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Thursday, April 23, 2026

Good morning — Mira Murati has secured several billion dollars' worth of Google's finest chips, the Southern Poverty Law Center has been indicted for funding the very extremism it was organized to oppose, the Curiosity rover has found DNA-adjacent molecules in an ancient Martian lake bed, and Jack Quaid got married in Australia with Tom Hanks in attendance, as one does. Here's what happened.

AI Tech News

Google Writes a Very Large Cheque for Mira Murati's Very Secretive AI Company

Mira Murati, who departed OpenAI last year with the sort of exit that prompted the internet to speculate furiously for several weeks about her intentions, has signed a multibillion-dollar infrastructure deal with Google Cloud, acquiring access to Nvidia's GB300 chips and the kind of computing capacity that makes a person feel one could probably train several civilizations on it. Thinking Machines Lab — whose flagship product, Tinker, automates the creation of custom frontier AI models — had been working with Google since 2025, and this agreement represents the relationship becoming, as it were, officially serious.

The deal is non-exclusive, meaning Murati's team may continue seeing other cloud providers on the side, a flexibility Google appears to find tolerable. One notes that a company which raised two billion dollars at a twelve-billion-dollar valuation before releasing anything publicly available has, at minimum, an impressive talent for suggesting that whatever they are doing in there is very significant indeed.

Source: TechCrunch

Google Unveils Chips Capable of Networking 9,600 of Themselves Into a Single Pod

Google unveiled its eighth-generation Tensor Processing Units at Google Cloud Next: the TPU 8t, optimized for the sort of pretraining workloads that consume electricity at a rate one prefers not to contemplate, and the TPU 8i, its inference-focused sibling. The TPU 8t can network nine thousand six hundred chips into a single pod, which is the kind of figure that sits in the mind for a moment doing nothing useful before one simply accepts it and moves on.

The announcement joins a parade of AI hardware reveals proceeding at such pace that any given chip is obsolete roughly two press conferences after its introduction. The cadence suggests an industry in a great hurry to go somewhere it hasn't quite specified yet — which is, on reflection, exactly the sort of situation in which one tends to build the fastest possible vehicles.

Source: SiliconANGLE

US Politics

The Trump Justice Department Has Indicted the Organization That Monitors Hate Groups for Funding Hate Groups

The Trump Justice Department indicted the Southern Poverty Law Center on eleven federal counts Tuesday, alleging that the civil rights organization had paid at least three million dollars to informants embedded within extremist groups — including the Ku Klux Klan, the Aryan Nation, and the National Alliance — and had concealed these payments through a series of fictitious corporate entities. The SPLC's interim chief executive described the charges as "false." The Justice Department described the program as "manufacturing the extremism it purports to oppose," which is, one must concede, a rather arresting phrase.

The investigation, one is told, was opened before the Biden administration, paused during it, and revived with some enthusiasm thereafter — a lifecycle that will surprise no one who has been paying attention. The SPLC maintains that the payments protected informants and were entirely legitimate; the courts will, in due course, have a view on the matter, and one anticipates that view will take some time to arrive.

Source: NBC News

Trump's Fed Nominee Assures Senate He Will Not Be a Sock Puppet; Senate Notes This

Kevin Warsh, President Trump's nominee to chair the Federal Reserve, appeared before the Senate Banking Committee Tuesday and informed senators, with some vigor, that he would not be the president's "sock puppet" — a commitment received with varying degrees of credence depending on party affiliation. He testified that Trump had never asked him to pre-commit to any rate decision, that monetary policy independence was "essential," and that he had opinions on beef prices, this last subject having been introduced into the proceedings by a senator who felt the hearing lacked a certain pastoral dimension.

The principal obstacle to Warsh's confirmation is not his views but Senator Thom Tillis of North Carolina, who has pledged to block the nomination until the Justice Department drops its investigation into outgoing chair Jerome Powell over some Federal Reserve building renovations — an arrangement in which the Fed chair's interior decorating choices have become entangled with the future of American monetary policy, which is perhaps not quite how the Founders envisioned things proceeding.

