The Amped Journal

Sen. Lindsey Graham, the senior US senator from South Carolina, died Saturday night, July 11, at age 71. His office said in a statement that he passed after a "brief and sudden illness," without giving further details.

First elected to the Senate in 2002, Graham built his reputation as a foreign policy hawk. He was once a vocal skeptic of Donald Trump but became one of the president's closest allies in the Senate, particularly on national security issues including Iran policy.

News of his death drew reaction across Washington. Podcaster and investor Jason Calacanis said it reignited debate over the age of US political leadership, calling for cognitive testing and term limits: "We now live in a Gerontocracy, where dying or becoming senile in office is the standard."

Wednesday, OpenAI confirmed that GPT-5.6 Sol, along with two sibling models called Terra and Luna, would launch publicly two days later, and said it was expanding preview access globally in the meantime. The announcement marked a shift from earlier reports that a US executive order had capped GPT-5.6 preview access to roughly 20 partners for 30 days after the model topped benchmarks; OpenAI didn't say whether those restrictions had been lifted. The rollout was also set to land the same day xAI planned to release Grok 4.5.

By Friday, OpenAI had begun shipping the GPT-5.6 family - Sol, Terra and Luna - across ChatGPT, Codex and its API, with availability expanding globally over the following day. Plus, Pro, Business and Enterprise users got Sol in ChatGPT immediately. OpenAI said Sol set a new state of the art on the Artificial Analysis Coding Agent Index at 80.0 (2.8 points above Anthropic's Claude Fable 5) while using less than half the tokens, time and cost, and beat Fable 5 by 13.1 points on the Agents' Last Exam benchmark. The company also launched ChatGPT Work, a Codex-and-Sol-based agent that can act across a user's apps and files for hours at a stretch, rolling out first to Pro, Enterprise and Edu plans.

Saturday brought two more updates. OpenAI said the smaller Luna model outperformed GPT-5.5 running at its highest reasoning setting while costing 25 times less, calling it "a major step forward for health intelligence." Separately, Sam Altman announced GPT-5.6 had become the preferred model inside Microsoft 365 Copilot, extending its reach into Word, Excel, Outlook and Teams for enterprise users. Early developer feedback was positive: an engineer at Snorkel AI had the model complete a coding task spanning nearly 1,000 lines without repeated prompting, and researcher Simon Willison suggested Sol at medium reasoning effort as a new default for coding work.

Sunday, Altman said physicians reviewing medical responses found fewer errors in GPT-5.6's answers than in ones written by human doctors. Venture capitalist Marc Andreessen made a similar claim, writing that "AI is already a better doctor than 99.99% of human doctors." Altman also said AI has so far been "net job-creating" in the economy, adding that he'd expected to see some negative employment impact by this point and hasn't - though he cautioned "it is possible this direction keeps going."

Monday, the X account long known as xAI rebranded to @SpaceXAI, tying Elon Musk's chatbot venture more visibly to his rocket company. The same account used the new handle to ship 21 new flagship voices for Grok's voice mode via API, adding to the original five. Musk separately posted that "AI+Optimus will enable universal excellent healthcare that is better than anyone receives today."

Tuesday, @SpaceXAI announced Grok 4.5 would go public the next day, Wednesday July 9, citing "strong positive feedback" from beta customers. Musk called it an "Opus-class" model - comparable to Anthropic's Claude Opus tier - but faster, more token-efficient, and cheaper. The launch was set to land the same week OpenAI planned to publicly release its own new flagship, GPT-5.6 Sol, on Thursday.

Also Tuesday, Musk claimed X had the highest monthly growth of any top-10 website in June, without citing supporting traffic data or a source.

By Wednesday, Grok 4.5 - built on xAI's internal V9 foundation model - was live. Musk said the company's internal assessment puts it "roughly comparable to Opus 4.7, but much faster," and pointed to the combined capability, speed and lower cost as the differentiator, adding that the team's focus is 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 reach 1 million tokens within about a week. The model is now available in 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.

SpaceX began prepping for Starship's 13th flight test on Friday, rolling Super Heavy Booster 20 out to the Starbase pad for static fire testing ahead of a targeted mid-July launch window. The next ship in line, Ship 41, also began its own test campaign for the following flight, Flight 14.

By Saturday, Booster 20 - part of the upgraded Super Heavy V3 - had completed a full-duration static fire of all 33 Raptor engines. Elon Musk shared footage of the milestone test, as SpaceX kept running parallel test campaigns for both the upcoming flight and the one after it.

Sunday brought a firmer target: Musk and SpaceX both said Flight 13 could launch as early as Thursday, July 16, from Starbase. But NASASpaceflight reported a broken actuator on Booster 20 at Pad 2 had delayed transporting the booster back to the production site for final closeout work, pushing the next road closure to Sunday morning.

Whether the actuator repair holds up the Thursday target is the next thing to watch.

Monday, multiple campaign events for Graham Platner, the Democratic candidate for US Senate in Maine, were canceled after Politico reported a new sexual assault allegation against him. A Maine woman told the outlet Platner assaulted her five years ago while the two were intoxicated. Platner denied the allegation and said he was "reflecting on the best path forward" in the race.

By Tuesday, Sen. Bernie Sanders - one of Platner's earliest and most prominent backers - joined a growing chorus of Democrats calling on him to step aside from the race.

Platner announced Wednesday that he plans to withdraw. The allegation had escalated from the earlier, lesser one reported Monday, and his announcement came alongside pressure from Democratic leaders, including Sanders, who had urged 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.