PLANNING AND DESIGN
Why Perfect AI Alignment Is Mathematically Impossible, and Why That Might Be Fine – ScienceBlog.com
Agentic coding at enterprise scale demands spec-driven development– venturebeat.com
AI Could Democratize One of Tech’s Most Valuable Resources– www.wired.com
April 16, 2026
EXCERPT:
Nvidia is the undisputed king of AI chips. But thanks to the AI it helped build, the champ could soon face growing competition.
Modern AI runs on Nvidia designs, a dynamic that has propelled the company to a market cap of well over $4 trillion. Each new generation of Nvidia chip allows companies to train more powerful AI models using hundreds or thousands of processors networked together inside vast data centers. One reason for Nvidia’s success is that it provides software to help program each new generation of chip. That may soon not be such a differentiated skill.
A startup called Wafer is training AI models to do one of the most difficult and important jobs in AI—optimizing code so that it runs as efficiently as possible on a particular silicon chip.
Emilio Andere, cofounder and CEO of Wafer, says the company performs reinforcement learning on open source models to teach them to write kernel code, or software that interacts directly with hardware in an operating system. Andere says Wafer also adds “agentic harnesses” to existing coding models like Anthropic’s Claude and OpenAI’s GPT to soup up their ability to write code that runs directly on chips.
Agentic coding at enterprise scale demands spec-driven development– venturebeat.com
News Source
EXCERPT:
Autonomous agents are compressing software delivery timelines from weeks to days. The enterprises that scale agents safely will be the ones that build using spec-driven development.
There’s a moment in every technology shift where the early adopters stop being outliers and start being the baseline. We’re at that moment in software development, and most teams don’t realize it yet.
A year ago, vibe coding went viral. Non-developers and junior developers discovered they could build beyond their abilities with AI. It lowered the floor. It made prototyping much quicker, but it also introduced a surplus of slop. What the industry then needed was something that raised the ceiling — something that improved code quality and worked the way the most expert developers work. Spec-driven development did that. It laid the foundation for trustworthy autonomous coding agents.
April 15, 2026
EXCERPT:
Google DeepMind research team introduced Gemini Robotics-ER 1.6, a significant upgrade to its embodied reasoning model designed to serve as the ‘cognitive brain’ of robots operating in real-world environments. The model specializes in reasoning capabilities critical for robotics, including visual and spatial understanding, task planning, and success detection — acting as the high-level reasoning model for a robot, capable of executing tasks by natively calling tools like Google Search, vision-language-action models (VLAs), or any other third-party user-defined functions.
Here is the key architectural idea to understand: Google DeepMind takes a dual-model approach to robotics AI. Gemini Robotics 1.5 is the vision-language-action (VLA) model — it processes visual inputs and user prompts and directly translates them into physical motor commands. Gemini Robotics-ER, on the other hand, is the embodied reasoning model: it specializes in understanding physical spaces, planning, and making logical decisions, but does not directly control robotic limbs. Instead, it provides high-level insights to help the VLA model decide what to do next. Think of it as the difference between a strategist and an executor — Gemini Robotics-ER 1.6 is the strategist.
This new chip survives 1300°F (700°C) and could change AI forever– www.sciencedaily.com
RESOURCES
Mustafa Suleyman: AI development won’t hit a wall anytime soon—here’s why– www.technologyreview.com
April 8, 2026
We evolved for a linear world. If you walk for an hour, you cover a certain distance. Walk for two hours and you cover double that distance. This intuition served us well on the savannah. But it catastrophically fails when confronting AI and the core exponential trends at its heart.
From the time I began work on AI in 2010 to now, the amount of training data that goes into frontier AI models has grown by a staggering 1 trillion times—from roughly 10¹⁴ flops (floating-point operations‚ the core unit of computation) for early systems to over 10²⁶ flops for today’s largest models. This is an explosion. Everything else in AI follows from this fact.
Republicans must reject Big Tech land grabs or start losing elections– www.theblaze.com
April 15, 2026
EXCERPT:
Republicans are continuing their uninterrupted streak of woefully underperforming in elections. However, in the first of its kind referendum on Big Tech data centers, voters are showing that a party that embraces land sovereignty over Big Tech dystopian land grabs will win the day.
Sadly, Republicans have chosen to be on the losing side of the issue.
The public is being asked to shoulder a burden to facilitate a supposed technology whose benefits are very unclear and dubious.
In a first of its kind local referendum, voters in Port Washington, Wisconsin, voted by a margin of 2-1 for a referendum that will require all future data center projects in the area to be approved by a vote of the city’s residents.
The referendum was sparked in the wake of Oracle and OpenAI’s Stargate facility setting up shop in the area. The proposed 1.3 gigawatt facility will consume the power equivalent of over one million households.
