New Post 5-1-2024

Author

Keith Collins MD
May 01, 2024

Top Story

How do normal people use AI? (Clearly, I wouldn’t know.) Luckily, The Verge has again released its annual survey of AI use among a representative sample of Americans, and here are some of the takeaways;

  • 40% of Americans have used AI at least once (up from 33% last year)

  • Of that 40%, 4 out of 5 use AI repeatedly for at least 1 purpose

  • 2 out of 3 of these repeat users use AI at least once per week

Clash of the Titans

Samsung’s profits soar 933% (10-fold!) on demand for AI chips

Korean chipmaker Samsung Electronics reports a stunning 933% increase in first-quarter profits, driven mainly by the insatiable demand for AI chips. To quote my colleagues at The Neuron, “It appears that the only items topping AI in popularity are pickleball and Ozempic.”

The country with the most AI patents is… China???

The data whizzes at Visual Capitalist put together the nifty infographic below, showing the number of AI patents granted annually by country. And the winner… is China, and it ain’t even close. In 2022, China granted almost three times the number of AI patents as second-place USA.

The race to put AI chips in space

Outer space is a tough place to run a computer. Hard vacuum, harder radiation, extremes of heat and cold depending on whether you are facing the sun, vibration from rocket thrusters, and no easy way to get a replacement part. That’s why, up to now, as much of the computing as possible has been done back on Mother Earth. The rapidly growing number of satellites, and the even more rapidly growing number of sensors per satellite, is beginning to outstrip the capacity of existing radio links. One solution is for satellites to do more of the processing onboard. Modern microchips are up to the task - the cellphone in your pocket has more compute power than all of NASA back when we put the first human on the moon - but such chips will have to be redesigned and rigorously tested for reliability in the harsh conditions of space. Now, an ever-expanding group of companies and governments are racing to make the chips that will allow satellites to have AI on board for data analysis and some degree of autonomous action.

Fun News

Inside the Funhouse Mirror Factory: How social media distorts perceptions of norms

Now it’s not just the Boomers blaming social media for the toxic polarization of our society. This open preprint article analyzes how the technology of social media platforms, heavily reliant on machine learning to increase engagement, spotlights extreme views, which then become the norms for online discussions. It appears that we are being torn asunder by algorithms. 

DARPA unveils AI-powered autonomous tank

DARPA, the DOD research agency that invented the internet (Sorry, Al Gore!) among other things, has recently tested an autonomous tank codenamed RACER (Robotic Autonomy in Complex Environments with Resiliency.) 12-ton mobile robots with cannons and a mind of their own - what could go wrong?

AI in Medicine

CRISPR-GPT automates design of gene editing

Researchers at Princeton and Stanford have developed an AI system that designs CRISPR gene-editing experiments and therapies. The same Large Language Model technology that allows chatbots to transform your request into a clever birthday poem for your sister, can be used to transform a biochemist’s request into a detailed plan for editing a genome to run an experiment, or to cure sickle cell anemia.

Google’s Gemini AI fine-tuned for medicine

Googles flagship AI model, Gemini, has now been fine-tuned to excel at biomedical tasks. The result, cleverly named Med-Gemini, was put through its paces and managed to better the state of the art on a wide variety of biomedical benchmark tests.

AI-enabled EKG alert system saves lives

Taiwanese medical researchers developed an AI-enabled EKG that identified hospitalized patients with high cardiovascular risk. Compared with standard care for these patients, the AI-enabled EKG alert system reduced cardiac death in high risk patients by 90%.

AI model deciphers how promoters initiate DNA transcription

How promoter regions of the genome initiate transcription of their target gene has long been a mystery. In an article published last week in Science, two researchers from Sanofi Pasteur, the world’s largest company devoted exclusively to vaccines, show how they used AI to detect the patterns common to Transcription Start Sites, and thus further elucidate how information is genetically encoded.

That's a wrap! More news next week.