A week of price wars: SpaceXAI, Meta, and Cognition all cut frontier-model prices at once. Also: OpenAI taught ChatGPT to speak like a human and shut down its browser, while Unitree robots performed the world's first live gallbladder removal on a pig.
🤖 AI
SpaceXAI released Grok 4.5
Elon Musk called it "an Opus-class model, just faster and cheaper": $2 per million input tokens vs. $5 at Anthropic and OpenAI, twice the token efficiency, and it works in Cursor out of the box.
OpenAI taught ChatGPT to listen and talk at the same time
The GPT-Live voice model now works in full duplex: it murmurs agreement, interrupts, stays quiet while you think, and hands heavy tasks off to a senior model running in the background. Over 150 million people use ChatGPT by voice.
Meta charged for its model for the first time
Zuckerberg came back to X for the first time in three years to open a paid API for Muse Spark 1.1 at $1.25 per million tokens — four times cheaper than Anthropic and OpenAI. New developers got $20 in credits — Meta also launched always-on agents earlier.
💻 Software
TypeScript rewritten in Go, 10x faster
Microsoft released TypeScript 7.0 with a native compiler: type-checking the VS Code codebase dropped from 125 to 10 seconds. The project spent over a year in the oven under the codename Corsa.
Cognition assembled frontier-level quality for $2 per task
SWE-1.7 got close to best-in-class models but noticeably cheaper: runs inside the Devin agent via Cerebras at 1,000 tokens per second, costs about $1.97 per task.
OpenAI shut down its Atlas browser after nine months
The company wound down standalone Atlas and moved agentic browsing into a Chrome extension and the desktop ChatGPT app. The reason: a "fewer side quests" policy that previously claimed Sora too.
⚙️ Robots and hardware
Unitree robots removed a gallbladder from a live pig
A team from UC San Diego performed the world's first surgery with humanoid robots controlled by surgeons and published the results in Nature. Off-the-shelf Unitree G1s cost under $20,000.
Apple is eyeing large models running directly on iPhone
Startup PrismML compressed a 27-billion-parameter Qwen 3.6 from 54 down to 4 gigabytes and ran it entirely on an iPhone 17 Pro. Apple has already held meetings about the technology — cheaper than the cloud and more private.
💰 Business
Bezos raised outside money for Blue Origin for the first time in 25 years
The rocket company raised $10B at a $130B valuation: Bezos put in $2B himself, hedge fund Coatue added another $4B. The round was fueled by SpaceX's recent IPO.
Netflix is weighing live TV
Amid falling engagement, leadership discussed launching linear channels and bundling with third-party services: streaming's share of viewing time slid from 21% to 17% over two years, and shares are down more than 40%.