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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 Scores Higher Than 95% of Human Biologists at Drug Design
TLDR: OpenAI just launched GPT-Rosalind, an AI built for drug research that scored above 95% of human experts on a key biology test.
The Story:
OpenAI dropped a new AI model this week called GPT-Rosalind. It's named after Rosalind Franklin, the scientist whose work helped crack the structure of DNA. This one's built just for life sciences work, like hunting for new drugs and making sense of medical research. Big partners include Amgen, Moderna, Thermo Fisher, and the Allen Institute.
On a test called BixBench, GPT-Rosalind beat every other AI model with published scores. In another test run with a gene therapy company, its top answers ranked above 95% of human experts at predicting RNA sequences. Only approved enterprise customers in the US can use it for now. OpenAI says drugs take 10 to 15 years to go from idea to your pharmacy, and they want to shrink that.
Its Significance:
New medicines take forever and cost a fortune. Only 1 in 10 drugs that start testing ever get approved. Over 30 million Americans live with rare diseases that still don't have good treatments. If AI can help scientists skip the slowest parts of research, real treatments could show up years sooner.
Drug companies know it. Money pouring into AI drug work is set to hit $2.51 billion this year and climb to $16.49 billion by 2034. Google's AlphaFold already won its creators a share of the 2024 Nobel Prize.
QUICK TAKES
The story: Earlier this month, Anthropic locked away an AI called Mythos, saying it was too dangerous to release because it could find and exploit software bugs on its own. Now a security firm called Vidoc reproduced several of those same hacks using GPT-5.4 and Claude Opus 4.6, models anyone can pay for. Each scan cost under $30 per file.
Your takeaway: The "scary AI hacker" is already out of the bag. Vidoc and another firm called AISLE both showed public, available models can hunt for real software flaws. Businesses running any software can't count on Mythos staying locked up to protect them. Defenders and attackers are working with similar tools now.
The story: A new Gallup poll shows 25% of US adults used AI for health questions in the past 30 days. Roughly 14 million say they skipped seeing a doctor because of what AI told them. Only 4% say they strongly trust what AI tells them about their health.
Your takeaway: People are using AI for health even when they don't fully trust it. The American Medical Association says it's fine as a research tool, not a doctor. About 11% of users got advice they thought was unsafe. If you're using ChatGPT to understand a symptom or prescription, that's one thing. If it's replacing your doctor, think twice.
The story: Anthropic launched Claude Design on Friday, built on its brand new Claude Opus 4.7 model. You type what you want, and Claude builds slides, one-pagers, interactive prototypes, and full website mockups. It reads your company's existing code to match your colors and fonts automatically.
Your takeaway: You no longer need Figma or Adobe to turn an idea into something real. Pro, Max, Team, and Enterprise subscribers can try it right now. Figma's stock dropped another 5% right after the launch, which tells you how seriously the design world is taking this.
TOOLS ON OUR RADAR
🧩 ComfyUI Free and Open Source: A powerful visual workspace that lets you create high quality images by connecting different artificial intelligence modules together using a simple drag and drop system.
💬 Chatbox Paid: A beautiful desktop application that allows you to manage and chat with multiple artificial intelligence models in one highly organized and secure local interface.
🔒 PrivateGPT Free: A document assistant that allows you to upload and chat with your own private files locally on your computer without any data ever leaving your device.
🎥 Screenpipe Paid: A local desktop application that safely records and indexes everything you see and hear on your computer so you can search through your own history using natural
TRENDING
Netflix is adding a TikTok-like vertical video feed and leaning hard on AI picks — Netflix confirmed on its Q1 earnings call that vertical clips will hit its app by the end of April. Tap a clip, jump into the full show. The company also plans way more AI for show picks and for making ads more personal. Revenue was $12.25 billion last quarter, up 16%.
A prominent PR firm is running a fake news site that rips off real journalists at huge scale — Futurism's new investigation shows TOP Agency (clients include Budweiser, Microsoft, and Intel) runs a site called National Today that rewrites other people's reporting using AI. It sometimes fabricates quotes. It sometimes turns real people into "Jane Doe." The site pretends to be local news to game Google.
