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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
An AI Laser Kills 30 Mosquitoes a Second, and Google Wants to Release 32 Million More
TLDR: A solo engineer built an AI laser that zaps mosquitoes in three milliseconds, and the fight against mosquito-borne disease is now drawing in giants like Google, which wants to release 32 million lab-bred mosquitoes to fight the bad ones.
The Story:
A robotics expert named Steven Cheng spent four months training a custom AI model to spot mosquitoes and fire a laser at them in three milliseconds, faster than you can blink. He says it cleared his home of the bugs in a single night, and it shuts the laser off the moment a person steps into range. He's not alone in chasing this problem. Google's life sciences arm, Verily, has spent over a decade on its Debug project and is now seeking federal approval to release up to 32 million lab-bred mosquitoes across California and Florida over two years. These are male mosquitoes carrying a natural bacteria called Wolbachia, so when they mate with wild females, the eggs don't hatch. AI even does the sorting, a camera checks each bug's anatomy to separate males from females, since releasing females would make things worse. Earlier trials in Fresno County cut disease-carrying mosquito populations by 93% to 95%.
Its Significance:
Mosquitoes kill more than a hundred thousand people a year through malaria, dengue, and other diseases, so this isn't a small problem. What's new is that fighting them has become a tech race, from one engineer's backyard laser to one of the biggest companies on Earth. That matters for you because the same AI tools showing up in your phone are now being aimed at public health. Not everyone is sold, though. Critics point out mosquitoes feed birds, bats, and fish, and warn we don't yet have the safety data on releasing millions of modified bugs into the wild. Google's public comment window on the plan closes June 5, so people still have a say.
QUICK TAKES
The story: MIT and the state of Massachusetts are building the Quantum Systems Laboratory, a shared lab open to researchers across the region, with construction starting this summer. It aims to be the first place in the world to link quantum computers, quantum sensors, and the connections between them in one spot.
Your takeaway: Quantum computing and AI feed each other. Faster quantum machines could train and run AI models that today's regular computers can't handle, which means breakthroughs in medicine and security may come sooner than expected.
The story: Recording Academy CEO Harvey Mason Jr. told The Verge that AI is everywhere in music production now, a big shift from two years ago when the question was just whether it would happen. He's openly wrestling with how to judge songs that are made or helped by AI while still protecting human artists.
Your takeaway: If you make music, the tools are already in the room. The harder question is credit and money: who gets called the artist, and who gets paid, when a machine helped write the track.
The story: A Chinese research team built an algorithm called HG-STR that lets drone swarms keep hunting and striking on their own, even when their signals are jammed and their cameras are blocked. In simulations, researchers claim it hit a 100% kill rate. Real battlefields are far messier than a simulation, so that number deserves caution.
Your takeaway: This is the part of AI that worries safety experts most: machines making kill decisions without a person saying yes. Even as a test, it shows where military AI is heading, and most major militaries are racing the same direction.
TOOLS ON OUR RADAR
💻 RustDesk Free and Open Source: A brilliant remote desktop software that lets you safely connect to your home computer from anywhere in the world without relying on external corporate servers to handle your private data.
📸 Flameshot Free and Open Source: An incredibly feature packed screenshot application that allows you to instantly capture your screen and draw beautiful colorful annotations over your images before securely saving them.
🪟 Rectangle Free and Open Source: A beautifully simple productivity tool specifically built for Apple computers that lets you quickly organize and snap your open windows perfectly into place using incredibly easy keyboard shortcuts.
📓 Dottie AI Journal A beautifully minimal and entirely private digital diary for your phone that uses artificial intelligence to help you reflect on your daily thoughts and notice personal growth patterns completely on your device without storing your private data in the cloud.
TRENDING
Your Boss Might Have "AI Psychosis" - Box founder Aaron Levie says CEOs are cutting jobs for AI without understanding what it can't do, because they're too far from the actual work, while tech layoffs in 2026 are already close to matching all of 2025.
Big Tech Is Borrowing Huge Sums to Pay for AI - Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and Meta plan to spend $725 billion on AI this year, up 77% from last year, and they're taking on debt to do it, with Meta's debt jumping from about $36 billion in 2023 to $84 billion.
A College Senior Built a Free Tracker for AI Healthcare Laws - Cornell senior Will Moss created the Health and AI Policy Index, a public database that tracks the patchwork of rules popping up around AI in healthcare, helping doctors and lawmakers keep up.
