8/12: Grok 4.6 and DeepSeek-V4 Pro

It’s Wednesday, and we have not one but two incredible new model releases: SpaceXAI’s Grok 4.6, and DeepSeek-V4-Pro-0813, the full version of the model first teased nearly four months ago. Be sure to monitor with us live on X and YouTube, and follow us on Instagram.

• Steven Byrnes (Astera Institute)

• David Holtz (Columbia University, OpenAI)

• Samuel Hammond (Foundation for American Innovation)

• Jesse Pollak (Coinbase)

• Rebecca Kacaba (DealMaker)

• Dan Schwarz (FutureSearch)

• Flo Crivello (Lindy)

• Eric Nguyen (Radical Numerics)

• Lauren Tan and Roshan Sadanani (Cursor)

• Kari Briski (Nvidia)

• SpaceXAI releases Grok 4.6. It outperforms Sol and Fable on some benchmarks, and outperforms all models except for Fable, Sol, and Opus 5 on the AA Intelligence Index. It places seventh on Code Arena. Pricing is much cheaper than Fable ($10/$50), Sol ($5/$30), and Opus 5 ($5/$25), at just $2/$6, making it Pareto-dominant for most use cases. Elon Musk says that Grok 4.7, which will come out in 3-4 weeks, will “exceed all current models” thanks in part to SpaceX’s real-world engineering data. Cursor has really helped xAI catch up to the frontier in a very short time.

• The full version of DeepSeek-V4 Pro is rolling out. The model hasn’t been officially announced yet, but the checkpoint (DeepSeek-V4-Pro-0813) is beginning to show up in DeepSeek’s chat interface and API. The benchmarks are quite good, though still below Fable/Sol/Opus 5 level, and only slightly behind Kimi K3 (a much larger and more expensive model). In typical DeepSeek fashion, the model is incredibly cheap, at $0.435/$0.87 per million input/output tokens — nearly 60x cheaper than Fable on output tokens — though DeepSeek plans to raise prices soon. DeepSeek is also reportedly working on a harness to rival Claude Code and Codex.

• The White House’s pre-release framework will expand to sufficiently capable open-source models over the coming weeks and months, likely in response to multiple prominent cybersecurity incidents. The Trump administration’s AI policy continues its shift away from laissez-faire accelerationism and towards AI safetyism.

• Sergey Brin is increasingly wielding power within Google. Brin co-founded Google in 1998 and stepped down as President in 2019. In 2022, he returned to day-to-day operations to help Google respond to ChatGPT. Brin personally recruited Noam Shazeer in 2024, encouraged Koray Kavukcuoglu to replace Demis Hassabis at Google DeepMind, and has recently urged GDM staff to go all-in on Gemini and recursive self-improvement rather than scientific research.

• Joshua Kushner and Bob Iger will buy the Los Angeles Lakers for $12.5B. Kushner1 is the founder of Thrive Capital, one of the world’s top venture capital firms, and Iger was the longtime CEO of Disney. The deal would be the most expensive for a sports team in history if approved by the NBA. Kushner currently owns a minority stake in the Miami Heat.

• Cognition is in talks to raise at a $40B valuation. The maker of autonomous coding agent Devin is approaching an annualized revenue run rate of $1 billion, double what it was during its last round. The company raised $1B at a $26B valuation less than three months ago.

• Lovable raises $400M at a $13.3B valuation. The Stockholm-based company builds an AI platform for users to vibecode software. Some startups run their entire business on it. Lovable is also a sponsor of MTS!

• New York City is investigating prediction markets over societal harms. Council Speaker Julie Menin opened a formal legislative inquiry into Kalshi, Polymarket, Coinbase, and Gemini2.

• The US will accelerate key AI shipments through the Panama Canal in a new pilot program as part of Pax Silica, the US-led international strategic initiative to secure the AI supply chain.

• The UK will regulate the use of AI in gene synthesis in order to prevent the development of AI-assisted bioweapons, possibly by requiring providers of synthesized DNA to screen for dangerous sequences.

• Dutch neocloud Nebius reports a 514% jump in quarterly cloud sales, showing continued strong growth in demand for AI compute.