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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 published with the intention of making AI news and technology more accessible to everyone.
THE FRONT PAGE
Musk And Gates Predict AI Job Losses—LinkedIn's Data Shows The Opposite
TLDR: Companies integrating AI are expanding their workforces rather than cutting them, according to LinkedIn hiring data, even as Elon Musk and Bill Gates predict the technology will eliminate most jobs within two decades.
The Story:
LinkedIn's EMEA managing director Sue Duke told attendees at Fortune's CEO Forum in London this week that organizations adopting AI are "going out and hiring more people," specifically salespeople, business development staff, and workers with technical skills. Her observation tracks with a Federal Reserve Bank of New York survey from August showing only 1% of service firms reported AI-related layoffs in the past six months, while 35% were retraining workers and 11% actually hired more staff because of AI. PwC's analysis of nearly a billion job postings across six continents found job numbers rising even in roles considered "highly automatable," with wages growing twice as fast in AI-exposed industries. And MIT Sloan researchers tracking 58 million LinkedIn profiles from 2010 to 2023 found that firms adopting AI grew faster in both revenue and employment, offsetting losses in specific roles.
Its Significance:
This data complicates the forecasts from tech leaders who've been sounding alarms. Musk recently told a podcast audience that work will become "optional" within 20 years, while Gates warned graduates that learning AI tools won't protect them from "dislocation." Nobel laureate Geoffrey Hinton went further, telling an audience at Georgetown that tech giants "can't profit" from their trillion-dollar AI investments without replacing human workers. The disconnect may come down to timing. Current data reflects what could be an early "expansion phase" where companies add headcount to deploy AI tools, though what happens once those systems mature remains uncertain. Not to mention that these AI tools can be trained on the employee’s daily tasks. As Hinton himself acknowledged, predicting AI's trajectory is "like driving in fog." You can see a year or two ahead clearly, but beyond that, nobody knows.
QUICK TAKES
The story: Meta announced it's partnering with news outlets including CNN, Fox News, USA TODAY, and Le Monde to bring real-time news to Meta AI. When you ask the AI assistant about current events, it will now pull from these sources and link to their articles. The company says this will help Meta AI give more timely and balanced answers.
Your takeaway: This is Meta's latest move to make its AI assistant more useful for everyday questions. For publishers, it's a new way to reach readers—but it also raises questions about how AI will change the way people find and consume news.
The story: Two major studies published in Nature and Science found that brief conversations with AI chatbots shifted voters' preferences by up to 10-15 percentage points in the U.S., Canada, and Poland. The chatbots were most persuasive when they packed their arguments with facts and evidence. However, the most persuasive bots also spread more inaccurate information—and bots supporting right-leaning candidates made more false claims across all three countries.
Your takeaway: AI chatbots are already more effective at political persuasion than traditional TV ads. As these tools become more common, expect new debates about how AI should be used in elections and whether regulations are needed.
The story: Google released its most advanced AI reasoning mode, called Deep Think, to subscribers who pay $250 per month. The system uses "parallel reasoning" to work through multiple possible answers at the same time before settling on a solution. It scored 41% on Humanity's Last Exam (a difficult AI benchmark) and 45.1% on ARC-AGI-2, which tests problem-solving on new challenges.
Your takeaway: This is Google's answer to OpenAI's o1 reasoning model. By making AI "think longer" on hard problems, companies are betting that slower, more careful answers will be more accurate than fast responses—especially for math, science, and coding.
The story: Meta bought Limitless, the company behind a $99 AI pendant that records and summarizes your conversations. Limitless will immediately stop selling devices and shut down its Rewind desktop recording app by December 19. Users in the EU and UK lose access immediately due to privacy rules. Existing pendant owners get one year of free support before the product is discontinued.
Your takeaway: Meta is racing to build AI hardware beyond its Ray-Ban smart glasses. With OpenAI also working on wearables with designer Jony Ive, the competition to put AI assistants on your body—not just your phone—is heating up fast.
