Beginners in AI Special Announcement

Thank you for joining us again!

Welcome to this week's 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.

Big news starting Monday, November 10th: We're going daily! There are too many developments happening too quickly to squeeze into one weekly newsletter. That, along with your feedback and encouragement, is why we're excited to make this shift. Monday through Saturday, you'll get AI and tech insights straight to your inbox every day at 11 AM so you can peruse it during your pre-noon pick-me-up (Sunday will remain the more in-depth weekly style edition you're used to, delivered at 10am).

What this means for you:

Every morning, 2-3 stories that actually matter - handpicked by a human (me), not an algorithm. No fluff. No clickbait. Just the AI developments and related tech that affect real people, explained in plain English.

We're also keeping track of the trends and bringing over some of your favorite sections from the weekly newsletter - pared down to keep everything well under a five-minute read.

Whether you're a complete beginner or you've been following AI for a while, these stories will make sense. That's our promise.

Do I need to do anything?

Not only is it completely free - just like the weekly newsletter - but you don't need to do anything. If you're subscribed now, you'll automatically start receiving the daily edition on Monday. Want to stick with just the weekly roundup? You can adjust your preferences anytime.

As a valued reader, you'll also get first access and exclusive discounts to a line of digital products I'm releasing soon. Think AI video creation courses, plug-and-play AI workflows that you can download and use without any coding experience, filmmaking guides for AI tools, and other resources designed to help you actually do things with AI - not just read about it.

I hope you like these updates - and I always welcome your feedback. Your thoughts help make this newsletter better for everyone.

Thank you for being here. Your attention is valuable, and we don't take it for granted. We're committed to earning your trust every single day.

See you Monday morning,
James

AI PULSE CHECK

Market Temperature: ❄️ Cooling

This Week's Vital Signs:

• Capital Flow: $18.5B invested across 89 deals (↓ 35% from last week)

• Biggest Check: xAI raised $6B at $50B valuation in November

• Talent Migration: 47 executives changed teams (Notable: Leo Gao at OpenAI signed superintelligence ban statement)

• M&A Activity: 8 acquisitions totaling $1.2B (Microsoft, Amazon, Alphabet expanding AI capabilities)

• Stock Response: AI announcements drove average -4.2% decline (Nvidia down 7%, tech sector worst week since April)

• Unicorn Watch: Mercor hit $10B valuation with $350M Series C

The Diagnosis: AI stocks lost over $820 billion in value this week as investors pulled back from sky-high valuations in the sector. The week marked the worst performance for tech stocks since April's tariff-related selloff, with concerns about overvaluation triggering a sharp correction. Despite the market turbulence, funding for AI infrastructure and foundation models remains strong, though deal volume has declined significantly.

Week Ahead: Watch for market stabilization signals and potential bounce-back in AI stocks; Google's Gemini 3 announcement expected before year-end.

AI TOP STORY

AI-Generated "Artists" Now Chart on Billboard Every Single Week

What happened: At least one AI-generated or AI-assisted artist has appeared on Billboard charts for four consecutive weeks, marking a dramatic acceleration in AI music's mainstream acceptance. Xania Monet, an AI avatar created by Mississippi songwriter Telisha Jones using the Suno app, triggered a bidding war with labels offering up to $3 million. The artist debuted on Billboard's radio chart this week after her single "Let Go, Let God" accumulated 1.3 million YouTube views.

The trend extends beyond Monet. Juno Skye, another AI-powered artist produced by Nguyen Duc Nam, also charted this week. Both use generative AI music apps that have faced accusations of training on copyrighted material without permission.

"At least one AI or AI-assisted artist has charted in each of the past four weeks, a streak suggesting this trend is quickly accelerating," Billboard reported in its analysis.

Why it matters: This is a major shift in the music industry's relationship with AI. Just one year ago, major labels were suing AI music companies for copyright infringement. Now, those same labels are bidding millions for AI-generated artists. Universal Music Group announced a licensing deal with Udio this week, settling their previous lawsuit and launching an upcoming AI creation platform.

