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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 Maker Anthropic Is Back in Pentagon Talks After Being Blacklisted Over a $200 Million Contract
TLDR: Anthropic is back in negotiations with the Pentagon over a contract governing how the military can use its Claude AI models, after talks broke down last week over disagreements about weapons and surveillance safeguards.
The Story:
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has resumed discussions with Emil Michael, the Pentagon's under-secretary of defense for research and engineering, according to the Financial Times. The two sides are trying to hammer out terms for the military's access to Anthropic's Claude models. Talks fell apart last Friday after Anthropic refused to agree to let the Pentagon use its AI for "any lawful purpose," seeking instead specific restrictions that the company would control. The original contract was worth up to $200 million, and Claude had been the first major AI model deployed on the government's classified networks.
Its Significance:
Government AI contracts are becoming some of the most valuable deals in tech right now, with multiple companies competing for access to military and intelligence networks. At a Morgan Stanley conference this week, Amodei told investors that Anthropic and the Defense Department "have much more in common than we have differences" and that the company is working "to de-escalate the situation." When OpenAI announced its own Pentagon deal last week, the company saw a notable backlash. Now that Anthropic is returning to the table, it will be worth watching whether its own users react the same way.
QUICK TAKES
The story: According to The Information, OpenAI's next model will more than double the current context window from 400,000 to over 1 million tokens, putting it on par with Google and Anthropic. It will also include an "extreme" reasoning mode that burns significantly more computing power on hard questions, aimed at researchers rather than everyday users.
Your takeaway: A bigger context window means the AI can "hold" more information at once, like reading an entire book instead of just a few chapters. For most people, the bigger news is how fast these updates are coming. OpenAI teased GPT-5.4 just one hour after releasing GPT-5.3 to the public. The AI race is moving at a pace that's hard to keep up with, even for the companies building it.
The story: Wisconsin lawmakers are pushing a bill that would let courts replace human interpreters with AI translation tools, arguing it would cut costs for counties that spent over $3.7 million on interpreter services in 2023. Critics, including the ACLU of Wisconsin and the deaf community, say AI can't handle legal nuances, sign language, or the high stakes of criminal proceedings where someone's freedom is on the line.
Your takeaway: If this passes, Wisconsin could become the first state to allow AI interpreters in courtrooms. That's a big deal for the roughly 167,000 state residents who don't speak fluent English, because a mistranslation during a trial could mean the difference between going home and going to jail.
The story: At a Morgan Stanley conference Wednesday, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said his company's $30 billion investment in OpenAI and $10 billion in Anthropic will likely be its last in both companies, saying the upcoming IPOs close the window. But the original $100 billion OpenAI deal shrank to $30 billion, and Anthropic's CEO recently compared U.S. chip sales to China to "selling nuclear weapons to North Korea."
Your takeaway: Nvidia sells the chips that power both companies, so it doesn't need to invest to make money off them. But the timing is interesting: Nvidia now holds stakes in two companies that are pulling in very different directions on the biggest question in AI right now, how it should be used by governments.
TOOLS ON OUR RADAR
🐧 Anytype Free and Open Source: A local first digital workspace that connects your notes tasks and files into a visual network ensuring your sensitive project data remains entirely under your control. (Alternative to Notion)
🎨 Beautiful.ai Freemium: An intelligent presentation creator that automatically formats your slides and aligns your content perfectly so you can focus entirely on your storytelling instead of manual design adjustments.
🖍️ Glasp Free: A social web highlighter that lets you easily capture important quotes from online articles and discover interesting reading material from a community of enthusiastic learners.
🖌️ Microsoft Designer Freemium: A creative artificial intelligence studio that helps you build professional social media graphics and digital flyers strictly from your conversational prompts.
TRENDING
Kids' Mentions of AI Jump 50% in BBC Writing Competition - Oxford University Press analyzed over 46,500 stories by UK kids aged 5-11 and found AI mentions rose 50% in one year. ChatGPT now shows up as a character in children's stories, and kids are starting to write about "doomscrolling" and "brainrot" for the first time.
