Finance – Lifeboat News: The Blog

Aug 14
2025

Building energy model offers cities decarbonization roadmap

A new software tool developed by Cornell researchers can model a small city’s building energy use within minutes on a standard laptop, then run simulations to help policymakers prioritize the most cost-effective approaches to decarbonization.

Using the City of Ithaca, New York, as a case study, the urban building energy model quickly mapped more than 5,000 residential and commercial buildings and their baseline energy use. Simulated investments in weatherization, electric heat pumps and rooftop solar panels, while also factoring in financial incentives, generated insights that are informing city efforts to achieve carbon neutrality by 2030.

The tool’s automated workflow, accessibility and accuracy—without advanced computing power—could be particularly valuable for smaller cities that lack resources and expertise dedicated to decarbonization, the researchers said. But they said the new model—now also supporting the county that surrounds Ithaca—could be further scaled up to serve big cities or an entire state.

Aug 14
2025

Sam Altman’s worst-case AI scenario may already be here

Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, appeared at a Federal Reserve event on July 22 and outlined three “scary categories” of how advanced artificial intelligence could threaten society.

The first two scenarios — a bad actor using artificial intelligence for malfeasance and a rogue AI taking over the world — were accompanied by the insistence that people were working to prevent them. However, Mr. Altman offered no such comfort with the third scenario, the one that seemed to trouble him most.

He described a future where AI systems become “so ingrained in society … [that we] can’t really understand what they’re doing, but we do kind of have to rely on them. And even without a drop of malevolence from anyone, society can just veer off in a sort of strange direction.”

Aug 13
2025

Cybercrime Groups ShinyHunters, Scattered Spider Join Forces in Extortion Attacks on Businesses

An ongoing data extortion campaign targeting Salesforce customers may soon turn its attention to financial services and technology service providers, as ShinyHunters and Scattered Spider appear to be working hand in hand, new findings show.

“This latest wave of ShinyHunters-attributed attacks reveals a dramatic shift in tactics, moving beyond the group’s previous credential theft and database exploitation,” ReliaQuest said in a report shared with The Hacker News.

These include the use of adoption of tactics that mirror those of Scattered Spider, such as highly-targeted vishing (aka voice phishing) and social engineering attacks, leveraging apps that masquerade as legitimate tools, employing Okta-themed phishing pages to trick victims into entering credentials during vishing, and VPN obfuscation for data exfiltration.

Aug 11
2025

How can we strengthen the carbon market?

The global voluntary carbon market (VCM) is a critical tool for mobilizing finance for decarbonization efforts. As the market for carbon credits has grown, however, the value and effectiveness of the market has come under scrutiny.

To restore trust and increase confidence in the market, it is critical that carbon credits represent real, additional, verifiable emission reductions. The credibility and integrity of carbon credits rely heavily on the standards governing their creation and purchase. Strengthening market mechanisms, ensuring rigorous accounting standards, and increasing global cooperation are all essential to ensure that carbon markets contribute towards a low-carbon future.

Aug 9
2025

OpenAI’s GPT-5 Flop, AI’s Unlimited Market, China’s Big Advantage, Rise in Socialism, Housing Crisis

Questions to inspire discussion.

📊 Q: How did GPT-5 perform compared to GPT-4? A: GPT-5 was narrowly ahead of GPT-4 in artificial analysis, but GPT-4 was significantly better in “humanity’s last exam” and RKGI2, which measures tasks relatively easy for humans but hard for AIs.

🌐 Q: What is the key architectural improvement in GPT-5? A: GPT-5 has a multimodal architecture that can self-select the underlying model for a task, providing a simple, clean interface without users needing to understand technical details.

AI industry growth and economic impact.

💰 Q: How much is being invested in the AI industry annually? A: The AI industry is experiencing astronomical growth, with hundreds of billions of dollars being deployed annually, and a projected trillion dollars in the next 5 years on data centers and AI infrastructure.

📈 Q: Are there already economic returns on AI investments? A: Economic returns on AI investments are already evident, with companies like Meta and Microsoft reporting significant revenue growth and productivity gains.

Continue reading “OpenAI’s GPT-5 Flop, AI’s Unlimited Market, China’s Big Advantage, Rise in Socialism, Housing Crisis” | >

Aug 7
2025

Major climate-GDP study under review after facing challenge

A blockbuster study published in top science journal Nature last year warned that unchecked climate change could slash global GDP by a staggering 62% by century’s end, setting off alarm bells among financial institutions worldwide.

But a re-analysis by Stanford University researchers in California, released Wednesday, challenges that conclusion—finding the projected hit to be about three times smaller and broadly in line with earlier estimates, after excluding an anomalous result tied to Uzbekistan.

The saga may culminate in a rare retraction, with Nature telling AFP it will have “further information to share soon”—a move that would almost certainly be seized upon by climate-change skeptics.