In partnership with
Introducing the first AI-native CRM
Connect your email, and you’ll instantly get a CRM with enriched customer insights and a platform that grows with your business.
With AI at the core, Attio lets you:
Prospect and route leads with research agents
Get real-time insights during customer calls
Build powerful automations for your complex workflows
Join industry leaders like Granola, Taskrabbit, Flatfile and more.
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
"It Was a Lie": The Bombshell Diary Entry at the Heart of Musk's OpenAI Case
LEAD STORY
TLDR: Elon Musk is seeking up to $134 billion from OpenAI and Microsoft, and a co-founder's private diary entry calling the nonprofit commitment "a lie" just became his star witness.
The Story:
Elon Musk's lawsuit against OpenAI heads to an April jury trial with a damages request that dwarfs most corporate litigation: between $79 billion and $134 billion. The figure comes from financial economist C. Paul Wazzan, who calculated what Musk's $38 million in early funding — roughly 60% of OpenAI's seed capital — would be worth given the company's current $500 billion valuation. But the real ammunition isn't numbers. It's private journal entries from co-founder Greg Brockman, obtained through discovery, that a federal judge found compelling enough to send the case to trial. One line has become central to Musk's argument: "I cannot believe that we committed to non-profit if three months later we're doing b-corp then it was a lie." Musk argues this proves OpenAI's leadership knew they were abandoning the charitable mission while still assuring him of their commitment to it.
Its Significance:
This case will test whether Silicon Valley's favorite trick, starting as a mission-driven nonprofit, then pivoting to for-profit once you've attracted talent, funding, and public trust, can cross into fraud. OpenAI fired back in a blog post calling Musk's evidence "cherry-picked" and claiming he agreed in 2017 that a for-profit structure would eventually be necessary. They say negotiations collapsed when Musk couldn't get majority control. If Musk wins, it could force AI companies to actually mean what they say when they promise to put public benefit first, or face billion-dollar consequences when they don't. The settlement amount would also put ChatGPT’s parent company in a tenuous position and upend the current power structure between the major AI companies and their flagship products.
QUICK TAKES
The story: Replit launched a tool that turns plain English into real iPhone apps. You describe what you want, and it builds everything - the screens, the code, even payment systems. The company says you can go from idea to the App Store in just a few days.
Your takeaway: This could let anyone with an idea make an app without learning to code. Replit's value just tripled to $9 billion because investors think "vibe coding" is the future of software.
The story: Moxie Marlinspike, who made the encrypted messaging app Signal, released an AI assistant called Confer. Unlike ChatGPT or Gemini, no one can read your chats - not even the people who run it. Everything is locked up tight by default.
Your takeaway: Most AI chatbots save your conversations and can hand them over to courts or use them for training. Confer proves there's another way, and schools and hospitals that need privacy might pay attention.
The story: The memory chip shortage that started with RAM has spread to graphics cards, SSDs, and even old-school hard drives. Hard drive prices jumped 46% since September. Some stores now limit how many parts you can buy to stop hoarding.
Your takeaway: AI companies are gobbling up memory chips for their data centers, leaving less for regular computers and phones. PC makers like Dell and Lenovo warn prices could rise 15-20% by late 2026. It may be wise to make any hardware upgrades now instead of waiting.
TOOLS ON OUR RADAR
🎨 Penpot Free and Open Source: Design interfaces and prototypes with a Figma alternative that's completely free, runs in your browser, and lets you own all your work.
✍️ Hemingway Editor Freemium: Make your writing bold and clear with an app that highlights complex sentences, passive voice, and hard-to-read phrases.
🧠 Mem Freemium: Take notes that organize themselves with AI that automatically connects related ideas and surfaces what you need when you need it.
🔒 Bitwarden Freemium: Keep all your passwords secure and synced across devices with an open-source password manager trusted by millions.
TRENDING
AI Speeds Up Making Medicines From Plants - Scientists are using AI to design proteins that help turn plants into useful drugs and chemicals. The tech could make it cheaper to produce natural medicines.
Claude Cowork Now Available for $20 Subscribers - Anthropic's AI tool that can do tasks on your Mac is no longer just for $100/month users. Pro subscribers can now try it, though they may hit limits faster.
Business Insider Publishes 2026 AI Dictionary - A handy guide to all the AI words you keep hearing, from "agentic" to "vibe coding." Good for anyone trying to keep up with tech talk.
Chinese AI Leaders Say They Can't Beat America Without Better Chips - Top scientists at Alibaba and other Chinese firms now admit there's only a 20% chance a Chinese company will lead AI within five years. U.S. chip bans are working.
How Scientists Are Using Claude to Speed Up Research - Labs at Stanford and MIT built tools on top of Claude that cut months of work down to hours. One system did a gene study in 20 minutes that would normally take months.
