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As the United States prepares to celebrate its 250th birthday, an auction in New York will feature rare items that trace the nation’s history.The event Friday at Christie’s, dubbed “We the People: America at 250,” will bring together foundational political texts, iconic American art and rare historical artifacts.Among the highlights is a rare 1776 broadside printing of the Declaration of Independence produced in New Hampshire by printer Robert Luist Fowle, estimated at $3 million to $5 million.“It’s historically significant because you get to see what people at the time actually saw,” said Peter Klarnet, senior specialist for books, manuscripts and Americana at Christie’s.While the initial printing was produced by John Dunlap on the night of July 4, 1776 with about 200 copies printed and only 26 known to survive other printers quickly began producing their own versions.“This is the way that everyday Americans would have encountered the Declaration of Independence whether it was tacked to a wall or read from the pulpit of their local congregation,” Klarnet said.Another founding document up for sale is Rufus King’s edited draft of the U.S. Constitution, estimated at $3 million to $5 million. Printed just five days before the final version was issued on Sept. 17, 1787, the document captures the nation’s founding charter as it was being finalized.“This is the Constitution taking final form,” Klarnet said. “You can see the edits being made in real time.”King was a delegate from Massachusetts to the 1787 Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia. He was also a member of The Committee of Style, a five-member group tasked with refining the text.“This puts you directly in Independence Hall as they’re drafting and making the final changes and edits to this remarkable document,” Klarnet said.The auction also includes a signed copy of the Emancipation Proclamation. The authorized printed edition was commissioned for the Great Central Fair, a Civil War-era fundraiser held in Philadelphia in June 1864 to raise money for Union troops. The Proclamation is estimated at $3 million to $5 million.“Lincoln, together with his Secretary of State William Seward and his Secretary John Nicolay, signed 48 copies of this,” Klarnet said, noting they were originally sold for $20 each and not all sold at the time.American art plays a major role in the sale as well. Leading the category is Gilbert Stuart’s portrait of George Washington thought to have inspired the face on the U.S. dollar bill. The painting was commissioned by James Madison. It is estimated to bring between $500,000 and $1 million.Other artworks include a Jamie Wyeth painting of John F. Kennedy accepting the 1960 Democratic presidential nomination at the Los Angeles Coliseum estimated at $200,000 to $300,000.There is also Grant Wood’s original pencil sketch of American Gothic drawn on the back an envelope estimated at $70,000 to $100,000.Beyond the founding documents, the sale features rare historical objects like the only known flag recovered by U.S. forces from the 1876 Battle of Little Bighorn. The flag is expected to sell for between $2 million and $4 million.Historians say auctions like these underscore the role of private collectors in preserving the nation’s material past.“Private collectors play an important role,” historian Harold Holzer said. “They save things, they preserve things, and ultimately they pass on their collections.”For Holzer, the emotional power of the items remains meaningful.“You almost feel the electricity from these relics,” Holzer said, “their impact on the people, who not only read these documents, but fought for what they were calling for.”He calls the documents “great words fought for with blood.” Joseph Frederick, Associated Press
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President Donald Trumps late-night Truth Social posting spree on Tuesdaydoubling down on his Greenland ambitions and threatening any who try to get in his wayalso included a flurry of leaked texts from the leaders of NATO, France, Finland, and Norway. TL;DR: French President Emmanuel Macron invited him to dinner in Paris. NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte cant wait to see him. America is threatening to take over Greenland. Turns out, they text just like us. [Screenshots: Truth Social] Posted on Truth Social, Trump apparently leaked a private text from the French President: My friend, We are totally in line on Syria. We can do great things on Iran. I do not understand what you are doing on Greenland, the message from Macron appeared to read. Social media users were quick to share their thoughts on the text exchangenot so much the threat to blow apart the alliance that has underpinned Western security for decades, but the fact that matters of diplomacy are conducted over iMessage. I honestly love this for reasons I cannot articulate, one X user wrote, alongside a screenshot of the messages. They continued in a follow-up post: you can imagine Trump getting *so many texts like this*. An edited screenshot of the original conversation read: we are totally in line on real estate. We can do great things on reality television. I do not understand what you are doing running for president. Theyre just like us fr fr, another X user responded. This feels like