Beginners in AI

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Welcome to this week's edition of Beginners in AI, where we explore the latest trends, tools, and news in the world of AI and the tech that surrounds it. Like all editions, this is human curated and published with the intention of making AI news and technology more accessible to everyone. 

This issue kicks off with Dr. Hua, an AI doctor greeting patients in Saudi Arabia’s first software-run clinic. You’ll read about a toddler saved by custom gene editing, a future ChatGPT that remembers your life, and DeepMind’s new model that cracks contest-level math. We round things out with Acer’s finger-ring translator, Netflix placing virtual props inside your favorite shows, and an ocean robot called Blue Whale that races past typhoons.

AI TOP STORY
Say ‘Ahh’ to Dr. Hua: Synyi AI Opens Saudi Arabia’s First AI Clinic

What Happened
Shanghai-based Synyi AI has teamed with Almoosa Health Group to pilot an outpatient center in Saudi Arabia’s Al-Ahsa region. Patients first interact with “Dr. Hua,” an AI system that takes the medical history, reads scans, and prints a provisional prescription covering 30 common respiratory conditions; a human doctor signs off before medicine is dispensed. The trial will gather data for regulators over the next 18 months, marking Synyi’s first move outside China.

What it Means
By shifting the first layer of diagnosis to software, Synyi is testing whether AI can ease physician shortages and lower costs while still keeping a doctor in the loop. The project also shows China’s med-tech firms expanding abroad and signals that regulators may soon need new rules for autonomous clinical tools.

What to Take Away
Self-service clinics are just the opening act. Industry observers expect AI to soon sort X-rays in seconds, chat with patients about refills, watch for sepsis from the bedside, and even balance hospital supply chains. The pattern on display with Dr. Hua—software managing the everyday tasks while humans step in for the judgment calls—looks set to ripple through most corners of care. A recent TechTarget roundup of 10 health-AI trends highlights chatbot triage, anomaly-spotting imaging tools, AI-guided physical therapy, and hands-free billing, hinting that your next “doctor visit” may begin on a kiosk, a smartwatch, or even a smart ring long before you greet a clinician.

LAST WEEK IN AI AND TECH

Genome Genie

A 15-month-old nicknamed KJ is the first person to receive a tailor-made CRISPR therapy that corrects a single mutation behind his lethal liver disorder. After three doses, doctors say he’s sitting up and thriving, a milestone unthinkable months ago. The one-off medicine was built with precision base-editing in just six months and showed no serious side effects. “The promise of gene therapy that we’ve heard about for decades is coming to fruition, and it’s going to utterly transform the way we approach medicine,” said Dr. Kiran Musunuru.

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Infinite Memory Mode

OpenAI is sketching a future ChatGPT that quietly stores your e-mails, docs, and browsing history so replies carry lifelong context. The company envisions an agent that behaves like a “personal thought processor,” weaving every digital footprint into answers. As the article notes, younger users already lean on ChatGPT for nuanced judgment, while older ones treat it like a search engine. But the piece warns that total recall raises privacy alarms, highlighting lawsuits over data misuse. “Every conversation, email, document, and reading history could serve as live context for an ever-expanding intelligence engine,” the report says.

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Math Whiz Kid

DeepMind’s new AlphaEvolve model aces Olympiad-level math by generating, critiquing, and self-grading answers before picking the best one. Early tests show it “rediscovered” top solutions 75 percent of the time and even shaved 1 percent off Google’s model-training clock. The tool targets problems with outcomes that are “machine-gradable” and will ship first to academics in an early-access program. DeepMind claims its Gemini-based approach is “state-of-the-art,” cutting hallucinations through automatic checks. The lab calls AlphaEvolve a way to free experts “to focus on other, more important work.” 

