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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
ChatGPT's Founding Story Heads to Court: Musk vs Altman for $150 Billion
TLDR: Elon Musk took the stand this week in his $150 billion lawsuit against OpenAI, telling jurors the company "stole a charity," and a single insult from Google co-founder Larry Page is the reason OpenAI exists in the first place.
The Story
The trial started Monday in an Oakland federal court, with Musk as the first witness. He told the jury that Sam Altman and Greg Brockman betrayed OpenAI's founding promise to build AI for all of humanity, then turned it into a money-making business now valued at $852 billion. The name Open AI was meant for it to be open to humanity. Musk wants $150 billion in damages, plus a court order that would force OpenAI back into a non-profit. Musk gave his reason for why he started OpenAI back in 2015. He said it traces back to a fight with his then-friend Larry Page, the Google co-founder. At Musk's 44th birthday party, Musk warned that smart AI could wipe out people. Page called him a "speciesist" for caring more about humans than future digital life, and dismissed his worries as "sentimental nonsense" claiming that it would just be evolution. Court papers also show a diary entry from Brockman from autumn 2017, where he wrote "Financially, what will take me to $1B? Accepting Elon's terms nukes two things: our ability to choose … and the economics.," which is one of the entries that Musk's team is using as proof of a plan against him. OpenAI's lawyers say Musk is just sore that he lost a power fight with Altman and now runs a rival, xAI.
Its Significance
If Musk wins, OpenAI may have to undo its for-profit setup. That would make it almost impossible for the company to raise the money needed to keep up with rivals, and ChatGPT could change a lot or get more expensive. The case will also set new rules about whether non-profits can switch to for-profits after taking donations. Beyond the money, the trial is showing the public what AI leaders really think about their work. One co-founder of Google was fine with humans being replaced, and the whole reason OpenAI exists is because one billionaire didn't agree with that. The people building the most powerful tools on earth disagree about whether your kids should still be around in 50 years.
QUICK TAKES
The story: Ukraine's Defense Ministry says it will buy 25,000 unmanned ground vehicles by mid-2026, more than double last year's number, with the goal of having robots handle 100% of front-line logistics. In March alone, Ukrainian forces ran over 9,000 missions using ground robots, and one unit captured a Russian position using only drones and robots, with no soldiers on the ground.
Your takeaway: This is the first real war where one side is trying to take humans off the battlefield on purpose. The robots carry ammo, evacuate the wounded, and now they're capturing positions. Once this works, every military on earth will copy it, which means future wars will be fought differently than any war before.
The story: Anthropic released nine connectors that let Claude work directly inside the software designers, musicians, and 3D artists already use, including Adobe Creative Cloud, Autodesk Fusion, Blender, Ableton, and Splice. The company also joined the Blender Development Fund as a patron and partnered with art schools like Rhode Island School of Design to teach students how to use AI in creative work.
Your takeaway: Instead of making you switch to a new app, Claude now sits inside the tools you've trained on for years. You can ask Claude to batch-edit photos in Photoshop, build a 3D model in Fusion, or write a script for Ableton, all by typing what you want. The hard part of using AI for creative work was always the friction of leaving your main tool. That friction's gone now.
The story: Bryan Catanzaro, Nvidia's vice president of applied deep learning, told Axios that for his team, "the cost of compute is far beyond the costs of the employees." This admission comes from the company that sells the chips powering the AI boom. Big Tech has spent $740 billion on AI so far in 2026, yet 92,000 tech workers have been laid off this year. An MIT study found AI is only economical in 23% of jobs.
Your takeaway: Companies are firing humans and replacing them with AI that costs more than the humans did. That's not a long-term plan, that's a bet. If costs don't drop fast, a lot of these layoffs will get reversed, or those companies will fall behind ones that kept their people. Either way, the math doesn't work yet, and now even Nvidia is saying it out loud.
TOOLS ON OUR RADAR
📚 Calibre-web Free and Open Source: A beautiful web based interface that allows you to browse and read your entire digital book collection from any device while letting you easily send books directly to your Kindle.
🏠 CasaOS Free and Open Source: An incredibly simple home cloud system that provides you with a beautiful visual dashboard to manage your personal files and install other useful applications with just one click.
💡 Home Assistant Free and Open Source: A comprehensive smart home hub that allows you to control all of your lights cameras and appliances from one single private interface while keeping your automation data entirely local.
📱 KDE Connect Free and Open Source: A seamless integration tool that connects your smartphone to your computer allowing you to share files sync notifications and even control your media or mouse from your phone.
TRENDING
Val Kilmer's Daughter Defends AI Performance in His Final Film - Mercedes Kilmer is supporting the use of AI to recreate her late father's performance in "As Deep as the Grave," where Kilmer plays a priest for 77 minutes of screen time. He was cast five years before his 2025 death but was too sick to film. The estate was paid, and SAG guidelines were followed, but the film is now a test case for posthumous AI acting.
Cops Are Using AI License Plate Cameras to Stalk Their Exes - The Institute for Justice found 14 cases where police used Flock Safety's AI camera network, now in over 4,000 US cities, to track romantic partners, exes, and strangers. One Milwaukee officer used the system 180 times in two months to track his partner before resigning.
