Wednesday, June 28 — 2 significant news stories

Quick project update.

Today OpenAI updated ChatGPT. The new version gives considerably higher scores: we got 27 unique articles with significance over 7! Ain’t nobody got time for that!

I will move the threshold to 8+ and see how it goes over the next few days.

Today ChatGPT read 989 top news stories. After removing previously covered events, there are 2 articles with a significance score over 8.

[8.2] Over $200 billion potentially stolen from COVID-19 relief programs in US — The Associated Press

According to a new report from the U.S. Small Business Administration inspector general, more than $200 billion may have been fraudulently obtained from two major COVID-19 relief programs. The Paycheck Protection and COVID-19 Economic Injury Disaster Loan programs were particularly vulnerable to fraud, especially in the early stages of the pandemic. The inspector general's report suggests that 17% of all funds were possibly given to fraudulent actors. The Biden administration has implemented stricter measures to curb such fraud and has proposed a $1.6 billion plan to enhance law enforcement efforts against pandemic relief fraudsters.

[8.1] Solar storm risks and the threat of large-scale internet outage examined — The Washington Post

The risk of a large-scale internet outage caused by a strong solar storm, known as an "internet apocalypse", has raised concerns among scientists and researchers. This comes as the sun, which has roughly 11-year cycles, enters a particularly active period known as the “solar maximum” in 2025. It has been pointed out that our current infrastructure might not be prepared for such an event, which could particularly impact submarine communication cables and regions in northern latitudes where much of the internet infrastructure is located. An outage could potentially last for months and cost billions in economic losses. Preparation and prevention mainly fall on governments and companies.

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