CEC

This is the biggest PR coup Anthropic could ever have imagined. And I mean that seriously. Let me explain. Aside from the fact that Anthropic is very good at presenting itself as a corporation, the recent hiring of Andrej Karpathy marked a new high point. Anthropic is showing the world that it not only employs the best researchers, but also, and especially, those who are popular within the community. However, Anthropic also thrives on its self-imposed moral standards, some of which literally come at a price that Anthropic has repeatedly paid. As is well known, Anthropic recently had serious problems with the Department of War regarding the use of Claude for autonomous weapons. Anthropic refused, and OpenAI and Google were awarded the contract; Anthropic was designated a supply chain risk. This moral standing, however, is something Anthropic has always emphasized. Whether it's Dario Amodei repeatedly warning of the dangers of the massive wave of unemployment (which they themselves are causing), or the potential for AI to be instrumentalized for wars. This moral stance is now paying off handsomely. The head of the Catholic Church, with its 1.4 billion members, has thanked Anthropic and announced an ethical collaboration. Church members are, by definition, moral people who live according to the ethical principles of their faith. The Pope has now consecrated a single AI company as ethically legitimate, thus essentially granting his followers sacred legitimacy to use Claude as the only morally correct model. I mean this seriously; let this thought sink in. The Pope says Anthropic is ethically and morally on the right side and is working with them. Who do you think the billions of Catholic believers now prefer? OpenAI, Google, or Anthropic? The answer is clear. Therefore, today was the biggest victory Anthropic could have hoped for. And I believe that their moral stance will literally pay off.

JD Vance tells a Polish reporter he's "overreacting" to news that Trump is scrapping a planned deployment to his country and tells him to "look in the mirror"

NATO Military Chief Giuseppe Cavo Dragone: Drones are kind of a revolutionary issue on the battlefield. They are not the only weapon, but they will probably be the most prominent and influence the entire battlespace. Probably in future confrontations they will be the very first thing involved in combat. What we basically learned is that they dramatically shrink the time of the killing cycle. It becomes a matter of minutes — or even seconds — to detect, track, analyze, identify, strike, assess damage, and feed information into the next operation.

Jackson Pollock’s ‘Number 7A, 1948’ from Masterpieces: The Private Collection of S.I. Newhouse achieves USD $181,185,000 in tonight’s sale, nearly tripling the auction record for the artist. This work represents the key moment Pollock produces one of the first truly abstract paintings in the history of art.

Farmers have figured out that the cheapest pesticide is a strip of flowers. When you plant wildflowers through a crop field, not just around the edge but in strips running through the middle, you get ladybugs, lacewings, hoverflies, and parasitic wasps living in the field instead of visiting it. They eat the aphids, the caterpillars, and the mites for free, all summer long. In controlled trials, fields with tailored flower strips had leaf-beetle numbers 40 to 50% lower and crop damage cut by around 60%, enough to drop below the threshold where spraying was even considered worth it. The flowers attract a standing army to our fields. We spent decades engineering chemicals to kill the insects eating the crop, when the insects that eat those insects would have worked for the price of seed.