Dan Elitzer and Jeremy Rubin rolled out the “MIT Bitcoin Project” in 2014.
Christopher A. Maynor
Jeremy Rubin was a sophomore studying computer science and electrical engineering when he decided that he wanted to give every undergraduate student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology $100 worth of bitcoin.
Seven months later – armed with half a million dollars in donations from alumni and bitcoin enthusiasts – Rubin offered to do just that, and 3,108 undergrads took him up on it.
This was back when the world’s most popular cryptocurrency wasn’t quite so popular, trading at around $336. Had all recipients of this free bitcoin let their crypto wallets sit idle, the “MIT Airdrop” collective would have been $44.1 million richer by today’s prices.
But some students didn’t hold on.
Researchers tracing the project, including Christian Catalini, now co-creator of the Diem stablecoin project initiated by Facebook, say that 1 in 10 cashed out in the first two weeks. By the end of the experiment in 2017, 1 in 4 had cashed out. The experiment creators stopped tracking transactions among the cohort after that.
Van Phu, now a software engineer and co-founder of crypto broker Floating Point Group, is still kicking himself for spending a lot of his bitcoin on sushi.
“One of the worst things and one of the best things at MIT is this restaurant called Thelonious Monkfish,” said Phu. “I spent a lot of my crypto buying sushi.”
Phu wasn’t alone in hemorrhaging his virtual coins at this campus dining hotspot.
Quantitative trader Sam Trabucco, who also took part in the experiment, estimated that half the people he knew spent their crypto spoils on fish.
“It was the only restaurant in Cambridge that was accepting bitcoin at the time, and it was a pretty popular spot,” he said. The restaurant has since changed its name and retired its bitcoin payment policy.
The MIT experiment
Rubin was halfway through a protracted legal battle with the New Jersey attorney general when he first got the idea for the bitcoin giveaway.
Unlike most 19-year-olds, Rubin was venting to his friends about the fact that state officials had accused him of being a “hardcore, hardened cyber criminal” who was “installing malware on people’s computers.” But Rubin says he had simply launched a bitcoin mining program called Tidbit. The project had just won an innovation award at a local hackathon known as Node Knockout, and Rubin, now CEO of bitcoin R&D lab Judica, was proud of what he had built.
The episode ended up with Rubin being cleared, but as it was happening, he kept noticing the blank stares from his friends each time he mentioned the word “bitcoin.”
“I thought, ‘This is MIT. I thought everyone was super cutting-edge.’ And I realized that no, it really wasn’t something that was all that widespread at that point,” said Rubin.
In late October 2014, Rubin and fellow project leader Dan Elitzer, then an MBA student at Sloan, opened up enrollment. Students who wanted the $100 worth of bitcoin had to complete a few questionnaires and review educational materials.
Jeremy Rubin touring the NYSE during a 2013 internship.
“We wanted to get bitcoin out in the world more, and we wanted to spread the technology,” said Rubin. “We also wanted to study what it means to distribute a new asset.”
Students wanting to take part also had to set up their own crypto wallet, which at the time was hard enough to discourage participation. Still, in the end, 70% of students ended up jumping through all the hoops.
Phu was among the students who started a side hustle opening up crypto wallets for those who didn’t want to spend the time figuring out how to do it and were willing to yield a percentage of their bitcoin as a fee for services rendered.
“A lot of the students would pay the other students half of the bitcoin if they would set it up on their behalf,” explained Phu. He says he helped somewhere between 10 and 12 people set up crypto wallets in exchange for a commission paid in bitcoin. It’s somewhat taken the sting out of the fact that he spent $100 worth of bitcoin — worth more than $14,000 today — on two sushi dinners.
Trabucco says that back when he was a student, he didn’t think that much of the project, though he did manage to triple his bitcoin handout playing poker online.
“Half the people I knew actually registered it as an event,” said Trabucco. As far as he was concerned, he thought bitcoin was cool, but “didn’t really think it was going to be the future of finance.”
