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Microsoft Just Dropped New AI That Makes Decisions Better Than Humans

Microsoft just introduced OptiMind — a new AI system that turns plain English decision problems into solver-ready optimization models. Instead of needing an expert to manually convert business intent into MILP math, OptiMind generates the full mathematical formulation plus executable Python code using GurobiPy. The result: faster, cheaper optimization workflows for logistics, scheduling, manufacturing, and supply chains — with major accuracy gains on cleaned, expert-validated benchmarks.

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🧠 What You’ll See.
0:00 What Microsoft OptiMind Really Is.
1:43 From Text to Optimization Code (MILP + Gurobi)
2:59 OptiMind Architecture: MoE and 128K Context.
3:34 Open Source Under MIT License.
4:28 Training With Expert Hints and Clean Data.
6:02 53 Optimization Problem Classes.
8:38 Multi-Stage Solver-in-the-Loop Inference.
9:11 Self-Consistency and Auto Error Correction.
9:55 Performance vs GPT-o4 Mini and GPT-5
10:32 Limits, Safety, and Human Oversight.

🚨 Why It Matters.
Optimization is already the hidden engine behind supply chains, factories, routing, and scheduling — the problem is the translation step. Converting messy real-world requirements into correct MILP constraints takes rare experts and days of work. OptiMind targets that exact gap: natural language in, solver-ready decisions out. This is why it’s going viral — it’s not just AI text generation, it’s AI generating decisions.

#AI #Microsoft #OptiMind

Greening the Solar System

A lovely, thoughtful, and evidence-based essay on the technical prerequisites for terraforming Mars and other nearby planets and asteroids. While this will take a long time, I believe it ought to be one of the main priorities towards opening up a bright and beautiful future for humanity.

A future where life flourishes beyond Earth is closer than you think. How, precisely, will we get there?

The idea of bringing life to other worlds has captured the imagination of many scientists and thinkers, from the founding father of astronautics, Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, in the 1890s to Carl Sagan, Freeman Dyson and other visionaries in the 20th century. Today, we know much more about spaceflight, biology, and the nature of habitable environments. We are entering an era of rapid and cheap access to space, and with it, we find ourselves on the brink of being able to extend Earth’s biosphere across the solar system, billions of times beyond its current bounds.

The possibilities for how we might do this range widely, from terraforming Mars (and possibly other planets or moons) to generating habitable bubbles on free-floating asteroids. While technological challenges remain, many of these techniques appear surprisingly feasible — making a detailed assessment of their merits all the more important.

What Is Manus? The AI agent that made Meta make a billion-dollar move

Meta Platforms is making one of its boldest moves yet in the global artificial intelligence race. The social media giant has agreed to acquire Manus, a fast-growing AI startup based in Singapore, as it looks to turn years of heavy spending on artificial intelligence into real, usable products and revenue.

For Meta founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg, artificial intelligence is no longer just another technology experiment. It has become the company’s top priority. Meta is investing billions of dollars into hiring top researchers, building massive data centers, and developing powerful new AI models. The acquisition of Manus signals a clear shift from long-term research to tools that businesses and everyday users can start using now. Manus is best known for its AI agent, a type of software that can perform tasks on its own once given basic instructions. Unlike chatbots that need constant prompts, AI agents are designed to act more like digital employees. Manus’ agent can screen job resumes, plan travel itineraries, analyse stock data, and carry out research tasks with minimal human involvement.

This practical approach may be exactly what Meta needs. While the company has spent heavily on AI, investors have questioned when those investments would begin to generate meaningful returns. Manus already operates on a subscription model and had an annual revenue run rate of about 125 million dollars earlier this year. That gives Meta a ready-made product that can be sold to businesses almost immediately. The startup behind Manus is called Butterfly Effect. It was founded in China but later moved its headquarters to Singapore, a move that reflects a wider trend among Chinese tech companies seeking a more stable base amid rising tensions between China and the United States. Earlier this year, Butterfly Effect raised funding at a valuation close to 500 million dollars in a round led by US venture capital firm Benchmark. Meta has not disclosed the financial details of the acquisition.

Interpretation, extrapolation and perturbation of single cells

Causal and mechanistic modelling strategies, which aim to infer cause–effect relationships, provide insights into cellular responses to perturbations. The authors review computational approaches that harness machine learning and single-cell data to advance our understanding of cellular heterogeneity and causal mechanisms in biological systems.

Aberrant Complement Activation Is a Prominent Feature of Chronic Inflammatory Demyelinating Polyneuropathy

To comprehensively characterize complement pathway activation in chronic inflammatory demyelinating polyneuropathy (CIDP) and its association with clinical disease features using advanced complement profiling.

B cells play a more sinister role than believed in progression of type 1 diabetes

A recent study by Vanderbilt Health researchers has revealed a greater, detrimental role for B lymphocytes (B cells) in the progression of type 1 diabetes (T1D).

B cells are immune cells thought to drive the immune system’s attack on insulin-producing beta cells by activating anti-islet T cells. The study published in Diabetes suggests they play an even more sinister role by also interfering with and limiting the function of regulatory T cells (Tregs) that help calm the immune system.

“Our study showed B cells can weaken the body’s natural defenses by interfering with Tregs, which normally behave as peacekeepers to ward off immune attacks on the pancreas and the insulin-producing beta cells,” said Daniel Moore, MD, PhD, associate professor of Pediatrics at Vanderbilt Health and the study’s corresponding author.

MCM8- and MCM9 Deficiencies Cause Lifelong Increased Hematopoietic DNA Damage Driving p53-Dependent Myeloid Tumors

(Cell Reports 28, 2851–2865.e1–e4; September 10, 2019)

Our attention was called to an image duplication in the right panel of Figure 3C in our published paper. Note that the right panels are not new results but enlarged representative cases present in the left panel, as indicated in the figure legend. They show so-called Howell-Jolly bodies (faulty, dysplastic red blood cells that did not manage to expulse their cell nucleus completely). The first and second images show the same cell in question but in different clippings. We apologize for this inadvertent mistake and provide a revised Figure 3C depicting a fifth example of (two) erythrocytes displaying Howell-Jolly bodies in the right panel.

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