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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
Anthropic Just Passed OpenAI at $1 Trillion, and Buyers Are Putting Up Their Homes
TLDR: Anthropic's private stock is now trading at a $1 trillion price tag on resale markets, jumping past OpenAI at $880 billion just three months after Anthropic's formal valuation was $380 billion.
The Story:
Claude-maker Anthropic has quietly passed OpenAI in private stock trading, hitting a $1 trillion price tag on Forge Global, the biggest site for buying and selling shares of private companies. Three months ago Anthropic closed a funding round at $380 billion. Today, buyers are paying roughly 2.6 times that on resale markets. OpenAI sits at $880 billion on the same site, only 3% above its last funding round. The money trail explains the gap. Anthropic's yearly revenue jumped from $9 billion in late 2025 to $30 billion by March 2026, a 233% bump in a single quarter. Most of that came from Claude Code, its coding tool for developers. One person offered to put up their house as collateral to buy shares at over $800 billion. Another offer came in at $1.15 trillion. Meanwhile OpenAI saw five sellers for every buyer in Q1.
Its Significance:
A $1 trillion price tag sounds huge, but it's a resale price for small slices of stock, not what Anthropic could raise in a real funding round. Still, the speed matters. Anthropic's path to this number was built on paying customers, not hype. The company reportedly plans an IPO as early as late 2026, aiming for $400 to $500 billion. For everyday readers, this flip tells you who is winning the AI business race right now. Claude is making real money from real companies, and that's changing who Silicon Valley thinks will lead the next decade.
QUICK TAKES
The story: Sony AI unveiled Ace, a table tennis robot that's beating elite and pro players in matches run under official rules. It uses nine cameras and three vision systems to track the ball faster than a human eye can. Published in Nature this week, it's the first robot to beat humans at a full-speed physical sport.
Your takeaway: AI has beaten humans at chess and Go for years, but those are digital games. Ace has to see, decide, and move in the real world within milliseconds. That's the skill factory robots and self-driving cars need. When machines can react this fast to physical chaos, the jobs that rely on hand-eye coordination look less safe.
The story: Google announced Maps Imagery Grounding at Cloud Next, a tool that turns Street View locations into AI-generated movie scenes. Type "futuristic spaceship hovering in front of the Washington Square Arch" and get an image anchored to that exact spot. Google's Veo video model can then animate it. The tool is in private preview in the U.S.
Your takeaway: Location scouts used to fly out, wait for weather, and shoot hundreds of photos. Now studios can test scenes before anyone books a ticket. The flip side is jobs: scout teams shrink, and real places compete with AI mockups of themselves. Hollywood is still arguing about where the line sits.
The story: OpenAI launched GPT-5.5 on Thursday, a model the company says can handle messy, multi-step tasks without step-by-step instructions. It's rolling out to Plus, Pro, Business, and Enterprise users in ChatGPT and Codex, with API access coming later. Early testers saved up to 10 hours a week on their workload.
Your takeaway: If you're paying for ChatGPT, you've already got access. The real shift is that GPT-5.5 can plan, use tools, and check its own work, which means you can hand it a vague request and walk away. Free users are stuck with older models.
TOOLS ON OUR RADAR
💬 LibreChat Free and Open Source: A unified chat interface that brings all of your favorite artificial intelligence models together into one highly customizable and professional platform.
🔐 CryptPad Free and Open Source: A privacy focused collaborative office suite that allows you to work on documents spreadsheets and presentations with others in real time using end to end encryption to ensure only you can see your work.
📰 FreshRSS Free and Open Source: A lightweight and customizable news aggregator that collects articles from all of your favorite blogs and news sites into one single feed so you can stay informed without being tracked by social media algorithms.
📂 FileBrowser Free and Open Source: A user friendly web interface that turns any folder on your computer or server into a private cloud storage system where you can upload download and manage your files from any device with a web browser.
TRENDING
Meta signs multi-billion-dollar deal for Amazon's AI chips - Meta agreed to deploy tens of millions of Amazon's Graviton5 processors for AI workloads. The three-to-five-year deal is worth billions and makes Meta one of Amazon's biggest chip customers, cutting Nvidia out of this round.
Meta is laying off 8,000 workers while spending $135 billion on AI - Meta confirmed it's cutting 10% of staff on May 20 and killing another 6,000 open roles. Zuckerberg said AI is now doing work that used to need big teams. The company is spending up to $135 billion on AI infrastructure this year.
Microsoft-backed Space and Time launches no-code AI app builder - Dreamspace lets people build and launch on-chain apps by typing what they want in plain English. It's built on Microsoft's Azure AI tools and runs on Base. Over 34,000 apps were made during the beta, and 140,000 students are already using it.
Tencent open-sources Hy3, its most capable model yet - Tencent released Hy3 preview on GitHub and Hugging Face, jumping from 53% to 74.4% on a coding benchmark that tests real GitHub bug fixes. It's cheaper to run than most rivals and was built in under three months. API access starts at $0.18 per million tokens.
White House accuses China of "industrial-scale" AI theft - The Trump administration said Thursday that foreign entities, mostly in China, are running tens of thousands of fake accounts to copy U.S. AI models. Anthropic earlier claimed Chinese labs DeepSeek, Moonshot, and MiniMax pulled this trick on Claude using 24,000 fraudulent accounts.
Meet Noscroll, the AI bot that doomscrolls for you - A new startup from OpenSea's former CTO will read X, Reddit, Hacker News, and Substack for you, then text you a digest when something matters. It costs $9.99 a month after a 7-day trial. No feed, no rage bait, just texts.
Claude now connects to Spotify, Uber, TurboTax, and more - Anthropic added personal life apps to Claude on Wednesday, including AllTrails, Instacart, Audible, and TripAdvisor. You can now ask Claude to plan a hike or help with your taxes without leaving the chat.
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.
TRY THIS PROMPT (copy and paste into Claude, ChatGPT, or Gemini)
⌨️ It's a real-time typing trainer. As you type, each character in the passage turns green for correct or red for wrong
Build me a React typing speed test app in a single HTML file using React 18 CDN + Babel standalone. Show a text passage to type, and highlight each character as the user types: green for correct, red for wrong. Track WPM and accuracy in real time, and show a results screen when the passage is complete. Include a live timer, difficulty options (easy/medium/hard passages), and a history panel showing past run results. Use a dark teal color scheme (#06b6d4 on #020e0e). No TypeScript, no imports, inline styles only.What this does:
WPM and accuracy update live, the timer starts on your first keystroke, and a results screen shows your final score when you finish the passage. Easy/medium/hard modes swap between different text passages.
What this looks like:
WHERE WE STAND(based on today’s news)
✅ AI Can Now: Beat professional table tennis players in full-speed rallies under official tournament rules
❌ Still Can't: Read human body language well enough to predict shots the way human pros do, which is how some players still beat it
✅ AI Can Now: Handle a messy multi-step task like "pull data, build a deck, send it to the team" without step-by-step prompts
❌ Still Can't: Prevent itself from being copied by fake-account farms running millions of queries to steal its capabilities
RECOMMENDED LISTENING/READING/WATCHING
Karpathy co-founded OpenAI, led AI at Tesla, and now makes some of the clearest educational content about AI anywhere. This video is a practical walkthrough of how he actually uses language models in his own work — not hype, just workflow. If you want to understand what these tools are genuinely good for, start here.
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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