A new platform could enable a wide range of new technological capabilities. However, in
the UK, this approach would have a long lead time compared to the renewed RTGS
which will start delivering in 2024.

The global central banking community continues to experiment with technologies
associated with wholesale CBDC (including establishing new infrastructure). The Bank
engages closely with such initiatives to evaluate whether wholesale CBDC technologies
offer benefits to the UK and, if so, whether they might best be delivered via the renewed
RTGS service, or whether new infrastructure might be needed. In particular, the Bank is
closely involved with the work of the BIS Innovation Hub, especially its London Centre,
so is well positioned to understand and learn from the range of experiments and
approaches being trialled internationally with regard to wholesale CBDC, and wholesale
settlement more broadly.

Download the report here

https://bizbuildermike.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/the-digital-pound-consultation-working-paper.pdf

The Commodity Futures Trading Commission does not have the ability to completely oversee cryptocurrency

A more stronger position has been adopted by Coinbase CEO and co-founder Brian Armstrong, who believes that it would be disastrous for the United States to do away with staking for cryptocurrencies.

In a tweet dated February 12, Armstrong contended that Coinbase’s staking services are not securities and said that he would “gladly defend this in court if it were necessary.”

The policy expert for the cryptocurrency advocacy group Blockchain Association says that despite attempts to police cryptocurrency through enforcement actions, United States financial regulators “are bound by legal reality,” and Congress will ultimately decide what regulations should be put in place for cryptocurrencies.

Jake Chervinsky, the chief policy officer of the organization, contributed his thoughts to a lengthy Twitter conversation on the topic of the current status of crypto policy on February 14.

He made the observation that the Securities and Exchange Commission as well as the Commodity Futures Trading Commission “do not have the ability to completely oversee cryptocurrency.”

Given the ideological divide that exists between the House Republicans and Senate Democrats, Chervinsky is of the opinion that a compromise on the crypto legislation is “unlikely.” He said that the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission had exceeded their powers in an effort to “get things done” without Congress.

Chervinsky issued a plea for the sector to maintain its composure in the wake of the recent flurry of action from the SEC, which he referred to as “crypto’s biggest opponent.” As an example, Chervinsky cited the SEC’s crackdown on staking services.

The settlement that the SEC reached with the cryptocurrency exchange Kraken on February 9, which forbade Kraken from ever selling staking services to consumers in the United States, has been publicly criticized by SEC Commissioner Hester Peirce.

Peirce expressed his disagreement with the majority opinion in a statement dated February 9, in which he said that regulating a growing business via enforcement “is neither an effective or equitable manner of governing” the industry.

It was proposed by Chervinsky that litigation is one method the cryptocurrency business may press for appropriate legislation. Chervinsky said that the court plays a key role in influencing policy that has been “ignored.”

Coinbase, a cryptocurrency exchange, is also the subject of an SEC investigation that is similar to the one that led to Kraken’s settlement.

A more stronger position has been adopted by Coinbase CEO and co-founder Brian Armstrong, who believes that it would be disastrous for the United States to do away with staking for cryptocurrencies.

In a tweet dated February 12, Armstrong contended that Coinbase’s staking services are not securities and said that he would “gladly defend this in court if it were necessary.”

The decisions that judges make in important cases establish new standards in the law. If such a case were to be taken before a court and the judge concluded that Coinbase’s staking services did not qualify as securities, then other cryptocurrency businesses who are in a situation comparable to Coinbase’s may utilize the precedent as part of their defense.

This just in the Second Coming happened earlier this week in the Sky over Alaska.

The 3 members of the Triune Godhead were met by the US Air Force with multiple denotations greeting the trio.

In a related story, the will be no Christmas this year.

AI Passes U.S. Medical Licensing Exam

— Two papers show that large language models, including ChatGPT, can pass the USMLE

by Michael DePeau-Wilson, Enterprise & Investigative Writer, MedPage  January 19, 2023

Two artificial intelligence (AI) programs — including ChatGPT — have passed the U.S. Medical Licensing Examination (USMLE), according to two recent papers.

The papers highlighted different approaches to using large language models to take the USMLE, which is comprised of three exams: Step 1, Step 2 CK, and Step 3.

ChatGPTopens in a new tab or window is an artificial intelligence (AI) search tool that mimics long-form writing based on prompts from human users. It was developed by OpenAI, and became popular after several social media posts showed potential uses for the tool in clinical practice, often with mixed resultsopens in a new tab or window.

The first paper, published on medRxivopens in a new tab or window in December, investigated ChatGPT’s performance on the USMLE without any special training or reinforcement prior to the exams. According to Victor Tseng, MD, of Ansible Health in Mountain View, California, and colleagues, the results showed “new and surprising evidence” that this AI tool was up to the challenge.

Tseng and team noted that ChatGPT was able to perform at >50% accuracy across all of the exams, and even achieved 60% in most of their analyses. While the USMLE passing threshold does vary between years, the authors said that passing is approximately 60% most years.

“ChatGPT performed at or near the passing threshold for all three exams without any specialized training or reinforcement,” they wrote, noting that the tool was able to demonstrate “a high level of concordance and insight in its explanations.”

“These results suggest that large language models may have the potential to assist with medical education, and potentially, clinical decision-making,” they concluded.

The second paper, published on arXivopens in a new tab or window, also in December, evaluated the performance of another large language model, Flan-PaLM, on the USMLE. The key difference between the two models was that this model was heavily modified to prepare for the exams, using a collection of medical question-answering databases called the MultiMedQA, explained Vivek Natarajan, an AI researcher, and colleagues.

Flan-PaLM achieved 67.6% accuracy in answering the USMLE questions, which was about 17 percentage points higher than the previous best performance conducted using PubMed GPT.

Natarajan and team concluded that large language models “present a significant opportunity to rethink the development of medical AI and make it easier, safer and more equitable to use.”

ChatGPT, along with other AI programs, have been showing up as the subject — and sometimes as the co-author — of new research papers focused on testing the technology’s usefulness in medicine.

Of course, healthcare professionals have also expressed concerns over these developments, especially when ChatGPT is being listed as an author on research papers. A recent article from Natureopens in a new tab or window highlighted the uneasiness from would-be colleagues and co-authors of the emerging technology.

One objection to the use of AI programs in research was based on whether they can be truly capable of making meaningful scholarly contributions to a paper, while another objection emphasized that AI tools can’t consent to be a co-author in the first place.

The editor of one of the papersopens in a new tab or window that listed ChatGPT as an author said it was an error that would be corrected, according to the Nature article. Still, researchers have published several papers now touting these AI programs as useful tools in medical education, research, and even clinical decision making.

Natarajan and colleagues concluded in their paper that large language models could become a beneficial tool in medicine, but their first hope was that their findings would “spark further conversations and collaborations between patients, consumers, AI researchers, clinicians, social scientists, ethicists, policymakers and other interested people in order to responsibly translate these early research findings to improve healthcare.”

Michael DePeau-Wilson is a reporter on MedPage Today’s enterprise & investigative team. He covers psychiatry, long covid, and infectious diseases, among other relevant U.S. clinical news. Follow 

Primary Source

medRxiv

Source Reference: opens in a new tab or windowKung TH, et al “Performance of ChatGPT on USMLE: potential for AI-assisted medical education using large language models” medRxiv 2022; DOI: 10.1101/2022.12.19.22283643.

Secondary Source

arXiv

Source Reference: opens in a new tab or windowSinghal K, et al “Large language models encode clinical knowledge” arXiv 2022; DOI: 10.48550/arXiv.2212.13138.