Four For Friday | April 10, 2026
LF214 Philanthropy's new OS, quantum breaks crypto, AI energy breakthrough, Open AI's New Deal, and tool of the week: Paperclip
Welcome to this week’s Four For Friday. Just back from a week of vacation in Bali and a couple of weeks in Europe - brimming with fresh energy and new ideas to take back to Australia. Four AI focused topics this week, as my world is increasingly shaped by the speed at which decisions are being made and products are evolving.
1. Philanthropy needs a new Operating System
The 2026 Global Philanthropy Forum wanted to redesign philanthropy’s “operating system” from scratch. The theme, “Architecting the Future,” was aspirational; nonprofits are mostly consumers rather than shapers of technology. Could that change?
Maybe. Philanthropy can play a role as “society’s risk capital” - governments and corporations are short term-focused, leaving foundations as the only actors with genuine tolerance for long-term, high-risk, high-leverage bets. For those philanthropists looking to make real, substantive, systemic change, there are now more options than ever.
The So What? Philanthropy must choose between being an architect, shaper and maker of the future or a polite, passive donor.
2. With AI + quantum, today’s cryptography may be toast
The internet’s security just got an expiry date. Papers from Google and Caltech startup Oratomic reveal that AI is now accelerating quantum computing breakthroughs in alarming ways (in particular for cryptographers).
A quantum computer could now theoretically break encryption with only tens of thousands of qubits, dramatically down from previous estimates of a million. Google has developed an implementation of a decrypting algorithm ten times more efficient than any prior method. Cloudflare, which secures a significant fraction of the internet, has already accelerated its preparation deadline to 2029, six years ahead of the NIST target.
The So What? AI accelerating quantum is not a future scenario. It is happening now.
3. AI energy breakthrough
AI has a voracious energy appetite, and researchers at Tufts University may have delivered the GLP-1 equivalent. They built a ‘neuro-symbolic’ AI that combines neural networks with human-style logical reasoning, cutting up to 99% energy consumption.
AI data centers already account for more than 10% of U.S. electricity production, with demand projected to double by 2030. The Tufts POC showed that training required only 1% of the energy used by a conventional model, completing training in 34 minutes against a day and a half for traditional models.
The novelty is in the architecture: instead of brute-force pattern matching, the system applies rules and abstract categories, the way a competent human actually reasons. Whether this scales remains to be seen, but the direction of travel is exciting.
The So What? Smarter AI architecture, not just more and bigger chips, may be the real path to sustainable intelligence.
4. Open AI’s New Deal for the intelligence age
OpenAI has published a sweeping industrial policy framework arguing that the transition to superintelligence demands a response as ambitious as the New Deal.
The document is notable less for its novelty than for who is saying it: the company building the technology is now explicitly calling for redistribution mechanisms.
Key proposals include a Public Wealth Fund giving every citizen a direct stake in AI-driven growth, portable benefits decoupled from employment, “efficiency dividends” converting AI productivity gains into shorter working weeks, and adaptive safety nets that automatically scale up when displacement metrics breach defined thresholds.
On governance, OpenAI proposes that frontier AI companies adopt Public Benefit Corporation structures with explicit commitments to broadly share benefits, and be more robust in preventing systems against ‘insider capture’. Given OpenAI’s various pivots, these reads with some irony. Anyway, the implicit acknowledgment is striking: markets alone will not distribute the gains.
The So What: When the builders of superintelligence call for redistribution and capital taxes, all policy options are on the table.
AI Tool of the Week: Paperclip
Paperclip is an open-source platform that organises AI agents into structured companies, with goal alignment, budget limits, ticket-based oversight, and full traceability built in. Claude has just introduced Managed Agents, which does something similar, although only for its own agents, whereas Paperclip works with any agent.
I’ve just built my first “virtual company” with Paperclip - a new startup to help buildings manage their pets, and to see the ‘CEO’ develop the launch plan then ‘hire’ a CMO and CTO who then get added to the agent stack, is fascinating. Here’s a video interview with the Paperclip founder that provides more context.
That’s all for now, happy weekend everyone.
- Stephen