Month: December 2024

DraftKings and FanDuel have been ruling the U.S. online gambling market for years to constantly compete for the leading position in the developing market. In the race, the two giants have taken a 61% share of the overall online gaming and sports betting operations to continue to thrive to add more weight to their operations and balance the scales to their respective advantage. These efforts currently seem more fruitful for DraftKings as the company is now holding the  highest share in the US market.

Reaching 31% Market Share:

According to Front Office Sports, the change occurred in August when DraftKings reached the 31% market share target to leave FanDuel behind with a 30% share. Since then, DraftKings has captured the largest gross gaming revenue among online gaming and sports wagering operators to take the leading position from FanDuel which had dominated the US market for years.

Overall Online Operating Result:

The figure reportedly refers to the revenues generated from both sports betting and online casino operations. Separatelly, FanDuel still leads the sports betting market with a 39.3% share, with DraftKings settling at the second position with a…

Yesterday, the Illinois Gaming Board reported that the state’s betting handle for September reached just over $596 million. This number was a solid number but fell short of the state’s record handle month of March when over $633 million in bets were generated. With the monthly totals now in, along with a few other states, the US has now seen over $5 billion wagered within one month, a new milestone for the nation.

With the large September bet total, Illinois is now the 4^th state in the country to go over the $6 billion mark in the betting handle. The only other states to do so are Nevada, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania.

Individual Breakdown in Illinois

For the state, it was DraftKings that reigned supreme. The operator is the only one that has been able to earn $200 million in the monthly handle. They hit $231 million in bets in September, according to sources, but bettors were the winner.

Sports fans were able to gain wins in baseball, earning over $660,000 while basketball bettors came out on top under $47,000. The leading revenue earner for DraftKings was parlay bets, with over $8 million claimed from more than $49 million in wagers…

New Jersey’s casinos, horse tracks, and online partners experienced a significant upswing in April, reporting total winnings of over $511 million, marking a notable 10.4% increase from the previous year, according to state gambling regulators.

Internet gambling surges:

A major contributing factor to this growth was the state’s exceptional performance in internet gambling, achieving its second-best month ever in this sector. Despite the ongoing challenges in the global landscape, the online segment of the gaming industry in New Jersey continues to thrive, demonstrating resilience and adaptability.

However, amidst this surge in internet gambling, the core business of in-person gambling witnessed a decline, down 6.3% from the previous year. While this trend poses challenges for traditional brick-and-mortar establishments, it also highlights the evolving preferences and behaviors of consumers…

Pretty much every year for the last five years, Elon Musk has promised that a full self-driving update for existing Tesla cars was just a year or so away. But now the Tesla CEO has dramatically changed his tune. It may not happen, after all.

In a conference call discussing the electric car company’s financial results (via Electrek) Musk dropped a veritable bomb when he said, “there is some chance that HW3 does not achieve the safety level that allows for unsupervised FSD.”

To unpick that statement, “HW3” refers to the self-driving computer that Tesla began fitting to its models since 2019, while “FSD” refers to Full Self Driving and in turn broadly indicates what’s known as Level 4 and 5 autonomous driving.

For the record, Level 4 enables fully autonomous driving within a limited geo-fenced area. Typically, you’ll still need a driver on board, plus controls. Meanwhile, Level 5 is the ultimate autonomous solution, the full no-driver, no-steering-wheel, go-anywhere experience.

So, the point is that Musk has been promising an “FSD” update for HW3-equipped Teslas for years. And now he’s saying that may no longer be the case. Indeed, Musk has said, “we don’t…

The latest version of ChatGPT will talk to you. It sounds eerily similar to a human being, too. That’s swiftly become a problem for the company behind it, OpenAI, which has announced it will be removing one of ChatGPT’s voices for sounding too similar to Hollywood actor Scarlett Johansson.

“We are working to pause the use of Sky,” OpenAI said in a post on X.

The company has also published a blog post on how it created the voices for the chatbot’s Voice Mode. It includes the key characteristics it was aiming for with each of the five voices used in the program, which include a sense of timelessness, being approachable, and being easy to listen to. And yet the voice assistant feature still makes for awkward watching.

The post says that professional voice actors were used for each of the voices: Breeze, Cover, Ember, Juniper, and Sky.

Also mentioned is how OpenAI believes “AI voices should not deliberately mimic a celebrity’s distinctive voice.”

Sky, however, does sound a lot like another famous AI, and in turn its celebrity voice actor. The emotive AI assistant in Her, a movie directed by Spike Jonze, voiced by Scarlett Johansson.

CEO…