Amazon Launches OpenClaw on Lightsail for One-Click Private AI Agents - AWS now lets you deploy OpenClaw, the viral open-source AI assistant with 263,000+ GitHub stars, on Amazon Lightsail with just a few clicks. It connects to WhatsApp, Discord, and Telegram and can manage emails, browse the web, and organize files on your behalf.
How to Spot AI-Generated Images and Videos in Your News Feed - The Better Business Bureau of Michigan is warning people about the growing flood of AI-generated fake images and videos spreading on social media during ongoing global conflicts, including fabricated war footage and fake celebrity endorsements.
Former Goldman Sachs Head Says AI Spending "Smells" Like the 2008 Crisis - Lloyd Blankfein, who led Goldman Sachs through the 2008 financial crisis, says the $650 billion being poured into AI in 2026 reminds him of the hidden leverage that crashed the economy before. "I don't feel the storm, but the horses are starting to whinny in the corral," he said.
Meta Will Let Rival AI Chatbots Back on WhatsApp in Europe, But They'll Pay Per Message - Under pressure from the European Commission, Meta will allow competing AI chatbots to operate on WhatsApp via its business API for 12 months in Europe. The catch: providers will pay €0.05 to €0.13 per message, which critics say is just as restrictive as the original ban.
Scientists Aren't Disclosing Their Use of AI Despite Journal Rules - A study from the American Association for Cancer Research found that 36% of submitted manuscripts showed signs of AI-generated text, but authors only disclosed AI use in 9% of them. Researchers say they fear their papers will be rejected if they admit to using AI.
TRY THIS PROMPT (copy and paste into Claude, ChatGPT, or Gemini)
📋 Build a meeting agenda builder with timed items, item types, owner assignment, and a live completion tracker
Build me a single-file HTML app called "Meeting Agenda Builder" using
React 18 (CDN) + Babel standalone. Dark red color scheme (#1a0808
background, #e05c5c accent). No external CSS or imports.
Include:
- Meeting title input and stats panel (total time, item count, covered count)
- Add Agenda Item form: item text, owner, duration (minutes)
dropdown (Decision/Discussion/Update/Brainstorm)
- Agenda list: each item shows a running
owner, type badge with color coding, click-to-toggle d
- Progress bar showing percent of items covered
- Search Best Practices button cycling through 4 meeting effectiveness tips
Use only React.useState, inline styles, and CDN scripts.
Make it fully functional in a single HTML file.What this does:
Turns a vague meeting list into a structured agenda with time accountability. Each item gets an owner, a type (Decision, Discussion, Update, Brainstorm), and a duration. The running clock shows when each item should start. Clicking an item marks it done, so you always know where you are and how much time is left.
What this looks like:
WHERE WE STAND(based on today’s news)
✅ AI Can Now: Get deployed as a private, self-hosted personal assistant through Amazon's cloud with one-click setup, connecting to your messaging apps to manage tasks around the clock.
❌ Still Can't: Accurately interpret American Sign Language or handle the legal nuances, idioms, and specialized terminology needed for courtroom translation.
✅ AI Can Now: Process over 1 million tokens of text at once (about 750,000 words), letting it read and reason over entire books or codebases in a single conversation.
❌ Still Can't: Be trusted to label itself. Four times as many scientists are using AI to write research papers as actually disclose it, despite journal rules requiring honesty.
FROM THE WEB
The video of Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg fighting might be AI, but their talks to have the fight was real.
Launching Tuesday, March 10th
RECOMMENDED LISTENING/READING/WATCHING
When aliens invade Earth, a retired special forces operator gets pulled back into action to fight a technologically superior enemy. It's fast-paced military sci-fi with plenty of action, but also explores how humanity might respond when faced with technology far beyond our understanding. First in a seven-book series that keeps the momentum going.
Here's how I use Attio to run my day.
Attio's AI handles my morning prep — surfacing insights from calls, updating records without manual entry, and answering pipeline questions in seconds. No searching, no switching tabs, no manual updates.
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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