Recently, the company Anthropic, founded by former OpenAI researchers, announced its latest artificial intelligence model series – Claude 3. This series includes three models of varying complexity, with increasing levels of intelligence and cost, known as Claude 3 Haiku, Claude 3 Sonnet, and Claude 3 Opus. Among these, the top model Opus has outperformed GPT-4 in several domains, including but not limited to: undergraduate-level expert knowledge, graduate-level expert reasoning, and basic mathematics. The understanding and coherence exhibited by Opus are close to human levels in handling complex tasks.
The Claude 3 series models offer a 200K context window and can handle inputs of over one million tokens, with free trials available through the Anthropic official website. However, the Opus model is currently reserved for Claude Pro subscription users, with a monthly fee of 20 US dollars. Both Opus and Sonnet models are available through API, and Haiku will soon also offer API support.
The series excels in tasks such as instant messaging, autocompletion, and data extraction. The Haiku model, in particular, stands out for its processing speed and cost-effectiveness. The costs for processing a million tokens are extremely low, with input fees of 0.25 US dollars, and outputs at 1.25 US dollars. For the information and data-rich papers on the arXiv website, Haiku can complete a reading task of roughly 10,000 tokens in just three seconds.
In terms of handling visual format data, the Claude 3 series models are also comparable to other models in their class. They are capable of processing a variety of visual materials including photos, charts, graphics, and technical drawings, and have also improved upon the previous generation models in terms of answering harmless questions. Opus’s accuracy in answering open-ended questions has improved by 100% compared to Claude 2.1, and the incidence of incorrect answers has decreased.
The Mystery of Color in the Seventh Panda Cub
For the giant panda, the distinctive feature is its black and white fur. However, in the Qinling region of China, there is a unique brown giant panda named Qi Zi. Scientists have recently found the genetic reason for this rare brown and white coat in a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The research team used microsatellite genotyping data from 157 Qinling giant pandas and their breeding history to construct Qi Zi’s family tree. The study found that Qi Zi’s parents and offspring all have the standard black and white coat. Combined with the understanding of the known Dan Dan lineage – Dan Dan being the first brown giant panda discovered in China in the 1980s – the research inferred that the brown phenotype of the giant panda is controlled by an autosomal recessive inheritance pattern.
Scientists’ research has unveiled the genetic secret behind the brown coloration of the brown giant panda. After conducting a thorough gene resequencing analysis on a total of 35 individuals, including “Qi Zi,” “Dan Dan,” four other black giant pandas from the “Qi Zi” lineage, and 29 wild giant pandas from the Qinling region and beyond, researchers found that the key to the unique fur color of the brown panda lies in the loss of a DNA fragment containing 25 base pairs in the first exon of the BACE2 gene. Further discoveries revealed that the melanosomes, a type of organelle that determines hair and skin color, contained in the fur of the brown pandas are fewer in number and smaller in size. Researchers plan to conduct further studies to explain how this gene loss affects the changes in size and number of melanosomes.
In the field of medicine, an exciting piece of news has come: a long-acting AIDS drug, potentially requiring injections only once every four months, may soon be available. This is the result of a Phase I clinical trial announced by ViiV Healthcare, a subsidiary of GSK. The drug, called long-acting cabotegravir Ultra Long Acting (CAB-ULA), significantly extends the dosing interval compared to the previously approved long-acting cabotegravir injection (CAB-LA, with the brand name Apretude). In this trial, which involved 70 healthy adults, it was shown that the half-life of CAB-ULA in the body, following intramuscular and subcutaneous injections, was twice to six times that of the existing Apretude. Using pharmacokinetic modelling simulations, researchers pointed out that an injection interval of every four months or even longer could achieve similar drug levels to Apretude, which is of great significance for the treatment of AIDS and pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) for HIV. Moreover, participants had a good tolerance response to this new drug, and there were no serious adverse events during the trial. It is reported that GSK plans to initiate larger-scale clinical trials later this year and expects to launch a long-acting AIDS prevention drug in 2026 and treatment drugs in 2027.
Another study published in the journal Nature Medicine has drawn attention as researchers, for the first time, created organoids using cells extracted from amniotic fluid without terminating the pregnancy. These organoids help scientists understand the late stages of fetal development more deeply and provide an important new approach to the study of congenital malformations. These so-called organoids are three-dimensional tissue models constructed based on human stem cells that can simulate the tissue structure of actual fetuses. Researchers used single-cell sequencing technology to analyze epithelial cells from amniotic fluid samples collected during 12 pregnancy check-ups (ranging from 16 to 34 weeks of gestation), successfully characterizing these cells and identifying populations with gastrointestinal, kidney, and lung characteristics.
In an innovative experiment, scientists successfully cultured cells and observed them not only proliferating but also spontaneously forming three-dimensional organ-like structures. Within just two weeks, these showed visible progress. Importantly, the cells developed into primitive fetal organ models of specific tissues including intestines, kidneys, and lungs, which also exhibited functional characteristics consistent with the original tissue. The research team believes that this method provides an alternative way to produce fetal organoids without terminating the pregnancy, thus avoiding associated ethical issues. This discovery opens up new avenues for studying the embryo during the later stages of pregnancy outside the womb. However, further research is needed to confirm the significance of these findings for practical applications.
In the field of planetary science, a recent study has garnered broad attention. The study suggests that the oxygen content on Jupiter’s icy moon Europa might be much lower than previously predicted by scientists, which has implications for assessing the moon’s potential habitability. An ocean lies beneath Europa’s icy crust, which is the source of its potential for habitability. Constant radiation bombarding Europa’s surface causes the ice crust to break down into hydrogen and oxygen, with a large amount of oxygen escaping into space or remaining to form the moon’s atmosphere. Most predictions about the atmosphere’s gas and ion content and their production rates are inferred from remote observations, which contain many uncertainties.
In response, researchers carefully analyzed data collected by the Juno spacecraft during a flyby mission on September 29, 2022, at an altitude of 353 kilometers above Europa’s surface. Using the Jupiter Auroral Distributions Experiment (JADE) instrument onboard the spacecraft, researchers measured the abundance of various ions in the atmosphere, which are charged particles created by collisions between neutral particles in the atmosphere and high-energy radiation or other ions. Based on these new data, it is estimated that only about 12 kilograms of oxygen are produced per second on Europa’s surface, whereas previous models predicted between 5 to 1100 kilograms per second. Therefore, it seems that the oxygen content on the surface of Europa may be much lower than expected, a finding which could imply that the moon’s potential habitability might be less likely.
