Good morning, { AI enthusiasts }. Rockets, AI models, a social platform, and now data centers in orbit — Elon Musk is constructing something that no other company can replicate.
Musk just merged xAI and SpaceX to create the world’s most respected private company at $1.25T, with the world’s richest man pitching a future where space-based compute solves the energy issues holding AI back on Earth.
In today’s AI rundown:
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SpaceX acquires xAI in $1.25T mega-merger
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OpenAI’s Codex “command center” for agents
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Prompts, strategies for generating AI headshots
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AI catches 27% more aggressive breast cancers
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4 latest AI tools, community workflows, and more
LATEST DEVELOPMENTS
XAI
Image source: Lovart / The Rundown
The Rundown: Elon Musk just announced the merger of his AI startup xAI with SpaceX, forming what’s now the highest-valued private company on the planet at a reported $1.25T — combining his rockets, Grok, and the X platform all under one entity.
The small print:
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xAI will operate as a division inside SpaceX, with Musk pitching a vision of launching AI data centers into orbit to beat Earth’s energy constraints.
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The merger comes ahead of an anticipated SpaceX IPO later this 12 months, expected to push the corporate’s valuation to $1.25T.
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Musk estimated that space-based AI compute can be cheaper than traditional data centers inside 2-3 years, powered by near-constant solar energy.
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He also said space-based data centers will “enable self-growing bases on the Moon, a complete civilization on Mars… and expansion to the Universe.”
Why it matters: Elon’s tech empire is consolidating fast, calling this merger “essentially the most ambitious, vertically-integrated innovation engine on (and off) Earth.” Data centers in space may sound wild, but Musk is not alone in eyeing that solution — and with SpaceX now in the combo, no one is best positioned to own that chance.
TOGETHER WITH YOU.COM
The Rundown: You.com’s Co-founders, Richard Socher and Bryan McCann, are among the many most-cited AI researchers on the planet. They simply released 35 predictions for 2026.
Three that stand out:
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The LLM revolution has been “mined out” as capital floods back to research
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“Reward engineering” becomes a job; prompts cannot handle what’s coming next
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Traditional coding can be passed by December— AI writes code and humans manage it
OPENAI
Image source: OpenAI
The Rundown: OAI just launched the Codex app for macOS, a brand new desktop interface that lets developers manage multiple AI coding agents in parallel, utilize skills, automate recurring tasks, and delegate entire features to AI.
The small print:
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The app acts as a “command center” to run separate agents across projects concurrently, with built-in isolation so agents don’t conflict with one another.
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Skills extend Codex beyond code generation into tasks like deploying apps, managing project boards, generating images, and more.
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OAI demoed Codex constructing a full 3D racing game from a single prompt, handling design, development, and QA testing across 7M tokens autonomously.
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The app is proscribed to Mac for now, with limited time access without spending a dime users and doubled usage limits for paid subscribers.
Why it matters: OpenAI has been playing catch-up to Anthropic’s breakout 12 months in dev tooling, and this launch is a transparent response. With OpenAI’s models still considered the most effective by many for coding tasks, a greater interface could possibly be all it takes to see an identical Claude Code-like consumer push for Codex.
AI TRAINING
The Rundown: On this guide, you’ll learn a brand new workflow to show selfies into professional-looking headshots using Google’s Nano Banana Pro, exploring why most AI headshots look “uncanny” and the best way to avoid that with our prompting system.
Step-by-step:
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Use a neutral background with direct light or a window to avoid shadows. Then, take a chest-up photo together with your webcam or camera, keeping the lens high
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Go to Google AI Studio, click “playground” to start out a brand new chat. Ensure that you add an API key that has Gemini and Nano Banana Pro enabled.
