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Where to Invest $100,000 Right Now, According to Experts
Investors face a dilemma. When the S&P 500 finished its worst quarter since 2022 last month, diversifiers like bonds and bitcoin fell too.
Even with the turnaround in mid-April, analysts at Goldman Sachs and Vanguard have projected low-single-digit annualized returns from 2024-2034.
Bloomberg asked where experts would personally invest $100,000 for their March monthly edition.
One answer that surfaced for a second time? Art.
It's what billionaires like Bezos and the Rockefellers have privately used to diversify for decades.
Why?
Appreciation. The ArtPrice100 Index outpaced the S&P 500 overall from 2000 to 2025
Low-correlation. The postwar contemporary segment has moved independently of traditional investments like stocks since ‘95.*
Resilience. A scarce, physical, and global asset class with decades of demonstrated demand.
Thanks to the world's premier art investing platform, now anyone can invest in works featuring legends like Banksy, Basquiat, and Picasso, without needing millions.
Shares in new offerings can sell quickly but...
*According to Masterworks data. Investing involves risk. Past performance is not indicative of future returns. See important Reg A disclosures at masterworks.com/cd.
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 Voice Assistants Hijacked by Silent Sounds Hidden in Podcasts
TLDR: Researchers from China and Singapore showed that hidden audio commands, silent to human ears, can hijack AI voice assistants and trick them into sending emails, downloading files, or pulling private data.
The Story: A team from Zhejiang University, Nanyang Technological University, and the National University of Singapore built an attack they call "AudioHijack" and will present it this week at the IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy. The attack hides commands inside normal-sounding audio like songs, podcasts, or YouTube clips. A person hears music. The AI hears "open my email" or "send my photos." The researchers proved it works on real products from Microsoft and Mistral. One catch for now: they needed full access to the model's weights, so the attack hits open-source systems. Many big commercial products are built on top of open-source models, which is how Microsoft got pulled in.
Its Significance: People are linking AI assistants to their email, photos, bank apps, and smart home gear. If a hidden command can ride in on a song playing in the background, your assistant could act on instructions you never gave. Microsoft told the researchers the work helps them harden their systems, but didn't say the problem is fixed. The simple takeaway is to be careful what you connect to a voice assistant, especially anything tied to money or private info.
QUICK TAKES
The story: Researchers at Helmholtz Munich built an AI system called MouseMapper that scans an entire mouse body at the cell level. It found that obesity damages the facial nerves linked to touch and triggers inflammation across the body. The same patterns showed up in human tissue too.
Your takeaway: AI is now reading whole-body scans in a way no human team could match by hand. Doctors may catch the side effects of conditions like obesity earlier, in places they weren't even looking. It's also a glimpse of how AI is becoming a research microscope, not just a chatbot.
The story: Mozilla unveiled Project Nova on May 21, a full visual refresh of Firefox coming later this year, with one switch in Settings that turns off every built-in AI feature. The redesign also brings rounded tabs, a warmer color palette, and a long-requested compact mode.
Your takeaway: Most browsers are racing to bake AI deeper into your daily web use. Firefox is betting some people want the opposite. If you've ever felt like your browser was doing too much without asking, this is one to watch when it ships.
The story: Inc. columnist Heather Wilde argues that the next big leap in AI won't come from smarter chatbots. It'll come from robots that can see, move, and do real work in factories, warehouses, and homes. Funding and hardware shipments back her up: billions are flowing into "physical AI," and humanoid units are starting to leave pilot programs.
Your takeaway: If your job involves moving things in the real world, AI hasn't ignored you, it just hadn't reached you yet. The next few years will bring more robot coworkers in places like warehouses, hospitals, and construction sites. Worth tracking the companies hiring for that work now.
TOOLS ON OUR RADAR
💻 VirtualBox Free and Open Source: A magical piece of software that creates a secure computer within your computer allowing you to safely try alternative operating systems or play older video games.
🧠 Freeplane Free and Open Source: An exceptionally powerful mind mapping application that helps you brainstorm new ideas organize your personal knowledge and visually connect your thoughts together.
⚔️ Shattered Free and Open Source: An incredibly engaging and highly replayable fantasy adventure game where you explore dangerous dungeons collect magical items and battle mysterious monsters.
🏫 OpenBoard Free and Open Source: A brilliant interactive digital whiteboard designed for teachers and presenters allowing you to write draw and share your lessons perfectly on a large television or screen.
TRENDING
Goldman Sachs Has Good News for U.S. Workers Worried About AI — Goldman economists say the mismatch between U.S. workers and open jobs is now below pre-pandemic levels, partly because AI cut openings in fields like sales and office support that already had too few applicants. They warn the next round of AI rollout will be harder on workers.
AI is Speeding Up the Quantum Threat to Crypto, Security Experts Warn — AI is helping quantum computing teams hit milestones faster than expected, which shrinks the timeline for cracking the encryption that protects crypto wallets, bank accounts, and online messages. Experts now say "Q-Day" could land between 2030 and 2033.
