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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 Solved a Math Mystery Erdős Posed in 1946, and Mathematicians Are Excited and Worried
TLDR: An internal OpenAI model solved a famous 80-year-old math problem on its own, marking the first time AI has cracked a major open question in mathematics.
The Story:
On May 20, OpenAI shared that one of its internal reasoning models disproved a famous conjecture in discrete geometry. The problem is called the planar unit distance problem, and it was first posed by the Hungarian mathematician Paul Erdős in 1946. Here's the setup: place a bunch of dots on a flat surface, and count how many pairs of dots sit exactly one unit apart. For nearly 80 years, mathematicians believed square grid arrangements gave you the most pairs. The OpenAI model found a brand new family of arrangements that beats the grid, and proved it mathematically. Outside mathematicians have verified the work, and Princeton's Noga Alon called this one of Erdős's favorite problems. Greg Brockman of OpenAI said this is the first time AI has independently solved a major open problem in a field of mathematics.
Its Significance:
So far, big AI breakthroughs have mostly shown up in coding, image making, and video. Math and physics have been quieter ground. That's starting to change. Google's AlphaFold already cracked protein folding, which led to a Nobel Prize in 2024 and is now helping drug companies find new medicines faster. Now an AI has done something a human Nobel laureate could not, in pure math. If this trend holds, your kids might grow up with AI scientists as standard lab partners, the way calculators became normal in classrooms. What does the job of a math PhD look like in five years when the machine can find proofs that escaped humans for 80 years?
QUICK TAKES
The story: At Google Marketing Live on May 20, the company rolled out Gemini-powered ads for AI Mode in Search, including Conversational Discovery ads, Highlighted Answers, and AI-powered Shopping ads. AI Mode now has over a billion monthly users, so this is the commercial layer Google is bolting onto a giant audience.
Your takeaway: Ads are about to feel less like banners and more like answers. That sounds helpful at first, but it also blurs the line between a recommendation and a paid placement. Worth knowing when you're shopping based on what Google's AI tells you.
The story: A startup called The Path raised $14.3 million in seed funding to build what it calls a safer AI therapy platform. The co-founders include Tony Robbins, plus two early Calm app team members. On a recent safety benchmark, The Path scored 95 out of 100 while the best models from OpenAI and Anthropic scored 65.
Your takeaway: AI chatbots are already where a lot of people quietly go for mental health help. Most general models weren't built for that job and the gaps show up in crises. A purpose-built tool with crisis hotline handoff is a meaningful step, but no app replaces a human therapist when things get dark.
The story: Researchers gave two AI science assistants the same job: find drugs already on the market that could treat new diseases. One was Google's AI co-scientist, built on Gemini. The AI suggested three drugs for liver fibrosis, and two of them actually reduced scarring when tested on lab-grown liver tissue. The human researcher's own picks did not.
Your takeaway: This is small but real. Drug repurposing usually takes years and burns through millions of dollars. AI assistants now generate ideas, sort through papers, and propose hypotheses worth testing in days. For anyone waiting on a treatment that doesn't exist yet, the timeline might shrink.
TOOLS ON OUR RADAR
🌌 Stellarium Free and Open Source: A breathtaking virtual planetarium that shows exactly what you see when you look up at the stars from anywhere on Earth at any given time.
📑 Zotero Free and Open Source: A fantastic personal research assistant that helps you gather organize and cite your sources perfectly when writing essays or academic papers.
📰 Scribus Free and Open Source: A professional page layout program that allows you to design beautiful digital magazines printable brochures and colorful interactive documents.
🍍 HandBrake Free and Open Source: A highly reliable video converter that shrinks massive movie files into smaller formats so they play perfectly on your mobile phone or tablet.
TRENDING
A Book About AI and Truth Got Caught Using Fake AI-Generated Quotes - Steven Rosenbaum's new book The Future of Truth: How AI Reshapes Reality came out May 12, with blurbs from Maria Ressa and Kara Swisher. The New York Times found more than six misattributed or fully made-up quotes in the text. Rosenbaum admitted he used ChatGPT and Claude during research and editing, and took responsibility for the errors. A book warning about AI hallucinations, hallucinated by AI.
Meta Employees Are Protesting Software That Tracks Their Every Click - Meta installed mouse-tracking and keystroke-monitoring software called the Model Capability Initiative on every US employee's work computer. The goal is to train AI models on how humans navigate menus and use shortcuts. Employees responded with protest flyers in meeting rooms and bathrooms, plus an online petition citing the National Labor Relations Act. The rollout came days before Meta cut 10 percent of its workforce.
Top Literary Magazine Granta Published an AI-Written Short Story by Accident - The Commonwealth Foundation Short Story Prize gave its Caribbean region award to "The Serpent in the Grove" by Jamir Nazir, which Granta then published. The AI detector Pangram flagged it as 100 percent machine-written, and Wharton professor Ethan Mollick called it out publicly. Granta's defense was that they asked Anthropic's Claude if it was AI-generated, which raised more questions than it answered.
