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🧬 Breakthrough in Genetic Blindness - AI of The Week - Keeping momentum

Scientists restored vision in mice using prime gene editing, AI advancements surged with Mistral's Small 3.1, NVIDIA’s GR00T N1 robot model, and OpenAI’s new audio tech, reminder to keep momentum going without skipping activities twice in a row.

Zvonimir Fras

• 2 min read
🧬 Breakthrough in Genetic Blindness - AI of The Week - Keeping momentum

Thing 1 - 🧬 Breakthrough in Genetic Blindness: Vision Restored in Mice Using Prime Editing

In an incredible US-China collaboration, scientists have restored vision in mice with retinitis pigmentosa (RP) - a condition that steals sight. Using prime editing (a super-precise CRISPR upgrade), they fixed a mutation in the PDE6B gene, key to healthy vision.

What They Did

  • Delivered the editing tool via tiny viruses (AAVs) to the mice's retinas.
  • Achieved a 26% editing success rate - enough to restore 40% of normal protein levels!
  • Photoreceptor cells (the retina's light sensors) were preserved, increasing over 4x compared to untreated mice.
Graphical abstract from the paper

The Result

These mice can see again! They reacted to light and navigated obstacles in tests like the visual cliff challenge.

What’s Next?

This could spark human trials for RP, offering hope to millions. It might also inspire future treatments for other genetic diseases like muscular dystrophy or cystic fibrosis. The future of gene editing just got brighter! That's punny, Z...

Thing 2 - AI of the week

  • Mistral introduced Mistral Small 3.1. Multimodal, Apache 2.0 licensed, outperforms Gemma 3 and GPT 4o-mini.
  • NVIDIA announced GR00T N1, the first fully customizable open-source humanoid robot foundation model, designed to advance general-purpose robotics.
  • xAI released "DeeperSearch" lol
  • OpenAI rolled out new audio models. Details are thin, but this likely ties into advancements in voice interaction or audio generation

Thing 3 - Keep the momentum

Once you get momentum, never stop.
It’s easy to continue, but if you stop, it’s hard to start again.
Never miss a day.

- Derek Sivers

A.k.a. if you don't like having to start from zero every time, don't stop in the first place.

I try to follow the rule of thumb: don't skip the activity twice in a row.

Cheers, Zvonimir