Off the beaten path

Good morning Staker! Here’s what’s cookin’ today. Global financial security watchdog sounds alarm on AI; new wearable helps reduce caregiver load; and Messi retires from international play.

Let’s get into it!

Fitbit and Luffu founders James Park and Eric Friedman announced the Luffu Link, an LTE-based wearable device that monitors various health indicators in real time, provides voice logging, as well as location awareness. It can also secure help from trusted contacts programmed into the device when something goes wrong for the wearer.

The device will cost US$250, and is expected to launch early next year. It was made as the natural companion for the Luffu health-monitoring app that the company launched earlier this year.

The device is able to learn its users typical day-to-day patterns of behavior, and can notify family members when behavior deviates from the norm, even when no other indicators suggest something may be wrong.

The two founders said they made the device based on their experiences with their own aging parents, and the desire they always had for a tool exactly like this one to assist with managing the realities of aging.

“When you become a family caregiver, or the CEO of the family, these people are spending an enormous amount of time doing it,” Park said in an interview with TechCrunch.

“Research shows over 27 hours a week on average, which is a crazy amount of time…I think technology can play a big role in helping reduce this load, but as we found out, the tools to help them are pretty fragmented,” he said.

A study published by researchers at MIT-Boston University found that cognitive decline may impact a person’s ability to utilize the language skills they’ve developed over their life, but the skillset itself is rarely actually damaged.

The researchers used brain imaging to analyze the neural activity going on in younger and older adults when performing a series of tasks. They found the regions of the brain responsible for language skills were nearly identical in both older and younger adults.

However, when it came to activity recorded in what’s called the “multiple demand network,” younger and older adults differed greatly. The multiple demand network is responsible for various aspects of executive function, including decision-making.

“In the language network, we couldn’t find any differences between older and younger groups,” said Anne Billot, one of the lead authors of the new study, who participated in the study while doing her PhD at Boston University.

“In contrast, the executive system showed decline across almost all of the measures. The network synchronization declined in older adults, the extent of activation was reduced, and the magnitude of activation was reduced as well.”

The research could be helpful in knowing which neural networks to target when treating the symptoms of cognitive decline.

Argentine phenom Lionel Messi announced the other day that he’s calling it quits from international play after 21 years of dominance on the global stage.

"It was a decision that hurt, and still hurts deeply, but I understand that the time has come," the 39-year-old said on his Instagram account.

Messi won the World Cup in 2022 and almost pulled off a repeat in this year’s tournament, losing in extra time to Spain in the finals. He also took his team to the final round in 2014, and altogether competed in a record-tying six World Cups.

"I swear to you that I always gave it my all, not just in these last few years when we won everything, but before that too," Messi wrote. "I always fought and left everything on the field for this jersey, to bring you joy and make you feel proud to be Argentine through football."

All in all, Messi scored an incredible 125 goals in international play. While many consider him the greatest to ever do it, his only competition in most circles is his long-time rival Cristiano Ronaldo, who himself has an even more eye-popping 146 goals internationally. Though Ronaldo is also approaching the end, he is yet to make any such announcement.

Divisions of Sony Music and Warner Music filed a lawsuit against Anthropic, its CEO Dario Amodei, and co-founder Benjamin Mann in a northern California federal court the other day, accusing them of "one of the largest and most blatant ongoing thefts of intellectual property in history."

This particular suit is broad by design, alleging Anthropic used the intellectual property of “tens of thousands” of music publishers to train its models. Its language frames the accused theft of reaching far beyond just a handful of songs as complete entities, instead pointing out that each song often contains several pieces of copyright-protected intellectual property, all of which it says Anthropic knowingly stole.

"Defendants Anthropic and its founders Dario Amodei and Benjamin Mann have conducted a brazen campaign of illegally torrenting, scraping, and downloading copyrighted works on a massive scale in order to develop, operate, and reap enormous profits from Anthropic's 'Claude' series of artificial intelligence ('AI') models," the plaintiffs wrote in the 48-page suit.

They are seeking hundreds of thousands in damages for each stolen song, driving the potential damages far into the billions of dollars.

“We disagree with the publishers' claims and we intend to defend ourselves robustly in court," Anthropic said in a statement.

Who doesn’t belong?

If we named a classic show from the ’70s or ’80s, could you tell us which characters belonged there, and which was the odd one out? Find out with, today’s trivia 😎 📺️