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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
Mark Zuckerberg Says AI In Instagram Increases Screen Time by Double Digits
TLDR: Meta told investors its new AI recommendation system grew Instagram time spent by double digits, and it said so like it was good news.
The Story:
On July 29, Meta walked Wall Street through its second quarter and credited AI for a jump in how long people stay on Instagram. Mark Zuckerberg said global time spent on the app grew by double digits compared to a year ago, "largely driven by improvements to our feed and Reels recommendations." He described the Reels system as running faster now on a new setup that reaches further back into what each person has already watched, which sharpens what it predicts you'll want next. CFO Susan Li added that Meta trained large language models to read what a Reel or a post is actually about, down to its topic and its tone. Meta averaged 3.6 billion daily users in June. It spent $31.1 billion on capital expenses in the quarter, more than double the $17 billion it spent a year earlier, most of it on AI.
Its Significance:
Meta said this out loud, on a call, to investors. The AI works better now, and "better" means you put the phone down later.
People who helped build these feeds have been warning about them for years. Tristan Harris walked away from Google and spent the next decade explaining how apps are designed to tug at you. A former Facebook executive wrote a whole memoir about her time inside the company. The documentary The Social Dilemma lined up ex-employees from several big platforms and let them say, on camera, that they knew what they'd made. None of it slowed anything down.
Now the same feed runs on models that understand tone. Not just "she watched three cooking videos" but what those videos felt like, and what mood you were probably in when you watched them. The old algorithm guessed. This one reads you.
Some of the sharpest engineering minds alive could be working on protein folding or grid storage or drug discovery. A lot of them are working on how to keep your thumb moving for four more minutes.
Instagram now has a "Your Algorithm" panel on Reels where you can add or drop interest categories by hand. Meta has admitted internally that most people never touch manual controls. If your screen time report jumped this summer and you couldn't work out why, you have your answer.
QUICK TAKES
The story: Hint launched nationwide this week. You type in your address, and it pulls public records on your property, weather, soil, and air quality, then lets you upload inspection reports, warranties, insurance policies, and plumber invoices so an assistant can answer questions about your own house. Stewart is a working co-founder with equity, not a paid face, and the company raised $10 million in seed funding from Slow Ventures.
Your takeaway: The home is turning into one of the busiest fights in consumer AI, probably second only to wearables. You've got software like Hint on one side, and hardware on the other with robot vacuums that map your floors and home robots inching toward doing chores. The pitch here is narrow: it can tell a Texas homeowner to water the foundation before dry clay season cracks it. That's the sort of thing a generic chatbot would never think to bring up, because it doesn't know where you live or what your dirt is made of.
The story: Security researcher Daniel Fox Franke was tracking down a crash in ripgrep, a common search tool, when OpenAI's GPT-5.6 Sol kept getting cut off by a cybersecurity filter that wouldn't let it discuss memory allocation or how to reproduce the crash. He finished the job using two open-weight models from Chinese companies, Z'ai's GLM 5.2 and Moonshot's Kimi K3, and traced the problem to what looks like a Linux kernel bug.
Your takeaway: The guardrails meant to stop attackers also stop the people patching holes. If you use AI for anything technical and hit a wall of refusals, you're not doing anything wrong, and having a second, more open model on hand is practical.
The story: Google DeepMind rolled Lyria 3.5 into Flow Music on July 29, with better melodies, better lyric structure, and singing that's meant to sound more expressive and pronounce words correctly. It also added tempo and length controls, plus exportable stems so you can pull the parts of a song apart.
Your takeaway: Vocals are exactly where Suno has been winning, so Google aimed at the right target. Independent tests earlier this year put Lyria's last version around Suno v4.5, still a step behind v5, and Google published no head-to-head numbers this time. What Google does have is clean paperwork: Lyria trains on licensed material, while Suno and Udio are both tied up in copyright litigation with Sony Music. If you plan to sell what you make, that difference may end up mattering more than the audio.
TOOLS ON OUR RADAR
💰 MoneyManagerEx Free and Open Source: A visually intuitive and highly comprehensive personal finance application that helps you carefully track your bank accounts monitor daily expenses and organize your family budget offline.
🌍 QGIS Free and Open Source: A tremendously powerful mapping tool used by professionals and hobbyists to create beautiful detailed geographical maps and visualize spatial data.
📹 Jitsi Free and Open Source: A brilliant and completely free video conferencing platform that allows you to instantly host large virtual meetings with your friends and family without creating any user accounts.
📖 Sigil Free and Open Source: An incredibly useful publishing tool specifically designed to help aspiring authors easily format visually organize and seamlessly package their own electronic books for digital distribution.
TRENDING
Schools are putting attack drones in the hallways - Schools in Florida, Georgia, and Colorado start this school year with drones from Mithril Defense that launch from storage boxes when staff hit a panic button, fly through halls at up to 60 mph, and use sirens, strobes, and pepper gel against an intruder. Pilots sit in Austin, Texas, the goal is reaching a threat within 15 seconds, and it costs about $20,000 a year per school.
AI companies are buying millions of books, scanning them, and throwing away the paper - First reported by 404 Media, AI firms are hiring middleman companies to buy used books in bulk without their names attached, then slicing off the spines to scan them. One bookseller said his weekly sales went from around 20 books to several hundred, and he's worried rare and out-of-print titles are being pulped for good. Anthropic did the same thing under a project called Panama, a judge ruled that destroying legally bought books after scanning counts as fair use, and the company later settled with authors for $1.5 billion over separate use of pirated copies.
