James Altucher:

LLMs Can Unmask Pseudonymous Users at Scale With Surprising Accuracy

Burner accounts on social media sites can increasingly be analyzed to identify the pseudonymous users who post to them using AI in research that has far-reaching consequences for privacy on the Internet.

The finding, from a recently published research paper, is based on results of experiments correlating specific individuals with accounts or posts across more than one social media platform. The success rate was far greater than existing classical deanonymization work that relied on humans assembling structured data sets suitable for algorithmic matching or manual work by skilled investigators. 

Recall – that is, how many users were successfully deanonymized – was as high as 68%. Precision – meaning the rate of guesses that correctly identify the user – was up to 90%.

The findings have the potential to upend pseudonymity, an imperfect but often sufficient privacy measure used by many people to post queries and participate in sometimes sensitive public discussions while making it hard for others to positively identify the speakers.

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Greg Guenthner:

As Bitcoin Mining Economics “Have Gone From Bad to Worse,” Companies Pivot and Sell To Survive

Bitcoin is down roughly 50% from its all-time high in October, putting immense pressure on bitcoin mining companies. To survive, the firms are increasingly pivoting to AI and selling their assets, while others are exiting the business entirely.

On Monday, Core Scientific announced in its earnings call that it sold over 1,900 bitcoin for $175 million in January.

Core Scientific’s bitcoin sale follows former bitcoin miner Bitdeer’s similar move in late February, when the company announced it had sold all of its bitcoin holdings to fund its pivot to AI.

Rosenblatt analyst Chris Brendler said in a recent note that in the two months since the firm’s previous sector update, bitcoin mining economics “have gone from bad to worse.” Mining is “unprofitable for all but the most efficient operations” now, he said.

Bitcoin's price drop means miners have been squeezed, and the network hash rate hasn’t kept up. The most vulnerable miners are the ones with higher cost structures.

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Enrique Abeyta:

Anduril Aims at $60 Billion Valuation in New Funding Round

Palmer Luckey’s defense-tech company is in the middle of a multibillion-dollar funding round led by Thrive Capital and Andreessen Horowitz.

The funding round would come less than a year after the company’s Series G, which closed in June with $2.5 billion against a $30 billion valuation. Lux Capital and Founders Fund are also expected to participate.

A previous report from Bloomberg said the new round could bring as much as $8 billion of capital into the company, which closed its previous funding round last summer.

The round comes at an awkward moment for defense startups. After a contract dispute between Anthropic and the Pentagon, the U.S. government is in the process of canceling all its contracts with the AI company, and Secretary of Defense Hegseth has threatened to designate the company as a supply-chain risk.

While not explicitly endorsing the supply-chain-risk designation, Luckey has vocally supported the government’s stance. 

“At the end of the day,” Luckey wrote in a recent X post, “you have to believe that our imperfect constitutional republic is still good enough to run a country without outsourcing the real levers of power to billionaires and corpos and their shadow advisors.

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