But already having a crypto wallet did lower the barrier to entry to the cryptosphere later in life. Trabucco now runs Alameda Research, which manages over $1 billion in digital assets and trades up to $10 billion per day across thousands of products, including all major coins and altcoins, as well as their derivatives.
“I can’t say for sure whether it was the deciding factor, but it certainly could have been, because if I didn’t already have an account, I’m not sure if I would have ended up doing this,” he said.
Phu, Rubin and Trabucco all declined to share how much they kept and how much crypto they’ve accrued since their days on campus.
Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) campus in Cambridge, Massachusetts
(Photo: Bloomberg / Getty Images)
Where all the bitcoin went
When CNBC spoke to Catalini, he was taking a walk to break up the 12 to 14 hours a day he spends on Zoom working.
Among Catalini’s lasting takeaways is the fact that bitcoin simply didn’t work as a method of payment on campus.
“Even at the time, the technology was quite user unfriendly,” he said. “Even within a pretty tech-savvy community such as MIT, it was kind of surprising to see how much work it really was to use bitcoin at the time.”
But that inability to spend was probably for the best.
“What was fascinating is that in a sense, the MIT students got it right. The vast majority held on to their bitcoin as an investment. And maybe it sounds obvious given the price has appreciated so dramatically. But I think in 2014, it wasn’t clear at all that something that was worth at the time, I think $250, would be worth more than that,” he said.
Honor launched the Honor Magic V5 on Wednesday July 2, as it looks to challenge Samsung in the foldable space.
Honor
Honor on Wednesday touted the slimness and battery capacity of its newly launched thin foldable phone, as it lays down a fresh challenge to market leader Samsung.
The Honor Magic V5 goes will initially go on sale in China, but the Chinese tech firm will likely bring the device to international markets later this year.
Honor said the Magic V5 is 8.8 mm to 9mm when folded, depending on the color choice. The phone’s predecessor, the Magic V3 — Honor skipped the Magic V4 name — was 9.2 mm when folded. Honor said the Magic V5 weighs 217 grams to 222 grams, again, depending on the color model. The previous version was 226 grams.
In China, Honor will launch a special 1 terabyte storage size version of the Magic V5, which it says will have a battery capacity of more than 6000 milliampere-hour — among the highest for foldable phones.
Honor has tried hard to tout these features, as competition in foldables ramps up, even as these types of devices have a very small share of the overall smartphone market.
Honor vs. Samsung
Foldables represented less than 2% of the overall smartphone market in 2024, according to International Data Corporation. Samsung was the biggest player with 34% market share followed by Huawei with just under 24%, IDC added. Honor took the fourth spot with a nearly 11% share.
Honor is looking to get a head start on Samsung, which has its own foldable launch next week on July 9.
Francisco Jeronimo, a vice president at the International Data Corporation, said the Magic V5 is a strong offering from Honor.
“This is the dream foldable smartphone that any user who is interested in this category will think of,” Jeronimo told CNBC, pointing to features such as the battery.
“This phone continues to push the bar forward, and it will challenge Samsung as they are about to launch their seventh generation of foldable phones,” he added.
At its event next week, Samsung is expected to release a foldable that is thinner than its predecessor and could come close to challenging Honor’s offering by way of size, analysts said. If that happens, then Honor will be facing more competition, especially against Samsung, which has a bigger global footprint.
“The biggest challenge for Honor is the brand equity and distribution reach vs Samsung, where the Korean vendor has the edge,” Neil Shah, co-founder of Counterpoint Research, told CNBC.
Honor’s push into international markets beyond China is still fairly young, with the company looking to build up its brand.
“Further, if Samsung catches up with a thinner form-factor in upcoming iterations, as it has been the real pioneer in foldables with its vertical integration expertise from displays to batteries, the differentiating factor might narrow for Honor,” Shah added.
Vertical integration refers to when a company owns several parts of a product’s supply chain. Samsung has a display and battery business which provides the components for its foldables.