Sam Altman's eye-scanning project is coming to Tinder, Zoom, and Docusign — World, the company that scans eyeballs to prove you're a real person, announced huge expansion plans Friday. A "verified human" badge is coming to Tinder profiles worldwide. Zoom will use it to stop deepfake meetings. Docusign will use it for real signatures. Altman's pitch: spot real people in a world filling up with AI.
Two MIT scientists built a no-code AI for protein design. Universities use it free — Tristan Bepler and Tim Lu started OpenProtein.AI to put powerful AI models in the hands of regular biologists who don't know how to code. Their tool, called PoET, can design new proteins, predict how they'll behave, and learn from your own lab data. Drug companies pay. Academic scientists get it free.
Elon Musk wants the government to send everyone a big check as AI takes jobs — Musk posted on X Friday that "Universal HIGH INCOME" checks from the federal government are the answer to AI-driven unemployment. His post got 32 million views in hours. He argues AI and robots will make so much stuff that fat checks won't cause inflation. Economists pushed back fast. Andrew Yang, who ran on a similar idea in 2020, gave tepid support.
TRY THIS PROMPT (copy and paste into Claude, ChatGPT, or Gemini)
🌱 A tiny pixel plant that depends on you. Water, sunlight, and conversation. Neglect has consequences.
Build me a single-file HTML app I can open in my browser without any setup. Pure vanilla HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, no frameworks, no CDN. Create an Ant Colony Simulator with a dark earth brown (#1a1410) background and rust orange (#c4622d) accents. Include: an HTML5 canvas rendering 80 pixel ants that spawn from a central nest, wander outward, and drop two kinds of pheromone trails (one heading home, one heading toward food), food sources as green circles the ants harvest and carry back to the nest, a pheromone grid system so ants actually follow strong trails with some randomness, walls the user can paint to block paths, four interactive tools (Drop Food, Build Wall, Erase, Move Nest) activated by clicking on the canvas, sliders for Ant Count (10-250), Speed, Pheromone Life, and Randomness, toggles for Show Trails, Show Ant Mood, and Pause, a stats panel tracking ants, food stored, food sources, ants carrying food, total deliveries, and runtime, a Scatter Food button that drops 8 food piles around the nest, plus Clear Food, Clear Walls, and Reset Colony buttons. Ants carrying food should appear in a brighter orange. Make it work in a single HTML file.What this does:
🌱A tiny pixel plant that depends on you. Water it, move it into the sun, talk to it, prune it. Vitals decay in real time, so if you walk away for too long the plant gets thirsty, lonely, or sick. Care for it well and it grows through six stages over the course of days, eventually flowering. Neglect it and it withers and dies. It even speaks to you in little speech bubbles, complaining when it's thirsty and thanking you when it's happy.
What this looks like
WHERE WE STAND(based on today’s news)
✅ AI Can Now: Score above the 95th percentile of human experts on RNA sequence prediction (OpenAI's GPT-Rosalind).
❌ Still Can't: Push a fully AI-designed drug through Phase 3 clinical trials. Not one has made it.
✅ AI Can Now: Read a company's existing codebase and apply its fonts, colors, and design system automatically.
❌ Still Can't: Stay locked behind one lab's walls. Public GPT-5.4 and Claude Opus 4.6 reproduced Anthropic's "too dangerous" Mythos findings for under $30 per file.
FROM THE WEB
RECOMMENDED LISTENING/READING/WATCHING
From Gore Verbinski, the director behind Pirates of the Caribbean, comes a gleefully unhinged sci-fi comedy about a man from the future who shows up at a Los Angeles diner and starts recruiting the wrong people to help him fight against a rogue AI threatening to end the world. Sam Rockwell is perfectly cast as someone who has clearly done this 117 times before and is running out of patience. Worth noting that the film was made entirely without AI. It's loud, chaotic, and very much on the nose about social media and algorithmic manipulation, which is either the point or the problem depending on your tolerance for being yelled at about things you already know. Divisive but memorable, and a playful return to form for a director who's been away too long.
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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