Latest news with #a16z
Yahoo
6 days ago
- Business
- Yahoo
DeFi Platform Cork Protocol Suffers $12M Smart Contract Exploit
Decentralized finance (DeFi) platform Cork Protocol has suffered a smart contract exploit, with hackers reportedly stealing $12 million worth of wrapped staked ether (wstETH). Blockchain security monitor Cyvers noticed the exploit, stating that the malicious contract was deployed by a wallet likely funded by a service provider. It added that $12 million worth of wstETH was quickly swapped for ETH. Cork Protocol received investments from a16z crypto and OrangeDAO in September 2024. "There was a security incident affecting the wstETH:weETH market at 11:23 UTC today," Cork wrote on X. Cork added that it has paused all other markets as a precaution and that it is investigating the root cause. Security auditing company Debaub wrote that the attacker likely manipulated an issue with the smart contact's exchange rate by issuing fake tokens. Error in retrieving data Sign in to access your portfolio Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data
Yahoo
6 days ago
- Business
- Yahoo
Top Venture Capitalist Says AI Will Replace Pretty Much All Jobs Except His, Which Relies on His Unique Genius
The future is a world of jobless workers — except for the enlightened philosopher-kings of venture capital, that is. Or at least that's according to Andreessen Horowitz cofounder Marc Andreessen, who imagines a future where the workers of the world sit jobless, in an employment apocalypse that will affect pretty much everyone except the unique genius of him and his peers. Appearing on his company's a16z podcast, Andreessen made the case that venture capitalists — like he and his rich buddies — will be some of the only ones exempt from the AI revolution. "Every great venture capitalist in the last 70 years has missed most of the great companies of his generation... if it was a science, you could eventually dial it in and have somebody who gets 8 out of 10 [right]," the investor reasoned. "There's an intangibility to it, there's a taste aspect, the human relationship aspect, the psychology — by the way a lot of it is psychological analysis," he added. "So like, it's possible that that is quite literally timeless," Andreessen posited. "And when the AIs are doing everything else, like, that may be one of the last remaining fields that people are still doing." The billionaire investor paints a pretty grim picture of life after AI takes over, especially given that Andreessen is an outspoken critic of the universal basic income, the idea that everyone in society would be given enough to live even after their jobs have been automated. Add it all up, and it's a vision of the future that gives Andreessen and his peers extraordinary power over everybody else. "After you die, VCs are the judges of whether you get into heaven or not," as one poster quipped on X-formerly-Twitter. In reality, whether AI will ever be able to replace a meaningful number of workers is a pretty open question. At present, the best AI isn't capable of automating any but the most basic of tasks, and some experts argue it never will; it's also easy to imagine an underwhelming future in which AI automates many roles sloppily, at the expense of quality work. And in that case, Andreessen's no common worker — the tech titan has hundreds of millions of dollars invested in AI startups like ElevenLabs, Figma, and Applied Intuition, making his prediction more than a little biased from the jump. His firm, Andreessen Horowitz, most recently announced the launch of a $20 billion megafund for AI startups, which would be the largest VC fund in history. If the "AI takeover" does come to pass, it's hard to imagine that gigs like Andreessen's would be spared. At the end of the day, all he really does is evaluate the financial outlooks of various startup ideas, which isn't the easiest task to do well, but a far cry from punishing physical careers like nurses and loggers, or rarefied intellectual ones like scientists and teachers. Andreessen's decidedly selfish outlook is unfortunately well-regarded among the class of libertarian thinkers, techno capitalists and political pundits who parrot his ideas. His infamous tome, the "Techno-Optimist's Manifesto," lays out just who benefits from his AI revolution: "We believe the techno-capital machine of markets and innovation never ends, but instead spirals continuously upward." Put another way: there is infinite money to be mined from the workers of the world, and a special class of entrepreneurs will be the ones to do so, all in the name of innovation. As tech and economics researcher Jathan Sadowski observed in his recent book, "The Mechanic and the Luddite": "This outcome can only be achieved to great effect by putting a highly concentrated industry that is driven by accumulating more money than god and enacting its own internalized savior complex in charge of your innovation system." More on venture capitalists: Investor Says AI Is Already "Fully Replacing People" Error in retrieving data Sign in to access your portfolio Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data
Forbes
24-05-2025
- Business
- Forbes
Agentic Commerce (A-Commerce) Do Not Work Without Agent Identities
Audience at the Featured Session "The Auto-Evolving Business: AI's Agentic Near Future" during SXSW ... More Conference & Festivals at the Austin Convention Center on March 10, 2025 in Austin, Texas. (Photo by Diego Donamaria/SXSW Conference & Festivals via Getty Images) We all know that agentic commerce is coming at us quickly and agentic commerce will of course mean that agentic finance is inevitable. The smart money is already looking in this direction. For example: Catena Labs has announced an $18 million financing round led by a16z crypto and its plan to establish the first fully regulated AI-native financial institution designed to serve the unique needs of the emerging AI economy. In my view, initiatives like this make agent identities a priority for fintechs. Catena's Sean Neville, who previously co-founded Circle and invented the USDC stablecoin, says that shortcomings in legacy systems make them poorly suited to the needs of agentic commerce and he specifically notes the inability to handle agent identity as a key issue. I have to say I agree with him wholeheartedly about this, and also see his view that agents will soon conduct 'most' economic transactions as far from hyperbolic. And I am not the only one. Craig De Witt, from Skyfire (who are building agent-agent infrastructure) makes a similar point: 'AI has payment and identity requirements that are different from anything we've seen before". He goes to talk about the paradigm shift here, meaning that we are looking at an entirely new approach to how agents will access and pay for services. That point about the