Personalized Health, Voice Clones, OpenAI, and Celebrity Number 6
Personalized Health, Voice Clones, OpenAI, and Celebrity Number 6
Weekly Review of News in Technology, UX and AI
Here’s the latest news, resources, and use cases from the world of product, UX, AI and technology. Let’s go:
💊 Personalized Health
🗣️ AI Voice Clones
🎨 AI Art
🍓 OpenAI o1
🍎 Apple Event
🤩 Celebrity Number 6
🪭 Air Conditioning
Podcast
Personalized Nutrition: How AI, Data, and 3D Printing Are Transforming Health with Ari Tulla of Elo
In this episode of Prodity: Product by Design, Kyle sits down with Ari Tulla, co-founder and CEO of Elo, a smart nutrition service using AI and data to personalize health solutions. Ari shares his fascinating journey from his early passion for gaming and technology to becoming a leading figure in the healthcare space. He discusses how Elo is turning the concept of "food as medicine" into reality, using biometric data, wearable devices, and AI to create personalized nutrition solutions. Ari also delves into the challenges and innovations that come with building a product in a space where technology, health, and human experience intersect, emphasizing the importance of balance in life and business. Join us to learn more about the future of health and how personalized nutrition is set to revolutionize wellness.
News and Useful Reads
Amazon’s Audiobook Narrators Can Now Make Their Own AI Voice Clones
It’s not surprising to see Amazon and Audible testing the waters here. I haven’t seen many narrators who like this idea though.
Audible, the Amazon-owned audiobook company, announced a trial program for generating AI voice clones to read works in its audiobook marketplace. The announcement came via a post in ACX—Audiobook Creation Exchange—Audible’s service that lets authors and publishers turn written books into audiobooks.
Don’t ask if AI can make art — ask how AI can be art
We highlighted an essay last week about how AI can’t create art. In response, this article explores the idea that the creation of art can be art as well.
But even as their output tends to be disappointing, AI tools have become the internet’s favorite game — not because they often produce objectively great things but because people seem to love the process of producing and sharing them.
Is OpenAI’s New “o1” Model The Big Step Forward We’ve Been Waiting For?
OpenAI has released its new “o1” model, which does more reasoning than previous LLMs. It accomplishes this through chain of thought, or working through problems that you assign to it, the same way you might think out loud.
The o1 release is the first of OpenAI’s “Strawberry” AI reasoning project (originally called Q*), which the company believes is a major step forward for the field. “We think this is actually the critical breakthrough,” OpenAI research director Bob McGrew told The Verge this week. “Fundamentally, this is a new modality for models in order to be able to solve the really hard problems that it takes in order to progress towards human-like levels of intelligence.”
Apple Event Recap With iPhone 16 and 16 Pro, Apple Watch Series 10, AirPods 4, and More
Apple had an event and released a bunch of new products…that are all basically slightly better models of the old ones. I may be getting cynical, but that is feeling more and more common with product launches.
How The Internet Found Celebrity Number 6
If you aren’t familiar with this story, I think it is one of the most fun stories on the internet. It started with some fabric that had celebrities on it. Almost all of them were easily identifiable. And the original photos were all eventually found. But one became impossible. Groups were formed, subreddits were dedicated to it, and the internet spent years looking for her. And she was found this week.
The search for Ms. Sarda began with a piece of fabric. Nearly five years ago, a Reddit user who goes by TontsaH posted an image of a piece of cloth printed with illustrations of several faces. Some were quickly identifiable as celebrities, like the model Adriana Lima and the actor Orlando Bloom, but one face remained a mystery.
Other Interesting Finds
How Air Conditioning Took Over the American Office
I think a lot about air conditioning. Almost every time I walk indoors, I think about what it would be like if there wasn’t air conditioning. What if we were living in a place where it wasn’t ubiquitous? Or what would we do if we were living 100 years ago when it didn’t exist? Or what if our cars didn’t have AC (I actually know the answer to that because we owned a car without AC for many years, and it was terrible).
A pattern emerged: Once about 20% of a city’s office buildings adopted AC, the rest were obliged to follow in order to compete, according to Cooper…
As it reshaped architecture, AC also reshaped the nation, reversing the post-Civil War migration from the southern US. Suddenly, working in Sun Belt cities became more appealing, and glassy towers rose in the downtowns of Atlanta, Dallas and Phoenix.
If you are seriously interested in productivity, the first thing to do is to learn about the nature of macroeconomics, or of what comprises our business social system and how it works. This is not a simple matter because so much confusion and complexity have been introduced into the many past explanations (which even the experts regard as being only a pseudo-science), that it will require a big effort to understand them and sort out which ones are truly applicable.
My research was made in order to do this for myself and to better evolve my way of thinking about the Big Picture of our social system. Only later did I see that It could usefully be shared with others who face a similar problem that I did. Below is my article about it and an introduction to my free e-copy 310-page book that resulted.
