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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
Sam Altman's House Was Firebombed. His Response Said Everything
TLDR: OpenAI's CEO Sam Altman wrote a rare personal blog post after a man threw a firebomb at his house, and his words say a lot about how polarizing AI leaders have become.
The Story:
On April 10, 2026, San Francisco police arrested a man for throwing a Molotov cocktail at one of Sam Altman's homes near North Beach. No one was hurt, and Altman was uninjured. He then published a blog post the same day, addressing the attack and sharing where he stands on AI. He connected the incident to what he called "incendiary" media coverage about him, including a new New Yorker investigation. But he didn't stop there. He also said that "the fear and anxiety about AI is justified," that we're in the middle of "the largest change to society in a long time," and that getting safety right requires more than just aligning a model. He said it needs "a society-wide response" to be ready for new threats, including what he called "a difficult economic transition."
Its Significance:
Altman isn't the first tech CEO to become a lightning rod for public frustration, and he won't be the last. When one person is steering technology that could change how billions of people work, live, and make money, it creates strong feelings on all sides. Some people see him as a visionary. Others see a billionaire building something no one asked for. That tension isn't going away, and it's showing up in ways that go well beyond blog posts and press releases.
QUICK TAKES
The story: A practice called "silicon sampling" is spreading through the polling industry. Instead of asking real people what they think, companies use AI to simulate human responses at a fraction of the cost. The practice came to light when Axios published a story about maternal health that cited a poll, but the poll turned out to be entirely AI-generated, with no actual people surveyed. Gallup has since partnered with a startup to build 1,000 AI "digital twins" for research.
Your takeaway: Public opinion polls shape policy, news coverage, and elections. If those polls are increasingly generated by machines rather than gathered from people, the results reflect the assumptions of whoever built the model, not what people actually believe.
The story: For years, mainstream economists pushed back on fears about AI wiping out jobs, pointing to history: new technology usually creates new work. But a major new paper from researchers at the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago and several top universities finds that economists are now increasingly factoring extreme AI disruption into their models. The shift is notable because economists are typically the last group to sound alarms.
Your takeaway: When the people who study labor markets for a living start updating their models to account for AI's job impact, it's worth paying attention. This doesn't mean a jobs apocalypse is certain, but the professional consensus is clearly moving.
The story: A new Gallup survey of 1,572 Americans ages 14 to 29 found that while 51% still use AI at least weekly, positive feelings about it are collapsing fast. Excitement dropped 14 points to just 22%. Hopefulness fell 9 points to 18%. Anger rose 9 points to 31%. Nearly half of employed Gen Zers say the risks of AI at work outweigh the benefits, up 11 points from last year.
Your takeaway: Gen Z isn't anti-AI, they're using it more than ever. But they're also the ones watching it reshape the entry-level job market in real time, which explains why the emotional response is shifting from curiosity to frustration.
TOOLS ON OUR RADAR
🖋️Outline Free and Open Source: A fast and collaborative knowledge base built for remote teams to document their internal processes and share company guides in a beautifully designed interface.
⚙️ *Make Freemium: A visual automation platform that allows you to connect thousands of different applications and APIs to create complex workflows without writing a single line of code.
📧 Google CC Free: An experimental AI productivity agent from Google Labs that lives directly inside your email inbox to act as your personal executive assistant. It connects to your calendar and cloud files to automatically generate a personalized morning briefing organize your daily schedule and draft email replies.
🎬 PlayPhrase Freemium: A unique search engine that lets you type in any quote or phrase to instantly find matching video clips from thousands of movies and television shows.
TRENDING
CoreWeave Announces Multi-Year Agreement With Anthropic — Cloud computing company CoreWeave struck a multi-year deal to power Anthropic's Claude AI models, with compute capacity coming online later in 2026. The announcement sent CoreWeave's stock up 11% and comes one day after the company locked in a separate $21 billion deal with Meta, pushing its total backlog past $66 billion.
Regal Cineworld Launches a ChatGPT App for Buying Movie Tickets — Regal Cineworld became the first major movie theater chain to launch a dedicated app inside ChatGPT, letting users ask conversational questions like "what's playing near me tonight" and get real-time showtime results. The app was built in partnership with The Boxoffice Company and covers Regal's 5,386 screens across 394 locations.