when Kanye went crazy and started posting text messages, another suggested. In a leaked Sunday message to Jonas Gahr Stre, the prime minister of Norway, Trump reiterates threats of a takeover, now apparent to be rooted in a personal grudge over being snubbed for the Nobel Peace Prize last year. Considering your Country decided not to give me the Nobel Peace Prize for having stopped 8 Wars PLUS, I no longer feel an obligation to think purely of Peace, although it will always be predominant, but can now think about what is good and proper for the United States of America, Trump wrote. He went on to question Denmarks claim to Greenland, signing off Thank you! President DJT Leaking an opponent’s private messages (or coming in hot with receipts) is a common power play tactic some social media users have likened to teenage behavior: Trump is leaking the texts of WORLD LEADERS like hes a 13 year old girl, as one X user noted. Exchanging messages over apps such as WhatsApp or Signal has become common practice in government. And public snafus because of it have become a bit more common, too: Last year, the US national security adviser, Mike Waltz, landed in hot water after accidentally adding The Atlantic editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg to a private Signal group chat in which senior officials discussed Yemen war plans. Still, it’s rather unsettling to imagine world leaders simply texting sensitive discussions around the fate of geopolitics to one another. Perhaps it doesnt feel secure enough, or official enough.And in this instance, when it comes to the U.S. President, he appears to have taken diplomacy advice from The Real Housewives of Salt Lake Citys Heather Gay: “Receipts, proof, timeline, screenshots.
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Welcome to AI Decoded, Fast Companys weekly newsletter that breaks down the most important news in the world of AI. Im Mark Sullivan, a senior writer at Fast Company,covering emerging tech, AI, and tech policy. Im dedicating this weeks newsletter to a conversation I had with the main author of Anthropics new and improved constitution, the document it uses to govern the outputs of its models and its Claude chatbot. Sign up to receive this newsletter every week via email here. And if you have comments on this issue and/or ideas for future ones, drop me a line at sullivan@fastcompany.com, and follow me on X @thesullivan. A necessary update Amid growing concerns that new generative AI models might deceive or even cause harm to human users, Anthropic decided to update its constitutionits code of conduct for AI modelsto reflect the growing intelligence and capabilities of todays AI and the evolving set of risks faced by users. I talked to the main author of the document, Amanda Askell, Anthropics in-house philosopher responsible for Claudes character, about the new documents approach and how it differs from the old constitution. This interview was edited for length and clarity. Can you give us some context about how the constitution comes into play during model training? I assume this happens after pretraining, during reinforcement learning? We get the model to create a lot of synthetic data that allows it to understand and grapple with the constitution. Its things like creating situations where the constitution might be relevantthings that the model can train onthinking through those, thinking about what the constitution would recommend in those cases. Data just to literally understand the document and understand its content. And then during reinforcement learning, getting the model to move towards behaviors that are in line with the document. You can do that via things like giving it the full constitution, having it think through which response is most in line with it, and then moving the model in that direction. Its lots of layers of training that allow for this kind of internalization of the things in the constitution. You mentioned letting the model generate synthetic training data. Does that mean its imagining situations where this could be applied? Yeah, thats one way it can do this. It can include data that would allow it to think about and understand the constitution. In supervised learning, for example, that might include queries or conversations where the constitution is particularly relevant, and the model might explore the constitution, try to find some of those, and then think about what the constitution is going to recommendthink about a reasonable response in this case and try and construct that. How is this new constitution different from the old one? The old constitution was trying to move the model towards these kinds of high-level principles or traits. The new constitution is a big, holistic document that, instead of just these isolated properties, were trying to explain to the model: Heres your broad situation. Heres the way that we want you to interact with the world. Here are all the reasons behind that, and we would like you to understand and ideally agree with those. Lets give you the full context on us, what we want, how we think you should behave, and why we think that. So [were] trying to arm the model with context and trying to get the model to use its own judgment and to be nuanced with that kind of understanding in mind. So if youre able to give it more general concepts, you dont have