SpaceX’s Mechazilla Chopstick Makes Historic Starship Catch, & More

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1. SpaceX’s Mechazilla Chopstick Makes Historic Starship Catch

By: Sam Korus

Last Sunday, SpaceX launched the fifth test flight of the Starship rocket, its Mechazilla chopstick arms catching[1] the booster successfully, as shown below. This impressive feat of engineering is difficult to overstate, as it will be crucial to reusing Starship after just hours.

Last week, SpaceX also updated its Federal Communications Commission (FCC) filing for Starlink’s V3 satellites, including plans to boost customer bandwidth by an order of magnitude and hit gigabit speeds.

SpaceX continues to execute in a league of its own. If you haven’t seen the historic catch, please enjoy the clip here: https://x.com/SpaceX/status/1845924467966726229 

2. Praxis Raises $525M To Build A Crypto-Native Physical City

By: Lorenzo Valente

Founded by Dryden Brown in 2019, Praxis just raised $525 million, led by GEM Digital and Arh Lending,[2] to build an internet-native city designed to foster technological and scientific innovation. Brown described Praxis as an urban hub for promising tech startups and entrepreneurs that will advance the Network State, a crypto-native movement inspired by Balaji Srinivasan, former CTO of Coinbase.

Now a tech investor and investor in Praxis, Srinivasan has been writing, speaking, and educating audiences about his utopian vision for years. He believes that the combination of technology, crypto, and decentralized governance could lay the foundation for new digital-first, autonomous societies. Balaji's thesis is based on the idea that, aligned in goals and interests, a highly talented group of people can achieve exceptional outcomes. Over the past 25 years, small communities have built multi-trillion-dollar companies, social networks, and currencies. Balaji believes that network states are the next step in this evolution. Bootstrapping Balaji’s vision, Praxis is an internet-native community of 14,000 people, distributed across 84 countries, whose members have founded companies worth more than $400 billion collectively.[3]

Praxis structured its recent funding round as a drawdown facility, with distributions based on specific milestones like securing government approvals, acquiring land, and tokenizing real estate. According to Dryden Brown, more than 2,500 members of the Praxis community have committed to moving to the city. After one government made a proposal to host the city, several other countries followed with proposals of their own.

While attempts to create startup societies and independent communities are not new—and many have failed—Praxis is pressing forward. Dryden Brown intends to disclose the physical location of the city by the end of the first quarter and anticipates that residents will begin to populate it by late 2026. Plans for the first phase are to occupy ~1,000 acres and accommodate ~10,000 people.

3. AI User Experiences Are Improving

By: Frank Downing

Like many of its fast-following competitors, ChatGPT launched as a simple product—a clean homepage with a text box—like Google’s search bar—for questions. Now, nearly two years after launch, many AI companies are evolving their user app experiences and creating stickier ways for users to engage with their models. Among the common trends emerging are the following:

Persistent Context: Giving AI models more context typically improves results, but typing out background information with each chat is painstaking. Companies like Perplexity, Anthropic, and OpenAI have launched features that aim to solve that problem. Perplexity Spaces[4] and Anthropic Projects[5] allow users to upload documents that could be relevant to a certain project. The model then can reference relevant information that applies to all conversations related to the project on which teams are working. OpenAI’s solution[6] is more personal: ChatGPT takes notes on the information that users deem potentially important.

Better Collaboration: OpenAI recently launched Canvas[7] for ChatGPT, which allows for interactive writing and coding. Instead of rewriting an entire document, users can highlight specific content or code on which the AI assistant can focus and edit. Anthropic launched a similar feature called Artifacts[8] earlier this year. ChatGPT and Perplexity also provide starter prompts and suggested follow-up questions, respectively, to help users tackle tasks and get additional information faster.

New trends are giving users more time to work with AI assistants directly, obviating the need to bounce around disparate applications and increasing user retention, as more and more context builds within a particular assistant application. The new trends also pair nicely with advances in other technical capabilities, including image, video, and voice support, web search, third-party integrations and, most recently, advanced reasoning capabilities.[9]

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[1] SpaceX. 2024. “Super Heavy landing burn and catch.” X.

[2] Katte, S. 2024. “Praxis gets $525M for utopic crypto, AI-friendly city.” Cointelegraph.

[3] Praxis. 2024. “Praxis Announces $525M Financing for New City.”

[4] Perplexity. 2024. “What are Spaces?”

[5] Anthropic. 2024. “What are Projects?”

[6] OpenAI. 2024. “Memory and new controls for ChatGPT.”

[7] OpenAI. 2024. “Introducing canvas.”

[8] Anthropic. 2024. “Claude 3.5 Sonnet

[9] Downing, F. 2024. “OpenAI's o1 Outperforms Other LLMs By ‘Stopping To Think.’” ARK Disrupt Newsletter. ARK Investment Management LLC.