Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket sits on the launchpad at the Kennedy Space Center (Gregg Newton/Getty Images)

Bezos’ Blue Origin just scrubbed the debut launch for its flagship rocket

The SpaceX rival has grand plans for the New Glenn rocket, if it ever gets off the ground.

1/13/25 11:28AM

Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin called off the debut launch of its largest-ever rocket on Monday morning because of a last-minute “subsystem issue” — another blow to the company’s bid to compete with SpaceX in the commercial space race.

The 30-stories-tall, partially reusable New Glenn launcher is the culmination of a decade-long, multibillion-dollar development spanning three CEOs and numerous delays.

Up, up, and away

Not content with dominating this planet, the new favorite hobby of the billionaire class is to compete in space, with the richest and second-richest men in the world, Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, engaged in a futuristic face-off for the final frontier.

Unfortunately for the Amazon founder, he’s losing right now.

Commercial Space Race Chart — Sherwood News

Indeed, Musk’s company SpaceX is dominating the industry, responsible for a skyrocketing ~65% of the total licensed commercial launches in the US since its founding. Blue Origin’s total launch count since its inception is only 16% of what SpaceX managed in 2024 alone.

New Glenn will unlock what Amazon’s founder and Blue Origin owner Jeff Bezos hopes will be a long line of contracts, as the rocket — which is expected to be twice as powerful as SpaceX’s Falcon 9 — reportedly carries the first prototype of a maneuverable spacecraft, which Blue Origin wants to sell to the Pentagon and beyond. If it ever gets off the ground, that is.

Jon Keegan

11h

Altman: We do “weird” things like building massive data centers so there will be “universal prosperity”

OpenAI’s CEO spelled out the company’s principles for AGI in a blog post.

12th Breakthrough Prize Ceremony - Arrivals

Rani Molla

Let Tim Cook

16h

Apple is on its way to becoming the biggest smartphone seller in China

The memory crunch has made iPhones a more popular alternative as competitors’ prices rise.

Jon Keegan17h

Microsoft loses exclusive access to OpenAI’s models and tools while ending revenue-sharing deal with ChatGPT maker

Microsoft shares dropped as it announced a revised agreement with OpenAI.

The amended agreement ends revenue-sharing payments from Microsoft to OpenAI, and also ends Microsoft’s exclusive access to OpenAI’s intellectual property (i.e. models and products).

OpenAI’s revenue sharing with Microsoft will end in 2030, is subject to a total cap, and is no longer dependent on its achieving artificial general intelligence.

Amazon, a likely beneficiary of this lack of exclusivity, initially popped on the news but erased those gains.

This is a developing story.

The next phase of the Microsoft-OpenAI partnership - The Official Microsoft Blog

Rani Molla18h

China just blew up one of Meta’s key AI bets

China has ordered Meta to unwind its $2 billion acquisition of Manus, a Chinese startup (since relocated to Singapore) that makes AI agents and was central to Meta’s push to turn its massive AI investments into a real business. The move is part of the Chinese government’s effort to stop US firms from gaining access to Chinese talent and intellectual property, as Washington continues to restrict sales of advanced AI chips to Chinese companies.

Unlike its tech peers, which can sell AI through cloud services, Meta mainly uses AI to improve its existing ad business rather than as a stand-alone revenue driver. The decision strips away one of Meta’s clearest paths to monetizing AI — leaving it spending like a hyperscaler, without a hyperscaler business model.

China blocks Meta's $2 billion acquisition of AI startup Manus

Jon Keegan4/24/26

DeepSeek releases new V4 series models highlighting efficiency and long context

Chinese AI lab DeepSeek has released a major new version of its eponymous open-source AI models that are nipping at the heels of leading frontier models in some areas.

The most significant DeepSeek-V4 Pro and DeepSeek-V4 Flash both have a 1 million-token context — the amount of information the model can actively work with in a single session — which is a crucial feature for complex, long-running coding tasks.

DeepSeek rebuilt how the models process information under the hood, making them substantially more efficient — and that efficiency is what makes the large context window actually usable.

Also, the new models’ coding skills have closed the gap with the major frontier models from Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google.

The authors of the model acknowledge some of V4’s shortcomings, such as its lower scores on reasoning benchmarks, saying that V4 “trails state-of-the-art frontier models by approximately 3 to 6 months.”

As open-weight models, V4 can be run on any user’s own hardware, making the V4 models among the top-performing open-source models out there. V4’s large context and token efficiency are especially significant among open-source models.

But like with earlier DeepSeek models, don’t ask it about Tiananmen Square.

DeepSeek Unveils Flagship AI Model a Year After Breakthrough