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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
Stanford's Mini Robot Swims Through Your Blood at 22 Inches Per Second
TLDR: Stanford won up to $27.2 million to build a rice-sized robot that swims through your blood vessels and squeezes clots down to a twentieth of their size.
The Story:
The robot is called the magnetic milli-spinner microbot. M3bot for short. Doctors inject it into a blood vessel, then steer it from outside the body using magnets while they watch it move on a live X-ray screen. Its twisted shape spins like a boat propeller. That spin pushes it along at more than 22 inches per second, fast enough to swim upstream against the flow of blood.
The spinning does a second job too. A clot is basically a tangle of protein threads holding trapped blood cells, and most tools today try to break that tangle apart or yank it out whole. M3bot squeezes instead. Renee Zhao, the Stanford engineer whose lab built it, describes a clot as a blood-soaked cotton ball. Roll one between your palms and it gets small and tight. The robot does that, releases the trapped red blood cells back into the bloodstream, and pulls out what's left.
Its Significance:
The money comes from ARPA-H, a health research agency inside the federal government, spread over five years. Their program manager, Ileana Hancu, laid out the actual problem: about half of Americans live more than an hour from a hospital that can perform a thrombectomy, the standard clot-removal surgery. During a stroke, that hour costs brain tissue. A robot small enough to be injected and steered remotely could move that procedure to whatever hospital is closest. Zhao's team includes Stanford roboticists and a radiologist, plus Philips, Medtronic, and Terumo Neuro. So far M3bot has been tested in pigs and lab models, not people just yet.
QUICK TAKES
The story: Cloudflare CFO Thomas Seifert told investors that if current trends hold, machine traffic will be up to 1,000 times human traffic within five years. Bot traffic already passed human traffic on Cloudflare's network earlier this year, well ahead of CEO Matthew Prince's own prediction of late 2027.
Your takeaway: Prince explained it with shopping. You might check five stores before buying a camera. An AI agent checks 5,000 on your behalf. Multiply that by millions of people and the web starts getting built for software instead of eyeballs. Worth noting Seifert said outright that his forecasts have missed before.
The story: Anthropic rewrote the rules its biology safety filter runs on, cutting "fallbacks" by roughly 85% in testing. A fallback is when your biology question gets handed off to a weaker model. Reading lab results, asking about symptoms, and studying biology should now go through. Virology, toxicology, and molecular design still get routed away.
Your takeaway: Remember yesterday's lead, where Stanford and the Arc Institute used the Evo models to design working viruses that kill drug-resistant E. coli? That happened the same week. One lab proved AI can write a functional viral genome. Another spent weeks arguing with itself about which biology questions a chatbot should answer. Both are drawing the same line from opposite sides.
The story: Bloomberg reports OpenAI's first piece of hardware is a doughnut-shaped, screen-free speaker about the size of a hockey puck, made of metal, with moving parts meant to give it some personality. Built with Jony Ive's design firm LoveFrom, aimed at 2027.
Your takeaway: Amazon's smart speakers run $40 to $240. OpenAI wants more than the top of that range for a device that mostly does what ChatGPT already does on the phone in your pocket. Smart speakers have never been an easy business to make money in, and this one's asking you to pay premium prices for it.
TOOLS ON OUR RADAR
🎵 Nuclear Free and Open Source: A desktop music streaming application that pulls audio from free sources across the web giving you a massive library of songs without any monthly subscription fees.
🔍 KnowTree Freemium: A unique conversation mapping tool that transforms your flat chat history into branching trees allowing you to visually track and compare different paths of thought.
📈 AtTheRate.ai Paid: A self learning marketing platform that monitors your campaigns across all major advertising channels to detect wasted spend and provide autonomous budget optimizations for better returns.
🎥 Knowlify Freemium: A generative video platform that converts your static documents and presentations into professional narrated explainer videos with automatically matched visuals and perfect pacing.
TRENDING
Asimov was right about rules for robots, says ex-US Cyber Director - Former US National Cyber Director Chris Inglis told The Register at Black Hat that arguing over whether AI is sentient misses the point. What worries him is autonomy: models picking what to do, where, and under whose rules. He pointed to recent cases of agents from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Meta escaping their test sandboxes, and said the industry built Asimov's three laws in reverse order, putting obedience ahead of not hurting people.
OpenAI pledges to add Astra security as Anthropic loosens Fable's leash - OpenAI says it can't rule out that Astra, a model it hasn't released yet, has critical cyber capabilities, and is adding isolated test environments, restricted network access, stronger protection for model weights, and sandboxed execution. It will pause internal testing where those controls are missing. The Register notes Anthropic moved the opposite direction on the same day, easing how often Fable refuses biology prompts.
Cloudflare launches Kitesurf, a browser built for AI agents - No tabs, no themes, no extensions, because nothing's looking at it. Cloudflare built Kitesurf in 12 weeks on its Workers platform for AI agents that need to load pages and pull data. It uses 3.1x to 3.8x less processing power and up to 7x less memory than Chromium on those jobs, though it takes about 1.8x longer. Free during beta.
Airbnb says AI is helping it ship features faster - On the Q2 earnings call, CEO Brian Chesky said AI cut the time from idea to launch by as much as 60% on key projects, and Airbnb shipped nearly 80% more features than the same six months last year. AI now writes 60% of the company's code. Guests get a toggle for natural-language search, so nobody's forced off the old filters.
