam Shazeer'co-author of 'Attention Is All You Need,' the paper every one of us has read until the margins are gray'left Google for OpenAI. A day later John Jumper, who shared a Nobel for AlphaFold, left Google DeepMind for Anthropic. Google paid roughly $2.7 billion two years ago to bring Shazeer back. That is the part worth dwelling on: acqui-hires buy retention windows, not loyalty, and when the window closes the most valuable asset simply walks out the door. The frontier is consolidating into a two-body problem, and the bodies are not the ones with the most compute. They are the ones with the most gravity for researchers. Talent, it turns out, is the scarcest accelerator....
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I'd Rather Risk Cancer Than See AI Move This Fast
On a fall afternoon 15 years ago, I met an idealistic researcher outside a Stanford coffee shop to discuss our shared dream: using AI to detect cancer. He had wiry hair, a penchant for talking with his hands, and a reputation for brilliance. He worked at a research lab that developed early screens for cancer; I, at 20, had just learned that I carried a mutation that conferred a very high risk of breast, ovarian, and other cancers. Over the following years, he offered guidance on how to enter his field, prepared me to apply for the scholarship that would fund my Ph.D., and warned me away from cancer-screening companies that made exaggerated claims. But from there our paths diverged. I became an AI professor. He co-founded Anthropic. My mentor was Dario Amodei, the man who leads one of the most powerful AI companies in the world. In a utopian 2024 essay titled 'Machines of Loving Grace,' he predicted that superhuman AI'smarter than Nobel Prize winners, freely using computers, and collaborating with millions of copies of itself'could soon compress a century of scientific progress into a single decade, and potentially reduce cancer mortality by 95 percent....
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