139. Competing with ChatGPT, Building Objects in Space, Affecting Brain Health With The Gut

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Notes:

Anthropic’s Claude improves on ChatGPT but still suffers from limitations | TechCrunch (01:10)

• A startup co-founded by ex-OpenAI employees called Anthropic has raised over $700 million in funding to date, and has developed an AI system similar to OpenAI’s ChatGPT.
  • System is called Claude and is accessible through a Slack integration as part of a closed beta
  • Developed with a technique call constitutional AI
• The company explains:
  • This learning is a principle based approach to aligning AI systems with human intentions, letting AI similar to ChatGPT respond to questions using a simple set of principles as a guide.
  • Anthropic started with a list of around ten private principles that formed the constitution in the AI.
  • The company says the principles are grounded in the concepts of beneficence (maximizing positive impact), nonmaleficence (avoiding giving harmful advice) and autonomy (respecting freedom of choice).
• Claude is fed an enormous number of examples of text from the web, and learns how likely words are to occur based on patterns such as the semantic context of surrounding text.
  • Therefore it can hold an open-ended conversation, tell jokes and be philosophical, etc.
• Yann Dubois, a Ph.D. student at Stanford’s AI Lab, also did a comparison of Claude and ChatGPT, writing that Claude “generally follows closer [to] what it’s asked for” but is “less concise,” as it tends to explain what it said and ask how it can further help.
• Claude isn’t perfect, however. It’s susceptible to some of the same flaws as ChatGPT, including giving answers that aren’t in keeping with its programmed constraints.
  • Flaw example: asking the system in Base64, an encoding scheme that represents binary data in ASCII format, bypasses its built-in filters for harmful content.
• Anthropic says that it plans to refine Claude and potentially open the beta to more people down the line.

The first CRISPR gene-edited meat is coming—and this is the CEO making sci-fi a reality | FastCompany (11:09)

• Joshua March is the CEO of SciFi Foods who are using CRISPR to hasten its advances.
  • The gene-editing technology
• According to the Good Food Institute, there are 152 cultivated meat companies as of the end of 2022, operating in 29 countries.
  • SciFi Foods is different because of the fact they are using CRISPR
• March got into the cultivated meats a reality because of these companies:
  • “​​I honestly became pretty disenchanted with the companies in the space and all the arm waving about how the costs would be solved.”
• For their meat creation they have a simple process that sounds like natural selection:
  • The key is engineering cycles that enable rapid prototyping.
  • The best cell lines will go on to create the next round of modifications.
• Cost parity with traditional meat is every lab grown meat founder’s goal, one that sets a seemingly unattainable target.
  • 2022 - the average price of ground beef was $4.81/lb
• SciFi is betting that the only way to economically scale cultivated meat is with CRISPR, and that by making iterative tweaks they can create dependable cell lines with rich, meat-y flavor.
  • CEO March stated, “We have an eventual target of $1 per burger at commercial scale.”
• Once harvested, beef cells will be formulated into a blended burger that is mostly like the plant-based burgers you may already know—soy protein and coconut oil.
  • Adding a small percentage of SciFi cells (5% to 20%, according to March) to give “beefy” notes.
• According to the Good Food Institute, $2.6 billion has been invested in these alternative proteins since 2010.

ISS astronauts are building objects not possible on Earth | Popular Science (20:49)

• Aboard the International Space Station (ISS) right now is a metal box, the size of a desktop PC tower.
  • Inside, a nozzle is helping build little test parts that aren’t possible to make on Earth.
  • Fail under Earth’s gravity.
  • The Box is scheduled to spend 45 days aboard the ISS
• The MIT group behind this process explains it’ll be the “first results for a really novel process in microgravity.”
  • It involves taking a flexible silicone skin, shaped like the part it will eventually create, and filling it with a liquid resin.
  • Like how you fill a balloon with air, this will just be resin
• The resin is sensitive to ultraviolet light.
  • Once UV light reaches the resin it’ll cure and stiffen, hardening into a solid structure.
  • Remove the skin and you have your part
• If everything is successful, the ISS will ship some experimental parts back to Earth for the MIT researchers to test.
  • Ensuring that the parts they’ve made are structurally sound.
• The benefit of building parts like this in orbit is that Earth’s single most fundamental stressor—the planet’s gravity—is no longer a limiting factor.
  • If the experiment is successful, you would be able to produce test parts that are too long to make on Earth.
• Long-term thinking, if astronauts can make very long parts in space, those pieces could speed up large construction projects, such as the structures of space habitats.
  • used to form the structural frames for solar panels or radiators
• Another benefit if you can make stuff in space means less things you need to pack into your rocket
  • Every pound of cargo can still cost over $1,000 to put into space.
• Ultimately the MIT group wants to “make this manufacturing process available and accessible to other researchers.”

3D printing reaches new heights with two-story home | Nasdaq (25:39)

• A 3D printer weighing more than 12 tons is creating what is believed to be the first 3D-printed, two-story home in the United States.
  • Producing layers of concrete to build the 4,000-square-foot home in Houston.
  • Construction will take a total of 330 hours of printing
• The project is a two-year collaboration by Hannah, Peri 3D Construction and Cive, a construction engineering company.
• Hikmat Zerbe, Cive's head of structural engineering, hopes the innovative technique can one day help more quickly and cheaply build multi-family homes.
• Zerbe talks on the newest for the construction industry:
  • “Traditional construction, you know the rules, you know the game, you know the material properties, the material behavior. In here, everything is new … The material is new, although concrete is an old material in general, but 3D printing concrete is something new.”
• Since the printer does all the heavy lifting, less workers are needed at the construction site.

Gut Bacteria Affect Brain Health | Neuroscience News (31:39)

• A growing pile of evidence indicates that the tens of trillions of microbes that normally live in our gut microbiome have far-reaching effects on how our bodies function.
  • Produce vitamins,
  • Help digest food,
  • Prevent the overgrowth of harmful bacteria
  • Regulate the immune system
• According to researchers from Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, findings from a new study suggests that the gut microbiome also plays a key role in the health of our brains.
• To determine whether the gut microbiome may be playing a causal role, the researchers altered the gut microbiomes of mice.
  • Mice were genetically modified to more likely develop Alzheimer’s-like brain damage and cognitive impairment.
• The mice were given a course of antibiotics at 2 weeks of age, permanently changing the composition of bacteria in their microbiomes.
  • For male mice, it reduced the amount of brain damage evident at 40 weeks of age.
  • No significant effect on neurodegeneration in female mice.
• From other studies we know that male and female brains respond differently to different stimuli.
  • For instance visual stimuli.
  • The composition of our brains are different as well.
• Further experiments linked three specific short-chain fatty acids — compounds produced by certain types of gut bacteria as products of their metabolism — to neurodegeneration.
  • Were scarce in mice with gut microbiomes altered by antibiotic treatment
  • They appeared to trigger neurodegeneration by activating immune cells in the bloodstream, which in turn activated immune cells in the brain to damage brain tissue.
• The findings suggest a new approach to preventing and treating neurodegenerative diseases by modifying the gut microbiome with antibiotics, probiotics, specialized diets or other means.