Top stories today:

1. Microsoft unveils MAI-Voice-1, MAI-1-preview in-house AI models
2. CFTC opens door for overseas crypto exchanges to register in U.S.
3. Elon’s xAI debuts Grok Code Fast 1 agentic coding model
4. Meta said to release next-generation Llama AI model by 2025-end
5. RFK Jr. taps pro-longevity advocate Jim O’Neill to lead CDC
6. Apple pressed by UK for wider back-door data access, filing shows

0. Data and calendar

Listen to our AI-generated podcast summarizing today’s newsletter (beware of hallucinations):

1. Microsoft unveils MAI-Voice-1, MAI-1-preview in-house AI models

MAI-1-preview hit 13th on LMArena’s text leaderboard, ahead of Gemini 2.5 Flash, o1, Claude Sonnet 4, and Qwen3 235B-A22B-Thinking:

• Trained on ~15K NVIDIA H100 GPUs, vs. 100K+ chips used to train xAI’s Grok.

  • Available to “trusted testers” initially, with no specific date on its broader availability.

• MAI-Voice-1 is Microsoft’s new speech model, designed to run on a single GPU and produce a 1-minute audio in under a second.

• Used techniques gleaned from the open-source community to get maximum results with minimal resources, Microsoft AI chief Mustafa Suleyman said.

2. CFTC opens door for overseas crypto exchanges to register in U.S.

• The agency issued an advisory clarifying how foreign platforms can register as “foreign boards of trade.”

• They need to be fully licensed in jurisdictions the CFTC considers equal to U.S. oversight.

• Binance and others could be benefited by this move.

• Hyperliquid was -8%, suggesting decentralized exchanges could be hurt by this move.

• North America is the largest crypto market globally, with ~$1.3T in on-chain value between Jul. 2023-Jun. 2024, ~22.5% of global activity, per Chainalysis.

4. Elon’s xAI debuts Grok Code Fast 1 agentic coding model to rival OpenAI, Anthropic

Grok Code Fast 1 outputs more tokens per second at a lower cost than GPT-5, Gemini 2.5 Pro, and Claude Sonnet 4, per xAI tests: