President Donald Trump asked Elon Musk to ease restrictions he had imposed on the military-grade version of SpaceX's Starlink system in Ukraine, The Wall Street Journal reported Thursday, citing U.S. officials.
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The Starshield system, which Ukraine depends on in its war against Russia, was "working more normally Thursday, shortly after" Trump spoke to Musk by phone, U.S. and Ukrainian officials told the Journal.
Trump said later Thursday he did not "want to comment one way or the other" about whether he made the call to Musk.
"Whether I called or whether somebody else called, doesn't make any difference," Trump told reporters outside the White House as he departed for a campaign rally in Iowa.
"The bottom line, he put it back," Trump said of Musk.
The Journal reported Tuesday that Musk, the founder and CEO of SpaceX and a critic of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, had ordered the Starlink slowdown.
Two unnamed sources in that report said Trump and Musk had discussed the decision to throttle Starlink "soon after" the change first became public last week, while one source said Musk had spoken to Trump prior to imposing the speed cap.
Trump has repeatedly denied involvement in the decision and said he does not know if Musk was behind it.
"I don't know who did it, but I was not involved," Trump said Wednesday.
The Starlink controversy, which drew bipartisan concern and criticism from lawmakers, emerged as Trump has ramped up criticism of Zelenskyy for continuing to target Russian energy infrastructure. At the same time, Trump has pursued a deal to ease sanctions on Russia so it can supply some diesel on the global market.
Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, told CNBC's "Squawk Box" on Wednesday that he does not believe Musk would throttle Starlink without "at least the acquiescence of the White House."
Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., the ranking member of the Senate homeland security committee's investigations subcommittee, on Thursday launched an inquiry into how SpaceX's satellite tech was "degraded for Ukraine without notice."
"This decision to limit critical technology for a key ally not only put Ukrainian forces at risk and their people in peril, but raises serious questions about who controls critical capabilities the U.S. government has spent billions of dollars to procure," Blumenthal said in letters to Musk and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth.
The White House and an email associated with Musk did not immediately respond to CNBC's requests for comment on Thursday's report that Trump had asked Musk to lift the restrictions. %!s()
Wouldn’t it be nice to curl up with a good book right about now? If you use the Kindle ebook platform, you can pick up one of my all-time favorite novels on sale right now for just $1.99. It’s The Road, by Cormac McCarthy, and you can get it at Amazon for barely any money at all. It tells the story of a father and his son trying to survive in a post-apocalyptic America that’s been scorched of nearly all other life.
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The Road, by Cormac McCarthy (Kindle ebook)
McCarthy is known for having dense, poetic prose, but he’s at his most readable in The Road. The book is comprised of many short sections, often just a paragraph long, with plenty of white space between each one. Here’s a scene-setting excerpt from near the beginning:
“With the first gray light he rose and left the boy sleeping and walked out to the road and squatted and studied the country to the south. Barren, silent, godless. He thought the month was October but he wasnt sure. He hadnt kept a calendar for years. They were moving south. There’d be no surviving another winter here.”
Notice the lack of apostrophes in some of the words. McCarthy famously doesn’t use quotation marks, either, but you almost always know who’s speaking. The sparse punctuation and the occasional unusual word choice create a unique tone in all of his work.
But whereas some of his other books, like Blood Meridian (often considered his masterpiece), are almost plotless and endlessly violent, The Road tells a simpler story of survival that's easy to follow. It has characters you can root for, even if a major victory is just them discovering unopened canned food in an abandoned cellar.
The Road won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for fiction and went on to be turned into a movie starring Viggo Mortensen (the book is way better). It's one of his most popular novels; others include No Country for Old Men and All the Pretty Horses.
McCarthy was famously reclusive, rarely agreeing to be interviewed, but Oprah picked The Road for her book club and scored one of those rare interviews.
Cormac McCarthy died in 2023, but he carved out a singular voice in American fiction. I’ve read about half of his books, and of those, I’d say The Road is by far the best entry point into his work. I can't recommend it highly enough, especially for $1.99.
