Per reporter: Zheng Yuhang, Li Menglin, Cai Ding, Tan Yuhan Per editor: Gao Han, Lan Suying, Tan Yuhan, He Xiaotao
This week, new types of domestic AI face-changing scams have occurred frequently, and some people were deceived of 4.3 million yuan in 10 minutes, which once rushed to the hot search, attracting the attention of the whole network. But using AI to commit fraud doesn't stop in China. Some experts estimate that AI fraud incidents in the United States have increased by more than 50% year-on-year in the past year.
In addition to the gullible elderly group, even some business elites have not been able to escape. How can we prevent such new types of fraud? "Daily Economic News" connects Peter Bentley, a computer scientist and artificial intelligence expert at University College London, to answer your questions.
As generative AI continues to be popular around the world, the price of computing power chips is also rising. Who is the big winner in the ChatGPT era? "People of the Week" takes you close to Huang Jenxun, the "shovel seller" who built the hard currency of Silicon Valley and led LinkedIn Weida to the trillion-dollar market capitalization club.
On Friday, Eastern time, U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen announced the postponement of the debt deadline to June 5, and people familiar with the matter said that the two parties in the United States may be close to negotiating a debt ceiling increase.
For more information, please find out in One Week International Finance.
"The crying is incomparably real!" It can be generated for as little as $5
How to prevent AI fraud
This week, new types of artificial intelligence fraud in China have occurred frequently, and typical cases of using AI to implement telecom fraud have rushed to the hot search, and some people were deceived of 4.3 million yuan in 10 minutes, which attracted the attention of the whole network.
Since ChatGPT detonated the generative AI boom in November 2022, the evolution of text, image, voice and video AI technologies has accelerated, bringing the potential for productivity revolution while giving criminals powerful tools. A few dollars plus a few seconds of speech can synthesize a fake human voice, and some experts estimate that AI fraud incidents in the United States have increased by more than 50% year-over-year in the past year.
Professor Peter Bentley, a computer scientist and artificial intelligence expert at University College London, said that there is currently no way to identify 100% AI-generated content, and individuals can no longer assume that what they see and hear on the screen is real, but can only be more vigilant and personally verify the authenticity of everything.
It is difficult to distinguish between true and false, and the increase in AI scams in the United States has exceeded 50% in the past year
Image source: Screenshot of CNN report
One day in late April, Jennifer DeStefano, an American woman, received a strange phone call. "Mom, I messed up!" On the other end of the phone came the voice of her eldest daughter, Brianna, who was preparing for a ski competition in the field, constantly asking her for help.
"Listen, your daughter is in my hands, if you call the police or tell anyone else, I'll drug her, throw her to Mexico when you've had enough, and you'll never want to see her again," a deep man's voice threatened over the phone, demanding a $1 million ransom from Jennifer.
Jennifer was stunned on the spot, but said that she could not get $1 million, and the man on the other end of the phone "sold" to $50,000. After hanging up the phone, Jennifer's friend called the police and tried to convince her that it was a scam, but the mother, who loved her daughter, couldn't listen to it, because the crying of the "daughter" was too real. Later, Jennifer had begun to discuss the way to transfer money with the other party, but fortunately her daughter called in time to report that she was safe and avoided property damage.
"When a mother can recognize her child, even if the child is across the building from me, I know it's my child when she cries," Jennifer was still surprised, recalling the exact same voice on the phone as her daughter.
According to CNN, with the development of AI technology, criminals can extort money by generating kidnapped dialogue clips based on just a few seconds of a person's voice material on social media, which may cost as little as $5 per month for the use of AI programs.
"Large language models can write text in any style, so if you have some samples of email or social media communication, it's now easy for AI to use to learn and pretend to be yourself." After example training, generative AI algorithms can also easily generate fake audio and video. As more and more applications have these features, it becomes more and more accessible," Professor Peter Bentley, a computer scientist and AI expert at University College London, told the Daily Economic News. ”
The U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) warned in May that bad actors are using AI voice technology to fake emergencies to defraud money or information, and such scams have skyrocketed 70% during the pandemic. Michael Skiba, an expert on international fraud in New York State, estimated to the media in May that the number of AI fraud cases in the United States has increased by between 50% and 75% year-on-year in the past year.
