Four For Friday | November 1, 2024
LF146 | Hitachi's future society scenarios, ArchetypeAI's practical intelligence, La Prairie's new longevity fund, metrics for pain + instant website creator
Welcome to Looking Forward’s Four For Friday. Four things that have piqued my interest this week, together with a bonus: AI Tip of The Week. Enjoy!
Hitachi’s future of AI scenarios: well-being a focus
The Hitachi Research Institute's recent "future mandala" study analyses how gen AI will transform society beyond 2030.
Three key scenarios emerge: smart cities with weather-predicting AI and sustainable infrastructure; enhanced well-being through personalized health services; and revolutionary business innovation through human-AI collaboration. These rather rosy scenarios do hinge on an effective governance framework and ethical implementation.
The So What? Validation for those of us betting on wellbeing, collaboration and environmental innovation.
Learning physics from first principles
Part of being human is being able to figure out what is likely to happen in a new situation. Criticism of the (generally incredible) LLM models has been that they’re just translating patterns for what they’ve seen before, and has been a spur for the ‘reasoning’ efforts by OpenAI and others.
AI startup Archetype AI makes a bold claim that its multimodal foundation model, Newton, can understand and predict physical systems through sensor data alone, without being explicitly taught physics laws. It can, in effect, learn physics on the job.
Unlike traditional approaches requiring system-specific models, Newton demonstrated “zero-shot” forecasting capabilities - i.e. it hasn’t been trained on the data -across diverse applications, from basic mechanics to complex electrical grid. Using 590 million sensor data samples it developed enough of an idea about how the world works to create accurate predictions in very different areas.
The So What? Models that don’t need training data set, will further accelerate the blistering pace of AI development.
New longevity fund from La Prairie
Arguably the world’s premier longevity clinic, La Prairie, has just launched a longevity investment fund. It’ll focus on developments in four core areas: “medical care, nutrition, movement and wellbeing”.
The So What? A welcome mission-driven addition to capital in this space, by a player with access to a significant wealthy client base and in-house living lab opportunities.
Measuring pain, objectively
One of the most important, yet hard to measure issues for chronic care management is pain, and this approach - a ‘pain-o-meter’ starts to assign metrics to what is a very subjective issue.
They’re using physiological sensors, brain imaging, and pupil response measurements to start to create objective measures. Startups include CereVu, a real-time, objective pain assessment system and Medasense's device, which is the first FDA-approved tool for pain measurement during surgery.
The So What? Still early days, but a promising new vital sign that can help with tracking care activities and outcomes.
Bonus - AI Tool of the Week
Butternut - create a fully functional website in 30 seconds with a simple prompt
That’s all for this week. As always, feedback welcome. Feel free to share insights or links of interest.
- Stephen