“In the first couple of weeks after returning home, Arbaugh had members of Neuralink’s team in his living room and kitchen to test the device. In research settings, brain implant patients usually need to rest after two to four hours because of mental and physical strain, but Arbaugh would go for up to 10 hours. The device also outperformed its predecessors. From Day 1, he began breaking speed records on the typical battery of tests used to benchmark the performance of brain-computer interface implants.

The world began to reopen for Arbaugh. He could play games like Sid Meier’s Civilization and chess with relative ease. He could hop between websites and audiobooks on his computer. And he could do all of this while lying in bed, which was far more comfortable and less spasm-inducing than sitting in his wheelchair and trying to get his mouth stick aligned just so with his iPad.

In the early days, Arbaugh had to learn how to tune Neuralink’s software to his brain patterns and get the gist of turning thoughts into action. As the weeks went by, the process became second nature. Arbaugh could carry on a conversation with someone while playing chess at the same time. It seemed like he’d developed a superpower.”

From Bloomberg.

“Google will use artificial intelligence to return summarized responses to search engine queries from US users as it continues to infuse generative AI into its most widely used products.

The company has been testing ‘AI overviews’ that appear at the tops of search results, summaries created by its Gemini AI model that appear alongside the traditional link-based search results.

The featured has also been tested in the UK but will be rolled out across the US beginning on Tuesday, Google announced at its annual I/O developer conference Tuesday in California. Google Search head Liz Reid said AI Overviews would become available to ‘more than a billion people’ by the end of the year.”

From The Guardian.

“In April, the 21-year-old got her old voice back. Not the real one, but a voice clone generated by artificial intelligence that she can summon from a phone app. Trained on a 15-second time capsule of her teenage voice — sourced from a cooking demonstration video she recorded for a high school project — her synthetic but remarkably real-sounding AI voice can now say almost anything she wants.

She types a few words or sentences into her phone and the app instantly reads it aloud.”

From Associated Press.

“Published in the journal Technology, Mind and Behaviour, the study describes how Przybylski and Dr Matti Vuorre, of Tilburg University in the Netherlands, analysed data collected through interviews involving about 1,000 people each year from 168 countries as part of the Gallup World Poll.

Participants were asked about their internet access and use as well as eight different measures of wellbeing, such as life satisfaction, social life, purpose in life and feelings of community wellbeing.

The team analysed data from 2006 to 2021, encompassing about 2.4 million participants aged 15 and above.

The researchers employed more than 33,000 statistical models, allowing them to explore various possible associations while taking into account factors that could influence them, such as income, education, health problems and relationship status.

The results reveal that internet access, mobile internet access and use generally predicted higher measures of the different aspects of wellbeing, with 84.9% of associations between internet connectivity and wellbeing positive, 0.4% negative and 14.7% not statistically significant.”

From The Guardian.