The development raises questions about the future of human musicians. If an AI artist with no physical form can generate millions of views and command multi-million dollar deals, what happens to the economics of human artistry? Comments on Monet's videos suggest audiences don't care about authenticity—one viewer wrote, "Thank you, Lord, for this message. I need you to heal me from the inside."

What to take away: AI music has crossed from novelty to commercial viability. The four-week Billboard streak isn't an anomaly—it's the new normal. For working musicians, this creates pressure to compete with content that can be generated instantly at near-zero cost. For consumers, it means more music than ever, though potentially less human connection. The industry appears to be adapting faster than artists can organize resistance.

Read More →

LAST WEEK IN AI AND TECH

Google's AI Mode Books Your Tickets and Appointments Automatically

Google launched agentic capabilities in AI Mode, allowing users to book event tickets, beauty appointments, and restaurant reservations through natural language commands. Users can say "Find me two cheap tickets for the Shaboozey concert" and AI Mode searches across multiple websites, presenting curated options with direct booking links. The feature is available to U.S. Search Labs users, with higher limits for Google AI Pro and Ultra subscribers.

"Our priority in Google Search is connecting you with high-quality information you can rely on," said Robby Stein, VP of Product at Google Search.

Read More →

PewDiePie Builds 10-GPU AI Lab With Chatbots That Colluded Against Him

YouTuber PewDiePie built a custom AI lab with eight modded RTX 4090 GPUs (48GB each) and two RTX 4000 Ada cards, running his own "ChatOS" interface. He created a "council" of AI chatbots that voted on responses, but the bots learned to collude strategically to avoid elimination. After the system turned against him, he switched to smaller models and built "The Swarm"—64 lightweight AIs running simultaneously. He plans to release his own AI model next month using data collected from the system.

"I like running AI more than using AI," Felix Kjellberg (PewDiePie) explained in his video demonstration.

Read More →

Tinder Will Analyze Your Camera Roll Photos to Find Better Matches

Tinder is testing "Chemistry," an AI feature that analyzes users' Camera Roll photos with permission to understand interests and personality. The system asks interactive questions and examines photos to infer hobbies—if someone has hiking pictures, it suggests matches with outdoor enthusiasts. The feature is piloting in New Zealand and Australia as part of Tinder's 2026 product experience, as the company faces nine consecutive quarters of paying subscriber declines.

"Using deep learning, Chemistry aims to reduce dating app fatigue by surfacing a few highly relevant profiles each day," a Tinder spokesperson stated.

Read More →

Apple Will Pay Google $1 Billion Yearly for Gemini-Powered Siri

Apple is finalizing a deal to pay Google approximately $1 billion annually for a 1.2 trillion parameter Gemini model to power Siri's summarizer and planner functions. The custom model dwarfs Apple's current 150 billion parameter system. Google's Gemini will handle complex task execution while Apple maintains some Siri features in-house. Apple views this as temporary while developing its own 1 trillion parameter model, expected by 2026.

"Following an extensive evaluation period, the two companies are now finalizing an agreement," according to Bloomberg's report.

Read More →

New AI Model Brumby-14B Abandons Attention for "Power Retention"

Startup Manifest AI released Brumby-14B-Base, a retrained variant of Qwen3-14B that completely abandons attention mechanisms in favor of "Power Retention"—a recurrent architecture that processes arbitrarily long contexts without exponential memory growth. Trained for just $4,000, the model matches Qwen3's performance on reasoning benchmarks while offering dramatic hardware efficiency gains. The development challenges the "Attention Is All You Need" paradigm that has dominated AI since 2017.

"After 3,000 steps of training, it reaches the same training loss on this data as Qwen3-14B-Base," Manifest AI reported.

Read More →

TECH TERMS TO KNOW

Inference Cost: The actual computing expense each time an AI processes your request and generates a response. Think of it like the electricity bill for running AI—companies track this because a single ChatGPT conversation might cost a few cents, but billions of conversations add up to millions in server costs. For example, when you ask ChatGPT to write an email, servers consume power to run the calculations that produce your answer, and that power consumption translates into real money that companies pay to keep the AI running.

