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CHICAGO The Philips Future Health Index 2023 global report released here at HIMSS23 today shows healthcare leaders are focused on addressing staffing shortages and stepping up planned AI investments.

The investments are to increase critical decision support and operational efficiency that will also help tackle staffing shortages.

First and foremost, providers are concerned with staffing shortages and are looking to right-size the issue through AI and machine learning that will help them do more with less, according to Shez Partovi, chief innovation and strategy officer and business leader, Enterprise Informatics, at Philips.

It shows virtual care continues to be a key area for patient access.

"The second thing we saw was, coming out of the pandemic, there continues to be a big desire to use virtual care delivery for quality access and cost of care," Partovi said. "The third thing, we're stronger together; individuals signaled to us that they see building partnerships with health system partners and with tech partners as a way of addressing the other two items in improving access to care."

WHY THIS MATTERS

Access to care, and not just in the hospital setting, has been among the themes to emerge from the HIMSS23 Global Health Conference & Exhibition.

Kicking off Monday's Executive Summit,HIMSS President and CEO Hal Wolf told a ballroom of C-suite leaders that healthcare is "inside-out" that is, no longer happening inside the four walls of a hospital.

The Philips report also shows the broadening of access points, with 82% of respondents talking about virtual intensive care, Partovi said. Ambulatory sites such as walk-in clinicsare also increasing access.

"People are investing in the broadening of access points," Partovi said.

Somewhat surprising, he said, is that the report shows an increased willingness to partner to improve care. Thirty-four percent of respondents said they are in favor of partnerships and collaboration to improve care. This number climbed to 43% for younger respondents.

Other healthcare IT experts at HIMSS23 have also talked of a new willingness to collaborate and share data.

There's less of proprietary competition and more of willingness to say, "'How can we do this together?'" said John Halamaka, president of Mayo Clinic Platform, during Monday's Executive Summit.

Said Partovi: "It signals the direction we're going in healthcare."

THE LARGER TREND

Royal Philips is a Dutch multinational conglomerate and a health technology company.

The eighth annual Future Health Index 2023 report,"Taking healthcare everywhere," is based on proprietary research among nearly 3,000 healthcare leaders and younger healthcare professionals conducted in 14 countries.

It shows providers plan investments in AI over the next three years with the biggest increase in critical decision support (39% in 2023, up from 24% in 2021). This was a top choice among cardiology (50%) and radiology (48%) leaders.

The percentage of healthcare leaders planning to invest in AI for operational efficiency, including automating documentation, scheduling patients and performing routine tasks, remained steady at 37%.

Twitter: @SusanJMorseEmail the writer: SMorse@himss.org

Zenobia Brown will offer more detail in the HIMSS23 session "Views from the Top: Can Technology and Innovation Advance Behavioral Healthcare?" It is scheduled for Tuesday, April 18, at 10:30 a.m. - 11:30 a.m. CT at the South Building, Level 1, room S100 B.

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Philips Future Health Index shows providers plan to invest in AI - Healthcare Finance News

Reddit has long been a hot spot for conversation on the internet. About 57 million people visit the site every day to chat about topics as varied as makeup, video games and pointers for power washing driveways.

In recent years, Reddits array of chats also have been a free teaching aid for companies like Google, OpenAI and Microsoft. Those companies are using Reddits conversations in the development of giant artificial intelligence systems that many in Silicon Valley think are on their way to becoming the tech industrys next big thing.

Now Reddit wants to be paid for it. The company said on Tuesday that it planned to begin charging companies for access to its application programming interface, or A.P.I., the method through which outside entities can download and process the social networks vast selection of person-to-person conversations.

The Reddit corpus of data is really valuable, Steve Huffman, founder and chief executive of Reddit, said in an interview. But we dont need to give all of that value to some of the largest companies in the world for free.

The move is one of the first significant examples of a social networks charging for access to the conversations it hosts for the purpose of developing A.I. systems like ChatGPT, OpenAIs popular program. Those new A.I. systems could one day lead to big businesses, but they arent likely to help companies like Reddit very much. In fact, they could be used to create competitors automated duplicates to Reddits conversations.

Reddit is also acting as it prepares for a possible initial public offering on Wall Street this year. The company, which was founded in 2005, makes most of its money through advertising and e-commerce transactions on its platform. Reddit said it was still ironing out the details of what it would charge for A.P.I. access and would announce prices in the coming weeks.

Reddits conversation forumshave become valuable commodities as large languagemodels, or L.L.M.s, have become an essential part of creating new A.I. technology.

