🎁 New Year Special: We're extending our $50 discount into 2026! Use code NEWYEAR50 - valid through January 31st. See details in our call-to-action below!
🌟 Founder musings
You can't stop AI. You can only join it.
The most exciting news of the week for me was the $1B investment that Disney made in OpenAI bringing about 200 Disney characters to Sora. This was a mere few days after Disney sent Google a cease-and-desist letter to remove Disney characters from the AI images generated by Google. Disney finally realized that intellectual property protection does not fly in the AI world. Better to control how your characters show up than pretend you can stop it. I cannot help but imagine the possibilities this brings to entertainment - A scene for a movie created by AI using Disney characters. With the advancements, we wouldn’t even know if this was real or generated with AI. Remember how we’ve been looking at articles trying to find the “em dash” to see if they were AI generated? This is going to be the norm for everything else - movie scenes, videos, emails, calls and so on. We're watching a fundamental shift across every industry AI touches from entertainment and banking to education.
And it's not just Disney adapting. Airtable, Handshake, and Opendoor are embracing what they're calling "refounding" - radical reboots that go beyond pivots. These companies are fundamentally rebuilding from the ground up, acknowledging that AI changes everything about how their products should work. When technology shifts this dramatically, incremental changes aren't enough.
This week, the students in our mastery program learned about augmented reality and built their apps using it. Each of them added a special touch to the app on top of what we demonstrated. Watching them work reinforced something again for me: companies designing AI tools should be observing how students think and use AI. That's where the real insights are.
-Janani
🗓️ Opportunities to not miss for high schoolers!
Registration Deadline: January 26, 2026, 11:59pm Pacific Time
Round 1 Competition: January 30, 2026 (Friday), 12pm-3pm Eastern Time
What: The USA-North America AI Olympiad is a prestigious three-round competition that selects students to represent the United States at international AI competitions. This rigorous challenge tests students' AI knowledge and problem-solving abilities at the highest level.
Who: High school students across the United States and North America. The competition must be proctored, but USAAIO has expanded proctoring options to include universities, K-12 schools, and qualified non-profit organizations.
Format: Three competitive rounds starting with a proctored 3-hour exam. Top performers advance through subsequent rounds with increasing difficulty.
What Makes It Special:
8 students will represent the U.S. at the 2026 International Olympiad in AI (IOAI) in Abu Dhabi, UAE
4 students will represent the U.S. at the 2027 International AI Olympiad
Support from MIT, Temple University, Google (FREE Colab Pro+ GPU access for Round 2+ qualifiers), and Jane Street
Connection to the global USAAIO network through Beaver-Edge AI platform
Prizes: International representation, access to cutting-edge computing resources, career mentorship opportunities, and national recognition
Perfect for: Students serious about AI who want to compete at the highest level and potentially represent the United States on the international stage
🚀 Stay Inspired
💡 The 15 biggest AI ideas for 2026 - and what they mean for you
Every December, venture capital firm a16z shares the problems they believe founders will tackle next. The 2026 list reveals something striking: AI has moved beyond experiments and copilots. The focus now is on systems that act, infrastructure built for agents, and companies that replace entire workflows.
According to a16z partners, AI is becoming the execution layer of the economy.
Here's what that means for students:
The prompt box is disappearing. The best AI products in 2026 will stop waiting for instructions and start acting based on context. Software will observe what you're doing and step in at the right moment. This changes product design completely - winners will feel invisible, helpful, and hard to replace.
Education is about to transform. Emily Bennett predicts the first AI-native university where courses evolve in real time, curricula update continuously, and assessment focuses on how students work with AI, not what they memorize. This matters because every industry needs people fluent in orchestration, not memorization. Education becomes a dynamic system instead of a static institution.
Personalization becomes the norm. The biggest companies of the last century optimized for the average user. AI allows companies to optimize for the individual. Education, health, media, and finance all shift toward products that adapt to you specifically. Josh Lu calls 2026 "the year of me."
Voice becomes the interface. Olivia Moore predicts voice agents will manage entire workflows through conversation instead of dashboards. Scheduling, intake, follow-ups, and resolution happen through conversation. Agents connect deeply to business systems and become the primary interface.
Creative tools go fully multimodal. We already have models that generate text, images, video, and sound. The missing piece? Control. In 2026, creative tools become collaborative environments where creators guide AI using references, constraints, and feedback loops.
What connects all 15 ideas is a fundamental shift in how value gets created. AI is becoming the layer where decisions are made, work is coordinated, and outcomes are produced.
