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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
China’s DeepSeek AI Is Coming for Anthropic's Hottest Product
TLDR: DeepSeek, the Chinese AI lab that wiped nearly $600 billion off Nvidia's market value in January 2025, is now building a free open-source rival to Anthropic's Claude Code, with a community version already pulling 5,000 GitHub stars in days.
The Story: DeepSeek is forming a new "Harness" team in Beijing to build DeepSeek Code Harness, an agentic coding tool aimed straight at Anthropic's Claude Code and OpenAI's Codex. The team is hiring a product manager and an R&D engineer, both required to have hands-on experience with Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, and GitHub Copilot. Their internal formula is simple: "Model + Harness = Agent." The harness is everything around the model itself, like memory, file reading, and tool use. Developers didn't wait for the official version. A community-built clone called DeepSeek-TUI already runs on DeepSeek's cheap models and pulled in 5,000+ GitHub stars within days of launch. This isn't DeepSeek's first hit. In January 2025, the lab's R1 model rattled Wall Street so hard that Nvidia lost close to $600 billion in a single trading day, the biggest one-day drop for any company in U.S. history. OpenAI has accused DeepSeek of using its model outputs to train its own, a claim DeepSeek hasn't directly answered.
Its Significance: Claude Code is one of Anthropic's most valuable products, with developers paying hundreds of dollars a month. If DeepSeek ships a free version that's even 80% as good, the price floor for coding agents drops fast, and with Anthropic planning to go public soon complicates things even further. That matters to anyone who codes for a living, since cheaper tools mean smaller companies and solo builders can do what only big teams could afford last year. It also raises hard questions about IP. If a free Chinese version really was trained on OpenAI's outputs, U.S. companies may push for new export and trade rules. For regular users, the upside is more choice and lower prices. The downside is that the most-used coding tool in the world could end up tied to whichever country wins this race.
QUICK TAKES
The story: Dr. Arturo Loaiza-Bonilla, head of cancer care at Saint Luke's University Health Network, says AI now helps him match patients to clinical trials, summarize patient notes, and cut paperwork. He calls it "connective tissue" that lets doctors spend more face time with patients instead of typing.
Your takeaway: Cancer doctors aren't being replaced. They're getting an assistant that handles the boring stuff so they can talk to you. Ask your own doctor if their office uses AI scribes. If yes, you might notice they look at you instead of a screen.
The story: Spotify and Universal Music Group signed a deal letting Premium users create AI-generated covers and remixes of songs from artists who opt in. The feature launches as a paid add-on, and participating artists and songwriters get a cut of the money.
Your takeaway: This is the first big label deal that pays artists when fans use AI to remix their songs. If it works, it could be the model the whole industry copies, since the alternative is unlicensed AI music tools that pay no one.
The story: Steven Rosenbaum's new book "The Future of Truth" was caught with more than six fake or misattributed quotes from AI tools he used to write it. One fake quote attributed to journalist Kara Swisher made her "sound like I have a stick up my butt," she told the New York Times. Rosenbaum says he'll keep using AI but check it more carefully.
Your takeaway: AI tools make up quotes, names, and sources, and they sound real enough to fool a published author. If you use ChatGPT or Claude for research, never trust a quote without checking the original source yourself. The author still wants to use AI. He just learned the hard way it can't be trusted alone.
TOOLS ON OUR RADAR
🎼 MuseScore Free and Open Source: An absolutely phenomenal music composition application that lets you write beautiful sheet music and hear your creations played back by a virtual orchestra.
🗜️ PeaZip Free and Open Source: A wonderfully secure file extraction tool that helps you open compressed folders and safely encrypt your private archives with highly advanced security protocols.
🖼️ Upscayl Freemium: An incredibly powerful desktop application that uses artificial intelligence to magically enlarge blurry photographs and enhance old low resolution images into stunning high definition.
📷 DigiKam Free and Open Source: An incredibly advanced professional photo management application that handles massive libraries of high resolution pictures while providing powerful tools to sort tag and edit your memories.
TRENDING
Spotify Investor Day Announces AI Podcasts and Real-Time Episode Questions - Spotify is rolling out personal AI-generated podcasts, a chatbot that answers questions about the episode you're listening to, and a new desktop app called Studio that builds daily audio briefings from your email and calendar.