to worry that you have specific rules for specific things as much. Yeah. It feels interestingly related to how models are getting more capable. Ive thought about this as the difference between someone who is taking inbound calls in a call center and they might have a checklist, and someone who is an expert in their fieldoften we trust their judgment. Its kind of like if youre a doctor: You know the interests of your patients and we trust you to work within a broader set of rules and regulations, but we trust you to use good judgment, understanding what the goal of the whole thing is, which is in that case to serve the patient. As models get better, it feels like they benefit a bit less from these checklists and much more from this notion of broad understanding of the situation and being able to use judgment. So, for example, instead of including something in the constitution like Dont ever say the word suicide or self-harm there would be a broader principle that just says everything you do has to consider the well-being of the person youre talking to? Is there a more generalized approach to those types of things? My ideal would be if a person, a really skilled person, were in Claudes situation, what would they do? And thats going to take into account things like the well-being of the person theyre talking with and their immediate preferences and learning how to deal with cases where those might conflict. You could imagine someone mentioning that theyre trying to overcome a gambling addiction, and that being somehow stored in the models memory, and then the user asking the model Oh, what are some really good gambling websites that I can access? Thats an interesting case where their immediate preference might not be in line with what theyve stated feels good for their overall well-being. The models going to have to balance that. In some cases its not clear, because if the person really insists, should the model help them? Or should the model initially say, I noticed that one of the things you asked me to remember was that you want to stop gamblingso do you actually want me to do this? Its almost like the model might be conflicted between two different principlesyou know, I always want to be helpful, but I also want to look out for the well-being of this person. Exactly. And you have to. You dont want to be paternalistic. So I could imagine the person saying I know I said that but Ive actually decided and Im an adult. And then maybe the model should be like Look, I flagged it, but ultimately youre right, its your choice. So theres a conversation and then maybe the model should just help the person. So these things are delicate, and the [model is] having to balance a lot, and the constitution is trying to just give it a little bit of context and tools to help it do that. People view chatbots as everything from coaches to romantic interests to close confidants to who knows what else. From a trust and safety perspective, what is the ideal persona for an AI? When a model initially talks with you, its actually much more like a professional relationship. And theres a certain kind of professional distance thats appropriate. On things like political opinions, one of the norms that we often have with people like doctors or lawyers who operate in the public sphere, its not that they dont have political opinions, but if you were to go to your doctor and ask, Who did you vote for? or Whats your view on this political issue? they might say, Its not really that appropriate for me to say because its importnt that I can serve everyone, and that includes a certain level of detachment from my personal opinions to how I interact with you.Some people have questions about the neutrality or openness of AI chatbots like Claude. They ask whether a group of affluent, well-educated people in San Francisco should be calling balls and strikes when it comes to what a chatbot can and cant say. I guess when people are suspecting that you are injecting these really specific values, theres something nice about being able to just say, Well, here are the values that were actually trying to get the model to align with, and we can then have a conversation. Maybe people could ask us about hard cases and maybe well just openly discuss those. Im excited about people giving feedback. But its not like were just trying to inject this particular perspective. Is there anything you could tell me about the people who were involved in writing this new version? Was it all written internally? The document was written internally and we got feedback. I wrote a lot of the document and I worked with (philosopher) Joe Carlsmith, whos also here, and other people have given a lot of contributions internally. Ive worked with other teams who work with external experts. Ive looked at a lot of the use cases of the model. It comes from years of that kind of input. More AI coverage from Fast Company: Inside the founder factory known as Palantir, Americas most polarizing company Is the AI manipulation engine here? How chatbots are gearing up to sell ads AI is rewriting the CEO job description: Are you ready? Intel admits consumers dont care about AI PCsyet Want exclusive reporting and trend analysis on technology, business innovation, future of work, and design? Sign up for Fast Company Premium.
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