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Upload the photo and prompt “Generate: Post-processing enhancement, skilled color grading, balanced studio lighting, remove noise and grain, sharpen focus, upscale to 8k, skin texture refinement, subtle dodging and burning, clear and crisp details, maintain original facial structure and clothing, photorealistic”
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Test this with multiple photos, and once you get a result you want, prompt the AI to generate the identical photo again in 4k
Pro tip: Drop the identical prompt into Gemini and ask it to “give you 4 concepts for headshots using the identical principles,” being clear that you must “edit photos.”
PRESENTED BY GLEAN
The Rundown: Join Glean’s flagship virtual launch event showcasing the brand new Glean Assistant — a personalised, context‑aware work partner. You’ll see live product demos, hear from actual customers, and understand what it takes to show enterprise context into real business impact.
Register for Glean:LIVE on February 17 to:
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Find out how context-aware, deeply connected AI drives broad impact and sustained usage across your organization
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Turn “aha moments” into enterprise‑wide change by expanding skill sets and delivering immediate AI value
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Meet the most recent Glean Assistant — personalized, proactive, and a real domain expert at work
AI RESEARCH
Image source: Lovart / The Rundown
The Rundown: Swedish researchers just published results from the largest-scale trial of AI-powered breast cancer screening, finding the technology helps radiologists spot the next percentage of tumors while cutting radiologist workload nearly in half.
The small print:
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The 2-year study tracked over 100K women to see if AI could catch cancers that traditional screening misses between appointments.
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The AI analyzed mammograms and flagged high-risk cases for radiologists, boosting the detection rate from 74% to 81% without increasing false positives.
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Women within the AI group saw 27% fewer aggressive tumor types and 21% fewer large tumors compared to plain screening alone.
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The system also cut radiologist workload by 44% by handling initial screening, sorting, and freeing doctors to give attention to the cases that need essentially the most attention.
Why it matters: Between drug discovery, tumor detection, treatment planning, and more, AI is quickly becoming some of the impactful tools within the cancer fight. With over 2M breast cancer diagnoses every year, scaling this type of early detection via AI could possibly be life-changing for ladies across the globe.
QUICK HITS
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🚀 Codex App – OpenAI’s Mac app for managing AI agents
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🎨 Riverflow 2.0 – Sourceful’s latest top-ranked AI image editing model
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🧠 Step-3.5-Flash – StepFun’s AI with strong reasoning, agentic capabilities
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🗣️ Eleven v3 – ElevenLabs’ expressive voice AI, now commercially available
xAI released Grok Imagine 1.0, an upgraded version of its video model featuring improved audio, 10-second generations, and better resolution.
Chinese AI lab StepFun open-sourced Step-3.5-Flash, a brand new model that shows strong agentic and reasoning capabilities alongside speed and efficiency.
ElevenLabs’ Eleven v3 officially exited alpha and is now commercially available, with the expressive speech model now featuring improved accuracy and stability.
Anthropic partnered with the Allen Institute and Howard Hughes Medical Institute to make use of Claude as a research assistant and construct agentic tools for scientists.
OpenAI signed a $200M cope with Snowflake to provide the information platform’s enterprise customers access to GPT-5.2 for constructing AI agents and leveraging their business data.
COMMUNITY
Every newsletter, we showcase how a reader is using AI to work smarter, save time, or make life easier.
Today’s workflow comes from reader Hung T. in Ann Arbor, MI:
“I recently added audio ‘podcasts’ to my personal blog using Qwen3-TTS. My latest workflow routinely parses each post, generates a high-fidelity clone of my very own voice, and embeds a player so visitors can listen. It’s a seamless technique to make my long-form content more accessible. More info on the workflow here.”
How do you utilize AI? Tell us here.
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Read our last AI newsletter: AI agents get their very own social network
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Read our last Tech newsletter: Humans head back to the moon
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Read our last Robotics newsletter: Waymo hits record $110B valuation
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Today’s AI tool guide: Prompts, strategies for generating AI Headshots
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RSVP to our next workshop on Feb. 11: Agentic Workflows Bootcamp pt. 1
That is it for today!
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- ⭐️⭐️⭐️ Average
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