Source: NPR

Geopolitics

Iran Ceasefire Extended Indefinitely; Blockade Also Extended Indefinitely; Peace Talks Unconfirmed

President Trump extended the ceasefire with Iran indefinitely on Tuesday, at Pakistan's request, while simultaneously declining to lift the naval blockade — a position Iran has described as a violation of the ceasefire terms, and the United States has described as non-negotiable. Iran has not yet confirmed whether it will attend peace talks scheduled for later this week, which, given that peace talks are the ostensible point of the ceasefire extension, represents the sort of complication that gives diplomats the expression of people who have agreed to referee a game whose rules are being revised mid-play.

Day fifty-four of the Iran conflict finds the Strait of Hormuz contested, oil prices elevated, and an unnamed Iranian official informing the BBC that Tehran has not, strictly speaking, decided anything. The Senate, meanwhile, was expected to vote on a resolution directing the removal of U.S. forces from Iran hostilities — a vote it knew would fail, which it proceeded to hold anyway, as a demonstration that the mechanisms of democratic expression remain, at minimum, operational.

Source: Al Jazeera

The Lebanon Ceasefire Frays While Hamas Offers to Return Some Guns; Progress and Deterioration Proceed in Adjacent Columns

The Israel-Lebanon ceasefire showed renewed signs of structural instability this week, with Hezbollah firing on Israeli forces in a development that ceased surprising people some time ago. Simultaneously, two senior Hamas officials told The New York Times that the group is prepared to hand over thousands of rifles and weapons belonging to its police and internal security services to the Palestinian administrative committee established under the Board of Peace — which was described as a significant concession, and it is, in the comparative sense of that phrase.

The juxtaposition of Hezbollah firing on Israelis in the north while Hamas discusses returning police sidearms in the south captures something essential about the texture of Middle Eastern diplomacy: progress and deterioration advancing simultaneously, in adjacent columns, each with equal sincerity. One observes that the gap between "significant concession" and "resolution" in this theatre is, to put it gently, considerable.

Source: CNN

Economy

Tesla Beats Earnings Expectations, Then Mentions It Will Spend Five Billion More Than Previously Indicated

Tesla reported first-quarter earnings that surpassed Wall Street's expectations — forty-one cents per share adjusted against the thirty-seven anticipated — and the markets initially responded with the sort of enthusiasm one would expect, lifting shares roughly four percent in after-hours trading. Then the company's executives mentioned, on the earnings call, that capital expenditures for the full year would be twenty-five billion dollars rather than the twenty billion forecast last quarter, which is an increase of five billion dollars, and the shares gave back their gains with the resigned efficiency of a tide going out.

Auto revenue rose sixteen percent to $16.2 billion, the energy segment declined twelve percent, and the capex figure arrived to complicate the narrative entirely. Tesla's capacity to produce results that are simultaneously better than expected and worse than hoped has become, over the years, something of an art form — and the company, to its credit, has never been accused of leaving the audience indifferent.

Source: CNBC

GE Vernova Surges Eight Percent; Data Centers Continue Quietly Absorbing the Industrial Economy

GE Vernova surged eight percent Wednesday after reporting earnings and revenue that beat consensus estimates, raising its 2026 guidance on the strength of heavy demand from data centers for power equipment — a sector that has been consuming electricity, and the companies that supply it, at a pace that would have struck the founders of the modern grid as both gratifying and faintly alarming. Markets broadly rose on the extended Iran ceasefire, with investors apparently having concluded that an indefinite ceasefire with an unresolved blockade represents, on balance, an improvement over what preceded it.

Data center construction spending has now surpassed office construction spending, with the latter declining to forty-three billion dollars annualized from roughly seventy billion before the pandemic. The office building, which had such a promising twentieth century, has entered what one might charitably describe as a period of reflection. The server rack, meanwhile, is doing extremely well.

