Health Tech Company Gets Funding For AI Doctor Mall Kiosk

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We may not know if there’s life outside of Earth, but new research brings us a little closer to understanding how it got here in the first place.

The emergence of life on Earth required a set of chemical precursors like amino acids and proteins that scientists believe developed naturally from a “primordial soup” or arrived when objects like comets and asteroids crashed into the planet.

Normally, the complex molecules needed to form life would be destroyed in the high energy environment created when a comet enters a planet’s atmosphere and strikes it, but if it was moving slowly enough, the comet could survive, researchers at the University of Cambridge said.

The findings could help narrow down places to search for alien life beyond our solar system.

BREAKING NEWS

Israeli President Isaac Herzog on Thursday said his country would likely need to keep “very strong force” in Gaza after the ongoing war to prevent the re-emergence of Hamas in the Palestinian territory, raising the possibility of an Israeli military occupation of the enclave. Herzog’s interview comes shortly after President Joe Biden told reporters that he “made it clear” to the Israelis that occupying Gaza would be a “big mistake.”

MORE: Capitol Police said six officers were injured in a clash with protesters outside the Democratic National Committee headquarters in Washington, D.C. on Wednesday night. Wearing black shirts with the slogan “Cease Fire Now,” the protesters said they planned to block the entrances and exits of the building to ensure lawmakers would see the protest.

The Senate voted 87-11 to pass a short-term budget to fund federal agencies into 2024, with the vote coming just two days before the government would have shut down. President Biden is expected to sign the legislation into law despite previously being opposed to the two-tiered nature of the budget, which will fund some federal agencies through Jan. 19 and others through Feb. 2.

BUSINESS + FINANCE

There’s growing consensus on Wall Street that stocks will build on this year’s rally in 2024, as stocks recover from a brutal 2022, but they will fail to crack the elusive highs reached just before interest rates skyrocketed. Goldman Sachs forecasts the S&P 500 to sit at 4,700 at the end of next year, strategists led by David Kostin said in a Wednesday note to clients. That’s 4.4% above its current level, but still below the benchmark index’s January 2022 all-time high of 4,797.

Target shares had their best day since 2019 after the retailer reported more robust quarterly profits than analysts anticipated, even as the company reported its second consecutive quarter of year-over-year sales declines. Target’s stock still reflects the company’s extended slump, as shares are down 14% year-to-date and about 50% from its 2021 all-time high.

WEALTH + ENTREPRENEURSHIP

Black Ambition, a nonprofit cofounded by mega music producer-turned fashion icon Pharrell Williams, not only offers mentorship to Black and Hispanic entrepreneurs, it has awarded an estimated $10 million combined to more than 100 startups. It’s “a return on investment for our ancestors’ sacrifice,” says Felecia Hatcher, the organization’s CEO.

TECH + INNOVATION

Microsoft shares soared as it debuted its first pair of custom AI chips designed to train large language models Wednesday as the tech giant looks to compete with chipmaker Nvidia, as well as Amazon and Google. The chips are designed to power its Bing AI chatbot, Microsoft’s Copilot and Azure OpenAI, which the company said will “help meet the exploding demand for efficient, scalable and sustainable compute power.”

Valued at $43 billion in September, Databricks is one of the hottest enterprise tech firms in the world thanks to its flagship data “lakehouse” software for companies looking for a way to store and analyze data. On Wednesday, the company announced a new product called the Data Intelligence Platform, which integrates generative AI from MosaicML, its $1.3 billion acquisition from June, into the lakehouse.

MONEY + POLITICS

Qatar is working to negotiate an agreement between Hamas and Israel that includes the release of some 50 hostages in Gaza in exchange for a three-day ceasefire, Reuters reported, which would be the largest number of hostages released at once since the start of the war. The deal also includes an agreement to increase the amount of humanitarian aid allowed into Gaza, as well as the release of some Palestinian women and children currently being held in Israeli jails.

The House Ethics Committee will not recommend formal punishment for Rep. George Santos (R-N.Y.), the chair told reporters ahead of a highly-anticipated report on the indicted congressman that’s expected to be released later this week. But Chairman Michael Guest (R-Miss.) predicted the findings would lead to another effort to expel the Long Island freshman, who survived an expulsion motion last month. Santos faces a 23-count indictment accusing him of defrauding donors and lying on his required financial disclosure forms.

SPORTS + ENTERTAINMENT

Walt Disney World Resort is an “an economic catalyst” for the state of Florida, generating more than $40 billion in economic impact and more than a quarter of a million total jobs in fiscal year 2022, according to a new study from Oxford Economics commissioned by Disney. The release of the study was a blatant public-relations salvo in the entertainment giant’s ongoing feud with Florida governor and presidential hopeful Ron DeSantis that began in March 2022 as a dispute over the governor’s controversial “Don’t Say Gay” law.

