Technology News | Time

Why Sam Bankman-Fried Received a 25-Year Prison Sentence

SBF

Sam Bankman-Fried, the former billionaire who was found guilty of defrauding customers and investors of his cryptocurrency exchange FTX, was sentenced to 25 years in prison on Thursday by a federal judge, who ruled that Bankman-Fried committed perjury and attempted witness tampering. The sentencing closes the door on an astonishing rise-and-fall saga in which Bankman-Fried, 32, was lauded as one of the world’s most successful entrepreneurs before losing more than $8 billion worth of FTX customer deposits.

[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]

Bankman-Fried’s sentence is less what federal prosecutors had hoped for: they recommended that he should receive 40-50 years due to the “extraordinary dimensions of his crimes” and the risk that he might carry out a future fraudulent scheme. Bankman-Fried and his lawyers conversely argued that he should receive five to seven years.

In comparison, Bernie Madoff received a 150-year sentence; Enron CEO Jeff Skilling received a 24-year sentence; and Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes received 11 years.

On Thursday, Judge Lewis Kaplan used strong language to criticize Bankman-Fried and justify his sentence. He said that Bankman-Fried perjured himself three times while under oath, including falsely testifying that he had no knowledge that his trading firm Alameda had spent FTX customer funds until the fall of 2022. He said that Bankman-Fried displayed “exceptional flexibility with the truth” and an “apparent lack of any real remorse”—and that Kaplan had never seen as “evasive” a “performance” as Bankman-Fried’s in his almost 30 years as a judge. Kaplan also ordered Bankman-Fried to forfeit $11.2 billion in assets.

Tim Howard, a former federal prosecutor with the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York and now a partner at the law firm Freshfields, says that 25 years is “an incredibly serious sentence for a first-time white-collar defendant.”

“It sends a serious message to those in the crypto industry that you can’t lie to get people’s money,” he says.

Bankman-Fried apologized for his actions on the stand. “I failed everyone I care about,” he said. “I made a series of bad decisions.” He maintained, however, that he could have paid back customers if he had been allowed to keep control of his company.

FTX’s Collapse

Bankman-Fried’s sentencing comes four months after a highly publicized trial in which he took the stand to claim that FTX’s collapse was the result of mistakes and not ill intent. Ultimately he was found guilty on all seven of the criminal counts he was charged with by the Department of Justice; the jury took less than five hours to come to their decision.  

Bankman-Fried, who often goes by the nickname SBF, founded the crypto exchange FTX in 2019. It allowed its customers to purchase bitcoin, ether and other cryptocurrencies with cash, as well as to make all sorts of high-risk bets on the direction of cryptocurrency prices. Thanks to an aggressive marketing campaign that included a Super Bowl commercial with Larry David and endorsement deals with Tom Brady and Stephen Curry, FTX became one of the most-used crypto exchanges in the world. In October 2021, Bankman-Fried was anointed by Forbes as the world’s richest 29-year-old, with a net worth of $22.5 billion.

But in November 2022, rumors began to spread about FTX’s shaky financial position. When concerned customers began to pull back their money from the exchange, withdrawing at a rate of $120 million an hour, FTX was soon unable to meet the demand, and stopped processing withdrawals. Many people had tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars locked away in their accounts, unable to be retrieved. A few days later, Bankman-Fried signed away control of the company, which quickly filed for bankruptcy. 

At the trial last October, some of Bankman-Fried’s closest collaborators accused the former CEO of knowingly funneling money from FTX depositors to his trading firm, Alameda Research, over a period of several years. Documents show that Bankman-Fried then spent those funds on Bahamian real estate, startup investments and political donations. “The money belonged to customers and the customers did not give us permission to use them for other things,” FTX co-founder Gary Wang testified. 

Read More: The Bombshell Evidence That Led to Sam Bankman-Fried’s Conviction

The Battle Over Sentencing

Judge Lewis Kaplan, who berated Bankman-Fried during the trial for his evasive way of answering questions, handed out the sentence on Thursday. (Kaplan also presided over the recent defamation lawsuit brought by E. Jean Carroll against Donald Trump.)

Bankman-Fried faced a maximum of 120 years prison, but many of the charges were similar in nature, and so were not considered separately in sentencing. Over the last few months, both sides submitted letters to the judge lobbying for either a shorter or longer sentence. Bankman-Fried’s mother, Barbara Fried, wrote that her son has mannerisms associated with people on the autism spectrum—and that “his inability to read or respond appropriately to many social cues…put him in extreme danger” in prison, she wrote. 

The prosecution team, in contrast, submitted documents which they argued showed evidence of Bankman-Fried’s continued scheming and lack of remorse for his actions. After FTX collapsed in November 2022, Bankman-Fried wrote documents in which he brainstormed ways to garner public support. One of his ideas was “Go on Tucker Carlsen [sic], come out as a republican”—despite the fact that he had been one of the biggest Democratic donors of the 2022 election cycle.

Bankman-Fried’s lawyers also argued that Kaplan should take FTX’s asset recovery into consideration. While FTX had debts of over $8 billion when it collapsed, much of that money and perhaps more will now be able to be returned to FTX customers, due to a surge in crypto prices and AI assets, and the recovery efforts from the bankruptcy team. Bankman-Fried invested $500 million in the AI company Anthropic, and this week, FTX struck a deal to sell two-thirds of those shares for $884 million. (Notably, a forensic account had testified during the trial that the original investment had come out of customer funds.)

Restitution can be taken into account for sentencing—and Bankman-Fried should not be punished if customers are eventually made whole, his lawyers argued. But FTX’s new CEO, John Ray, pushed back against that logic, writing that when Bankman-Fried left FTX in November 2022, the company was “neither solvent nor safe.”