Argentina Launched an AI to Predict the Future. It Couldn't Predict a Typo — Argentina's Ministry of Human Capital rolled out a "Digital Twin" AI to simulate the impact of social policy before it ships, but the launch video had grammar errors, a Singapore flag instead of Argentina's, and a visible AWS logo. Privacy experts also warn the project has no governance rules.
Google's $40 Billion Bet on Anthropic Just Cracked Nvidia's AI Monopoly — Google committed up to $40 billion to Anthropic, with $10 billion upfront and $30 billion tied to milestones. Anthropic is running its models on Google's TPU chips and Amazon's Trainium chips instead of Nvidia, which is starting to reshape who controls AI hardware.
NASA's New AI Space Chip Could Let Spacecraft Think for Themselves — NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab is testing a new radiation-hardened processor that runs about 500 times faster than current spacecraft chips. With onboard AI, future probes could make their own calls during deep-space missions when Earth is too far away to help in real time.
MSEDCL Launches AI-Powered "Vitaran Intelligence" to Predict Transformer Failures — Maharashtra's state electricity company, one of the largest power distributors in the world, is using AI to spot transformer breakdowns before they cause outages. The system watches load data and stress signals to flag at-risk equipment for crews.
TRY THIS PROMPT (copy and paste into Claude, ChatGPT, or Gemini)
📜 What you got from your parents. The patterns, gifts, and wounds you carry — named honestly.
Build a single-file HTML app with vanilla HTML/CSS/JS. The Inheritance List — honest accounting of what someone got from the people who raised them. Persist to localStorage key 'inheritance_list_v1'.
Aesthetic: aged document cream (#ece6dc), faint noise texture, sepia vignette. Old Standard TT serif for headings and labels, Cormorant Garamond for body italic, Inter for UI. Burnt sienna accent (#785028). Box-shadow offset stacked paper effect. Ornamental dividers and ❦ flourish in header.
Form: parents/caregivers textarea, emotional weather of childhood textarea, current relationship dropdown (close & complicated / warm & steady / distant / estranged / they're gone / still working it out), what they've already noticed input.
System instructions to the model: write an honest accounting of inheritance in three categories — gifts, patterns, wounds. Avoid generic psychology language. Use what they told you. Be specific and kind but truthful. Reckoning, not therapy speak. Return raw JSON: title (specific, evocative), summary (one italic line), gifts/patterns/wounds arrays (3 each: name, source, shows_up_as, plus honor_it / work_with_it / tend_to_it respectively), reckoning (2-3 sentences on what's hardest to look at and why it matters), blessing (2-3 sentences — earned not toxic positivity).
Render as a sepia document: ornamental doc-title card with hairline rules, three sections each with colored left-border items (green for gifts, amber for patterns, deep red for wounds), each item showing italic source line, body text, and a tinted move callout. Dark Reckoning section with cream italic text. Centered Blessing card.What this does: Describe who raised you and the emotional weather of your childhood. Get back an honest accounting in three sections: 3 Gifts (strengths and beauty they passed down), 3 Patterns (neutral or mixed traits you carry), 3 Wounds (the harder things named without bitterness). Each item shows where it came from, how it appears in your adult life, and one concrete move — honor it, work with it, or tend to it. Closes with a reckoning and an earned blessing. Saves to localStorage.
What this looks like:
Payroll errors cost more than you think
While many businesses are solving problems at lightspeed, their payroll systems seem to stay stuck in the past. Deel's free Payroll Toolkit shows you what's actually changing in payroll this year, which problems hit first, and how to fix them before they cost you. Because new compliance rules, AI automation, and multi-country remote teams are all colliding at once.
Check out the free Deel Payroll Toolkit today and get a step-by-step roadmap to modernize operations, reduce manual work, and build a payroll strategy that scales with confidence.
WHERE WE STAND(based on today’s news)
FROM THE WEB
✅ AI Can Now: Map a whole mouse body at the cell level and spot disease patterns that match human tissue
❌ Still Can't: Tell the difference between a real voice command and a hidden audio attack mixed into music
✅ AI Can Now: Help quantum researchers shrink the time it takes to break today's encryption
❌ Still Can't: Launch a government policy video without typos, wrong flags, and a stray cloud logo
RECOMMENDED LISTENING/READING/WATCHING
Machines Like Me by Ian McEwan - Book
Set in an alternate 1980s London where Alan Turing didn't die and synthetic humans went on sale in the early 80s, the novel follows a man who buys a model called Adam and lets his girlfriend help design Adam's personality. The three of them form a love triangle and Adam starts making moral decisions the humans can't live with. Booker winner McEwan writing AI from the angle of, what if the machine has better ethics than us. Largely overlooked because critics couldn't decide if it was sci-fi.
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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