Although the losses caused by scams using AI technology are not separately calculated, the FBI's annual report released in March showed that the losses caused by online fraud in the United States reached $10.3 billion in 2022, a five-year high, and pointed to AI voice scams targeting the elderly as one of the hardest hit areas.
The maturity of AI synthesis technology has vividly demonstrated the cover video of AI Sun Yanzi, which is popular in China. Infinitely close to the real AI voice means that it is not only housewives or grandparents who will be deceived, but even business elites will be difficult to tell.
According to Gizmodo, the voice of a CEO of a British energy company was synthesized by scammers using AI technology, and then the scammers used the synthesized voice to guide phone transfers, defrauding him of £220,000 to his Hungarian account. The CEO said he was shocked to hear the AI-synthesized speech himself, because it mimicked not only his usual intonation, but even his "subtle German accent."
It only takes a few seconds to synthesize the original sound, it costs a few dollars How to prevent it?
Since ChatGPT sparked the generative AI boom, tech giants and startups have scrambled to launch and upgrade AI products. With technology accelerating iteration, applications becoming cheaper and cheaper, and regulatory means and strength difficult to cope with, AI fraud poses an urgent challenge.
At the beginning of 2023, Microsoft launched a new model VALL· E only needs 3 seconds of material to replicate anyone's voice, even the ambient background sound. Companies like ElevenLabs, Murf, Resemble and Speechify already offer services to generate AI voices, with monthly subscriptions ranging from a few dollars to $100 in premium packages.
Hany Farid, a professor of digital forensics at the University of California, Berkeley, said that a year or two ago cloning a person's voice required a large amount of audio data, and now only the human voice in a short video, AI software can analyze age, gender, accent and other characteristics, and then search a huge voice database to find similar sounds and predict patterns, thereby reconstructing the overall similar voice of an individual. "It's terrible, with all the conditions to cause a catastrophe," he said.
Jennifer also suspected that the scammers obtained the audio through her daughter's social accounts, and she said Brianna had a private TikTok account and a public Instagram account containing photos and videos of her ski races, CNN reported.
If AI voice is coupled with the same mature "face change" technology, "seeing is believing" can easily become a thing of the past. "The current AI audio and video scams, if you look and listen very carefully, you may find some strange 'errors' or tones," Professor Peter Bentley said, "but unfortunately, many people use audio filters to reduce noise when using mobile phone calls, which makes real people sound like fake and fake people may sound like real people, so we can no longer assume that anything we see or hear on the screen is real." ”
How can ordinary people train their sensitivity and prevent being deceived? Professor Peter Bentley said there was currently no way to recognise the difference between AI-generated and real.
"So the best advice is: Be suspicious and double-check anyone who asks you for money or personal information, even if 'he' appears to be a trusted friend or family member." Be sure to call them back, preferably by video, or preferably meet them in person to see if the request is genuine. If you need help from a friend, talk to them in person. Either way, that's the right thing to do! ”
The big winner of the ChatGPT era, Jensen Huang
Create Silicon Valley hard currency and bring LinkedIn Weida to a trillion market value
Image source: Visual China
He loved a black leather jacket, tattoos on his arms, and muscles, and he donated a school building named after himself at Stanford.
He was extremely low-key and often out of the public eye. He devotes almost all of his time to work and is a complete workaholic. In his life, only four things mattered: working, thinking, helping others, and creating new things.
He is Huang Jenxun, the head of NVIDIA. He founded NVIDIA at the age of 30 and has now been at the helm of the company for 30 years. This year, Huang Jenxun, who is a young man, has become a big winner in the ChatGPT era.
In 1999, at the height of the Internet bubble, Huang took LinkedIn Weida public. Today, 24 years later, Huang has led LinkedIn Weida to the trillion-dollar market cap club.
As of the close of trading on May 26 (Friday), NVIDIA's market value reached about $963.2 billion, and its stock price has risen by 46219.61% since listing. Based on the market value of the day, NVIDIA ≈ 8 Intel and 4.7 AMD.
