7/8: Big News Day
SpaceXAI Grok 4.5, OpenAI GPT-Live, Blue Origin raises $10B, Prime Intellect raises $130M, Mistral Robostral Navigate, OpenAI NatSec Principles
It’s Wednesday, monitors. There are no World Cup games today, which is great timing since it’s the biggest tech news day we’ve seen in a long time. As always, be sure to catch us on X and YouTube, and join our Discord to chat with our hosts live.
Today’s Experts
Nathan Calvin (Encode AI)
Chris Hladczuk (Hanover Park)
Making Sense of the World
SpaceXAI releases Grok 4.5, its first model built specifically for coding, agentic tasks, and knowledge work. It’s roughly Opus 4.8/GPT-5.5 level, a step below Fable and Sol but is much more token-efficient and cheaper ($2/$6 per million input/output tokens, compared to $5/$25 for Opus 4.8 and $5/$30 for GPT-5.5). On preliminary impressions, it’s a very strong model, and SpaceXAI is now a real frontier lab contender again.
OpenAI releases GPT-Live, a new generation of voice models that can listen and speak at the same time to produce more natural conversations, unlike past generations of ChatGPT’s now two-year-old Advanced Voice Mode. It’s also powered by a much smarter underlying model. Also, GPT-5.6 comes out tomorrow.
Cognition releases SWE-1.7, a small specialized coding model built on a base of Kimi K2.7 that scores slightly behind frontier models but is much smaller and cheaper. It’s free with Devin plans and runs at 1000 tokens/second. The blog post goes into some detail on the technical innovations behind the model, quite rare for labs these days.
Blue Origin raises $10B at $130B, its first external capital since its founding in 2000. Coatue will contribute $4B, and founder Jeff Bezos will contribute $2B. In May, the company suffered a catastrophic explosion of its New Glenn rocket that destroyed the launch vehicle and substantially damaged the launch site. It’s currently recovering New Glenn launch capacity and working on launch services, the TeraWave satellite communications network, Project Sunrise for orbital data centers, and more.
Anthropic and AE Studio release new research on dual-use knowledge in models. For sensitive topics like cyber and bio that can be used for good or evil, you can give models dedicated removable modules, and only update those specific modules when the model learns about a dual-use topic so they can be removed if needed.
OpenAI publishes its Principles for National Security Partnerships, including maintaining human judgment for high-stakes decisions (including use of force) and opposing mass domestic surveillance, evasion of legal oversight, and excessive concentration of power, similar to Anthropic’s “red lines” from earlier this year.
Meta is working on “super-sensing” glasses that will continuously collect audio and video data from users to help act as a “second brain” (or perhaps “whispering earring”) in collaboration with AI.
China plans to let top firms buy some Nvidia H200s. Companies including DeepSeek, Alibaba, and ByteDance will be allowed to use a limited number of H200s, which are more powerful than any domestic Chinese chips, for training only (not inference).
Nvidia is partnering with their chip competitors. Nvidia announced plans to combine its hardware with chip competitors d-Matrix and SambaNova for AI inference tasks, signaling a willingness to work with chip startups rather than trying to dominate the entire market.
SambaNova raises $1B at $11B. The company is another inference chip competitor to Nvidia, specializing in low-power inference, on-prem deployments, and multi-model switching.
Prime Intellect raises a $130M Series A to build the “open superintelligence stack”, helping enterprises build things like RL environments, evals, post-training pipelines, and more.
Mistral launches robotics model Robostral Navigate. It takes in an image and language instruction and moves a robot through an environment, and is hardware-agnostic, meaning it can work across multiple platforms. It’s Mistral’s first physical intelligence model.
Noam Brown says GPT-5.6 is better at AI research than human interns. Brown, a research scientist at OpenAI, was a key contributor to the development of the o-series models and the reasoning paradigm.
Shanghai-based MiniMax will launch a 2.7T parameter model, larger than any current Chinese model. It will likely be known as M3 Pro. MiniMax is one of the only publicly traded AI companies, and currently has a market cap of $14.5 billion.
SK Hynix’s $25 billion US share offering is more than 7x oversubscribed. Investors really, really want exposure to memory stocks.
Z.ai is selling $4 billion of shares after a 13x run-up in its share price since its IPO in January. Iluvatar1 CoreX, a Chinese semiconductor company, is also doing a share sale to raise $850 million.
Apple’s deal with Broadcom will be worth over $30 billion. The deal, announced Monday, will see Apple tap Broadcom to help design and produce Wi-Fi and Bluetooth chips for Apple’s devices as well as server chips for Apple’s data centers.
CXMT is working on expanding production and going public. ChangXin Memory Technologies, a Chinese state-backed DRAM memory manufacturer based in Hefei, has seen skyrocketing revenues and profits due to the ongoing memory boom. Apple is testing CXMT DRAM for iPhones sold in China.
Banger Review
In J.R.R. Tolkien’s legendarium, Erū Ilúvatar was the omnipotent creator of the universe of Ëa and of many of the beings inside it — Valar, Maiar, Elves, and Men. The name is Quenya: “Erū” means “The One” and “Ilúvatar” means “Sky Father”/“Heavenly Father”/“All-Father”. He is not mentioned by name in The Hobbit or The Lord of the Rings, but is heavily implied to interfere subtly in worldly affairs, such as by resurrecting Gandalf after he was killed by the Balrog, or tripping Gollum so he fell into Mount Doom with the One Ring on his finger.