Lifeboat Foundation

The AI startups working to build products that support African languages often get ignored by investors, says Hadgu, owing to the small size of the potential market, a lack of political support, and poor internet infrastructure. However, Hadgu says small African startups including Lesan, GhanaNLP, and Lelapa AI are playing an important role: “Big tech companies do not give focus to our languages,” he says, “but we cannot wait for them.”

Lelapa AI is trying to create a new paradigm for AI models in Africa, says Vukosi Marivate, a data scientist on the company’s AI team. Instead of tapping into the internet alone to collect data to train its model, like companies in the West, Lelapa AI works both online and offline with linguists and local communities to gather data, annotate it, and identify use cases where the tool might be problematic.

Bonaventure Dossou, a researcher at Lelapa AI specializing in natural-language processing (NLP), says that working with linguists enables them to develop a model that’s context-specific and culturally relevant. “Embedding cultural sensitivity and linguistic perspectives makes the technological system better,” says Dossou. For example, the Lelapa AI team built sentiment and tone analysis algorithms tailored to specific languages.

A new device that can be swallowed like a pill can track vital signs such as breathing and heart rate from inside the body.

Left: Ben Pless Right: Traverso Lab at Brigham and Women’s Hospital.

“This device can help diagnose and monitor many health conditions without requiring hospital visits, which can make healthcare more accessible and supportive for patients,” says Giovanni Traverso, the lead author of the study, an associate professor of mechanical engineering at MIT and a gastroenterologist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital.

Continue reading “Swallowable device tracking vital signs inside the body in human trial” »

Mira Murati is to temporarily take up the reins at OpenAI following Sam Altman’s surprising departure.

After Sam Altman’s surprise sacking from OpenAI on Friday, the AI company has announced that Mira Murati will fill the gap as interim Chief Executive Officer (CEO) until a replacement is found. A relative unknown outside of Silicon Valley, many interested in the artificial intelligence (AI) space are rightfully wondering who she is. Let’s find out what we know so far.

Continue reading “How Mira Murati steered OpenAI’s evolution into a global AI leader” »

The company’s journey to make its modem has been long and frustrating.

Justin Sullivan/Getty Images.

As per a Bloomberg report, the iPhone maker, which had planned to launch its chip by next year, will likely miss its target of shipping the component by the spring of 2025, people familiar with the matter said. The chip may debut at the end of 2025 or early 2026, the last year of Apple’s extended contract with Qualcomm.

Continue reading “Apple’s modem chip project fails to match Qualcomm’s modem technology” »

Architect Fria Folket positioned a Billy bookcase from Ikea along almost every wall to house the owners’ expansive library.

Scientists have built noise-canceling headphones that filter out specific types of sound in real-time — such as birds chirping or car horns blaring — thanks to a deep learning artificial intelligence (AI) algorithm.

The system, which researchers at the University of Washington dub “semantic hearing,” streams all sounds captured by headphones to a smartphone, which cancels everything before letting wearers pick the specific types of audio they’d like to hear. They described the protoype in a paper published Oct. 29 in the journa IACM Digital Library.

It is a big setback for OpenAI, and could slow the industry as a whole | Business.

Engineers and paleontologists teamed up to reconstruct an ancestor of starfish from the Paleozoic era and figure out how it moved.

By Lauren Leffer

Engineer Ross M. Brown, who built and sold an industrial conglomerate for more than $400 million, is donating nearly all his wealth to promising mid-career chemistry and physics professors at a range of universities.