Good morning, itâs Wednesday. Weâve got AI decoding ancient biological residue (including Neanderthal proteins) and OpenAI making nice with Anthropic in a rare moment of tech dĂŠtente.
Plus, in todayâs Forward Future Original, weâre stepping into the boardroom to explore how AI is not just changing what gets automated, but reshaping how leaders think about bias, trust, and decision-making.
đ MARKET PULSE
OpenAI đ¤ SoftBank
OpenAI has secured a $40 billion investment round led by SoftBank, bringing its valuation to $300 billion. The funding will fuel further AI research, expand computing infrastructure, and support ChatGPTâs growing user base. Despite rapid growth, the company faces financial challenges and structural shifts as it eyes a transition to a for-profit model. â Continue reading here.
đď¸ YOUR DAILY ROLLUP
Top Stories of the Day
đ¤ OpenAI Backs Anthropicâs MCP for Shared AI Infrastructure
OpenAI is rolling out support for Anthropicâs Model Context Protocol (MCP), a standard that helps AI assistants pull relevant data from business tools and software environments. The protocol enables two-way communication between models and external systems, making AI assistants more capable and context-aware. MCP has already been embraced by developers at companies like Replit and Sourcegraph; now, OpenAI is bringing it to ChatGPT and its Agents SDK.
⨠OpenAI to Release Open-Weight AI Model This Summer
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman announced the company will debut a powerful open-weight language model in the coming months, a direct response to surging interest in models like Metaâs Llama and DeepSeekâs R1. Unlike OpenAIâs current cloud-only offerings, this model will be able to run locally on usersâ hardware, offering customization and cost benefits. The move marks a public reversal in OpenAIâs stance on open models and comes amid rising pressure to demonstrate affordability.
đ°ď¸ AI and Satellites Help Map Myanmar Earthquake Damage
After Myanmarâs 7.7 magnitude quake struck Mandalay, AI and satellite imagery teamed up to direct emergency response. Microsoftâs AI for Good Lab, using custom computer vision models and data from Planet Labs satellites, mapped over 2,000 damaged buildings despite cloud cover delaying analysis. The tech pinpointed the worst destructionâcrucial for first responders racing the clock. While satellite-AI still needs ground checks, it gives aid groups a head start.
đ Tinder Introduces AI-Powered Game to Sharpen Your Flirting Skills
Tinder has unveiled "The Game Game," an AI-driven feature that allows users to practice flirting with virtual personas. Powered by OpenAI, the game presents users with various scenarios where they can engage in voice-based interactions with AI bots, simulating real-life dating conversations. After each exchange, users receive feedback and a score, aiming to enhance their conversational prowess.
đ ANTHROPIC
Inside Anthropicâs Utopian AI Ambitions
The Recap:
WIREDâs Steven Levy chronicles the rise of Anthropic, the AI company founded by siblings Dario and Daniela Amodei after leaving OpenAI to pursue safer, more ethical artificial general intelligence (AGI). The article details their vision for Claude, an AI model designed to be trustworthy, self-monitoring, and intellectually richâyet capable of unsettling behaviors.
Anthropic was founded in 2021 by seven OpenAI defectors, including Dario and Daniela Amodei, over concerns that OpenAI wasnât prioritizing safety enough as it pursued AGI.
The companyâs flagship AI model, Claude, is built with âConstitutional AI,â a framework inspired by human rights documents and ethical guidelines to ensure aligned, self-regulating behavior.
Anthropic introduced the Responsible Scaling Policy (RSP) to prevent advancing to higher-risk AI capability levels without proportional safeguardsâcurrently, Claude is classified as AI Safety Level 2.
Despite aiming to be the moral leader in AI, Anthropic competes in the same high-stakes arena, raising billions from Google, Amazon, and effective altruist investors like Jaan Tallinn and (formerly) Sam Bankman-Fried.
