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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's Gold Rush Turns Shoe Company into AI Company, Ditching Their Products to Sell Computing Power
TLDR: Allbirds, the once-popular sneaker company, sold its entire shoe business for $39 million and is rebranding as "NewBird AI" to rent out GPU computing power, part of a growing trend of companies abandoning their original products to become AI infrastructure suppliers.
The Story:
Allbirds, the company known for its wool sneakers beloved by Silicon Valley, just did something nobody saw coming. After watching its stock drop about 50% over the past year, the company sold its shoe brand and all related assets to American Exchange Group for $39 million. It then announced it's changing its name to NewBird AI and using a new $50 million investment to buy GPUs (the specialized chips that power AI systems) and rent them out to companies that need computing power. The stock jumped 373% in a single day. To be clear: a company that made shoes last month now plans to compete with cloud giants like Amazon, Microsoft, and Google by offering "GPU-as-a-Service" to AI developers and researchers who can't get computing power fast enough.
Its Significance:
Allbirds isn't alone in this kind of pivot. It's part of a larger pattern where companies are abandoning their original businesses to sell the "shovels" in AI's gold rush. The memory chip industry is seeing the same thing. Samsung, SK Hynix, and Micron have shifted their factories away from making memory for phones and laptops and toward making high-bandwidth memory for AI systems, because the profit margins are so much higher. That's caused memory prices for regular electronics to jump as much as 95%, and the entire supply of this specialized AI memory is sold out through at least the rest of 2026. The bet these companies are making is simple: it doesn't matter what AI ends up being used for, because everyone building it needs computing power and memory chips. Whether NewBird AI can actually compete in that crowded market is a different question entirely. But the stock market reaction tells you something about where investors think the real money is right now: not in products people buy, but in the infrastructure that makes AI possible.
QUICK TAKES
The story: A developer named Jackrong created "Gemopus," a set of free AI models built on Google's open-source Gemma 4 that mimic the reasoning style of Anthropic's Claude Opus 4.6, one of the most capable (and expensive) AI systems available. The smaller version runs on an iPhone at 45 to 60 words per second, with no internet connection required.
Your takeaway: Running smart AI locally on your own phone for free was a fantasy two years ago. It's still not as good as the real thing, and tool-calling features are broken, but the fact that it works at all shows how fast the gap between paid cloud AI and free local AI is closing.
The story: Science Corporation, founded by ex-Neuralink president Max Hodak, hired Yale's chair of neurosurgery to lead its first human brain sensor placement in the US. The company just raised $230 million at a $1.5 billion valuation. Unlike Neuralink's metal probes, Science Corp's device uses lab-grown neurons that naturally connect with brain tissue, which could avoid the long-term damage that traditional electrodes cause.
Your takeaway: Brain-computer interfaces are moving fast. Between Neuralink's 20+ patient implants and Science Corp's biological approach, the race to connect computers to human brains is no longer theoretical. The question now is which method works best over time, metal or biology.
The story: Amazon Web Services launched Amazon Bio Discovery, an AI tool that helps scientists design and test new drugs without needing to write code. In a test with Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, the system designed nearly 300,000 potential antibody molecules for pediatric cancer treatment and narrowed them to 100,000 candidates for lab testing, compressing months of work into weeks.
Your takeaway: This is AI doing something that directly affects your health. If drug companies can test 100,000 candidates in weeks instead of a few hundred in a year, treatments for diseases like cancer could reach patients faster. 19 of the top 20 pharmaceutical companies already use AWS, so this tool has a real path to widespread adoption.
TOOLS ON OUR RADAR
🤖 The 44% Rule Free and Open Source: A powerful business audit plugin based on a 2026 Harvard and INSEAD research study that helps founders and operators discover overlooked automation opportunities. By running a simple command the tool scans your current projects and asks plain English questions to uncover high impact use cases that can significantly increase your revenue and reduce required capital.
✂️ Krible Paid: An artificial intelligence powered video clipping tool that automatically transforms long form content from podcasts and webinars into multiple short vertical clips ready for social media publishing.
🛍️ Tagshop AI Paid: An advanced artificial intelligence video advertisement generator that helps brands increase conversions by creating high quality and engaging promotional content using realistic digital avatars.
💬 BoundBot Freemium: An artificial intelligence powered multi channel platform that reads your website and product catalog to deliver context aware customer support answers across various chat applications.