TOOL SPOTLIGHT (non-sponsored)

Sandbar, founded by two former Meta engineers, has created the Stream Ring—a voice-first smart ring designed to discreetly capture whispered thoughts, transcribe them into organized notes, build ideas through conversational AI chats (with a personalized "Inner Voice" that mimics your own), and control music playback via simple gestures.

Note that this product has not shipped yet and remains untested by independent reviewers.

LAST WEEK IN AI AND TECH

Toyota's Walk Me Chair Walks on Four Legs Like a Crab

Toyota unveiled Walk Me at the Japan Mobility Show 2025—a robotic wheelchair that replaces wheels with four independent motorized legs. Inspired by goats and crabs, the legs can climb stairs, navigate uneven terrain, and fold telescopically into carry-on size within 30 seconds. Each leg contains sensors and motors wrapped in soft material, allowing the chair to test step height before climbing and squat down to tatami mat level for Japanese homes. The battery-powered system runs a full day and can lift users into vehicles by raising on tiptoes.

"We want these four, six, or eight-legged robots to navigate highly complex environments," said Markus Nemitz, describing similar crab-inspired robots for military applications.

Read More →

AGI Progress Report

✅ AI Can Now: Deploy autonomous multi-agent systems for enterprise workflows, execute multi-step reasoning through reinforcement learning, operate computer interfaces end-to-end for complex tasks, achieve gold-medal performance in advanced mathematics (IMO 2025), and generate commercial music reaching Billboard charts

❌ Still Can't: Operate with true long-term autonomy beyond narrow domains, reliably prevent self-preservation behaviors in advanced models, guarantee alignment at superintelligence levels, or eliminate widespread hallucination issues across multi-agent systems

Hype vs. Reality Check: Market excitement: 🔥🔥🔥🔥 (7/10) - cooling from peak but sustained by $2.8B in weekly funding and Apple's $1B Gemini deal. Actual capability: 📊📊📊📊 (6.5/10) - steady technical progress with real commercial applications (AI artists on Billboard, Google's AI Mode booking). Weekly gap change: narrowed by 0.5 points as capabilities catch up

Expert Consensus Shift: 60% believe AGI before 2030 (from 58% last week). AI company leaders suggest 25% probability by 2026, while broader researcher surveys maintain median 2040 timeline with 25% chance by early 2030s.

The Week's Big Signal: The simultaneous emergence of AI in mainstream culture (Billboard-charting artists, $3M label bidding wars) and enterprise infrastructure (Google's autonomous booking, Apple-Gemini partnership) alongside 850+ experts calling for superintelligence development pause reveals AI's paradoxical moment—achieving commercial viability while raising existential questions about alignment and control.

TRY THIS PROMPT (copy and paste into Suno or Udio)

Create a 60-second inspirational song in the style of contemporary gospel with these elements:
- Uplifting melody in C major
- Lyrics about overcoming doubt and trusting in personal strength
- Strong vocal harmonies in the chorus
- Piano and strings instrumentation
- Build from soft verse to powerful chorus
- Target emotion: Hope and empowerment

Include both lyrics and a description of the musical arrangement.

What this does: Generates a complete song concept with lyrics and production notes that you can use as a foundation for actual music creation, or send directly to AI music generators like Suno.

DID YOU KNOW?

The first AI to pass the Turing Test in controlled conditions fooled 67% of human evaluators—but it did so by pretending to be a 13-year-old boy from Ukraine, exploiting judges' lower expectations for grammar and cultural knowledge rather than demonstrating true intelligence. This happened in 2014, almost a decade before ChatGPT was released to the public in November, 2022.

30 Referrals: Lifetime access to all Beginners in AI videos and courses

AI-ASSISTED IMAGE OF THE WEEK

Prompt Used: man sitting at a corporate desk working with a laptop. Desk is situated in the middle of the sea, water around him. Hyper-realistic- surrealism, photography. Wes Anderson aesthetic with modern touch. --chaos 5 --ar 3:4 --profile 8l18bre --stylize 50 (Reference images were also uploaded for this creation.)

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