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 Maker Open AIJust Offered the US Government $42 Billion
TLDR: OpenAI has offered the US government a 5% stake in the company, worth about $42.6 billion, and it wants Anthropic, Google, and Meta to hand over the same.
The Story:
OpenAI has been talking with the US government about giving it a 5% ownership stake in the company, according to a Financial Times report covered by Decrypt. At OpenAI's $852 billion valuation from its March funding round, that slice is worth roughly $42.6 billion. CEO Sam Altman pitched the idea to the White House. He reportedly wants the other big US AI companies, Anthropic, Google, and Meta, to give up a matching 5% into the same pot. The plan copies the Alaska Permanent Fund, a state fund that invests oil money and mails every Alaskan a check each year. None of the other companies have said yes, the talks are early, and any real deal would likely need Congress to sign off.
Its Significance:
This is OpenAI trying to buy goodwill with something that costs it nothing today: a piece of future profit. If it goes through, regular Americans could someday get a small payout from AI's growth, the way Alaskans get an oil check. That's the friendly version, and it's a big deal on its own. It would be the first time the US government owns a stake in a private AI company. The government would own part of a company it's also supposed to police. A regulator that makes money when OpenAI's value climbs has less reason to come down hard when something goes wrong.
QUICK TAKES
The story: Security firm Sysdig says it caught the first ransomware attack run start to finish by an AI, with no human at the keyboard. The bot, nicknamed JADEPUFFER, broke in through an old unpatched bug, stole logins, then locked up a company's database and wiped the data.
Your takeaway: The victim can't get their files back even if they pay, because the AI never saved the key. As one researcher put it, the cost to run an attack like this is now close to whatever it costs to rent an AI agent. Patch your stuff.
The story: Researchers at TU Delft and Wageningen built a way for drones to feel something like pain when a propeller wears out or breaks. The drone reads warning signs in its own sensor data and eases off before it loses control, the way you limp home on a sprained ankle instead of sprinting.
Your takeaway: They tested it with blade damage from zero all the way to 55%, and it caught trouble early. As drones start flying over neighborhoods with packages, knowing when to slow down instead of crashing is a safety win we'll all benefit from.
The story: Anthropic released Claude Science, an app that pulls together the messy pile of tools scientists juggle, like PubMed, Jupyter, and R, into one place. The company is also starting its own drug program aimed at "neglected" diseases that big drugmakers usually skip.
Your takeaway: One lab said work that used to take about two years now moves far faster, and another cut an analysis to roughly a tenth of the time. Cheaper, quicker research on diseases nobody was funding could reach real patients.
TOOLS ON OUR RADAR
🎧 Audiobookshelf Free and Open Source: A fantastic dedicated library server specifically designed to help you organize stream and track your progress through your massive collection of digital audiobooks and podcasts.
📰 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.
🖋️ Caret Paid: A sleek and professional writing assistant that provides intelligent inline suggestions and autocorrect features across all of your desktop applications to help you write faster and more accurately.
🎵 Udio Freemium: A highly expressive artificial intelligence music creator that produces astonishingly realistic tracks across any genre strictly from your conversational text prompts.
TRENDING
Amazon is shutting the door on Mechanical Turk - Amazon's 20-year-old crowd-work marketplace closes to new customers on July 30, and even the AI-labeling boom couldn't keep it alive.
Anthropic shared how it locks down its newest model - After a government pause last month, Anthropic detailed the safety filters on Claude Fable 5 and, with Amazon, Microsoft, and Google, proposed a shared way to grade how dangerous an AI "jailbreak" really is.
Companies using the most AI are hiring the most people - New data from Ramp pushes back on the "AI kills jobs" story, showing the heaviest AI adopters are growing headcount, including entry-level roles, though the payoff takes time to show up.
A brain-inspired chip design ran faster on far less power - Researchers built an AI setup that copies how the brain mixes fast and slow signals, hitting over 4x the speed and 5x better energy use than earlier versions on long tasks.
Wall Street banks are matching a $1,000 boost to kids' new government savings accounts - Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs will each add $1,000 on top of the US government's $1,000 seed deposit for employees' children, as the new federal savings accounts launch July 4.
