The Amped Journal

Andrej Karpathy, the prominent AI researcher and former OpenAI and Tesla AI lead, said the field is moving past simple benchmarks like asking a model to draw an SVG of a pelican riding a bicycle. As one alternative, he gave Anthropic's Opus 5 model a 1-million-token budget (about $10) and only the first paragraph of "The Lord of the Rings," then asked it to generate a response - an early attempt at gauging frontier models on far more open-ended tasks.

AI conference organizer and developer advocate swyx ran a head-to-head test of three emerging "metaharness" tools for AI coding agents: Fred Schott's Flue, cramforce's Eve, and Matei Zaharia's Omnigent. He said Omnigent won "hands down" for his needs, though he noted it leans heavily on containers and Python, which may not suit every workflow.

Guillermo Rauch, Vercel's CEO, pointed to a new open-source agentic CRM built on Vercel and Next.js. He described it as model-agnostic, self-hostable or deployable serverlessly, multi-channel and headless - calling the approach "the way" forward for business software.

Capital One has closed the Trump Organization's bank accounts following an anti-money-laundering investigation, the company confirmed to Reuters. Further details on the probe's findings or timeline were not disclosed.

SpaceX shares, which launched at $135 in the company's June IPO and later soared above $220, have since fallen below that offering price amid market caution and upcoming share unlocks. Elon Musk said AI and robotics output will outpace money-supply growth, adding "few understand" the implications for his companies. Analysts are watching the Aug. 4 earnings report as a near-term catalyst; prediction markets currently put 60% odds on a Tesla-SpaceX merger before 2028, and some project SpaceX could match Tesla's revenue within 12 to 24 months.

SpaceX released composite footage from its Starlink V3 satellites showing the Starship upper stage after payload deployment during the July 24 Flight 13 test. The satellites' cameras filmed the heat shield every half second, revealing the structure intact despite missing tiles near the aft end - data the company says will help refine future landing and reusability attempts.

Frying Pan Ventures LLC, led by managing directors Andy Mitwol and Clayton Williams, plans to begin construction in early September on Covil Village, a 65-unit, three-bedroom townhome community at 202, 310 and 314 Covil Avenue in Wilmington, according to the Greater Wilmington Business Journal. The 5.4-acre site has sat vacant for more than a decade since Port South Village, an assisted-living facility, closed in 2013. Mitwol and Williams spent about two years tracking down the property's owners - it had passed through multiple estates and a family trust - before finally reaching a deal.

The Network for Entrepreneurs (NEW) will host an AI Roundtable discussion Aug. 27 from 5:30 to 7:30 p.m. at Vantaca, featuring speakers from Vantaca, Greenlight Ventures and Aster Labs, according to the Greater Wilmington Business Journal's tech events calendar.

Pieter Levels said talk of AGI destroying competitive moats pushed him to start building again. His takeaway from discussions with other founders: if AI lets you ship faster and better, use that edge to build far more ambitious projects - things you couldn't have attempted before - rather than just doing the same work quicker.