TechCapsules

Elon Musk has announced that xAI's model, Grok, will be capable of creating full movies by the end of 2026. A trailer for Homer's The Odyssey, created using Grok Imagine Video 1.5, showcases the AI's rapid strides in video generation. The 2-minute-plus trailer features 36 consistent shots, realistic special effects, and emotional depth, demonstrating Grok's capabilities in scale, physics, and cinematic workflow. Musk believes Grok will be "watchable" by the end of 2026 and "really good" by

Loft Orbital's YAM-9 spacecraft successfully demonstrated the first publicly disclosed execution of a vision-language model in orbit. Aboard the spacecraft, Google DeepMind's Gemma 3 performed natural language queries, classified Earth imagery, and produced plain-English summaries without transmitting raw pixels to the ground. This achievement marks a significant shift in the value layer of Earth observation, moving from ground-based processing to onboard inference capabilities. The model, running on an Nvidia Jetson Orin AGX graphics processing unit, utilized a [...]

Chinese firm Alibaba has unveiled its first embodied AI model family, the Qwen-Robot suite, which links large language models with real-world robotic actions. The suite comprises three models focused on navigation, manipulation, and world modeling for robots operating in physical environments. Developed by Alibaba's Tongyi Lab, the Qwen-Robot suite enables machines to perceive, reason, and interact with the real world, joining a growing global push to advance embodied AI beyond traditional chatbot applications. The models are currently [...]

The US has held off adding China's AI startup DeepSeek and over 100 other companies to a trade blacklist, despite being flagged as national security risks. DeepSeek, which has supported China's military and intelligence operations, and memory chipmaker CXMT, were approved for addition to the Entity List last year. The list, which restricts US companies from shipping goods to listed companies without a license, has not been updated since October. The delay is seen as an effort [...]

SpaceX has signed a $60 billion merger agreement to acquire Anysphere, the company behind AI coding tool Cursor, following its record Nasdaq debut. The deal coincides with the public release of Grok V9-Medium, a 1.5-trillion-parameter coding model trained on Cursor developer workflows. This raises questions for over one million developers who use Cursor, which currently runs on multiple models. Grok V9-Medium is optimized for NVIDIA's Blackwell GPU architecture and is designed to close the coding performance gap [...]

A growing number of ChatGPT users are questioning the value of the service, wondering if they're getting away with something due to its low price. The $20-a-month ChatGPT Plus and $200-a-month ChatGPT Pro subscription prices haven't changed since their introduction, despite the service becoming more powerful and feature-rich. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman previously stated that ChatGPT Pro loses money for the company due to its popularity. The concern arises from the significant computing resources required to power [...]

Mark Zuckerberg's $14 billion investment in Meta's artificial intelligence push has led to the development of Muse Spark, a proprietary AI model designed to power Meta's platforms and emerging AI-driven products. However, the company now faces the challenge of monetizing its AI investments, with advertising accounting for 98 percent of its revenue. Analysts are calling for proof of adoption and commercialization, as investor skepticism over Meta's ability to compete in the AI market has led to a [...]

The United Kingdom and Japan have launched a new Frontier Technology Partnership, expanding their bilateral cooperation on quantum computing, sensing, and communications with a focus on commercialization and deployment. The partnership aims to integrate quantum computing with high-performance computing systems, encourage cross-border investment and research, and accelerate practical applications across various domains. The agreement builds on a 2025 Quantum Memorandum of Cooperation and emphasizes the need for joint, long-term collaboration on quantum high-performance computing systems. The partnership [...]