Doctors saved the life of a terminally-ill patient with AI

Bonjour! Here’s what you need to know about AI today:

👉 GitHub coding assistant now lets you generate code from images

👉 Doctors saved the life of a terminally-ill patient with AI

👉 Amazon will invest $100b on AI in 2025

and many more!

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Read time: 4.9 minutes

What’s going on: GitHub has updated its AI coding assistant, GitHub Copilot, with many agentic abilities including a new feature called “Vision for Copilot”. This allows users to upload images like screenshots or diagrams into a chat interface where Copilot generates corresponding code, interfaces, and alt text.

What does it mean: This is especially useful for teams who can now visually suggest webpage modifications without detailed text. The feature, previously available via an extension, is now integrated into GitHub Copilot Chat, making it more accessible to many developers.

More details: 

• GitHub is also improving its code-completion with "next edit suggestions", which now considers a user's recent edits to predict future code changes. Read their official blog post for more details or Watch this demo.

• GitHub is introducing more autonomous features in Copilot, like Copilot Edits, where developers can prompt changes across multiple files using natural language. An "agent mode" helps by automatically selecting files for edits.

• GitHub has also teased Project Padawan, an initiative to develop a software engineering agent that can handle entire tasks independently under a developer's guidance. (Watch this video for a demo)

What’s going on: In a groundbreaking medical case, a patient suffering from terminal idiopathic multicentric Castleman disease (iMCD), a rare immune disorder, has entered remission thanks to an AI-driven approach to drug repurposing. Researchers at the University of Toronto used an AI algorithm to analyze over 4,000 existing medications, searching for a match that could treat this life-threatening condition. The AI pinpointed Adalimumab, a drug commonly used for autoimmune diseases like rheumatoid arthritis, as a potential solution.

What does it mean: This case shows the capability of AI in accelerating drug discovery and repurposing, potentially saving years of research and clinical trials. This approach could be particularly beneficial for rare or orphan diseases where the patient population is small, and traditional drug development might not be economically viable.

More details:

• The patient was on the brink of entering hospice care with no other viable treatment options. After receiving Adalimumab, the symptoms began to subside, leading to a full remission of the disease.

• The scientists involved in the study used proteomic, transcriptomic, in vitro modeling, and computational techniques to identify new targetable pathways for treatment.

• The team pioneered a novel machine-learning approach to generate predictive scores for the likelihood of every FDA-approved drug to treat every disease.

• This case was detailed in a study published in The New England Journal of Medicine. (Read the paper)

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🗣 Meta has launched a new program in partnership with UNESCO to collect speech recordings and transcriptions for improving future openly available speech and translation AI.

💰 Amazon has plans to invest $100 billion in 2025, with the majority of this investment directed towards enhancing AI capabilities in its AWS cloud division.

🧠 OpenAI has updated its o3-mini model to provide a clearer insight into its reasoning process, making it available to both free and paid ChatGPT users by showing more detailed "chain of thought" steps.

💗 Tinder is introducing AI-powered features for matching and discovery to combat a decline in user engagement and a drop in monthly active users.

👻 Snapchat has introduced a new feature for its Snapchat+ subscribers, allowing them to create custom AI-generated stickers within chats.

🌍 OpenAI has launched data residency in Europe, enabling organizations to comply with local data sovereignty requirements while using the company's AI products.

🔓 Anthropic claims its new AI security method, Constitutional Classifiers, blocks 95% of jailbreaks and invites security experts to attempt to bypass these safeguards.

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