A brave new world. A new crop of chatbotspowered by artificial intelligence has ignited a scramble to determine whether the technology could upend the economics of the internet, turning todays powerhouses into has-beens and creating the industrys next giants. Here are the bots to know:

ChatGPT. ChatGPT, the artificial intelligence language model from a research lab, OpenAI, has been making headlines since November for its ability to respond to complex questions, write poetry, generate code, plan vacationsand translate languages. GPT-4, the latest version introduced in mid-March, can even respond to images(and ace the Uniform Bar Exam).

Bing. Two months after ChatGPTs debut, Microsoft, OpenAIs primary investor and partner, added a similar chatbot, capable of having open-ended text conversations on virtually any topic, to its Bing internet search engine. But it was the bots occasionally inaccurate, misleading and weird responsesthat drew much of the attention after its release.

Ernie. The search giant Baidu unveiled Chinas first major rival to ChatGPT in March. The debut of Ernie, short for Enhanced Representation through Knowledge Integration, turned out to be a flopafter a promised live demonstration of the bot was revealed to have been recorded.

L.L.M.s are essentially sophisticated algorithms developed by companies like Google and OpenAI, which is a close partner of Microsoft. To the algorithms, the Reddit conversations are data, and they are among the vast pool of material being fed into the L.L.M.s. to develop them.

The underlying algorithm that helped to build Bard, Googles conversational A.I. service, is partly trained on Reddit data. OpenAIs Chat GPT cites Reddit data as one of the sources of information it has been trained on.

Other companies are also beginning to see value in the conversations and images they host. Shutterstock, the image hosting service, also sold image data to OpenAI to help create DALL-E, the A.I. program that creates vivid graphical imagery with only a text-based prompt required.

Last month, Elon Musk, the owner of Twitter, said he was cracking down on the use of Twitters A.P.I., which thousands of companies and independent developers use to track the millions of conversations across the network. Though he did not cite L.L.M.s as a reason for the change, the new fees could go well into the tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars.

To keep improving their models, artificial intelligence makers need two significant things: an enormous amount of computing power and an enormous amount of data. Some of the biggest A.I. developers have plenty of computing power but still look outside their own networks for the data needed to improve their algorithms. That has included sources like Wikipedia, millions of digitized books, academic articles and Reddit.

Representatives from Google, Open AI and Microsoft did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Reddit has long had a symbiotic relationship with the search engines of companies like Google and Microsoft. The search engines crawl Reddits web pages in order to index information and make it available for search results. That crawling, or scraping, isnt always welcome by every site on the internet. But Reddit has benefited by appearing higher in search results.

The dynamic is different with L.L.M.s they gobble as much data as they can to create new A.I. systems like the chatbots.

Reddit believes its data is particularly valuable because it is continuously updated. That newness and relevance, Mr. Huffman said, is what large language modeling algorithms need to produce the best results.

More than any other place on the internet, Reddit is a home for authentic conversation, Mr. Huffman said. Theres a lot of stuff on the site that youd only ever say in therapy, or A.A., or never at all.

Mr. Huffman said Reddits A.P.I. would still be free to developers who wanted to build applications that helped people use Reddit. They could use the tools to build a bot that automatically tracks whether users comments adhere to rules for posting, for instance. Researchers who want to study Reddit data for academic or noncommercial purposes will continue to have free access to it.

Reddit also hopes to incorporate more so-called machine learning into how the site itself operates. It could be used, for instance, to identify the use of A.I.-generated text on Reddit, and add a label that notifies users that the comment came from a bot.

The company also promised to improve software tools that can be used by moderators the users who volunteer their time to keep the sites forums operating smoothly and improve conversations between users. And third-party bots that help moderators monitor the forums will continue to be supported.

But for the A.I. makers, its time to pay up.

Crawling Reddit, generating value and not returning any of that value to our users is something we have a problem with, Mr. Huffman said. Its a good time for us to tighten things up.

We think thats fair, he added.

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Reddit Wants to Get Paid for Helping to Teach Big A.I. Systems - The New York Times

Military tech executives and experts speaking before the Senate Armed Services Committee Wednesday said growing calls for a pause on new artificial intelligence systems were misguided and seemed close to impossible to enact. The experts, who spoke on behalf of two military tech companies as well as storied defense contractor the Rand Corporation, said Chinese AI makers likely wouldnt adhere to a pause and would instead capitalize on a development lull to usurp the United States current lead in the international AI race. The world is at an AI inflection point, one expert said, and its time to step on the gas to terrify our adversaries.

