MAROKO133 Breaking ai: Crabby 82-Year-Old Politician Attacks 10-Year-Old Child for Thinkin

📌 MAROKO133 Update ai: Crabby 82-Year-Old Politician Attacks 10-Year-Old Child for

North Carolinian congresswoman Virginia Foxx has never shied away from regressive takes.

Over her many decades in politics, the 82-year-old representative has opposed everything from the release of the Epstein files and abortion for sexual assault survivors to legalized gay marriage and even aid for victims of Hurricane Katrina.

But as flagged by the Daily Beast, the octogenarian politician’s latest broadside may take the cake. When a 10-year-old child wrote her a letter expressing support for electric cars, Foxx didn’t agree to disagree — instead, she fulminated at the poor kid in a response that sounds more like a late night Donald Trump post on social media than a polite rejoinder to an engaged member of the public.

“Your request that ‘the federal government should give a $5,000 tax rebate for all new electric car purchases’ means that the federal government must take that money out of the pockets of hardworking people who may not have the means to buy an electric vehicle in the first place,” Foxx seethed in the letter, posted on social media by the boy’s mother.

Back in the real world, research on the effects of EV tax credits suggests the type of convoluted trade-offs familiars to policy wonks everywhere. A 2024 Stanford study found that while they decrease pollution and help domestic auto manufacturers, they do impose certain costs on taxpayers. There are also hearty downstream benefits: researchers at Georgia Tech recently found that simply getting more EVs on the road pushes down energy bills and gas prices for everybody by a striking margin — a compelling proposition in an era of surging gas prices caused by the Trump’s war on Iran.

Looming over all that are the more existential stakes: that while Foxx will die before the worst effects of climate change hit, future generations like the concerned kid who wrote to her will have to deal with the brunt of the repercussions, which will almost certainly be brutal.

Foxx didn’t have time for nuance, though, as she scolded the boy for the national debt crisis that her generation created, even attacking his teachers.

“YOU and your classmates will be responsible for paying down the national debt,” she fumed, directing the child to watch Fox News and read the National Review for more reliable information on the environment. “While I will never be able to know, my guess is that your teachers will not give you a good educational experience and help you learn to think, as they are too interested in indoctrinating you. How sad.”

More on electric cars: Cybertruck Recalled to Keep Its Wheels From Flying Off While Driving

The post Crabby 82-Year-Old Politician Attacks 10-Year-Old Child for Thinking Electric Cars Are Cool appeared first on Futurism.

🔗 Sumber: futurism.com

📌 MAROKO133 Hot ai: Listen Labs raises $69M after viral billboard hiring stunt to

Alfred Wahlforss was running out of options. His startup, Listen Labs, needed to hire over 100 engineers, but competing against Mark Zuckerberg's $100 million offers seemed impossible. So he spent $5,000 — a fifth of his marketing budget — on a billboard in San Francisco displaying what looked like gibberish: five strings of random numbers.

The numbers were actually AI tokens. Decoded, they led to a coding challenge: build an algorithm to act as a digital bouncer at Berghain, the Berlin nightclub famous for rejecting nearly everyone at the door. Within days, thousands attempted the puzzle. 430 cracked it. Some got hired. The winner flew to Berlin, all expenses paid.

That unconventional approach has now attracted $69 million in Series B funding, led by Ribbit Capital with participation from Evantic and existing investors Sequoia Capital, Conviction, and Pear VC. The round values Listen Labs at $500 million and brings its total capital to $100 million. In nine months since launch, the company has grown annualized revenue by 15x to eight figures and conducted over one million AI-powered interviews.

"When you obsess over customers, everything else follows," Wahlforss said in an interview with VentureBeat. "Teams that use Listen bring the customer into every decision, from marketing to product, and when the customer is delighted, everyone is."

Why traditional market research is broken, and what Listen Labs is building to fix it

Listen's AI researcher finds participants, conducts in-depth interviews, and delivers actionable insights in hours, not weeks. The platform replaces the traditional choice between quantitative surveys — which provide statistical precision but miss nuance—and qualitative interviews, which deliver depth but cannot scale.

