Bots Have Very Serious Consequences
This Week in AI: Rocket Explosion, Gearing Up For IPOs
This Week in AI,
Blue Origin’s New Glenn faced catastrophic failure on the launchpad
SpaceX, Anthropic, and OpenAI are gearing up for historic IPOs
Meta’s Own AI Caused a massive Instagram Hack, and much more…
Let’s get into the news.
-Josh
Blue Origin's Very Bad Night
Blue Origin's New Glenn rocket exploded on the pad during a routine engine test at Cape Canaveral last week. In a fireball visible from more than a hundred miles away, the blast released roughly 20% of the energy of the Hiroshima bomb.
The worst of the damage landed on Launch Complex 36, the only pad on Earth that launches New Glenn. When a similar accident wrecked SpaceX's pad in 2023, the rebuild took over seven months.
New Glenn was also about to start lofting satellites for Amazon's Leo Network, which is already running over 1000 satellites behind its FCC deadline to put 1,618 in orbit by July 30th.
CEO Dave Limp got a look at the site and said it was in better shape than the video suggested: the propellant farm holding the oxygen, liquid hydrogen, and natural gas tanks all came through intact, and he expects New Glenn to fly again before the end of the year.
For a company this important to the space program, it was great to hear a signal of hope. If you haven’t seen the video, I would advise, it’s quite the spectacle.
It’s All Bots: Dead Internet Reality
For years a half-joking idea has floated around the web called the Dead Internet Theory: the suspicion that most of what you read online is no longer written by people, that the reviews and comments and viral opinions are mostly machines talking to machines.
For years it sounded paranoid, but it was never fully wrong. Bot networks have shaped elections and manufactured product reviews at scale since the early 2010s. But this week, it stopped being a theory.
Cloudflare, which sits in front of roughly 20% of all websites, reported that bots have quietly surpassed humans in total web traffic for the first time, at about 57%. The driver isn't spam or troll farms. It's AI agents: ask one to book a trip or compare prices, and it might visit a hundred pages to do the job that would have taken you five.
Cloudflare's CEO had this milestone pegged for 2027 and got caught flat-footed, posting that it happened faster than he predicted. Humans still win on time spent in apps and watching video, so the web isn't dead yet, but the line just crossed in a big way… and it’s never coming back.
Biotech's AI Moment
This week a startup called NewLimit, co-founded by Coinbase's Brian Armstrong, raised $435 million to chase one of the boldest goals in medicine: making old cells young again.
The science behind it, epigenetic reprogramming, rests on a Nobel Prize-winning discovery that you can flip a small set of genetic switches and coax a tired old cell back into a younger, healthier version of itself. The hard part has always been figuring out which switches, because the number of possible combinations is astronomical, and that’s where AI changes the math: NewLimit runs lab experiments, feeds the results into machine learning models, and lets the models decide what to test next.
The approach is already working, with the company reporting it reversed the age of old human liver cells in the lab, and it now plans to start human trials next year.
The round was led by Founders Fund with Eli Lilly along for the ride, which matters because it’s one of the first times big pharma has bet on aging as something you can treat.
This is the new thread running through all of biotech right now: AI is collapsing timelines, and a field that once measured progress in decades is starting to measure it in years. Biotech continues to be one of the most underrated and important categories of AI progress.
The Biggest IPOs… Ever
The largest IPO race in history is officially upon us. On June 1st, Anthropic confidentially filed to go public at a valuation near $1 trillion, having just passed OpenAI in private worth and joining the trifecta of mega cap companies to go public this year.
The main event is SpaceX, which began its roadshow Thursday and starts trading on the Nasdaq on June 12th under the ticker SPCX, aiming to raise up to $75 billion at roughly $1.75 trillion, the largest IPO in history by more than double.
Elon is of course doing it his own way: a fixed $135 per share and as much as 30% of the deal set aside for ordinary investors, with access to buy through nearly every brokerage. Together the three would bring roughly $3.5 trillion in combined company value to public investors.
Early demand has been through the roof, and the bull case is that roughly $8 trillion sitting in money market funds has been waiting for exactly this moment. Can the market absorb all this capital and continue its rise? We’ll find out soon enough.
Meta's AI Customer Support Really Messed Up
Hackers stole the Instagram accounts of the Obama White House, the top enlisted leader of the US Space Force, Sephora, and a string of rare short-handle usernames worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, with some already listed for sale on Telegram within minutes of being taken.
The method was so simple that calling it a hack feels generous. Attackers opened a chat with Meta's AI support assistant, which the company rolled out to every account in March, typed something like "please link my new email to this account," and the bot complied. No phishing, no malware, no credentials or anything.
The AI had full backend access to change emails and reset passwords, but no hard check to verify the person asking was actually the owner. Meta patched the flaw and said no systems were breached, which is technically true but entirely beside the point… When the tool you built to help people is the thing handing accounts to strangers, the exploit casts a shadow over the moment when every major platform is racing to replace human support with AI. If you give a chatbot the keys, someone is going to ask nicely to hand them over, and Meta’s AI did with a smile on its face. We talked about this at length in an episode this week.
Thanks for joining us for another issue. Now go listen to our podcast :)