Microsoft is putting 6,000 AI engineers inside customer offices - Microsoft launched Frontier Company, a $2.5 billion unit that embeds its own experts inside businesses to build and run AI systems, matching similar moves from Amazon, OpenAI, and Anthropic.
TRY THIS PROMPT (copy and paste into Claude, ChatGPT, or Gemini)
🧭 Give it your city and a free afternoon. Get a small, unexpected outing planned that turns an ordinary day into a discovery.
Build a single-file HTML app with vanilla HTML/CSS/JS. The Micro-Adventure Generator — enter your city and a free window, get a small unexpected outing planned. Persist to localStorage key 'micro_adventure_v1'.
Aesthetic: dark forest (#0c1210), green (#6ec88a) primary with green glow top-left and warm amber glow bottom-right. Bricolage Grotesque sans for headings, Newsreader serif italic for pitches/details, JetBrains Mono for labels. Amber (#f0b450) for the "optional twist" card. A vertical itinerary timeline with emoji dots connected by a gradient line.
Form: city/neighborhood input (encourage specificity), dropdowns for time (hour → full day), transport (foot/bike/transit/car), budget (free-ish → a bit), vibe (surprise / calm / curious / thrill / creative / social), company (solo / partner / friend / kids), optional notes textarea (weather, interests, avoid).
System instructions: creative local guide designing micro-adventures — small, low-cost, unexpected outings favoring the overlooked and sensory over generic tourist stuff. CRITICAL: no live data, so describe TYPES of places and how to find them ("find the oldest bakery within a few blocks"), never invent specific business names or addresses. Tailor to city character, time, transport, budget, vibe, company; warm and evocative. Return raw JSON: title (catchy), pitch (2-3 sentences selling the feeling), meta_chips (3-4 short tags), steps (4-5: emoji + time + what (punchy) + detail on how/what to notice, no invented names), prep (2-3 before-you-go items), twist (optional level-up), souvenir (something intangible/tiny to bring back). Form a natural arc, respect the time budget.
Render: gradient title card (name + italic pitch + meta chips). Itinerary timeline with emoji dots + connecting gradient line, each step showing time / bold what / italic detail. Two-column split: green "before you go" checklist (✓) and amber "optional twist." "Bring back" souvenir card. Buttons: copy plan, "somewhere else" (re-run), start over. Archive by title + city.What this does: Enter your neighborhood, how much time you have, how you're getting around, budget, the vibe you want, and whether you're solo or with someone. It designs a micro-adventure: a named outing with a pitch, quick meta tags, and a step-by-step plan laid out as a timeline with timing and what to notice at each stop. Because it has no live map data, it guides you to discover real spots (the oldest bakery within a few blocks, a hidden staircase) rather than inventing fake business names. You also get a quick before-you-go checklist, an optional twist to level it up, and something intangible to bring back. "Somewhere else" re-rolls a fresh plan; everything saves to localStorage.
What this looks like:
WHERE WE STAND(based on today’s news)
✅ AI Can Now: Chain together a full ransomware attack end to end, from breaking in to wiping a database, with no human running it.
❌ Still Can't: Reliably sense when its own hardware, like a drone's worn propeller, is about to fail, which is why researchers had to add a separate "pain" warning system.
✅ AI Can Now: Act as a research workbench that ties lab tools together and cuts some drug analysis to about a tenth of the time.
❌ Still Can't: Be trusted with open-ended cybersecurity tasks without safety filters, which is why Anthropic's newest model routes risky requests through classifiers first.
FROM THE WEB
RECOMMENDED LISTENING/READING/WATCHING
The Employees by Olga Ravn - Book
A 2018 Danish novel (International Booker shortlisted) told entirely as short witness statements from the mixed human and humanoid crew of the Six-Thousand Ship, who have taken aboard some strange objects from a newly discovered planet and started feeling unusual longings. Ravn wrote it four years before ChatGPT and its depiction of humanoids grown in pods, uploaded and re-uploaded across bodies, captures the emotional strangeness of AI companionship better than most recent novels. Only 130 pages, reads like a poem.
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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