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In a bid to combat the ongoing homelessness crisis, Los Angeles County is using artificial intelligence (AI) to identify and support individuals at the highest risk of becoming homeless.

This pioneering pilot program analyzes data from seven county agencies, including medical visits, mental health care, substance abuse diagnoses, arrests, and public benefit sign-ups, to identify those most vulnerable to homelessness.

Dedicated case managers then reach out to these individuals, offering comprehensive support for four to six months, including access to $4,000 to $6,000 in aid to cover essential expenses like rent, utilities, and groceries. This assistance is designed to stabilize not only their housing but also their overall well-being.

In today’s column, I am going to walk you through a prominent AI-mystery that has caused quite a stir leading to an incessant buzz across much of social media and garnering outsized headlines in the mass media.


I make use of detective work to try and figure out what the alleged AI breakthrough was at OpenAI and has been claimed to be called Q*, leading supposedly toward AGI.

Inflection claims that its new language model, Inflection-2, outperforms direct competitors such as Google PaLM-2 and Claude 2, and is second only to GPT-4.

The new model is said to be significantly more powerful than its predecessor, Inflection-1, and, according to the startup, demonstrates improved factual knowledge, better style control, and significantly improved reasoning.

Inflection-1 was released in July. It was roughly on par with GPT-3.5 and PaLM-540B. Inflection-2 should now catch up with GPT-4, the company claims.

An AI tool that can predict 10-year risk of deadly heart attacks, could transform treatment for patients who undergo CT scans to investigate chest pain, according to British Heart Foundation-funded research presented today at the American Heart Association’s Scientific Sessions in Philadelphia.

In the first real-world trial of the AI tool, it was found to improve treatment for up to 45 per cent of patients. The AI technology could potentially save the lives of thousands with chest pain, who may not have been identified as at risk of a heart attack, and therefore may not have received appropriate treatment to lower their risk. With the technology also found to be cost-effective, the researchers hope it could change the management of patients who are referred for chest pain investigations, across the NHS.

Every year in the UK around 350,000 people have a cardiac CT scan – the standard test to identify any narrowings or blockages in the coronary arteries. In around three quarters of cases, there is no clear sign of significant narrowings, so patients are often reassured and discharged. Unfortunately, many of these people will die from a heart attack in future, because small, undetectable narrowings may break up if they are inflamed, blocking the arteries. Until recently, it was not possible to identify these patients at risk.

Silicon photonics (SiPh), the manufacturing of integrated photonics on CMOS platform, has been a buzzword in the recent two years, given the technology’s promising prospect to deliver a faster, securer and more efficient solution to data centers increasingly burdened by the ever-growing transmission demand of AI. However, the potential of silicon photonics is not confined to the realm of conventional computing and communication.

Buckle up, because we’re entering the era of thinking machines that make humans look like chattering chimps! But don’t worry about polishing your resume to impress our future robot overlords just yet. The experts are wildly divided on when superintelligent AI will actually arrive. It’s like we’re staring at an AI time machine without knowing if it will teleport us to 2 years from now or 2 decades into the future!

In one corner, we have Mustafa Suleyman from Inflection AI. He says take a chill pill, we’ve got at least 10–20 more years before the AI apocalypse. But hang on…his company just whipped up the world’s 2nd biggest AI supercomputer! It’s cruising with 3X the horsepower of GPT-4, the chatbot with reading skills rivaling a university professor. So something tells me Suleyman’s timeline is slower than your grandma driving without her glasses.

Meanwhile, OpenAI is broadcasting a very different arrival time. They believe superintelligence could show up within just 4 years! To get ready, they’ve launched an AI safety SWAT team, led by brainiacs like Ilya Sutskever. They’re funneling millions into this initiative with a strict 2027 deadline. Why so urgent? Well, they say superintelligence could either catapult humanity into a sci-fi future utopia, or permanently reduce us to drooling toddlers. Not great options there.