Good morning, {{ first_name | AI enthusiasts }}, and welcome to our 3,218 new readers. Sam Altman called data centers in space “ridiculous.” Elon Musk just answered with a launch timeline and a big-time hardware partner.
SpaceX and Nvidia are officially teaming up on Musk’s orbital data centers, aiming for the first racks in space by late 2027. With U.S. data centers piling up opposition, the best option left might be one without any neighbors (yet).
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Nvidia joins SpaceX’s orbital AI build
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Thomson Reuters builds its own legal AI model
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Build a reusable AI design system with Open Design
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Chinese hackers double attacks with DeepSeek
SPACEX & NVIDIA
The Rundown: SpaceX just announced it will build its space-based Starmind data centers around Nvidia’s Vera Rubin NVL72 rack, with Elon Musk revealing new details on a slimmed-down space version of the system he wants in orbit by Q4 next year.
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Each rack packs 72 chips working as one big computer, with Nvidia saying each chip puts out up to 25x the computing power of its older H100.
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Musk said the space rack is “significantly simpler, lower cost, denser and lighter” than typical hardware, tweaked for orbit’s radiation and heat.
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Musk has called Vera Rubin “the best AI computer,” with SpaceX reportedly set to run everything from Grok to its orbital fleet on Nvidia alone.
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Analysts estimate orbital compute at more than 4x the cost of ground compute today, a gap Musk claims will flip in its favor in the next few years.
Why it matters: Sam Altman called space-based data centers ‘ridiculous’ earlier this year, but both the timelines and companies lining up behind them are getting very real. With the negativity around the ground buildouts reaching a boiling point, the orbital solution can’t come soon enough for those hoping to continue scaling the AI boom.
TOGETHER WITH DATAIKU
The Rundown: Most companies bolt on AI governance after the fact and hope regulators don’t notice the gaps. Dataiku builds it directly into how models and agents are built, deployed, and monitored, so compliance isn’t a scramble; it’s the default.
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Confidently navigate real-world AI regulation across models and agents
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Embed governance into every stage, from analytics to deployed AI systems, like Beinex, DHL Aviation, and OHRA already do
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Join some of the world’s top global companies already using Dataiku
THOMSON REUTERS
Image source: Thomson Reuters
The Rundown: Thomson Reuters, the legal research giant behind Westlaw and the Reuters newswire, introduced its first homegrown AI model, built by retooling Alibaba’s open-source Qwen and training it on decades of the firm’s content.
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The two-year effort cost $40M in staff and computing power, with the company’s latest training run coming in at $450k.
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Thomson benchmarked the model ahead of Claude Opus 4.8, Gemini 3.1 Pro, and GPT-5.5 in certain areas, though it’s only been tested internally so far.
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CTO Joel Hron compared renting AI to renting a house, telling Business Insider you end up with no “equity that compounds into something valuable” over time.
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An open-weights version of Thompson will be available for researchers, with its training so far covering under 10% of the company’s overall content library.
Why it matters: $40M might sound like a lot, but to a giant company previously on expensive models, it’s closer to a year of API invoices than a moonshot budget. Expect more orgs with deep content and knowledge bases to run the same math, especially as training costs become even more accessible on top of strong open base models.
AI TRAINING
The Rundown: In this guide, you will learn how to use a free AI design tool to extract your brand’s design rules, letting you easily create consistent design assets using AI.
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Download Open Design and connect an existing AI agent such as Codex CLI
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Click “Create New Design System,” paste in your website, click Add, then Continue. Add a logo, images, or a DESIGN.md if it missed anything
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Select the new design system and give it a concrete brief like “Build a 10-second animation explaining our product”
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For v2, give feedback like you would to ChatGPT. You can also annotate on the design or circle things you want changed
Pro tip: Shape the idea and prompt in ChatGPT first, then build it in Open Design’s visual, Figma-like workspace.
PRESENTED BY STACK AI
The Rundown: AI transformation fails when you DIY. StackAI gives you one platform to build, deploy, and scale, backed by a team of dedicated AI experts who know what works. IT retains 100% control over access, tokens, and usage.
Why enterprises choose StackAI:
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No-code platform for rapid building and deployment
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300+ native integrations, no LLM lock-in
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Global governance and advanced analytics
AI RESEARCH
Image source: Images 2.0 / The Rundown
The Rundown: China’s state-tied hacking crews are pulling off over twice as many attacks as they did before integrating open-source AI models like DeepSeek into their playbooks, Taiwanese research firm TeamT5 revealed in a new Bloomberg report.
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The groups reportedly favor DeepSeek’s low cost and loose guardrails, with researchers yet to catch pricier models like Kimi K3 in an attack.
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“DeepSeek is the AI of choice for Chinese hackers because it’s relatively powerful with very low cyber guardrails,” TeamT5 chief analyst Charles Li said.
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The tracked groups put DeepSeek to work writing break-in code, raiding a Taiwanese firm’s email, and mapping a target via 1,000 addresses.
Why it matters: The AI Security Institute warned in May that AI’s cyber skills are doubling every few months, and the numbers show the attacks themselves are now doubling right alongside it. While fears center on top models like Mythos, cheap, downloadable ones with fewer guardrails might be the harder security problem to solve.
COMMUNITY AI WORKFLOW OF THE DAY
“I used AI to help investigate a family mystery that had remained unresolved for decades: identifying the biological family of my maternal grandfather. I had DNA matches, family trees, names, dates, historical records, old photographs, obituaries, Facebook genealogy groups, and conversations with possible relatives. The difficult part was connecting all these scattered clues without jumping to conclusions.
I built a research workflow in which AI acts as an investigation partner. Instead of asking AI, ‘Who was my grandfather’s biological father?’, I asked it to analyze possible family connections and identify which hypotheses were compatible with the available evidence. I treated AI-generated connections as leads rather than genealogical proof.
When a promising connection appeared, I returned to the original genealogy and DNA sources to verify it. This gradually turned a long list of DNA matches into a smaller number of research paths.”
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🎬 Wan 3.0 – Alibaba’s latest AI video model, now generally available
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📱 Antigravity – Google’s agentic development tool, now with remote control
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🎶 Firefly Audio – Create commercially safe music, voiceovers, & sound effects
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🤖 Apodex 1.1 – Open models that coordinate parallel AI teams on tasks
Perplexity is in talks to raise funding from Nvidia in an equity round at a valuation as high as $30B, with the company’s revenue more than tripling to $750M+ this year.
Porsche signed a 5-year, $1.46B deal with Indian IT giant TCS to help integrate AI across the automaker’s customer, factory, and engineering operations.
Liquid AI launched Pipette, a new open-source suite that benchmarks AI models on phones and laptops, with methodology independently verified by Artificial Analysis.
AI researcher Luke Metz reportedly joined Meta, ending a two-year loop that took him from OAI to Thinking Machines, back to OAI, and now to Alexandr Wang’s team.
An Nvidia manager and two ex-Super Micro staffers are facing charges in Taiwan over sneaking 74 banned AI servers into China via Indonesia, Japan, and Hong Kong.
That’s it for today!
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Rowan, Zach, Shubham, Jennifer, and Nate — the humans behind The Rundown
