Category: Business

Nothing says “I trust the future of medicine” quite like lighting a Marlboro and waiting for the chatbot to fix your lungs. That is the habit Palantir CTO Shyam Sankar says is spreading among AI researchers, who have supposedly started smoking cigarettes to prove how confident they are that AI will cure cancer.

“So many AI researchers have started smoking as a way of signaling to other researchers how much they believe in AI,” Sankar said in an interview on CBS News’ “Face the Nation” on Sunday. “I believe so much in AI that it’s going to cure cancer. So I’m showing you my chips are all in.”

He did not name a single researcher, cite a survey, or explain how he knows. The remark landed as an aside while host Margaret Brennan pressed him on why he was so focused on the topic.

He pointed to FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried as the effective altruist most Americans know, calling the movement a “millenarian doomsday cult.” He also invoked Pascal’s idea of a god-shaped hole in every human heart, which he suggested some of these researchers are filling with a machine god called AGI.

The medical record is less enthusiastic than the thesis. The CDC says smoking causes roughly one in three cancer deaths in the United States, and cigarette smoke contains at least 69 chemicals known to cause cancer.

Smokers face about 25 times the lung cancer risk of non-smokers, according to the agency. Quitting lowers the risk of 12 types of cancer, and the added lung cancer risk drops by half 10 to 15 years after stopping.

The cancer pitch is not new in this industry. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei said in August that promising AI will cure cancer has become “more a cliche than it is inspiring,” and that only actually curing it would earn the public’s trust.

That trust is thin. In the CBS poll Brennan cited, 50% of Americans said AI will create more problems than it solves, 29% said it will solve more than it creates, and 21% were unsure.

About 45% said they want the government to restrict AI’s use and development. Smoking to show faith in the technology does not obviously help that number, but it does help AI bros bond with each other. “When you’re smoking, you’re networking by accident,” Revamp AI cofounder Stephen Campbell told Business Insider last month.

The IMF’s Kristalina Georgieva recently warned that AI could hit 40% of jobs, and insiders expect a major AI incident within a year. Indirectly causing a lung cancer outbreak was probably not on their bingo card.

Palantir sells data-analysis software to governments and militaries. Most of its business relies on AI.

Strive is piling into Bitcoin at its fastest clip of the year, scooping up another 3,311 BTC worth roughly $280 million in its biggest single purchase since January.

The Nasdaq-listed asset manager, which trades under the ticker ASST, disclosed in a filing Monday that it bought the Bitcoin between Oct. 5 and Oct. 9 at an average price of about $84,500 per coin, including fees. The buy lifts Strive’s total holdings to 32,773 BTC, worth roughly $2.73 billion at today’s prices, up from 29,462 BTC a week earlier.

The purchase caps a stretch of aggressive accumulation. Strive added $169 million in Bitcoin earlier this month in what was then its largest buy in four months, after pushing its stack past 27,000 BTC with a $94.5 million purchase in late September.

The latest tranche extends that momentum, and the timing is notable: the firm bought as Bitcoin slid through a rough week, picking up coins at an average price well below the token’s recent highs near $87,000.

Strive, led by CEO Matthew Cole, is among a wave of public companies that have adopted Bitcoin treasury strategies, raising capital to stockpile the asset and tie their share price to its performance.

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The model, pioneered by Michael Saylor’s Strategy, has drawn a crowded field, and Strive has moved aggressively since going public through its merger with Asset Entities, recently completing a tie-up with Semler Scientific to bulk up its balance sheet. Beyond its Bitcoin, the company also holds about 505,000 shares of Strategy’s STRC preferred stock, valued near $50 million, and roughly $310 million in cash.

The buying spree arrives amid a flurry of treasury activity across the sector. Strategy itself recently added $21.5 million in Bitcoin while buying back preferred stock, Solana treasury firm DeFi Development Corp. kept accumulating SOL, and Bitmine continued stacking Ethereum, though chairman Tom Lee said that company is nearly finished and will halt purchases once it holds 5% of the token’s supply.

The strategy carries the category’s familiar risk: Strive’s fortunes rise and fall with a notoriously volatile asset. Buying into a dip can pay off if Bitcoin rebounds, but the same exposure cuts the other way, and treasury firms have faced scrutiny over how much their stock premiums depend on continued accumulation.

Vibe coders are porting PlayStation 5 applications to Windows and Linux, leaving some users optimistic that the project will unlock better performance for PS5 games, and could even work for GTA 6 at launch.

AnyPS5 is an open-source, AI-powered project on GitHub that converts PS5 game executables into programs that run natively on PC, swapping Sony’s system libraries for its own version rather than emulating the console. A community-run tracker lists more than 180 PS5 titles that have been tried with the tool, but only a handful have been verified as playable.

An important distinction to make is that this is not an emulator and that games will be running natively on PC. As a result, some speculators believe that users will be able to get better performance from PS5 games by playing them on a high-powered PC.

“GTA 6 most likely will be able to run on your PC at launch, and [with] significantly higher frames than it would on your PS5,” pseudonymous gaming content creator Schlayerr said on TikTok. “We live in a crazy time.”

“Technically, this is feasible given the similarities between console and PC architectures, and AI can dramatically accelerate the reverse engineering work,” Theodore Agranat, Director of Web3 at Gunzilla Games, the game studio behind battle royale Off the Grid, told Decrypt. However, he remained skeptical over whether they “can deliver the quality, performance, and fidelity players expect from AAA games at scale.”