Kaplan, on Thursday, said that the defense’s claim that customers and creditors would be paid in full was “misleading,” “logically flawed,” and “speculative,” and had little bearing on the original crime of misappropriating the money. “A thief who takes his loot to Las Vegas and successfully bets the stolen money is not entitled to a discount on the sentence,” Kaplan said. 

Kaplan ruled that Bankman-Fried had attempted to tamper with a potential witness when he sent a text message in January 2023 to Ryne Miller, the former general counsel at FTX, asking to “vet things with each other.” He also criticized Bankman-Fried’s behavior as a witness on the stand during his trial. “When he wasn’t outright lying, he was often evasive, hairsplitting, dodging questions,” he said. 

Howard, the former prosecutor, says these sorts of behaviors were extremely costly for Bankman-Fried. “There are two things under sentencing law the judge has to consider: The seriousness of the offense, and the nature and characteristics of the defendant,” he says. “And Judge Kaplan basically said, ‘this is a deceptive, devious guy who can’t be trusted.’”

Kaplan himself said on Thursday that he decided on his sentence in part to make sure that Bankman-Fried cannot harm other people going forward. “There is a risk that this man will be in a position to do something very bad in the future,” he said. “In part, my sentence will be for the purpose of disabling him, to the extent that can appropriately be done, for a significant period of time.” 

Bankman-Fried will be almost 60 by the time his sentence is completed. In the federal system, prisoners can earn up to 54 days per year of good behavior, which amounts to about 15% of the sentence. 

At the sentencing on Thursday, Sunil Kuvari, a former FTX customer who says he lost $2.1 million on FTX and was involved in a class action lawsuit against influencers and celebrities who touted FTX, also testified against Bankman-Fried. Kuvari said that at least three people had committed suicide in the aftermath of FTX’s collapse. “I lived the FTX nightmare everyday for almost two years,” he said.

Meanwhile, Bankman-Fried’s co-conspirators who previously testified against him—Alameda co-CEO Caroline Ellison and FTX executives Gary Wang and Nishad Singh—are awaiting their own sentences after pleading guilty to various financial crimes and agreeing to cooperate with prosecutors. They seek sentences much lighter than Bankman-Fried’s.

Andrew R. Chow is writing a book about Bankman-Fried, Cryptomania, which will be published in August. 

Source: Tech – TIME | 29 Mar 2024 | 4:50 am

Elon Musk Announces Significant Changes to X. Here’s What to Know

COMBO-EU-US-DISINFORMATION-ISRAEL-PALESTINIAN-CONFLICT

Elon Musk has announced new changes to social media platform X (formerly Twitter) that will allow certain accounts to unlock free premium features.

Posting on the platform Thursday, the 52-year old tech billionaire, and TIME’s 2021 Person of the Year, said: “Going forward, all X accounts with over 2500 verified subscriber followers will get Premium features for free and accounts with over 5000 will get Premium+ for free.”

[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]

Previously, X Premium features would cost a user $8 per month and include the ability to share longer posts and video uploads, have larger reply prioritization, and see fewer adverts on their timeline. Meanwhile X Premium+ users have all the features of Premium with no adverts in the For You and Following timelines, as well as access to generative artificial intelligence chatbot Grok

These models are the only way users can now display a blue checkmark that once denoted a verified account before the Tesla and SpaceX CEO acquired Twitter Inc for $44bn in April 2022.

The changes come two days after a U.S. judge threw out a lawsuit brought by X against a group that claimed hate speech has risen on the app since Musk’s takeover. 

X accused the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) of taking “unlawful” steps to access and misrepresent its company data in CCDH research. But Judge Charles Breyer said it was “evident” that Musk’s X could not handle criticism and that his firm was “punishing the defendants for their speech.” X is set to appeal Judge Breyer’s decision. 

Read More: A Brief History of Elon Musk Saying One Thing and Doing Another at Twitter

The number of people using X each day is also reportedly falling, lagging behind its market rivals Instagram and TikTok. 

As of February, the platform’s daily usership in America has decreased by 23% since November 2022, the month after Musk’s takeover was finalized, according to Sensor Tower figures reported by NBC News. Meanwhile, figures show that TikTok recorded drops of 10%, while Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat all had user slumps of less than 5%.

[video id=0X9Opybd autostart="viewable"]

Outside the U.S., global figures have also taken a hit. Daily active users on X fell to 174 million, a decline of 15% on the previous year. Meanwhile Snapchat grew by 8.8%, Instagram recorded 5.3%, Facebook 1.5%, and TikTok 0.5%, per Sensor Tower data.  

“This decline in X mobile app active users may have been driven by user frustration over flagrant content, general platform technical issues, and the growing threat of short-form video platforms,” Abe Yousef, a senior insights analyst at Sensor Tower, wrote in a research report. 

In a post shared by X Data on March 18, the platform said it currently welcomes 250 million global daily users. Outlets such as NBC News have been quick to point out that this is still a decrease from the 258 million users Musk reported in 2022, upon completing his acquisition of the platform.

Source: Tech – TIME | 29 Mar 2024 | 3:35 am

Women in NYC Are Posting TikToks About Getting Punched in the Face on the Street

screenshots from three tiktoks showing women speaking about being punched in New York

When Halley Kate, a New York City-based TikToker posted a video on Monday shortly after getting punched in the face by a stranger, at least 12 more young women posted on the social media platform to share similar tales. 

