Your upcoming Powerball loss is DraftKings’ gain
As the Powerball jackpot has stretched to $1.8 billion, users are flooding into DraftKing’s Jackpocket lottery app.
Paramount and Microsoft’s Activision agree to partner on a “Call of Duty” movie
Less than a month after forming, Paramount Skydance has landed another major piece of intellectual property. The studio said it’s signed a deal with Microsoft’s Activision to create a live-action “Call of Duty” film.
The competitive shooter is one of the most popular gaming franchises in the world and has been the US’s bestselling series for the past 16 years. The next title in the 22-year-old franchise, “Black Ops 7,” will debut in November.
Paramount, which closed its merger with Skydance in August, has had a summer of big deals. It acquired UFC broadcast rights in a $7.7 billion deal with TKO last month, following a $1.5 billion deal for “South Park” rights in July. The company also lured “Stranger Things” creators away from Netflix last month for a four-year film and TV development deal.
The competitive shooter is one of the most popular gaming franchises in the world and has been the US’s bestselling series for the past 16 years. The next title in the 22-year-old franchise, “Black Ops 7,” will debut in November.
Paramount, which closed its merger with Skydance in August, has had a summer of big deals. It acquired UFC broadcast rights in a $7.7 billion deal with TKO last month, following a $1.5 billion deal for “South Park” rights in July. The company also lured “Stranger Things” creators away from Netflix last month for a four-year film and TV development deal.
“Blinding Lights” just officially hit 5 billion streams on Spotify
Over the weekend, The Weeknd’s biggest hit crossed over the impressive threshold, with Spotify marking the feat with an Instagram post that the artist shared to his story.
According to Spotify data collated by Kworb, the song now has a staggering 5,000,010,581 streams on the platform, and is racking up nearly 1.5 million streams each day at the time of writing.
While Ed Sheeran’s “Shape of You,” released about two years before “Blinding Lights,” looks like it’ll be the next song to hit the 5 billion boundary, “Starboy,” another song from The Weeknd, might not be too far behind.
Besides those two megahits, The Weeknd has 26 other songs that have been streamed more than 1 billion times on Spotify — more than any other artist on the platform.
While Ed Sheeran’s “Shape of You,” released about two years before “Blinding Lights,” looks like it’ll be the next song to hit the 5 billion boundary, “Starboy,” another song from The Weeknd, might not be too far behind.
Besides those two megahits, The Weeknd has 26 other songs that have been streamed more than 1 billion times on Spotify — more than any other artist on the platform.
Americans are set to gamble a record $30 billion on the NFL this season, according to estimates from the American Gaming Association.
For context, that’s the same price tag as all US sports broadcasting rights combined. Leading sportsbooks like DraftKings, Flutter Entertainment’s FanDuel, Caesars Entertainment, and MGM’s BetMGM are positioned to cash in, with each battling for market share through promos, partnerships, and increasingly sticky mobile apps.
Meanwhile, lawmakers are ramping up efforts to crack down on illegal sportsbooks: this month, 50 attorneys general urged the Justice Department to take action against unlicensed gambling, warning that states are losing roughly $4 billion in tax revenue.
Yum! Brands is rethinking its rollout of AI drive-thru technology, according to The Wall Street Journal. Customers, frustrated by the tech’s glitchy behavior and quick but wrong performance, have taken to trolling the AI by placing ridiculous orders (see: “can I get 18,000 water cups, please?”).
Taco Bell Chief Digital and Technology Officer Dane Mathews told the WSJ that the chain is now thinking carefully about how to use the tech — which it’s already put in more than 500 US restaurants — going forward.
We’re not expecting too big of a pullback: earlier this year, Taco Bell partnered with Nvidia and said it’s invested $1 billion into “digital and technology.”
Since the pandemic, picky high earners have been at the epicenter of a new cost headache for retailers: “buy now, return later.”
That’s the message from the Bank of America Institute, which reports that US retailers stared down a massive $890 billion tab from returns last year, according to the National Retail Federation. Return rates have more than doubled since 2019 among large retailers, with the associated costs rising even more:
More tidbits from BofA:
Department stores are taking the hardest hit, with a return rate in the high teens versus 4.5% for all US retailers.
Gen Z has the lowest return rate — unless it’s for electronics.
Higher-income shoppers are returning items at nearly twice the rate of lower-income households.
One explanation “may be that higher-income households are less cash-constrained and so are more likely to buy items speculatively when they are searching for a particular purchase, in the knowledge they can return it later if they decide it’s not right for them,” wrote Bank of America Institute economists led by David Michael Tinsley.
For shoppers, free returns have become the trade-off for hitting “buy,” but for retailers already squeezed by tariffs and soft demand, “buy now, return later” is proving to be an expensive habit to support.
![I want you, US Army poster [altered]](https://sherwoodnews.imgix.net/uncle-sam-poster-influencer.png)
The US military is deploying influencers to help drive recruitment
With the armed forces seeing its active-duty personnel slump to a record low last year, where better to attract young new recruits in 2025 than social media?
ChatGPT head hopes “we can unequivocally endorse the product to a struggling family member”
Stories abound of human beings’ inappropriate and disastrous relationships with AI chatbots:
Here, a teen became romantically involved with a Character.AI chatbot before dying by suicide.
Here, a ChatGPT user went down conspiratorial rabbit holes that nearly killed him.
Here, an 76-year-old man died by accident on a trip to New York City to visit the Meta chatbot he became infatuated with.
The extent and frequency of such relationships led ChatGPT maker OpenAI to recently roll out overuse notifications, and it’s working to be able to “better detect signs of mental or emotional distress” among its users.
Amid all this, The Verge’s Alex Heath conducted an excellent interview with OpenAI’s head of ChatGPT, Nick Turley. Read the whole thing, but this excerpt suggests that instead of shunning such relationships, OpenAI is leaning in, working to make its product capable of helping people in their most perilous personal moments.
“I trust our ability to do the right thing, but we still have to do the work and the work has begun and it won’t stop until we feel like we can unequivocally endorse the product to a struggling family member. That’s kind of the thought exercise we often give ourselves: if you knew someone who was struggling in life, maybe they’re going through something, maybe they just had a breakup, maybe they’re lost in life, would you actually recommend ChatGPT to them unequivocally and with confidence? For us, that’s the bar, and we’re going to keep working until we feel that way.”
Here, a ChatGPT user went down conspiratorial rabbit holes that nearly killed him.
Here, an 76-year-old man died by accident on a trip to New York City to visit the Meta chatbot he became infatuated with.
The extent and frequency of such relationships led ChatGPT maker OpenAI to recently roll out overuse notifications, and it’s working to be able to “better detect signs of mental or emotional distress” among its users.
Amid all this, The Verge’s Alex Heath conducted an excellent interview with OpenAI’s head of ChatGPT, Nick Turley. Read the whole thing, but this excerpt suggests that instead of shunning such relationships, OpenAI is leaning in, working to make its product capable of helping people in their most perilous personal moments.
“I trust our ability to do the right thing, but we still have to do the work and the work has begun and it won’t stop until we feel like we can unequivocally endorse the product to a struggling family member. That’s kind of the thought exercise we often give ourselves: if you knew someone who was struggling in life, maybe they’re going through something, maybe they just had a breakup, maybe they’re lost in life, would you actually recommend ChatGPT to them unequivocally and with confidence? For us, that’s the bar, and we’re going to keep working until we feel that way.”
