Pics du jour

🌏 Russia is hosting the 16th annual BRICS summit. Representatives from 20+ countries are gathering in Russia this week – including China’s Xi Jinping and India’s Narendra Modi – for the annual meeting of BRICS, a group of emerging economies seen as a counterweight to the US-led Group of Seven (G-7). Participating countries this year account for nearly half the world’s population, and over a quarter of the global economy.

🤖 Anthropic’s latest update allows its Claude AI to “use” a computer on its own. The company’s Claude 3.5 Sonnet AI model has a new feature in public beta, called “computer use,” that allows developers to direct Claude to work on a computer like a human does. Claude’s new feature allows it to take over a user’s computer by looking at their screen, moving their cursor, clicking buttons, and typing text.

🛞 Scientists modeled how humanity may have first started using the wheel. In a new study, researchers propose that humans made three key innovations to the wheel (shown by the arrows☝️) over a period of ~500 years, taking it from essentially tree trunks with their limbs removed to the modern-day version of a wheel. Nobody knows for certain who invented the wheel, or when it was first used, but historians do know the wheel was widely used around the world as early as 3000 BC.