The AI company shouting about AI's dangers can't quite bring itself to slow down. T hese are not the words you want to hear when it comes to human extinction, but I was hearing them: "Things are moving uncomfortably fast." I was sitting in a conference room with Sam Bowman, a safety researcher at Anthropic. Worth $183 billion at the latest estimate, the AI firm has every incentive to speed things up, ship more products, and develop more advanced chatbots to stay competitive with the likes of OpenAI, Google, and the industry's other giants. But Anthropic is at odds with itself--thinking deeply, even anxiously, about seemingly every decision. Anthropic has positioned itself as the AI industry's superego: the firm that speaks with the most authority about the big questions surrounding the technology, while rival companies develop advertisements and affiliate shopping links (a difference that Anthropic's CEO, Dario Amodei, was eager to call out during an interview in Davos last week).

Sinners, Marty Supreme and One Battle After Another are among the films set to compete at the Golden Globe Awards on Sunday night. Frankenstein, Sentimental Value, Hamnet and Wicked: For Good are some of the other films going for gold at the ceremony in Los Angeles. A new category, best podcast, has been introduced this year, while Adolescence, The Pitt and The Studio are nominated in the TV categories. The Golden Globes are a major milestone of the film awards season, and take place with less than a fortnight to go until the announcement of the Oscar nominations (22 January). The Globes hand out more trophies than many other ceremonies, as they split their film categories by drama and musical or comedy.

The brain goes through five distinct phases in life, with key turning points at ages nine, 32, 66 and 83, scientists have revealed. Around 4,000 people up to the age of 90 had scans to reveal the connections between their brain cells. Researchers at the University of Cambridge showed that the brain stays in the adolescent phase until our early thirties when we peak. They say the results could help us understand why the risk of mental health disorders and dementia varies through life. The brain is constantly changing in response to new knowledge and experience - but the research shows this is not one smooth pattern from birth to death.

Research reveals that those diagnosed with autism early show distinct genetic and developmental profiles from those diagnosed later. New research from the University of Cambridge suggests that autism should not be understood as a homogeneous condition with a single cause. Scientists found that people diagnosed in early childhood often have a different genetic profile than those diagnosed later in life, broadening the understanding of how the condition develops. The study analyzed the behavior of autistic people during childhood and adolescence in the United Kingdom and Australia. It also evaluated genetic data of more than 45,000 patients with the condition from diverse cohorts in Europe and the United States.

The 77th Primetime Emmy Awards have taken place in Los Angeles on Sunday night, with shows The Studio, The Pit and Adolescence dominating the awards. Owen Cooper became the youngest ever male Emmy winner at 15-years-old, for his breakout role in the Netflix miniseries Adolescence. Seth Rogan's comedy series The Studio scooped up four Emmys, while The Pitt beat out the likes of Severance and The White Lotus to win Best Drama. 'No doubt' Russia will cross Nato border if Ukraine falls, former US VP says Former US Vice-President Mike Pence calls for security guarantees in Ukraine to help deliver "just and lasting peace". The US House Oversight Committee has released new surveillance footage recorded hours before the convicted paedophile's death.

It sometimes happens that a random British TV show will suddenly shoot to enormous, worldwide acclaim without a big publicity campaign to push it there, instead driven primarily by word of mouth. The best example of this is 2024's Baby Reindeer, which became a hit and sparked real-life twists and turns to rival those within the series itself. The latest example, Adolescence, has seen success on a different scale, though. The four-part drama, about a 13-year-old boy named Jamie who is arrested for murdering a girl at his school, became one of Netflix's most popular series of all time--beating out Stranger Things Season 3--within just the first 17 days of its release. Why is everyone watching this show?

Popular and news media often portray teenagers with sensationalism, as both a risk to society and at risk from society. As AI begins to absorb some of the epistemic functions of traditional media, we study how teenagers in two countries speaking two languages: 1) are depicted by AI, and 2) how they would prefer to be depicted. Specifically, we study the biases about teenagers learned by static word embeddings (SWEs) and generative language models (GLMs), comparing these with the perspectives of adolescents living in the U.S. and Nepal. We find English-language SWEs associate teenagers with societal problems, and more than 50% of the 1,000 words most associated with teenagers in the pretrained GloVe SWE reflect such problems. Given prompts about teenagers, 30% of outputs from GPT2-XL and 29% from LLaMA-2-7B GLMs discuss societal problems, most commonly violence, but also drug use, mental illness, and sexual taboo. Nepali models, while not free of such associations, are less dominated by social problems. Data from workshops with N=13 U.S. adolescents and N=18 Nepalese adolescents show that AI presentations are disconnected from teenage life, which revolves around activities like school and friendship. Participant ratings of how well 20 trait words describe teens are decorrelated from SWE associations, with Pearson's r=.02, n.s. in English FastText and r=.06, n.s. in GloVe; and r=.06, n.s. in Nepali FastText and r=-.23, n.s. in GloVe. U.S. participants suggested AI could fairly present teens by highlighting diversity, while Nepalese participants centered positivity. Participants were optimistic that, if it learned from adolescents, rather than media sources, AI could help mitigate stereotypes. Our work offers an understanding of the ways SWEs and GLMs misrepresent a developmentally vulnerable group and provides a template for less sensationalized characterization.

Profound changes to the substance and structure of our lives -- wrought by disruptive technologies ranging from smartphones and social media to newly ascendent AI -- often go unnoticed amidst the rush of daily life. Over 30 percent of U.S. adults report "almost constant" online activity, something that would have been impossible only two decades ago. From an early age, children are exposed to digital technologies, and one recent study found that two- and three-year-olds average two hours of screen time daily. Nor is this phenomenon simply a matter of media consumption. Ordinary market transactions, whether online shopping or home mortgage applications, are now facilitated through sophisticated algorithmic systems.

Emerging psychopathology studies are showing that patterns of changes in emotional state -- emotion dynamics -- are associated with overall well-being and mental health. More recently, there has been some work in tracking emotion dynamics through one's utterances, allowing for data to be collected on a larger scale across time and people. However, several questions about how emotion dynamics change with age, especially in children, and when determined through children's writing, remain unanswered. In this work, we use both a lexicon and a machine learning based approach to quantify characteristics of emotion dynamics determined from poems written by children of various ages. We show that both approaches point to similar trends: consistent increasing intensities for some emotions (e.g., anger, fear, joy, sadness, arousal, and dominance) with age and a consistent decreasing valence with age. We also find increasing emotional variability, rise rates (i.e., emotional reactivity), and recovery rates (i.e., emotional regulation) with age. These results act as a useful baselines for further research in how patterns of emotions expressed by children change with age, and their association with mental health.

The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2022, which collects 20 of the best fantasy and science fiction stories of the past year, features a wide range of characters and settings. Guest editor Rebecca Roanhorse made the final selections for this year's volume. "This is not your father's science fiction and fantasy collection," Roanhorse says in Episode 538 of the Geek's Guide to the Galaxy podcast. "I'm excited to see what people are writing, and where the genre is going, and what sort of new voices can be discovered, and how far we can push boundaries and still tell universal stories." P. Djèlí Clark's genre-bending "If the Martians Have Magic" features Haitian priests battling the alien invaders from The War of the Worlds. "I always think my stories are too weird," Clark says.