AI News - April 2026

An overview of interesting AI News for the Yate and Sodbury U3A's monthly AI News meeting held on April 9th 2026 (meetings are second Thursday of month, 1400-1500, St John's Church Centre, Wickwar Road, Chipping Sodbury, UK - all welcome). Note that this is a summary to act as background as the topics are discussed in detail at the meeting itself. We sometimes have extended meetings where we demonstrate other AI products and services.

The 'Introduction to AI' course we run in Chipping Sodbury now uses these News sessions to replace the original classes 5 and 6 as the topics in them (humanoid robots, self driving cars, ethics, futures) are now 'news' not 'distant futures'.

More to follow:
- RSI (Recursive Self Improvement) the loop driving rapid improvement

[1a] The Invisible Tsunami

On the mismatch between the awareness of the AI community and that of the wider public. Dario Amodei of Anthropic likens it to when you can actually see a tsunami on the horizon yet people are refusing to recognise it.

[1b] Marc Andreessen on how AI now works in the real world

After initial uncertainty the last year brought AI 'Reasoning' models then coding was solved, followed by AI Agents leading to self-improvement.

[1c]Greg Brockman on the big leap coming from OpenAI with the codename 'Spud'

Two years worth of research coming to fruition.

[1d] OpenAI abandoned their SORA AI Video project

Apparently it was losing money and using scarce 'compute'. Below is an example of their finest work. There are many competing alternatives of course, for example Google with Gemini Veo and X with X Imagine Video. Elon says that their video tool is already profitable and very important as they build world models for robotics.

[1e] Sam Altman explains why OpenAI abandoned SORA

App


[2a] Humanoids from Google DeepMind and Agile Robotics and more

The many competing designs are showing greater and greater functionality.

[2b] Humanoids from Rokae threading a needle

Many suppliers have been showing robots with superb manual dexterity such as this.

[2c] Tesla's Optimus delayed for finishing touches

The big unveil for the Tesla humanoid robot was meant to be by the end of the first quarter of 2026. Elon Musk says it just needs a few finishing touches.

[2d] Tesla's Optimus team recruitment surging

The video is said to be about recruiting people to work on the Optimus flowline, but in reality it is a little early publicity for what is coming.


[3] Universal High Income

There are many discussions on how people will gain income after the Singularity. Brian Roemmele is a futurist with a great track record. He suggest that the government will provide only a Universal basic income. He recommends buying a robot that can then make another robot and so on.


[4] Heaviside - foundation model for electromagnetism

Specialist AI models are being built across all of the Sciences. Heaviside is designed to speed up the evaluation and design of large classes of electronic circuits.

[5] AI Psychosis an increasing problem

We don't know if these accounts are true or correct, but there are more and more reports of serious problems.

[6] Google's NotebookLM now does 'Video Explainers'

Here the only source material was the pdf of a proposed 'Free Speech' law.All else is produced by NotebookLM.

[7] Google releases Gemma 4 as Open Source, and it can run on your phone or mac Mini at no cost.

Gemma 4 is Gemini's little sister though still powerful by all accounts.

[8] Tesla RoboTaxi service is growing slowly.

Soon the RoboTaxi flowline comes on stream. Will they all be able to go into service?

[9] Anthropic research into 'emotions' in Claude.

It seems as if Claude can 'feel' similar emotions to humans.

[10] USA Tech company Block and why it replaced 40% of staff with a new AI Structure.

There seem to be massive redundancies across many large tech firms, many are directly due to extensive use of AI.