Sneaky as a cat

Good morning Staker! Here’s what’s cookin’ today. Inflation rises again in August, rate hike now all but certain; Anthropic CEO calls for AI slowdown, cites China as threat; and how pink noise can help boost restorative sleep patterns.

Let’s get into it!

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei published an essay the other day calling on developers to slow down the process of building out frontier AI.

The essay was published days after the resignation of a high-up Anthropic employee, who left his post over concerns that AI developers are racing towards a civilization-threatening technology.

He called for a coordinated slowdown between all AI companies, who could proceed with help from “third-party evaluators” and the assistance of government regulators.

At the same time, he recognized the threats that would also come with slowing down, particularly at the international and military levels.

“The more long-term thing would be working together to put a speed limit on the rate of of AI progress,” Amodei told CBS News’ Sunday Morning. “I think that’s going to be very difficult because the incentives to pull ahead and the military advantage that you get from that are so large. And honestly, I don’t know if it’s possible, but we should we should try.”

Several other leading executives in the hyper-scaling of AI agreed with Amodei’s essay, including Elon Musk, Sam Altman, and Demis Hasabbis, who chairs Google DeepMind.

“Dario’s essay points towards the right path forward,” Hassabis wrote in a post on X on Saturday. “The details need working through, but the direction is correct for meeting this critical moment.”

A team of researchers at MIT conducted a study published in Science Translational Medicine that suggests exposing someone to bursts of “pink noise” while they sleep can increase the amplitude of slow electrical waves in the brain.

They found that by strengthening slow electrical waves, the brain was able to more efficiently facilitate cerebrospinal fluid waves, which are known for cleaning the brain of lactic acid and worn out proteins that build up during the day.

Pink noise contains all frequencies able to be heard by humans, but the lower frequency ones are stronger, and the higher frequency ones are lower. This creates a soothing and relaxing sound.

“We found that we were able to increase the size of the CSF flow wave during sleep, which as far as we know, there hasn’t been a method to do before. Now that we can enhance CSF flow during sleep in healthy adults, we’re really excited to bring this technology to clinical populations to see what effects we can have,” said Laura Lewis, the Athinoula A. Martinos Associate Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT.

“You can make more of these electrical slow waves through an auditory stimulus, if it comes at just the right time. Similar to a child on a swing, if you push them when they’re at the right moment in their movement, you can make that swing go farther,” Lewis said.

Halifax is known for its bustling east coast culture, its deep-water harbor, its proximity to Peggy’s Cove, and of course, the Donair.

Just inside the forested area of Bayer’s Lake Business Park, however, is a rock structure that’s clearly man-made but with no clear purpose, attributable creator, or exact age, and it’s generating new interest both at home and abroad.

It’s been deemed an official archeological site by conservation authorities for archeologists to study it, preventing construction or destruction. Tourists and locals are allowed to visit it and see for themselves, and a growing number of the former are making it a priority on trips to the HRM.

Saint Mary’s University archeology professor Jonathan Fowler has studied the stone walls for a decade, and has a theory for who built them and why.

“It just doesn’t have the normal things that a house has, including a hearth and it doesn’t fit military architecture for this period,” he said. “I tend to lean to the animal husbandry hypothesis. I think it was a vernacular structure, and some farmer or shepherd built it.”

According to Nova Scotia historian David Jones, the walls were likely constructed sometime in the late 1700s, long before Canada was officially a country.

Fine in ‘79

From new shows premiering, to the top of the charts, we’re lookin’ at everything that was going down during this week in ’79 with today’s trivia 😎