Product leader (ex-Meta, Walmartlabs); I lead https://xitter.cf/t.co/vBStExp7gF, patient-centered AI. Father/husband; 1% better daily; Views are mine & loosely held.
San Francisco
Joined October 2010
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Ari Akerstein retweeted
It's time for personal agents in healthcare.
Our system is fragmented and runs on clunky legacy software. That's exactly why agents that can navigate those systems on our behalf could make such an impact.
Karan, who leads health AI at OpenAI, calls it "absolutely ripe for agents and computer use" and thinks many of the barriers between patients, clinicians, and their data will dissolve. I agree.
Super inspiring convo with my friend @thekaransinghal on how AI can raise both the floor and the ceiling of human health.
More than 300 million people use ChatGPT for health and wellness questions each week. OpenAI’s Karan Singhal thinks that’s only the beginning.
Karan joins a16z's Jay Rughani to explain how OpenAI is building health intelligence, the advantages of using generalized models for health applications, how AI could lower the cost of healthcare, and more.
00:00 Intro
01:00 How OpenAI is building health intelligence
07:57 A doctor in your pocket
14:20 Creating trust with users
19:44 Medical consensus and its 5–17 year lag
28:03 AI for mental health
30:59 How AI enables the healthcare ecosystem
38:21 A "move 37" for health
43:39 Driving down the cost of care
50:27 Procedural care and what's next
YouTube: youtu.be/9n0MI4D7TCM
@thekaransinghal @JayRughani
Ari Akerstein retweeted
I am writing this in a pain I cannot imagine.
My dear, beloved France which opened my eyes in 2010 and helped me live with a kind French Jewish family so that I might expel hate from my heart is now falling into the hands of those who wanted to globalize the intifada.
Ari Akerstein retweeted
It’s no secret that Grok @Bot is my favorite 24/7 AI agent right now.
I’m partnering with @SpaceXSI to give out codes for one month FREE of the Super tier ($100) of their new X Subscription.
It combines X, Grok, Grok Bot, and Cursor into one subscription and is imo a no brainer.
For a chance to get a free code, just reply to this post with how you’d use these tools together. What would you build, automate, or experiment with?
I’ll pick the best responses and send you a code via DM in 24 hours.
Note that the code is for 1 month free and available to new paid subscribers only.
Ari Akerstein retweeted
NEW: Google and Beth Israel Deaconess published a clinical study in The Lancet testing AMIE, Google's medical AI, with 98 real patients ahead of urgent primary care visits.
Patients chatted with AMIE before seeing their doctor, allowing the AI to collect medical histories, ask follow-up questions, and prepare clinical summaries for physicians.
The results:
• 90% included the doctor's final diagnosis
• 75% said summaries helped prepare for visits
• ~60% said AI may have changed their approach
• 0 conversations stopped for safety reasons
Having an AI take a patient's history before the visit so doctors can spend less time gathering information & more time actually caring for patients is just a good idea.
Ari Akerstein retweeted
The contrast between hanging up the last phone call of the day of high-stakes decisions and then a minute later walking in the door to the pure love of small children who want to laugh and play and show you every discovery they made that day is the strangest and best thing I have ever experienced in life.
Ari Akerstein retweeted
Before the Nazis took power in 1933, the groups that leaned most strongly into Nazi or Nazi-adjacent ideology were university students (by far), professors, doctors, Protestant clergy, judges, and the nationalist press. Many teachers too, individually – not yet as a profession.
Ari Akerstein retweeted
Had this man not found the courage to fight back after being repeatedly attacked with an axe capable of cutting through metal—while bleeding profusely—and had the presence mind to trigger the hijack/emergency code, initiate the emergency response and open the cockpit door to allow passengers to assist him, the aircraft’s subsequent dive could have had catastrophic consequences.
Had that aircraft not been recovered, the geopolitical consequences for the Middle East could have been profound and potentially irreversible.
Sometimes history turns on the courage, resilience and presence of mind of one person.
Yes. One Indian man.
Ari Akerstein retweeted
GPT-6 Astra deciphered a 1918 German radio transmission that, to my knowledge, has never been deciphered before.
The message below translates to:
"EIN ENGLISCHER KREUZER EINLIEG X SEWASTOPOL X S4STEN X EIN GESCHWADER DER X ALLIIERTEN FOLGT 26STEN X"
or, in English:
"AN ENGLISH CRUISER ARRIVED AT SEVASTOPOL ON THE ?4TH AN ALLIED SQUADRON FOLLOWS ON THE 26TH"
Astra even double-checked its work by determining that an English cruiser, HMS Canterbury, reported its arrival in Sevastopol on November 24, 1918 and the arrival of an allied squadron on November 26, 1918.
This message is one of the ~20 WWI German radio messages that appear as one of the entries in the scienceblogs.de list of top 50 unsolved ciphers (scienceblogs.de/klausis-kryp…).
A minor, but really cool result!
Ari Akerstein retweeted
A young Jewish man walks into the Lingerie Department. He tells the saleslady,
"I would like a Jewish bra for my wife, size 34C.
With a quizzical look the saleslady asked, "What kind of bra?"
He repeated, "A Jewish bra. She said to tell you that she wanted a Jewish bra, and that you would know what she wanted."
"Ah, now I remember," said the saleslady. "We don't get as many requests for them as we used to. Most of our customers lately want the Catholic bra, or the
Salvation Army bra, or the Presbyterian bra."
Confused, and a little flustered, the man asked "So, what are the differences?