digital identity of agents is, I think, central to developing a functioning agentic finance ecosystem. Ravi Loganathan from Sardine summarises some of the problems, asking The race is on to solve these problems as agentic commerce heads to the mainstream, for the obvious reason that if they are not addressed then our commerce infrastructure will be vulernable to agentic fraud on overwhelming scale and trying to fight it using the techniques of a previous era will be like cavalry charges against tanks. Or, for that matter, tanks against drones. Robot wars redux. Earlier this year, payments guru Tom Noyes wrote that identity and authorization will be key to to agentic commerce, with digital wallets as the means for organising and permissioning agent actions, and highlighted the key role of the payment networks in the mainsteam. Well, in the space of a few days last month, Visa launched "Visa Intelligent Commerce', Mastercard launched 'Agentic Tokens' and PayPal launched the 'PayPal Agent Toolkit', all with the general purpose of giving AI agents the ability to pay for purchases and bookings on behalf of consumers. That point about granular access is at the heart of these announcements. They will offer agents payment tokens (rather like the tokens in you xPay wallet) that have tight restrictions so that your agent can only use them in certain merchant categories and with certain payment limits (eg, a token that can be used for travel but only up to $1000 per month, or whatever). (PayPal in fact went even further. At its 2025 Dev Days event, the company announced not only a toolkit for AI agents but a Financial Operating System Financial OS tailored specifically for those agents—autonomous software that can browse, buy, negotiate, refund, and optimize transactions for users—to meet the needs of a future described by Jeremiah Owyang, partner at Blitzscaling Ventures, as a world run by AI agents in which websites may become obsolete and where 'the interfaces of the future are conversations, not clicks.') I see these initiatives as starting points rather than complete solutions. In time, we need a more comprehensive infrastructure to deliver safe and secure agentic commerce. One way to think about this is in terms of the necessary Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI) for the new world of agents. You are almost certainly familiar with the concept of DPI and the link between an effective DPI and the wider economy, but if not, a quick primer: The World Bank identifies DPI's core functions as digital identity, digital payments and data sharing. These essential features support more efficient public and private-sector applications to improve outcomes for citizens (across health, social welfare, financial services, business and beyond). The International Monetary Fund (IMF) say that DPI has the potential to support the transformation of the economy and support inclusive growth. They highlight the particular example of India's foundational DPI, the so-called "India Stack' , and show how it has been harnessed to foster innovation and competition, boost financial inclusion and improve government revenue collection. Payments are an easy place to start. I've written before that with AI systems becoming increasingly agentic business-to-robot-to-consumer (B2R2C) commerce about to explode, and it is a natural evolution for AIs to become economic actors in their own right and to exchange value in return for services. Bots paying other bots are a new frontier for the payments industry that needs new rails. Data exchange is desirable because among other things to do with productivity and efficiency, in the finance sector it is vital as (to use McKinseys framing) "a critical enabler of financial inclusion'. Open financial data can create economic value by benefiting financial institutions, individuals and businesses in many ways. For example, open data sharing can enable customers (or, more likely, customers' agents') to buy and use financial services they might not be able to otherwise access. The future economy, however, is about agents as much as it is about businesses and consumers (the ABCs, if you like) and these will need a DPI that satisfies their needs. That is, AIs will need DPI too. So what will it look like? Let's focus on the digital identity element of an AI DPI to see what it might look like. Clearly, unless we do something about the digital of identity of agents, agentic finance will bring agentic fraud (just as instant payments brought instant fraud). Jelena Hoffart of Mastercard and I have written a paper about this 'know your agent' (KYA) problem for a forthcoming Journal of Digital Banking in which we identify the need for digital identity for agents as a fundamental enabler for agents to access financial services on behalf of individuals or organisations (or, indeed, themselves) to create a new financial environment able to generate better outcomes for consumers and businesses. To deliver on this vision of agentic finance as a means to improve financial health for all, we must therefore begin with a digital identity infrastructure that can provide identification, authentication and authorisation for not only financial institutions and their customers, but also their agents. In that environment, Know-your-customer (KYC) is necessary as know-your-business (KYB) and know-your-employee (KYE). But without know-your-agent (KYA) there will be no progress. Addressing these issues begins with verifiable credentials (VCs) and claims that provide granular access to, for example, the payments system. Some commentators see this in terms of granting agents access to the VCs of individuals and organisations in order to act on their behalf but that's not quite right. We don't want AIs to present our credentials, we want AIs to present their own credentials in order to obtain claims that we have consented to authorise. In other words, my bot shouldn't show up at a bank pretending to me: it should show up at a bank as a bot acting on my behalf. As I said at the start, the smart money is moving in. Persona, the verified identify platform used by a host of fintechs (including Robinhood, Brex and OpenAI) has raised $200 million at a $2 billion valuation. The company says that rise of AI agents, increasingly sophisticated AI-driven fraud, regulatory fragmentation, and growing privacy expectations have created a far more complex — and constantly evolving — identity landscape. As Rick Song, CEO of Persona, puts it 'Identity in an AI-driven world isn't about ticking a box, and the question is no longer 'is this a bot or not?' but rather 'who is the bot acting on behalf of, and what is their intent?''. Indeed. This is how agentic commerce and agentic finance should work, and extending DPI to agent identities give us the right framework for ensuring that they do.