Chris Reed is a senior commerce editor and deals expert for IGN. He also runs IGN's LEGO coverage and maintains the upcoming release dates articles for video games, LEGO sets, and 4K Blu-rays. You can follow him on Bluesky.%!s()
OpenAI made its Decisions API model widely available to users for the first time, entering the market for fast, cheap intelligence that recently made TypeSafe, a startup founded by a former researcher at the frontier lab, a $7.6 billion company.
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TypeSafe’s Jev model created a category for deep learning models that act as super classifiers: Given a set of options, they can quickly make choices and offer a confidence rating in their decision. Software developers quickly found that these decision or System One models could replace LLMs in a variety of workflows, operating more quickly and a at dramatically lower cost.
Nikunj Handa, the product lead for OpenAI’s APIs, told TechCrunch that his colleagues saw Jev and said “wow, we we have like a million use cases for this.” Handa’s team sprinted to offer their own version: Rather than building a specifically calibrated decision model, the team took ChatGPT Luna and reconfigured it to speed up the inference and lower the cost.
“The big unlock with Decisions API has been the speed, shrinking things from one to three seconds to 100, 120, 180 milliseconds,” Handa said. “In the future, we may sort of like have specific training to make our models like even better in these ways. But right now, it’s just plain old Luna that gets the job done.”
Announced at the company’s developer day on September 29, the Decisions API became available to all customers on Thursday. OpenAI added new voice and visual modalities to the public version, and worked to ensure lower latency in regions around the world by targeting its inference resources geographically.
In initial trials with customers like Box, Datadog, Ramp, and Speak, engineers used the API to replace OpenAI’s LLMs with higher throughput. Andrew Hsu, the CTO at Speak, which builds AI language tutors, said the Decisions API allowed the company to cut the time between actions from 1.4 seconds to .13 seconds. OpenAI also used the product to improve their Dots voice assistant’s responsiveness.
Still, it’s not clear exactly what makes a good decision model, other than “it works for you” — optimization across intelligence, cost, calibration, and speed seems to differ by workload. TypeSafe CEO Diogo Almeida distrusts benchmarks and urges people to trial the models in their own work, but even TypeSafe released its own rankings last week alongside the release of its latest Jev model, which includes new features including support for images and smart-if statements.
Public benchmarks like the AIM System One Index and the Artificial Analysis Decision Index tend to favor D1 Ultra, a new decision model that Liquid released last week, and Base Lab’s Elephant-1. The latest Jev model remains competitive on both indices, in seventh and third, with OpenAI’s Decision Model falling eighth and fourteenth, respectively. However, TypeSafe’s offerings are, for now, the most widely-queried on OpenRouter.
The most fun Jev benchmark, however, is JevMan, a benchmark where decision models play PacMan; the latest Jev model tops that ranking. Felix Wunderlich, the chief growth officer at Opper AI, which built the benchmark, said the classic game “is an interesting test because of its nonstop stream of quick, high-stakes decisions. At every junction the model must decide where to go in a few hundred milliseconds.”
Where OpenAI’s arguably more capable model may have an advantage is in multi-modality—for image classification, “Luna is extremely powerful and has been showing better calibrations,” Handa told TechCrunch, adding that OpenAI customers want the Decisions API to be more flexible about using images as outputs as well.
Handa also saw further increases in speed enabling new use cases: “Can we get this to something like you know 60 milliseconds, and then you could imagine like an API like call like for every single frame in like a video?”
As these offerings get faster and cheaper, we can expect them to live up to Jev’s namesake, an economist who explained how using a resource more efficiently makes it more ubiquitous. Or, as Handa sees it, there will be an expanding “crazy set of use cases” that were hiding in plain sight until the decision models revealed them.
When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. This doesn’t affect our editorial independence.