“I was literally like leaving class, I turned the corner, and I was looking down and I was looking at my phone and texting and then out of nowhere this man just came up and hit me in the face,” Mikayla Toninato, a TikTok user who posted about her assault on Tuesday, said in her video. “I’m like actually in shock right now. I’m just walking home because what else do you do?”

[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]

It’s unclear whether the reports are part of a broader coordinated attack on women, or how many people have been perpetrating the assaults. (Most women said a man initiated the attack, though others said a woman had.) In response to a list of questions about the TikTok videos, whether the New York Police Department (NYPD) is investigating the assaults, and crime rates in NYC, the NYPD said it has a report on file for assault and on Wednesday arrested and charged 40-year-old Skiboky Stora for hitting a woman in the head on Monday. The investigation remains ongoing, a spokesperson said. The NYPD did not say whether Stora’s victim, who wasn’t named in the police report, was one of the women who posted about her assault on TikTok. It’s not clear whether Stora has retained an attorney.

There are certain patterns that have emerged from the initial series of TikTok videos: some victims have shared similar details about being on the phone when the assault happened. At least two users said they were attacked near Times Square—though the assaults happened on different days. Others said the attacks were in neighborhoods including Noho, the East Village, and Brooklyn. All the women say they were punched, or the perpetrator attempted to punch them, on the street in broad daylight. Not all of the attacks happened in the last 48 hours, but many women have been emboldened to share previous assaults.

“I was just walking down the street today at like 5, so kind of midday, and this woman walks past me… and out of nowhere I feel someone grab the back of my head, pulling my hair, trying to pull me to the ground,” said Desiree Brady in a TikTok video posted on Tuesday night. Brady said she was then punched in the face. 

The emerging number of videos of young women sharing their stories are the latest high-profile incidents that have stirred conversations about safety in New York City. On Wednesday, a young man died after being pushed onto the subway track. On March 14, a subway shooting on the A train made national headlines. In early March, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul announced her plan to deploy 1,000 personnel, including 750 National Guard troops, to “protect New Yorkers on the subways.” Another 800 officers were deployed after the subway shooting.

Despite online chatter about increasing crime in the city, Christopher Herrmann, a professor at the CUNY John Jay College of Criminal Justice who was a former crime analyst supervisor with the New York Police Department, says that notion is not quite true. “If you’re looking at the numbers, overall, total crime is down a little over 2% this year,” he says. “Robbery is down 80% since the ‘90s and assault is down 26% since the ‘90s. So we’re nowhere close to… when crime was really kind of rampant in New York City.”

Still, a collection of year-to-date statistics by the NYPD found that felony assault and robbery have increased by 3% and 4.1% so far in 2024, respectively. “These are the high volume, violent crimes that a lot of people care about and that a lot of people hear about. When it goes up a percent or two, you know, we’re talking about dozens of more victims every week now,” says Herrmann. More serious crimes like murder have decreased by 17.8%. Rape has gone done by 1.2%. 

Herrmann says he isn’t sure whether the alarming number of videos about women getting hit in the street is part of a social media trend highlighting a crime rate that already existed, or whether this specific street crime rate is rising in NYC. Many crimes go unreported; a Pew Research Center report found that only 40.9% of violent crimes were reported in 2019.

“This is one of the problems with crime statistics in general. Someone posts something on TikTok and all of a sudden, it’s like, ‘Oh, hey, that happened to me too,’” says Herrmann. Referencing the number of videos posted online after Kate’s initial post, he adds, “You get that snowball effect.”

Source: Tech – TIME | 28 Mar 2024 | 10:57 am

The U.S. Military’s Investments Into Artificial Intelligence Are Skyrocketing

Pentagon

U.S. government spending on artificial intelligence has exploded in the past year, driven by increased military investments, according to a report by the Brookings Institution, a think tank based in Washington D.C. 

The report found that the potential value of AI-related federal contracts increased by almost 1,200%, from $355 million in the period leading up to August 2022, to $4.6 billion in the period leading up to August 2023.

[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]

This increase was almost entirely driven by the Department of Defense (DoD). The total amount committed by the DoD to AI-related contracts increased from $190 million in the period leading up to August 2022 to $557 million in the period leading up to August 2023. 

The total that the DoD might spend on AI-related contracts if each contract were extended to its fullest terms grew even faster, from $269 million in the period leading up to August 2022 to $4.3 billion in the period leading up to August 2023. This potential surge in military spending was so large that “all other agencies become a rounding error,” the report’s authors note.

https://datawrapper.dwcdn.net/ZgipY/4/
The DoD has made a number of recent announcements regarding its use of AI. In November 2023 it released an AI adoption strategy, and in January of this year Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense Michael C. Horowitz stated that the DoD had launched a number of AI initiatives and investments.

These announcements, and the dramatic increase in AI spending, come at a time of fierce technological competition between the U.S. and China. The AI superpowers are nurturing their domestic industries for the semiconductor chips required to develop the most powerful AI models, while the U.S. government has imposed export restrictions that aim to prevent China from acquiring the most advanced chips.

When asked for comment, a DoD official questioned the accuracy of the Brookings analysis, pointing out that, for example, the department requested $874 million in fiscal year 2022 for AI research, development, testing and evaluation and $1.8 billion for AI research, development, testing and evaluation in fiscal year 2024.

But despite the substantial increase, public expenditures on AI are dwarfed by those of big tech companies. In the private sector, AI researchers and engineers command salaries in the millions. Companies are investing heavily in the computational resources required for cutting-edge AI systems, too. Mark Zuckerberg, founder and CEO of Meta, recently claimed that by the end of 2024, his company would own more than 340,000 Nvidia H100 GPUs, the semiconductor chip of choice for advanced AI models, which cost around $30,000 each. Microsoft is reportedly annually investing more than $50 billion into data centers packed with semiconductor chips.

