Jay Cuthrell covers AI independence as Microsoft builds in-house models, Google's open-source Gemma 4, and space data centers as an alternative to Maine's data center moratorium. He also discusses Artemis II's mission and how Outlook once ran in space.
Chapters
Welcome to What the Fudge for April 5th, 2026. In about 5 minutes, I'm going to cover the major topics for the week. The first was the AI race, and that race is about independence, a little bit of governance, obviously with the news that Microsoft has decided they will be becoming AI self-sufficient or pulling themselves up by their own bootstraps from an AI perspective, that means that it would give you an option other than just using the OpenAI models. And so these in-house Frontier models appear to be using about half the hardware, but if that's true, this means that you're going to see Copilot everywhere. I, I expect that Copilot will become more inclusive of every UI/UX experience across all of the Microsoft platforms. It, it will not be limited to just what you've seen so far. And I think the next interesting story around the independence of AI is that Google has open sourced a particular view of how one might run a proprietary model. And this is an open model, meaning that you can take this and avoid having to pay potentially per token model costs elsewhere. So interesting to see how that plays out. That would be the Gemma 4. The next piece of this would be obviously there are some amount of news cycles devoted to, you know, getting past that clichéd 95% of AI projects fail. Now we're taking that second or double click around whether or not AI is truly related to any reductions in force that have been in the news, or if AI is a convenient scapegoat, or as probably one of the shared articles or sound bites of the week from Jensen Huang was, if it's, if it's AI is being used as the justification, it just simply is a way of the managerial team saying they have lacked imagination. So what you would then want to understand is if there is an AI component, is that additive to your workload? Is it a chance for you to think more clearly as the user of an AI in your workflow? Or is this a question of, is the, is the juice worth the squeeze? So if that's true, then is it also meaning that you're getting more time to think, more higher-level thoughts, taking more time to think about where only a truly subjective use of your brain for things that are tribal knowledge, not documented, certainly something that an AI could not feast upon to look for a pattern through machine learning. And then the last one was, if you do think of this as a geopolitics and cybersecurity story, it is important to understand that we now have data centers. Notably, 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. And so the other part of this would be, of course, is that if you do expect the cloud to be ubiquitous, I think there is a good chance that if you follow any of my other writing, that there will be data centers that will be in a cloud above our heads, meaning something in space rotating above us. Geosynchronous or low Earth orbit, scanning across very quickly. Either way, what we're looking for here is an indication that if AI is going to grow, where will it grow next? It's also interesting to note that I believe the state of Maine in the United States has decided they will put a moratorium on net new data center builds. So kind of keep track of that legislation in the news. And then the last part of this is of course the reinforcement of common carrier law. I believe there was a Supreme Court ruling around the common carriers, the internet service providers, the, the, the people that previously were associated with the sharing or peer-to-peer networks that took place across these broadband networks, emerging broadband networks, and, and sort of the, the copyright infringement concerns from copyright holders and trying to hold accountable those ISPs as opposed to trying to track down individual users on those ISPs. And so this will be interesting, of course, as you get into the user behaviors that come from not just consuming content that has a copyright holder, but even AI-generated or manipulations or transformations of that content. So interesting space there. And speaking of space, Artemis II, how delightful that we get to see humans in a tin can flying towards the moon once again for the first time in many, many decades. So if you think about this as How amazing is it that you would have these astronauts that have trained their lives to take on this mission, and they too were apparently stymied by the wonders of Microsoft Outlook. They had to have someone help troubleshoot that, come in, I think remotely, and help them troubleshoot an Outlook issue. So Outlook in space, something to think about and maybe perhaps look forward to if you're a fan of the movie franchise that might be built around an Ad Astra type dystopia. But just wrapping up, because I know we're trying to keep this under 5 minutes and I'm already crossing over to the 6-minute mark, I wanted to also highlight that it'll be interesting to see what will happen as biometrics and new ways of conducting single sign-on sequences, kind of a movement even beyond this concept of a passkey, What will happen when we go into the VR and AR world? VR and AR are probably going to come into our lives. They may not come through the current commercial vehicles, but in a long enough timeline, it is, it is pretty astounding that if you look at the precipitous drop in the cost to deliver a VR and AR experience, I believe that headsets, embedded optics, you look at the glasses, and eventually we'll get to these smarter and smarter glasses, potentially even optics that could be built into something that's more akin to our concept of a contact lens. But I think VR and AR headsets will become much, much lower cost. And I think that some of the notions of how we would log in without having to use our digital experience, not having to use an appendage, for example, there'll be some very interesting ways of thinking about non-repudiation identity and how that ties back into a login system for biometric purposes. So with that, I'm going to wrap up. I think there's going to be a couple of other items that I'll dig into, but that can wait until the next update. So thank you again for the What the Fudge Digest for April 5th, 2026. Have a good one.