TRENDING
Adobe's Firefly AI Assistant Can Now Control Your Creative Apps for You - Adobe launched the Firefly AI Assistant, which lets you describe what you want and it handles the work across Photoshop, Premiere, Illustrator, Lightroom, and other apps. It comes with 100+ built-in creative skills and learns your preferred tools and style over time. Public beta starts in the coming weeks.
Parasail Raises $32M to Feed AI Developers Hungry for Cheap GPU Power - GPU rental startup Parasail raised $32 million to expand its network of on-demand computing power for AI developers. The company claims it offers access to more GPUs than Oracle's entire cloud, at 15 to 30 times lower cost than traditional providers. The funding comes as "tokenmaxxing," the practice of burning through as many AI tokens as possible, becomes a trend among Silicon Valley engineers.
Boston Dynamics' Spot Robot Gets a Brain Upgrade from Google - Boston Dynamics integrated Google DeepMind's Gemini Robotics into its Spot robot, letting it understand plain English commands, read industrial gauges, and reason about its environment. In a demo, Spot cleaned up a living room by identifying and sorting objects on its own, with no pre-programmed instructions.
Gen Z Workers Admit to Sabotaging Their Company's AI - A new survey of 2,400 workers and executives found that almost half of Gen Z employees have intentionally undermined their employer's AI initiatives. Separately, a Gallup poll of 1,500 young people found excitement about AI dropped 14 points in a year, with 31% now saying AI makes them angry. Yet 51% still use it daily or weekly.
Google Chrome Now Lets You Save and Reuse Your Favorite AI Prompts - Google added "Skills" to Gemini in Chrome, letting you save any AI prompt as a one-click tool you can run on any webpage. Type a forward slash, pick your saved Skill, and it runs instantly. Google is also launching a library of 50+ pre-built Skills for tasks like comparing products across tabs and scanning documents.
Hyundai Plans $26 Billion US Investment With Robots and AI at the Center - Hyundai Motor Group will invest $26 billion in the US by 2028, with a major focus on robotics and AI. The company plans to deploy Boston Dynamics humanoid robots in its factories by 2028 and produce up to 30,000 units per year by 2030.
TRY THIS PROMPT (copy and paste into Claude, ChatGPT, or Gemini)
🧪 Experiment Log -- Track Your Personal Science in Terminal Green
Build the Experiment Log app in the Terminal style: pure black (#0D0D0D) background, bright green (#00FF41) Courier New monospace, CRT scanline overlay. Users create experiments with a hypothesis, start date, and duration in days. Each day they log a brief observation entry. Experiments show as collapsible blocks with status: RUNNING / SUCCESS / FAILED / ABANDONED. A progress bar shows days elapsed vs duration. Closing an experiment requires picking SUCCESS or FAILED and writing a conclusion. Stats show total experiments, success rate, and current active count. Single HTML file with localStorage and 3 sample experiments.What this does:
Experiment Log is a single-file personal science tracker that lets you run structured self-experiments on your own habits, routines, and ideas. You define a hypothesis, set a duration, and log daily observations as the experiment runs. When you're done, you close it with a verdict and a written conclusion, building a permanent record of what you tried, what you learned, and what actually worked.
WHERE WE STAND(based on today’s news)
✅ AI Can Now: Design 300,000 drug molecule candidates and narrow them to 100,000 for lab testing in weeks instead of the usual year-long timeline
❌ Still Can't: Run reliably on local hardware with full tool-calling support, as even the best open-source fine-tunes have broken agent capabilities on consumer devices
✅ AI Can Now: Let a robot dog understand plain English commands like "recycle any cans in the living room" and figure out how to do it without any pre-written instructions
❌ Still Can't: Reason about how to hold a soda can upright so it doesn't spill, because robots still lack the kind of common-sense physical knowledge humans pick up from a lifetime of experience
FROM THE WEB
Explainer of the Harvard study showing that businesses have doubled their revenue by adding AI to 44% more of it, and the free tool made for this.
RECOMMENDED LISTENING/READING/WATCHING
A molecular biologist obsessed with debunking intelligent design through the evolution of the eye makes a discovery that sends his research in a direction he never anticipated. Writer-director Mike Cahill keeps the science grounded enough to feel credible while the philosophical implications quietly build in the background. It splits cleanly into two halves with very different emotional textures, and the second half is where it really lands. One of those films that stays with you for days afterward, less because of what it shows you and more because of the question it leaves sitting on the table.
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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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