Wahlforss explained the limitation of existing approaches: "Essentially surveys give you false precision because people end up answering the same question… You can't get the outliers. People are actually not honest on surveys." The alternative, one-on-one human interviews, "gives you a lot of depth. You can ask follow up questions. You can kind of double check if they actually know what they're talking about. And the problem is you can't scale that."

The platform works in four steps: users create a study with AI assistance, Listen recruits participants from its global network of 30 million people, an AI moderator conducts in-depth interviews with follow-up questions, and results are packaged into executive-ready reports including key themes, highlight reels, and slide decks.

What distinguishes Listen's approach is its use of open-ended video conversations rather than multiple-choice forms. "In a survey, you can kind of guess what you should answer, and you have four options," Wahlforss said. "Oh, they probably want me to buy high income. Let me click on that button versus an open ended response. It just generates much more honesty."

The dirty secret of the $140 billion market research industry: rampant fraud

Listen finds and qualifies the right participants in its global network of 30 million people. But building that panel required confronting what Wahlforss called "one of the most shocking things that we've learned when we entered this industry"—rampant fraud.

"Essentially, there's a financial transaction involved, which means there will be bad players," he explained. "We actually had some of the largest companies, some of them have billions in revenue, send us people who claim to be kind of enterprise buyers to our platform and our system immediately detected, like, fraud, fraud, fraud, fraud, fraud."

The company built what it calls a "quality guard" that cross-references LinkedIn profiles with video responses to verify identity, checks consistency across how participants answer questions, and flags suspicious patterns. The result, according to Wahlforss: "People talk three times more. They're much more honest when they talk about sensitive topics like politics and mental health."

Emeritus, an online education company that uses Listen, reported that approximately 20% of survey responses previously fell into the fraudulent or low-quality category. With Listen, they reduced this to almost zero. "We did not have to replace any responses because of fraud or gibberish information," said Gabrielli Tiburi, Assistant Manager of Customer Insights at Emeritus.

How Microsoft, Sweetgreen, and Chubbies are using AI interviews to build better products

The speed advantage has proven central to Listen's pitch. Traditional customer research at Microsoft could take four to six weeks to generate insights. "By the time we get to them, either the decision has been made or we lose out on the opportunity to actually influence it," said Romani Patel, Senior Research Manager at Microsoft.

With Listen, Microsoft can now get insights in days, and in many cases, within hours.

The platform has already powered several high-profile initiatives. Microsoft used Listen Labs to collect global customer stories for its 50th anniversary celebration. "We wanted users to share how Copilot is empowering them to bring their best self forward," Patel said, "and we were able to collect those user video stories within a day." Traditionally, that kind of work would have taken six to eight weeks.

Simple Modern, an Oklahoma-based drinkware company, used Listen to test a new product concept. The process took about an hour to write questions, an hour to launch the study, and 2.5 hours to receive feedback from 120 people across the country. "We went from 'Should we even have this product?' to 'How should we launch it?'" said Chris Hoyle, the company's Chief Marketing Officer.

Chubbies, the shorts brand, achieved a 24x increase in youth research participation—growing from 5 to 120 participants — by using Listen to overcome the scheduling challenges of traditional focus groups with children. "There's school, sports, dinner, and homework," explained Lauren Neville, Director of Insights and Innovation. "I had to find a way to hear from them that fit into their schedules."

The company also discovered product issues through AI interviews that might have gone undetected otherwise. Wahlforss described how the AI "through conversations, realized there were like issues with the the kids short line, and decided to, like, interview hundreds of kids. And I understand that there were issues in the liner of the shorts and that they were, like, scratchy, quote, unquote, according to the people interviewed." The redesigned product became "a blockbuster hit."

The Jevons paradox explains why cheaper research creates more demand, not less

Listen Labs is entering a massive but fragmented market. Wahlforss cited research from Andreessen Horowitz estimating the market research ind…

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🔗 Sumber: venturebeat.com