Even putting aside expenditures on AI infrastructure, the private sector significantly outspends the public sector on AI, says Josh Wallin, a Fellow in the Defense Program at D.C.-based think tank Center for a New American Security. This is unlikely to change, given how general-purpose of a technology AI is, he argues.

The Brookings report also found that the size of the contracts awarded was starting to increase, reflecting a shift from small-scale experimentation to larger-scale implementation. AI’s technological maturation, rather than geopolitical competition with China, is responsible for the surge in military AI spending, says Wallin.

“DoD has obviously been aware of the fact that we are up against potential adversaries in terms of AI development,” says Wallin. “DoD has been investing for the last several years in capability development, and they’re finally just getting to the point where they’re having to actually deploy, validate, and do a lot more large-scale experimenting.”

Source: Tech – TIME | 28 Mar 2024 | 10:10 am

Cell Phone Pouches Promise to Improve Focus at School. Kids Aren’t Convinced

Yondr pouch

When the students at Eastlake High School in Colorado Springs, Colo., returned to their school building in January 2021 following the COVID-19 lockdowns, principal Cassandra Berry noticed that they were glued to their phones even more than before. Students texted throughout classes, ignoring teachers. Fights broke out, sparked by nasty missives sent over DMs and posted on social media. 

[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]

“We had a couple of fights, and unfortunately, one of them was taped by a student in the classroom and posted on social media,” Berry says. “We wanted to make sure to nip that in the bud.” 

After mulling different solutions, Berry signed a contract this year with Yondr, an ed-tech company that sells locked pouches for cell phones. Berry learned about them when she went to a Dave Chappelle comedy show that required audience members to stow their phones during the performance. She liked the experience and thought it could be effective for her students as well. 

Eastlake High School now is one of thousands of schools across the world that have turned to Yondr in order to combat phone addiction and distraction. Founded in 2014, Yondr has rapidly expanded since the pandemic and now serves more than 1 million students in 21 countries. The company has had more than a tenfold increase in sales from government contracts since 2021, from $174,000 to $2.13 million, according to GovSpend, a data service. 

Some teachers swear by Yondr, saying it has dramatically transformed their classrooms to allow students to actually focus on learning. But many students have decried it as invasive and paternalistic, and some parents argue that phones are a safety tool, especially given the proliferation of school shootings. Some experts also worry that the money spent on Yondr could be better spent on other resources. 

“I would call into question if you’re putting it into schools that are quote-unquote under-resourced academically,” says Tanji Reed Marshall, CEO and principal consultant of Liaison Educational Partners. ‘“So you don’t want to support my academics, but you want to put my money on buying a tool to keep me off my phone?’”


The debate over whether phones belong in schools has raged for more than a decade. A 2015 study found that test scores rose by as much as 6% after cell phone bans were enacted. Phone usage has only escalated since then: A Pew Research Center study last year found that a third of teens were on social media “almost constantly.” 

A majority of parents support limits on cell phone usage in schools, one study found, and many schools already have cell phone bans in place. But the same study found that parents are largely skeptical of taking phones away from kids outright. And many students have tried to resist these more restrictive measures. At least 80 petitions calling for schools to stop using Yondr have been created on Change.org. “They are inconvenient and a waste of money,” reads one petition started in January 2023, which has garnered over 600 signatures. 

Nevertheless, some U.S. school districts, including in Holyoke, Mass., and Akron, Ohio, have mandated it for middle and high school students, and legislative efforts may be coming as well: Both Republican and Democratic Senators have flagged tamping down cell phone use as a priority this congressional year. Arkansas Republican Tom Cotton told CBS News, “Teachers dislike cell phones the way the devil hates holy water.”

A Yondr spokesperson addressed student concerns in an email, writing, “There will always be students who try to push boundaries, but in our experience, we see 90/95% compliance in the vast majority of our schools, practically overnight….Yondr is not a punishment, we know that when students are given the opportunity to experience a phone-free school environment, they feel the benefits and can then fully understand why it’s a good idea to have regular breaks from their phones/social media.” The spokesperson added that the company’s reach in schools is expected to “grow significantly” for the next academic year. 


At the start of every day at Eastlake High School, students turn off their phones and put them in individual Yondr pouches. They keep their ensconced phones on them and then unlock them by tapping them on a magnetic device at the end of each day as they leave. After more than a month of Yondr usage, Berry says the experiment is helping students focus. “We had a young lady who half the time she’s engaged and half the time she’s not. After we started doing Yondr, one day she told the teacher, ‘Well, I guess I gotta do classwork, because I don’t have anything else to do,’” Berry says. 

Berry says the number of fights between students has decreased, because there are fewer impetuses to start them. “They don’t have to worry about what someone’s saying about them or what someone thinks about them, because they don’t see it throughout the day,” Berry says. “They’re all working on their work.” 

Yondr typically costs $25 to $30 a student. Berry says that Eastlake High School used Title IV funds to pay about $2,400 for 80 pouches. She acknowledges that Eastlake’s small size—fewer than 100 kids—allowed them to keep the costs down.  

One public school teacher in New South Wales in Australia, who was contacted by TIME via Reddit direct message, has also been very happy with Yondr since their school district implemented it two years ago. “We know that a number of students don’t use them correctly and still have their phones accessible, but they’re rarely being brought out and used in class or during breaks, which was a significant problem before,” the teacher wrote. “I’m not paranoid about students filming or photographing me during class to then post on social media and rant about me. We’ve also noticed that our students are far more active and social during their breaks.” (The teacher, who teaches 12- to 18-year-olds, asked TIME not to use their name because they were not authorized to speak about school policies.)

