AI is Actually Changing This Time
This Week in AI: Thinking Machines Inkling | Kimi K3 | Starship
Good afternoon,
Mira Murati and Moonshot both made the same bet from opposite directions: the next phase of AI is less about the smartest model and more about efficiency. The new game is who gets to own, tune, and run the intelligence themselves.
OpenAI’s first computer is apparently a screenless companion for your house.
SpaceX is launching the orbital internet layer underneath it all.
…and a guy sequenced his own genome on his kitchen table and gave the file to AI.
The stack is getting weirdly complete: model, device, network, body.
Let’s get into the news.
-Josh
Mira Murati’s Lab Shows Its Cards
Thinking Machines, the $12 billion startup Mira Murati founded after leaving OpenAI, released its first model this week.
They opened the announcement by admitting that Inkling is not the strongest model you can get, open or closed. Inkling is open-weight, meaning anyone can download it, run it on their own hardware, and reshape it however they want. The bet is that companies would rather own a model tuned to their exact business than rent a one-size-fits-all genius from a frontier lab.
Bridgewater, the world’s largest hedge fund, already used the company’s fine-tuning platform to build a custom model that beat top proprietary models on financial reasoning at less than a tenth of the cost.
It also comes with a dial that turns the model’s thinking effort up or down, trading brainpower for speed depending on the job. The novel part is what this unlocks for anyone with sensitive information, because until now you had to choose between frontier intelligence and keeping your data to yourself.
Inkling lets a hospital, a bank, or a hedge fund train a genuinely smart model on their most private data without a single byte ever leaving the building.
China Dropped the Biggest Open Model Ever
Meanwhile, Beijing's Moonshot AI released Kimi K3, and at 2.8 trillion parameters it's the largest open model anyone has ever published, nearly double the size of DeepSeek's flagship.
The trick that makes something this enormous usable is a design called mixture of experts, where only a small slice of the network wakes up to answer each question, so you get the knowledge of a giant with the running costs of something far smaller.
Early testers spent the day flooding social media with side-by-side comparisons against the best closed models from OpenAI and Anthropic, and the emerging read is that the gap between Chinese open models and American closed ones is largely shrinking.
It holds a million tokens in its head at once through the context window, enough to read several novels in a single sitting, and it costs a fraction of what the top American labs charge. If this feels like this could be another DeepSeek moment, with a Chinese lab giving away the kind of intelligence everyone else charges premium prices to access.
It’s available to try right now and I know I'll be spending a bit of my weekend playing around and seeing what it can do.
We Finally Know What OpenAI is Building
The mystery device from OpenAI and Jony Ive has been leaked (again).
After a year of rumors about pens, pins, and earbuds, Bloomberg reports it's a portable, screen-free smart speaker designed to feel less like a gadget and more like a companion. Internally OpenAI won't even call it a speaker, describing it instead as the first computer built for the AI era, one that can be placed around your house on a rechargeable battery, controls your appliances, plays your music, answers your messages, and watches the room through a camera so it can offer help before you ask.
The defining feature is meant to be its personality rather than its spec sheet, which is exactly the kind of bet you'd expect from the designer of the iPhone teaming up with the maker of ChatGPT.
Reports put the price between $200 and $300, with a launch expected in early 2027, and it’s being taken seriously enough that Apple sued OpenAI days before the leak, claiming former Apple hardware chief Tang Tan carried trade secrets out the door. The one thing nobody has leaked is what it actually looks like, so for now the most anticipated object in tech remains invisible.
Starship Flight 13
Tonight, the largest rocket ever built lifts off from South Texas for its thirteenth flight, and for the first time it's carrying real cargo.
Flight 13 is the second outing for Starship V3, the taller and more powerful upgrade that debuted in May, and tucked inside are twenty of SpaceX's new V3 Starlink satellites, machines so large that no other rocket on Earth can carry them. Once deployed, they'll unfold their solar arrays, link into the constellation with lasers, and attempt to talk to ground stations in South Africa as a dress rehearsal for the satellite generation that pushes Starlink toward gigabit speeds for anyone anywhere in the world.
The last flight ended with the loss of the booster on its way back down, so SpaceX spent two months on fixes and will bring this one home to a controlled ocean splashdown rather than a tower catch. The Starlink upgrades are landing on the ground too because this week SpaceX released its V5 home dish, which shrinks to nearly a third of the old footprint and less than half the weight while cutting power draw roughly in half.
The space based internet is making pretty incredible progress.
A Guy Sequenced His Own Genome at Home
For the fun science slot this week, a builder named Bradley Woolf published a full walkthrough of how he sequenced his own DNA at home, five times now, using a pocket-sized device called the MinION that plugs into a laptop over USB.
The process is exactly as wild as it sounds. You swab your cheek, spin the cells down, chemically crack them open to release the DNA, attach a few molecular adapters, then pipette the result onto a chip that reads your genetic code letter by letter as strands thread through microscopic pores. It still isn't cheap, since the sequencer runs about $7,500 before consumables, but the cost curve here has been falling faster than almost anything in technology, and what used to require a national lab and billions of dollars now fits on a countertop.
The cool part is that once you have the file, you can hand it to an AI and start asking pretty interesting questions, like which medications your body might process differently or which rare variants are worth a doctor's attention. Woolf believes that your DNA is the stable blueprint and your RNA is the live readout, and we're heading toward a world where a model can hold a real-time picture of your own biology… and you can talk to it.
Thanks for joining us for another issue. Now go listen to our podcast :)