💉 Smart insulin prevents diabetic highs — and deadly lows

• Scientists have developed a new form of insulin, NNC2215, that adjusts its activity in response to blood glucose levels, effectively managing high blood sugar while preventing hypoglycemia.
• The insulin contains a glucose-sensitive switch that modulates its activity by binding and releasing a glucoside based on glucose concentrations, demonstrating effective glucose control in animal trials.
• Further research is needed to optimize this insulin's effectiveness in human-relevant glucose ranges, as well as to assess its safety and pricing, with the aim of creating personalized therapies for diabetes management.

⚛️ Amazon goes nuclear, to invest more than $500 million to develop small modular reactors

• Amazon Web Services (AWS) is investing over $500 million in nuclear power projects across Virginia and Washington state to meet the growing demand for clean energy, particularly for data centers that support generative AI services.
• AWS has partnered with Dominion Energy to explore developing a small modular nuclear reactor (SMR) in Virginia, aiming to deliver at least 300 megawatts of power, while also announcing a collaboration with Energy Northwest to support the construction of four SMRs in Washington.
• The investment and partnerships align with Amazon’s commitment to achieve net-zero carbon emissions and highlight a trend among major tech companies, including Google and Microsoft, to invest in nuclear energy to meet their escalating power needs as data center demands increase.

🤖 Meta AI's New Tracking Model

• CoTracker is a new point tracking model that utilizes semi-supervised training, allowing it to leverage real, unannotated videos for training by generating pseudo-labels, achieving better results with significantly less data.
• The model effectively tracks visible and occluded points, outperforming recent trackers on standard benchmarks, and exhibits impressive qualitative performance in challenging scenarios such as occlusions.
• Key enhancements include a simpler architecture compared to previous trackers, and research on scaling behavior to improve model performance with increased real data.

📉 Meta is laying off employees at WhatsApp, Instagram, and more

• Meta is implementing layoffs across various departments like WhatsApp, Instagram, and Reality Labs, focusing on smaller cuts tied to team reorganizations rather than a large-scale layoff.
• Notable employees, including Jane Manchun Wong, have reported being laid off as part of these changes, which aim to align resources with Meta's long-term strategic goals.
• This follows previous rounds of layoffs, including 11,000 employees in 2022 and an additional 10,000 in 2023, as part of CEO Mark Zuckerberg's emphasis on efficiency.

🎥 Adobe's AI video model is here, and it's already inside Premiere Pro

• Adobe has launched its generative AI video capabilities with the Firefly Video Model, allowing users to extend footage and generate videos from still images and text prompts within tools like Premiere Pro.
• The first tool, Generative Extend, enables minor adjustments to video clips and extends clips by up to two seconds, while new web-based Text-to-Video and Image-to-Video tools allow users to generate video content from textual descriptions and reference images.
• Current limitations include a maximum duration of five seconds for generated clips, 720p resolution, and a 90-second generation time, but Adobe emphasizes the commercial safety of its AI tools due to the licensed training data used.

🖥️ Google Chrome is switching to Manifest V3, but what does that mean for ad blockers?

• Google's Manifest V3 will cause extensions based on the older Manifest V2 to stop working soon, with an end date for these extensions in June 2025.
• Browsers like Vivaldi and Brave plan to continue supporting Manifest V2 for some extensions until they are phased out, while other browsers, including Firefox, will maintain support for Manifest V2 without deprecation.
• The transition to Manifest V3 has raised concerns about the efficacy of content blockers, due to the replacement of the webRequest API with the more restrictive declarativeNetRequest API.