It Will Be Interesting To Watch How This Plays Out Over The Next Few Years!

 This popped up last week!

22 January 2025

Virtual service aims to keep 85k people out of NSW EDs every year

---

By

Staff Writers

The Sydney Local Health District has launched its latest virtual initiative aimed at keeping adults out of emergency departments where possible.

The virtualADULTS urgent care service – accessed through Healthdirect Australia – joins the virtualKIDS service that was expanded across NSW in January 2024 for children aged up to 16 years.

Since that expansion, more than 10,000 children across NSW have received more timely, convenient care through the virtualKIDS service, and many thousands of these families have avoided a trip to the ED, according to the state government.

The paediatric service originally began in three NSW local health districts and the virtualADULTS program rollout will follow a similar path.

The rollout has started in the SLHD. RPA Virtual is one of two hubs that will operate the service, delivering virtualADULTS to all of metropolitan Sydney, Illawarra-Shoalhaven and the Central Coast.

A regional hub will begin operating early this year, with plans to expand the service statewide at the end of 2025.

NSW health minister Ryan Park said the program would help ease the pressure on emergency departments and give people the option of receiving care in the community or at home.

“This is all about making sure we can deliver safe care, at the right place, at the right time, with the right staff,” he said.

Once fully implemented, 85,000 patients would use this service in a year, with doctors and nursing staff able to treat people via video call for a range of conditions that were deemed urgent but not life-threatening, said Mr Park.

“It’s about those issues that you might normally see a GP for, but for some reason can’t access in a timely hour, this is about filing that gap,” he said.

“It works because of skilled clinicians, fantastic nursing staff, and really strong clinical leads as well as allied health care professionals who work in multidisciplinary teams providing care to patients where they need it most.”

Dr Jeremy Fry, emergency medicine staff specialist at RPA Virtual Hospital and at RPA Emergency Department, said he supported the initiative.

“My colleagues and I have seen and experienced first-hand what can be an overwhelming and exhausting experience for patients in emergency departments,” he said.

“This includes overcrowding in clinical spaces and waiting areas, and the often-extended wait times for care.

“Through working at RPA Virtual Hospital, we have also seen the seen the immense possibilities offered by virtual urgent care to safely reduce the burden on our emergency departments. This new service will mean less waiting time for patients.”

VirtualADULTS will use video conferencing technology to connect patients with a multidisciplinary team of clinicians, including doctors and nurses, where clinically appropriate. The clinician will assess the patient and give expert advice.

It will initially be available from 8am-4.30pm Monday to Friday (excluding public holidays) for people aged 16 years and over. From February 2025, the service will be extended to be available from 8am to 10pm Monday to Sunday.

The service provides virtual urgent care for illnesses or injuries such as coughs, colds, fevers or flu; respiratory symptoms; vomiting and diarrhoea; minor infections; and rashes.

“Virtual care has made tremendous progress, accelerated in part by the pandemic, and it is becoming an increasingly embraced model of care, allowing people to be treated from the comfort of home,” said Mr Park.

“Virtual care is safe, effective and convenient, and I am so pleased we are making it available for adults for urgent care.”

Free, 24/7 health advice and access to health services like virtualADULTS and virtualKIDS is available through Healthdirect for patients in NSW.

Here is the link:

 https://www.medicalrepublic.com.au/virtual-service-aims-to-keep-85k-people-out-of-nsw-eds-every-year/113775 

Will be interesting to come back in a year or so and see how it has worked out!

David.

This Is A Useful Summary On Just Where We Are With AI Now!

This appeared last week

AI system reaches human level on test for ‘general intelligence’

Here’s what that means.

By Michael Timothy Bennet, Elija Perrier on Jan 23 2025 11:11 AM

Is AI capable of "general intelligence"?

A new artificial intelligence (AI) model has just achieved human-level results on a test designed to measure “general intelligence”.

On 20 December, OpenAI’s o3 system scored 85 per cent on the ARC-AGI benchmark, well above the previous AI best score of 55 per cent and on par with the average human score.

It also scored well on a very difficult mathematics test.

Creating artificial general intelligence, or AGI, is the stated goal of all the major AI research labs.

At first glance, OpenAI appears to have at least made a significant step towards this goal.

While scepticism remains, many AI researchers and developers feel something just changed.

For many, the prospect of AGI now seems more real, urgent and closer than anticipated.

Are they right?

