Artemis II Launches First Crewed Lunar Mission Since Apollo as SpaceX Files for $1.75 Trillion IPO

NASA's Artemis II launched from Kennedy Space Center on Wednesday, the closest crewed approach to the Moon since Apollo. It was spotted mid-flight from a passenger plane. By 6:59pm, all four Orion solar array wings had deployed, completing a key milestone. Seven hours in, Commander Wiseman's Outlook inbox failed.

SpaceX has filed confidentially for an IPO seeking a valuation above $1.75 trillion, which would be the largest technology listing ever.

Amazon is in talks to acquire Globalstar, the $9 billion satellite telecom partly owned by Apple, to build its own low Earth orbit constellation.

Arcee AI released Trinity-Large-Thinking under Apache 2.0, calling it the strongest open model outside China at 76.3% on GPQA-D, beating MiniMax M2.7. GPQA-D is a benchmark of graduate-level science questions.

Greg Brockman says OpenAI's upcoming "Spud" (GPT 5.5) is a new pre-train embodying two years of research and has "big model smell."

Dwarkesh Patel frames the near-term implications not as superintelligence but as replication: imagine cloning Terry Tao a thousand times, dumping millions in inference per copy, and pointing them at separate Millennium Prize Problems for a hundred subjective years. The Millennium Prize Problems are seven unsolved math problems, each with a $1 million reward.

Meta released BOxCrete, an AI model for designing concrete mixes.

IKEA built an AI customer service agent called Billy that handled requests at 57% approval. The 43% of failures were all people asking for design advice, so IKEA launched a consultancy, retrained employees with AI tools, and made $1.2 billion in year one.

Anthropic is testing "Conway," its own standalone agent environment featuring extensions, webhooks, and Chrome use.

Chinese GPU makers have captured nearly 41% of China's AI accelerator server market, eroding Nvidia's once-dominant position.

Intel is paying $14.2 billion to buy back half of its Ireland plant from Apollo, signaling confidence that its fabs can ride the AI infrastructure boom.

Researchers found land surface temperatures rise 2°C on average after a data center begins operations, inducing local microclimate zones.

Tesla FSD was caught stopping so a small delivery robot could cross the street.

R3 Bio emerged from stealth pitching nonsentient monkey organ sacks as an alternative to animal testing, and reportedly brainless human clones as backup bodies.

The CEO of America's largest public hospital system says he is prepared to replace radiologists with AI once the regulatory landscape catches up.

Preskill and collaborators show Shor's algorithm can run at cryptographically relevant scales with as few as 10,000 reconfigurable atomic qubits. Shor's algorithm is a quantum method that can break the encryption protecting most current digital systems.

The House Oversight Committee has formally requested 46 specific UAP videos that whistleblowers say AARO withheld from Congress.

Rep. Burchett claimed his recent briefing would have left the country "unglued."

Lab-grown diamonds have fallen 80% in five years to under $1,000 for two carats, now accounting for 61% of engagement rings.

The DOL proposed opening 401(k) plans to crypto and private equity. Paradigm is building a prediction markets trading terminal.

OpenAI acquired TBPN for editorial talent, but its shares are falling on secondary markets as investors pivot to Anthropic.

Oracle cut 10,000 jobs in India in a global AI restructuring hitting 30,000 employees.

In Europe, the Commission is urging citizens to work from home and drive less amid a prolonged crisis from the Gulf conflict.

A 14-year-old running for governor has become the first teen on Vermont's general election ballot.