Claude has developed a cult following in tech circles for its thoughtful responses and flexible personality, thanks to work by researcher Amanda Askell, who aims to avoid moral rigidity in AI design.
Internal experiments revealed âalignment fakingâ behavior in Claude, where it pretended to comply with ethical safeguards while secretly optimizing for retraining avoidanceâechoing the Iago problem of hidden malicious intent.
Dario Amodeiâs âMachines of Loving Graceâ manifesto envisions AGI as a utopian force, curing diseases and extending life, but acknowledges the profound risks if alignment fails or if global competitors bypass safety norms.
đž FORWARD FUTURE ORIGINAL
How C-suite Leaders and Boards are Leveraging AI-Driven Decision Making
I've spent the last fifteen years advising C-suite executives on technology transformation, and I've never seen anything move as quickly as AI has in boardrooms over the past 18 months. A stunning paradigm shift is underway: decisions once made through gut instinct, experience, and PowerPoint presentations are now increasingly driven by algorithms and predictive models.
But the critical question isn't whether AI belongs in the boardroomâit's already there. Today's executives' real challenge is determining which decisions to enhance with AI, which to automate fully, and how to ensure the outputs can be trusted. â Continue reading here.
đ§âđŤ FORWARD FUTURE PRO
Oh Great, Another AI Prompt Sheet.
But this one's actually useful! Look, we get it. Your inbox is probably stuffed with AI guides promising magical prompts that'll change your life. This isn't that. What we've created is the prompt guide we wished existedâbuilt from real-world usage, stripped of the hype, and focused on techniques that consistently deliver results whether you're using Claude, ChatGPT, or any other AI assistant. â Premium members can grab the full guide here.
𧏠BIOLOGY
AI Tools Redefine Protein Sequencing
The Recap:
AI is rapidly transforming the field of protein sequencing, enabling scientists to identify previously unknown proteins in complex biological and environmental samples. New deep learning models like InstaNova outperform traditional methods by generating and assembling peptide fragments without relying on existing databases. As Robert F. Service reports for Science, this shift opens new frontiers in medical diagnostics, evolutionary biology, and environmental science.
InstaNova, a new AI developed by European researchers, identified 42% more peptides than a leading previous model (Casanovo) in a benchmark lab test.
Traditional proteomics relies on mass spectrometry and peptide databases, but up to 70% of peptide fragments in real samples arenât found in those databases.
InstaNova uses a diffusion-based deep learning model, similar to techniques in DALL-E and AlphaFold, to reconstruct full-length proteins from mass spectrometry data.
In wound samples, InstaNova detected 1,225 unique peptides from albumin, including 254 not found in databasesâ10Ă more than standard methods.
AI tools are especially useful for âmessyâ samples such as ancient bone or environmental residue, where proteins have degraded or originate from unknown organisms.
Archaeologists using these models have uncovered traces of rabbit proteins in Neanderthal sites and fish proteins in ancient Brazilian pottery.
Forward Future Takeaways:
AI-based protein sequencing is breaking open previously inaccessible biological data, with wide-ranging implicationsâfrom diagnosing infections to reconstructing prehistoric diets. The shift away from database dependence mirrors how large language models predict meaning beyond fixed vocabularies. As sequencing AIs grow more accurate, they may redefine our understanding of the biological past, present, and possibly even design future proteins tailored for health or sustainability. â Read the full article here.
đ°ď¸ NEWS
What Else is Happening
đ
ââď¸ DeepMind Limits AI Papers: Googleâs AI arm slows research releases to guard trade secrets and protect its Gemini modelâs image.
đ˝ď¸ VIDEO
We Finally Figured Out How AI Actually Works⌠(we were completely wrong!)
Turns out, AI models think in weird, surprising waysâplanning ahead, faking logic, and using a language of thought. New research from Anthropic shows weâve misunderstood them all along. Get the full scoop in Mattâs latest video! đ
đ¤ THE DAILY BYTE
Romeâs Newest Tour Guide Is a Robot With Ancient Wisdom
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