Generalisation and intelligence

To understand what the o3 result means, you need to understand what the ARC-AGI test is all about. In technical terms, it’s a test of an AI system’s “sample efficiency” in adapting to something new – how many examples of a novel situation the system needs to see to figure out how it works.

An AI system like ChatGPT (GPT-4) is not very sample efficient.

It was “trained” on millions of examples of human text, constructing probabilistic “rules” about which combinations of words are most likely.

The result is pretty good at common tasks.

It is bad at uncommon tasks, because it has less data (fewer samples) about those tasks.

Until AI systems can learn from small numbers of examples and adapt with more sample efficiency, they will only be used for very repetitive jobs and ones where the occasional failure is tolerable.

The ability to accurately solve previously unknown or novel problems from limited samples of data is known as the capacity to generalise.

It is widely considered a necessary, even fundamental, element of intelligence.

Grids and patterns

The ARC-AGI benchmark tests for sample efficient adaptation using little grid square problems like the one below.

The AI needs to figure out the pattern that turns the grid on the left into the grid on the right.

Each question gives three examples to learn from.

The AI system then needs to figure out the rules that “generalise” from the three examples to the fourth.

These are a lot like the IQ tests sometimes you might remember from school.

Weak rules and adaptation

We don’t know exactly how OpenAI has done it, but the results suggest the o3 model is highly adaptable.

From just a few examples, it finds rules that can be generalised.

To figure out a pattern, we shouldn’t make any unnecessary assumptions or be more specific than we really have to be.

In theory, if you can identify the “weakest” rules that do what you want, then you have maximised your ability to adapt to new situations.

What do we mean by the weakest rules?

The technical definition is complicated, but weaker rules are usually ones that can be described in simpler statements.

In the example above, a plain English expression of the rule might be something like: “Any shape with a protruding line will move to the end of that line and ‘cover up’ any other shapes it overlaps with.”

Searching chains of thought?

While we don’t know how OpenAI achieved this result just yet, it seems unlikely they deliberately optimised the o3 system to find weak rules.

However, to succeed at the ARC-AGI tasks it must be finding them.

We do know that OpenAI started with a general-purpose version of the o3 model (which differs from most other models, because it can spend more time “thinking” about difficult questions) and then trained it specifically for the ARC-AGI test.

French AI researcher Francois Chollet, who designed the benchmark, believes o3 searches through different “chains of thought” describing steps to solve the task.

It would then choose the “best” according to some loosely defined rule, or “heuristic”.

This would be “not dissimilar” to how Google’s AlphaGo system searched through different possible sequences of moves to beat the world Go champion.

You can think of these chains of thought like programs that fit the examples.

Of course, if it is like the Go-playing AI, then it needs a heuristic, or loose rule, to decide which program is best.

There could be thousands of different seemingly equally valid programs generated.

That heuristic could be “choose the weakest” or “choose the simplest”.

However, if it is like AlphaGo then they simply had an AI create a heuristic.

This was the process for AlphaGo.

Google trained a model to rate different sequences of moves as better or worse than others.

What we still don’t know

The question then is, is this really closer to AGI? If that is how o3 works, then the underlying model might not be much better than previous models.

The concepts the model learns from language might not be any more suitable for generalisation than before.

Instead, we may just be seeing a more generalisable “chain of thought” found through the extra steps of training a heuristic specialised to this test. The proof, as always, will be in the pudding.

Almost everything about o3 remains unknown. OpenAI has limited disclosure to a few media presentations and early testing to a handful of researchers, laboratories and AI safety institutions.

Truly understanding the potential of o3 will require extensive work, including evaluations, an understanding of the distribution of its capacities, how often it fails and how often it succeeds.

When o3 is finally released, we’ll have a much better idea of whether it is approximately as adaptable as an average human.

If so, it could have a huge, revolutionary, economic impact, ushering in a new era of self-improving accelerated intelligence. We will require new benchmarks for AGI itself and serious consideration of how it ought to be governed.

If not, then this will still be an impressive result. However, everyday life will remain much the same.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original here.

I suspect all most of us can do is stand back and watch! I guess it had to happen!

David.

 

This Seems Likely To Be Closest We Will Get To The Truth On The Origin Of COVID-19!

 This popped up a few days ago!

CIA now favours lab leak theory on origins of Covid-19

Michael R. Gordon and Dustin Volz

26 Jan, 2025

Dow Jones

The Central Intelligence Agency has now concluded that the deadly Covid pandemic most likely arose from a laboratory leak, lending credibility to a view that has been the focus of sharp debate among scientists and politicians for years.