Tim Fernholz is a journalist who writes about technology, finance and public policy. He has closely covered the rise of the private space industry and is the author of Rocket Billionaires: Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and the New Space Race. Formerly, he was a senior reporter at Quartz, the global business news site, for more than a decade, and began his career as a political reporter in Washington, D.C.
You can contact or verify outreach from Tim by emailing [email protected] or via an encrypted message to tim_fernholz.21 on Signal.
Michael McWhertor is a New York-based journalist and editor with more than 20 years of experience covering games, industry events, technology, movies, and TV.
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A fan-favorite Lego Ideas set is becoming real
Lego reveals official Daft Punk set and teases big plans
Image: The Lego Group
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Lego is officially teaming up with Daft Punk for new "products, content and brand experiences," the toymaker announced Thursday. While Daft Punk (the musical act) split up in 2021, Daft Punk (the brand and trademark) lives on. As part of a new partnership between The Lego Group and the French electronic music duo, a Daft Punk Lego set originally designed by a fan will be released as an official product. But that's apparently just the start of what the brands have in store.
The new partnership officially kicked off on Thursday with a short film set to two iconic Daft Punk tracks, "Voyager" from the album Discovery and "Human After All" from the album of the same name. Like many of The Lego Group's other recent partnerships, the Danish brick maker promises more to come.
Daft Punk and Lego fans can thank a pair of Lego builders for the partnership's inspiration. The grand prize winner of the Lego Ideas "Music to Our Ears" challenge back in 2020, a Lego-built Daft Punk concert stage, has gone from under review to fully greenlit: The famous pyramid stage from Daft Punk's 2007 Alive tour is being made into an official Lego set. That set was designed by Lego fan Patrick Harbourn and his son, who designed the set and submitted it to the Lego Ideas program back in 2024.
"This all started as a creative escape during lockdown between my son and I because of our shared love of Daft Punk and Lego building," said the elder Harboun, owner of the Lego Ideas Daft Punk Concert submission. "We never dared imagine it would take off in this way. Watching our passion project become part of an official collaboration is an incredible experience, and it's a reminder of what makes the Lego Ideas community so special. That a simple idea, shared by fans, really can become something much bigger.”
"The pyramid stage is one of the most recognisable expressions of Daft Punk’s visual world, so it feels fitting that this fan-created design will be centre stage of this partnership," said Cédric Hervet, creative director for Daft Punk. "Fans have always played an important part in Daft Punk’s story, and we are excited to see that creativity reflected through the Lego universe.”
Image: The Lego Group
The Lego Group didn't say when the Daft Punk Lego Set will be released, but that it "will represent the ultimate symbol of shared fandom and the creative foundation of this partnership."
Beyond the fan-designed set — which will include Lego minifigure versions of Thomas Bangalter and Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo's robot alter egos — Lego says Daft Punk will be "brought to life in new ways across the Lego brand, through a mashup of surprising events and content that crosses music, culture and creative spaces," according to a news release.
Lego says there's more to come in 2027.
The Lego Group's collaboration with Daft Punk is a rare crossover into pop music. The toymaker more frequently collaborates with pop culture movie, TV, and video game properties, such as Star Wars, Harry Potter, Pokémon, and Batman. But Lego has expanded its crossovers on the pop music front recently, including collaborations with Olivia Rodrigo and KPop Demon Hunters. %!s()
Microsoft’s AI diagnostic system correctly diagnosed complex medical cases in a simulation more than twice as often as generalist physicians, according to a study published Thursday in Science. Mustafa Suleyman, Microsoft AI’s CEO, called the result a step toward “medical superintelligence.”
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The system, dubbed MAI-DxO (DxO for short), coordinates several AI agents that act like a panel of doctors. They question a patient, order tests, and debate a diagnosis.
In a simulation using complex cases from the New England Journal of Medicine, it was correct 83% of the time. Primary care doctors and general internists, working individually with reference materials, were correct 36% of the time. One note: Cases this complex are usually handled by specialists or physician teams, who weren’t part of the comparison.
