Key Takeaways
- SpaceX is acquiring nationwide 800 MHz low-band spectrum and has FCC approval for a 15,000-satellite Starlink Mobile Gen2 constellation, aiming to become a major US mobile carrier.
- SpaceX launch cadence rose from 8 flights in 2016 to 170 in 2025, and Musk says SpaceX may carry about 90% of this year's mass to orbit.
- Grok Bot drew user praise for phone-based task automation, while Harvey's legal benchmark showed Grok 4.7 leading on hallucination-gated pass rate at 9.4%.
- Perplexity's Computer generated explainer videos for all 722 OpenAI math preprints and shipped a new site editor with queued element-level edits.
- Gumroad cut its AWS bill by about $8.4K per month, roughly $100K annually, with some changes also improving speed.
- Musk received the National Medal of Science, with Sergey Brin, Jensen Huang and Lisa Su also honored; Michael Dell and Satya Nadella received the National Medal of Technology and Innovation.
1. SpaceX, Starlink and Spectrum
- SpaceX announced it is acquiring nationwide 800 MHz low-band spectrum licenses, up to 14 MHz paired, to make Starlink Mobile a major US mobile carrier; low-band signals penetrate better indoors and most US phones already support the band. The FCC simultaneously approved the Starlink Mobile Gen2 constellation, authorizing 15,000 satellites optimized for 2 GHz, with V2 satellites offering more than 100x the bandwidth of the current generation and Ka/V/E/W backhaul bands authorized. Musk called it the "last key spectrum piece" needed for full US phone coverage. — via 1 2 3 4 5
- SpaceX's launch count grew from 8 in 2016 to 170 in 2025, more than all other countries combined, according to the cited figure. Musk said SpaceX may carry about 90% of mass to orbit this year and that nearly 80% of active satellites in orbit belong to SpaceX; he also argued internet connectivity is the single biggest lever for lifting people out of poverty. — via 1 2 3
- Starlink launched a referral program giving both parties $100 in most countries, with rewards varying by market. Separately, SpaceX donated nearly $500,000 to Texas's Anderson-Shiro CISD for three new school buses. — via 1 2
2. AI Models, Agents and Benchmarks
- Grok Bot received multiple user endorsements: one user said it completed Colab notebooks, website pages and security bots on a phone; another said a single sentence auto-edited a Trump award video into a vertical subtitled clip; a third said a zero-setup test handled video editing, review and voiceover. Musk said Grok Bot "only gets better" and could staff an entire company. Users said it connects to Claude and ChatGPT subscriptions without API keys or new subscriptions, and Shopify has integrated Grok and Bot. Grok Imagine API launched Video 1.5 Lite at $0.02/s for 480p, $0.03/s for 720p and $0.14/s for 1080p. — via 1 2 3 4 5 6 7
- Harvey LAB-AA v1.1 introduced a hallucination-gated metric: Grok 4.7 (xhigh) led with a 9.4% full-pass rate, followed by Muse Spark 1.3 (max) at 8.9% and GPT-6 Astra (max) at 8.6%. Without the gate, Muse Spark 1.3 led at 26.7% but two-thirds of its passes contained major hallucinations; GPT-6 was the most solid, with Astra averaging 0.03 major hallucinations per task. Grok 4.7 cost about $9.50 per task versus about $21.70 for Claude Fable 5.1. — via 1
- Perplexity's Aravind Srinivas said Computer produced explainer videos for all 722 preprints in OpenAI's math manuscript release, totaling 93 hours, published on YouTube. Perplexity's design team used its own agent platform Computer to build the tools behind a brand refresh, and Computer's new site editor supports queuing change requests for specific page elements, which Computer processes on the main thread to output a new site. Separately, pplx-decider-v1.1-27b topped Decision Bench on both accuracy and cost: 94.5% across 1,071 cases at $0.017 per 1,000 decisions. — via 1 2 3 4
- Garry Tan argued LLMs have surpassed top human experts on some research problems, with the gap between "slightly below" and "slightly above" top human performance explaining sudden surges in math results, though LLM capabilities remain uneven. He also said Amazon banning agents may be the first chance since Amazon's founding for startups to build an Amazon competitor, since people will want agents shopping for them rather than Amazon's own. — via 1 2
3. Infrastructure, Cost and Engineering
- Sahil Lavingia said Gumroad cut its AWS monthly bill by about $8.4K over the past two weeks, roughly $100K annually, and that several changes also improved speed. — via 1
- Jack's account highlighted a new goose team show, AI Caramba, whose first episode has @dosinga explaining how goose replaces the agent loop with a state machine that can be shut down anywhere and resume as if uninterrupted, though the destination of intermediate state is unclear. Jack also replied "yes" to a tweet calling Buzz underrated, describing it as functionally similar to dots and grok bot but model- and harness-agnostic, even able to run omp, with a mobile app, conversation sharing, shared compute and a Slack/Discord-like interface. — via 1 2
- Yohei said in an ODSC AI podcast that he discussed public building as market research and founder networking, the Jev experiment involving knowledge graphs, relevance filters and "sentiment blobs," BabyAGI's evolution to ActiveGraph around logs rather than LLMs, FirmOS distilling playbooks from actual decisions, and making research reproducible rather than just reporting results. He also forwarded a claim that the same method found a new optimum of 2.942809 for tesseract packing at n=26 to 30, beating Friedman's 1998 value of 2.956. — via 1 2
4. Awards, Policy and Other Signals
- Trump awarded Musk the National Medal of Science, calling him a "modern Edison" and citing Crew-12's safe return, Starship, Starlink's hurricane rescue work, Tesla and Neuralink. The same cohort included Sergey Brin, Jensen Huang and Lisa Su, while Michael Dell and Satya Nadella received the National Medal of Technology and Innovation. — via 1 2 3 4
- Naval pushed back on the claim that AI makes all software effectively open source, saying "Open" means your own code. He also amplified a claim that the Biden administration's $42.5B rural broadband program has connected less than 1% of its target population despite over $18B disbursed in five-plus years, with the forwarded view that Starlink will cover them sooner and cheaper. — via 1 2
- Jack Mallers' account said Strike now supports setting a send limit on account balances, so if an account is compromised the amount withdrawable cannot exceed that limit, and advised keeping bitcoin in Strike and moving to self-custody when ready. — via 1
- Musk said all superintelligence organizations have jointly agreed to move AI/SI safety testing onto Delta flights because there is no internet on board. Tesla Powerwall 3 supports immersion in 0.6 meters of water, and a user described the Cybercab ride as relaxing. — via 1 2 3