Ban on data centers in St. Charles gets city planning commission’s endorsement– www.stltoday.com
Bill Gates Given Green Light to Build Nuclear Reactor– slaynews.com
CULTURE
Anthropic seeks Christian leaders’ help in shaping AI ethics – Christian Post
April 14, 2026
A man who tried to kill OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has been caught. Included in the evidence is a hit list of AI leaders the man hoped to kill. An FBI Affidavit claimed the suspect wanted to kill AI by killing its human leaders.
The suspect allegedly wrote, “Also if I am going to advocate for others to kill and commit crimes, then I must lead by example and show that I am fully sincere in my message.”
Man Who Allegedly Attempted To Murder Sam Altman Had Hit List Of Other AI Leaders, FBI Says– dailycaller.com
News Source
EXCERPT:
The man accused of attempting to murder OpenAI CEO Sam Altman kept a hit list of other tech executives, according to the FBI.
Twenty-year old Daniel Moreno-Gama, who faces federal charges for posession of an unregistered firearm and attempted destruction of property with explosives, wrote a document that “identified views opposed to Artificial Intelligence (AI) and the executives of various AI companies,” an FBI affidavit revealed Monday.
After detaining Moreno-Gama, officers “recovered incendiary devices, a jug of kerosene, a blue lighter, and a document” from his possession, according to court records.
After the Attack on Sam Altman’s Home, Will AI CEOs Go On the Offensive? – Mother Jones
April 14, 2026
Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, takes his seat before a meeting of the White House Task Force on Artificial Intelligence Education in the East Room of the White House, Thursday, Sept. 4, 2025, in Washington.Alex Brandon/AP
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Sam Altman suggested that an investigative story describing him as someone “unconstrained by truth” with a “sociopathic lack of concern” for consequences caused an early Friday attack on his San Francisco home.
Moody’s CEO: AI has a trust problem – better models won’t fix it– fortune.com
EXCERPT:
Nearly every week, the headlines about AI are dominated by the news of the latest model. A few days ago, Meta announced its newest model called Muse Spark – its first under its revamped AI division. According to their internal benchmarking tests, the new model is competitive with leading rivals across several tasks.
AI Companies Building A Trojan Horse To Get Public On Their Side– crooksandliars.com
April 8, 2026
The Wall Street Journal, which famously floats trial balloons for corporate behemoths, is carrying water for the poor AI companies who are so, so disliked:
OpenAI this week published a populist wish list of policy proposals that zero in on worries like job replacement and wealth concentration, floating such ideas as a four-day workweek and an AI-invested public-wealth fund distributed to citizens.
Those proposals come as its rival Anthropic has been signing partnerships and building tools for such sectors as consulting and software, where share prices have been whacked by investor worries that they will be replaced by AI. Anthropic’s efforts have helped push back up shares of tech companies including LegalZoom.com LZ 3.84%increase; green up pointing triangle.
Anthropic and OpenAI are each pursuing ventures to help private equity, a big owner of companies in sectors ripe for disruption, with AI transformation. (Those efforts could also yield lucrative new business customers.)
AI Will Be Met With Violence, and Nothing Good Will Come of It– www.thealgorithmicbridge.com
The first thing you learn about a loom is that it’s easy to break.
The shuttle runs along a track that warps with humidity. The heddles hang from cords that fray. The reed is a row of thin metal strips, bent by hand, that bend back just as easily. The warp beam cracks if you over-tighten it. The treadles loosen at the joints. The breast beam, the cloth roller, the ratchet and pawl, the lease sticks, the castle; the whole contraption is wood and string held together by tension. It’s a piece of ingenuity and craftsmanship, but one as delicate as the clothes it manifests out of wild plant fibers. It is, also, the foundational tool of an entire industry, textiles, that has kept its relevance to our days of heavy machinery, factories, energy facilities, and datacenters.
AI Slop Is Making the Internet Fake-Happy– www.wired.com
April 15, 2026
EXCERPT:
To anyone with a pulse and a smartphone, it’s obvious that the internet has an AI slop problem. The issue has grown more severe since ChatGPT launched in 2022, with some social platforms flooded with AI-generated writing. Now, there’s data to back up the anecdotal evidence.
A new preprint study published today from researchers at the Imperial College of London, Stanford University, and the Internet Archive found that approximately 35 percent of all new websites are either AI-generated or AI-assisted. The same study also found that online writing is “increasingly sanitized and artificially cheerful.” In other words, AI is making the internet fake-happy.
The research team tried four different approaches to AI detection before settling on tools from Pangram Labs after it delivered the most consistent results. (Though the team found it performed well on its tests, it is worth noting that all artificial intelligence detection tools are imperfect.) To compile a representative sample of websites, it tapped the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, which collects snapshots of webpages. In addition to quantifying how many sites created between 2022 and 2025 lean on AI-generated writing, the study also tested six different theories about the characteristics of slop.
