Meta Releases Muse 1.1, GPT-5.6 Sol Reactions, New Robot Hand Alert | Eric Seufert, Bernt Børnich, Josh Lindgren, Jeffrey Morgan, Thibault Sottiaux, Sean Frank

9 Jul · 143 min

Key points

Meta launched Muse Spark 1.1 with a paid API tier, its first time charging businesses for access to its models, with Zuckerberg promising aggressive pricing.
Eric Seufert argues Meta would earn more from its compute by applying it to its core advertising business than by selling API access.
GPT-5.6 Sol scored 7.78% on the ARC-AGI-3 benchmark, against 1.5% for Opus 4.8, in a result the hosts highlighted in the main story.

Funding and deals

Ollama. Open-source platform for accessing open models, used by about 9m developers, raised a $65m round.

Guest interviews

Eric Seufert, mobile app marketing analyst and founder of Mobile Dev Memo. Meta's ad revenue grew 33% last quarter on $55bn, and he says investors need about 40% growth to believe the AI spending pays off. He argues Meta should apply its compute to its core advertising business rather than sell API access, and calls its move into prediction markets misdirected. His Prosperous Society series argues AI makes distribution, not production, the binding constraint on commerce.
Thibault Sottiaux, head of core products and platform at OpenAI. GPT-5.6 Sol's computer use runs about three times faster than GPT-5.5. The new Ultra mode has multiple agents collaborate and can run for two days on very hard problems such as finding a cyber vulnerability.
Bernt Øivind Børnich, founder and CEO of 1X Technologies. The new Neo hand matches an average human hand in strength and has about three times the force of other general-purpose robot hands. 1X promised to ship Neo this year.
Josh Lindgren, head of the podcast department at Creative Artists Agency. Global podcast advertising grew from about $45m when he started to $9.2bn last year. An Edison study finds most listeners consume both audio and video. He points investors to India as a market to watch.
Sean Frank, CEO of Ridge Wallet. Ridge's wallet and year-old tech businesses each do about $100m a year. He puts US TikTok Shop sales at about $20bn this year and aims for $1bn in annual revenue.

News

GPT-5.6 Sol outscores Opus 4.8 on ARC-AGI-3. Sol scored 7.78% against 1.5% for Anthropic's Opus 4.8 on a test built so humans can score 100%. OpenAI also says Sol autonomously post-trained GPT-5.6 Luna.
Meta starts charging businesses for Muse Spark API. Muse Spark 1.1 brings Meta's first paid API tier, and Mark Zuckerberg promised aggressive pricing. Jordi Hays notes even a $3bn API business would not get Meta to 40% revenue growth.
xAI releases Grok 4.5 for coding and agents. The model was built with Cursor and targets coding and AI agents, part of a busy week of launches in a slow summer.
Meta defends logging employee keystrokes. CTO Andrew Bosworth defended the experiment to The Atlantic and said he opted out because of legal holds.

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