The saleslady responded. "It is all really quite simple. The Catholic bra supports the masses, the Salvation Army lifts up the fallen, and the Presbyterian bra keeps them staunch and upright."
He mused on that information for a minute and said: "Hmm...I know I'll regret asking, but what does the Jewish bra do?"
"Ah, the Jewish bra," she replied "makes mountains out of molehills".
Ari Akerstein retweeted
Do you think there was even one person in that auditorium in Venice who, somewhere in the back of their mind, said to themselves, Wait a minute:
1) One side is holding 251 hostages, including children, grandparents, and parents.
2) It has just invaded and massacred defenseless civilians in Mongol-style fashion.
3) It has systematically turned one of the most beautiful places in the world into a fortress of hundreds of kilometers of tunnels used exclusively for warfare.
4) Its entire doctrine of warfare is built on erasing the fundamental distinction on which the laws of war rest: the distinction between combatants and non-combatants. In fact, its strategy depends on Israel being the only side bound by the laws of war.
5) It knows that Israel calculates the risk to civilians when planning military strikes, and therefore makes sure to surround itself with a minimum number of non-combatants in order to gain protection and cause Israel to call off attacks.
6) It uses mosques, hospitals, schools, and homes as weapons depots and centers of military activity.
7) There is a country, Egypt, with a border that refuses to allow people to leave the war zone. Yet instead of all the world's "humanitarians" pressuring Egypt to accept refugees fleeing a war zone, they call this "ethnic cleansing" and insist that people who are not combatants and do not want to be in a war zone must remain there, despite wanting to flee.
And on the other side, Israel:
a) Invests billions in obtaining intelligence that allows it to calculate, for each military target, how many non-combatants are likely to be killed if it is attacked.
b) Changed its calculations after the massacre regarding how many non-combatants may be put at risk or killed while still falling within the range of collateral damage permitted under the laws of war.
c) Following the massacre, decided to expand its definition of military targets to include, for example, an active Hamas member who is officially listed as "only" a police officer carrying a weapon.
d) Has lawyers who, for every strike, deliberate over whether the expected harm constitutes permissible collateral damage and whether the attack is justified under international law.
And isn't all of this rather strange behavior, and an extraordinary investment in intelligence and lawyers, for a country supposedly intent on carrying out the "indiscriminate killing of civilians/genocide"?
Do you think there was even one such person in the auditorium?
(In another post, I'll address the phenomenon of Jews giving their enemies pound after pound of flesh.)
Ari Akerstein retweeted
MIT published a brutally honest report on what AI is doing to students.
A committee of professors and students spent five months studying how AI changed learning on campus, and the findings read like a warning to every university on the planet.
Study groups are disappearing. Office hours are emptying out. Problem sets and take-home exams no longer prove anything, because AI can produce credible solutions to almost any written assignment in the undergraduate curriculum. Students who lean on chatbots lose mastery and confidence, and some slip into what the report calls cognitive surrender, reaching for AI at the first hint of struggle.
The numbers are rough. 46 percent of surveyed MIT undergrads use LLMs daily. 90 percent worry about their own overreliance. Undergrads who feel AI makes them replaceable now outnumber those who feel it makes them capable.
The committee's answer surprised me. They refused to fight AI with surveillance. The report calls AI detectors unreliable, says lockdown browsers feel like spying, and warns that policing students builds a classroom atmosphere of mutual distrust.
Instead, MIT wants to rebuild education around the things AI can't replace. That means oral exams, semester portfolios, in-person project work, and a required social component in every subject. The report even floats the idea of rethinking grades entirely, since without a GPA to optimize, much of the incentive to cheat with AI evaporates.
The committee warns professors against replacing undergrad research assistants with AI agents just because they're cheaper, because a university exists to grow people, not output.
The most famous tech school on earth admitted the machines broke its way of teaching. Its answer is more humans, not more software.
Ari Akerstein retweeted
Paul Simon pays tribute to 9/11 by performing "The Sound Of Silence".
A native New Yorker, you can see the deep emotion in Paul's face as he sings.
Heartbreaking.
Ari Akerstein retweeted
I can’t stress enough how little an idea matters compared to the agency of the people executing the idea.
I have had the privilege of knowing and sometimes even working with some of the most successful people (by various metrics).
The difference between mediocre and excellent work and outcomes is predominantly one of agency.
In practice this means: they dont wait for things to happen to them they go out and make things happen for them.
They don’t wait for someone else to do something, for someone to teach them, for someone to give them the path, etc. They just go out and find a way to do it.
I think the single biggest superpower these people have is the realization/belief that the world around them is completely mutable. Most everything that happens is because a person made it happen.
I used to tell people to look around the room you’re sitting in. Look at everything. Every noun. It almost all exists because a person willed it into existence. Nothing is stopping you from doing the same.
I see people online all the time dismissing someone else’s success because “I had that idea first” or whatever. I mean… yeah? If so then the difference is… you. So a bit of a self own whenever I hear that.
Number one tip: act with agency.
Ari Akerstein retweeted
PSA: this is not the right century to mess with the Jews.
BREAKING:
Israel has blown up the Hezbollah’s Ali al-Taher Ridge tunnel network 15 km north of the Israeli border. 1100 tons of explosives were used.
The systematic military operation started in early August and involving a tight encirclement, localized ground clearing, and intelligence-driven airstrikes.
More than 100 Hezbollah terrorists and IRGC advisors were trapped in the tunnels during the siege. Hezbollah tried to resupply them with drones but failed.
Tonight, the 2 km long tunnel network was destroyed forever.