What The Fudge for April 5, 2026: AI Independence, Space Data Centers, & Outlook on the Moon

From Microsoft's AI self-sufficiency and the Gemma 4 model, to AWS data centers going offline, and Artemis 2 astronauts troubleshooting Outlook in space

Four times in a row! Here we go!

Note: This week I tried using Descript (referral link for 50% discount for 2 months on the Creator monthly plan) again for the first time since April 13, 2024 (I am quite fickle about SaaS but like to kick the tires). This time, I aimed to remove uhms, ahhs, and pauses to go from 7m 28s (raw) to 6m 59s (scrubbed).

Microsoft’s AI Self-Sufficiency: Microsoft has decided they will be “becoming AI self-sufficient or pulling themselves up by their own bootstraps from an AI perspective,” giving users an option beyond OpenAI models.
Copilot Everywhere: With in-house frontier models appearing to use “about half the hardware,” we can expect Copilot to “become more inclusive of every UI UX experience across all of the Microsoft platforms.”
Gemma 4: Google has released an open model, meaning users can take this open model and “avoid having to pay potentially per token model costs elsewhere,” by using Gemma 4 on your own device.

Moving Past The Cliches: The news cycle is moving past the “cliched 95% of AI projects fail” narrative and investigating whether AI is truly causing reductions in force.
A Convenient Scapegoat: Addressing whether AI is a convenient scapegoat, Jensen Huang noted that if AI is used as a justification, “it just simply is a way of the managerial team saying they have lacked imagination.”
Additive Workloads: Organizations must understand if AI is “additive to your workload” or if “the juice worth the squeeze,” giving users more time to apply “a truly subjective use of your brain for things that are tribal knowledge, not documented.”

AWS Offline Zones: As a geopolitics and cybersecurity story, AWS “has taken some of their data centers offline in the areas where there is a quote unquote hard down in their other zones that are part of the conflict taking place right now in the Middle East.”
Data Centers in Orbit: Cloud infrastructure is expanding, with predictions of data centers “in a cloud above our heads, meaning something in space, rotating above us, geosynchronous or low earth orbit.”
Maine Moratorium: Domestically, the state of Maine “has decided they will put a moratorium on net new data center builds.”

Supreme Court Ruling: A Supreme Court ruling addressed internet service providers (ISPs) and copyright infringement concerns over peer-to-peer networks.
ISP Accountability: The focus is on “trying to hold accountable those ISPs as opposed to trying to track down individual users on those ISPs.”
AI Generated Content: This accountability will be interesting regarding user behaviors surrounding “AI generated or manipulations or transformations of that content.”

Return to the Moon: It is delightful to see humans “in a tin can flying towards the moon once again for the first time in many many decades.”
Outlook in Space: Astoundingly, these highly trained astronauts “were apparently stymied by the wonders of Microsoft Outlook” and needed remote help to “troubleshoot an Outlook issue.”

Beyond Passkeys: There is a movement beyond passkeys, looking at “what will happen as biometrics and new ways of conducting single sign on sequences” evolve.
VR/AR Evolution: With a precipitous drop in cost to deliver VR/AR experiences, we will eventually see “smarter and smarter glasses potentially even optics that could be built into something that’s more akin to our concept of a contact lens.”
Non-Repudiation Identity: With new tech, there will be “very interesting ways of thinking about non repudiation identity and how that ties back into a login system for biometric purposes” without needing an appendage.