🧠 AI Uncovers Shocking Cause of Alzheimer’s

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AI just uncovered something about Alzheimer’s no human ever noticed. A gene scientists thought was just a marker? Turns out, it may be causing the disease and found a treatment that could be as simple as a pill.

What are on FIRE 🔥

• 🧠 AI Reveals Surprising New Hidden Cause of Alzheimer's

• 🌟 AI Highlights

• 📚 AI Sources From AI Fire

• 🏅 AI Tools

• ⚡ 5 AI Quick Hits

• 📊 AI Chart

• 💼 4 AI Jobs

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AI INSIGHTS

🧠 AI Reveals Surprising New Hidden Cause of Alzheimer's

What if I told you the gene we’ve been watching as a mere Alzheimer’s biomarker... is actually helping cause the disease? UC San Diego researchers just used AI to discover that while also discovering a potential treatment that could be taken as a simple pill.

🧬 The Discovery: PHGDH Is Not Just a Marker

• PHGDH was already known as a blood biomarker for early Alzheimer’s detection.

• But higher PHGDH levels = worse disease across multiple patient groups. Conclusion: PHGDH is causal.

🧠 The Hidden Mechanism: A Moonlighting Role

• PHGDH is an enzyme for producing serine, an essential amino acid. That was all we knew. But all attempts to link serine production to Alzheimer’s failed.

• Using AI to model PHGDH’s 3D structure, researchers found:

  • A hidden DNA-binding domain — similar to transcription factors.

  • This lets PHGDH regulate genes — something it wasn’t known to do.

• This “moonlighting” role messes with how brain cells turn genes on and off — a process known to go wrong in Alzheimer’s.

💊 The Treatment Angle: NCT-503

• Scientists looked for a compound that could target the rogue function without affecting serine production.

• NCT-503, a known small molecule, was a good candidate. It could be taken orally, unlike current treatments needing infusions.

Unlike existing infusion treatments, the new drug could be taken as a pill, and prevents damage before it occurs rather than trying to reverse it.

Why it matters: AI has uncovered a surprising role in a decades-old protein, revealing how much remains unseen by human researchers. These advances set to fast-track for the world’s most complex disorders and diseases!

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TODAY IN AI

AI HIGHLIGHTS

💥 Amazon launches Nova Premier, its most capable AI model yet - best for “teaching” smaller models via distillation. But it’s not a “reasoning” model like OpenAI’s o4-mini or DeepSeek’s R1.

📸 Google’s Gemini chatbot app now lets you modify both AI-generated images and images uploaded from your phone or computer using “multi-step” editing flow.

🖼️ Freepik and Fal have unveiled F Lite, the world’s largest open-source image model built exclusively on copyright-safe data. You can try it here.

📚 Duolingo just launched 148 AI-made courses in record time, but it’s replacing human workers to do it. Users are upset, calling the new lessons lower quality and less personal.

🍝 Yelp has launched a series of AI tools, including voice agents that can book restaurant reservations and answer customer calls to help convert the leads that (normally might be) missed.

⚡ New research slashes language model response times from 30 seconds to just 3, using a breakthrough framework (d1) to turbocharge diffusion models' reasoning abilities.

💰 AI Daily Fundraising: Persona just raised $200M to build an AI-ready identity layer. With 42% of suspicious banking activity tied to ID fraud, it's pushing verified, intent-based IDs for a safer digital future.

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AI QUICK HITS

1. 🌍 NotebookLM’s hit podcast feature goes multilingual with 50+ languages.

2. 🧠 OpenAI officially retires GPT-4: The end of an AI that shocked the world.

3. 🚀 DeepSeek just upgrades its math-focused AI model Prover V2.

4. 🛡️ Meta launches LlamaFirewall to stop AI jailbreaks and insecure code.

5. 💳 Visa wants to give AI ‘agents’ your credit card, on the order of e-commerce itself.

AI CHART

🏗️ Microsoft’s Datacenter Leasing Slowdown Misunderstood

Microsoft hit the brakes on 1.5 gigawatts of self-built datacenters. But it still has 5GW of datacenter capacity under contract, and much of the panic you’re seeing is based on misunderstood signals - especially when it comes to suppliers like Vertiv.

By mid-2024, Microsoft’s leasing footprint was larger than Meta, Amazon, Google, and Oracle combined.

Market Misreads: Vertiv and the Supplier Panic:

• Vertiv’s pipeline doesn’t yet include Microsoft’s 5GW of preleased capacity.

• So while immediate orders might look soft, the real demand hasn’t hit the books yet.

What’s Really Going On?

• Microsoft seems to be recalibrating its infrastructure playbook, not exiting it. Possible reasons:

  • Managing capital intensity of its AI push.

  • OpenAI shift in compute usage or efficiency.

  • Waiting on next-gen AI hardware before scaling.

Other hyperscalers (like Oracle and Stargate) may be speeding up while Microsoft taps the brakes. In short: the boom isn’t over, it’s just being rescheduled.

AI JOBS

• Google: Software Engineer III, AI/ML GenAI, Google Applied AI

• Oracle: Senior Director Sofware Development ( OCI GEN AI/ML)

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• Upwork: AI Cold DM & Appointment Setter for SaaS MVP

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The AI Fire Team