Yahoo
22-05-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Chatbot Arena secures $100m to enhance AI platform
Chatbot Arena, a platform designed to compare the performance of various AI models, has raised $100m in seed funding. The round was led by Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) and UC Investments (University of California), with participation from Lightspeed, Laude Ventures, Felicis, Kleiner Perkins, and The House Fund. The round values the company at $600m, according to a Bloomberg report. The funding coincides with the upcoming relaunch of LMArena, featuring a fully rebuilt platform designed to enhance AI evaluation with greater rigor, transparency, and user focus. The platform, which originated as an academic project at UC Berkeley, enables researchers, developers, and users to assess how AI models perform in real-world scenarios. More than 400 model evaluations have been conducted on LMArena, with more than three million votes cast, influencing both proprietary and open-source models from companies such as Google, OpenAI, Meta, and xAI, the company said. LMArena co-founder and CEO Anastasios Angelopoulos said: "In a world racing to build ever-bigger models, the hard question is no longer what can AI do. Rather, it's how well can it do it for specific use cases, and for whom. We're building the infrastructure to answer these critical questions." The relaunched LMArena, set to debut in late May 2025, incorporates community feedback and introduces a rebuilt user interface, mobile-first design, lower latency, and new features like saved chat history and endless chat. Ion Stoica, co-founder and UC Berkeley professor, said: 'AI evaluation has often lagged behind model development. LMArena closes that gap by putting rigorous, community-driven science at the centre. It's refreshing to be part of a team that leads with long-term integrity in a space moving this fast.' The company collaborates with model providers to identify performance trends, gather human preference data, and test updates in real-world conditions, aiming to develop advanced analytics and enterprise services while keeping core participation free. 'We invested in LMArena because the future of AI depends on reliability,' said Anjney Midha, general partner at a16z. 'And reliability requires transparent, scientific, community-led evaluation. LMArena is building that backbone.' Jagdeep Singh Bachher, chief investment officer at UC Investments, said: 'We're excited to see open AI research translated into real-world impact through platforms like LMArena. Supporting innovation from university labs such as those at UC Berkeley is essential for building technologies that responsibly serve the public and advance the field.' "Chatbot Arena secures $100m to enhance AI platform" was originally created and published by Verdict, a GlobalData owned brand. The information on this site has been included in good faith for general informational purposes only. It is not intended to amount to advice on which you should rely, and we give no representation, warranty or guarantee, whether express or implied as to its accuracy or completeness. You must obtain professional or specialist advice before taking, or refraining from, any action on the basis of the content on our site.
Yahoo
22-05-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Sam Altman's World Raises $135M in Token Sale to a16z and Bain Capital Crypto
Sam Altman's blockchain project World Network has raised $135 million in a private token sale of its WLD token. The sale was to venture capital giants a16z and Bain Capital Crypto and will be used to fund network expansion, the team shared. WLD is higher by 14% on the news. The funding comes as the group behind the blockchain announced the project's in-app functionalities as well as the WLD token has become available as of earlier this month to U.S. users. 'To meet increasing demand for Orb-verified World IDs and support the expansion of the World network throughout the U.S. and beyond, World Assets, Ltd. (a subsidiary of the World Foundation) sold $135M of WLD at market prices to two of the project's earliest backers, Andreessen Horowitz and Bain Capital Crypto. The circulating supply of WLD has thus increased correspondingly,' the team wrote in a blog post. The WLD token was created at launch in July 2023, and it currently has a market capitalization of $1.87 billion and is up 55% in the last month, according to CoinMarketCap. WLD though is down roughly 75% from its all time high. Until earlier this month, U.S. users were unable to use World's primary product, their orbs, a bowling ball-shaped device that scans a person's eyeballs to confirm their identity. Once they scan, users can access the World app and receive an airdrop of the WLD token, which can then be used in World's miniapps ecosystem. During the announcement earlier this month, Altman shared that the project hopes to have to give 180 million Americans access to Orbs, more than half the country's population, by the end of the year. Read more: Sam Altman's World Crypto Project Launches in US With Eye-Scanning Orbs in 6 Cities Error in retrieving data Sign in to access your portfolio Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data