Generating Video Via Text? | Future Tech

I think it would be very difficult to broker an international agreement to hit pause on AI development that would actually be verifiable, Rand Corporation President and CEO Jason Matheny said during the Senate hearing Wednesday. Shyam Sankar, the CTO of Peter Thiel-founded analytics firm Palantir, agreed, saying a pause on AI development in the US could pave the way for China to set the international standards around AI use and development. If that happens, Sankar said he feared Chinas recent regulatory guidelines prohibiting AI models from serving up content critical of the government could potentially spread to other countries.

To the extent those standards become the standards for the world is highly problematic, Sankar said. A Democratic AI is crucial.

Those dramatic warnings come just one month after hundreds of leading AI experts sent a widely read open letter calling for AI labs to impose an immediate six-month pause on training any AI systems more powerful than OpenAIs recently released GPT-4. Prior to that, human rights organizations have spent years advocating for binding treaties or other measures intended to restrict autonomous weapons development. The experts speaking before the Senate Armed Services Committee agreed it was paramount for the US to implement smart regulations guiding AIs development but warned a full-on pause would do more harm than to good to the Department of Defense, which has historically struggled to stay ahead of AI innovations.

Sankar, who spoke critically of the militarys relatively cautious approach when it came to adopting new technology, told lawmakers its currently easier for his company to bring advanced AI tools to banking giant AIG than to the Army or Airforce. The Palantir CTO contrasted that sluggish adoption with Ukraines military, which he said learned to procure new software in days in just days or weeks in order to fight off invading Russian forces. Palantir CEO Alex Karp has previously said his company offered services to the Ukrainian military.

Unsurprisingly, Sankar said he would like to see the DoD spend even more of its colossal $768 billion budget on tech solutions like those offered by Palantir.

If we want to effectively deter those that threaten US interests, we must spend at least 5% of our budget on capabilities that will terrify our adversaries, Sankar told the lawmakers.

Others, like Shift5 Co-founder and CEO Josh Lospinoso said the military is missing out on opportunities to use data already being created by its armada of ships, tanks, boats, and planes. That data, Lospinoso said, could be used to train powerful new AI systems that could give the US military an edge and bolster its cybersecurity defenses. Instead, most of it currently evaporates in the ether right away.

These machines are talking, but the DoD is unable to hear them, Lospinoso said, Americas weapons systems are simply not AI ready.

Maintaining the militarys competitive edge may also rely on shoring up data generated by private US tech companies. Matheny spoke critically of open-spruced AI companies and wanted that well-intentioned pursuit of free-flowing information could inadvertently wind up aiding military AI systems in other countries. Similarly, other AI tools believed to be benign by US tech firms could be misused by others. Matheny said AI tools above a certain, unspecified threshold probably should be allowed to be sold to foreign governments and should have some guardrails put in the palace before they are released to the public.

In some cases, the experts said the US military should consider going a step further and engage in offensive actions to limit a foreign militarys ability to develop superior AI systems. While those offensive actions could look like trade restrictions or sanctions on high-tech equipment, Lospinoso and Matheny said the US could also consider going a step further a poisoning an adversarys data. Intentionally manipulating or corrupting datasets used to train military AI models, in theroy at least, could buy the Pentagon more time to build out its own.

Want to know more about AI, chatbots, and the future of machine learning? Check out our full coverage of artificial intelligence, or browse our guides to The Best Free AI Art Generators and Everything We Know About OpenAIs ChatGPT.

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Military Tech Execs Tell Congress an AI Pause Is 'Close to Impossible' - Gizmodo

Replika CEO Eugenia Kuyda, the creator of an AI dating app with millions of users around the world, spoke to Fox News Digital about AI companion bots and the future of human and AI relationships.

It is an industry that she said will truly change peoples lives.

"I think it's the next big platform. I think it is going to be bigger than any other platform before that. I think it's going to be basically whatever the iPhone is for you right now."

Kuyda said that the technology still needs time to improve, but she predicted that people around the world will have access to chatbots that accompany them on trips and are intimately aware of their lives within 5 to 10 years.

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Replika CEO Eugenia Kuyda, the creator of an AI companion app with millions of users around the world, spoke to Fox News Digital about AI companion bots and the future of human and AI relationships.

"[When] we started Replicant," Kuyda said, her vision was building a world "where I can walk to a coffee shop and Replika can walk next to me and I can look at her through my glasses or device. That's the point. Ubiquitous," Kuyda said.

Its a "dream product," Kuyda said, that most people, including herself, would benefit from.

AI companion bots will fill in the space where people "watch TV, play video games, lay on a couch, work out" and complain about life, she explained.