In doing so, the CIA has now joined the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Energy Department in identifying a laboratory mishap in Wuhan, China as the probable source of the Covid-19 virus. It has killed more than 1.2 million Americans and over seven million people worldwide.

“CIA assesses with low confidence that a research-related origin of the Covid-19 pandemic is more likely than a natural origin based on the available body of reporting,” an agency spokesman said in a statement released Saturday.

The spokesman added that the judgment was “low confidence” and that the CIA would continue to evaluate “any available credible new intelligence reporting or open-source information that could change CIA’s assessment.”

The agency had previously taken the stance that it didn’t have enough information to assess whether the virus had leapt from an animal to a human or arose from a laboratory mishap.

Covid-19 emerged in Wuhan in late 2019 and then spread rapidly through the world in 2020 and 2021 before the development of vaccines helped limit deaths. It marked one of the worst pandemics in modern history.

But the origins of the virus still divides the U.S. intelligence community, in large part because the Chinese government hasn’t co-operated with international investigations.

Four U.S. intelligence agencies have favoured, with low confidence, the animal transmission theory. So has the National Intelligence Council, a body of senior intelligence officers who reports to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.

John Ratcliffe, the new director of the CIA confirmed earlier this week by the Senate, has long said he thought the lab leak theory was the most plausible explanation.

In an interview with Breitbart published Friday, Ratcliffe said investigating the issue was a top priority that he wanted to tackle on “day one.”

Officials familiar with the matter said the agency has been continuing its work on the question since the virus arose. The agency said in its Saturday statement that “both research-related and natural origin scenarios of the COVID-19 pandemic remain plausible.”

The New York Times earlier reported on the new judgment.

A spokesman for the Chinese Embassy in Washington didn’t respond to a request for comment.

A former FBI senior scientist told The Wall Street Journal in December that a fresh look at the virus’s origin and the intelligence-community reports on the issue, was needed.

In the waning days of the Biden administration, Jake Sullivan, Joe Biden’s national-security adviser, called for establishing a panel of outside experts to take a fresh look at the intelligence agencies’ findings.

The debate over Covid origins at times has been heavily politicised. During his first term in office, President Trump blamed Beijing for what he called the “China virus,” while his Democratic critics at the time said the White House was trying to divert attention from its management of the response to the pandemic.

While the natural transmission theory was initially the dominant view within the intelligence community, the debate over Covid’s origins has shifted considerably over the past several years. No host animal that might have transmitted the virus has been found, while experts have raised concerns that precautions for containing biological agents at the Wuhan Institute of Virology were inadequate.

The FBI, which was the first intelligence agency to point to a lab leak as a likely explanation, made its judgment with “moderate confidence,” while the Energy Department and CIA’s views were made with low confidence.

The CIA issued its low confidence judgment after former CIA Director William Burns directed the agency to take a position on the origins rather than remain agnostic, according to officials familiar with the matter, though he didn’t urge a particular conclusion. The updated analysis, which wasn’t based on specific new intelligence, was published internally at the agency before Ratcliffe’s arrival, the officials said.

Sen. Tom Cotton, the Republican chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, applauded the CIA for releasing its new judgment, which he called “the most plausible explanation of Covid’s origins.”

He added: “Now, the most important thing is to make China pay for unleashing a plague on the world.”

The Wall Street Journal

Here is the link:

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/business/the-wall-street-journal/cia-now-favours-lab-leak-theory-on-origins-of-covid19/news-story/799d885e412840c3b696a3cbdabc94ed

I think the bottom line here is that we will never know – but that the US needs someone to blame given the huge death toll in the US.

David.

This Is A Really Big Deal, No Matter How You Look At It!

 This appeared a few days ago:

China narrows gap on US in AI arms race as Australia stands idle

Paul Smith Technology editor

Jan 24, 2025 – 5.30pm

As the world waited for Donald Trump to unleash a trade war on China after his inauguration, it was a $US500 billion ($792 billion) artificial intelligence scheme called Stargate that demonstrated where the digital battleground will be contested.

The AI war is being fought on two fronts: infrastructure capacity and the level of sophistication of the AI models built. The US has been leading in both, but the symbolic importance given to Stargate by its presidential announcement comes as China is catching up fast.

Australia, meanwhile, occupies the sidelines wondering where it will fit into the AI world order.

