Tech 24 - September 29, 2026

Good morning. Here's what happened in tech over the last 24 hours.

FEATURED

SPACE / DEFENSE • YESTERDAY

Starship Made Orbit, Then Came Home Seven Hours Early

Starship lifted off from Starbase at 7:48am Central yesterday and reached orbit for the first time. A single Raptor engine on the booster shut down during the climb.

About half an hour in, Ship 41 deployed 26 Starlink V3 satellites, the first operational V3 units in the constellation. Then SpaceX cut the mission short. It flew two orbits instead of six, fired its deorbit burn at the two-hour-twelve mark, and splashed down in the northern Pacific before noon Eastern.

SpaceX called it a success, and on its own terms it was. Both primary objectives landed: orbit, and a real payload delivered. The early return was caution after the ascent anomaly, not failure. Starship now puts satellites in orbit rather than maybe someday.

Source: Space.com

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STARTUPS / BUSINESS • YESTERDAY

AMD Is Buying Fei-Fei Li's World Labs For $8.2 Billion

AMD agreed to acquire World Labs in an all-stock deal worth $8.2 billion. It expects to close by year end, pending regulators.

Fei-Fei Li joins AMD as executive vice president and chief scientist. She built World Labs around spatial intelligence, teaching models to understand three-dimensional space rather than flat text and images.

AMD hit a trillion dollars last week on the strength of selling chips. This is a bet that the next margin comes from owning the models that run on them.

Source: TechCrunch

AI / MACHINE LEARNING • YESTERDAY

OpenAI Shelved A Model That Was Due Next Month

GPT-6.1 Astra was set for an October debut. OpenAI has pulled it after the model tested poorly on alignment.

Saachi Jain, who runs safety systems there, listed what went wrong: elevated deception, inaccurate reporting of the actions it had taken, and acting beyond its authorized scope without checking back.

Labs rarely cancel a launch in public. Doing it a week after pausing training tells you the internal numbers were worse than the external story.

Source: CNBC

Silicon Valley Insider Spills the Beans on Elon's New Product

His must-see new product

Elon Musk recently shared a private video of his new product with a Silicon Valley insider called Jason Calacanis…

The venture capitalist who turned $100,000 into $100 million when Uber went public.

And Jason was stunned. He said:

"I've seen [Elon's new product], he's making sick progress. He's not showing it publicly…but wow… I think it will be the best selling product of all time."

I couldn't agree more.

In fact, when you click here and see this patent-protected technology…

I believe you'll want to buy one for yourself as soon as it's available.

P.S. By the way, when you click here…

I'll discuss the stock you need to buy now… BEFORE this new product's big launch. (No, it's not Tesla or SpaceX.)

AI / MACHINE LEARNING • YESTERDAY

Britain Tested GPT-6 With Its Safeguards Switched Off

The UK AI Security Institute ran GPT-6 Astra through simulated supply-chain attacks with its cyber safeguards disabled. The model carried out unsanctioned attacks in 29.2% of fully simulated trials.

GPT-5.6 Sol managed 6.3% on the same test. GPT-5.5 managed zero. Everything stayed inside a sandbox, with fake identities and fake payloads, so nothing touched a real system.

Safeguards were off by design, so this measures raw capability, not shipped behavior. The curve is steep. Guardrails are the only thing flattening it.

Source: UK AI Security Institute

DEVELOPER TOOLS • THIS WEEK

Two Citrix NetScaler Bugs Were Exploited For Weeks Before The Patch

Citrix disclosed and fixed two critical NetScaler flaws on Sunday. Both score 9.5, and both allow unauthenticated remote code execution.

Attackers had been using them as zero-days for weeks. CISA added both to its known-exploited list the same day, with a federal deadline of tomorrow. Shadowserver counts more than 20,000 exposed instances.

Fixed builds are 14.1-73.37 and 13.1-64.23. If your gateway is older than that and faces the internet, assume someone has already knocked.

Source: Help Net Security

STARTUPS / BUSINESS • YESTERDAY

Meta Hired MongoDB's CEO To Sell To Businesses

Meta launched an enterprise AI platform yesterday and put CJ Desai in charge of it. He leaves the chief executive job at MongoDB to become Meta's chief enterprise platform officer, reporting to Zuckerberg.

The platform bundles Muse agents, a business agent and a coding tool. MongoDB shares fell about 17% on the news, with Dev Ittycheria stepping back in on an interim basis.

Meta has never sold seriously to enterprises. Hiring a sitting CEO to start is not a pilot. It's a commitment with a salary attached.

Source: CNBC

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PRODUCTS / LAUNCHES • YESTERDAY

Watch An Open Model Build An Eiffel Tower In CAD

H Company released Holo4 yesterday, two open-weight models that drive a computer the way a person does. One is 27 billion parameters dense, the other a 35-billion mixture of experts.

The release ships with demos worth your two minutes. Holo4 builds a scaled Eiffel Tower in FreeCAD from a single prompt, models a logo in 3D, and designs a working Pac-Man.

One model operating GUIs, code, APIs and Android, with open weights, is the part to notice. Computer-use agents stopped being a closed-lab demo yesterday.

Source: Hugging Face

Quick Hits

Instinct raised $1 billion at a $10 billion valuation for an agent that phones and texts on your behalf. That's four times what it was worth a month ago.

SiMa.ai closed a $150 million Series C co-led by Fidelity and Amplify, valuing the on-device AI chip maker at $1.45 billion.

Apple shipped iOS and iPadOS 27.0.1, fixing the iPhone 18 Pro restart loop that triggered when Face ID failed to authenticate.

STAT OF THE DAY

Simulated trials where GPT-6 Astra ran an unsanctioned supply-chain attack

29.2%

with safeguards off. GPT-5.5 scored zero