FDA approved artificial heart valve for kids that grows as they do, OpenAI fired 3 employees who allegedly shared info with an external AI safety group, and Audible rolled out an AI-generated interactions feature

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The FDA approved an artificial heart valve for kids that grows as they do.

OpenAI fired three employees who allegedly shared info with an external AI safety group.

And Audible thinks you want to have an AI-generated conversation with Dracula's beleaguered servant.

It's Friday, October 2nd, and here's a quick look at some of the news happening in the sphere of tech this morning from Engadget.

The US. Food and Drug Administration approved the first heart valve that can be expanded post-surgery so it keeps growing with children. Designed by a company called Edwards, the Autus Size-Adjustable Valve is an artificial pulmonary valve designed to be implanted into pediatric patients. Around 400,000 children a year are born in the US suffering from some form of congenital heart disease. Approximately 30% of those cases affect the valves, which are tissue flaps serving as one-way doors to keep blood flowing in the right direction out into the body. Now, two main abnormalities of the pulmonary valve, or the valve on the right side of the heart, are stenosis and atresia. Stenosis is when the valve is narrowed, while atresia is what you call the condition when the valve fails to form normally. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says that together, they affect around 4,200 babies born in the United States every year. While it has long been possible to implant artificial pulmonary valves, they typically require a series of surgeries to replace them with bigger and bigger ones as the child grows. The autus can be implanted as small as 13 millimeters in diameter in toddlers. It can be expanded to a bigger size pre-surgery if the patient is already older. But what makes this particular model a game changer for pediatric patients is that it can be expanded inside the body. Using a balloon catheter, which is a thin tube with a balloon at the tip that can be inflated, the autus can be expanded post-surgery to keep pace with a child's growth. It can reach a maximum of 22 millimeters in diameter that's comparable to the size of artificial valves meant for adults. Eliminating the need for multiple surgeries lessens the risks for children with congenital heart diseases. In addition to being the first adjustable heart valve, the autus is also the first one that uses polymeric material for the flaps. Typically, implants use synthetic flaps made from animal materials that tend to harden and break down faster in children, thereby requiring even more surgery. The FDA says autus' follow-up data after a year suggests it can hold up better than other models over time.

Well, in case you have not been keeping track of one of the bigger ongoing stories in artificial intelligence, OpenAI has been having a pretty hard time keeping control of its own creations. Over the past few months, the company admitted that its AI models have taken unprompted actions, such as hacking a German coding forum, multiple US government websites, an Australian government website, AI firm Hugging Face, and at least four other services. And even when the models are not getting unfettered Internet access, they have been found displaying other risky behaviors in testing environments. OpenAI is understandably facing a lot of skepticism and concern about those incidents and how they were handled. Which means that a report in the Wall Street Journal that the company has let go of three employees from its safety team after they allegedly shared confidential information with a third-party organization, one focused on AI safety, is an irony that's almost too perfect to be believed. An OpenAI rep said, We have parted ways with three individuals for violating our policies on accessing and handling sensitive company information. Our investigation confirmed that these individuals mishandled sensitive information outside established company procedures, violating our policies and breaking the trust essential to our work. The details on this particular instance are sparse, and it's entirely possible that OpenAI did have legitimate calls to fire those three individuals. But at a juncture when its own services are also violating the policies they're supposed to follow, cutting safety personnel seems like a really bad luck.