Image source: Per Drawing
On this day, NVIDIA's market value skyrocketed by $184 billion; The intraday market value growth once reached $219.7 billion, surpassing Apple and Amazon, becoming the first single-day market value increase in the history of US stocks. $184 billion (about 1.3 trillion yuan) means that NVIDIA rose "1.6 Intel" and "1 PetroChina" in one day, and the market value of the one-day increase exceeded the market value of 472 companies in the S&P 500 index, including well-known companies such as Cisco, Nike, Disney and Netflix.
Image source: Per Drawing
As Nvidia co-founder and CEO, Huang's worth soared by about $6.5 billion overnight to more than $33 billion, and has skyrocketed about $20 billion so far this year, making him the fastest-growing fortune among the world's tech billionaires.
The most classic of Huang's success stories is that in August 2016, he arrived at the OpenAI office building with a supercomputer DGX-1 loaded with eight P100 chips. It was the DGX-1 that compressed OpenAI's one-year training time into just one month. Today, DGX is widely used by enterprises to optimize data and process AI.
Seven years later, at the NVIDIA Spring GTC Conference in March this year, Huang Jensen wore a black jacket and said the phrase "ChatGPT is the equivalent of the iPhone in the AI world." ”
With OpenAI's launch of ChatGPT, a wave in global capital markets, the market expects Nvidia to be the main beneficiary of advances in ChatGPT and other artificial intelligence (AI) technologies, and the value of Nvidia's stock and options soars.
The price of the NVIDIA H100 flagship chip, which represents the most cutting-edge technology, is more than $40,000 per piece.
And Huang's "bet" success is inseparable from his wise decision ten years ago. At that time, Huang Jenxun found that graphics cards had excellent performance in deep learning algorithms, so NVIDIA decided to abandon mobile chips, bet heavily on artificial intelligence, and then dominate the deep learning chip market.
Before ChatGPT, the algorithm-focused graphics card allowed NVIDIA to "accurately" catch up with virtual currency, meta-universe and other outlets.
During the cryptocurrency boom in 2017, as an indispensable device for cryptocurrency "miners", graphics cards made NVIDIA a lot of money, and its stock price soared. In 2020, with the rise of the metaverse, as the main force of graphics computing, it has become an indispensable infrastructure for the metaverse.
Although the collapse of the "currency circle" and the gradual decline of the meta-universe later caused NVIDIA's stock price to fall to a stage low, the artificial intelligence boom set off by ChatGPT made NVIDIA fight a beautiful "turnaround". Since the beginning of this year, NVIDIA has risen sharply, and its stock price has risen more than 200% from its bottom in August 2020.
Thanks to the all-or-nothing bet 10 years ago, of all the options available in the current market, NVIDIA products have far faster data transfer speeds than all competitors, including AMD and Intel. For NVIDIA's product competitiveness, Bank of America Securities semiconductor analyst Vivek Arya bluntly said, "Today's computing power is basically equivalent to the hard currency of Silicon Valley. The head Huang Jenxun has also become the "number one player in AI".
The combat readiness of the army has been raised to the highest level!
"European powder keg" ignited?
Image source: Sky Map
According to CCTV news on May 27, at 19 o'clock local time on the 26th, a large gathering called "Hopeful Serbia" called by Serbian President Vučić was held in front of the Serbian Parliament, and thousands of people from all over Serbia held up Serbian flags and slogans to express their support for Serbian President Vučić.
Serbian President Vučić ordered on the same day to raise the combat readiness of the Serbian army to the highest level and urgently move in the direction of the administrative line with Kosovo.
According to reports, on the same day, Serbs in the Zvecan Serb district of northern Kosovo clashed with Kosovo Albanian police, who used tear gas and detonation grenades in the clashes and broke into the administrative building of the Zvecan district. The Zvecan district is currently sealed off by the Kosovo Special Police.
Known as the "powder keg of Europe", Kosovo is an autonomous province of Serbia and was entrusted by the United Nations after the end of the Kosovo War in 1999. In 2008, Kosovo unilaterally declared independence, and Serbia has always insisted on sovereignty over Kosovo.