1 in 7 Young Adults in Relationships Secretly Chat With AI Romantic Partners - A new Brigham Young University study of 2,431 U.S. adults aged 18 to 30 found 15% regularly use AI romantic chatbots while in a real relationship, and 69% say it's important their partner never finds out the full extent. Regular use was linked to a 46% drop in relationship stability.
An Author Wrote a Book About AI Lies, Then AI Wrote Fake Quotes Inside It - Steven Rosenbaum's new book "The Future of Truth" was caught with more than six fake or misattributed quotes from AI tools he used to write it. One fake quote attributed to journalist Kara Swisher made her "sound like I have a stick up my butt," she told the New York Times. Rosenbaum says he'll keep using AI but check it more carefully.
ChatGPT Now Builds and Edits PowerPoint Slides From a Text Prompt - OpenAI's PowerPoint beta lets all ChatGPT users create decks, rewrite slides, and reorganize entire presentations using plain language inside PowerPoint itself. It can pull from connected Gmail, Outlook, and SharePoint accounts.
How AI and Edge Computing Are Changing Battlefield Drones - At SOF Week 2026, One Stop Systems product chief Jim Ison explained how edge computing lets drones run AI models on the device itself, so they can spot threats and react in milliseconds without needing a cloud connection. This matters in war zones where signals get jammed.
A Wired Writer Cloned Himself With Google's New Gemini Avatar Tool - Google's new Gemini Omni model lets paid users build a photorealistic AI avatar of themselves in about five minutes by reading numbers on camera. The clone can star in AI-generated videos with their real face and voice. Google limits the feature to adults using their own likeness, with a SynthID watermark on every video.
TRY THIS PROMPT (copy and paste into Claude, ChatGPT, or Gemini)
🕯️One hour. One room. The people you love. Get the lecture you'd actually give.
Build a single-file HTML app with vanilla HTML/CSS/JS. The Last Lecture — write the lecture someone would give if they had one hour and the people they love. Persist to localStorage key 'last_lecture_v1'.
Aesthetic: aged paper cream (#f1ece1), grain texture, warm spotlight from above. EB Garamond serif for body (400-600), Libre Caslon Text for labels, Inter for UI. Burnt amber accent (#8c5a28). Editorial book feel with section dividers using horizontal rules.
Form: life textarea, learnings textarea, audience dropdown (children/students/strangers/younger self/closest friends), voice dropdown (warm/funny/plainspoken/reflective/passionate).
System instructions to the model: write the lecture only THIS person could give using what they told you. Voice should feel earned, lived-in, slightly imperfect — like a real person speaking, not a TED talk. Return raw JSON: title (specific evocative — not "The Last Lecture"), subtitle, opening (2-3 paragraphs), lessons array (4-5 items: specific title + 1-2 paragraph text using their details), story (one vivid moment from their life, 2-3 paragraphs), closing (2-3 sentences), final_line (one short memorable benediction).
Render as a printed lecture: ornamental title card with double horizontal rules, Opening section in serif paragraphs, Lessons as numbered cards with big italic numbers and amber left-borders, Story card with smart-quote watermarks, dark Closing card with cream text, centered final line in italic. Save lectures to localStorage.What this does: Tell it what your life has been and what you've learned. Get back the lecture in your voice — title, opening, 4–5 lessons drawn from your actual life, one specific story that carries everything, a closing, and a final line. Pick the audience and tone. Saves to localStorage.
What this looks like:
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WHERE WE STAND(based on today’s news)
✅ AI Can Now: Build a photorealistic video clone of you from a five-minute phone scan (Google Gemini Omni)
❌ Still Can't: Reliably quote real people without making up things they never said (Steven Rosenbaum's book)
✅ AI Can Now: Run on a drone in a contested battlefield with no cloud connection
❌ Still Can't: Replace the human judgment of an oncologist deciding cancer treatment
RECOMMENDED LISTENING/READING/WATCHING
A near-future thriller set on a Chinese island that processes 70% of the world's electronic waste, where migrant workers strip down old AI-enabled devices that occasionally still think. Chen worked at Google and Baidu before writing this, and the book has the unsettling specificity of someone who has actually seen the supply chain. Translated by Ken Liu and praised by Liu Cixin, but nowhere near as well-known as it should be in the West.
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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