A Key to Detecting Brain Disease Earlier Than Ever - WIRED | How to Launch a Custom Chatbot on OpenAI’s GPT Store - WIRED | The Danger of Digitizing Everything - WIRED | What SoundCloud Created Can Never Die

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A Key to Detecting Brain Disease Earlier Than Ever - WIRED (Full Access)

Earlier this year, Parkinson’s disease (PD) research entered a new era when the Michael J. Fox Foundation announced a momentous scientific breakthrough—the discovery of a biomarker for PD. It meant that, for the first time ever, we can now pinpoint the earliest known signs of the disease in Parkinson’s patients.

This long-awaited new procedure is called the “alpha-synuclein seeding amplification assay” (SAA), and it’s capable of detecting the misfolded alpha-synuclein in spinal fluid—the wayward protein clearly linked to Parkinson’s. It separates, with a stunning 90 percent specificity, those who have evidence of PD pathology in their cells from those who do not. It does so even before the emergence of symptoms, much like the way high blood pressure or cholesterol levels are used to detect cardiovascular risk long before a heart attack lands someone in the ER.

It would be hard to overstate the implications of this development for people living with dysfunction in their alpha-synuclein. For one thing, we’ve never had a way to know who these people are—that is, until the moment of diagnosis, by which point ongoing damage to brain cells is already well underway. As for the diagnosis itself, which for most people comes as a bolt from the blue, it has always been frustratingly subjective and essentially based on a physician’s opinion following a brief once-over in the doctor’s office—not very useful for medical care provision, let alone biomedical drug development.

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How to Launch a Custom Chatbot on OpenAI’s GPT Store - WIRED (Full Access)

Get ready to share your custom chatbot with the whole world. Well, at least with other ChatGPT Plus subscribers.

OpenAI recently launched its GPT Store, after it delayed the project following the chaos of CEO Sam Altman's firing and reinstatement late in 2023.

While OpenAI's GPT Store shares some similarities to smartphone app marketplaces, it currently functions more like a giant directory of tweaked ChatGPTs. Similar to OpenAI's GPT-4 model and web browsing capabilities, only those who pay $20 a month for ChatGPT Plus can create and use "GPTs." The GPT acronym in ChatGPT actually stands for "generative pretrained transformers," but in this context, the company is using GPT as a term that refers to a unique version of ChatGPT with additional parameters and a little extra training data.

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The Danger of Digitizing Everything - WIRED (Full Access)

In 2024, I will walk into a physical space—a restaurant, a hairdresser, an arts venue, an artisanal cheese shop—and instead of being handed a physical piece of paper with some useful information on it, or being told it in words, I will be shown a faded roundel with a QR code on it. I will hold my phone’s camera up to it wearily. Sometimes it will work, but the font on the menu or the information will be small. I’ll have to enlarge it and take my glasses off to read it, because I’ve reached that age. Sometimes it won’t work at all. Sometimes the information on it will be out of date.

In all cases, many people—some elderly, others with access needs, children, anyone who just doesn’t fancy constantly looking at their phone—will be pushed toward more useless screen time and away from the kind of brief, friendly interactions with other humans that help us all feel part of the fabric of life. We’ll have reached the point of overdigitization.

This story is from the WIRED World in 2024, our annual trends briefing. Read more stories from the series here—or download a copy of the magazine.

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What SoundCloud Created Can Never Die - WIRED (Full Access)

Kaytranada and Kehlani. Lil Nas X’s “Old Town Road.” Sheck Wes’ “Mo Bamba.” The commonalities these artists and songs share is neither region nor genre but platform. SoundCloud was their origin point. “It sparked so many careers once upon a time,” says Stonie Blue, a New York-based DJ and cofounder of BIYDIY Records. “Artists could upload their music straight to the community that would lurk there before the main focus was streaming on Apple Music or Spotify.” Since joining the platform in 2012, he was introduced to newbie artists like Sango, Dream Koala, Yeek, and WOLFE de MÇHLS. “SoundCloud,” he says, “always felt like the underground.”

The element of discovery has been SoundCloud’s secret sauce since it launched in 2007. The Berlin-founded company has maintained its relevance by embracing a simple ethos: come as you are. That’s made SoundCloud the for-everybody platform—one that embraces all genres, sexualities, religions, and definitions of music and art. By setting itself up as a hub for community-oriented music streaming, it’s become a kind of incubator for avant-garde sounds. SoundCloud is everybody’s underground.

That may soon change. SoundCloud has plans to pursue a buyer this year, according to multiple reports, a move the company has been working on for some time. In 2017, SoundCloud nearly shut down when it was reported that the company would run out of funding within two months. Thanks to a last-minute $170 million cash infusion from investment firms Raine Group and Temasek Holdings, and a little help from Chance the Rapper, the company was saved from termination. Raine Group and Temasek are now reportedly seeking a payday of upwards of $1 billion. With news of a possible sale, what hangs in the balance is the possible loss of what has made SoundCloud such a unique platform, and the impact that loss will have on the future of the music business.

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