The CIA Let AI Write Its First Intelligence Report — CIA Deputy Director Michael Ellis confirmed that the agency recently produced its first fully AI-generated intelligence report, with no human analyst driving it. Ellis outlined plans to embed AI "coworkers" across all agency analytics platforms within two years, and said within a decade, CIA officers will manage teams of AI agents. He also warned that the agency "cannot allow the whims of a single company" to limit its AI options, an indirect reference to the Trump administration's ban on Anthropic tools at federal agencies.
Elon Musk's xAI Sues Colorado to Block Its AI Law — xAI filed a federal lawsuit to block Colorado's Senate Bill 24-205, which requires developers of "high-risk" AI systems to disclose risks and prevent algorithmic discrimination in areas like hiring, housing, and education. The company argues the law violates the First Amendment by forcing it to change how Grok responds to certain topics. Colorado's governor has expressed reservations about the law himself, and the state legislature has been trying to revise it before its June 30 deadline.
Powell and Bessent Warned Bank CEOs About Anthropic's New AI Model — Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Fed Chair Jerome Powell called an emergency meeting with the heads of Citigroup, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, Morgan Stanley, and Goldman Sachs to warn about cybersecurity risks tied to Anthropic's new Claude Mythos Preview model. The model reportedly found thousands of previously unknown software vulnerabilities across major operating systems and browsers during testing, and Anthropic has restricted access to a small group of cybersecurity partners while it evaluates the risks.
OpenAI Is Projecting $2.5 Billion in ChatGPT Ad Revenue in 2026 — Internal projections shared with investors show OpenAI expects to reach $2.5 billion in ad revenue this year, scaling to $100 billion annually by 2030. The company began testing ads in ChatGPT for free and Go-tier users in January, with early pilots crossing $100 million in annualized revenue within weeks. Paying subscribers on Plus, Pro, and Enterprise plans will stay ad-free.
TRY THIS PROMPT (copy and paste into Claude, ChatGPT, or Gemini)
📅 Build a ‘Life in Weeks’ grid that shows your entire life as a visual map of filled and empty squares
Create a single-file React app (using React 18 CDN + Babel standalone) with a dark theme. Build a Life in Weeks visualization: show a grid of 80 years by 52 weeks, making 4,160 small squares total. Color filled squares indigo for weeks already lived, amber for the current week, and dark for future weeks. Add a birth year input, a stats panel showing age, years left, weeks lived, weeks remaining, and percentage of life used, a progress bar, hover tooltips showing Age X Week Y, and a tips section with 4 facts about time and mortality. Use a dark slate background with indigo accent colors.What this does: Calculates how many weeks of an 80-year life you've already lived and renders them as a color-coded grid. Enter your birth year and it fills past weeks in purple, marks this week in amber, and leaves future weeks dark. Hover any square to see your exact age during that week. The stats panel tracks weeks and years remaining.
What this looks like:
WHERE WE STAND(based on today’s news)
✅ AI Can Now: Read years of patient social media posts and flag drug side effects that clinical trials missed, surfacing real-world health signals at scale.
❌ Still Can't: Replace actual human polling. Silicon sampling can simulate what people might say based on past data, but it can't capture what people actually think right now.
✅ AI Can Now: Write a full intelligence report without a human analyst involved, as confirmed by the CIA's own deputy director.
❌ Still Can't: Predict its own most dangerous capabilities in advance. Anthropic said Mythos's ability to find software vulnerabilities was not intentionally trained, meaning it emerged unexpectedly from general improvements.
FROM THE WEB
RECOMMENDED LISTENING/READING/WATCHING
Written in 1945, Vannevar Bush imagined a device called the "memex" that would store and link all human knowledge, essentially predicting the internet and hypertext decades before they existed. This essay is where the idea of connected, searchable information began. Reading it now feels like finding the blueprint for our entire digital world.
Are you tracking agent views on your docs?
AI agents already outnumber human visitors to your docs — now you can track them.
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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