If the gaming industry knows anything, it’s how to hedge a bet. 

On Wednesday, a collection of the biggest US sports betting groups, including FanDuel and DraftKings, announced they are joining together to combat “problem gambling,” forming the Responsible Online Gaming Association (ROGA) — just as the industry faces a torrent of high-profile scandals.

One Man’s Problem…

The sports betting industry continues to explode. In fact, in the minutes leading up to this year’s Super Bowl, bettors were recording nearly 15,000 transactions per second with major sports books, according to data collected and analyzed by cybersecurity firm GeoComply. But, as with any vice, the rise of legalized gambling comes with a social cost. An estimated 2 million US adults meet the criteria for a severe gambling problem, according to the National Council on Problem Gambling, while up to 8 million more could be considered to have a mild or moderate problem.

The increased presence of problem gamblers has not gone unnoticed. Earlier this month, Cleveland Cavaliers head coach JB Bickerstaff said he and his family had received threats from scorned bettors who had discovered his phone number. And just ahead of the kickoff of March Madness, US Senator Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) wrote a letter to major sports books demanding they “stop leveraging data to target problem gamblers with promotions and ads.”

The details of ROGA remain vague, outside of an initial pledge of $20 million that will be used to “create these evidence-based best practices and to really empower players with information,” according to a statement by group executive director Jennifer Shatley. Of course, the line between “problem bettors” and “top customers” is quite blurry:

• A 2021 parliamentary report on the UK’s legal gambling industry, which is far older than in the US, found that 60% of the industry’s profits come from just 5% of users who are either problem gamblers or at the risk of becoming so.
• In December, famed short-seller Jim Chanos exited his bet against DraftKings after realizing how “bad bettors the US gamblers are,” thanks in part to the popularity of same-game parlays — bets with odds that are typically less transparent.

Double Trouble: Betting’s rise has also spurred questions about the integrity of pro sports. The NBA recently opened an investigation into end-of–bench Toronto Raptor Jontay Porter, due to a string of irregular bets on his in-game stats. And earlier this month, Shohei Ohtani of the Los Angeles Dodgers became ensnared in a scandal after it was found that at least $4.5 million in wire transfers had been sent from Ohtani’s bank account to an illegal Southern California bookkeeper; Ohtani has since accused his longtime interpreter of sending the funds in an act of “massive theft.” Athletes are always told to bet on themselves – just not literally, please.

If you know your way around AI software, they’re coming after you. 

Job candidates with experience in making large language models, the systems that underpin glamorous generative AI tools like ChatGPT, are like gold these days. The Wall Street Journal reported on Wednesday that candidates with a solid background in LLMs can easily reap annual salaries of more than $1 million, and companies are aggressively poaching talent. But will the salaries keep up with the hype?

Poaching Season

Big Tech companies are used to a little light poaching — after all, they recruit from the same pool of skilled engineers and developers. But for AI, the talent hunt seems to have gone to the next level. The Information reported this week that Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has personally been sending emails to researchers at Google’s DeepMind AI research unit to entice them over to Meta. Earlier this month Mustafa Suleyman, a cofounder at DeepMind, jumped ship to Microsoft.

Even by Big Tech’s historically opulent standards, the job offers are eyebrow-raisingly rich. And they stand out even more as the rest of the tech industry is still weathering rounds of layoffs that started in 2022, as the pool of LLM professionals is much smaller than the overall tech workforce:

•  Zuhayeer Musa, cofounder of tech recruiting company Levels.fyi, told the WSJ that the median salary for six people who were offered jobs at Chat GPT-maker OpenAI was $925,000. He added that across 344 machine learning and AI engineers with jobs at Meta, the median remuneration was $400,000.
• The biggest of the big tech companies aren’t the only ones aggressively chasing talent. Food delivery platform DoorDash hired a handful of senior employees from AI startup Standard AI, Bloomberg reported on Wednesday. DoorDash’s AI work will focus on allowing restaurants to take phone orders — which would be a wonderful bit of technology. Imagine calling up a restaurant and they send you food? What a time to be alive.

None Left Over: Big Tech may not have the same deep cash reserves as before, but they can still outbid your average employer. Especially when that employer is a government regulator with budget constraints. Chris Stokel-Walker reported for Wired earlier this month that although world governments are eager to create AI watchdogs, hiring for those new entities is extremely tough given candidates can do better working for tech companies. “There’s a brain drain happening across every government across the world,” Nolan Church, CEO at salary tracking company FairComp, told Stokel-Walker.

Whether it’s Pam Beesly holding up two identical photos, Homer Simpson retreating into a hedge, or Kermit the Frog drinking a cup of Lipton tea, promotional-use rules still need to be followed. 

The Financial Conduct Authority, a UK watchdog, is cracking down on financial influencers — or “finfluencers” — who use popular memes as a way to market their products and investments, which in plenty of cases, have turned out to be scams. 

Trade Offer!

Social media has become flooded with advertisements for financial services — minutes-long commercials about why you’d be a fool not to buy a finfluencer’s crash course on drop shipping, crypto mining, or the stock market. Occasionally, they might offer some worthwhile nuggets of information, but most come off as too good to be true — and some are downright deceptive. Their ubiquity across the internet only ramped up during the pandemic. 

But even dodgy advertisements take time and money to produce. Now there’s a quicker and cheaper way to get a similar message across: funny memes. But regulators aren’t amused:

• The FCA’s grievances lie mostly in forum and chatroom-based platforms like Reddit and Telegram, where in 2022, the regulator had about 10,000 misleading ads for financial services removed, many of which dealt with cryptocurrencies.
• The regulator announced this week that promotions — even in meme form – must be fair, clear, and not misleading. To stamp out further fraudsters, the FCA will require finfluencers to get approval from an FCA-appointed representative to be able to make advertisements and memes about financial products. 

Fair Warning: “Promotions aren’t just about the likes, they’re about the law,” the FCA’s Lucy Castledine said in a statement Tuesday. “We will take action against those touting financial products illegally.”