Arijit Sarkar
The shockwaves caused by the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) were felt by countless businesses, including a bank from India with no connection to the California-based banking institution.
Soon after reports of SVB’s imminent shutdown surfaced on March 10, panic spread across the globe as investments tied to one the biggest banks in the United States depicted an uncertain future. However, a Mumbai-based 116-year-old cooperative bank — Shamrao Vithal Co-operative Bank (SVC Bank) — got caught in the line of fire.
The similarity in the short forms of the two banks — SVB and SVC Bank — caused a mixup among a few Indian citizens as they took up the concern with the Indian bank.
Clarifying all doubts, SVC Bank issued an announcement distancing itself from the failed American bank now managed by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC). The statement read:
“SVC Bank is completely unrelated to Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) that was based in California. SVC Bank reserves the right to take due legal action on rumor mongers for tarnishing its brand image.”
Furthermore, the Indian bank advised its members, customers and stakeholders to avoid the ongoing rumors of its shutdown. The announcement also disclosed the bank’s profitability in the last year.
On March 13, U.S. President Joe Biden announced his plan to help the fallen traditional banks, SVB and Signature Bank, “at no cost to the taxpayer.”
On the other hand, Biden’s followers on Twitter highlighted that “everything you do or touch costs the taxpayer!”
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Brayden Lindrea
GPT-4, the latest version of the artificial intelligence chatbot ChatGPT, can pass high school tests and law school exams with scores ranking in the 90th percentile and has new processing capabilities that were not possible with the prior version.
The figures from GPT-4’s test scores were shared on March 14 by creator OpenAI, revealing it can also convert image, audio and video inputs to text in addition to handling “much more nuanced instructions” more creatively and reliably.
“It passes a simulated bar exam with a score around the top 10% of test takers,” OpenAI added. “In contrast, GPT-3.5’s score was around the bottom 10%.”
The figures show that GPT-4 achieved a score of 163 in the 88th percentile on the LSAT exam — the test college students need to pass in the United States to be admitted into law school.
GPT4’s score would put it in a good position to be admitted into a top 20 law school and is only a few marks short of the reported scores needed for acceptance to prestigious schools such as Harvard, Stanford, Princeton or Yale.
The prior version of ChatGPT only scored 149 on the LSAT, putting it in the bottom 40%.
GPT-4 also scored 298 out of 400 in the Uniform Bar Exam — a test undertaken by recently graduated law students permitting them to practice as a lawyer in any U.S. jurisdiction.
The old version of ChatGPT struggled in this test, finishing in the bottom 10% with a score of 213 out of 400.
As for the SAT Evidence-Based Reading & Writing and SAT Math exams taken by U.S. high school students to measure their college readiness, GPT-4 scored in the 93rd and 89th percentile, respectively.
GPT-4 excelled in the “hard” sciences too, posting well above average percentile scores in AP Biology (85-100%), Chemistry (71-88%) and Physics 2 (66-84%).
However its AP Calculus score was fairly average, ranking in the 43rd to 59th percentile.
Another area where GPT-4 was lacking was in English literature exams, posting scores in the 8th to 44th percentile across two separate tests.
OpenAI said GPT-4 and GPT-3.5 took these tests from the 2022-2023 practice exams, and that “no specific training” was taken by the language processing tools:
“We did no specific training for these exams. A minority of the problems in the exams were seen by the model during training, but we believe the results to be representative.”
The results prompted fear in the Twitter community too.
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Felix Ng
The United States Department of Justice (DoJ) and the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) have reportedly launched inquiries into the sudden collapse of Silicon Valley Bank (SVB), which was shuttered by regulators last week amid a historic bank run.
According to “people familiar with the matter” — as cited in a March 14 report by The Wall Street Journal — the probes will look into events that led to the bank’s collapse, along with the stock sales that SVB financial officers undertook in the weeks leading up to the closure.
Securities filing show the bank’s CEO, Greg Becker, and chief financial officer, Daniel Beck, sold shares two weeks before the bank’s failure, sparking outrage from some observers.
Becker sold $3.6 million worth of shares on Feb. 27, while Beck sold $575,180 in stocks that same day, according to Newsweek. In total, SVB executives and directors cashed out $84 million worth of stock over the past two years, CNBC reported.
However, the probes are in the early stages and may not lead to charges or allegations of wrongdoing, the sources said.
Another person with direct knowledge of the situation, quoted by NPR, said a formal announcement from the DoJ is expected in the coming days.
Cointelegraph contacted the SEC and the DoJ but did not receive an immediate response.
Only two days after the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank, SEC Chairman Gary Gensler made a stark warning that the regulator would be on the lookout for violators of U.S. securities laws.
“Without speaking to any individual entity or person, we will investigate and bring enforcement actions if we find violations of the federal securities laws,” said Gensler.
The U.S. Federal Reserve is also looking into the bank's collapse in its own way — namely, how it supervised and regulated the now-collapsed financial institution.
Meanwhile, on March 13, SVB Financial Group — SVB’s parent organization — and two executives were reportedly sued by shareholders accusing them of failing to disclose how rising interest rates would leave the bank “particularly susceptible” to a bank run.
The lawsuit seeks damages for SVB investors from June 16, 2021, to March 10, 2023.
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This Daily Dose was brought to you by Cointelegraph.