But Yondr’s rollout has been far from perfect. Marshall consulted for a large public school in Massachusetts that tried to introduce it last fall. For a while, the effort was successful: “The administration found that the building didn’t have as much high energy, because their weekend drama isn’t coming to school with all the texting,” Marshall says. 

Within weeks, however, students began to fight back against the program, which they perceived as a control mechanism—especially because the other two schools that shared the same building did not require the pouches. “The students felt put upon. They didn’t feel as though they were part of the process and felt this was targeted towards Black and brown kids in schools that are under-resourced,” she says. 

And once students started to rebel, they found ways to get to their phones in spite of the pouch.  “Students were very adept at adapting to this new environment,” Marshall says. “They found ways to keep phones and pretend they had Yondr. They found ways to break into the Yondr; they found ways to ignore it altogether.” Within 60 days, Marshall says the teachers at the school stopped enforcing the use of Yondr. 

Similarly, Regina Galinski, a New York City parent, says that her child’s school’s use of Yondr has been relatively ineffective. “It’s pretty useless, since kids have access to Chromebooks and just chat that way,” she wrote over Facebook Messenger. “It helps in the lower grades when kids follow rules, but as they get older, they are pointless. If you hit the pouch hard enough, it pops open.” 

“The pouch is very durable,” a Yondr spokesperson said, “and schools are provided with guidance and processes in which they can ensure students are compliant.” 

Improving schools via technology and other novel solutions has proved challenging. A February 2024 report examined a $1.4 billion Department of Education initiative to develop and test new ideas in the classroom and found that only a quarter of those innovations yielded any positive benefits for students and no negative harms.

Marshall says she’s not against Yondr but believes it needs to be rolled out in a conscientious way, and with the buy-in of everyone involved: students, parents, and teachers. “Yondr is neither good nor bad,” Marshall says. “It’s as good or bad as the systems and the conditions around which it is meant to operate.”

Source: Tech – TIME | 28 Mar 2024 | 4:45 am

Can AI Help You Do Your Taxes?

Taxes, AI help

Leaders of AI companies often argue that AI products will handle mundane tasks, freeing people up to be more productive and creative. And there are few tasks more mundane than taxes. An individual American taxpayer spends roughly 13 hours and $240 out-of-pocket costs just to prepare and file one annual tax return, according to one 2022 study—an estimated 1.15 billion hours collectively spent on tax preparation.

So it’s not surprising that tax companies have begun rolling out AI-powered tools in an effort to make filing easier. AI-powered tax software, these companies argue, can automate repetitive tasks like data entry, cull through patterns in order to find relevant tax breaks, identify potential compliance risks, and answer tricky questions that filers may have. 

[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]

But like a lot in the world of artificial intelligence at the moment, the promise of AI tax tools is more compelling than the products currently available. This year, AI chatbots have given out wrong answers to straight-forward tax questions, a dangerous proposition especially for filers who depend on refunds to pay bills. Tax experts contend that taxpayers should not rely exclusively on AI tools to file this year. However, some still predict that AI will have a major impact on both the way people file and the entire tax industry in the years to come.

Read More: The 3 Most Important AI Innovations of 2023

“Building tax software in the U.S. is very complicated, tedious and requires a lot of capital and time,” says Ben Borodach, co-founder & CEO of the AI tax startup April. “AI allows us to basically 10x the rate at which we code tax law—which will allow new providers to come into the market with better products and services.”

The IRS’s Use of AI

The first way that AI is already having an impact on taxes on the Internal Revenue Service itself. The IRS is notoriously underfunded and slow to respond to individual questions about returns. In 2022, President Biden granted the IRS $80 billion over ten years as part of the Inflation Reduction Act, which earmarked funding for tech upgrades to ease the experience of filers. (Republicans in Congress clawed back $20 billion of that, however.) 

That IRS funding has gone in part to the development of voicebots and chatbots, which have helped more than 13 million taxpayers avoid wait times in getting their questions answered, according to an IRS statement. However, Subodha Kumar, a professor at the Fox School of Business at Temple University, has been testing IRS’s chatbots with his students at the Center for Business Analytics and Disruptive Technologies, and says they are “not really great yet” in terms of delivering useful answers at a high rate. “But they’re still working on it,” he adds.  

The IRS also intends to deploy artificial intelligence in auditing. The IRS has long grappled with bias in that process: Black taxpayers are three to five times more likely to be audited than other taxpayers, research has shown. In September, the IRS announced that it would use AI tools as part of an effort to “restore fairness,” detect tax cheating, and focus its auditing on high earners. 

Kumar, however, worries about the biases that generative AI systems could bring to an already flawed process. “Many of these generative AIs are built on the kind of data that has the potential to have this kind of bias,” he says. “That worry is genuine: It may not only create more headache for the IRS, but pain for certain segments.” 

The Rollout of Chatbots

Most people don’t file their taxes with the IRS directly: they use software like TurboTax and H&R Block. A survey of 3,499 people from PCMag found that 58%  of respondents filing online used TurboTax, while 14% used H&R Block Deluxe. Both of those companies have turned to AI to bolster their products. Last year, H&R Block announced a partnership with Microsoft and OpenAI to create products including AI Tax Assist, a chatbot trained on information from H&R Block’s accountants, lawyers and tax professionals. 

Jeff Jones, the CEO of H&R Block, says that advancements in generative AI have “unleashed a whole new level of possibility for the business.” “Our basic approach is, let’s just start deploying models in real time and let our own knowledge inform our product roadmap instead of sitting on the sidelines and waiting to see what happens,” Jones says. 

