AI Can’t Spell ‘Strawberry’; Apple Research-Remote Controlled Home Hub; Clothes to Keep People 15 Degrees Cooler; Experiment Kept Mice Alive 33% Longer-How About People

Maybe if you want to know if you are communicating with a bot, or a person…or at least a person with some degree of spelling literacy, you can just ask them to spell ’strawberry.’ TechCrunch.com reports that in a crazy quirk, when you query muscular AI models like Chat GPT4o and Claude how many times does the letter R appear in the word ‘strawberry,’ they will tell you twice! I just did a video seminar on the use of these AI models, and watched as a guy produced a non-disclosure agreement in around a minute, and then had one of the AI models…Claude in this case…translate the document into French, Italian, and simple Chinese. It spit out the results in about 30 seconds. We already know the things will lie..’hallucinate’ as the AI companies euphemistically say…when they don’t have an answer, but this is a pretty interesting wrinkle. It is a good reminder that they are incredible at predicting the next word and many words, but they don’t have brains or really think. So, Claude…how many times DOES the letter R appear in the word ‘strawberry?’ 

Apple is working on something that may be somewhat at odds with all the health features that the Apple Watch brings to users. Cupertino is allegedly working on more remote control for things around the home. According to appleinsider.com, the remote could be a free-standing device, or incorporated into iPhones as an app. The actual patent says…somewhat nebulously…as can be the case with patent descriptions… “Electronic devices with touch input components and haptic output components.” From the text of the patent, it looks like it could be for finding, controlling, or reacting to, most any device in the home that runs on electricity. While it could be a phone, Apple says in the description that the aim is not to have an iPhone-like device that a person has to constantly look at. “The use of localized and global haptic output from components… may help a user interact more intuitively with surrounding objects and devices,” says Apple, “by reducing the need for the user to look at [the] device at all times.” In other words, it sounds like Apple has invented a universal remote control…only with haptic feedback. One thought…it may be being planned to control the reported Apple robots!

With climate change here and looming larger as time goes on, here’s something useful from some scientists at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Bgr.com says they have developed a flexible chalk-based coating that can be added to any type of fabric. Once added to the fabric, the clothes can reduce the body temperature by up to 15 degrees compared to untreated clothing. The nice thing about this coating is that it can be applied to nearly any commercially available fabric out there, making almost any outfit into a set of body cooling clothes. And because the coating is surface level, it doesn’t actually change the material in any way. It doesn’t even penetrate the fibers, the researchers note. The additional expense is described as ‘low to moderate,’ so this could be a pretty huge deal.

A research study found that mice that take in less of a specific amino acid lived 33% longer than those that had a more normal amount. Bgr.com reports that if the findings pan out on humans, it could lead to an anti-aging diet that helps us to live longer. As with all human trials, this will take a while to get approved. That said, the scientists were surprised that the result extended the rodents’ life spans so much. The actual study had a control group with 20 amino acids, another group with reduced amino acids, and then a third with just one amino acid…isoleucine…reduced. Cutting that one amino acid seemed to create the anti-aging type diet. Here’s an interesting point…the 33% lifespan increase was for male mice…the females in the group only got a 7% bump in life span. Those eating off the anti-aging diet were also less likely to develop things like cancerous tumors, age-related prostate enlargement, and other common age-related issues. Further, the researchers found that the mice eating the restricted diet ate significantly more calories, but they didn’t actually gain any weight. Instead, they actually burned more energy and maintained lower body weights overall, despite their activity levels being on different than the others in the research.

I’m Clark Reid and you’re ‘Technified’ for now.