Doctors x AI = less burnout? Also...
Your security camera wants to download your videos!
Hey, y’all – Sherveen here!
I took an accidental hiatus on these emails -- US politics is distracting like that lately – but expect me to be more present in your inbox again. 3 stories worth paying attention to in this moment:
First, for all my doctor homies in the audience –
An early study out of Yale School of Medicine tracked 263 physicians and practitioners using across 6 healthcare systems over 30 days. Some were paired with Abridge, an AI platform for clinical note documentation.
“[When paired with] an ambient AI scribe, burnout among those working in ambulatory clinics decreased significantly from 51.9% to 38.8%. There were also significant improvements in the cognitive task load, time spent documenting after hours, focused attention on patients, and urgent access to care.”
One of the more pervasive ways in which AI will become essential over the next 12 to 36 months: helping people elevate their time spent to the more meaningful parts of their job and life.
(the study’s authors say that Abridge had no role in the design and conduct of the study or analysis of the results, beyond assistance in data collection)
Second, your security camera wants your video data –
Fascinating story being reported by TechCrunch -- Anker, the Chinese company behind the popular Eufy brand of security cameras, recently offered customers money in exchange for videos to train AI systems.
For $2 per video, Anker got rich video data to improve its security detection systems in a somewhat positive feedback loop. Eufy has said “the data collected from these staged events is used solely for training our Al algorithms and not for any other purposes.”
But most amusingly -- they don’t mind if you stage the video to fit their needs. They want real package and car thefts, but if you fake it, that works for them, too.
“Don’t worry, you can even create events by pretending to be a thief and donate those events. You can complete this quickly. Maybe one act can be captured by your two outdoor cameras simultaneously, making it efficient and easy. If you also stage a car door theft, you might earn $80.”
Data is oil in the AI era, so this makes sense at a high level. The more raw video they have of different incidents, driveways, patios, and sidewalks, the better for their models. It’s the same reason OpenAI wanted to pay $500 million to acquire a video game clipping company.
Beyond being a little dystopian, it’s also a tad concerning that staged data could be used for such important algorithms. Like… do fake robbers really act the same as real robbers?
A question for another day, I suppose…
Third, OpenAI held their conference for nerds –
At OpenAI’s third annual DevDay conference for developers, the company launched:
Third party apps inside ChatGPT (ex. Canva, Zillow, Spotify)
GPT-5 Pro (my favorite), Sora 2 (& Pro) made available via API
There are a few different themes here that deserve a more thorough analysis, both for developers and end-users, so I’m going to save that for another day.
In the meantime, I’ll register this as my complaint that OpenAI didn’t do as swell of a job as I’d hoped in helping people understand the difference between AI assistants and AI agents (my rant in video form here). I will continue to wage this war alone. Alas!
Alright, that’s all for now –
Stay bald,
Sherveen
Was disappointed - tho not surprised - that the third-party app function won’t be starting in the EU yet. ChatGPT tells me, however, that rollout might still come this year. Hope so!