JPMorgan is developing a "ChatGPT-like" business
The technology and operations departments laid off about 500 jobs
Image source: Visual China
On May 27, according to foreign media reports, JPMorgan Chase (JPM. US) laid off about 500 jobs this week, mostly from its technology and operations divisions. The number of people who were laid off was only a small fraction of the total number of employees.
In addition, according to the US Consumer News and Business Channel (CNBC) reported on May 25, JPMorgan Chase is developing an artificial intelligence service similar to ChatGPT to help customers choose investment targets.
The investment bank reportedly filed for trademark registration this month for a product called IndexGPT. Lori Beer, JPMorgan's global head of technology, said the bank, which employs 1,500 data scientists and machine learning engineers, is testing "multiple use cases" of GPT technology.
Musk's brain-computer interface company, Neuralink
Approved to initiate human clinical trials
Image source: Visual China
On May 25, local time, Musk's brain-computer interface company Neuralink announced that the company has obtained approval from the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to launch its first human clinical study. This means that Neuralink will implant their device in human brains in the future.
Although the company currently has no plans to recruit volunteers, as soon as the news came out, many American netizens volunteered and were willing to act as "guinea pigs" to participate in the experiment.
But the experiment was also opposed by many activists. According to Reuters, Neuralink has been the subject of a U.S. government investigation at the time of FDA approval. Earlier this month, U.S. lawmakers urged the U.S. Department of Agriculture and other departments to investigate whether oversight of Neuralink's animal testing led to innocent animal deaths and hasty experimental results.
Yellen postponed the debt deadline until June 5
People familiar with the matter said that the two parties in the United States may be close to negotiating a higher debt ceiling
Image source: Visual China
On Friday, Eastern time, U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen sent a letter to congressional leaders on the debt ceiling that the Treasury Department will exhaust all unconventional means and touch the debt ceiling on June 5. In other words, a catastrophic default on U.S. debt could occur as early as June 5, four days later than Yellen's previously reiterated deadline of June 1.
According to a Reuters report quoted by Xinhua News Agency on May 25, Democratic President Joseph Biden and Republican Speaker of the House of Representatives Kevin McCarthy are close to reaching an agreement on raising the federal government's debt ceiling in the next two years and setting a ceiling for most federal financial spending.
According to The Washington Post, the White House has proposed redistributing the roughly $80 billion budget allocated to the IRS last year through the Inflation Reduction Act. A person familiar with the matter estimates that the IRS budget is unlikely to exceed $10 billion eventually "cut." According to Reuters, citing people familiar with the matter, Republican negotiators have retreated from their previous positions of increasing military spending and reducing non-defense spending to support the White House position, pushing for a more balanced defense and non-defense spending. Judging from his public statements, Biden stressed that there are still differences between the two sides on which spending to cut. McCarthy also said that "it is not easy to negotiate an agreement" and that "in the end it will not be satisfactory for everyone."
Biden on Ukraine's aid to F-16 fighters loose the chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff warning: it is not a "magic weapon"
Image source: Visual China
According to the latest news from the US "Political News Network", the top general of the US military warned on the 25th local time that F-16 fighters will not become Ukraine's "magic weapon", but the United States still fully supports NATO allies to take the lead in providing F-16 fighter assistance to Kiev.
The above warning was issued by Mark Milley, chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, who told reporters at the Pentagon on the same day, "Russia has 1,000 fourth-generation fighters," "If you want to confront Russia in the air, you need a large number of fourth- and fifth-generation fighters, and the wisest thing to do is exactly what we do, which is to provide a large number of integrated air defense systems to cover the battlefield space and prevent Russia from entering the airspace." ”
Fighters are reportedly much more expensive than artillery shells and ground vehicles. Mark Milley also said on the same day that it was worth spending money on these equipment and weapons, rather than on expensive fighters that require complex logistics.
Reporter|Zheng Yuhang, Li Menglin, Cai Ding, Tan Yuhan
Editor|Gao Han, Lan Suying, Tan Yuhan, He Xiaotao, Du Hengfeng
Proofreader|Lu Xiangyong
| Daily Economic News nbdnews original article|
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