Humane has launched its AI Pin, one of the world’s most hyped tech products, and it has immediately made a public mistake. The AI Pin has been the subject of speculation promoted by Humane, a company that has remained somewhat mysterious and includes designers and executives who have worked at Apple and Microsoft. The system is intended to be attached to clothing and then makes use of a range of microphones, speakers and a display that can shine onto its owners hand to give information. That information is provided by artificial intelligence systems built on technology from ChatGPT creator OpenAI and Microsoft. The pin costs $699 and will be available later this year. It has been promoted by its president Imran Chaudhri as a response to both the prevalence of phones and the future of mixed-reality headsets, instead aiming to allow people to engage with the world around them. One of the features intended to do that is access to artificial intelligence systems that can be used to get answers to questions. Users can just press the AI Pin and speak into the air, which will then allow the computer to access the internet and show an answer. During its reveal event, executives showed the pin being used to answer one such question. “I can also use it to ask questions, like: when is the next eclipse, and where is the best place to see it?”, representatives said, explaining that it would be answered by “an AI browsing the web, or grabbing knowledge from all over the internet”. The AI Pin is then showed answering by saying that the best place to view the next total solar eclipse, in April 2024, would be Exmouth in Australia or East Timor. But next year’s solar eclipse will in fact be visible in North America, and in fact has been given the name “the Great North American Eclipse”. It will not be at all visible in Australia, and can only be seen in Mexico, the US and Canada. The system may have made the mistake because a total solar eclipse earlier this year was in fact best viewed from Exmouth and East Timor. That eclipse, in April, brought widespread coverage to the small Australian town – and that coverage was presumably used to train the artificial intelligence system that answered the question. Humane did not say which assistant was being used for that answer. The AI Pin is built specifically to call on a number of different assistants depending on what question is asked. The error recalls a similar error made by Google’s Bard chatbot when it was introduced at the beginning of the year. An ad showed Bard being asked about interesting discoveries by Nasa’s James Webb Space Telescope, and replying that it had taken “the very first pictures of a planet outside of our own solar system” – which is not true. At the time, many noted that the error highlighted a central error with large language models. The systems tend to “hallucinate” – or confidently state falsehoods – and have no real way of being able to check whether the information they are given is true. Read More You can finally use one feature of the Apple Vision Pro headset – sort of ChatGPT creator mocks Elon Musk in brutal tweet Call of Duty launch sparks record traffic on broadband networks

Scientists have developed new ultrasound technology that can induce immediate “hibernation”, they say. The system can be aimed at the head and bring on “torpor” a state similar to hibernation where mammals suppress their metabolism, reduce their body temperature and slow down other processes. The researchers behind the new system successfully brought it on in mice and rats, after pointing the ultrasound pulses at the animals’ heads. They suggest that it could work in humans – and might have important applications for long-distance space flight or medicine, they say. While further work is needed to understand how it might work on people, they suggest that it could be used when people have experienced acute emergencies or severe disease, for instance. If someone is in a car accident, for instance, they could essentially be put on ice until their organs are used for transplantation, for instance. It might also be useful in long journeys through space, where it would help reduce the amount of resources that people might stay alive if they are travelling to Mars or other distant locations. Mammals and birds keep high body temperatures and burn through a lot of energy. That characteristic is useful host of ways, but almost means that they require a lot of food and other resources. Some animals are able to limit the drawbacks of that situation by inducing torpor, which turns down many of those processes. It means that they use less energy, but are able to come back to living as normal after, without damage to their body. Humans are not able to do that. But if they were, it would be incredibly useful – which has led to the search for a noninvasive, safe and reliable way of inducing that state. The scientists found that directing ultrasound pulses at mice’s heads for around 10 seconds brought on the same conditions as torpor, with their heart rate slowing, their body temperature cooling and their metabolism slowing. They also built a special system that was able to measure that body temperature and send more of those pulses if a mouse appeared to be coming back to normal. Without that, however, the mice would wake back up again, returning to normal metabolism and body temperature. There are still a host of dangers, however. Experiments have shown that it is dangerous to bring animals back from those deep “torpid” states, and that they might not recover. If the mice were in cold environments, for instance, they did not spontaneously wake up. And any experiments in humans would be at risk of repeating those safety issues for people. The work is described in a new paper, ‘Induction of a torpor-like hypothermic and hypometabolic state in rodents by ultrasound’, published in Nature. Read More Apple lays bare danger of losing your health data What is Twitter Spaces and why did it go so wrong during DeSantis’s 2024 launch? Electric car range set to double with first production of breakthrough battery Apple lays bare danger of losing your health data What is Twitter Spaces and why did it go so wrong during DeSantis’s 2024 launch? Electric car range set to double with first production of breakthrough battery

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