TRY THIS PROMPT (copy and paste into Claude, ChatGPT, or Gemini)
Competitor Stalker Dashboard: Build intelligence dossiers on your competition with social monitoring, pricing tracking, and "what are they up to?" alerts
Build a fully functional Competitor Stalker Dashboard as an interactive React app. Render the working application immediately - no code display.
**My business/project**: [What you do]
**Main competitors**: [List 2-5 competitors to track]
Create these sections:
1. **Target Dossiers**
• Create profile cards for each competitor:
- Company name & logo placeholder
- Founded / Size / Location
- Their one-liner positioning
- Target audience
- Estimated revenue range
- Key people to watch
• "Add Competitor" button
• Threat level rating: 🟢 Low 🟡 Medium 🔴 High
• "Search [Competitor] News" button for each
2. **Positioning Map**
• 2x2 grid plotting competitors:
- X-axis: Price (Low → High)
- Y-axis: Quality/Features (Basic → Premium)
• Drag competitors to position them
• Find the white space (where you fit)
• "Gap Opportunity" identifier
• Your position marker
3. **Feature Comparison Matrix**
• Side-by-side feature table:
| Feature | You | Comp A | Comp B | Comp C |
| ✅/❌ for each |
• Add custom features to track
• "They have it, you don't" alerts
• "You have it, they don't" advantages
• Feature gap prioritizer
4. **Pricing Intel**
• Competitor pricing tracker:
- Their plans/tiers
- Price points
- What's included
• Price change alerts
• "They just raised/lowered prices" flags
• Your pricing comparison
• Undercut opportunities
• "Search [Competitor] Pricing" button
5. **Social Surveillance**
• Track their moves:
- Recent posts/announcements
- Engagement levels
- Content themes they're pushing
- Hashtags they're using
• "They're talking about X a lot" patterns
• Campaign detection
• "Search [Competitor] Social Media" button
• Content strategy reverse-engineering
6. **Weakness Spotter**
• Customer complaint mining:
- Common complaints about them
- Bad review themes
- "People wish they had..."
• Your opportunity to be better
• Weakness severity rating
• "Search [Competitor] Reviews" button
• Turn their weakness into your pitch
7. **Movement Alerts**
• "What are they up to?" feed:
🚨 New product launch
🚨 Pricing change
🚨 New hire/leadership change
🚨 Funding announcement
🚨 Partnership/acquisition
🚨 Rebranding
• Set alert priorities
• Response playbook for each move
• "Should you react?" decision guide
8. **Counter-Strategy Planner**
• Based on intel, your moves:
- Immediate responses (this week)
- Strategic adjustments (this month)
- Long-term positioning (this quarter)
• "If they do X, we do Y" playbook
• Differentiation reinforcement
• Stay-in-your-lane reminders
Design specs:
- Spy/intelligence agency aesthetic
- Classified document styling (redacted text effects, stamps)
- Dark theme with accent colors (black, dark gray, red/amber alerts)
- Dossier folder tabs for each competitor
- Target crosshairs and surveillance imagery
- "CLASSIFIED" and "TOP SECRET" stamps (playful)
- Radar/scanning animations
- Alert banners for movements
- Matrix/grid data displays
- Manila folder and paperclip touches
When search buttons are clicked, use web search to find current news, pricing, social presence, and reviews for the specified competitor.What this does: Turns scattered competitor awareness into organized intelligence. Build dossiers on each rival, track their pricing and features, spot their weaknesses in customer reviews, and get alerts when they make moves so you can respond strategically instead of reactively.
What this looks like:
WHERE WE STAND(based on today’s news)
✅ AI Can Now: Build a working iPhone app from a text description and submit it to Apple's App Store in days, not months.
❌ Still Can't: Guarantee the code is secure. A recent study found AI coding tools ship apps with serious safety holes that need human review.
✅ AI Can Now: Run encrypted so even the company behind it can't read your conversations, as Confer proves with its "trusted execution" setup.
❌ Still Can't: Match top U.S. models without access to the best chips. Chinese AI leaders now openly claim the hardware gap may be widening, not shrinking.
RECOMMENDED LISTENING/READING/WATCHING
Benedict Cumberbatch plays Alan Turing, the mathematician who cracked Nazi Germany's Enigma code during World War II and basically invented the computer in the process. The film follows his team at Bletchley Park racing against time to build a machine that can decode thousands of encrypted German messages.
It's part war thriller, part character study of a brilliant but difficult man. The movie takes some liberties with history (as biopics do), but it captures why Turing matters: his work saved millions of lives and laid the foundation for everything we now call computing. The ending, which deals with his tragic persecution for being gay, hits hard. A solid intro to the person many consider the father of AI.
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.
*Some product links may be affiliate or referral links. This helps support the newsletter at no extra cost to you.