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Ring Leader

At Computex, Acer showed off the titanium FreeSense Ring and AI TransBuds earbuds. The ring tracks heart-rate variability, blood oxygen, and sleep stages, then pipes insights to a companion app—“Users also have full access to all health data without additional subscription fees,” the article points out. The TransBuds handle two-way voice translation in 15 languages even if only one person wears them, pairing well with Acer’s e-bike and scooter line-up on display. Together they hint at wearables that serve as on-call interpreters and wellness monitors rather than mere step counters.

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Blendflix Breaks

Netflix’s ad-supported tier now boasts 94 million monthly users, and the streamer plans to slip AI-generated ads straight into shows like Bridgerton or Stranger Things. Advertisers will be able to “marry” their products with on-screen worlds, overlaying props mid-episode or on the pause screen. During its Upfront, ad chief Amy Reinhard said the roll-out pace “is going to be even faster.” Netflix says the format debuts later this year, letting brands blend into sets without jarring cutaways and giving the company a fresh revenue lever beyond subscriptions.

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TECH TERMS TO KNOW

A vector database stores information as long strings of numbers called vectors. Each vector is a “fingerprint” that captures the meaning or look of the item—whether it’s a sentence, a picture, or a sound clip.

For Example:
Imagine an app that helps designers find the perfect stock photo. Instead of tagging every image with words like “sunset” or “mountain,” the app feeds each picture through an AI model that turns its colors, shapes, and textures into a 1,024-number vector. When a user drags in a new photo of a pink-orange sky, the app converts that photo into its own vector and asks the database, “Which fingerprints sit closest to this one?”—in other words, which images feel most similar. The database returns a list of near-identical sunsets in milliseconds, even if those images were never labeled “sunset.”

Because the search happens on numbers, the system scales to millions of items while staying fast, and it works for text-to-image, audio-to-audio, or any mix you can imagine.

TOOL SPOTLIGHT (non-sponsored)

Flowiseai is an open-source platform that allows users to build AI agents and applications using a visual, drag-and-drop interface without requiring coding knowledge. It provides modular building blocks for creating various AI systems, from simple workflows to autonomous agents.

Top Reasons to Try Flowise

• No-code AI development through an intuitive drag-and-drop interface, making AI accessible to users without programming expertise

• Open-source platform with zero cost for both personal and commercial use, backed by a thriving community of developers

• Versatile AI solution building capabilities for creating chatbots, multi-agent systems, and custom knowledge bases

• Support for 100+ LLMs including integration with both open-source and commercial language models like GPT-4 and Claude

ROBOTICS AND AI

China has launched the Blue Whale, an 11-metre, typhoon-proof uncrewed vessel that skims the ocean at 36 knots, dives to dodge storms, and loiters underwater for a month. Its AI navigation triples efficiency and it can even fire research rockets, giving scientists a roaming ocean lab.

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TRY THIS PROMPT (copy and paste into ChatGPT, Grok, Perplexity, Gemini)

AI Daily Progress Check — Day __ / 30

Data snapshot
• Focus: ___________________________ (e.g., strength training, sleep quality)
• Key metric & unit: _______________
• Yesterday’s value: _______________
• Yesterday’s action: ______________
• Obstacles / assists noticed: ______
• Energy / mood (1–10): ____________
• New info or resources: ____________

Instructions for the AI
1. Review the snapshot above along with my entire chat history on this focus.
2. Suggest one micro-action I can finish today (≤ 45 min) that is most likely to lift the key metric by tomorrow.
3. List up to three pieces of evidence—from past chats or today’s data—that support the suggestion.
4. Predict tomorrow’s metric if I complete the micro-action.
5. Offer one reflection question for tonight’s log that will help me uncover hidden patterns.

DID YOU KNOW?

Early CAPTCHAs doubled as a crowdsourcing project to digitize old books. When you typed the squiggly words, one was already known (to verify you’re human) and the other was an unreadable scan—your answer helped preserve literature.

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Thank you for reading. We’re all beginners in something. With that in mind, your questions and feedback are always welcome and I read every single email!

-James

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