On this week's 'Galaxy Brain,' Charlie Warzel explores the culture of this boom with the writer Jasmine Sun, who's been chronicling San Francisco's AI scene. Sun describes what this moment feels like on the ground, including a subculture of massive salaries, and a weird pride in leaning into tech's strangeness. Together, Warzel and Sun unpack two major factions shaping the industry: the AI 'doomers,' and the accelerationists. The conversation also traces Silicon Valley's rightward drift'the 'founder mode' backlash against regulation and employee activism and the rise of 'Trump style' provocation-first tech marketing. Finally, Sun and Warzel address the jagged reality of today's models, which are brilliant at some tasks and weak at others. Jasmine Sun: The way that AI progresses is in these fits and starts, and it's going to diffuse into our society quickly, but also incrementally. And I don't really want to wait around until that moment that AGI shows up and we can all agree on it before we start to think about what that actually means for us....

Anthropic has released a new version of its midsized Sonnet model, keeping pace with the company's four-month update cycle. In a post announcing the new model, Anthropic emphasized improvements in coding, instruction-following, and computer use. The beta release of Sonnet 4.6 will include a context window of 1 million tokens, twice the size of the largest window previously available for Sonnet. Anthropic described the new context window as 'enough to hold entire codebases, lengthy contracts, or dozens of research papers in a single request.' The launch comes with a new set of record benchmark scores, including OS World for computer use and SWE-Bench for software engineering. But perhaps the most impressive is its 60.4% score on ARC-AGI-2, meant to measure skills specific to human intelligence. The score puts Sonnet 4.6 above most comparable models, although it still trails models like Opus 4.6, Gemini 3 Deep Think, and one refined version of GPT 5.2. Tickets are live at the lowest rates of the year. Save up to $680 on your pass now.Meet investors. Discover your next portfolio company. Hear from 250+ tech leaders, dive into 200+ sessions, and explore 300+ startups building what's next. Don't miss these one-time savings....

It's the middle of February, and the air is dry. There are fine lines emerging on my forehead, maybe because I don't moisturize enough, but maybe as a harbinger of something greater: each day I grow closer to my own death. Soon, I will be 30. I will never be younger than I am right now. Fintech-founder-turned-longevity-guru Bryan Johnson has an offer that has caught my attention. For the low, low price of $1 million per year, I can pay him to show me the ropes of the 'exact protocol' he's followed for the last five years. He calls the program 'Immortals.' Yes, a guy who has received botox injections in his genitals will teach me how to supposedly reverse the process of aging. Why shouldn't I believe that Byran Johnson has uncovered the secrets to living longer than any other human' No, he has not yet proven his capacity to outlive all other humans. He was born in 1977, a year in which many current humans were born. But why would I doubt the judgement of a guy who fortified his constitution with blood from his teenage son' When have the tech elite ever misled us' Should I also question when Elon Musk says that saving for retirement is irrelevant because AGI will create an economic abundance so great that no one will ever know poverty again'...

This is an interesting recruitment strategy after the company's merger with Musk's rocket maker, SpaceX, and the combined company's anticipated IPO. You might think that xAI employees ought to be fascinated with achieving AGI, using deep learning models to disrupt traditional software companies, or simply bad wordplay like 'Macrohard.' But instead, Elon is going to the moon. After outlining plans to build AI data centers in orbit, the primary synergy between the two companies, Musk took the idea further. 'What if you want to go beyond a mere terawatt per year'' Musk asked. 'To do that, you have to go to the moon'I really want to see a mass driver on the moon that is shooting AI satellites into deep space.' In Musk's telling, the step beyond data centers orbiting Earth is even larger computers in deep space. And furthermore, Musk says the best way to achieve that is to build a city on the moon to manufacture space computers and hurl them into the solar system using a big maglev train. If that all feels a bit much, veteran Musk watchers know there's a clue about where the discussion appears in a video of an all-hands meeting xAI shared with the public. The slide describing the moon base comes at the end of the presentation deck, where, during SpaceX pep talks, Musk typically shares renderings of SpaceX rockets landing on Mars and waxes rhapsodic about the future of multi-planetary humanity....