Paul Stenhouse: Apple's new hearing aid and OpenAi's new "reasoning" AI

Saturday Morning with Jack Tame

Apple released a surprising product this week... a hearing aid.

They were awaiting FDA approval, but today they got it, making it the first over-the-counter hearing aid software device to receive such approval.

It's more tech for good! Approximately 1.5 billion people around the world are living with hearing loss, according to the World Health Organization. The Apple Hearing Study revealed that 75% of people diagnosed with hearing loss haven’t received the assistive support that they need.

How does it work? You open the health app to take a hearing test from the comfort of home - it takes about five minutes. It builds an 'audiogram', just like what you'd get at the doctor's office, and uses this to personalize your hearing experience. If you struggle with high, mid, or low tones these will be boosted accordingly allowing you to hear conversations and the environment around you more clearly. It's designed for folks with mild to moderate hearing loss.

It's worth pointing out that AirPods could be a very successful company all on their own. Apple has sold tens of billions of dollars worth of them, and it's thought there are over 100 million users globally. Typically if someone has their AirPods in it signals 'leave me alone', but not anymore. So, should you, will you, talk to someone with AirPods in?

OpenAI's new AI can 'reason'.

Get set, we're entering a new phase of AI. Open AI's "o1", the first in a planned series of “reasoning” models that have been trained to answer more complex questions - and they say it can do it faster than a human can.

It's better at producing code and solving "multistep problems", but it's much slower and more expensive.

In the qualifying test for the International Mathematics Olympiad, the GPT-4o scored 13%, this new model scored 83%. In an online code competition, it reached the 89th percentile of participants.

The next model... Open AI says it will perform at the PhD level for physics, chemistry and biology tests.

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