NEWS YOU CAN’T MISS

AI Scammers Are the Real Grinch This Holiday Season

The holiday shopping season has become a goldmine for scammers using AI to steal money from unsuspecting shoppers.

Scammers are creating fake shopping sites, ads, counterfeit IDs, and hyper-personalized videos that mimic authentic content, tricking people into trusting them.

These scams are rapidly growing:

• The FBI reports that senior citizens were conned out of roughly $3.4 billion in a range of financial crimes in 2023.

• This year, Visa blocked 200% more fraudulent charges on Black Friday and Cyber Monday compared to last year, while Mastercard stopped 9 times more fraud attempts.

• US shoppers have lost $8.7 billion to fraud through Q3 2024, up 14.5% from last year.

AI is at the center of this new wave and is being used in 25% of cases where scammers falsely verify identities. As Michael Jabbara (Visa’s Global Head of Fraud Services) puts it, we're in "a golden age for fraudsters."

The banks are fighting back with their own AI tools: JPMorgan Chase is using AI to validate payments, and Visa has invested $500 million in fraud detection tech.

So if this holiday season, a deal looks too good to be true, it probably is. Double-check websites, watch out for the red flags, be safe.

Don’t let AI-powered grinches steal your holiday cheer! 🎄🔒

OpenAI’s o3 Beat Its Own Chief Scientist at Programming

OpenAI has concluded its "12 Days of OpenAI" with the launch of o3, its new AI model built to further push the boundaries of reasoning in math, science, and programming.

Here’s why o3 is a game-changer:

• Over 20% more accurate than o1 in common programming tasks—it even outperformed OpenAI chief scientist Jakub Pachocki on a competitive programming test.

• Scored 87.5% on the ARC-AGI benchmark and nearly aced the 2024 American Math Exam, solving challenging tasks like logical puzzles and advanced programming problems.

• The o3-mini version is 4x faster than earlier models, making it perfect for quick-response tasks without sacrificing accuracy.

OpenAI has also added a new “deliberative alignment” to ensure the model behaves ethically and avoids errors such as misleading or deceptive reasoning.

Currently, o3 is accessible to safety researchers, with broader availability slated for January.

The new model is part of a broader push to develop AI systems capable of reasoning through complex tasks—Google recently released a similar tool called Gemini 2.0 Flash Thinking Experimental. Both tools function in the same way: tackle complex reasoning tasks by breaking problems into smaller, logical steps.

These similarities highlight a shared industry goal of creating AI systems that can reason more like humans while navigating the challenges of AI’s hallucination and safety.

WOMAN IN TECH

Meet Sarah Bird, Chief Product Officer of Responsible AI at Microsoft

Celebrating this week's Woman in Tech 🥳: Meet Sarah Bird, Chief Product Officer of Responsible AI at Microsoft, where she ensures the ethical development of AI applications like Microsoft's Copilot and the new Bing AI. 

Dr. Bird earned her MS and PhD in Computer Science from UC Berkeley, where she was advised by Turing Award winner Dave Patterson. 

Career Highlights:

• Before 2013: Interned at IBM, Google and Microsoft. At Microsoft, she helped improve the manufacturing test process for the Xbox 360’s processors.

• 2013: Served at Microsoft as a Technical Advisor, working on the company’s machine learning systems.

• 2017: Joined Facebook as a Technical Program Manager, working on Facebook’s AI research and applied machine learning systems.

• 2019: Returned to Microsoft to lead their responsible AI initiatives and lead the Responsible AI development for Github Copilot.

Under Bird's leadership, Microsoft helped define the requirements for Microsoft’s Responsible AI standard. She also contributed to the company’s Responsible AI tools including Fairlearn, SmartNoise and InterpretML. 

One of my fave quotes from Dr. Bird on the power of AI: 

“This technology has the amazing ability to meet people where they are. That gives it the potential to be the bridge to all other technologies or other complex systems.”

AI Judge in Boxing: Fair Play or Foul?

Oleksandr Usyk and Tyson Fury's much-anticipated rematch was scored by a 4th “AI judge” alongside the traditional three human judges.

All four judges gave the result in favor of Usyk, with the AI scoring it 118-112 compared to 116-112 from the human judges. Even though Usyk landed 42% of his punches compared to Fury’s 28%, debates over who truly deserved to win continue due to the subjective nature of boxing.

Many fans, including YouTube star KSI, felt that Fury deserved to win and suggested that AI still has a long way to go before it can replace human scoring. What do you think?

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