But the rollout hasn’t been perfect. A Washington Post reporter found that both H&R Block’s AI Tax Assist and TurboTax’s Intuit Assist incorrectly answered questions about taxes. Jones acknowledges that AI Tax Assist doesn’t always give the right answer. He points out that the chatbot is one of three options provided to customers who need help, next to a live-chat option and a search engine that directs customers to knowledge articles. “Any time something is being done for the first time in the world, innovation is ripe for criticism,” he says. “We’ve tried to provide the guardrails necessary so the consumer understands how early in this journey this technology really is. You want to make sure you get professional expert help before you rely on the answers.” 

Because these tools are rudimentary, the level of skepticism remains high. Jones says that customers calling in asking for help have generally preferred to wait to talk to a human rather than talking to a conversational AI. Meanwhile, a survey from The American Survey this month found that 73% of at least 23,900 respondents say they wouldn’t trust AI to help them do their taxes. 

Can AI Startups Disrupt the Status Quo?

As the powerhouses of the tax world incorporate AI, startups have also emerged in the last couple years with the hopes of taking some of their market share. One of those is April, which was founded in 2021 and raised $30 million in a Series A funding round the following year. 

A key draw of April’s software is that it is embedded within financial apps that people already use, including Gusto, a payroll platform, and Chime, a mobile banking app. April automatically imports data from those sources to give users tax estimates and information throughout the year, so they’re not starting from scratch every March or April. April is now available in 50 states. Ben Borodach, the company’s CEO, says that tens of thousands of people are using April to file their taxes this year. 

More From TIME

[video id=4zJkZ15v autostart="viewable"]

April wields machine learning to analyze tax code and tax forms in order to personalize filings. Borodach says building the company would have been impossible without AI tools. “The federal law has grown to tens of millions of words, and the legal code changes every year,” he says. “As a provider, you have to go through testing and build in a very short period of time. AI has dramatically reduced the amount of time and capital to get this done.” 

The user experience of April feels pretty similar to that of TurboTax: It asks you various yes/no questions about your job, family, education that might be pertinent to taxes. April also comes with its own AI-powered chatbot that algorithmically generates answers by combining knowledge from AI models and content from April’s support team. 

But April’s product is only useful if filers already use one of the services that April has partnered with. And its coverage isn’t all-encompassing: It is unable to help you if you need to file two state returns, for instance. Borodach says April’s services will continue to expand in the coming years. “The AI story in tax is all about enabling a new provider in the space, which we haven’t had in the market for years,” he says. 

Kumar, at Temple University, agrees, and points to other startups creating similar products to April, including Chetu, Keeper and FlyFin. “For a long time, there were two to three companies who were ruling this market. But going forward, that will not be the case,” he says. 

Helping disadvantaged filers

Code for America, a nonprofit focused on bringing 21st century technology to government, has also been exploring how AI might aid filers in need. Code for America has a program called “Get Your Refund,” in which it pairs low-to-moderate-income applicants with volunteer tax filing experts. In 2023, the nonprofit reported that the program helped 24,500 taxpayers in 29 states and DC claim over $33 million in benefits. 

Recently, Code for America realized that one of the major barriers to helping applicants was the simple but tedious matter of making sure all of their correct documents were uploaded. Now, the nonprofit is looking into how it might use machine learning to identify uploaded documents, label them, and figure out what’s missing before passing an applicant on to an actual human volunteer. This could then free up the volunteers that were previously culling through documents to provide more hands-on help. “We’re really interested in being able to use new technologies in a human-centered way to be able to provide this more empathetic and dignified experience,” says Jenn Thom, Code for America’s senior director of experience insights, who also leads the organization’s AI strategy. “And there are a lot of bottlenecks still out there that can be tackled with AI.” 

Kumar, at Temple, similarly believes that generative AI could be a “game-changer for filers, and reduce lots of steps for the users.” However, the idea that an AI could do your taxes for you without guidance or oversight remains far away. “At least for the next five to seven years,” Kumar says, “people will still need to check everything.”

Source: Tech – TIME | 27 Mar 2024 | 5:58 am

What to Know About Meta’s ‘Political Content’ Limit—and How to Turn It Off on Instagram

Instagram and Facebook

Meta has come under fire in recent days from social media users startled to discover they’ve been automatically enrolled in a relatively new setting that reduces “political content” on Instagram and Threads, with the company being accused of censorship amid an important global election year.

“This is not okay,” civil rights attorney Scott Hechinger posted on X (formerly Twitter). “Instagram is now trying to suppress political content just months before the next presidential election. Why is Meta attempting to censor the democratic process?” asked Republican Sen. Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee.

[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]

In fact, Meta announced that it was rolling out the setting in a little-noticed February blog post, saying that it wanted to make its platforms “a great experience for everyone” and claiming that it would not filter content from followed accounts but rather would limit its algorithm from “proactively” surfacing political content from unfollowed accounts. The new setting—which users can opt out of—applies to the Feed, Reels, Explore, and Suggested Users parts of Instagram and Threads. This comes as Meta has continued to reduce political content on its Facebook platform since 2021.

Here’s what to know about the political content setting—and how to turn it off if desired.

Why is Meta reducing political content?

“One of the top pieces of feedback we’re hearing from our community right now is that people don’t want politics and fighting to take over their experience on our services,” Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said during an earnings call in January 2021. But the Wall Street Journal reported last year that the company wasn’t just responding to consumer preferences: After the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol in 2021, Meta’s leaders were tired of the litany of criticisms leveled at the social media giant—that it amplified misinformation and disinformation, hate speech, and partisan bias—and embarked on implementing drastic changes to demote content about political and social issues as a result.

