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

Nearly $700 Billion in AI Spending Is Creating a Gold Rush for Trade Workers

TLDR: The $700 billion AI data center boom is creating a massive shortage of skilled trade workers, pushing salaries up 25-30% and opening six-figure careers for electricians, welders, and HVAC technicians.

The Story:

While AI keeps replacing white-collar jobs, it's creating a gold rush for people who work with their hands. The four biggest tech companies (Amazon, Microsoft, Meta, and Google) are spending nearly $700 billion combined this year to build AI data centers. All that construction needs real humans: electricians, plumbers, welders, and cooling system engineers. Between 2022 and 2026, demand for robotic technicians jumped 107%, cooling system engineers grew 67%, and industrial automation technicians rose 51%, according to a global study of 50 million job postings by Randstad, the world's largest recruitment firm. Workers who switch into data center jobs often see a 25-30% pay bump, according to staffing firm Kelly Services.

Its Significance:

The U.S. could be short 1.9 million manufacturing workers by 2033, and the construction industry needs nearly half a million new workers by next year alone. That shortage is pushing pay higher and higher. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has said these jobs now pay six-figure salaries. For anyone worried about AI taking their job, or anyone looking for a career change, the trades are suddenly one of the safest and most profitable places to be. Companies like Amazon, Microsoft, and Google are even launching apprenticeship programs and community college partnerships to train new workers, so you don't need years of experience to start.

QUICK TAKES

A Mystery AI Model Has Developers Buzzing: Is This DeepSeek's Latest Blockbuster?

The story: A powerful AI model called "Hunter Alpha" appeared anonymously on the developer platform OpenRouter on March 11 with no creator listed. When tested by Reuters, the chatbot said it was "a Chinese AI model primarily trained in Chinese" and has 1 trillion parameters and a 1-million-token context window, specs that closely match rumors about DeepSeek's upcoming V4 model expected in April.

Your takeaway: Some engineers say Hunter Alpha's reasoning style matches DeepSeek's training patterns, while others disagree. Either way, anonymous model drops are becoming a trend in the AI world: another mystery model called "Pony Alpha" appeared last month before being claimed by Chinese firm Zhipu AI. If this really is DeepSeek V4, it could shake up the AI market again.

Microsoft May Challenge Amazon-OpenAI $50 Billion Cloud Deal

The story: Microsoft is weighing legal action against Amazon and OpenAI over a $50 billion deal that would make Amazon Web Services the exclusive outside cloud provider for OpenAI's new enterprise AI platform called Frontier. Microsoft says this could violate its existing partnership that requires OpenAI's models to run through Microsoft's Azure cloud.

Your takeaway: Microsoft has invested over $11 billion in OpenAI since 2019 and built its cloud strategy around that partnership. This fight shows that as AI money gets bigger, the partnerships holding the industry together are starting to crack. The outcome could reshape how AI services are delivered worldwide.

Big Tech Is Racing to Build the Best AI Coworker

The story: The AI race is shifting from "who has the smartest model" to "who can build the most useful work tool." Microsoft is merging its consumer and business Copilot into one system, Alibaba is reorganizing its entire AI division around work agents, and OpenAI is pulling back from side projects to focus on coding and business tools.

Your takeaway: All these companies are spending huge money on AI infrastructure, and now they need to prove it pays off. The next big fight won't be about chatbots. It'll be about which company can replace the most meetings, emails, and busywork with an AI that actually gets things done.

TOOLS ON OUR RADAR

✉️ Mautic Open Source: A highly capable marketing automation platform that gives you total control over your email campaigns and audience segmentation on your own servers. (Alternative to Mailchimp)

📊 Piktochart Freemium: A brilliant visual communication tool that makes it incredibly easy to distill massive spreadsheets and complex data into beautiful interactive reports.

📝 Drafts Freemium: A brilliantly fast text editor that opens instantly to a blank page allowing you to capture quick thoughts before deciding where they should be organized.

📚 Shortform Freemium: A highly detailed reading companion that provides incredibly thorough summaries and actionable insights from the best nonfiction books in the world.

TRENDING

Nvidia Ridiculed for AI Feature That "Yassifies" Video Game Characters - Nvidia's new DLSS 5 uses AI to "improve" game graphics, but demos show it giving characters smoother skin, bigger lips, and heavy makeup. Gamers are calling it a "yassify filter" that overwrites artists' original designs. Nvidia says critics are "completely wrong" and that studios will have full control.

Senator Introduces Bill to Set Red Lines on Military AI - Sen. Elissa Slotkin introduced the AI Guardrails Act to ban the Pentagon from using AI to autonomously kill targets, spy on Americans, or launch nuclear weapons. The bill comes after a public fight between the U.S. military and Anthropic over AI safeguards.

Midjourney Launches V8 Alpha with 5x Faster Generation - Midjourney's V8 model is now available for testing with improved detail, better text rendering, native 2K resolution, and generation speeds roughly five times faster than before. Users need to visit alpha.midjourney.com to try it.

MIT Researchers Build AI That Predicts Heart Failure Worsening a Year in Advance - A new deep learning model called PULSE-HF can read a simple heart monitor test (ECG) and predict whether a patient's heart function will decline within 12 months. It could help doctors catch worsening cases earlier and save hospital resources.

Cedarville Professor Uses Space Debris Research to Teach Real-World AI Limits - Dr. George Landon is working with the U.S. Air Force Academy to use AI for identifying space junk through ground telescopes. His main lesson for students: real-world AI is messy, and methods that work on paper often fail with actual data.

Turkey's Baykar Unveils K2 Kamikaze Drone with AI Swarming - The K2 is a new AI-powered attack drone with a 1,200+ mile range, a 440-pound warhead, and the ability to fly in coordinated swarms of five without human control. Baykar, maker of the famous TB2 drone, says it's designed for mass production at low cost.

TRY THIS PROMPT (copy and paste into Claude, ChatGPT, or Gemini)

🍳 Build a recipe scaler that works backwards with the time that you have to create a meal

What this does: Set the time you want dinner on the table, then add each dish with its prep and cook times. The planner works backward from your serving time to calculate exactly when to start prepping and cooking each dish, with live countdowns and progress bars so nothing burns or goes cold. Preset buttons load common dishes instantly.

What this looks like:

WHERE WE STAND(based on today’s news)

✅ AI Can Now: Predict which heart failure patients will get worse a year before it happens, using a simple ECG reading

❌ Still Can't: Stop giving video game characters Instagram-model makeovers when asked to "improve" graphics

✅ AI Can Now: Fly five kamikaze drones in coordinated swarm formations without any human steering or GPS signal

❌ Still Can't: Reliably identify a single pixel of space junk moving at high speed through a noisy telescope image

FROM THE WEB

Rosy the Robot(Jetsons), early version.

RECOMMENDED LISTENING/READING/WATCHING

Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson(Book)

A pizza delivery driver for the corporatized Mafia (yes, really) discovers a new drug called Snow Crash that works on both humans and computer avatars in the Metaverse, a virtual reality world Stephenson invented years before anyone else. It's equal parts cyberpunk thriller, linguistic history lesson, and absurdist comedy. The book that coined "avatar" and "Metaverse" as we use them today. It's one of the defining novels of the cyberpunk genre and a must-read for anyone interested in how science fiction predicted our digital world.

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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