The latest project update claims that 100% of the PS5 GPU shaders have been ported while 88% of the system libraries have been ported. Discord community members believe the final 12% for system libraries is likely to take a long time, especially as new system libraries are continuously being discovered.

In the Discord showcase channel, some users have shown off rudimentary demos of PS5 games on PC. One community developer reported running GTA 5 at 27 frames per second, or FPS, in the performance graphics mode. Others have reported getting 4 FPS on Epic Mickey, 25 FPS on Phasmophobia, and 60 FPS on Vampire Survivors. It’s still a work in progress.

Still, in all of these examples, the games aren’t fully playable due to the incomplete system library port as well as game-specific bugs being encountered.

A potential roadblock in playing GTA 6 on PC at launch is a mandatory firmware update, Discord members say. This is because the AnyPS5 project would need to overhaul its converted files to the latest update in order to get GTA 6 running. As such, there is likely to be a delay before the game is available on PC via AnyPS5.

“Firmware updates could create hurdles, particularly around DRM, but likely wouldn’t invalidate the entire approach,” Agranat said.

A response to Sony’s disc ban?

AnyPS5 bans any form of piracy in its Discord server, meaning using the tool requires purchasing the game on the PlayStation Store. That said, there is nothing stopping an individual using AnyPS5 with a pirated copy of a video game.

Some PlayStation users have speculated that the movement is a response to Sony’s plan to discontinue physical game discs.

“The reason this all happened is because Sony discontinued discs,” pseudonymous gaming content creator The 1st Gamer said on TikTok. “They wanted to go digital, and they did, but just not on PS5.”

Sony announced in July that it plans to stop producing physical discs at the start of 2028. The decision was met with major community backlash, including a petition called “Don’t Kill the Disc” gaining over 385,000 signatures. Shawn Layden, a former PlayStation executive, called the move a “heavily spreadsheeted decision” and said it has damaged the company’s reputation.

In August, Sony argued in a California court that purchasing a digital game in the PlayStation Store does not equate to ownership of it. Sony claimed its Terms of Service and the Software Product License Agreement explain this and that users should understand it as a fact.

“Even without Sony stopping physical discs, this was bound to happen with AI accelerating dev,” Agrant said. “My hope is that projects like this push platform holders to offer the same flexibility themselves, but at a much higher standard,” he told Decrypt, hoping for a future where Sony rolls out games on PC as well as console. “That would be a genuine win-win.”

Trezor is cutting its network of authorized resellers, telling partners their authorization ends on January 1, 2027, days after rival hardware wallet manufacturer Ledger started an investigation that eventually confirmed a hidden spy implant in crypto wallets sold through a third-party store.

The company announced the move on X on Tuesday, saying “there is not a single piece of evidence” that Trezor devices have been compromised. It described the cut as a preventive step taken out of caution.

“Following recent supply-chain incidents, we decided to reduce the number of resellers so we can more effectively check those we work with,” Trezor wrote.

A hardware wallet is a small device that keeps the secret keys to your crypto offline, away from hackers. Setting one up produces a 24-word recovery phrase that works as a master password: whoever has those words can empty the wallet from anywhere in the world.

Ledger’s Donjon security team says wallets sold by CryptoBilis, a reseller in Southeast Asia, contained an unauthorized component that reads the screen and decodes the recovery phrase when it appears. The spy implant then sends the words out over LTE, the same mobile data network your phone uses, through an eSIM, a SIM card built into the hardware. Ledger says the implant does not alter the chip that stores the keys or the device’s operating system, so a tampered wallet looks and works normally.

Trezor CCO Danny Sanders shared the letter that the company sent to those providers that Trezor is ditching. “If you are receiving this letter, your authorization ends on 1 January 2027. On that date we will remove you from our list of authorized Trezor resellers,” the letter reads. “I am sorry. This decision says nothing about your effort or the way you represented us.”

BitcoinBTC · USD

$83,133−0.73%

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Oct 7Oct 9Oct 10Oct 12Oct 14

$84.2k$83.1k$81.9k$80.7k

24h HighHigh$84,025

24h LowLow$82,919

VolVol$1.1B

Market projectionsOdds by Myriad

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This is a precautionary measure to protect our supply chain and our customers,” he wrote. “If things change in the future we will review it.”

Affected resellers will get no new stock, but they can keep selling what they have through Black Friday and the holiday season. Sanders said the decision just reflects how many partners Trezor can vet closely itself.

Neither the post nor the letter says how many resellers are affected. Trezor says it reviewed each country on its own, weighing revenue and distribution against its own presence there, and that resellers who stay will face an updated legal framework and tighter rules on how devices are sourced, stored, and handled.

Trezor said on X earlier this week that CryptoBilis was already off its seller list and that it had received no reports of tampered Trezors from the retailer.

In May 2022, Trezor warned that counterfeit Model T wallets were being sold on a Russian marketplace by a seller that was not an authorized reseller. The devices had been opened, resealed, and fitted with replaced internal components, and Trezor said the recovery phrases they generated were predictable or predefined, meaning someone else could already know the words.

Trezor’s advice then was to buy only from its official shop or an authorized reseller. The second option is the network it is now shrinking.

In August, shipping partner ShipMonk exposed Trezor customer data after unauthorized access, and Trezor’s September update put the total at 80,689 customers. Trezor says its systems, devices, private keys, and wallet backups were not affected.

Ledger told anyone who bought from CryptoBilis in the past 90 days not to set up their device, and told those who already did to move their funds to a new seed phrase on a device bought from Ledger. Ledger and Trezor have each warned buyers against unauthorized sellers.