🔬 World-First Diabetes Cure?, AI Agents in Action, and the Ambition Roadmap

It's been a busy week. All my feeds are exploding with this stem cell treatment for diabetes. And there's been too many AI news to fit the Thing 2...

We live in interesting times.

Thing 1 - 🎉 Big Win for Diabetes Treatment – A World First!

A groundbreaking moment just hit the world of medicine – and it could change the game for diabetes.

👩‍⚕️ What happened?

A woman with type 1 diabetes received the world’s first successful stem cell transplant to reverse her condition.

Scientists used cells from her own body, transformed them into insulin-producing cells, and transplanted them back.

In just 75 days, she became insulin-independent. She’s been off insulin for over a year now, with no major side effects!

🚀 Why it matters?

This is HUGE. Millions of people with type 1 diabetes rely on insulin shots to control blood sugar. Now, this new method may one day offer a way to reverse the disease - letting the body manage blood sugar on its own again.

Imagine the ripple effects on healthcare, quality of life, and the economy!

🔮 What's next?

It’s just one case so far, so scientists need more time (five years give or take) and more patients to confirm if this could be a long-term solution, but so far, it’s a giant step forward.

(source)

Thing 2 - AI of the week

• Pudu Robotics unveiled their first-generation "semi-humanoid" robot. While it's not real humanoid, Pudu continues to lead in commercial robotics with practical applications.

• Slack announced AI agents that can answer questions and automate tasks within channels, aligning with Salesforce's Agentforce expansion
• OpenAI rolled out Advanced Voice for ChatGPT. You can talk to it (as before) but now you can interrupt it and all sorts of other things. It might make you "feel the AGI" 🙃
• Microsoft 365 Copilot introduced new AI-powered agents to automate tasks in Teams, Word, and Excel. These GPT-inspired agents help streamline repetitive work​
• Groq partnered with Aramco to build the world’s largest AI inference center in Saudi Arabia. The facility will start with 19,000 language processing units (LPUs), growing to 200,000 in the future​.
• Microsoft and BlackRock announced a plan to raise $30 billion for AI infrastructure investments. If demand warrants, the total investment could reach $100 billion, further fueling AI's rapid growth​
• Disney Research and ETH Zurich presented 'RobotMDM', a diffusion-based AI system combined with reinforcement learning that allows robots to learn how to move from random motion data​

• Meta released lightweight Llama models: 1B & 3B. These models empower developers to build personalized, on-device agentic applications with capabilities like summarization, tool use and RAG where data never leaves the device. (You can run it in the browser!)

Thing 3 - The First Step to Success: Separating What You Want from What’s Possible

Of course, figuring out what you like to work on doesn't mean you get to work on it. That's a separate question. And if you're ambitious you have to keep them separate: you have to make a conscious effort to keep your ideas about what you want from being contaminated by what seems possible.

- Paul Graham

However, figuring it out is the first steps. Spend however long you need to figure that out.

Cheers, Zvonimir