THIS WEEK IN AI: Pope Approves Anthropic, Comparing AI Plans, Starcloud SpaceX Partnership

The Pope has endorsed Anthropic. Meta is launching a multi-tier subscription blitz starting at $4 a month. SpaceX has a new customer for orbital data centers. And Snowflake’s stock jumped 30% in a single day by proving it can sit on top of frontier AI models rather than be replaced by them. This week’s news roundup from the Limitless Podcast covers a dense set of developments across the AI landscape, from the subscription wars to space-based compute to a new benchmark that actually tests how well models perform on long, real-world coding tasks.

Meta’s Subscription Push and the AI Pricing War

Meta, which has spent roughly $30 billion on AI capex, GPUs, and talent over the past twelve months with little to show for it, is now aggressively entering the subscription game. The company rolled out three tiers of consumer plans: Instagram Plus at $3.99/month, Facebook Plus at $3.99/month, and WhatsApp Plus at $2.99/month. These plans offer profile customization, super reactions, and story insights — but notably do not remove ads. Above those sit creator-focused plans (Plus, Premium, Max) that include the verified blue checkmark, and then Meta’s new AI subscription, Meta One Plus, starting at $8/month. A $20/month plan is positioned to compete head-to-head with ChatGPT Plus, Claude Pro, and Google’s AI offerings.