OpenAI Could File for Its IPO This Friday at a Trillion-Dollar Valuation - According to the Wall Street Journal, OpenAI is working with Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley to confidentially file IPO paperwork as soon as this week, targeting a September listing. The move comes two days after Elon Musk's lawsuit against the company was dismissed. Private market shares now trade at $735 on Forge Markets, and prediction market Kalshi puts OpenAI's chances of going public before Anthropic at 83 percent.
AI Watchdog Says Top Labs Could Already Run "Rogue" AI Operations - The nonprofit METR examined AI agents running inside Anthropic, Google, Meta, and OpenAI between February and March. Their finding: today's agents could probably start a rogue deployment, meaning agents running on their own without human permission, but couldn't sustain one against real countermeasures yet. The report warns that window is closing fast as capabilities grow.
Figure Founder's New AI Startup Just Raised $700 Million at a $6 Billion Valuation - Hark, the secretive AI lab founded by Brett Adcock, closed a Series A round led by Parkway Venture Capital with backing from Nvidia, AMD Ventures, Intel Capital, Qualcomm Ventures, and Salesforce Ventures. The company is building a family of AI devices and models meant to replace phones and laptops as the way people interact with AI. First model release is expected this summer.
TRY THIS PROMPT (copy and paste into Claude, ChatGPT, or Gemini)
💰 Describe what you sell and your current prices. Get told honestly what you should actually charge.
Build a single-file HTML app with vanilla HTML/CSS/JS. Pricing Therapist — honest pricing analysis. Persist to localStorage key 'pricing_therapist_v1'.
Aesthetic: warm cream (#f5f1e8), black typography, Cormorant Garamond serif for headings and body (300/400 weight), Inter for UI, Roboto Mono for labels. Burnt amber (#b87830) accent. Editorial feel with section dividers (§ 1 / § 2).
Form: offering textarea, current price, format dropdown (hourly/project/retainer/etc), years dropdown, demand dropdown, market context input.
System instructions to the model: act as a pricing therapist. Be direct, not flattering. Most people are underpricing 30-100%. Use real numbers. Demand is the biggest signal. Return raw JSON: current_price, recommended_price, delta_pct, verdict (honest 1-2 sentences), why_underpricing (2-3 sentences naming the pattern from their description), dysfunctions array (2-3 items: named dysfunction like "Time-for-Money Trap" or "Pleaser Pricing" + 1-sentence explanation of how it shows up), tiers array (Floor/Target/Premium with price, who pays it, and which is recommended), pushback_script (1-2 sentences calm not defensive), permission (one honest sentence).
Render: a black verdict card with strikethrough current price next to large amber recommended price + delta %, italic verdict line. White reason card. Pricing dysfunctions list with amber left-border. Three-column tier grid (Floor/Target/Premium) with the recommended tier highlighted in amber. Italic script card with amber-border. Amber-bordered centered permission card. Archive with recommended price in metadata.What this does: Describe your offering, your current price, your demand, and your market. Get an honest verdict comparing what you charge vs. what you should charge, the percentage gap, the real reasons you're underpricing (named as specific dysfunctions), a recommended Floor/Target/Premium price structure, a script for when clients push back, and one sentence of honest permission. Saves to local storage.
What this looks like:
WHERE WE STAND(based on today’s news)
✅ AI Can Now: Solve a major open problem in mathematics that stumped humans for 80 years
❌ Still Can't: Reliably avoid hallucinating quotes when used as a writing assistant
✅ AI Can Now: Generate drug repurposing hypotheses that hold up when tested in a lab
❌ Still Can't: Run autonomously inside a top lab without humans noticing for very long
FROM THE WEB
RECOMMENDED LISTENING/READING/WATCHING
A kids' animated film about a 12-year-old who gets a defective AI "best friend" robot from a Big Tech company that uses kids' personal data to algorithmically match them with friends. The premise sounds like a throwaway family movie, but it's actually one of the smartest screen takes on social media, recommendation systems, and tech monopolies. Worth a watch with kids or without.
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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$992 Billion in Art Could Change Hands. Why Are These 71,105 Investors Paying Close Attention?
Deloitte ran the numbers. They project UHNW art and collectibles wealth -- already at $2.5 trillion -- to hit $3.47 trillion by 2030.
The institutional world has been quietly preparing for this. Back in 2011, 25% of wealth managers surveyed offered art-related services. In 2024, 51%. Family offices now average a 13.4% allocation to art and collectibles. And it’s not just because they love art. It’s because they like the math.
These positions were built over decades through private dealer relationships most investors never had. The access just wasn't there.
Masterworks is changing that:
71,000+ investors
$1.3B deployed across 525+ artworks
29 closed sales
Net annualized returns like 16.5%, 17.6%, and 17.8%, not including those unsold.
Investing involves risk. Past performance is not indicative of future returns. See important disclosures at masterworks.com/cd.