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- 🤖 Elon and Zuck enter the A.I. battle
Good morning and welcome to the latest edition of neonpulse!
Here's what we have for you today:
Elon is assembling an A.I. research team
Zuck arrives fashionably late to the A.I. party
Fiat launches the first metaverse car dealership
Disease detection goes digitial with “Shazam” for heartbeats
Elon enters the A.I. war
Elon Musk has reportedly been approaching A.I. researchers about forming a new A.I. research lab, leading to many to wonder exactly what he has in mind.
His main target is allegedly Igor Babuschkin, a former DeepMind researcher that specializes in the types of machine learning models that power tools like ChatGPT, yet Babuschkin said that a “better chatbot” is not what Musk has in mind.
Elon originally co-founded OpenAI in an effort to ensure that A.I. was developed safely, but since departing the company back in 2018 he’s become a vocal critic of the lack of regulation and oversight for the technology:
“I'm increasingly inclined to think that there should be some regulatory oversight, maybe at the national and international level, just to make sure that we don't do something very foolish. I mean with artificial intelligence we're summoning the demon.”
Meta’s new A.I. focus
After the success of ChatGPT and Microsoft’s Bard, Zuckerberg has arrived fashionably late to the party, announcing a new “top-level” team at Meta in order to develop new A.I. products.
“We're creating a new top-level product group at Meta focused on generative AI to turbocharge our work in this area. We're starting by pulling together a lot of the teams working on generative AI across the company into one group focused on building delightful experiences around this technology into all of our different products,” Zuckerberg said in a recent Facebook post.
In the short term the team will be focused on integrating A.I. tools into their existing products, including Instagram, WhatsApp, and Messenger, and in the longer term the team will “focus on developing AI personas that can help people in a variety of ways.”
Metaverse team in action
The shift of resources away from the metaverse (which cost the company $13.7 billion in 2022 alone) is being celebrated by Meta shareholders, with the stock up 41% percent so far this year.
Fiat goes meta
Fiat recently announced its “metaverse” car dealerships, allowing customers to shop for the car of their dreams from the comfort of their own home.
Fiat Metaverse Dealership
The Fiat metaverse store was first released in January at CES, and was created in collaboration with Touchcast and Microsoft.
Inside the store, shoppers are able to interact with a ChatGPT powered “Fiat Genius” that can help answer basic questions about the cars, with more complex questions being referred to humans.
The experience models the way that "a human salesperson would meet you in a dealership, where you would ask them a question and they'll say, 'Let me show you," said Touchcast CEO Edo Segal.
The only catch?
The entire process takes place inside Microsoft teams, which may actually make you miss the experience of being taken advantage of at an actual car dealership.
Shazam for heartbeats
Medical startup Eko Health has launched an A.I. powered heart disease detection platform that connects with the companies digital stethoscopes, allowing healthcare workers to identify potential symptoms of the illness in its earlier stages.
Eko digital stethoscope
“We’ve called it Shazam for heartbeats. You know Shazam, the music identification app that helps you figure out what song is playing in Starbucks. We do the same thing, but for heart sounds.”
Their Sensora platform, which was cleared by the FDA last summer, allows healthcare workers to identify structural murmurs earlier on in the diseases progression, leading to better outcomes for patients.
“Instead of finding the song that’s playing, we determine whether there is heart disease or not,” Landgraf declared. “Then we provide that notification to the clinician with an app that runs on a smartphone or tablet. The physician gets that interpretation right there in the exam room, and they then make their decision about next steps for the patient.”
To train the A.I. detection model inside of their Sensora platform, Eko partnered with a number of health networks, collecting data from hundreds of thousands of patients with different types of cardiovascular disease.
“We were able to see a very substantial increase in diagnostic accuracy, specifically around sensitivity. If a physician hears something, they’re pretty good at knowing what they hear. If they hear a murmur, most of the time they are correct and they did hear that. But there are still a lot of cases where there are murmurs but they’re very subtle, and the physician doesn’t necessarily hear it. So what we can provide is additional accuracy to make sure that physicians didn’t miss any patients who have more subtle signs of disease,” Landgraf explained.
And now your moment of zen
That’s all for today folks!
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