SCIENCE + HEALTHCARE

Digital health startup Forward announced $100 million in funding to bring 25 of its AI-powered “CarePod” kiosks to malls across the country, and the company is betting people will pay $99 a month for unlimited access to them. The goal, which cofounder Adrian Aoun compares to Elon Musk’s vision of self-driving cars, is to put medicine on autopilot. “In fact, we don’t even believe a doctor’s office should exist,” he said.

People who are hospitalized are often given central lines, tubes placed in veins close to the heart, to deliver necessary medications and fluids, but they are difficult to keep sterile and infections are common. On Wednesday, the FDA approved DefenCath, a liquid from New Jersey-based CorMedix that can be injected into the central line to help prevent infections, for patients undergoing kidney dialysis.

TRENDS + EXPLAINERS

The FTC sent warning letters to two food and beverage trade associations and a dozen TikTok and Instagram health influencers over posts promoting artificial sweeteners and sugary foods, a crackdown the FTC hopes sets a precedent across all influencer marketing. The FTC letters addressed posts, some of which disputed and downplayed a report from the WHO on the dangers of aspartame, that either did not disclose they were made as part of a partnership, or contained inadequate disclosures of a paid partnership with the trade associations.

Employees at roughly 200 Starbucks stores will walk off the job Thursday morning during the company’s “Red Cup Day” to protest a two-year labor dispute that has not resulted in a contract for workers. Red Cup Day was the highest single sales day of the year in 2022, and the walkout will be the union’s biggest coordinated effort to date.

DAILY COVER STORY

ChatGPT Has Been Turned Into A Social Media Surveillance Assistant

TOPLINE Most people use ChatGPT to answer simple queries, draft emails, or produce useful (and useless) code. But spyware companies are now exploring how to use it and other emerging AI tools to surveil people on social media.

In a presentation at the Milipol homeland security conference in Paris on Tuesday, online surveillance company Social Links demonstrated ChatGPT performing “sentiment analysis,” where the AI assesses the mood of social media users or can highlight commonly-discussed topics amongst a group. That can then help predict whether online activity will spill over into physical violence and require law enforcement action.

Founded by Russian entrepreneur Andrey Kulikov in 2017, Social Links now has offices in the Netherlands and New York; previously, Meta dubbed the company a spyware vendor in late 2022, banning 3,700 Facebook and Instagram accounts it had used to repeatedly scrape the social sites.

But that hasn’t halted its growth: Company sales executive Rob Billington said Social Links had more than 500 customers, half of which were based in Europe, with just over 100 in North America. That Social Links is using ChatGPT shows how OpenAI’s breakout tool of 2023 can empower a surveillance industry keen to tout artificial intelligence as a tool for public safety.

According to the American Civil Liberties Union’s senior policy analyst Jay Stanley, using AI tools like ChatGPT to augment social media surveillance will likely “scale up individualized monitoring in a way that could never be done with human monitors,” he told Forbes.

That’s a problem not just because this kind of technological eavesdropping could amplify inaccuracies or biases. It could also chill discourse online because everyone feels “that they’re being watched, not necessarily by humans, but by AI agents that have the ability to report things to humans who can bring consequences down on your head,” Stanley added.

WHY IT MATTERS “ChatGPT went viral after it showed an astonishing ability to understand questions and respond to them like a hyper-intelligent human,” says Forbes senior writer Thomas Brewster. “It’s been feared that same capability could be used to assist police in their surveillance operations. And that’s exactly what’s happening here. It’s an early sign that large language models like OpenAI’s tool are going to form part of surveillance technologies and could be used to clamp down on protest and free speech.”

MORE Cops Can Now Fly Drones From Anywhere In The World Using Just A Web Browser

FACTS AND COMMENTS

Americans will get a slight reprieve from last year’s record-high prices for 2023’s Thanksgiving dinner. That’s mainly due to falling prices of the turkey centerpiece amid a sharp reduction in avian flu cases:

$61.17: The estimated cost of a classic Thanksgiving feast for 10, according to an annual American Farm Bureau Federation survey

25%: The increase from 2019 to 2023 in the cost of a Thanksgiving meal

$27.35: The cost of a 16-pound frozen turkey, down 5.6% from 2022

STRATEGY AND SUCCESS

Budgeting is a skill, and if you’re trying to get back in the habit, the cold winter months are a good time to practice. If you want to fix your finances in 2024, set up a recurring meeting with yourself or whoever you’re budgeting with and focus on the areas of spending that you can control. Try checking in monthly, and stop trying to predict the future: Prepare for 30 days out at a time.

VIDEO

QUIZ

A New Zealand conservation group declared the winner of their country’s “bird of the century” contest—the pūteketeke, which won in a landslide victory—after which TV host waged an “alarmingly aggressive” campaign in support of the bird?

A. Jimmy Kimmel

B. Stephen Colbert

C. Seth Meyers

D. John Oliver

Check your answer.

ACROSS THE NEWSROOM

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