Nvidia Wants an "AI Supercomputer" in Every Home - Nvidia unveiled its RTX Spark superchip for Windows laptops and desktops, built to run AI agents directly on your machine instead of the cloud, with the first "AI PCs" expected this fall.
A Student's AI Research Could Help Predict Stormwater Damage - A Clemson doctoral student won recognition from the American Society of Civil Engineers for using AI to predict how stormwater systems behave, work that could make flood planning faster and cheaper.
Florida Tells Lawyers: You're Responsible for AI's Mistakes - Starting June 15, every signer of a Florida court filing must vouch that their cited cases actually exist and are quoted right, a direct response to AI tools inventing fake court cases, with sanctions for getting it wrong.
Strava Cuts Off AI Apps From Your Workout Data - Strava updated its rules to block third-party apps from using your fitness data to train AI models, part of a wider push to give users more control over where their personal data ends up.
TRY THIS PROMPT (copy and paste into Claude, ChatGPT, or Gemini)
🚨 Paste any pitch, claim, or piece of corporate-speak. Get the plain English translation and a BS score from 0 to 100.
Build a single-file HTML app with vanilla HTML/CSS/JS. The Bullshit Detector — translate corporate-speak to plain English with BS rating. Persist to localStorage key 'bs_detector_v1'.
Aesthetic: terminal/cyberpunk. Pure black (#0a0a0a), faint horizontal scanline overlay, vignette. VT323 monospace for labels and terminal text, Space Grotesk for headings, Newsreader serif for body text. Green (#00ff88) primary, red (#ff4060) for flags, amber (#ffc040) for warning tags. Conic-gradient BS meter circle (green → amber → red). Terminal-style ">" prompts. Glowing button.
Form: large textarea for suspect text, source type dropdown (corporate / startup / marketing / LinkedIn / political / academic / influencer / HR), tone dropdown (professional / sardonic / brutal).
System instructions to the model: be precise, not cynical for sport. Translate corporate-speak, marketing fluff, and rhetorical evasions to plain English. If text is genuinely substantive, score it honestly low. Return raw JSON: bs_score (0-100), rating (named label), verdict (1-sentence summary), original_summary (what it appears to say), plain_english (what it actually means), flags array (3-5 items with type from BUZZWORD/WEASEL WORD/UNFALSIFIABLE/FALSE PRECISION/EMOTIONAL HIJACK/NON-ANSWER/METRIC SLEIGHT/NAME-DROP/PASSIVE BLAME + text), not_saying (2-3 sentences on what's absent), questions array (4 sharp questions that force real answers), final_verdict (1 punchy sentence).
Render: conic-gradient BS meter with score in center, side-by-side original-vs-plain-english translation columns (red-tinted left, green-tinted right), flags list with ⚐ markers and amber type badges, black "what they're not saying" card with green border, questions list with Q1/Q2/Q3/Q4 labels and green left-borders, final verdict bar with score-coded coloring. Archive shows score badge per scan.What this does: Paste a LinkedIn post, startup pitch, exec memo, sales page, or any suspicious chunk of language. Get back a 0–100 BS score with a named rating (Mild Spin / Heavy Filler / Industrial-Grade BS), a side-by-side translation of what they said vs. what it actually means, 3–5 flagged tactics (Buzzword / Weasel Word / Unfalsifiable / False Precision / Non-Answer), what they're notably not saying, four sharp questions that would force a real answer, and a final one-line verdict. Saves to localStorage.
What this looks like:
WHERE WE STAND(based on today’s news)
✅ AI Can Now: Spot and zap a mosquito with a laser in three milliseconds, faster than you can blink
❌ Still Can't: Be trusted to cite real court cases without a lawyer checking every one by hand
✅ AI Can Now: Sort millions of mosquitoes by sex using a camera, accurately enough to guide a public health program
❌ Still Can't: Tell us the long-term effects of releasing those modified mosquitoes into the wild
FROM THE WEB
RECOMMENDED LISTENING/READING/WATCHING
A Swiss sci-fi film about a young doctor taking a four-year shift aboard an interstellar cargo ship, the kind of long-haul gig where the crew sleeps in cryo and an AI runs the day-to-day, until strange noises start coming from the supposedly empty cargo hold. Made on a shoestring by first-time directors Ivan Engler and Ralph Etter and looks like it cost ten times what it did.
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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