For students, the signal is clear: the biggest opportunities sit where AI is treated as the foundation, not the add-on. The skills that matter most are about understanding how to build systems that use AI to execute, coordinate, and create value.
This is why hands-on experience building with AI matters more than ever. When software can plan and execute, the ability to design AI-powered products becomes the most valuable skill. Students who understand not just what AI can do, but how to architect solutions with AI at the foundation, will shape the next decade of innovation.
Read the full breakdown: a16z's Big Ideas for 2026
🚀 The new frontier: AI is moving to space and it's not science fiction
"Greetings, Earthlings! Or, as I prefer to think of you, a fascinating collection of blue and green."
This message came from 340 miles above Earth, from an AI model running on a satellite orbiting our planet.
Last month, Nvidia-backed startup Starcloud launched a satellite with an Nvidia H100 chip 100 times more powerful than any GPU that's ever been in space. The company just successfully trained an AI model in orbit for the first time in history, running Google's Gemma language model and training NanoGPT on Shakespeare's complete works.
Why train AI in space? Earth's data centers are hitting their limits. The International Energy Agency predicts global data center electricity consumption will more than double by 2030. These facilities strain power grids, consume billions of gallons of water for cooling, and produce massive emissions.
Space offers what Earth can't. Constant solar energy - no day-night cycles, no weather. Cooling through passive radiation into space - no water needed. Energy costs 10x cheaper than Earth-based facilities, even including launch expenses.
Starcloud plans to build a 5-gigawatt orbital data center with solar panels measuring 2.4 miles wide - more power than the largest U.S. power plant, but smaller and cheaper than an equivalent terrestrial solar farm.
The race is heating up. Google announced "Project Suncatcher" with satellite launches starting in 2027. Elon Musk declared next-generation Starlink satellites could become "the lowest cost AI compute platform within five years." Jeff Bezos's Blue Origin is also building orbital computing plans.
For students learning AI today, this is remarkable. The field is moving so fast that infrastructure is literally leaving the planet. Within a decade, significant AI training could happen in orbit.
The next frontier is not just better algorithms, it's building infrastructure that makes AI sustainable, even if that means leaving Earth behind.
🦄 Student spotlight
Magic Pet Generator: When AI brings imagination to life
Ever dreamed of having a pet dragon? A flying unicorn? Or maybe a cat with a mermaid tail swimming through underwater kingdoms?
This week, we're highlighting a 7th grader, Mithra, from Raleigh, NC, who's bringing magical creatures to life with the power of AI.
This creative student has always loved animals and fantasy worlds. But she noticed something: while everyone loves imagining magical creatures, most of us can only describe them in words or sketch rough drawings. What if there was a way to instantly bring those magical pets to life in stunning detail?
So she built Magic Pet Generator - a portal to creating one-of-a-kind magical pets!
Here's how it works: With a single click, watch as AI conjures up completely unique fantasy creatures that are as adorable as they are imaginative. From mer-cats swimming through enchanted oceans to dragons perched on mystical mountains, every pet is different, special, and absolutely magical.
What makes this project remarkable isn't just the whimsical result - it's how quickly it came together. This 7th grader built Magic Pet Generator after just 3 sessions in the October Foundations cohort at Flintolabs. In less than a month, they went from learning AI basics to creating an app that sparks joy and wonder with every click.
The best part? Every magical pet is unique, which means your magical companion is truly one-of-a-kind.
The mindset of using technology to amplify human creativity and bring pure imagination to life - is what makes truly delightful applications possible.
🔥 Holiday offer extended! Start 2026 with real AI skills
We're extending our $50 discount into 2026 to give more students the opportunity to start the new year building real AI skills.
🎁 $50 Off Your First Month with code NEWYEAR50
Valid through January 31st, 2026!
Here's what you get with just one hour per week:
Hands-on AI skills through building real applications, not watching lectures
3 transferable college credits from an accredited university
Portfolio of real work that demonstrates actual capability
Small class sizes (capped at 20 students) ensuring personalized attention
Students in our current cohorts are already building AI-powered solutions - from creative tools to problem-solving applications. They're not just learning about AI; they're using it to create things that matter to them.
Next cohort starts January 3, 2026 - book your spot now!
Don't let another month pass with your student consuming AI instead of creating with it. The foundational skills employers need - critical thinking, adaptability, problem-solving, and technological fluency - develop through hands-on experience over time, not just before graduation.
Our program has a 5-star rating with reviews from both students and parents. If you have questions before signing up, email us at [email protected].
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