🌟 Founder musings
What does it mean to exist in a world AI builds for you?
My feed this week has been flooded with AI opinions. Videos from technologists, philosophers, parents, economists, journalists. Some of them dig into the technical trajectory, others spiral into emotion. And honestly? Both kinds make me stop scrolling.
The one that stuck with me most was an article by a product leader about a documentary releasing this week called "The AI Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist." The filmmaker, Daniel Roher, found out he was going to be a father. And that changed everything about how he looked at what he was building and covering. He gave his feeling a name: Anxiety Mountain. The place you live when your life's work and your child are entering the same terrifying, exhilarating, impossible-to-predict world at the same time.
I know that mountain. I think a lot of us do.
What struck me reading about this alongside other things this week, like the story about the AI tool that completed entire college courses autonomously, is a question I keep coming back to: if AI can do the learning for you, earn the credential for you, do the work for you, what exactly are we preparing our kids for? What is the purpose of the struggle?
There's always been a generational version of this anxiety. Every era worries its children will have it too easy, or too hard, or just differently hard. But this feels like something else. When the tool that's supposed to help you learn can also just... do it for you, the question stops being about productivity and starts being existential. What is the point of learning if the output can be generated? What is the point of working if the work can be automated? AI is forcing us to ask what we're striving for. And I'm not sure we've had that conversation clearly enough yet.
The documentary points out that every major AI lab has looked directly at the possibility of superintelligence and acknowledged, publicly, that it could go badly. And then gone back to building. That tension is real, and it's not going away.
I'm not an apocaloptimist or an optimist yet. I'm still figuring it out, like most of us.
But here's what I do know from watching our students: the ones who build things, who wrestle with a problem until it breaks and then fix it, who ship something into the world that didn't exist before, who has learned how to “figure it out” - they don't look lost. They look like they know exactly why they showed up.
Maybe that's the answer, for now.
-Janani
🗓️ Opportunities to not miss for high schoolers!
Registration deadline: June 6, 2026 | Hackathon dates: June 20–21, 2026
What: The inaugural USAII Global AI Hackathon is a free, fully virtual competition where high school students build real-world AI solutions — no prior hackathon experience required. The high school track runs as a focused 2-day sprint around the theme "AI for Good in Your World," tackling challenges in community, learning, and environment. Students work in teams of 2–5, with no-code and low-code approaches welcome. Mentors, industry speakers, and judges support participants throughout.
Who: US high school students (grades 9–12), open to all experience levels. Teams can include students from different schools.
Prizes: $15,000+ prize pool and USAII AI certification scholarships for top performers.
What makes it special: This is the first edition of this hackathon, which means early participants are getting in on the ground floor of what promises to be a recurring global event. The challenge is explicitly focused on impact rather than abstraction — students solve problems that matter, not hypothetical case studies. Certificates and digital badges are awarded to all participants, which can strengthen college applications and resumes.
Perfect for: Students who want to apply AI to real community problems in a supported, structured environment, especially those who have been building skills and want their first high-stakes competition experience.
Pre-register now → aihackathon.usaii.org
🚀 Stay Inspired
🎯 Three teens, one shifting job market - here's how they're responding
The job market that today's high schoolers are entering looks genuinely different from anything their parents navigated. CNN spoke with three teens who aren't waiting around to figure out how to handle it and their strategies say a lot about what this moment actually requires.
One teen, Karissa, framed it not as a threat but as a character question: "How are we building our tenacity, curiosity, and empathy to succeed and adapt in a world where AI is bound to rise?" Others are pairing humanities and data science to hedge against disruption, or teaching themselves AI tools well ahead of any classroom instruction. What they share is a refusal to be passive.
The data backs them up. A 2026 Wharton Business School and Accenture report found that specific technical skills such as analytical fluency and context-based decision-making now outrank vague credentials in employer demand. Microsoft's Future of Work team notes that 70% of the skills in today's workforce will be "completely changed" by 2030.