Microsoft is folding every Copilot into one app - On the July 29 earnings call, Satya Nadella confirmed a Copilot "super app" arriving this quarter that pulls chat, coding, Cowork, and Autopilots into a single place for both regular people and businesses. Microsoft 365 Copilot has passed 30 million paid seats, and no pricing or launch date has been shared yet.
Zuckerberg says billions of people will have a personal AI agent within five years - He described software working for you around the clock on health, money, relationships, and career, and said it's unlikely that future doesn't arrive. Meta's revenue rose 28% past $60 billion, but earnings came in at $6.18 per share against expectations of $7.17, and the stock dropped nearly 10% after hours.
Musk's xAI is suing Minnesota over a law banning "nudification" apps - Minnesota's law takes effect Saturday and is the first in the country to target the tools themselves rather than the people using them, with fines of $500,000 per image. xAI argues in its 38-page filing that the law is too broad, that it bans a type of speech rather than a specific act, and that the penalties could theoretically reach $50 billion for a company whose users made 100,000 images. xAI says it doesn't dispute the state's interest in stopping non-consensual nude images from spreading.
Anthropic's Mythos is finding bugs faster than Microsoft can patch them - Internal documents reviewed by ProPublica show Mythos flagged 90 critical and 141 important bugs in SharePoint in April alone, and Microsoft is triaging by severity because it can't fix everything. The catch is that Mythos can chain several low-level flaws together into one serious attack, so the bugs Microsoft deprioritizes may not stay harmless.
TRY THIS PROMPT (copy and paste into Claude, ChatGPT, or Gemini)
🗺️ Describe the occasion. Get a full clue chain with real, scannable QR codes generated for every stop, ready to print and hide.
Build a single-file HTML app with vanilla HTML/CSS/JS. The QR Scavenger Hunt Maker — describe an occasion and stop count, get a full clue chain with real scannable QR codes for each stop, plus separate printable clue cards and an organizer answer key. Load the QRCode.js library from https://cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/qrcodejs/1.0.0/qrcode.min.js in the head (client-side QR generation, no external API, fully offline once printed).
Aesthetic: dark treasure-map brown-black (#14100a), gold (#d4a034) primary with gold glow top-left, teal (#3a9a86) secondary with glow bottom-right. Bricolage Grotesque (bold geometric) for headings/stop numbers, Kalam (handwritten) for the starting clue and "hide at" notes, Inter for body, JetBrains Mono for labels.
Form: occasion textarea (who/where/vibe), stop-count dropdown (4/5/6/8), setting dropdown (indoor/outdoor/mixed/office), age-group dropdown (young kids/tweens/teens-adults).
System instructions: scavenger hunt designer writing a clue chain where each clue leads to the NEXT stop's physical hiding place, ending in a prize reveal. Clues describe generic hiding-spot TYPES (under/behind/near something), not invented specific furniture; playful, age-matched, no invented brand/store names; each qr_text under 140 characters to keep QR codes easily scannable. Return raw JSON: hunt_name, starting_clue (given directly to players to begin), stops[] (number, hide_at — organizer-only instruction on where to physically hide this stop's card, qr_text — the actual text encoded in this stop's QR, pointing to the next stop's location; the FINAL stop's qr_text is a prize-reveal message instead).
Screen view (organizer-facing, shows everything including spoilers): gradient hunt-name hero with the starting clue in handwritten font. A card per stop showing a real rendered QR code (new QRCode(element, {text, width, height})) plus "organizer only" hide-at instructions and the raw clue text for reference.
Print system: two dedicated print-only sections, toggled via a body[data-print-mode] attribute set right before window.print() (cleared on the afterprint event) and matching @media print CSS rules. "Print Clue Cards" mode shows only a 2-column grid of dashed-border cards with just "Stop N" and its QR code — zero spoiler text, meant to be cut out and physically hidden. "Print Answer Key" mode shows only a plain-text organizer page listing each stop's hide-at location and its QR's actual clue content, plus the starting clue. The normal on-screen interactive view (with buttons/header) is hidden entirely during print via a .no-print class.What this does: Describe who the hunt is for, the setting, the age group, and how many stops you want, and it writes a full clue chain: a starting riddle you hand to players directly, then for each stop, a hiding instruction meant only for you plus clue text that gets baked into an actual scannable QR code, each one pointing to the next stop's hiding place until the final QR reveals the prize. Every QR code is generated live in your browser, no external service, genuinely scannable by any phone camera. Two dedicated print views keep things honest: "Print Clue Cards" gives you clean cards with just a stop number and the QR, no spoilers, ready to cut out and hide, while "Print Answer Key" gives you a private cheat sheet of where everything's hidden and what each QR actually says.
What this looks like:
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WHERE WE STAND(based on today’s news)
✅ AI Can Now: Read the topic and tone of a video, match it against years of your viewing history, and predict what will hold your attention next
❌ Still Can't: Tell the difference between a security researcher fixing a bug and an attacker looking for one
✅ AI Can Now: Find 90 critical software flaws in one product in a single month
❌ Still Can't: Fix them, which is why Microsoft is backed up
FROM THE WEB
RECOMMENDED LISTENING/READING/WATCHING
Roujin Z (1991) - Movie
An animated film written by Katsuhiro Otomo, the acclaimed director of Akira, directed by Hiroyuki Kitakubo, with Satoshi Kon as art director, set in a Japan struggling with an aging population. The Ministry of Public Welfare rolls out the Z-001, a fully computerized robotic hospital bed that monitors health, feeds, cleans, and entertains its occupant better than any human nurse could, and an elderly man is selected as the first test subject over the objections of his volunteer nursing student. Funny, angry, and one of the earliest films to seriously ask what we lose when we hand caregiving to a machine.
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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