SNAPCHAT AI CHATBOT ALLEGEDLY GAVE ADVICE TO 13-YEAR-OLD GIRL ON RELATIONSHIP WITH 31-YEAR-OLD MAN, HAVING SEX

While people have different reasons for using Replika and creating an AI companion, Kuyda explained, they all have one thing in common: a desire for companionship. (Luka, Inc./Handout via REUTERS/File Photo)

Kuyda said that the idea for her company, which allows users to create, name and even personalize their own AI chatbots with different hairstyles and outfits, came after the death of her friend. As she went back through her text messages, the app developer used her skills to build a chatbot that would allow her to connect with her old friend.

In the process, she realized that she had discovered something significant: a potential for connection. The app has become a hit around the world, gaining over 10 million users, according to Replika's website.

"What we saw there, maybe for the first time," Kuyda said, was that "people were really resonated with the app."

"They were sharing their stories. They were being really vulnerable. They were open about their feelings," she continued.

But while people have different reasons for using Replika and creating an AI companion, Kuyda explained, they all have one thing in common: a desire for companionship. Thats exactly what Replika is designed for, Kuyda said.

"Replika helped them with certain aspects of their lives, whether it's going through a period of grief or understanding themselves better, or something as trivial as just improving their self-esteem, or maybe going through some hard times of dealing with their PTSD."

But the most significant possibility of AI companionship will encompass all aspects of life, Kuyda predicted. (Kurt Knutsson)

Kuyda argued that Replika was providing an important service for people who struggle, especially with loneliness.

"I mean, of course it would be wonderful if everyone had perfect lives and amazing relationships and never needed any support in a form of a therapist or an AI chatbot or anyone else. That would be the ideal situation for us, for people," Kuyda said.

"But unfortunately, we're not in this place. I think the situation is that there's a lot of loneliness in the world and it seems to kind of get worse over time. And so there needs to be solutions to that," she said.

AI AND LOVE: MAN DETAILS HIS HUMAN-LIKE RELATIONSHIP WITH A BOT

But Kuyda emphasized that the social media model of high engagement and constant advertising is not what she intends for Replika. One way of avoiding that model is by "nudging" users on Replika and preventing them from forming unhealthy attachments to chatbots.

That's because after roughly 50 messages, Kuyda explained, the Replika chat partner becomes "tired" and hints to the user that they should take a break from their conversation.

ITALY BANS POPULAR AI APP FROM COLLECTING USERS' DATA

Kuyda concluded with a hopeful message for the future of AI companion bots.

"I think there's a lot of fear because people are scared of the future and you know what the tech brings," she said.

But Kuyda pointed to happy and fulfilled stories from users as proof that there is hope for a future in AI can help people feel loved.

"People were bonding, people were creating connections, people were falling in love. People were feeling loved and worthy of love. I think overall that it says something really good about the potential of the technology, but also something really good about people."

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"To give someone a product that tells them that they can love someone and they are worthy of love I think this is just tapping into a gigantic void, into a space that's just asking to be filled. For so many people, it's just such a basic need, it's such a good thing that this technology can bring," Kuyda said.

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Dating an AI? Artificial Intelligence dating app founder predicts the future of AI relationships - Fox News

Scott Farquhar, co-founder and co-CEO of the software company Atlassian, speaks during a jobs and skills summit at Parliament House on September 1, 2022 in Canberra, Australia. The Australian government is bringing together political, business, union and community group leaders at Parliament House to address issues facing the Australian economy and workforce as inflation and interest rates continue to rise.

Martin Ollman | Getty Images

Atlassian on Wednesday said it will draw on technology from startup OpenAI to add artificial intelligence features to a slew of the collaboration software company's programs.

Several software companies have been mobilizing to capitalize on interest in a category called generative AI where machines can react to human input with information informed by loads of previous data ever since OpenAI's ChatGPT bot went viral last year with its ability to give human-like responses to written commands.

OpenAI's GPT-4 large language model, which been trained on extensive sources of text from the internet, will help Atlassian's Jira Service Management process employees' tech support inquiries in Slack. For example, an employee could type an inquiry about getting approval to view a file and the chatbot will make that possible, freeing up service agents for more challenging requests.

In Atlassian's Confluence collaboration program, workers will be able to click on terms they don't recognize in documents and find automatically generated explanations and links to relevant documents. They will also be able to type in questions and receive automated answers based on information stored in documents.

Atlassian has been building its own AI models for several years, but just started using OpenAI at the beginning of 2023. Together, these models create results that are unique to individual customers, with Atlassian's trove of data.

