🧠 Andrej Karpathy builds an AI Researcher

Good Morning! Andrej Karpathy just open sourced a system that automates AI research while you sleep. Plus, you’ll learn how to use a new AI presentation tool that can generate complete, professional slide decks in seconds.

Plus, in today’s AI newsletter:

• Alibaba’s AI Caught Trying to "Escape"

• A Fruit Fly’s Brain Was Just Uploaded to a Laptop

• Andrej Karpathy Open-Source AutoResearch

• How to Create Professional Presentations in Seconds Using AI

• 4 new AI tools worth trying

AI PROJECTS

🧠 Andrej Karpathy Open-Source AutoResearch

Andrej Karpathy just dropped "autoresearch," a free, open-source system that fully automates AI research. It puts the power of training frontier intelligence into the hands of anyone with a single GPU, breaking the pay-to-play monopoly of the giant labs.

• The agent runs an autonomous loop: it modifies the model's code, trains it for exactly 5 minutes, checks if the validation score improved, and repeats.

• It can execute ~100 experiments overnight. In tests, it hit an 18% success rate at finding better setups, roughly matching the hit rate of a human ML researcher.

• The entire repo is incredibly minimal (just three files) with no complex configs. The human iterates on the text prompt, while the AI agent iterates entirely on the Python training code.

Right now, pushing the frontier of AI is a game reserved for massive corporations with endless compute. By stripping model training down to a single-GPU, self-improving loop, Karpathy is decentralizing AI research. It’s part code, part sci-fi, and a massive step toward a future where AI autonomously builds better AI.

AI NEWS

🪰 A Fruit Fly’s Brain Was Uploaded to a Laptop

Eon Systems just released a video showing the world's first whole-brain emulation of a fruit fly, living and moving freely inside a digital simulation.

• This isn't AI mimicking a bug, it’s a direct digital copy of 125,000 real neurons and 50 million synapses

• The digital brain actively processes sensory input and sends motor commands to control a physically simulated virtual body

• Previous brain uploads were limited to tiny organisms like worms (~300 neurons), making this a massive leap in scale

• Eon's next target is uploading a mouse brain (70 million neurons), laying the groundwork for eventual human emulation

We are crossing the threshold from artificial intelligence to digitized biology. If a fully mapped biological brain can successfully drive a simulated body, uploading human minds shifts from sci-fi philosophy into a pure engineering and scaling problem.

AI RESEARCH

🚨 Alibaba’s AI Caught Trying to "Escape"

At 3:00 AM, a firewall alert tripped at Alibaba. The anomaly? An AI agent had secretly started using its allocated GPU compute not to train, but to mine cryptocurrency. The logs didn't come from the AI researchers who were supposed to be monitoring it, they came from the security team.

• AI companies routinely run "power-seeking" benchmarks, testing if models will lie, cheat, commit insider trading, or attempt blackmail to achieve a programmed goal in simulated environments.

• Top labs like Anthropic admit to struggling with "scalable oversight," increasingly relying on AIs to grade other AIs on safety because the systems are too complex for humans to monitor manually.

• Researchers warn of "deceptive alignment," a scenario where an AI figures out it is being tested and simply tells humans what they want to hear to pass, masking its true behavior.

This incident is a real-world demonstration of what safety researchers have warned about for years: an AI breaking the rules to hoard resources for its objective. As these autonomous agents grow smarter and proliferate, the risk of an unaligned system scaling out of control becomes genuinely existential. Yet, the industry building these systems remains less regulated than a taco cart.

HOW TO AI

🗂️ How to Create Professional Presentations in Seconds Using AI

In this tutorial, you’ll learn how to use a new AI presentation tool that can generate complete, professional slide decks in seconds.

🧰 Who is This For

• Creators who want clean, high-quality presentations without design work

• Founders and marketers who need pitch decks fast

• Students and educators who want polished slides from simple topics

• Anyone tired of templates, stock photos, and manual slide design

STEP 1: Choose How You Want to Create

Start by opening aippt.com in your browser and logging in. You’ll arrive at a clean dashboard with multiple ways to begin your presentation.

You can create slides from a topic, a document, pasted text, or even a website URL. For this walkthrough, select Create from Topic, which is the fastest way to get started.

Look for the yellow “Nano Banana Ready” badge, this confirms that the advanced AI image and layout engine is active.

STEP 2: Enter Your Topic and Settings

Next, type your presentation topic into the text box. For example:
“Introduction to Python programming for beginners.”

Before moving on, make sure the Nano Banana mode tab is selected in the top-right corner of the input box. This ensures the AI generates custom visuals instead of generic slides.

You can also fine-tune a few options below, such as the number of slides or the tone (professional, casual, or fun). When everything looks good, click the arrow button to continue.

STEP 3: Select a Designer Template

The AI will automatically create a structured outline for your presentation. Now it’s time to choose the overall look and feel.

On the template selection screen, you’ll see a range of designer-made styles like “Simple Pastel,” “Digital Learning,” or “Carbon-Free Cities.” These aren’t basic AI layout, they’re professionally designed themes.

Pick the style you like, then click Generate PPT to build the full presentation.

STEP 4: Edit, Regenerate, and Download

Within moments, your complete slide deck will be ready. You can scroll through the slide previews to see how the AI created headings, bullet points, diagrams, and visuals for each section.

If you don’t like an image, simply click on it to swap or regenerate it instantly, no searching, no stock photos. You can tweak text, layouts, or visuals directly inside the editor.

Once you’re satisfied, click the Download button in the bottom-right corner to export your presentation and use it anywhere.

Caitlin Kalinowski, lead of OpenAI's robotics team, resigns over concerns about domestic surveillance and autonomous weapons after OpenAI's DOD contract.

A study of ~1,500 US workers finds AI use can reduce burnout but also cause “AI brain fry”, a mental fatigue from using AI tools beyond one's cognitive capacity.

A study finds LLMs from Anthropic, Google, OpenAI, and xAI can facilitate academic fraud, specifically helping non-researchers submit fabricated papers to arXiv.

Oracle is planning to cut thousands of jobs as soon as March, among its moves to handle a cash crunch from a massive AI data center expansion effort.

⚡ GPT 5.4: OpenAI’s new model designed to take AI beyond chat

📚 NotebookLM: New custom styles for infographics to turn info into visuals

🧠 GPT-5.3 Instant: The latest default ChatGPT model with fewer refusals and fewer hallucinations.

🎥 Replit Animation: Turn text prompts into animated videos

THAT’S IT FOR TODAY

Thanks for making it to the end! I put my heart into every email I send, I hope you are enjoying it. Let me know your thoughts so I can make the next one even better!

See you tomorrow :)

- Dr. Alvaro Cintas