In March, Honor pledged a $10 billion investment in AI over the next five years, with part of that going toward the development of next-generation agents that are seen as more advanced personal assistants.
Honor said its AI assistant Yoyo can interact with other AI models, such as those created by DeepSeek and Alibaba in China, to create presentation decks.
The company also flagged its AI agent can hail a taxi ride across multiple apps in China, automatically accepting the quickest ride to arrive? and cancelling the rest.
One of the most popular gaming YouTubers is named Bloo, and has bright blue wavy hair and dark blue eyes. But he isn’t a human — he’s a fully virtual personality powered by artificial intelligence.
“I’m here to keep my millions of viewers worldwide entertained and coming back for more,” said Bloo in an interview with CNBC. “I’m all about good vibes and engaging content. I’m built by humans, but boosted by AI.”
Bloo is a virtual YouTuber, or VTuber, who has built a massive following of 2.5 million subscribers and more than 700 million views through videos of him playing popular games like Grand Theft Auto, Roblox and Minecraft. VTubers first gained traction in Japan in the 2010s. Now, advances in AI are making it easier than ever to create VTubers, fueling a new wave of virtual creators on YouTube.
The virtual character – whose bright colors and 3D physique look like something out of a Pixar film or the video game Fortnite – was created by Jordi van den Bussche, a long time YouTuber also known as kwebbelkop. Van den Bussche created Bloo after finding himself unable to keep up with the demands of content creation. The work no longer matched the output.
“Turns out, the flaw in this equation is the human, so we need to somehow remove the human,” said van den Bussche, a 29-year old from Amsterdam, in an interview. “The only logical way was to replace the humanwith either a photorealistic person or a cartoon. The VTuber was the only option, and that’s where Bloo came from.”
Jordi Van Den Bussche, YouTuber known as Kwebbelkop.
Courtesy: Jordi Van Den Bussche
Bloo has already generated more than seven figures in revenue, according to van den Bussche. Many VTubers like Bloo are “puppeteered,” meaning a human controls the character’s voice and movements in real time using motion capture or face-tracking technology.Everything else, from video thumbnails to voice dubbing in other languages, is handled by AI technology from ElevenLabs, OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini and Anthropic’s Claude. Van den Bussche’s long-term goal is for Bloo’s entire personality and content creation process to be run by AI.
Van den Bussche has already tested fully AI-generated videos on Bloo’s channel, but says the results have not yet been promising. The content doesn’t perform as well because the AI still lacks the intuition and creative instincts of a human, he said.
“When AI can do it better, faster or cheaper than humans, that’s when we’ll start using it permanently,” van den Bussche said.
The technology might not be far away.
Startup Hedra offers a product that uses AI technology to generate videos that are up to five minutes long. It raised $32 million in a funding round in Mayled by Andreessen Horowitz’s Infrastructure fund.
Hedra’s product, Character-3, allows users to create AI-generated characters for videos and can add dialogue and other characteristics. CEO Michael Lingelbach told CNBC Hedra is working on a product that will allow users to create self-sustaining, fully-automated characters.
Hedra’s product Character-3 allows users to make figures powered by AI that can be animated in real-time.
Hedra
“We’re doing a lot of research accelerating models like Character-3 to real time, and that’s going to be a really good fit for VTubers,” Lingelbach said.
Character-3’s technology is already being used by a growing number of creators who are experimenting with new formats, and many of their projects are going viral. One of those is comedian Jon Lajoie’s Talking Baby Podcast, which features a hyper-realistic animated baby talking into a microphone. Another is Milla Sofia, a virtual singer and artist whose AI-generated music videos attract thousands of views.
Talking Baby Podcast
Source: Instagram | Talking Baby Podcast
These creators are using Character-3 to produce content that stands out on social media, helping them reach wide audiences without the cost and complexity of traditional production.
