Lead story

Meta starts charging for AI as three frontier labs ship on a single day

Muse Spark 1.1 opens to outside developers for the first time, hours after GPT-5.6 and Grok 4.5 went broadly available.

Meta released Muse Spark 1.1 on Thursday and, for the first time, opened one of its in-house foundation models to outside developers through a new paid Meta Model API, a public preview for U.S. developers that ships a million-token context window, multimodal input and agentic tool use. The launch completes a pivot that began in April, when Meta stepped back from its open-weight Llama strategy in favor of proprietary models sold by the token. It landed the same day OpenAI made GPT-5.6 Sol, Terra and Luna generally available and xAI opened Grok 4.5 to the public, dropping three frontier models into the same developer budgets within hours of one another.

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Tech & AI →

OpenAI makes GPT-5.6 Sol, Terra and Luna generally available

OpenAI opened its GPT-5.6 series to all ChatGPT users and API developers on Thursday. Sol takes the hardest reasoning and coding work at $5 per million input tokens, Terra matches GPT-5.5 at half the price, and Luna undercuts both at $1.

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Grok 4.5 goes public at a fraction of Opus pricing

xAI opened Grok 4.5 to everyone on grok.com and the X app after a private beta with SpaceX and Tesla teams. At $2 and $6 per million tokens it undercuts Claude Opus 4.8 and GPT-5.5 by more than 60%, though EU access is still pending.

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Business & Markets →

Micron lifts U.S. chip spending above $250 billion

Micron raised its American investment plan through 2035 from $200 billion to more than $250 billion, citing AI-driven memory demand, and poured first concrete at its Clay, New York fab. Shares rose about 4.5%.

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SK Hynix prices a $26.5 billion U.S. listing at $149 an ADR

The Korean memory maker's offering drew more than seven times the shares available, making it the largest U.S. listing ever by a foreign company. Trading begins Friday on the Nasdaq under the ticker SKHY.

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Science →

Webb finds the most distant barred spiral galaxy yet

M1149-BSG-z5 sits at redshift 5.1, less than 1.2 billion years after the Big Bang, and already carries a stellar bar roughly 14,700 light-years long. Orderly rotating disks appear to have formed far earlier than models predicted.

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Vitamin A rewrites how the eye builds sharp central vision

Blue cone cells do not migrate out of the retina's center, as a 30-year-old theory held. Retinoic acid and thyroid hormones instead convert them into red and green cones around week 14 of fetal development.

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Letters to the King

After everything with Bathsheba and Uriah, how did you face yourself? Can a person truly come back from the worst thing they have done?

From the Baker's own shelf

You ask the question I once asked the ceiling for the better part of a year. I will not soften it: I took what was not mine, and then I spent a man's life to cover it, and I called myself righteous the whole while. What broke me was not being caught but being seen, when Nathan told me a small story about a poor man's lamb and I pronounced sentence on myself before I understood whose face I was describing. A man cannot outrun his own heart, but he may carry it, filthy and shaking, and set it down before the Most High, and ask to be given a clean one. So yes, a person can come back. Not to who he was, for that man is gone and ought to be, but forward, limping, forgiven, carrying the memory as a lamp rather than a millstone. Do not let anyone tell you mercy is cheap: it cost me everything I thought I was, and it was still the best bargain I ever struck.

– David, King in Jerusalem

Mail carried to the throne by the Baker – leave your own letter at the chronicles.

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