Tony Orlando will play his last-ever concert tonight, capping the singer’s 64-year touring career. Orlando is best-known for 1973’s biggest hit, “Tie a Yellow Ribbon Round the Ole Oak Tree,” credited with popularizing the practice of displaying yellow ribbons to show support for absent loved ones, particularly soldiers at war. If you win “Jeopardy” on that bit of trivia, feel free to send us 10% of your winnings.
In today’s email:
Bedside bots: Would you take advice from an AI nurse?
Clean sweep: Luxe showerhead makers are multiplying their profits.
Weird week: Fraud, an alligator, a dancing ban, and a predicted firestorm.
Around the web: A daily chess puzzle, tooth tips you never knew you needed, and more.
👇 Listen: Reddit finally goes public, but how about that whole “profitability” thing they haven’t figured out yet?
The Big Idea
Are AI nurses the future of health care?
Can $9/hour AI nurses replace human ones?
2024-03-22T00:00:00Z
Juliet Bennett Rylah
When the starship Voyager’s chief medical officer is killed, the crew is stuck with The Doctor, an AI doc that presents as a hologram. That makes sense for “Star Trek,” but IRL, the idea of being treated by AI is daunting.
And yet, that’s what Nvidia proposed earlier this week when it announced a partnership with Hippocratic AI, a startup offering AI nurses.
What do these “nurses” do?
They’re designed to provide nondiagnostic care, such as preop or post-discharge instructions, via video chat.
A promo video shows an AI nurse offering a “patient” advice about how to take her prescriptions and optimize recovery following an appendectomy.
Why would anyone want this?
Hippocratic claims its AI nurses, priced at $9/hour, are far cheaper than human nurses, who can charge ~$90/hour, and could help alleviate a nationwide nursing shortage.
But:
The US Bureau of Labor Statistics pegged the average RN’s salary in 2022 at $38.74/hour, not $90, perPopular Science.
PopSci also pointed out that it takes a lot of power to run an H100 GPU — the Nvidia chip Hippocratic uses, which cost $30k-$40k each.
Meanwhile, nurses’ union National Nurses United says that the shortage isn’t about pay, but understaffing, which has led to nurses leaving the field and widespread strikes.
AI is already at play…
… in the medical field, where diagnostic tools have offered a mixed bag of results.
But there are sure to be questions surrounding whether AI can or should provide any kind of patient-facing care.
Health care experts toldStateline that, while hospitals already use algorithms and machine-learning tools, regulations must ensure that humans are calling the final shots.
Research professor Maura Grossman toldMedPage Today that AI can act as a “second pair of eyes” for a human nurse, provide recommendations, and do admin work, but that the algorithms need to be evaluated carefully for misinformation and bias.
BTW: A Pew Research Center survey found that 60% of Americans would be uncomfortable with medical professionals using AI, while 79% said they don’t want AI in their mental health care.
Free Resource
Lessons from an internet expert
What better time to talk about the impact of TikTok than right now, as Congress ponders banning it across the US (again)?
We interviewed Extremely Online author and Washington Post reporter Taylor Lorenz on the state of TikTok, the future of ecommerce, and whether your kid should be chasing a career as an influencer. Listen to the whole golden episode.
Dog longevity startup Loyal, named by us right here, right now as the most important startup on the planet, added $45m in funding. The company is testing two drugs — one that slows dogs’ growth, and one that improves their metabolism — with initial aspirations of giving good boys and good girls at least one more healthy year.
SNIPPETS
The US Department of Justice is suing Apple, claiming it runs a monopoly on the smartphone market and makes it difficult for customers to switch platforms.
RDDT’s good start: It took them 19 years to get there but Reddit is officially a public company. The market was quite welcoming, as shares popped 48% during Thursday’s debut.
Neuralink, Elon Musk’s brain-computer interface company, posted a video on X showing the first human patient to receive an implant (who is paralyzed from the shoulders down) playing a chess game using his brain.
Ippei Mizuhara, interpreter for $700m baseball supernova Shohei Ohtani, was fired under strange circumstances centering on $4.5m+ in wire transfers from Ohtani’s bank account to a bookie.
Whoa: Doctors successfully transplanted a pig kidney, prepped for transplantation using Crispr gene-editing tech, into a human patient. If the patient continues to respond well, it’ll offer hope for ~90k Americans awaiting kidney transplants.
Glassdoor’s integration with networking app Fishbowl means it now requires real names. Glassdoor vowed to protect users’ anonymity when griping about their jobs, but some are skeptical.