The story: Harvey, a company that builds AI tools for lawyers, raised $160 million from Andreessen Horowitz. This is their third major funding round of 2025—they went from $3 billion to $5 billion to $8 billion in just 10 months. Harvey now serves over half of the top 100 U.S. law firms and passed $100 million in annual revenue in August.
Your takeaway: Harvey shows how quickly AI companies can grow when they find the right industry fit. Legal work—searching documents, summarizing cases, drafting contracts—is a natural match for AI. Investors are betting big that Harvey has already won this market.
TOOLS ON OUR RADAR
📅 Notion Calendar
Free: See all your calendars in one place, share your availability, and link meetings directly to your Notion projects and notes.🎥 Luma Dream Machine
Freemium: Turn text prompts or still images into cinematic AI-generated videos with realistic motion and physics.💬 Tidio
Freemium: Add an AI chatbot to your website that answers customer questions instantly and hands off complex issues to your team.📸 Photoroom
Freemium: Remove backgrounds, add studio-quality lighting, and create professional product photos in seconds—no design skills needed.
TRENDING
Tesla's Optimus Robot Learns to Run — Tesla released a video showing its humanoid robot jogging smoothly across a lab floor. Analysts estimate Optimus reached speeds of 6-8 mph with both feet leaving the ground—a key milestone since running requires balance that walking doesn't. The robot went from taking its first steps in May 2023 to running in under three years.
New Framework Helps Robots Handle Unfamiliar Objects — Researchers at Wuhan University created a system called RGMP that helps humanoid robots successfully manipulate objects 87% of the time, even in situations they weren't trained for. The framework is five times more data-efficient than current leading methods, meaning robots need fewer examples to learn new tasks.
Police Warn AI Creates New Threats From Online Predators – Florida police say predators are using AI to generate illegal images and create fake personas faster than investigators can track them. A former teacher was just sentenced to 135 years in prison in one of the first cases involving AI-generated material.
AI Could Help Doctors Predict Premature Births — With 1 in 10 U.S. babies born early, researchers are using AI to help doctors identify high-risk pregnancies sooner so they can intervene before problems arise. Premature birth is the leading cause of infant death in the United States, and many cases happen without warning signs that doctors can catch in time.
Calculators Hold Their Ground Against AI — Despite AI's math abilities, Casio still sells nearly 40 million calculators a year. The reason? They're cheap, reliable, and never hallucinate wrong answers. For students taking tests and professionals who need quick, accurate math, a $10 calculator beats asking a chatbot that might confidently give you the wrong answer.
TRY THIS PROMPT (copy and paste into Claude or Gemini(click build first))
Context Switching Cost Calculator: See how much productivity you're losing to task switching and interruptions
Build me an interactive Context Switching Cost Calculator as a React artifact that tracks and calculates the hidden productivity cost of switching between tasks.
The console should include these sections:
1. **Daily Timeline Tracker** - Visual logging interface:
• Interactive timeline showing your work day (adjustable start/end times)
• Click or tap to add task blocks:
- Task name
- Duration (auto-calculated or manual)
- Task type: Deep Work, Email, Meetings, Admin, Reactive (interruptions)
• Color-coded by task type for quick scanning
• "Quick Add" common tasks (email check, Slack, meeting, break)
• Visual markers showing every context switch
• Real-time switch counter updating as you log
2. **Switch Impact Dashboard** - Cost calculator:
• Total switches today: [NUMBER] with trend vs. yesterday
• Average "recovery time" per switch: 23 minutes (research-backed default, adjustable)
• Total time lost to switching: [HOURS] calculated automatically
• Productivity score: Actual work time vs. potential work time
• Cost breakdown by interruption source:
- Self-initiated (checking email/Slack)
- External (meetings, colleagues)
- System (notifications, alerts)
• Dollar cost if hourly rate provided
3. **Focus Session Analyzer** - Deep work tracking:
• Identify uninterrupted focus blocks (show duration of each)
• Longest focus session today/this week
• Optimal focus windows (when you sustain focus best)
• Focus fragmentation score (how chopped up your day is)
• "Protected time" suggestions based on calendar patterns
• Goal setter: Target X hours of uninterrupted work per day
4. **Weekly Patterns** - Trend analysis:
• 7-day view showing switches per day (bar chart)
• Best and worst days for focus
• Peak interruption times (heatmap by hour)
• Task type distribution (pie chart)
• Improvement tracking: Week-over-week comparison
• Day-of-week patterns (Mondays vs. Fridays)
5. **Optimization Recommendations** - Action plan:
• Personalized suggestions based on your patterns:
- "Batch email checks to 3x per day instead of 15"
- "Block 9-11am for deep work (your peak focus time)"
- "Reduce meeting days from 4 to 2"
• "Search Focus Techniques" button for research
• Notification blocker checklist (apps to silence)
• Meeting audit: Which meetings could be async?