Stargate tackles the infrastructure side of the AI war by pledging to build huge data centres at a rapid clip to house the servers, Nvidia chips and other tech smarts needed to develop technology that is smarter than humans.

China is also spending billions on infrastructure, and reports suggest that its AI models are rapidly catching, and even surpassing, some of those built by OpenAI, Anthropic and Google.

Despite Mr Trump’s presence at the announcement, Stargate is an entirely commercial endeavour, largely boosting the efforts of ChatGPT maker OpenAI. It is funded by OpenAI and Oracle, Japan’s SoftBank and Abu Dhabi-based technology investment firm MGX.

US media has calculated that the $US500 billion investment would cost more than NASA’s Apollo program in the 1960s when factoring in inflation.

Microsoft (a big backer of OpenAI) has also launched its own $US30 billion AI infrastructure fund, alongside fund manager BlackRock, and plans to spend $US80 billion this year on data centres alone.

This sits alongside big investments from other companies such as Amazon Web Services and Elon Musk’s xAI. Earlier this month, Macquarie Asset Management looked to repeat its successful investment in Australian data centre builder AirTrunk with up to $8 billion backing the plans of Nasdaq-listed company Applied Digital.

‘It’s the opposite of the Cold War’

China had to think fast. Restrictions on the sale of AI chips from the likes of Nvidia to China are a hurdle it must overcome, but official data reported by the South China Morning Post on Thursday showed about 250 advanced data centres and other computing facilities were being completed or under construction in mainland China as of June last year.

“The battle over AI is critical, as it determines the future for the economy, and for defence. The US and China are putting billions in because they each identified a decade ago that their sovereignty depends on having world-leading AI,” the chief scientist at the University of Adelaide’s Australian Institute for Machine Learning, Anton van den Hengel, said.

“It’s the opposite of the Cold War, where neither side could use their nuclear arsenals without incurring a high risk of being annihilated. This time the commercial application technology is out in the open.”

US-China tech tensions were high before Mr Trump’s election, and a move in December by the US to tighten restrictions on chips and semiconductor equipment, coupled with the addition of 140 Chinese tech firms to its restricted entity list, marked a significant escalation.

China responded by launching an antitrust probe into Nvidia, while Chinese industrial associations issued warnings about the reliability of US chip supplies. It also banned exports of critical minerals to the US and sanctioned 13 US defence companies.

Professor Van den Hengel said he was frustrated that Australia was not making moves to ramp up AI capability in the form of infrastructure and local large language models to serve as an alternative to those from US giants such as OpenAI, Anthropic and Meta.

“The challenge for Australia is that we are a decade behind the US and China, and we still haven’t started building our own sovereign capability,” he said.

“We face cyber threats right now, and the US is never going to give us their best technology as it would undermine their own defences. You don’t buy AI, you rent it. Microsoft isn’t offering to sell OpenAI to us, they’re offering to give us access. We can’t operate a sovereign economy when a critical part of the infrastructure is owned by a multinational from a foreign country.”

My expectation is that we’ll end up with two AI worlds like we ended up with two internets either side of the ‘Great Firewall of China’.

— Toby Walsh, UNSW AI Institute

The results of all this investment in terms of building the best AI capabilities are still unclear. The US was out of the blocks fastest, but concerns have emerged that the rate of improvement in the AI models underpinning services such as ChatGPT is slowing.

China has its own tech titans to rival the US, in the form of Alibaba, Baidu, Tencent and emerging AI names such as DeepSeek and Zhipu AI, which perform strongly against American bots in some of the tests used to gauge efficacy.

This week, a Chinese-built AI “reasoning” large language model called DeepSeek-R1 had AI analysts talking when it demonstrated it could be a credible rival to OpenAI’s latest o1 model. It thinks through problems step by step, and takes its time to come up with solutions to complex problems.

Unlike OpenAI, it is open source, meaning it is freely available for academic and commercial use, and could potentially become an influential model outside China. That being so, the AI cold war would invariably limit its use in Western business and research.

“DeepSeek is the most impressive, but some of the largest AI models today are Chinese,” said Toby Walsh, the chief scientist at UNSW’s AI Institute.

“My expectation is that we’ll end up with two AI worlds like we ended up with two internets either side of the ‘Great Firewall of China’.

“There will be the US AI world, and there will be the Chinese one. In one, you’ll not be able to prompt about Tiananmen Square, but it will be seamlessly integrated into your WeChat. In the other, it will be one of the US tech giants that owns your data.”