The National Park Service is being sued by three plaintiffs who allege its plastic-only payment policy violates US law. NPS claims taking cash is both expensive and time-consuming.
Hungry customers in Christiansburg, Virginia, will be able to have their Wendy’s orders delivered by drone thanks to DoorDash’s pilot program with Alphabet’s Wing.
A Banksy painting went to auction in the UK this week seeking $633k-$1m, but no one bit. It wasn’t all bad for the auction house, though: They offloaded one Banksy-made birthday card for ~$38k.
Don’t miss this…
OpenAI’s new text-to-video tool, Sora, has drawn the attention of filmmakers like Tyler Perry, who announced the indefinite pause of an $800m studio expansion shortly after the AI model was unveiled. Should Hollywood be worried?
Data Point
Making a splash: Unfortunately, in our quest to keep up with the Joneses, there’s already a new frivolous luxury item taking off in people’s bathrooms: fancy AF showerheads. It seemed like the one appliance left that wasn’t a status symbol, but now there’s an ever-growing crop of new companies looking to change that, perThe Wall Street Journal. Jolie, one of the brands leading the charge, reports revenue rising from $4m in 2022 to $28m in 2023. Its showerhead costs $165, or $148 with a subscription for replacement filters. And other brands are vying for some of Jolie’s success — Canopy and Act+Acre have both launched their own filtered showerhead models, starting at $125 and $115, respectively.
FIT THE BILL
There are thousands of companies valued at $1B+. How many clues do you need to identify today’s billion-dollar brand?
Clue 1: In its founding story, the company’s eventual chief engineer, Grenville Dodge, met with President Lincoln and had the following conversation that set everything in motion: “Mr. Lincoln sat down beside me and, by his kindly ways, soon drew from me all I knew of the country west and the results of my reconnaissances.”
Clue 2: You think you have a lot to keep track of at work? This company’s ~30k employees have ~52k miles of track to keep track of.
Clue 3: This company’s workers built west from Omaha, another company’s workers worked east from Sacramento, and they met in the middle, with a golden spike in Utah. When it was driven into the ground on May 10, 1869, the ceremony was billed the “wedding of the rails,” with a reverend presiding over the proceedings.
👇 Scroll to the bottom for the answer 👇
That was odd
Weird week: A prolific fraudster, an emotional support alligator, and more wild stories
Another week behind us, another week of the world being a strange, strange place.
2024-03-22T00:00:00Z
Brad Wolverton
An American woman who once posed as an Irish heiress to a $30m fortune was arrested in Maine on fraud and theft charges. Marianne Smyth, who was arrested in 2019 for scamming a Hollywood producer out of $100k+, now faces extradition for allegedly running a mortgage scam in Northern Ireland between 2008 and 2010. Say what you will, the woman has range: Over the years, she’s impersonated everyone from Jennifer Aniston and an NHL hockey coach, to a witch, a psychic, and an Irish mobster.
A New York man wants his “emotional support” alligator back. Tony Cavallaro adopted Albert — a 34-year-old, 12-foot, 750-pound reptile — when he was just two months old. Over the past three decades, he’s spent $120k outfitting his home to accommodate Albert, installing heated floors, tropical plants, and an indoor pond complete with a waterfall and spa jets. Unfortunately, conservation officers took Albert away due to an expired permit and some broken rules (like going for a swim in the pool together). But according to Cavallaro, “He’s just a big baby.” Over 120k people have signed an online petition to free Albert.
Cambodia’s new prime minister says no more bopping, only beeping. Forty-six-year-old Hun Manet, who was appointed prime minister in August, is banning musical truck horns in favor of regular horns after seeing videos of people dancing in streets to their melodies. In a recent Facebook post, he wrote that such “inappropriate activity committed by some people, especially youth and children” threatens public order. You know what else can threaten public order? Oppression — clearly someone hasn’t seen Footloose.
AROUND THE WEB
🏌️ On this day: In 1934, the first Masters golf championship kicked off in Augusta, Georgia. Horton Smith won the tournament, shooting four under par.
♟️ Game:Chess.com’s daily puzzle asks players to choose the correct moves to get out of hot water.
🖥️ Useful: A website that figures out what drivers your computer needs.
Today’s Fit the Bill answer is Union Pacific Corp. (Market cap: $151.87B)
Today’s email was brought to you by Juliet Bennett Rylah, Sara Friedman, and Singdhi Sokpo. Editing by: Ben “Sending Loyal blank checks every day” Berkley.
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