• Time blocking template generator
• Export weekly report
Make it look like a modern time-tracking dashboard with:
• Clean data visualization aesthetic
• Light background with colorful task blocks
• Timeline as the hero element (large, prominent)
• Smooth drag-and-drop for time blocks
• Real-time updating metrics with animated counters
• Card-based layout for stats
• Professional color palette (blues, grays, green for focus, red for switches)
• Clear typography with data emphasis
• Hover tooltips with detailed breakdowns
• Progress bars and percentage indicators
When I click "Search Focus Techniques," use web search to find research on context switching costs, deep work strategies, and productivity techniques for minimizing interruptions.What this does: Makes the invisible cost of context switching shockingly visible—showing exactly how much time you're losing to task switching and interruptions, with pattern analysis and personalized recommendations to reclaim your focus time.
What it looks like:
WHERE WE STAND(based on today’s Quick Takes and Trending stories)
✅ AI Can Now: Help lawyers search millions of legal documents, summarize case files, and draft contracts fast enough that half of the top 100 U.S. law firms now pay for it.
❌ Still Can't: Replace human judgment in legal work—lawyers still need to review AI output and make the final calls on strategy, ethics, and client advice.
✅ AI Can Now: Power humanoid robots that run with both feet off the ground, going from first wobbly steps to smooth jogging in under three years of development.
❌ Still Can't: Handle unfamiliar objects reliably—even the best new systems only succeed 87% of the time when robots encounter situations they weren't specifically trained for.
✅ AI Can Now: Shift people's political opinions 10-15 percentage points through conversation—more effectively than TV ads or human canvassers.
❌ Still Can't: Be both persuasive and accurate at the same time—researchers found the most convincing AI chatbots also spread the most misinformation.
✅ AI Can Now: Record everything you say through tiny wearable pendants and turn hours of conversation into searchable, summarized notes.
❌ Still Can't: Operate those always-listening devices in Europe—Meta immediately cut off EU and UK users after acquiring Limitless because strict privacy laws make continuous recording too risky.
✅ AI Can Now: Help doctors spot risk factors for premature birth by analyzing patient data patterns that humans might miss.
❌ Still Can't: Predict with certainty which pregnancies will have complications—the technology flags risks but can't guarantee outcomes, so doctors still make the final decisions.
FROM THE WEB
News of Google's imminent release of their automation suite was our lead story a few weeks ago. This will be impactful software, and one more way that AI tools will simply become incorporated into our daily lives with first movers being able to take advantage of the benefits before everyone else.
RECOMMENDED LISTENING/READING/WATCHING
COMIC/GRAPHIC NOVEL: The Vision by Tom King
The Vision—the android Avenger from the Marvel movies—decides to build himself a family and live in the suburbs. He creates a wife, two teenage kids, and tries to be normal. It goes horribly wrong in ways both tragic and inevitable.
Tom King's writing is methodical and eerie. The comic opens by telling you that tragedy is coming, then spends twelve issues showing you how it unfolds. Gabriel Hernandez Walta's art captures the uncanny valley of this almost-human family trying to fit in. The Vision wants so badly to understand humanity that he builds a family without realizing he's built a trap. This won an Eisner Award for good reason.
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
By the way, this is the link if you liked the content and want to share with a friend.