The students who come out ahead won't be the ones who worried the most. They'll be the ones who started building the earliest.
🤖 If AI can finish your homework, what are you actually learning?
In February, a 22-year-old developer launched an AI tool called Einstein that could log into Canvas, watch lectures, write papers, join discussions, and submit homework, automatically, around the clock. It was taken down within days after a legal challenge. But the question it raised didn't go away: if AI can complete an entire course, what exactly is a credential certifying?
Einstein's creator, Advait Paliwal, said that was the whole point. He believes higher education has drifted from real learning into credentialism, and he wanted to force the conversation. It worked. Over 124,000 people visited the site in three days, and educators across the country started asking hard questions about what their courses were actually measuring.
One educator's warning cuts right to the stakes: if students can game credentials with AI, those credentials become suspect in the job market for everyone, even the students who did the real work. The fix isn't banning AI. It's designing learning that AI can't fake projects, oral defenses, real things built and demonstrated in front of other people.
That's a preview of what education needs to become. And it's exactly what students building real AI applications today are already doing.
💻 Program spotlight
When your phone becomes a portal: building augmented reality
Most people experience augmented reality every day without thinking much about it. The filter that puts puppy ears on your face. The arrow floating over the road in your navigation app. The IKEA furniture you "place" in your living room before buying it. AR is everywhere and until recently, building it required specialized teams and expensive tools.
Our Mastery track students are building it in three weeks.
The AR unit starts with the fundamentals that most courses never teach: what augmented reality actually is at a technical level. Not the consumer experience of it, but the mechanics underneath. Students learn how a device's camera and sensors work together to map the real world in real time, how the software anchors virtual objects to physical surfaces, and how interaction works — how a tap, a gesture, or the position of your face becomes an input that the program responds to. Face tracking is one of the concepts that lands hardest. When students realize that what looks like "magic" is really a set of coordinate points being mapped and updated dozens of times per second, the magic doesn't disappear. It gets more interesting.
By the end of three weeks, each student has built a working AR application of their own, something that uses the camera, responds to the real world, and creates an experience that didn't exist before they built it.
That progression, from "I've used AR" to "I built something with AR," is exactly the kind of shift that changes how a student sees technology for the rest of their life. The world stops being a thing that happens to them and starts being something they can build on top of.
🔥 Build Real AI Skills Before College
🎁 April cohort enrollment now open
While the debate rages over what AI can do to a homework assignment, Flintolabs students are busy building the things AI can't fake — real applications, real problem-solving, and a real portfolio of work that shows colleges and employers what they're actually capable of.
Here's what you get with just one hour per week for 6 months:
✅ Hands-on AI skills through building real applications, not watching lectures
✅ 3 transferable college credits from University of Colorado Denver
✅ Portfolio of real work that demonstrates capability to colleges and employers
✅ Small class sizes (capped at 20 students) ensuring personalized attention
✅ Advanced concepts like OpenCV, Minimax algorithms, computer vision, and more
✅ The critical thinking and problem-solving skills employers desperately need
While college grads struggle with workplace readiness and entry-level roles disappear to automation, Flintolabs students are building portfolios of real work, exactly the kind of demonstrated capability that matters when so much else is automated away.
Classes start Saturday, April 4!
Our program has a 5-star rating with reviews from both students and parents.
Questions? Email us at [email protected]
Coming soon: We're launching week-long summer camps and student internships — two new ways to build real AI skills this summer. These will go live on our website shortly. Follow our LinkedIn company page to be the first to know when they drop.
Found this valuable? Forward this newsletter to other high schoolers and parents who want to be informed about AI trends and what is needed to prepare for an AI-driven future. Every student deserves the chance to build real skills before college.
You're receiving this newsletter because you expressed interest in Flintolabs or crossed paths with our community. If you believe you received this in error, please feel free to unsubscribe using the link in this mail.