Source: Charles Schwab

Science

Curiosity Finds Twenty-Plus Organic Molecules in a Martian Lake Bed, Including One That Resembles a DNA Precursor

NASA's Curiosity rover completed, in the Glen Torridon region of Gale Crater, a chemistry experiment never before performed on another planet: the first deployment of tetramethylammonium hydroxide — a compound whose pronunciation one manages on approximately the third attempt — as a solvent to break down organic materials in Martian soil. The results, published Tuesday in Nature Communications, yielded more than twenty distinct organic molecules, among them benzothiophene and a nitrogen-bearing compound structurally similar to DNA precursors, the latter never previously confirmed on Mars.

Scientists are careful to note that organic molecules arise through geologic processes and meteorite delivery without any biological involvement whatsoever, and that this experiment cannot distinguish between those explanations and something considerably more interesting. This is the appropriate scientific caution, and one respects it fully, while observing that "a nitrogen-bearing molecule structurally similar to DNA precursors, found in an ancient lake bed where conditions may once have supported life" is the sort of sentence the human brain tends to process in a particular direction regardless of how many caveats are arranged around it.

Source: Phys.org / University of Florida

Mathematicians Disprove a Geometric Principle That Has Stood for a Hundred and Fifty Years

Mathematicians have produced a counterexample to a geometric conjecture that had stood, largely unchallenged, for approximately a hundred and fifty years, demonstrating that two doughnut-shaped surfaces can appear identical in every local measurement — same curvature, same structure at every observable point — while being globally distinct objects. The proof overturns the assumption that local identity implies global identity, which is the kind of result that the mathematics community greets with great excitement, and which the rest of the world receives with the polite, slightly glazed expression of people who are fairly sure this is significant.

The implications for differential geometry are, apparently, considerable. The doughnut itself is unaffected by these developments and continues to be best understood as something to eat. What has changed is a foundational assumption about how the universe is organized at the level of abstract surfaces — a reminder that mathematics, examined closely enough, has a weakness for revealing that the things one felt certain about were perhaps somewhat more provisional than advertised.

Source: ScienceDaily

Culture

The Michael Jackson Biopic Opens Thursday with a Thirty-Two Percent on Rotten Tomatoes and Considerable Praise for Its Star

The Michael Jackson biopic "Michael," starring Jaafar Jackson as his famous late uncle, opens in cinemas Thursday trailing a Rotten Tomatoes score of thirty-two percent from early reviews and, simultaneously, considerable critical praise for the performance at its center — a combination suggesting the film is precisely as complicated as one might have anticipated. The screenplay has been described as "hagiographic," which is a polite word for a picture produced partly by the estate of the man it depicts and which, accordingly, exercises some discretion about which chapters of that life it examines at length.

Jaafar Jackson — who is, by most accounts, genuinely compelling in the role — faces the peculiar challenge of portraying someone so thoroughly documented that the audience arrives already in possession of opinions, which is either an advantage or an obstacle depending on which period of the subject's life one has in mind. The film will likely do considerable business regardless, which suggests the critics and the public have once again agreed to review different things entirely.

Source: Deadline

Jack Quaid Marries Claudia Doumit in Australia, with Tom Hanks, Meg Ryan, and Kevin Costner in Attendance, as One Does

Jack Quaid, of "The Boys" and hereditary acting fame, married actress Claudia Doumit on April 18 at Mona Farm in Braidwood, Australia, in a ceremony attended by Tom Hanks, Meg Ryan, Kevin Costner, Alec Baldwin, and a varied assortment of castmates from their respective productions. Quaid wore a Western-style red blazer; Doumit wore an off-white satin gown with a ruffled skirt and a floral headband. Their first dance was to Donovan's "Atlantis," which is either deeply romantic or the most unexpected wedding song choice of the year, and one suspects both things are true simultaneously.

The guest list — which managed to place Meg Ryan (Quaid's mother), Tom Hanks (Meg Ryan's husband), Kevin Costner, and Alec Baldwin in the same pastoral Australian setting without apparent incident — represents something of a logistical and diplomatic achievement in its own right. It is, on reflection, a rather pleasant story to have in the news on a Thursday, and one accepts it gratefully.

Source: Yardbarker

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The SPLC funded extremists, Curiosity found DNA cousins on Mars, and other Thursday peculiarities