“We have been working for years to show people less political content based on what they told us they want, and what posts they told us are political,” Dani Lever, a spokesperson for Meta, told TIME in a statement after publication.

What other content is filtered on Instagram, Facebook, and Threads?

In addition to now reducing “political” content, Meta has also curbed the reach of other forms of “problematic” content on its platforms, including “sensitive” content, such as depictions of violence and sexually suggestive material, as well as, in some regions, content that’s been found to contain false or partly-false content by independent fact-checkers. Both filters can also be adjusted in a user’s settings, though a user must be 18 years of age or older to be able to opt to see more sensitive content.

What does Meta mean by “political” content?

Meta’s definition of political content is vague. A Meta spokesperson told CNN: “Informed by research, our definition of political content is content likely to be about topics related to government or elections; for example, posts about laws, elections, or social topics. These global issues are complex and dynamic, which means this definition will evolve as we continue to engage with the people and communities who use our platforms and external experts to refine our approach.” In-app settings describe “political content” as “likely to mention governments, elections, or social topics that affect a group of people and/or society at large.”

Adam Mosseri, Meta’s head of Instagram, said in a series of posts on Threads about the political content moderation feature that it would apply only to public accounts. According to Instagram’s blog post announcing the feature, accounts are classified as political if “they’ve recently posted political content,” and professional accounts, such as those used by businesses, may check their status to see if they remain eligible for recommendation.

Despite broader efforts to reduce political content on Meta platforms, Threads, the company’s X competitor that launched in 2023, recently announced a new trending section, called Topics, which it says will not limit political content. “Political content can be a topic,” a representative for Meta told TechCrunch. “We will only remove political topics if they violate our Community Guidelines or other applicable integrity policies. Today’s topics aim to reflect timely, relevant topics in the app, and are not personalized recommendations.”

Why is the new moderation policy controversial?

Meta’s reduction of “political” content on Instagram has only added to existing concerns about its seemingly nebulous content moderation practices. Some users claim that the company is actively muzzling civic action, with widespread allegations of a particular crackdown on pro-Palestinian voices amid the ongoing war in Gaza, as social media platforms have been prominently used to share information and advocacy.

In a December report, Human Rights Watch alleged that Meta’s content moderation policies have “increasingly silenced voices in support of Palestine” on Instagram and Facebook. “Meta’s censorship of content in support of Palestine adds insult to injury at a time of unspeakable atrocities and repression already stifling Palestinians’ expression,” said Deborah Brown, the group’s acting associate technology and human rights director. “Social media is an essential platform for people to bear witness and speak out against abuses while Meta’s censorship is furthering the erasure of Palestinians’ suffering.”

And an investigation published last month by tech news outlet The Markup of “shadowbanning,” when users claim to be stealthily demoted by a platform, on Instagram since the outbreak of the Israel-Hamas war “found that Instagram heavily demoted nongraphic images of war, deleted captions and hid comments without notification, suppressed hashtags, and limited users’ ability to appeal moderation decisions.”

How can I change my political content setting?

The controversial content-moderation feature is enabled by default but is easy to change in one’s Instagram settings, though it must be done in the mobile app. To do so, one must navigate to their personal profile, then tap the three-line icon at the top right to enter the ‘Settings and activity’ or ‘Settings and privacy’ (depending on region) menu. Scroll down to the ‘What you see’ section and tap ‘Content preferences’ or ‘Suggested content’ (depending on region). From there, select ‘Political content’ to see two options, described as follows:

Limit political content from people you don’t follow. You might see less political or social topics in your suggested content. (enabled by default)

Don’t limit political content from people you don’t follow. You might see more political or social topics in your suggested content.

Source: Tech – TIME | 26 Mar 2024 | 10:45 pm

New York Deploys Hundreds of Officers in Crackdown on Subway Fare Evasion

Fare Jumping In New York City

NEW YORK — New York City plans to intensify a crackdown on subway fare-beating by sending at least 800 police officers specifically to keep watch on turnstiles, officials announced Monday.

It’s the latest in a string of recent moves to address concerns about safety and unruliness in the nation’s busiest subway system. Hours after the announcement, a person was shoved onto the tracks in East Harlem as a train was approaching the station. The train could not stop and the person was struck and was pronounced dead at the scene, the New York Police Department said.

[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]

A 45-year-old man was taken into custody. NYPD said the incident was unprovoked.

The NYPD said earlier Monday it plans to deploy hundreds of uniformed and plainclothes officers this week to deter fare evasion.

“The tone of law and order starts at the turnstiles,” department Transit Chief Michael Kemper said at a news conference. Chief of Patrol John Chell said the additional officers would fan out to various stations, based on crime, ridership statistics and community complaints.

Data shows the crackdown on fare-skippers is already under way. Over 1,700 people have been arrested on a charge of turnstile-jumping so far this year, compared to 965 at this time in 2023. Police have issued fare evasion tickets to over 28,000 people so far this year.

A single subway ride is $2.90, though multiple-ride and monthly passes can cut the cost. Officials have complained for years that fare evasion costs the city’s transit system hundreds of millions of dollars a year. However, the policing of turnstile-jumpers has drawn scrutiny of tickets and arrests that disproportionately affected Black and Hispanic people, at least in some past years.

Police and Mayor Eric Adams, a former transit officer himself, in recent weeks have suggested some links between fare-skipping and violence on the trains.

Subway safety fears have proven difficult to put to rest since people in New York and other cities emerged from COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns to a 2021 spurt in crime.

