🌡️ Is Heat Lowering Your Productivity? Plus, AI Innovations You Can't Miss!

Delivering some hot stuff to your inbox this week - pun intended. 😜

Thing 1 - Sweating it Out: How Heat Affects Our Performance

Ever felt like your brain was turning into a fried egg on a hot summer day? Well, you're not alone. Turns out, heat can mess with our performance.

A recent study showed that when classrooms get too hot, students' grades take a nosedive. Try to concentrate on your homework while sitting in a sauna... Not fun.

Researchers looked at data from a huge school district in the United States and found that on hotter test days, students scored lower. In fact, for every 10 degrees Fahrenheit the temperature went up, students' scores dropped by about 1%.

But the problem isn't just limited to schools. Heat can affect your work productivity, your workouts, and even your mental health.

So, what can you do about it - even if you're not a student?

• Cool down
  Crank up the AC, find a shady spot, or grab a frozen treat. Make sure your workspace or home is well-ventilated and at a comfortable temperature. No one wants to work in a sweat lodge.
• Hydrate
  Drink plenty of water, especially during hot weather. Your brain will thank you.
• Take a break
  If you're feeling overwhelmed, step outside for some fresh air or find a cooler spot to relax.
• Time it right
  Avoid intense physical activity during the hottest parts of the day. Unless you're a masochist, of course. Then proceed.

We're not robots. We need optimal conditions to function at our best. Heck, even robots work better in optimal conditions.

(source 1, source 2)

Thing 2 - AI of the week

• OpenAI released a new series of AI models designed to spend more time thinking before they respond. They can reason through complex tasks and solve harder problems than previous models in science, coding, and math.

OpenAI o1 ranks in the 89th percentile on competitive programming questions (Codeforces), places among the top 500 students in the US in a qualifier for the USA Math Olympiad (AIME), and exceeds human PhD-level accuracy on a benchmark of physics, biology, and chemistry problems (GPQA).

• Weave Robots revealed Isaac - a personal robot designed to help you around the house with chores etc. You can get one of the first 30 in the Fall of next year if you reserve it now. How much? $1k for reservation, $59k for the whole thing, or 48 monthly installments of $1385, plus interest.
• Google launched Ask Photos - it enhances Google Photos app by allowing users to search their photo libraries using natural language queries, powered by Google's Gemini AI.

• Chai Discovery introduced Chai-1 - what in the green drink, Z?
  It's a foundation model for molecular structure prediction that performs at the state-of-the-art across a variety of drug discovery tasks.
  Huh?
  It's gonna help scientists discover new drugs in a similar way ChatGPT helps you reply to emails.
• Read Their Lips lets you... read their lips from videos where you can't hear what people are saying.
• Mistral AI released pixtral-12b - an open-source model that lets you put text and images as input and get text and images as output. Their previous models were text-text.
• HuggingFace released FineVideo - a high-quality annotated video dataset with a Creative Commons license. Now open-source devs can start building AI video models.

Thing 3 - Will you ask for what you want?

Ask for what you want. You usually won’t get it, and often the rejection will be painful. But when this works, it works surprisingly well.

- Sam Altman

And if you never ask and never go for it, what do you get?

You can't win if you don't play.

Cheers, Zvonimir