Hard Numbers: Deepfakes and pig butchering, Murati starts fundraising, Checking students’ work, The nuclear option, Perplexity’s money moves

46 million: Hong Kong police say that romance scammers used deepfake video and audio technology to steal $46 million. Twenty-seven people were arrested and charged with crimes related to what is called “pig butchering,” scams so named because fraudsters “fatten up” their targets before going in for the kill. The perpetrators allegedly contacted potential victims with simple text messages and started fake romances with them that gradually got more sophisticated with deepfakes used on phone and video calls. Once in their grasp, the scammers coerced their victims to “invest” money on fake cryptocurrency sites and made off with the cash.

100 million: Former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati, one of the biggest names in artificial intelligence, is expected to raise $100 million for a new AI startup with few public details. Murati, who briefly served as interim CEO of OpenAI last year following Sam Altman’s short-lived ouster, resigned from OpenAI last month. Murati said she wanted to start her own “exploration” of AI when she resigned and will reportedly serve as CEO of the new venture trying to do just that.

68%: About 68% of middle and high school teachers report using an AI checker for students’ work, according to a survey from March 2024. But Bloomberg, pointing to a rising number of students who claim to have been falsely accused of writing with AI, reports that popular AI checkers have a 1-2% error rate, calling into question their reliability.

99: Nuclear energy stocks are surging because of increased demand for power by AI companies in search of new energy sources. Oklo, a US-based small modular reactor developer – which counts OpenAI CEO Sam Altman as an investor – saw its share price pop 99% last week. Nuclear energy is considered a “clean” energy source because it has no carbon emissions.

8 billion: The AI search engine Perplexity is seeking to raise $500 million in a new funding round that would value it at $8 billion. Perplexity has positioned itself not only as a rival to OpenAI and Anthropic — leading AI chatbot companies — but also to Google, the longtime leader in the search industry.