Canada Is Mulling Age Restrictions on AI Chatbots and Social Media – Bloomberg.com
Claude puts up a wall as ID checks complicate access for Chinese users– technode.com
OpenAI can’t duck federal claims over murder-suicide tied to ChatGPT – Courthouse News
Apple threatened to remove Grok from the App Store over sexualized deepfakes, letter says – NBC News
Video. Humanoid robots box and perform at Hong Kong AI and robotics fair– www.euronews.com
April 15, 2026
EXCERPT:
Hong Kong hosted the AI and robotics fair where humanoid robots boxed and played music as part of InnoEX 2026 and the Hong Kong Electronics Fair (Spring Edition), which ran from 13 to 16 April 2026 at the Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre.
The innovation-and-technology showcase reflects a broader trend of robots expanding into service and public functions. Unitree unveiled four models with advanced capabilities, including navigation assistance and support in emergencies, with some able to operate fire hoses in hazardous settings.
At the exhibition, robots also performed martial arts style routines and mimicked musical instruments, highlighting their versatility across sectors. Developers say these systems are designed for security, rescue and customer service as well as entertainment.
According to organisers, the fair brought together companies and researchers from across Asia, reflecting strong investment in the sector. Firms including AgiBot, EngineAI, UBTECH and Unitree showcased advanced robots, alongside start-ups and international participants, underlining Hong Kong’s role as a regional hub.
MARKET
AI Is Exposing The Limits Of Economics– thefederalist.com
April 7, 2026
There is a particular pleasure in watching a scholar dismantle the monument he has spent a career admiring. Tyler Cowen named his blog after the Marginal Revolution; he has spent decades explicating, celebrating, and applying marginalist thinking to every aspect of modern life. In Cowen’s compact and astringent book, The Marginal Revolution: Rise and Decline, and the Pending AI Revolution, he turns to survey the edifice and finds it, if not crumbling, then visibly retreating from the frontier where the real intellectual work gets done. The result is one of the more honest performances in recent economic writing: a love letter that doubles as an elegy, delivered without sentimentality.
The book’s method is itself something of a marginalist exercise. Rather than mounting a frontal assault on large questions about the future of economics, Cowen begins at the margin, with the history of a single idea, the doctrine that value is determined not by the total utility of a good but by the utility of an additional unit of it. Many readers arrive at this book knowing that definition. Cowen’s first service is to show how much that belief has concealed. Marginalism is not one thing but several: There is intuitive marginalism, tautological marginalism, engineering marginalism, and social marginalism. The further one presses into the concept, the more it ramifies. Even the ideas we think we understand resist the grip that holds them.
Google hosts AI for the Economy Forum in Washington D.C.– blog.google
April 14, 2026
EXCERPT:
Today we’re bringing people together in Washington D.C. to discuss how AI will impact the economy and jobs. At our inaugural AI for the Economy Forum, co-hosted with MIT FutureTech, we’re starting with a simple premise: neither the benefits nor the risks are automatic or guaranteed. How AI impacts our lives, jobs and economy is something we as a society can shape – and fully realizing AI’s economic potential will require a new era of partnership between companies, workers, governments, researchers and more. At the forum, economists, industry leaders, policymakers and experts will gather to share information, identify gaps in current understanding, and lay the foundation for ongoing collaboration.
Google has a long-standing commitment to helping positively shape this transition. Today, we’re building on that commitment in two critical ways. First, we are making new investments in research to ensure governments, companies, researchers, and civil society have the information required to make smart decisions. Second, we are providing training opportunities to equip people with the skills needed to navigate a changing economy.
Why A.I. Ads Could Define the Next Internet Economy– observer.com
News Source
EXCERPT:
The shift to A.I.-driven interfaces is transforming advertising from attention-grabbing to machine-readable participation. Unsplash+
For decades, advertising has quietly powered the modern internet. It funded the rise of search engines, social platforms, maps, email and media, making them accessible to billions of people around the world. Most users never paid directly for these services, and yet they benefited from one of the most open and expansive information ecosystems ever created.
Now, that ecosystem is being reshaped. Over the past year, the rapid adoption of generative A.I. and the corresponding decline in traditional search traffic for many publishers have intensified questions about how the next phase of the internet will be funded.
Artificial intelligence is rapidly becoming the new front door to information. Instead of typing queries into a search bar and sifting through links, users are turning to A.I. systems to deliver direct answers, recommendations and decisions. Platforms like OpenAI, Perplexity and Anthropic are redefining how information is accessed altogether. Meanwhile, incumbents like Google are integrating A.I.-generated overview answers directly into search results, signaling a structural shift in how users discover information.
AI TOOLS
The AI Revolution in Math Has Arrived – Quanta Magazine
China Says AI Outperformed Human Commanders With 90% Accuracy in Simulation – The Defense Post
The AI build-out is powering global goods trade – Financial Times
Decentralized AI models take over healthcare systems – Devdiscourse
Algorithms Now Discover And Write Scientific Papers Autonomously – Quantum Zeitgeist
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