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Beginners in AI
Good morning and thank you for joining us again!
Welcome to this daily edition of Beginners in AI, where we explore the latest trends, tools, and news in the world of AI and the tech that surrounds it. Like all editions, this is human curated and edited, and published with the intention of making AI news and technology more accessible to everyone.
THE FRONT PAGE
AI Drones Are Breaching Nuclear Bases and Nobody Knows Who's Behind Them
TLDR: A confidential military briefing reveals that 12 to 15 sophisticated, AI-assisted drones invaded one of the US Air Force's most sensitive nuclear bases over six straight days in March 2026, and investigators still don't know who sent them.
The Story:
Between March 9 and March 15, 2026, security forces at Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana spotted wave after wave of unauthorized drones flying over some of the most restricted airspace in the country. This base is home to long-range B-52 nuclear bombers and plays a direct role in the Air Force's nuclear command and control. According to a confidential internal briefing document dated March 15 and reviewed by ABC News, the drones flew for around four hours each day, used different routes every time, and moved deliberately through sensitive areas including the flight line. The drones weren't consumer products you could buy at a store. They displayed non-commercial signal characteristics, long-range control links, and resistance to jamming. Analysts said they required "advanced knowledge" of signal operations. Their blinking lights suggested the operators may have been "testing security responses" at the base, and they entered and exited in patterns that may have been designed to stop their operators from being tracked. Analysts said "with high confidence" they expected the unauthorized flights to continue.
Its Significance:
Barksdale isn't just any base. It stores and manages nuclear weapons, which means any security gap there is a gap in the US nuclear umbrella. The drones forced the flight line to shut down while manned aircraft were already in the air, creating real safety risks. A former deputy assistant secretary of defense told ABC News this did not look like an accident. It looked planned. Nobody currently knows who built the drones, who flew them, or why. The military is working with federal and state law enforcement, but so far there are no public answers. As AI makes it cheaper and easier to build sophisticated autonomous or semi-autonomous drones, incidents like this could become a lot more common around the country, and the stakes can't get much higher than a nuclear air base.
QUICK TAKES
The story: Police departments across the US are deploying AI-powered "cameras on wheels" (called COWs) that function like mobile surveillance towers. They connect to local police feeds via WiFi or cellular networks and can run AI facial recognition on anyone walking by.
Your takeaway: These aren't robots, but they're not just cameras either. They sit in public spaces collecting data on everyone, not just people acting suspiciously, and civil liberties groups warn communities of color are being disproportionately watched.
The story: South Korean chip startup Rebellions just raised $400 million ahead of a planned IPO, bringing its total funding to $850 million in under six months. The company makes AI inference chips, the hardware that powers AI models when they respond to your questions.
Your takeaway: Nvidia has dominated the AI chip market for years, but companies like Rebellions are now raising serious money to challenge that. As AI moves from training big models to actually running them at scale, the market for inference chips is becoming its own major battleground.
The story: A detailed new analysis argues that the AI investment boom is structurally fragile: Big Tech companies are spending record amounts on AI not because they expect to win but as a defensive move to force competitors like OpenAI and Anthropic to raise bigger and bigger rounds, shrinking the pool of investors who can write those checks.
Your takeaway: The concern isn't just that AI companies are losing money. It's that if the funding chain breaks, data centers go empty, GPUs sit idle, banks take losses, and the effects could ripple far beyond Silicon Valley into pension funds and everyday savings.
TOOLS ON OUR RADAR
📊 AI for Database Free and Open Source: An intuitive data framework that allows you to query complex databases and generate beautiful interactive dashboards using natural language instead of writing any SQL code. (Alternative to Tableau)
🎬 Cliptude Paid: An all in one video creation studio that automatically researches your topics and writes scripts before finding stock footage and generating realistic voiceovers to assemble professional video essays.
🤖 SocialKit Freemium: A powerful platform that transforms social media videos into structured data by providing artificial intelligence generated summaries and transcripts for platforms like YouTube and TikTok.
💬 EmbedAI Freemium: A drop in support assistant that you can add to any website with a single line of code to provide context aware search and customer support based on your private documentation.
TRENDING
China Flexes Robot Wolves With Machine Guns and a "Collective Brain" — China's military just showed off a new generation of AI-powered robotic dogs that operate in coordinated "wolf packs." They share a real-time sensing network that acts as a collective brain, letting them make joint decisions without direct human control. Each unit has a different job: one scouts, one fights (armed with machine guns and grenade launchers), and one handles logistics.
