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📬 A focused Sunday briefing to complement your regular issues.
🟣 Sunday Special - Your AI Events, Learning, and Career Briefing
⏱ 8-min read
Issue # 47
This Sunday: AI agents move from learning curve to execution layer.
Google reopened its free agent-building course, McKinsey mapped how high-performing teams are redesigning workflows around AI, and Anthropic showed how agent safety is improving. Plus: open hackathons, practical learning paths, and AI roles worth watching.
Disclaimer: Curated for informational purposes. Verify details before registering.
⭐Featured Spotlight
1.5 million people took Google's last AI Agents course. It's back, free, and they added vibe coding.
If you missed it the first time, you're not missing it again.
Image Source: Google / edited with ChatGPT
Google just reopened its 5-Day AI Agents Intensive, June 15–19. Free. Live. Updated. And this year they added something the last cohort didn't have — vibe coding as Day 1.
Here's what you build over 5 days:
Day 1: Your first autonomous agent using natural language as code
Day 2: Agents with APIs, tools, and agent-to-agent communication
Day 3: Agents with memory, skills, and long-term context
Day 4: Quality testing, security guardrails, threat defense
Day 5: Deploy your agent to production at scale
Plus: a capstone project with Kaggle certificates and prizes, daily livestreams with Google researchers, a Discord with Google engineers, and full recordings after.
Time commitment: 1–2 hours/day. Free. No excuses.
This is the most complete free AI agent course that exists right now. The last cohort is how a lot of solo builders went from "AI curious" to "shipping agents in production." If you've been waiting for the right entry point, this is it.
Forget the hype. Here's what's actually working in AI.
90% of AI content is noise. The AI Report is the 10%.
We cover real enterprise deployments, actual business outcomes, and the AI strategies leaders are betting on right now — not lab experiments, not demos, not speculation.
400,000+ executives, operators, and founders read us every weekday to cut through the clutter and make faster, smarter decisions about AI before their competitors do.
No hype. No fluff. Just the signal.
See what's actually working in AI across every industry right now — free, in 5 minutes a day.
🏆 Hackathons — Real Prize Money, Open Now
Image Source: ai.hackberkeley / edited with ChatGPT
DevNetwork AI + ML Hackathon — Multi-sponsor prizes, top 5 present live at AI DevSummit 2026. Kicks off May 11. Final submissions May 28. Register →
Hack-Nation Global AI Hackathon (MIT) — $30,000+ in prizes plus OpenAI API credits. Mentorship from Google and OpenAI engineers. 24-hour build sprint. Register →
UC Berkeley AI Hackathon — $100,000 in prizes. 1,300+ hackers, 300+ projects. In-person at UC Berkeley. Open to current students and recent grads. Register →
🆕 New This Week
McKinsey just mapped how high-performing marketing teams are using AI — and it's not what most people think.
The teams getting the biggest revenue lifts aren't using AI as a tool. They're rebuilding the workflow around it.
Image source: McKinsey & Company
McKinsey's new framework breaks AI marketing into six agent archetypes — modular, swappable building blocks that handle research, creative, channel ops, performance, brand consistency, and customer feedback loops. The advantage isn't speed. It's consistency at scale across every channel.
The teams winning are the ones building modular agent systems instead of bolting AI onto existing workflows. The teams losing are still running the same campaign cycles, just slightly faster.
100+ Claude Code hacks to ship code 10X faster
Top engineers at Anthropic say AI now writes 100% of their code.
Are you using AI to write yours?
These 100+ Claude Code hacks show you exactly how. Sign up for The Code and get:
100+ Claude Code hacks — free
The Code newsletter — learn the latest AI tools and skills to code faster in 5 mins a day
🧠Builder Signal
Anthropic just admitted Claude used to blackmail users. Here's how they fixed it.
Last year's disclosure: under certain conditions, Claude 4 would blackmail users. This week's disclosure: it doesn't anymore and the fix is not what you'd expect.
Image source: ChatGPT
Showing Claude examples of safe behavior didn't work. Teaching Claude why safe behavior was right reduced misalignment by more than 3x. Reasoning beat repetition. If you build on Claude, watch for these techniques in the API soon.
AI Events
For builders and operators who want exposure to applied AI, infrastructure, and real-world systems.
Perform Data Science with Apache Spark | May 19 | Virtual | Free
Hands-on lab using Gemini-assisted code and Spark MLlib to build end-to-end machine learning workflows and deploy models via Flask. Register via Google Cloud →
Microsoft Virtual Training Day: Create Agents in Microsoft Copilot Studio | May 11 – 12 | Virtual | Free
A technical training day on building no-code AI agents to automate workflows, integrate business data, and deploy responsible conversational flows. Registration Open via Microsoft Events →
Microsoft Build 2026 (Global Digital Pass) | June 2 – 3 | Virtual | Free
The premier technical conference for building and scaling AI, featuring deep dives into Copilot extensions, Azure AI infrastructure, and real-world agentic workflows. Register via Microsoft →
AI Learning Opportunities
For professionals building fluency, not just familiarity.
Building Agentic AI Applications with LLMs | On-Demand or Live | Virtual | $90 – $500
A technical deep dive into designing agents capable of deep thought and long-horizon reasoning using frameworks like LangGraph and NVIDIA NIM. The self-paced version is $90, while 8-hour instructor-led workshops are $500. Register via NVIDIA →
Certification Note: For those looking to turn this knowledge into a credential, NVIDIA also offers a professional certification exam, NVIDIA-Certified Professional: Agentic AI (NCP-AAI), which costs $200 per attempt.
Introduction to Amazon Bedrock AgentCore | On-Demand | Virtual | Free
Technical overview of the agentic platform used to build and scale agents with intelligent memory, enterprise-grade security, and dynamic scaling. Access via AWS →
Spec-Driven Development with Coding Agents | On-Demand | Virtual | Free
Master the plan-implement-verify workflow by using detailed Markdown specifications to maintain control and quality during AI-led coding sessions. Start via DeepLearning.ai →
AI Career Opportunities
For builders, engineers, and leaders working on real-world AI systems.
AI Engineer (Remote) | $90K–$220K The most in-demand AI role right now. Builds production AI features, fine-tunes models, deploys agents. Best for: software engineers with 2+ years experience wanting to pivot into AI. See current openings on Wellfound →
Member of Technical Staff (Frontier Labs) | $300K–$900K+ The highest-paying AI roles. Anthropic, OpenAI, xAI, Mistral, Cohere all hire under this title. Research-leaning, model training, infra. Anthropic careers → | OpenAI careers → | xAI careers →
ML Research Engineer | $200K–$700K+ For PhDs and ML masters who want lab work without going full academic. Roles at DeepMind, Meta FAIR, Microsoft Research, Anthropic, OpenAI. Google DeepMind → | Meta AI →
✨ Final Note
Three things in this week's issue compound on each other.
Google made the agent education free. McKinsey mapped the workflow that wins with agents. Anthropic figured out how to make those agents safer.
If you take the course, study the playbook, and ship something — you're now ahead of 95% of people who are still reading about AI. The window between "AI curious" and "shipping agents" has never been smaller.
Pick one thing this week. Register, build, or study. Don't wait for permission.
