Eliana Willis

Jason Hiner/ZDNETThe hottest frontier in the wearables market is smart rings, health trackers worn discreetly on your finger. Although Samsung just unveiled the Galaxy Ring, its take on the trend, this past July, its successor may be announced soon. A new report from DigiTimes reveals that the Galaxy Ring 2 will be launched at Samsung Unpacked 2025, the company’s annual hardware launch event. Building on its predecessor, the ring will feature an improved battery life of up to seven days, more accurate health data sensors, two new sizes, and improved AI, according to the report. Also: Why Oura Ring 4 is ZDNET’s product of the yearThese upgrades are set to improve the Galaxy Ring’s position as an Oura ring competitor, which has dominated the smart ring market since its launch in 2013. Despite the shortcomings of the first-generation Samsung ring, ZDNET crowned it the best smart ring for Android users, with nods to its unique AI algorithms that help determine sleep quality and patterns and its seamless integration with the rest of the Samsung ecosystem.  More

Sabrina Ortiz/ZDNETFitness wearable company Whoop claims data from its screenless wristband has revealed a “novel biomarker” for tracking menstruation, which could make some health issues easier to catch earlier on. Vital signs, including body temperature and heart rate, change through each phase of a person’s menstrual cycle. But Whoop’s research, published on Monday, indicates that the amplitude, or size, of those changes can tell us more than previously thought. Also: The best fitness trackers you can buyThe company’s study reviewed data from more than 11,500 women who opted in, ultimately including 45,000 menstrual cycles. “Amplitude was found to be suppressed in individuals with characteristics linked to reduced fertility, such as higher BMI & older age. This non-invasive marker could help identify reproductive health issues earlier, cutting time to diagnosis,” Whoop Founder and CEO Will Ahmed shared in an X thread on Thursday. NEW @WHOOP RESEARCH – NOVEL BIOMARKER FOR UNDERSTANDING MENSTRUAL CYCLESExcited to share groundbreaking research from the WHOOP Research team, just published in Nature Digital Medicine. A leap forward in understanding and monitoring female physiology. 🧵— Will Ahmed (@willahmed) December 27, 2024

The study explains that for women who get a period and are premenopausal, menstrual cycle changes can indicate potential health issues, like hormonal fluctuations that suggest certain disorders. “Those experiencing irregular menstrual cycles have been found to have a higher risk of coronary heart disease, cancers, and osteoporosis later in life,” the study notes. “Unfortunately, recognizing these cycle disruptions can be challenging as it may take several months before an individual identifies irregular or missed menses.” Also: I test wearable tech for a living. These are my favorite products of 2024The study suggests that, based on the data Whoop collects, irregularities found by wearables could be used to diagnose conditions more quickly and easily — without the need for blood tests or other more invasive and slower methods of diagnosis.  More

Vladimir_Timofeev/Getty Images The building of more powerful data centers for artificial intelligence, stuffed with more and more GPU chips, is driving data centers to enormous size, according to the chief executive of Ciena, which makes fiber-optic networking equipment purchased by cloud computing vendors to connect their data centers together.  “Some of these large data centers […] More

Maria Diaz/ZDNETWhat’s the deal?The Eufy Security Floodlight Cam E340 More

<!–> ZDNET’s key takeaways The DJI Osmo Pocket 3 has a reliable 1-inch CMOS sensor that captures stabilized 4K footage. It’s compact, has a built-in gimbal, and is very easy to use. The control pad can be wonky, and low-light performance takes a hit. more buying choices I didn’t expect a pocket camera to be […] More

Sam Altman and deputies at OpenAI discuss the performance of the new o3 model on the ARC-AGI test. OpenAI/ZDNETThe latest large language model from OpenAI isn’t yet in the wild, but we already have some ways to tell what it can and cannot do.The “o3” release from OpenAI was unveiled on Dec. 20 in the form of a video infomercial, which means that most people outside the company have no idea what it really is capable of. (Outside safety testing parties are being given early access.)Also: 15 ways AI saved me time at work in 2024Although the video featured a lot of discussion of various benchmark achievements, the message from OpenAI co-founder and CEO Sam Altman on the video was very brief. His biggest statement, and vague at that, was that o3 “is an incredibly smart model.”ARC-AGI put o3 to the testOpenAI plans to release the “mini” version of o3 toward the end of January and the full version sometime after that, said Altman.One outsider, however, has had the chance to put o3 to the test, in a sense.The test, in this case, is called the “Abstraction and Reasoning Corpus for Artificial General Intelligence,” or ARC-AGI. It is a collection of “challenges for intelligent systems,” a new benchmark. The ARC-AGI is billed as “the only benchmark specifically designed to measure adaptability to novelty.” That means that it is meant to test the acquisition of new skills, not just the use of memorized knowledge.Also: Why ethics is becoming AI’s biggest challengeAGI, artificial general intelligence, is regarded by some in AI as the Holy Grail — the achievement of a level of machine intelligence that could equal or exceed human intelligence. The idea of ARC-AGI is to guide AI toward “more intelligent and more human-like artificial systems.”The o3 model scored 76% accuracy on ARC-AGI in an evaluation formally coordinated by OpenAI and the author of ARC-AGI, François Chollet, a scientist in Google’s artificial intelligence unit.A shift in AI capabilitiesOn the website of ARC-AGI, Chollet wrote this past week that the score of 76% is the first time AI has beaten a human’s score on the exam, as exemplified by the answers of human Mechanical Turk workers who took the test and who, on average, scored just above 75% correct. More

ZDNET”See for yourself.”It’s not exactly clear what’s on the way, but Apple TV+ is teasing something coming Jan. 4 and 5.Save the dateIn an X post yesterday, the streaming service shared two words — “Stay tuned” — along with an image from an Apple TV+ show and the phrase “See for yourself.” The dates for next weekend appear at the bottom. A similar post shared on Christmas Day read “Save the date” and also included the words “See for yourself.”Also: Apple TV vs. Roku: Which streaming device should you buy?While some people think this will just be a preview of content coming in 2025, it doesn’t make sense to spread that out over an entire weekend (and it doesn’t make sense to make that announcement over a weekend in the first place). A free weekend?The most common projection is that Apple TV+ will be offering a free weekend to “See for yourself” what the service has.The company does offer a free trial week when you sign up and three free months if you purchase certain Apple devices, but if the rumors are true, this will be a free window open to everyone. It doesn’t seem likely Apple will make the entire catalog available, since people could just binge the shows they’ve been wanting to see, but it’s always possible. More

ALFRED PASIEKA/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY I’m just going to come out and say it: I don’t think AI is the next big thing. 😤 In fact, I’m betting the future of my company on it. I know what you’re thinking: “This guy’s lost it.” Also: 3 lucrative side hustles you can start right now with OpenAI’s […] More