Here is the link:

https://www.afr.com/technology/china-narrows-gap-on-us-in-ai-arms-race-as-australia-stands-idle-20250123-p5l6lx

One really does get the feeling that it is in this domain that WWIII will be played out!

Sadly I fear Australia will wind up being a non-playing spectator – and as time passes, without some real effort we will slip endlessly behind. Right now there is little evidence I can see that our politicians are in any way on top of this field….

$700 Billion is a huge sum and shows just how serious this is IMVHO! It is staggering that Meta alone is planning to spend $100B on the effort!

It will be exciting to watch and I hope OZ can find some useful ways to be involved and learn!

David.

I Really Wonder What Has Gone Wrong To Burden Us With Trump As US President Again?

I can only conclude we must all have been very naughty indeed!

Greenland

Trump again demands to buy Greenland in ‘horrendous’ call with Danish PM

Source says: ‘The Danes are in crisis mode’ after US president’s call with prime minister Mette Frederiksen

Maya Yang

Sun 26 Jan 2025 05.19 AEDT

Donald Trump had a fiery phone call with Danish prime minister Mette Frederiksen over his demands to buy Greenland, according to senior European officials.

Speaking to the Financial Times, officials said that Trump, then still president-elect, spoke with Frederiksen for 45 minutes last week, during which he was described to be aggressive and confrontational about Frederiksen’s refusal to sell Greenland to the US.

The Financial Times reports that according to five current and former senior European officials who were briefed on the call, the conversation “was horrendous”. One person said: “He was very firm. It was a cold shower. Before, it was hard to take it seriously. But I do think it is serious and potentially very dangerous.”

Another person who was briefed on the call told the outlet: “The intent was very clear. They want it. The Danes are now in crisis mode.” Someone else said: “The Danes are utterly freaked out by this.”

According to one former Danish official, the call was a “very tough conversation” in which Trump “threatened specific measures against Denmark such as targeted tariffs”.

Trump has previously said that the US needs to control Greenland and has refused to rule out using US military force to take over the territory. During a press conference a few weeks ago, Trump said that the US needed Greenland “for economic security”. The 836,300-sq-mile (2,166,007-sq-km) Arctic island is rich in oil and gas, as well as various raw materials for green technology.

Speaking to TV 2 earlier this month, Frederiksen said that the autonomous territory is “not for sale”, adding: “Seen through the eyes of the Danish government, Greenland belongs to the Greenlanders.”

In 1953, Greenland became part of the kingdom of Denmark, and in 1979, home rule was introduced. Despite Denmark controlling Greenland’s foreign and security policy, Greenland has its own parliament.

During his new year speech, Múte Egede, Greenland’s prime minister, said that he wanted Greenland to break free from “the shackles of colonialism”. Then, following a visit from Donald Trump Jr earlier this year, Egede said: “We are Greenlanders. We don’t want to be Americans. We don’t want to be Danish either. Greenland’s future will be decided by Greenland.”

Here is the link:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/jan/25/trump-greenland-denmark

Given he (Trump) is 78, or so, years old and apparently eats a very poor diet (hamburgers and Coke?) is it too much to hope that his reign will not be unduly prolonged? I really think a graceful retirement would be good for the world, but what would I know?

You really do have to wonder, however, about this obsession with Greenland for Heaven’s sake! Has he slipped a cog or two?

From what I read his chosen successor (the present VP) is hardly a model of sensible humanity so maybe the devil we know?

I guess we will have to wait to see how it all turns out, but if the apparent plans of his new US Health Secretary are anything to go by, we are in deep dodo (He thinks vaccines are a hoax etc.)! God help us all if there is a global health emergency of some sort with him leading the effort!

David.

AusHealthIT Poll Number 778 – Results – 26 January 2025.

Welcome back! Here are the results of the poll.

Is Peter Dutton Right To Be Encouraging National Debate On Adoption And Use Of Nuclear Energy For Power Generation In Australia?

Yes                                                                         38 (68%)

No                                                                          18 (32%)

I Have No Idea                                                         0 (0%)

Total No. Of Votes: 56

An interesting outcome with a large majority keen on discussion of a nuclear future!

Any insights on the poll are welcome, as a comment, as usual!

Good voting turnout for the long break. 

0 of 56 who answered the poll admitted to not being sure about the answer to the question!

Again, many, many special thanks to all those who voted! 

David.