Social Media's impact on mental health is being examined in a landmark case   

The trial, which centres on a 20-year-old woman's mental health struggles allegedly caused by Instagram and YouTube, will serve as a critical test for thousands of other lawsuits targeting social media companies.  

Meta CEO Mark Zukerberg testified this week, taking questions for around six hours. At the centre of the case are documents that show the company had a goal to increase the time 10-year-olds spend on Instagram, despite the app being officially for 13 and above. Zuckerberg testified that while they want teens using their apps, they account for just 1% of the company’s revenue. He also talked about the challenge of identifying accounts of children, because they can simply lie about their age.   

Another week, another new AI model   

This time Anthropic —the company behind Claude— has released Sonnet 4.6, designed to be used for more general applications and is better than previous models at "computer use".  

This use case is interesting, because there are so many disconnected systems in companies, and some are not easily able to use automation but if an agent can see the screen and knows the software, then it can work on the task. But these types of uses are still wildly risky. When they announced the new model, they said in the release that "that Sonnet 4.6 has a broadly warm, honest, prosocial, and at times funny character." Describing a chatbot like that will never not be weird to me.  

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