AI-generated video is a rapidly evolving technology that is reshaping how content is made and shared online, making it easier than ever to produce high-quality video without cameras, actors or editing software. In May, Google announced Veo 3, a tool that creates AI-generated videos with audio.
Google said it uses a subset of YouTube content to train Veo 3, CNBC reported in June. While many creators said they were unaware of the training, experts said it has the potential to create an intellectual property crisis on the platform.
Faceless AI YouTubers
Creators are increasingly finding profitable ways to capitalize on the generative AI technology ushered in by the launch of OpenAI’s ChatGPT in late 2022.
One growing trend is the rise of faceless AI channels. These are run by creators who use these tools to produce videos with artificially generated images and voiceover that can sometimes earn thousands of dollars a month without them ever appearing on camera.
“My goal is to scale up to 50 channels, though it’s getting harder because of how YouTube handles new channels and trust scores,” said GoldenHand, a Spain-based creator who declined to share his real name.
Working with a small team, GoldenHand said he publishes up to 80 videos per day across his network of channels. Some maintain a steady few thousand views per video while others might suddenly go viral and rack up millions of views, mostly to an audience of those over the age of 65.
GoldenHand said his content is audio-driven storytelling. He describes his YouTube videos as audiobooks that are paired with AI-generated images and subtitles. Everything after the initial idea is created entirely by AI.
He recently launched a new platform, TubeChef, which gives creators access to his system to automatically generate faceless AI videos starting at $18 a month.
“People think using AI means you’re less creative, but I feel more creative than ever,” he said. “Coming up with 60 to 80 viral video ideas a day is no joke. The ideation is where all the effort goes now.”
AI Slop
As AI-generated content becomes more common online, concerns about its impact are growing. Some users worry about the spread of misinformation, especially as it becomes easier to generate convincing but entirely AI-fabricated videos.
“Even if the content is informative and someone might find it entertaining or useful, I feel we are moving into a time where … you do not have a way to understand what is human made and what is not,” said Henry Ajder, founder of Latent Space Advisory, which helps business navigate the AI landscape.
Others are frustrated by the sheer volume of low-effort, AI content flooding their feeds. This kind of material is often referred to as “AI slop,” low-quality, randomly generated content made using artificial intelligence.
Google DeepMind Veo 3.
Courtesy: Google DeepMind
“The age of slop is inevitable,” said Ajder, who is also an AI policy advisor at Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram. “I’m not sure what we do about it.”
While it’s not new, the surge in this type of content has led to growing criticism from users who say it’s harder to find meaningful or original material, particularly on apps like TikTok, YouTube and Instagram.
“I am actually so tired of AI slop,” said one user on X. “AI images are everywhere now. There is no creativity and no effort in anything relating to art, video, or writing when using AI. It’s disappointing.”
However, the creators of this AI content tell CNBC that it comes down to supply and demand. As the AI-generated content continues to get clicks, there’s no reason to stop creating more of it, said Noah Morris, a creator with 18 faceless YouTube channels.
Some argue that AI videos still have inherent artistic value, and though it’s become much easier to create, slop-like content has always existed on the internet, Lingelbach said.
“There’s never been a barrier to people making uninteresting content,” he said. “Now there’s just more opportunity to create different kinds of uninteresting content, but also more kinds of really interesting content too.”
The X logo appears on a phone, and the xAI logo is displayed on a laptop in Krakow, Poland, on April 1, 2025. (Photo by Klaudia Radecka/NurPhoto via Getty Images)
Nurphoto | Nurphoto | Getty Images
Elon Musk‘s social media platform X was hit with an outage on Wednesday, leaving some users unable to load the site.
More than 15,000 users reported issues with the platform at around 9:53 a.m. ET, according to analytics firm Downdetector, which gathers data from users who spot glitches and report them to service.
The issues appeared to be largely resolved by 10:30 a.m., though some users continue to report disruptions with the platform.
The site has suffered from multiple disruptions in recent months.
Representatives from X didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment on the outage.