After taking office in 2022, Adams rolled out a plan to send more police, mental health clinicians and social service outreach workers into the subways.

Police reports of major crimes in the transit system dropped nearly 3% from 2022 to 2023, and officials said Monday that overall crime so far this month is down 15% compared to last year.

But worries ratcheted up after some shootings and slashings in the last few months, prompting the NYPD to say in February that it was boosting underground patrols. Earlier this month, Gov. Kathy Hochul—like Adams, a Democrat—announced she was sending National Guard troops to help conduct random bag checks in the underground system.

Hours before Monday’s news conference, a man was stabbed multiple times on a subway train in a dispute over smoking, police said. A suspect was arrested.

Source: Tech – TIME | 26 Mar 2024 | 5:15 pm

U.S., U.K., and New Zealand Accuse China of Cyberattacks Targeting Politicians, Voters

Hacker cyber attack

The U.S. and U.K. accused state-backed Chinese hackers of targeting politicians, companies and dissidents for years, as well as stealing troves of British voter data, in the latest revelation of cyberattacks that Washington and its allies have linked to President Xi Jinping’s government.

U.S. officials said seven Chinese nationals targeted members of Congress and officials working at the White House and agencies including the Justice Department, as well as candidates, campaign staff and U.S. companies. The hackers, part of a state-sponsored group known as APT31, have been charged with conspiracy to commit computer intrusions and conspiracy to commit wire fraud.

[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]

Both the U.S. and U.K. announced sanctions against two of those individuals, as well as a firm in Wuhan, China, called Wuhan Xiaoruizhi Science and Technology Co. The U.S. alleged it was a front that “has served as cover for multiple malicious cyber operations” and the hackers had worked there as contractors.

The U.K. also accused China of accessing details of some 40 million voters held by the Electoral Commission, according to Deputy Prime Minister Oliver Dowden.

The revelations Monday add to a growing list of cybersecurity breaches that the U.S. and its allies say are backed by the Chinese government as part of a broader strategic and economic competition worldwide.

New Zealand also established links between a state-sponsored actor linked to the Chinese government and malicious cyber activity targeting parliamentary activities there, Judith Collins, the minister responsible for the Government Communications Security Bureau, said Tuesday in Wellington. She said a compromise of the Parliamentary Counsel Office and the Parliamentary Service in 2021 was resolved quickly. 

China disputed the claims, with a foreign ministry official in Beijing calling the U.K.’s accusations “disinformation” and a spokesman for the Chinese embassy in Washington saying in a statement that the U.S. has “jumped to an unwarranted conclusion and made groundless accusations.”

In January, the FBI said that it had dismantled infrastructure used by a Chinese state-backed group named Volt Typhoon, which targeted the U.S. power grid and pipelines. Last October, security officials from the so-called Five Eyes—the U.S., U.K., Australia, New Zealand and Canada—raised alarm about Chinese hacking and espionage in media interviews and public appearances. In 2015, security researchers suspected Beijing was behind the theft of more than 22 million U.S. security clearance records.

U.K. Prime Minister Rishi Sunak said Monday that an “increasingly assertive” China’s support for the hacks present an “epoch-defining challenge” and “the greatest state-based threat to our economic security.” The head of the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation, Christopher Wray, called them “continuous and brash efforts to undermine our nation’s cybersecurity and target Americans and our innovation.

Malicious emails

According to U.S. authorities, some of the hacking activity successfully compromised the targets’ networks, email accounts, cloud storage accounts and telephone call records, with some surveillance of compromised email accounts lasting years.

The hacking campaign involved more than 10,000 malicious emails sent to targets that often appeared to be from prominent news outlets or journalists and appeared to contain legitimate news articles, U.S. authorities said. The emails contained hidden tracking links that would allow information about the recipient, including their location and devices used to access email, to be transmitted to a server controlled by the defendants and others that they were working with.

That information was the used by the group to carry out more sophisticated hacking, the U.S. Justice Department said, including compromising home routers and other electronic devices.

Among the more alarming allegations, the U.S. said that the hackers began targeting email accounts belonging to several senior campaign staff members for an unnamed presidential candidate in about May 2020. By that November, the hackers had sent emails containing tracking links to targets associated with additional political campaigns, including a retired senior U.S. government national security official, according to the indictment.

U.S. companies in the defense, information technology, telecommunications, manufacturing and trade, finance, consulting, legal and research industries were targeted by the group, and the victims include a provider of 5G network equipment in the U.S., an Alabama-based research corporation in the aerospace and defense industries and a Maryland-based professional support services company, according to the U.S.

In the U.K., the National Cyber Security Centre said it’s “almost certain” APT31 conducted reconnaissance activity against British parliamentarians during a separate campaign in 2021—though no parliamentary accounts were successfully compromised.

Britain summoned the Chinese ambassador in London, and Foreign Secretary David Cameron said in a separate statement that he raised the matter directly with Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi.

For the U.K., the episode marks an escalation in tensions that have been growing after Hong Kong passed security legislation that the U.K. says erodes freedoms in the city, contravening the handover deal signed between the two nations when governance of the territory was transferred to Beijing in 1997.

Source: Tech – TIME | 26 Mar 2024 | 2:45 pm

Building Affordable Homes Out of Plastic Waste

[video id=ZPma3wW2 autostart="viewable"]

With a growing population of over 120 million inhabitants, Ethiopia sees an estimated total consumption of plastic waste of around 400 million kilos every year. Kubik is a start-up based in Africa that makes building materials out of recycled plastic for affordable housing projects while reducing their carbon and plastic footprint.

Source: Tech – TIME | 26 Mar 2024 | 12:00 am









© 澳纽网 Ausnz.net