#venture

Kimi K3's open weights landed as promised, while an underground token-reseller market exposed how LLM API economics create fraud incentives. In pharma, argenx paid $2.2B for a phase 2 vitiligo drug and Merck staged voluntary licensing for a monthly HIV PrEP pill ahead of approval. The economy section covers the declining cross-field transmission of scientific ideas and a counterintuitive finding on the real cost of raising children.

OpenAI launched GPT-Live, a full-duplex voice model backed by GPT-5.5 reasoning, while xAI's Grok 4.5 topped SaaS automation benchmarks at one-quarter the cost of rivals. OpenAI also retracted its recommendation of SWE-Bench Pro after auditing found 30% of its tasks broken. Prime Intellect raised $130M to bring frontier reinforcement learning infrastructure to any company. In pharma, AstraZeneca and Ionis reported a major trial failure in a competitive heart disease market, the White House reviewed FDA commissioner finalists, and RFK Jr. moved to create a formal list of Covid vaccine injuries. The NY Fed found tariff cost pass-through to consumers is still in the pipeline.