Fast walkers have higher IQ? ⋆ AI of the week ⋆ Cost of Hesitation
Fast walkers have higher IQ and larger brains? AI breakthroughs from China steal the spotlight, and hesitation costs more than just time—decide boldly for yourself and those who believe in you.
This week, we uncover how the speed of your walk reveals hidden truths about your brain and long-term health, dive into groundbreaking AI advancements shaking up the industry, and reflect on the high cost of indecision.
Thing 1 - Fast walkers have higher IQ?
Fast walkers have higher IQ and larger brains than slow walkers.
The speed at which you walk could reveal a lot about your brain and overall health. A fascinating study from JAMA Network Open followed 904 people from childhood to midlife (5 decades!) and found that slower gait speed at age 45 is tied to lifelong health markers.
Things like reduced brain volume, thinner cortices, and cognitive challenges - sometimes as far back as when you were a toddler (age 3) - are all connected to how fast you move in your 40s.
It turns out that walking isn't just physical. It's an intricate dance involving your muscles, brain, and nervous system.
Slower walking at midlife reflects the wear and tear of your entire body over decades.
For researchers, this changes the game. Instead of waiting for older adults to show signs of decline, gait speed could become a cheap, easy way to spot and address health risks much earlier in life.
Imagine being able to predict future health challenges just by measuring how you walk! That's where this is heading, with potential for breakthroughs in aging prevention, health interventions, and even reshaping how we think about long-term wellness.
Thing 2 - AI of the week
The Stargate Project is a new company which intends to invest $500 billion over the next four years building new AI infrastructure.
Arm, Microsoft, NVIDIA, Oracle, and OpenAI are the key initial technology partners.
China is cooking!!
It's been a week of crazy good AI models from China labs, and cheap!
- DeepSeek released DeepSeek-R1 (MIT licensed for clear open access!!) with performance on par with OpenAI's o1
- BridgeDP Robotics demoed AGIBOT A2 dancing
- Kimi.ai introduced Kimi k1.5 on Web - they say it beats 4o and Sonnet 3.5 on multiple benchmarks. And it's free with unlimited usage!
- Doubao released Doubao-1.5-pro - outperforms almost every other LLM on popular benchmarks
- Perplexity introduced Sonar - the most affordable search API product on the market
- Google rolled out Gemini 2.0 Flash Thinking update
Thing 3 - The Cost of Hesitation
People who don't have the courage to decide on what they want often spend a decade running around just to end up where they started, and the problem isn't just that you are wasting your time, you are also wasting the time of all the people who believe in you.
- Orange Book
If you won't do it for yourself, do it for them.
Cheers, Zvonimir