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In a recent article published in Scientific Reports, researchers describe the symptom profiles of respiratory viral infections from the Flu Watch Community and the Virus Watch cohort studies to compare the frequency of the range of symptoms experienced during influenza, respiratory syncytial virus (RSV), rhinovirus, seasonal coronaviruses (CoVs) infections, and infections from severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) wild-type (wt) strain and variants of concerns (VOCs), including Alpha, Delta, Omicron BA1/BA2/BA5.

Study: Symptom profiles of community cases infected by influenza, RSV, rhinovirus, seasonal coronavirus, and SARS-CoV-2 variants of concern. Image Credit: KitjaKitja/Shutterstock.com.

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As Meta Platforms Inc.’s META latest social media platform, Threads’ daily active user count continues to drop, Elon Musk has accused Mark Zuckerberg’s forum of committing a “cardinal sin.”

What Happened: Meta’s Threads entered the social media arena with much fanfare, quickly attracting over 100 million sign-ups in just five days.

However, the initial hype didn’t translate into long-term user retention, as the daily active user count witnessed a staggering 82% decline since its peak at 44 million users on launch day, reported CNN, citing data from Sensor Tower.

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Will someone please tell us who the hell owns AI.com and what they’re doing with it?

The domain, which used to direct to ChatGPT, now redirects users to xAI, an AI company owned by Elon Musk. Separate from X Corp, xAI claims on its website that it “will work closely with X,” the social media company formerly known as Twitter — including using posts on X as training for its large language model.

The high-value AI.com domain name changed hands in 2021, sat idle for a while, and then suddenly started redirecting to ChatGPT in February. For ChatGPT users, it was a helpful shortcut if they didn’t have the site bookmarked and couldn’t quite remember the precise URL for the chatbot (chat.openai.com, for the record).

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In a recent review published in BJC reports, researchers investigated the complex relationship between gut bacteria, diet, and patient nutrition, aiming to discern how these combined elements impact responses to immune checkpoint inhibitor (ICI) cancer treatment and identify patients most likely to benefit from such therapy.

Study: Gut microbiome and nutrition-related predictors of response to immunotherapy in cancer: making sense of the puzzle. Image Credit: SewCreamStudio/Shutterstock.com.

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Plus: The race to find a better way to label AI.

Earlier this year, when I realized how ridiculously easy generative AI has made it to manipulate people’s images, I maxed out the privacy settings on my social media accounts and swapped my Facebook and Twitter profile pictures for illustrations of myself.

The revelation came after playing around with Stable Diffusion–based image editing software and various deepfake apps. With a headshot plucked from Twitter and a few clicks and text prompts, I was able to generate deepfake porn videos of myself and edit the clothes out of my photo. As a female journalist, I’ve experienced more than my fair share of online abuse. I was trying to see how much… More.

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Andy Jassy used Thursday’s earnings call to underscore just how much the company is investing in artificial intelligence.

“Every single one” of Amazon’s businesses has “multiple generative AI initiatives going right now,” Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said on the company’s Q2 2023 earnings call on Thursday. The company offers infrastructure and services via AWS that can help power many generative artificial intelligence applications, which Jassy did discuss on the call, but he also stressed just how important AI is across the company as a whole.

Here’s more from Jassy about those generative AI initiatives:

Amazon wants you to know that it really cares about AI.

Continue reading ““Every single” Amazon team is working on generative AI, says CEO” | >

Kenya has ordered Worldcoin to stop collecting data in the country due to privacy and security concerns.

Kenya is pumping the brakes on Worldcoin — the eyeball-scanning crypto project launched by OpenAI founder Sam Altman. The Kenyan government has ordered Worldcoin to stop collecting data in the country while it reviews the project for potential privacy and security risks, as reported earlier by Reuters.

Worldcoin is a project that uses your iris to create a unique digital identity, which you can then link to digital currencies managed through the company’s World App. The project launched last week and has had people lining up to get their eyeballs scanned by the shiny, silver orbs Worldcoin… More.

Kenya has some reservations about Worldcoin.

Continue reading “Kenya suspends Sam Altman’s eyeball-scanning crypto project” | >

What you get, starting out in this video, is that algorithms impact our lives in, as CSAIL grad student Sandeep Silwal puts it, “silent ways”

Silwal uses a simple example – maps – in discussing what he calls the “marriage of provable algorithm design and machine learning.”

Lots of people, he notes, want to move from the area around MIT, south across the Charles to Fenway Park, to see the Red Sox.

That sort of fact could inform the thinking about how to program algorithms. For example, Silwal mentions how you can analyze data results to identify the most visited websites on the Internet – and direct focus accordingly.

“We use (algorithms) to compute fundamental things about us,” he says. “And… More.

Continue reading “Algorithms Can Learn, And They Probably Should: Saving Resources For The Future” | >