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
- Claude Code Horse Racing Experiment

[1a] Sam Altman on how this moment in time reminds him of his feelings just before COVID struck

From an OpenAI Forum discussion early April 2026 link: Sam Altman on Building the Future of AI .

[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] Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei talks about the significance of Claude Mythos

Mythos is said to be as good as a very good professional at finding 'exploits' (bugs) in complex software. So much so that it cannot yet be released. Project Glasswing is Anthropic's initiative to protect the software industry.

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

Two years worth of research coming to fruition.

[1e] 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.

[1f] Sam Altman explains why OpenAI abandoned SORA

Why huge deals like the one for Sora with Disney, made just a few months ago, were sacrificed.


[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. One idea - 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. As an example, 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, Mac Mini etc 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 factory flowline comes on stream. Will they all be able to go into service? Meanwhile in China, a system problem caused Baidu Apollo Go self-driving taxis in Wuhan to stop operating. Some were on major highways at the time. Teslas are self-contained in that all AI used for driving is on board.

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

It seems as if Claude can 'feel' similar emotions to humans. Or at the least it uses similar 'circuits' internally when it is experiencing situations that would lead humans to feel those emotions.

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

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

[11] Anthropic build their own AI Agents in the style of OpenClaw/Clawdbot/Moltbook

Anthropic have resisted Claude becoming part of third party tools, preferring instead to build their own complete solution.


[12a] Intel partnering with Elon Musk to build the Terafab

The mission - to build vast volumes of ultra-high-performance chips for AI Servers and more.

[12b] The Terafab website shows the huge ambition

Tesla and SpaceX/xAl are working together on this massive project, making it more likely that they will one day merge to become an enormous company leading the way into expansion in Space.

[13] Street delivery robots meet resistance - an early sign of popular resistance

Slow moving delivery robots make for an easy target for a new generation of 'Luddites'. This incident looks as if it could be staged, but the feelings expressed have been seen many times elsewhere.