THIS WEEK IN AI: Grok is Back, ChatGPT 5.6, Meta's New Models, China's Threats

July 10, 2026

AI Summary

5 min read

This Week in AI: Grok Is Back, ChatGPT 5.6, Meta's New Models, China's Threats

Elon Musk's SpaceX AI is officially back in the frontier race. The company's first major model since its public IPO and the $60 billion Cursor acquisition — Grok 4.5 — launched this week, and it ranks roughly third behind Fable 5 and GPT 5.5. But it held that spot for only about a day, because OpenAI immediately followed with GPT 5.6, a general release now available to most users. Meanwhile, Chinese AI labs DeepSeek and Zhipu are developing their own custom chips, Meta released new image and video models, and ByteDance debuted a competitive image generator. The week was dense with releases that together signal a new cadence: frontier labs shipping models monthly, not quarterly.

Grok 4.5: SpaceX AI Is Back

SpaceX AI's first major model since its public IPO and the $60 billion Cursor acquisition is Grok 4.5, and it ranks roughly third on the frontier behind Fable 5 and GPT 5.5. The model is particularly strong at coding and notably efficient: it costs about half of Opus 4.8, generates around 80 tokens per second, and is roughly 17 times cheaper than Opus 4.8 per token. On the SWE-bench coding benchmark, Grok 4.5 solves the average problem in about 16,000 tokens versus Opus's 67,000 — a 4.2x efficiency gap.

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What you'll learn

1 (00:02) **Grok 4.5 Launch** - SpaceX AI releases its first major model since the Cursor acquisition, ranking around third on benchmarks behind Fable 5 and GPT 5.5.
2 (06:51) **GPT 5.6 Launch** - OpenAI releases GPT 5.6 (Sol, Terra, Luna) broadly after a brief government block, now available to users.
3 (10:12) **New ChatGPT Voice Model (GPT Live One)** - A full-duplex voice model that allows simultaneous listening and speaking, now integrated into the main app.
4 (15:19) **China's AI Chip Strategy** - DeepSeek and another major Chinese AI lab are developing their own custom ASIC chips to reduce reliance on NVIDIA and Huawei.
5 (20:55) **Meta's Muse Image & Video Models** - Meta releases new Muse image and video generation models, featuring agentic reasoning.
6 (25:12) **ByteDance's Seedream Image Model** - TikTok's parent company releases a competitive image generation model with powerful editing capabilities.
7 (26:40) **Cloudflare's AI Payments API** - Cloudflare launches a new payments gateway designed for AI agents to make micro-payments.

+ Full timestamped outline available in the app

Show Notes

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So many new AI releases this week! Including xAI’s Grok 4.5 and OpenAI’s GPT 5.6, we discuss their coding, reasoning, and benchmark performance. OpenAI also introduced a new full-duplex voice mode, which lets users speak and listen at the same time, and may preview future AI interfaces.

We also discuss Chinese AI labs building their own chips to reduce reliance on NVIDIA and imported hardware. And finally, a few updates on Meta’s new image and video models, ByteDance’s SeeDream image model, and Cloudflare’s payments API for micropayments and AI agent access.sis)

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TIMESTAMPS

0:00 Grok Is Back
2:03 Cheap Intelligence Wins
3:51 Cursor Deal Pays Off
6:21 GPT 5.6 Arrives
10:05 Voice Mode Breakthrough
15:17 China’s Chip Push
20:32 Meta’s New Visuals
25:06 ByteDance Joins Image Gen
26:36 Cloudflare Opens Payments
28:21 Wrap-Up And Farewell

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RESOURCES

Josh: https://x.com/JoshKale

Ejaaz: https://x.com/cryptopunk7213

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Not financial or tax advice. See our investment disclosures here:
https://www.bankless.com/disclosures⁠

Josh works with Anthropic as a contractor. All views expressed are his own and do not represent Anthropic, its leadership, or its affiliates. Nothing in this episode is investment advice.