Create presentations from text prompts with Gamma

Welcome back to The Daily Update — here’s what’s on deck today:

🗞️ The Latest in AI: Fully AI-generated drug begins clinical trials in human patients

🤖 AI Tool of the Day: Create presentations from text prompts with Gamma

📸 Business Spotlight: The AI that powers Duolingo’s language-learning app

Read time: 3 minutes

🗞️ The Latest in AI: Fully AI-generated drug begins clinical trials in human patients

The first drug fully generated by AI entered clinical trials with human patients last week. Hong Kong-based biotech startup Insilico Medicine created the drug, INS018_055, as a treatment for idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis.

Insilico Medicine’s CEO Alex Zhavoronkov claims that the company’s drug is the first with both a novel AI-discovered target and a novel AI-generated design. The discovery process for the new drug began in 2020 with hopes to overcome challenges with current treatments for IPF.

INS018_055 is the first fully generative AI drug to reach Phase II trials with patients. The drug’s current study is a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled trial taking place over 12 weeks in China. Insilico has plans to expand testing to 60 subjects at 40 sites in the U.S. and China.

The company expects to have results from the current Phase II trial next year.

Click here to learn more.

🤖 AI Tool of the Day: Create presentations from text prompts with Gamma

Gamma takes instant AI-generated slides to a new level by creating eye-catching presentations from a single text prompt. Simply input a topic and Gamma will construct the first draft of your presentation. Here are a couple slides from a presentation I made with Gamma in less than a minute:

Check out the full presentation here. Remember that Gamma is designed to construct the first draft of your presentation, so it isn’t perfect. You can edit presentations by prompting an AI chatbot in the right toolbar to make changes.

Key Feature: Also create documents and web pages from text prompts.

Try Gamma out for free here.

📸 Business Spotlight: The AI that powers Duolingo’s language-learning app

Duolingo’s AI learns what users need to learn to master a new language. The language-learning app successfully emulates a one-on-one experience with a human tutor, and the AI that powers it may revolutionize learning as AI becomes commonplace in education.

Several years ago, the company’s founders were challenged by the relationship between learner engagement and lesson difficulty. When students are given material that’s too difficult, they often get frustrated and quit. Material that feels easy may keep students engaged, but it doesn’t challenge them to learn.

Duolingo’s solution was to use AI to keep learners in the zone where they remain engaged but still learn at the edge of their abilities.

Birdbrain is an AI system that estimates both the difficulty of an exercise and the current proficiency of a learner. Every time a learner completes an exercise, Birdbrain updates both estimates and dynamically selects new exercises for the next lesson. It functions like the Elo rating system: if a learner gets an exercise wrong, the system lowers the estimate of their ability and raises the estimate of the exercise’s difficulty.

The company’s founders discovered that Birdbrain consistently caused both engagement and learning measures to increase since its launch in 2020. While great teachers can never be replaced by an app, Duolingo’s Birdbrain has unlocked the future of optimized learning and adaptive curriculum.

Click here to learn more.

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Jack

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