A health monitor for pets; Fostering leadership and community awareness

Hello,

There’s a new kid on the block and it means business.

OpenAI’s ChatGPT AI chatbot is now integrating search engine capabilities, challenging the long-standing dominance of Google’s web search. That has prompted some experts to declare that Google is ‘no longer the standard’.

By citing sources and showing users how it came up with answers, ChatGPT has attempted to address large language model (LLM) hallucinations and lack of transparency in one fell swoop.

Apple is also darting for accuracy with Apple Intelligence, however, co-founder Steve Wozniak remains wary of LLMs’ potential inaccuracies. “I want things to be really [meticulous] that I know it’s accurate,” he told Bloomberg TV.

But what will be the long-term impact of LLMs? According to researchers at the University of Toronto, these models can impair the ability of humans to think creatively, resulting in less varied and innovative ideas.

There are still greater problems—even bad actors are after LLMs. Attackers use LLMs to generate content for fake websites to extract credentials from victims (classic phishing) or by pretending to be stores of famous brands offering super discounts.

But there’s a telltale sign of a spurious website using LLM-generated text: it apologises a lot.

Also, a new study by researchers at Technion, Google Research and Apple revealed that these models possess a much deeper understanding of truthfulness than previously thought. They do not encode truthfulness through a single unified mechanism but rather have different notions of truth.

Welcome to the post-truth world.

In today’s newsletter, we will talk about 

• Helping pet parents monitor health
• Fostering leadership and community awareness

Here’s your trivia for today: Who was the first woman to construct a railway line in India?

Woman Entrepreneur

Helping pet parents monitor health

After helping her friend Vivek Srinivas get a dog, Vani Aiyer realised the challenge people faced with every vet visit—a lack of comprehensive data that often served as a roadblock to accurate diagnoses.

Through research discussions with vets and pet parents, Aiyer and Srinivas decided to start VETiNSTANT in 2023 to connect pets, vets, and pet parents for timely diagnosis. 

Happy tails:

• The startup offers P.A.W.S. (Pets Administration and Workflow System) for clinics. It digitises clinic management by automating payments, billing, and inventory, and simplifying consultations by automatically creating notes, prescriptions, and billing records.
• It also offers a non-invasive, hand-held pet health monitoring device called ExamD, which integrates with the VETiNSTANT tracker app. It monitors the pet’s temperature, SPO2, heart, lung, and abdomen auscultation.
• There’s also the Exam D Pro device for veterinarians. It tracks multiple metrics that professionals can handle, like murmur identification and grading for early heart condition detection, lung abnormality detection, insights for issues like COPD, asthma, wheezing, and more.

Top Funding Deals of the Week

Startup: Finova Capital

Amount: $135M

Round: Series E

Startup: Vridhi Home Finance

Amount: Rs 310 Cr

Round: Series B

Startup: Udaan

Amount: Rs 300 Cr

Round: Debt

Education

Fostering leadership and community awareness

At the age of 17, Ali Basha and his friend Chitra started tuition for children from vulnerable communities of North Chennai who faced the risk of dropping out of school due to poverty and unstable home environments. In 1992, Basha’s efforts formalised into Zenith Tuition Centre in Tiruvottiyur, North Chennai.

“My work has been to show them a glimpse into the world outside their homes and schools,” he tells SocialStory.

Education for leadership:

• Basha has built a network of educators and educational institutions to spread awareness of the dangers of unchecked industrialisation and trade expansion in peripheral Chennai.
• “Our goal now is to educate children by exposing them to talks by climate experts, arts education, and street theatre that explore these long-term ecological damages,” he adds.
• “For communities like ours, education is often looked at as a one-stop solution,” says M Rajesh, who joined the centre in 2018, adding, “Education, when not rooted in our indigenous knowledge and cultural contexts as farming and fisher communities, is just a superficial solution to a much larger problem.”

News & updates

• Local first: Indonesia has banned sales of Google Pixel smartphones for failing to meet domestic content requirements, days after blocking Apple’s iPhone 16 in Southeast Asia’s largest phone market. The government said Google’s phones cannot be traded until they comply with rules requiring 40% local content in smartphones sold in Indonesia.
• Unprecedented: Meta’s publicly available AI model Llama model was used by some Chinese research institutes associated with the People’s Liberation Army to develop an AI product for potential military uses, Reuters reported.
• Growth test: The economic outlook for the Asia-Pacific region seems a touch brighter but as risks to growth mount, cautious policymaking will be needed, the International Monetary Fund said. Asia’s economic growth is expected to moderate this year and the next as the post-pandemic boost fades and demographic factors like population ageing increasingly put a brake on activity.

Who was the first woman to construct a railway line in India?

Answer: Alice Tredwell. The Englishwoman took up the contract of the Bhor Ghat section of the Great Indian Peninsular Railway line between Mumbai and Pune and completed the construction in 1863.

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