In 2000 the government opened the system to private insurers, who crowded in and began to cut corners. Lacking even the most basic of checks and balances, the industry lost an estimated $28 billion to scams in the seven years through 2012, according to Deloitte.
few if any residents have birth certificates, and other basic documents have become easy to forge. Husbands told insurers that their living wives were dead. Wives said their long-dead husbands had recently died anew. Siblings made up extra siblings who could fake-die as painlessly as they were fake-born. And in many cases, the scams were perpetrated by people who had no relation to the allegedly deceased at all.
Let’s try that again …
And in many cases, the scams were perpetrated by Nigerian Princes who have been completely honest and above-board since the 1990’s.
More than a member of the overemployed community, Charles, the FAANG alumni, considers himself part of the FIRE movement—short for “Financial Independence, Retire Early” Not yet 30, he is already making $500,000 working two jobs and worth around $3 million, claims he backed up to Motherboard with documentation. But he hopes to increase his compensation to $800,000 by tacking on a third position, and reach a net worth of $10 million by 35.
Even though he is already using ChatGPT to work multiple jobs, Charles still is trying to figure out ways to make his dream even easier to obtain. When we spoke he said he’s already been “able to outsource” coding tasks to a third party in the past, and that he has been hard at work trying to develop a way to have someone else mimic both his voice and image on a computer screen. Once he can do so, he said, he hopes to offshore his job to someone in India who can “do my job for me.”
Chatgpt has wowed the world with the depth of its knowledge and the fluency of its responses, but one problem has hobbled its usefulness: It keeps hallucinating.
Yes, large language models (LLMs) hallucinate, a concept popularized by Google AIresearchers in 2018. Hallucination in this context refers to mistakes in the generated text that are semantically or syntactically plausible but are in fact incorrect or nonsensical. In short, you can’t trust what the machine is telling you.
That’s why, while OpenAI’s Codex or Github’s Copilot can write code, an experienced programmer still needs to review the output—approving, correcting, or rejecting it before allowing it to slip into a code base where it might wreak havoc.
High school teachers are learning the same. A ChatGPT-written book report or historical essay may be a breeze to read but could easily contain erroneous “facts” that the student was too lazy to root out.
Trading stocks too high stakes? Trade high end restaurant reservations.
he told me, “Sometimes they recognize my voice, so I have to do different accents. I have to act like a girl sometimes.” He switched into a bad falsetto: “I’m, like, ‘Hiiii, is it possible to book a reservation?’ I have a few Resy accounts that have female names.” Last year, he made seventy thousand dollars reselling reservations.
“It’s, like, some people play Candy Crush on their phone. I play ‘Dinner Reservations,’ ” he said. “It’s just a way to pass the time.” Last year, he made eighty thousand dollars reselling reservations. He’s good at anticipating what spots will be most in demand, and his profile on the site ranks him as having a “99% Positive Sales History” over his last two hundred transactions. It also notes that he made almost two thousand reservations that never sold—a restaurateur’s nightmare.
And how big data approaches are changing access, not just the reservation process but who restaurants decide they want.
SevenRooms scans customers’ bills, tracks referrals, and monitors guests’ online reviews; people who frequently cancel or no-show can be required to provide a credit-card deposit. In January, the percentage of restaurants on Resy that charged cancellation fees had grown more than fourfold from pre-pandemic levels.
Guest data is not shared between restaurants with different owners, but platforms like SevenRooms and Blackbird want to change that. SevenRooms’ Montaniel envisions partnerships between restaurant groups to “make the world a private member club for everyone.”
