The Amped Journal

xAI's Grok 4.5 (built on the company's internal V9 foundation model) is now live, a day after xAI said it would launch publicly. Elon Musk said the company's internal assessment puts Grok 4.5 "roughly comparable to Opus 4.7, but much faster," adding that the combination of capability, speed and lower cost is what makes it competitive - and that the team is focused on real-world usefulness at Tesla, SpaceX, Neuralink and Boring Company rather than benchmark scores alone.

Musk said Grok 4.5 already ranks first on several outside benchmarks, including a coding "SWE marathon" test, and that its context window should expand to 1 million tokens within about a week. The model is now available inside developer tools Vercel and Cursor, and Musk said doubling its inference speed is achievable once it moves onto xAI's custom software built for its GB300 chips.

The US military carried out a second round of strikes on Iran after Iran attacked shipping in the Strait of Hormuz a day earlier, the Associated Press reported. The exchange follows President Trump's declaration that the tentative ceasefire between the US and Iran was "over," a call he made after Iran retaliated against US sites in Bahrain and Kuwait following an American strike campaign that hit more than 80 targets.

Democratic Maine Senate candidate Graham Platner said he plans to withdraw from the race after a Maine woman accused him of sexual assault, an escalation from an earlier, lesser allegation. Fox News reported the announcement came alongside pressure from Democratic leaders - including Sen. Bernie Sanders, one of Platner's earliest backers, who had called on him to step aside just a day earlier. His exit clears the way for Democrats to find a new challenger to take on Republican Sen. Susan Collins.