Skip to main content

Testing the Viral AI Necklace That Promises Companionship But Delivers Confusion

3 months 1 week ago
Fortune tested the AI Friend necklace for two weeks and found it struggled to perform its basic function. The $129 pendant missed conversations entirely during the author's breakup call and could only offer vague questions about "fragments" when she tried to ask for advice. The device lagged seven to ten seconds behind her speech and frequently disconnected. The author had to press her lips against the pendant and repeat herself multiple times to get coherent replies. After a week and a half the necklace forgot her name and later misremembered her favorite color. The startup has raised roughly seven million dollars in venture capital for the product and spent a large portion on eleven thousand subway posters across the MTA system. Sales reached three thousand units but only one thousand have shipped. The company brought in slightly under four hundred thousand dollars in revenue. The startup told Fortune he deliberately "lobotomized" the AI's personality after receiving complaints. The terms of service require arbitration in San Francisco and grant the company permission to collect audio and voice data for AI training.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

msmash

Immune System Research Earns Nobel Prize for Brunkow, Ramsdell and Sakaguchi

3 months 1 week ago
Mary E. Brunkow, Fred Ramsdell and Shimon Sakaguchi received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine on Monday for their discoveries about how the immune system regulates itself. The three researchers split 11 million Swedish kroner ($1.17 million). Their work identified regulatory T cells and the FOXP3 gene that controls them. Dr. Sakaguchi spent more than a decade solving a puzzle about the thymus. He discovered that the immune system has a backup mechanism to stop harmful cells from attacking the body's own tissues. Dr. Brunkow and Dr. Ramsdell found the specific gene responsible for this process while studying mice that developed severe autoimmune disease. More than 200 clinical trials are now underway based on their research. Cancers attract regulatory T cells to block immune attacks. Researchers are developing drugs to turn the immune system against these cancer cells. In autoimmune diseases, regulatory T cells are missing or defective. The FOXP3 gene provides a starting point for drugs that teach the immune system to stop attacking itself.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

msmash