AI shows its skills in the emergency room

The newsletter opens with coverage of a Harvard study published in Science that tested OpenAI's o1-preview model against two attending emergency room physicians across 76 real ER cases. The AI outperformed both doctors at the initial triage stage, achieving a 67.1% correct diagnosis rate compared to 55.3% and 50.0% for the two physicians. Notably, physician reviewers scoring the diagnoses could not distinguish AI-generated outputs from human ones. In one highlighted case, the AI identified a rare flesh-eating infection in a transplant patient approximately 12–24 hours before the treating physician did. The newsletter frames this as evidence that AI is ready for a formal role alongside doctors, especially given that newer frontier models would likely perform even better.

The Rundown Roundtable section features staff members sharing personal AI use cases. One writer describes using Gemini and ChatGPT to navigate her daughter's rare autoimmune disease diagnosis, using AI to parse medical literature, identify leading specialists, and understand treatment options across countries. An editor shares how he uses ChatGPT to analyze packaged food labels, uploading product photos to flag unhealthy ingredients and decode technical food-industry jargon like INS numbers and emulsifiers.

The newsletter includes a tutorial on using Claude Design, Anthropic's new AI design tool, to generate high-converting landing page mockups. The guide walks through a multi-step process involving wireframe creation, screenshot references from high-traffic pages, and iterative refinement using comments — with a final option to hand off the design to Claude Code for deployment.

On the geopolitical and defense front, the newsletter reports that the Pentagon added 8 AI companies — including OpenAI, Google, SpaceX, Nvidia, Microsoft, AWS, Oracle, and Reflection — to its classified networks, while notably excluding Anthropic due to a standing supply-chain risk designation. The newsletter highlights the apparent contradiction in the White House simultaneously blacklisting Anthropic while seeking priority access to its Mythos model. It also flags Reflection's inclusion as notable, given its $2B funding from a Donald Trump Jr.-backed venture fund.

Additional news briefs cover OpenAI shipping Codex Pets (animated desktop companions for tracking agent tasks), Maryland passing the first U.S. ban on AI-driven personalized grocery pricing, SAG-AFTRA securing AI protections in a new studio deal, and a Chinese court ruling that replacing a worker with AI does not legally justify termination. A reader workflow from Finland describes using Gemini Pro and other free AI tools to build a real estate market analysis tool in a county with limited data transparency.