AI predicts crimes before they happen? (and more)

Thing 1 - AI predicts crimes before they happen?

Cue the Minority Report theme music.

Researchers at the University of Chicago have developed an AI algorithm that can forecast crimes a week in advance with about 90% accuracy.

🚨 How It Works

• What it analyzes
  Historical data on violent crimes (homicides, assaults) and property crimes (burglaries, thefts).
• How it operates
  The AI breaks cities into 1,000-square-foot zones and spots crime hotspots based on recent activity.
• The prediction
  It forecasts the likelihood of specific crimes occurring in those areas.

Unlike the psychic “Precogs” in Minority Report, this AI relies just on hard data - no visions involved. 🙃

✅ Potential Benefits

This tech could:

• Optimize police resource allocation.
• Help cities identify and address systemic crime trends.

⚠️ Big Red Flags

• Bias in predictions
  It often highlights predominantly Black and Latino neighborhoods, which raises concerns about reinforcing racial and socioeconomic inequalities.
• Ethical concerns
  Are we inching toward a dystopian future where predictions dictate actions - like in Minority Report?

🛡️ The Researchers’ Defense

They’re upfront about the ethical challenges and emphasize:

• No targeting individuals
  The AI doesn’t predict who will commit crimes, just where patterns suggest potential hotspots.
• Transparency
  The algorithm and data are available to public for scrutiny, inviting others to refine or challenge the findings.

Thing 2 - AI of the week

ElevenLabs let's you talk to Santa Claus... We ain't gonna top that, but there's more AI news below.

• Tencent released Hunyuan Video - their open-source video model

Hunyuan Video - demo

• 12 Days of OpenAI started this week
  • o1 is out of preview
  • o1 Pro is available
  • new $200 per month Pro tier (are you getting it?)
  • reinforcement finetuning
• cohere introduced Rerank 3.5 - state-of-the-art performance with improved reasoning and multilingual capabilities
• Happenstance.ai helps you find people in your network by just describing who you're looking for.
• Grok 2 got a new image generation model that's better at creating photorealistic pictures of (real) people
• Google DeepMind revealed Genie 2 - large-scale foundation world model. That's a fancy way of saying it lets you play a game from a single image. You give it keyboard an mouse input and every frame is AI generated.
  Yes, it's mind-boggling.

• Google DeepMind also presented GenCast - AI weather model which gives us the probabilities of different weather conditions up to 15 days ahead with state-of-the-art accuracy
• 02 launched Daisy, an Al-powered "granny" designed to waste scammers' time with lifelike, rambling conversations

Thing 3 - Fear into Action

The courage you don't have today is the frustration you will have to live with tomorrow.

- Orange Book

Fear comes from inexperience, not incapability.

You're afraid because you haven't done it yet, not because you can't do it.

When you feel fear, inexperience is the problem to be solved—and it's only solved through action.

- Sahil Bloom

Need more reasons to do the thing you've been waiting the right time for?