Roundups
AI Leaders to Watch: What Musk, Altman, Hassabis, Huang & Amodei Are Doing
The five people steering AI: Musk, Altman, Hassabis, Huang, and Amodei — what they're building, saying, and why it matters to you. Updated regularly.
- Oct 19 — Zuckerberg's double launch week. Meta announced closed frontier models Muse Wonder and Muse Wonder Full (Oct 12, $4/$20 per million tokens) and released open-weight Muse Spark Open 816B (Oct 15) — fighting the frontier race and the open-weights race at once. Weekly briefing
- Oct 16 — Amodei writes his own safety bill. Anthropic quietly pitched Congress a draft AI safety bill (reported by Politico) letting the government block a model only at $1B+ damages or 50+ lives at risk — with Commerce-registered evaluators and a federal judge as the only off-switch. Weekly briefing
- Oct 15 — Huang's open agent models. NVIDIA released open-weight Nemotron 3.5 for AI agents, including a 74B model that fits in 24GB of GPU memory, while Nvidia-backed startup doubleAI debuted Maxwell, a "code execution model" to cut compute costs. Weekly briefing
- Oct 14 — Altman: eight states sue OpenAI. State attorneys general in Arizona, Arkansas, Idaho, Iowa, Kansas, Montana, Nebraska, and West Virginia each sued OpenAI, alleging ChatGPT was misrepresented as safe for children and teens and seeking court-ordered safety changes plus damages. Flash post
- Oct 12 — Zuckerberg’s Meta enters the frontier race. Meta announced Muse Wonder and Muse Wonder Full, its first closed frontier AI models — scoring 52 and 56 on the Artificial Analysis index, just behind Claude Opus 5.5 at 58 — a pivot from Meta’s open-weights Llama strategy to paid, paywalled models. Flash post