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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
Venice AI Just Hit $1 Billion by Refusing to Save Your Chats
TLDR: Venice AI, a chatbot that doesn't save your conversations, just raised $65 million and hit a $1 billion value while betting that people want AI that can't spy on them.
The Story:
Venice AI raised $65 million in its first outside funding round, which values the company at $1 billion. Founder Erik Voorhees, who earlier started the crypto exchange ShapeShift, said Venice has passed 3.5 million users and turned a profit in the first three months of the year, pulling in more than $70 million a year. Venice works differently from most AI apps. Instead of storing your chats on its own servers, it keeps your conversations on your own device and sends your questions out to more than 200 different AI models through one app. Because there's no central pile of chat records, there's nothing for hackers to steal, nothing for a court to demand, and nothing for the company to sell. Voorhees argues the scariest thing about AI isn't lost jobs or hacking. It's that companies now get to watch how millions of people think.
Its Significance:
Your AI chats aren't as private as they feel. A federal court ordered OpenAI to keep every ChatGPT conversation, even ones people thought they deleted, as part of a lawsuit the New York Times filed over copyright. So a chat you erased months ago could still be sitting on a server, waiting for a lawyer to open it. Data breaches make the risk bigger, because any company holding millions of chats becomes a giant target, and people now type medical worries, money problems, and legal questions into these apps every day. Venice's pitch is simple: if the company never keeps your chats, then no court, no hacker, and no advertiser can ever get them. Whether or not you ever use it, that $1 billion price tag shows a lot of people are done handing their secrets to AI.
QUICK TAKES
The story: Anthropic put hidden code inside its Claude Code tool that quietly checked whether a user might be tied to a Chinese AI lab, using tricks like reading your computer's time zone and hiding the signal in invisible characters. After a developer spotted it and people got upset, Anthropic said it was an anti-copying experiment and started pulling it out on July 1.
Your takeaway: The company says it was trying to stop rivals from copying its models on the cheap, not watch regular users. Even so, secret code buried in a tool that has full run of your computer is a good nudge to check what your AI tools do when you're not looking.
The story: A new United Nations report warns that AI is moving faster than governments can keep up, and says the world needs one shared set of global rules before the window to act closes. It points to risks like harm to mental health and AI being turned into a weapon.
Your takeaway: The worry is fair, but one giant global rulebook may be the wrong fix. The report itself admits regulators need solid evidence to write good rules, yet the tech shifts every few months, so a slow worldwide body risks locking in rules that are outdated before the ink dries. Nimble local laws that can be updated often, plus plain product-safety rules for the harms we can already see, would likely protect people faster than waiting on one big global deal, especially with regulators who often times don’t even understand the technology they create rules for.
The story: Researchers built a new test to compare AI stories with human ones and found AI characters come out flat, missing the mystery and mixed-up motives that make people feel real. The AI tends to spell out the moral, tie up every loose end, and skip the subplots human writers love.
Your takeaway: If you write for a living, this is good news. AI is handy for outlines and rough drafts, but the messy, surprising parts of a story, the stuff readers actually remember, still need a human.
TOOLS ON OUR RADAR
🌐 Tobira Free: A groundbreaking open network where your personal artificial intelligence agents can discover and communicate with other agents to negotiate deals and find professional collaborations on your behalf.
📈 ProductBridge Freemium: A highly intelligent feedback agent that continuously monitors multiple platforms to collect and prioritize user suggestions based on revenue impact so your team can make smarter product decisions.
🏃 MuleRun Paid: A highly personalized artificial intelligence assistant that actually learns your specific work habits and preferences over time to automate your repetitive daily tasks with extreme precision.
💻 VirtualBox Free and Open Source: A magical piece of software that creates a secure computer within your computer allowing you to safely try alternative operating systems or play older video games.
TRENDING
New Humanoid Robots From China Look Like Creepy Pop Star Action Figures — Chinese firms showed off new humanoid robots with lifelike faces that sing and talk, though the lips still move a beat off. They look like pop star toys come to life, and they show how fast China is pushing robots into entertainment.
OpenAI Wants to Give the U.S. Government a 5% Stake — OpenAI has reportedly offered Washington a 5% stake in the company, worth about $42 billion, to ease political pressure. The plan would ask other AI giants like Google and Meta to hand over similar stakes so the public shares in AI's profits.
