What caught my eye this week

2024 HR Trends: Mental Health And The Year Of AI

With rates of employee stress and burnout reaching all-time highs, it's clear that mental health needs to be a specific and dedicated focus of organizations' well-being efforts in 2024. This is one of the key findings in the recent report, ?2024 HR Trends: The Year of AI. This report not only surfaces important questions for HR and business professionals to consider, it also provides strategies to help deal with the important issues now

Source: Forbes

How can German universities produce more spinouts?

Founders, investors and policymakers in Germany have all told me recently that they’re grappling with one big challenge: how to create more companies from academic research. Germany tops the European Patent Office’s annual index for the most applications filed in each of the?last three years. Yet, data shows it’s not as good at commercialising those inventions.

Source: Sifted

That viral video showing a head transplant is a fake. But it might be real someday

An animated video posted this week has a voice-over that sounds like a late-night TV ad, but the pitch is straight out of the far future. The arms of an octopus-like robotic surgeon swirl, swiftly removing the head of a dying man and placing it onto a young, healthy body. We can report that BrainBridge is not a real company. The video was made by Hashem Al-Ghail and is not merely a provocative work of art. This video is better understood as a public billboard for a hugely controversial scheme to defeat death that’s recently been gaining attention among some life-extension proponents and entrepreneurs.?

Source: MIT Technology Review

How One Chinese EV Company Made Battery Swapping Work

Despite the EV sales drop across the world (except China), increased EV adoption is still one of the most important options of energy transition to combat global warming. How can EV companies address consumers’ range anxiety to allow for a better travel experience and further fuel sales? One direction is to improve battery technology, including faster charging batteries and those with longer driving range. Recently, the Chinese EV company #Nio challenged the conventional approach with an interesting alternative: battery swapping. Here’s how they did it.

Source: HBR

Health And Biotech Startups Now Get The Majority Of US Series A Funding

So far in 2024, biotech and health companies have pulled in around $5.6 billion across 110 Series A rounds, per Crunchbase data. That accounts for 53% of all funding at the Series A stage, which is a closely watched barometer for the startup ecosystem. The biotech sector’s comparatively strong showing comes as overall Series A dealmaking looks on track to come in a bit above last year’s totals

Source: Crunchbase

xAI raises $6B in Series B funding to accelerate development of truthful and beneficial AI

The $6 billion raised will be used for several key purposes. Firstly, xAI plans to bring its first AI products to market, signalling a shift from research and development to commercialization. Building advanced infrastructure is crucial for xAI to support its growing capabilities and future product launches. Hence, the raised money will also be used to enhance this area. Further, the funding will fuel research and development efforts, allowing xAI to push the boundaries of AI technology.

Source: Tech Funding News and Bloomberg Law

Evolve Clinical Medicine With AI And Customization

It’s been a few years – so why isn’t AI making medicine better? Okay, that’s a sort of simplistic question, and yes, AI is advancing medicine in many ways, but there’s still a lot further to go. “A properly developed and deployed AI, experts say, will be akin to the cavalry riding in to help beleaguered physicians struggling with unrelenting workloads, high administrative burdens, and a tsunami of new clinical data,” wrote Alvin Powell in the Harvard Gazette, and yes, it was 2020, but how much headway have we made in the last three years?

Source: Forbes

What Scarlett Johansson v. OpenAI Could Look Like in Court

In a product demo last week, OpenAI showcased a synthetic but expressive voice for ChatGPT called “Sky” that reminded many viewers of the flirty AI girlfriend Samantha played by Scarlett Johansson in the 2013 film Her. James Grimmelmann, a professor of digital and internet law at Cornell University, believes Johansson could have a good case. “You can't imitate someone else's distinctive voice to sell stuff,” he says. OpenAI declined to comment for this story, but yesterday released a statement from Altman claiming Sky “was never intended to resemble” the star, adding, “We are sorry to Ms. Johansson that we didn’t communicate better.”

Source: Wired

Samsung could leapfrog Apple and Google with new Galaxy AI fitness tools for Galaxy Watch 7

Samsung will add Galaxy AI features to both its Samsung Health app and Galaxy Watches this summer. Tailor-made sleep, health, and workout recommendations could help the Galaxy Watch series catch up to its fitness watch rivals — or even surpass them. Samsung's announcement suggests some of these Galaxy AI features will use "powerful on-device AI," while other metrics will rely on Samsung Health data from your phone or the cloud.

Source: Android Central