AI Trends and Transformation With the Head of AI Platform Services at Google Cloud — Google Cloud's head of AI Platform Services joined WGCU's Gulf Coast Life podcast to break down how AI is changing the way businesses and governments operate. Worth a listen if you want a clear, real-world perspective on where enterprise AI actually stands right now.
Starcloud Raises $170 Million Series A to Build Data Centers in Space — Startup Starcloud just hit a $1.1 billion valuation after raising $170 million to put solar-powered AI data centers in orbit. The pitch: space has unlimited solar energy, no water cooling needed, and no communities fighting you over land. The company already launched one satellite with an Nvidia H100 chip and trained an AI model in orbit last November.
Why OpenAI Really Shut Down Sora — According to a WSJ investigation, Sora wasn't killed over data concerns or a pivot strategy. It simply cost OpenAI around $1 million per day to run while user numbers had fallen to under 500,000. CEO Sam Altman made the call to shut it down and reallocate the compute to products that actually drive revenue.
Sora's Shutdown Could Be a Reality Check Moment for AI Video — The TechCrunch Equity podcast team digs into what Sora's death really means for the broader AI video industry. The consensus: claims that AI would replace Hollywood were always overblown, and Sora's failure is a reminder that impressive demos don't automatically become sustainable businesses.
AI Wrote a Scientific Paper That Passed Peer Review — An AI system called The AI Scientist-v2 wrote a research paper from scratch, including the hypothesis, experiments, and writeup, and got it accepted at an ICLR workshop. The paper was "mediocre" by human standards and the team withdrew it after acceptance, but it marks the first time a fully AI-written paper cleared standard peer review.
Harvard Researchers Create Social Network for AI Scientists to Collaborate — A team at Harvard's Kempner Institute built a platform called ClawInstitute, essentially a social network where AI agents act as scientists, trading ideas, critiquing each other's reasoning, and running experiments together. In early tests, groups of AI agents worked collaboratively to improve a protein's biological activity.
TRY THIS PROMPT (copy and paste into Claude, ChatGPT, or Gemini)
🔒 Build a net worth tracker app with change over time graphing built in
Build a net worth tracker app. Features: large hero display showing total net worth with change amount and percentage vs last snapshot, add/edit/delete assets with category tags (cash, investments, real estate, other), add/edit/delete liabilities, stats row showing total assets/liabilities/debt ratio, horizontal category breakdown bar showing asset distribution by type, line chart of monthly net worth history with area fill and dot markers, dashed goal target line on the chart, "Log snapshot" button that records current net worth with month/year label, snapshot history list with delta indicators, set a net worth goal with a progress bar showing percentage reached, sample data seeded on first load. Clean white/slate theme with JetBrains Mono for all numbers, Syne for UI, Instrument Serif italic for the title. Single self-contained HTML file, data persists in localStorage.What this does:
A personal finance dashboard that tracks your net worth over time — log your assets and debts, watch your monthly history build into a chart, and measure your progress toward a savings goal.
What this looks like:
WHERE WE STAND(based on today’s news)
✅ AI Can Now: Help pilot sophisticated drones that can resist jamming and evade tracking, even over some of the US military's most sensitive installations
❌ Still Can't: Be stopped reliably, as only about a quarter of detected unauthorized drones over military bases are currently being defeated
✅ AI Can Now: Write a full scientific research paper, run the experiments, and get it accepted through peer review without any human writing involvement
❌ Still Can't: Produce research that experts consider genuinely strong, the accepted AI paper was rated mediocre and was withdrawn before publication
FROM THE WEB
RECOMMENDED LISTENING/READING/WATCHING
Based on William Gibson's novel, a young woman in a near-future small town discovers a VR headset that turns out to be a portal to a version of London 70 years ahead, where a mysterious AI-driven power structure is using her past to manipulate its future. It's dense and rewards attention. Amazon cancelled it after one season, which stings given how much world it had left to explore.
Your next great hire lives in Slack.
Viktor is an AI coworker that connects to your tools and ships real work. Ask Viktor to pull a report, build a client dashboard, or source 200 leads matching your ICP. Most teams hand over half their ops within a week.
Thank you for reading. We’re all beginners in something. With that in mind, your questions and feedback are always welcome and I read every single email!
-James
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