As AI has grown from a menagerie of research projects to include a handful of titanic, industry-powering models like GPT-3, there is a need for the sector to evolve -- or so thinks Dario Amodei, former VP of research at OpenAI, who struck out on his own to create a new company a few months ago. Anthropic, as it's called, was founded with his sister Daniela and its goal is to create "large-scale AI systems that are steerable, interpretable, and robust." The challenge the siblings Amodei are tackling is simply that these AI models, while incredibly powerful, are not well understood. GPT-3, which they worked on, is an astonishingly versatile language system that can produce extremely convincing text in practically any style, and on any topic. But say you had it generate rhyming couplets with Shakespeare and Pope as examples.

That the Universe exists and that we are here to observe it tells us a lot. But it doesn't tell us as much as some people infer. The Universe has the fundamental laws that we observe it to have. Also, we exist, and are made of the things we're made of, obeying those same fundamental laws. These two statements, spoken first by physicist Brandon Carter in 1973, are known, respectively, as the Weak Anthropic Principle and the Strong Anthropic Principle.

The Anthropic Principle states that the laws of nature and the parameters governing the Universe take on values that are consistent with the existence of intelligent life on Earth rather than a set of values that would be inconsistent with intelligent life on Earth. Thus, the universe seems to be "just right" for us. In its Weak form, the Anthropic Principle is not used to explain why the conditions happen to be just right for the existence of intelligent life on Earth, but merely to state that if the conditions were not just right, then there will be no one to describe the Anthropic Principle. The Strong Anthropic Principle--the one that was wholeheartedly adopted by creationists--states that the conditions are just right for the existence of intelligent life, because the universe was specifically designed for us. In particular, believers in the Anthropic Principle flaunt the four fundamental forces of nature (gravity, electromagnetism, the strong nuclear force, and the week nuclear force) as necessary for the existence of life.

In brief A synthetic enzyme designed using machine-learning software can break down waste plastics in 24 hours, according to research published in Nature. Scientists at the University of Texas Austin studied the natural structure of PETase, an enzyme known to degrade polymer chains in polyethylene. Next, they trained a model to generate mutations of the enzyme that work fast at low temperatures, let the software loose, and picked from the output a variant they named FAST-PETase to synthesize. FAST stands for functional, active, stable, and tolerant. FAST-PETase, we're told, can break down plastic in as little as 24 hours at temperatures between 30 and 50 degrees Celsius.

This paper sets out to resolve how agents ought to act in the Sleeping Beauty problem and various related anthropic (self-locating belief) problems, not through the calculation of anthropic probabilities, but through finding the correct decision to make. It creates an anthropic decision theory (ADT) that decides these problems from a small set of principles. By doing so, it demonstrates that the attitude of agents with regards to each other (selfish or altruistic) changes the decisions they reach, and that it is very important to take this into account. To illustrate ADT, it is then applied to two major anthropic problems and paradoxes, the Presumptuous Philosopher and Doomsday problems, thus resolving some issues about the probability of human extinction.