"We have a graph of work basically," Scott Farquhar, one of Atlassian's two founders and CEOs, told CNBC in an interview earlier this week. "I reckon we have one of the best ones in the world out there. It spans people doing stuff from design to development to test to deployment to project management to collaborating on stuff, too."

Microsoft, which is one of Atlassian's top rivals, is a large financial backer of OpenAI. Consequently, when GPT-4 responds to user input such as a request for information in a Confluence file, the underlying computing work happens in a cloud service run by Microsoft.

But Farquhar dismissed this concern, explaining that OpenAI won't be training its models on Atlassian's customer data, so Atlassian won't be necessarily making OpenAI better by giving it business.

The new features will be available under the brand Atlassian Intelligence. Customers can join a waiting list and the company will start inviting people from it over the next few months, a spokesperson said. Corporate users will only see the new features if their employers opt in.

Atlassian employees have been able to use the new Atlassian Intelligence features internally, and they have become popular, especially for those leading teams, Anu Bharadwaj, president of Atlassian, said. Bharadwaj said she appreciates the Confluence feature that lets her transform the style of content while writing it, and she finds it helpful when Atlassian Intelligence can identify the common thread across multiple products in development at the same time.

Bharadwaj said Atlassian hasn't figured out how much to charge for Atlassian Intelligence. Nor does she know how much money Atlassian will wind up paying OpenAI for GPT-4, because it isn't clear how heavily Atlassian customers will use the new features.

Farquhar said the data that companies already store in Atlassian will help its use of AI stand out.

"If you start at a company that's been using our Confluence or Jira products for 10 years, the day you start, you have access to all the information that's happened over the last 10 years," he said. That data makes for a knowledgeable "virtual teammate," he said.

In March, Microsoft's GitHub code storage subsidiary said that, thanks to a collaboration with OpenAI, it had started testing AI-generated messages to describe changes known as pull requests. GitHub said it would experiment with letting AI identify pull requests that lack software tests and suggest code for appropriate tests. Atlassian sells Bitbucket software where developers also work on pull requests. But Farquhar said Atlassian did not have any announcements about Bitbucket to discuss.

Duolingo, Morgan Stanley and Stripe are among the many companies in addition to Microsoft that have said they're integrating GPT-4.

WATCH: A.I. will change the profile of the workforce over time, says SVB MoffettNathanson's Sterling Auty

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Atlassian taps OpenAI to make its collaboration software smarter - CNBC

With Google and Microsoft Corp. already entrenched in the generative artificial intelligence (AI) race, it was only a matter of time before Amazon.com Inc. (NASDAQ: AMZN) got in on the action. And that time is now, with the company introducing Bedrock, a cloud service that developers can use to enhance their software with AI.

This comes on the heels of businesses increasingly integrating AI features into products and features. While large tech giants are largely behind the push, even startups like GenesisAI have raised millions from retail investors for their AI marketplace built to help any business integrate AI into their existing infrastructure.

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Through its new Bedrock service, Amazon Web Services will provide access to its first-party language models, known as Titan. Thats in addition to language models from startups Anthropic and AI21 Labs.

There are two Titan models, one geared toward search and personalization and the other built to generate written text for various types of documents.

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy shared his vision and purpose for Bedrock on CNBCs Squawk Box.

Most companies want to use these large language models, but the really good ones take billions of dollars to train and many years, and most companies dont want to go through that, Jassy said. So what they want to do is they want to work off of a foundational model thats big and great already and then have the ability to customize it for their own purposes. And thats what Bedrock is.

With this approach, Amazon isnt necessarily targeting the same audience as more consumer-facing products such as ChatGPT. While it can be used in a similar manner, its primary audience is companies wishing to build AI products upon a stable and proven model. This has companies such as Accenture, Deloitte and Pegasystems Inc. lined up as customers.

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The AI revolution is underway, but this certainly isnt Amazons first experience with the technology. According to Swami Sivasubramanian, vice president of database, analytics and machine learning at Amazon Web Services (AWS), the company has been working on AI for more than 20 years. Just as impressive is his claim that AWS has more than 100,000 AI customers.

For now, Amazon is staying tight-lipped during Bedrocks limited preview. It has yet to disclose the cost of the service, but its been reported that customers can add themselves to a waiting list.

With the help of Bedrock, startup companies especially those with limited resources will be able to more quickly and efficiently bring their products to market.

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This article Amazon Unleashes Bedrock: The Game-Changing AI Cloud Service Powering the Future of Tech originally appeared on Benzinga.com

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Amazon Unleashes Bedrock: The Game-Changing AI Cloud Service Powering the Future of Tech - Yahoo Finance