Macroeconomics badly needs to be properly understood without the confusion of it being a pseudo-science. Here is how it is a true and exact one: Making Macroeconomics a Much More Exact Science
Today macroeconomics is treated inexactly within the humanities, because it appears to be a very complex and easily confused matter. But this does not give it fair justice, because we should be trying to find a viable approach to the topic and examine it in a way that avoids these problems, and for us to better understand of what it comprises and how it actually works. Suppose we ask ourselves the question: “how many different KINDS of financial (business) transaction occur within our society?”
The simple and direct answer shows that that only a limited number of them are possible or necessary. Although our sociological system comprises of many millions of participants, to properly answer this question we should be ready to consider the averages of the various kinds of activities (no matter who or what organization performs them), and simultaneously to idealize these activities so that they fall into a number of commonly shared operations. This approach uses some general terms for expressing the various types of these transactions, into what becomes a relatively small number. Here, each kind is found to apply between a particular pair of agents, (sectors or entities), each one of which has individual properties. Then to cover the whole sociological system of a country, it requires only 19 kinds of exchanges of the goods, services, access rights, taxes, credits, investments, valuable legal documents, etc., versus the mutual and opposing flows of money.
The argument that led to this initially unexpected result was prepared by the author. It may be found in his working paper (on the internet) as SSRN 2865571 “Einstein’s Criterion Applied to Logical Macroeconomics Modelling”. In this model these double-flows of money versus goods, etc., necessarily pass between only 6 kinds of role-playing entities (or agents). Of course, there are a number of different configurations that are possible for this type of simplification, but if one tries to eliminate all the unnecessary complications and sticks to the more basic activities, then these particular quantities and flows provide the most concise yet fully comprehensive result, which is presentable in a seamless manner, for our whole social system and one that is suitable for its further analysis.
Surprisingly, past representation of our sociological system by this kind of an interpretation model has neither been properly derived nor formally presented before. Previously, other partial versions have been modelled (even using up to 4 agents, as by Professor Hudson), but they are inexact due to their being over-simplified. Alternatively, in the case of econometrics, the representations are far too complicated and almost impossible for students to follow. These two reasons of over-simplification and of complexity are why this pseudo or non-scientific confusion has been created by many economists, and it explains their failure to obtain a good understanding about how the whole system works.
The model being described here in this paper is unique, in being the first to include, along with some additional aspects, all the 3 factors of production, in Adam Smith's “Wealth of Nations” book of 1776. These factors are Land, Labour and Capital, along with their returns of Ground-Rent, Wages and Interest/Dividends, respectively. All of them are all included in the model, which as a diagram is included in the paper.
(Economics’ historians will recall, as originally explained by Adam Smith and David Ricardo, that there are prescribed independent functions of the land-owners and the capitalists. The land-owners speculate in the land-values and rent it to tenants, whilst the capitalists are actually the owners/managers of the durable capital goods used in industry. These items may be hired out for use. Regrettably, for political and commercial reasons, the concept of these 2 different functions were combined by John Bates Clark and company, about 1900, resulting in the later neglect of their different influences on our sociological system-- the terms landlord and capitalist becoming virtually synonymous along with the expression for property as real-estate.)
The diagram of this model is in my paper (noted above). A mention of the related teaching process is also provided in my short working paper SSRN 2600103 “A Mechanical Model for Teaching Macroeconomics”. With this model in an alternative form, the various parts and activities of the Big Picture of our sociological system can be properly identified and defined.
Subsequently by analysis, the way our sociological system works can then be properly seen, calculated and illustrated. This analysis is introduced by the mathematics and logic, which was devised by Nobel Laureate Wellesley W. Leontief, when he invented the important "Input-Output" matrix methodology (that he originally applied only to the production sector). This short-hand method of modelling the whole system replaces the above-mentioned block-and-flow diagram. It enables one to really get to grips with what is going-on within our sociological system. It is the topology of the matrix which actually provides the key to this.
The logic and math are not hard and are suitable for high-school students, who have been shown the basic properties of square-matrices and the notation of the calculus. By this technique it is comparatively easy to introduce any change to a pre-set sociological system that is theoretically in equilibrium (even though we know that this ideal is never actually attained--it simply being a convenient way to begin the study). This change creates an imbalance and we need to regain equilibrium again. Thus, sudden changes or policy decisions may be simulated and the effects of them determined, which will point the way to what policy is best. In my book about it, (see below) 3 changes associated with taxation are investigated in hand-worked numerical examples. In fact, when I first worked it out, the irrefutable logical results were a surprise, even to me!
Developments of these ideas about making our subject more truly scientific (thereby avoiding the past pseudo-science being taught at universities), may be found in my recent book: “Consequential Macroeconomics—Rationalizing About How Our Social System Works”.
Please write to me at chesterdh@hotmail.com for a free e-copy of this 310-page book and for any additional information....