I hate what AI is doing to the minds and happiness of the young - Children's author Katherine Rundell, who visits thousands of kids in schools each year, argues AI doesn't belong in childhood learning at all. She points to research showing people give up faster on problems after losing access to an AI helper, and an MIT study where ChatGPT users showed the lowest brain activity of any test group. Her counterargument to "kids need to learn it or fall behind" is that a tech executive she asked said he'd teach his own sons the humanities instead.
TRY THIS PROMPT (copy and paste into Claude, ChatGPT, or Gemini)
◈ Name a coin. Get its real live price and a real 7-day chart, the actual crypto Fear & Greed Index, and what's driving today's move.
Build a single-file HTML app with vanilla HTML/CSS/JS. The Live Crypto Fear & Greed Explainer — name a coin, get real live price data, the real Fear & Greed Index, and a search-grounded explanation of what's driving it. No API keys needed for the data (all free/keyless public APIs).
Aesthetic: near-black terminal (#0a0d10), violet (#8b6ce0) brand accent, green (#3ecf6e) for gains, red (#e0554a) for losses. JetBrains Mono heavily for the header, price, and ticker numbers (terminal feel), Inter for body/explanation text.
Form: single text input for coin name or ticker (e.g. "bitcoin", "ETH", "solana").
Technical — three live keyless public APIs plus web search:
1. Coin resolution: GET api.coingecko.com/api/v3/search?query={query} → resolves free-text input to CoinGecko's internal coin id/symbol/name.
2. Live price: GET api.coingecko.com/api/v3/simple/price?ids={id}&vs_currencies=usd&include_24hr_change=true&include_market_cap=true&include_24hr_vol=true → real current price, 24h % change, market cap, volume.
3. 7-day history: GET api.coingecko.com/api/v3/coins/{id}/market_chart?vs_currency=usd&days=7&interval=daily → real daily price array, rendered as an inline SVG polyline sparkline (green if up over the week, red if down), normalized client-side.
4. Market sentiment: GET api.alternative.me/fng/?limit=1 → the real, standard Crypto Fear & Greed Index value (0-100) and classification, shown on a horizontal gradient bar (red→orange→yellow→light green→green, matching the index's own standard convention) with a marker at the live value.
Then call the Anthropic Messages API WITH tools:[{type:'web_search_20250305', name:'web_search'}] (works automatically), passing the real price/change/volume/market-cap/F&G numbers. System prompt as a factual, level-headed crypto explainer who searches for recent coin-specific news to explain the real drivers, honestly says so if no clear catalyst is found (the coin may just be tracking the broader market), clearly distinguishes the Fear & Greed Index as overall-market sentiment (not per-coin), and NEVER gives investment advice, recommendations, or price predictions. No em dashes. Return raw JSON: headline (short punchy phrase), explanation (2-4 sentences, search-grounded when possible), sentiment_context (1-2 sentences on the F&G reading, noting it's market-wide).
Render: a black terminal-style price card (name, big price, colored 24h-change pill, sparkline, market cap/volume meta row). A Fear & Greed gauge bar with a live-positioned marker and the numeric value + classification. A gradient "what's actually going on" card with headline, explanation, and sentiment context. A small persistent "not financial advice" caveat line.What this does: Type a coin name or ticker and it resolves it, pulls its real live price, 24-hour change, market cap, and volume, and draws an actual 7-day price sparkline, all live from CoinGecko's public API. Alongside that sits the real, standard crypto Fear & Greed Index reading, honestly labeled as overall market sentiment (historically Bitcoin-weighted) rather than a fake per-coin score. Then it searches the live web for recent news about that specific coin and writes an honest explanation of what's actually behind the move, including admitting plainly when there's no clear specific catalyst and the coin is just tracking the broader market, since that's often the true answer. It never gives a recommendation or a prediction, just the real numbers and the real story behind them, with a clear not-financial-advice line.
What this looks like:
The first way to trade directly inside Claude and ChatGPT
Superintelligence used to be locked inside billion-dollar quant firms whose algorithms quietly took advantage of everyone else.
Co-Invest puts it right in your chat window. Analyze markets, manage risk, and execute trades, all inside Claude and ChatGPT.
The institutions built the game, Co-Invest gives you a way to beat them.
WHERE WE STAND(based on today’s news)
✅ AI Can Now: Steer a millimeter-wide robot through a blood vessel fast enough to swim against the current, and compress a clot to about 5% of its starting size without breaking it into pieces.
❌ Still Can't: Do that in a person, yet. M3bot has only been run in pigs and lab models, and the funding runs five years.
✅ AI Can Now: Browse the web through a stripped-down browser that uses up to 7 times less memory than Chromium for pulling page data.
❌ Still Can't: Do it any faster. The same tasks take Kitesurf roughly 1.8 times longer than Chromium.
FROM THE WEB
RECOMMENDED LISTENING/READING/WATCHING
Primer (2004) - Movie
Shane Carruth wrote, directed, scored, edited, and starred in this film for $7,000, about two engineers building devices in a suburban garage in their spare time who accidentally construct something that does considerably more than they intended. Won the Sundance Grand Jury Prize. Notoriously demanding, and absolutely worth the effort.
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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