OpenAI's GPT-6 Astra is rolling out today, priced at $10/$50 per million tokens to match Claude Fable. It posts 99.9% on ARC-AGI-3 with OpenAI's custom harness (62.7% on the standard one), near-perfect long-context recall out to 1M tokens, and big jumps on security benchmarks, though Artificial Analysis still ranks it below Fable 5.1 on its Intelligence Index.
Nvidia's largest acquisition ever, nearly double the Mellanox deal, gives the chipmaker control of the main distribution hub for open-weight models. Hugging Face turned down Nvidia money at a $7B valuation last year to stay independent; Nvidia says it will stay open and hopes to close by 2027 pending antitrust review.
Anil Dash, writing from the founder side of the table, argues that a handful of billionaire firms have turned venture capital into a self-dealing structure accountable to no market, regulator, or voter, and ties it to data-center fights, enshittified apps, and bought politicians. He cites former a16z partner John O'Farrell publicly breaking ranks.
Verisign proposed killing every third-level .name domain to simplify its own administration and ICANN approved it in July. Neil Fraser's 25-year-old site, email, and IoT endpoints vanish in February despite being paid through 2040, and the freed second-level names could let a stranger recreate and hijack his identity.