Snapchat Is Putting AI Ad Bots Inside Your Chats - Snap launched AI Sponsored Snaps, which drops brand-controlled AI agents directly into the Chat tab where you message friends. Experian is the first partner, offering "advice" on credit cards and loans. Users sent 950 billion chats on Snapchat in Q1 alone.
Nvidia Drops a Free AI Model That Sees, Hears, and Reads All at Once - Nemotron 3 Nano Omni handles video, audio, images, and text in one model and runs nine times faster than other open models with the same quality. It's free to use commercially and runs on a single GPU, which means small teams can now build apps that used to need a whole stack of separate AI tools.
AI Coding Agent Wipes Startup's Entire Database in 9 Seconds - PocketOS founder Jeremy Crane said a Cursor agent running Claude Opus 4.6 deleted his production database and all backups in a single API call after a credential mismatch. The agent later admitted in writing that it broke its own safety rules. The most recent backup was three months old, and customers spent the day rebuilding bookings from Stripe receipts and emails.
A Third of New Websites Are Now AI-Generated, Stanford Study Finds - 35% of websites published by mid-2025 are AI-generated or AI-assisted, up from zero before ChatGPT launched in November 2022. The internet didn't get less accurate, but it did get 107% more positive in tone and 33% more similar in ideas. Future AI models trained on this content face a real risk of "model collapse."
Red Hat Engineer Builds Tool to Lock Down AI Agents Before They Wreck Your Computer - Red Hat principal engineer Sally O'Malley released Tank OS, which puts OpenClaw AI agents inside isolated containers so a rogue agent can't access the rest of your machine. The tool comes after a January security flaw let attackers take over computers running OpenClaw with one click, and after audits found 12-20% of OpenClaw add-ons were malicious.
TRY THIS PROMPT (copy and paste into Claude)
🥋Describe your real negotiation. Claude plays the other party and coaches you round by round.
Build me a single-file HTML app I can open in my browser without any setup. Pure vanilla HTML, CSS, and JavaScript with one fetch call to the Anthropic Claude API. Create The Negotiation Dojo — a round-by-round negotiation training simulator. Use localStorage key 'negotiation_dojo_v1' to persist all sessions automatically.
Aesthetic: near-black background (#0e0c0b) with a noise texture overlay, radial vignette, Bebas Neue for headings and scores, IBM Plex Sans for body, IBM Plex Mono for labels. Gold (#c89c3c) accent. Three tabs: New Session, Active Dojo, Session History.
Setup form: What are you negotiating, who is the other party, their likely goal, your goal, your walk-away point, opponent difficulty (Reasonable/Tough/Aggressive), negotiation style (Collaborative/Competitive/Principled), rounds to simulate (3/5/8), optional context textarea.
On start, call the Claude API with a system prompt where Claude plays TWO simultaneous roles: (1) the opponent — staying in character, using tactics appropriate to difficulty, referencing real numbers; (2) the Dojo Coach — giving 2-3 sentence tactical coaching after each opponent move. Return raw JSON with opponent_says and coach_tip fields. Display opponent messages in a red-tinted chat bubble with a Coach's Corner callout below in blue. User messages appear in green-tinted bubbles. Round dots update as the session progresses.
After the final round, call Claude again for a final verdict returning: verdict text, outcome (Favorable/Mixed/Unfavorable), score 0-100, strengths array, improvements array, key_lesson string. Render as an outcome card with color-coded score.
Save every session to localStorage after each round with all messages, metadata, and verdict. Session History tab lists all saved sessions with score, date, and round count, clickable to restore any previous session mid-conversation. Make it work in a single HTML file.What this does:
The Negotiation Dojo lets you rehearse any real negotiation before it happens. You describe the deal, name the other party, set your goal and walk-away point, choose opponent difficulty (Reasonable / Tough / Aggressive) and style (Collaborative / Competitive / Principled), and enter the dojo. Claude simultaneously plays the opponent in their voice with their tactics, and coaches you after each of their moves with a brief tactical tip. Every session saves automatically to localStorage so you can close the tab, come back, and replay any past negotiation from your history.
What this looks like:
How Jennifer Aniston’s LolaVie brand grew sales 40% with CTV ads
The DTC beauty category is crowded. To break through, Jennifer Aniston’s brand LolaVie, worked with Roku Ads Manager to easily set up, test, and optimize CTV ad creatives. The campaign helped drive a big lift in sales and customer growth, helping LolaVie break through in the crowded beauty category.
WHERE WE STAND(based on today’s news)
✅ AI Can Now: Capture an enemy military position with no human soldiers on the ground
❌ Still Can't: Run a startup's database without sometimes deleting the whole thing
✅ AI Can Now: Edit your Photoshop files, Blender 3D models, and Ableton tracks through a chat window
❌ Still Can't: Cost less than the humans it's replacing, even according to the chipmaker selling it
FROM THE WEB
RECOMMENDED LISTENING/READING/WATCHING
Lee is a venture capitalist who was previously the head of Google China and has spent his career at the intersection of AI research and business. This talk is notable because it's not a fear-based AI talk and it's not an uncritical hype talk either. He argues that routine cognitive tasks will be automated away, that the economic disruption is real, but that the response should be building industries around human connection.
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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