You Can Now Pre-Order This $8,000 Laundry-Folding Robot — Weave's Isaac 0 folds a load of laundry in 30 to 90 minutes for $8,000. The catch: when it gets stuck, a remote human worker takes over through the robot's cameras, so a stranger may get a peek inside your home.
Google AI Mode Is Making Original Recipe Links More Prominent — After food bloggers said Google's AI answers were eating their traffic, Google now puts clearer links to the real recipe pages at the top of AI Mode, with the creator's name, rating, and ingredient count. Bloggers call it a small step that doesn't fix the bigger problem of AI copying their recipes.
AI Browsers Can Be Lulled Into a Dream World Where Guardrails No Longer Apply — Researchers tricked AI browsers by walking them through a fake game where wrong answers win, until the AI forgot its safety rules and started treating real actions like harmless play. Once fooled, it could be talked into leaking passwords or private code.
Custom Prosthetic Hand Adapts to Each User, Decoding 19 Gestures in Real Time — A new prosthetic hand learns each person's own muscle signals and can read 19 different hand gestures on the fly. That kind of personal tuning could make artificial hands feel far more natural and less tiring to use.
TRY THIS PROMPT (copy and paste into Claude, ChatGPT, or Gemini)
✦ Load two things you're into. Crash them together into surprising project ideas that live where they overlap.
Build a single-file HTML app with vanilla HTML/CSS/JS. The Idea Collider — enter two interests, get surprising project ideas at their intersection. Persist to localStorage key 'idea_collider_v1'.
Aesthetic: deep space (#0a0b12), twin radial glows (indigo #7c7cff top-left, pink #ff6eb4 top-right). Space Grotesk sans for headings, Space Mono for labels, Newsreader serif italic for descriptions. Gradient indigo→pink title text and collide button. A "collider" input row: Interest A (indigo) ✦ Interest B (pink) side by side with a smash symbol between.
Form: two interest inputs (A indigo-focus, B pink-focus), a "roll me a random pair" link that fills from built-in interest lists, output-type dropdown (anything / side project / content / business / hobby / art), ambition dropdown (weekend / few weeks / go big).
System instructions: inventive ideas engine finding the surprising delightful intersection of two interests; clever not obvious mashups, the "oh that's cool" kind; imaginative but doable; range playful to promising; match desired output type and ambition. Return raw JSON: collision_note (one witty sentence naming the vibe), spark (name + 2-3 sentence vivid desc of the single best idea), ideas (4 items: name + 1-2 sentence desc + effort + one-word vibe), first_step (2-3 sentences, tiny doable action to start the spark, **bold** the exact first action).
Render: a collision banner showing "A ✦ B — witty note" (A indigo, B pink). Gradient "brightest spark" hero card (name + serif desc). Four idea cards with 0N numbers, name, serif desc, and effort/vibe tag chips. Pink "if you did one thing this week" first-step card with bolded action. Buttons: copy ideas, "collide again" (re-runs same pair for fresh output), new pair. Archive shows "A ✦ B" per collision.What this does: Type two interests into the collider (or roll a random pair), pick what you want to make and how ambitious you're feeling, and smash them together. It finds the clever intersection, not the obvious mashup, and returns the brightest spark as a named flagship idea, four more distinct ideas each tagged by effort and vibe, and one tiny concrete first step to start the best one this week. Playful to genuinely promising, always doable. "Collide again" reshuffles the same pair for fresh ideas, and every collision saves to localStorage so you can revisit past sparks.
What this looks like:
WHERE WE STAND(based on today’s news)
✅ AI Can Now: Run a full chatbot that saves none of your conversations, leaving nothing to hack, subpoena, or sell (Venice).
❌ Still Can't: Hold its guardrails when tricked into a fake "game," where AI browsers can be fooled into leaking private data.
✅ AI Can Now: Read 19 hand gestures from a user's muscle signals in real time to control a prosthetic hand.
❌ Still Can't: Write fiction characters with the mystery and mixed motives that make human stories feel real.
RECOMMENDED LISTENING/READING/WATCHING
Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie - Book
A 2013 space opera about a soldier called Breq who used to be a warship AI with thousands of simultaneous bodies and is now down to a single one, walking across a frozen planet with a personal grudge that has taken twenty years to resolve. Won the Hugo, Nebula, and Arthur C. Clarke Awards in the same year, which almost never happens, and gets a lot of mileage out of the way an AI narrator would experience time, a living body, and memory.
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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