1 After years of insults, Anthropic and SpaceX have teamed up
Anthropic will tap SpaceX’s GPUs to meet surging demand. (Axios)
+ While SpaceX gets a marquee customer for its AI ambitions. (Wired $)
+ Anthropic says the deal will double Claude Code’s rate limits. (Ars Technica)
+It’s also exploring building compute capacity in space. (CNBC)
+ Musk previously called Anthropic “evil” and “misanthropic.” (Gizmodo)
2 Ex-OpenAI leaders say Sam Altman sowed “chaos” and distrust
Former CTO Mira Murati said she couldn’t trust his words. (The Verge)
+ He also bypassed OpenAI’s safety board before a model release. (Gizmodo)
+ And pitted leaders against one another. (Forbes)
+ But Elon Musk still tried to recruit Altman to lead a Tesla AI lab. (FT $)
+ Here’s why Musk and Altman are in court. (MIT Technology Review)
3 China’s humanoid robots are fueling its next export boom
Morgan Stanley says Beijing has taken an early lead in the sector. (Bloomberg $)
+ Gig workers are training humanoids at home. (MIT Technology Review)
4 SpaceX’s IPO plans will give Elon Musk “virtually unchecked” authority
And erode typical shareholder protections. (Reuters $)
+ Activists and pension funds are pushing back against the IPO. (Wired $)
+ While SpaceX is shifting focus from Falcon 9 to Starship. (Ars Technica)
5 Google DeepMind will use the MMORPG Eve Online for AI model testing
It’s also bought a stake in the game’s maker. (Ars Technica)
+ DeepMind also recently built a new video-game-playing agent. (MIT Technology Review)
6 The US risks isolating its automakers by banning a Chinese EV standard
It’s prohibiting software that’s dominating global EV markets. (Rest of World)
7 Elon Musk’s proposed Texas chip factory could cost $119 billion
It would manufacture chips for Tesla, SpaceX, and xAI. (CNBC)
+ Future AI chips could be built on glass. (MIT Technology Review)
8 Why the “attention-span crisis” is misunderstood
Technology may be exhausting attention rather than shortening it. (Atlantic $)
9 Scientists are getting closer to explaining what causes lightning
New tools are revealing unexpected physics inside thunderstorms. (Quanta)
10 Kids have found an age verification loophole: fake mustaches
Resourceful children are foiling blocks on adult websites. (TechCrunch)
Quote of the day
“My concern was about Sam saying one thing to one person and completely the opposite to another person.”
—Mira Murati, the former CTO of OpenAI, testifies in court that CEO Sam Altman was deceptive, Reuters reports.
One More Thing
ALAMY
A brief, weird history of brainwashing
During the Cold War, the US prepared for a psychic war with the Soviet Union and China by spending millions of dollars on research into manipulating the human brain.
The science never exactly panned out, but residual beliefs fostered by this bizarre conflict continue to play a role in ideological and scientific debates to this day. And now, new technologies are altering how we think about mind control.
This is how the race for mind control changed America forever.
—Annalee Newitz