“There is something very substantial and exciting here,” Dominic King, vice president of Health at Microsoft AI, told TechCrunch. “The biggest challenge in healthcare delivery at the moment is the growing mismatch between demand and supply of medical expertise.”
The study’s own data suggests that much of the improvement comes from more powerful underlying AI models, with Microsoft’s orchestration system adding gains on top.
Microsoft tested MAI-DxO with models from several companies, including OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, Meta, and DeepSeek, but its best results came with OpenAI’s GPT-5 and GPT-5.5.
Accuracy improvements delivered by DxO (no budget constraints) on CPC over models prompted with baseline prompt across different large language models.Image Credits:Microsoft AI
Microsoft measured DxO on cost as well as accuracy, meaning the estimated cost of running the AI on each case. On its own with a short, basic prompt, GPT-5 scored 78.9% on complex cases at about $8,400 per case. DxO cut that cost by about $3,000 but raised accuracy by only about four points. On emergency department cases, there was little improvement in either accuracy or cost improvement between GPT-5 on its own and with the assist from DxO.
With GPT-5.5, a newer model released in April 2026, the results split. On complex cases, DxO increased GPT-5.5’s accuracy score from 72% to nearly 87% at a slightly cheaper cost. However, the gains once again didn’t show up on emergency department cases. Both (with and without DxO) scored about 85% at a similar cost.
DxO helps most on complex cases and with less capable AI models. Gemini 2.5 Flash, for example, scored 46.4% on its own but nearly 69% with DxO. Even so, the gap between the weaker and stronger models was larger than the boost DxO provided.
Microsoft’s researchers said that accuracy gains naturally shrink as models approach the theoretical maximum. “The DxO orchestration helps with the broader challenge of optimization both accuracy and cost,” a spokesperson added.
Suleyman, who leads Microsoft’s effort to build its own frontier AI, told TechCrunch that the company is working with the Mayo Clinic to train a foundation model for healthcare, with release planned for next year. He believes this model will enable the company to “make really enormous leaps here,” and says DxO is part of the foundational infrastructure Microsoft is building to see real breakthroughs in healthcare.
“I really believe that in 2027, we will be on the verge of a coding style breakthrough for medical records,” Suleyman said. “I think we’re going to be able to stream highly accurate predictions about how a medical record might unfold, and obviously that kind of foresight for a clinician is gold dust.”
Suleyman has spent his career trying to use AI to solve medical issues. He was previously a co-founder of DeepMind, which was acquired by Google in 2014. The following year, Google DeepMind acquired King’s startup Hark, a clinical task management app, and the two of them launched DeepMind Health together. Suleyman joined Microsoft to lead its AI unit in 2024, and King followed a few months later.
“We’re just true believers,” Suleyman said.
He said while the use of generative AI in healthcare is still early, he expects healthcare models to get “an order of magnitude better in capability within the next 24 to 36 months.”
“As we’ve seen multiple times in the last five or six years, the progress happens very quickly once you have a flywheel,” Suleyman said. “A flywheel means we have a model in production which we are iterating with real-world usage in order to identify gaps in the model and then patch them and improve them. That’s what’s happened in coding. It’s what happened in chat before that. And I think next year it’s going to start to happen for medical records and for clinical decision support.”
Through a new partnership with Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, Microsoft will evaluate the clinical reasoning capabilities of DxO across different hospital settings.
“This technology is ready for real-world evaluations, and you can imagine the complexity and diversity of issues that come from a Boston emergency department on a Friday evening,” King said.
He explained how the study will work: Patients will get standard treatment, including triage, time with a specialist, treatments, investigations, and decision on whether it’s safe to discharge. In parallel, those who consent will also engage with DxO. Microsoft and its partners will compare DxO’s recommendations against the human doctors’.
Google published a clinical study alongside Beth Israel in The Lancet this month to evaluate Google’s AMIE conversational diagnostic AI in real-world urgent care visits, while human physicians monitored the interactions in real time.
“We think this will be the biggest study of its kind,” King said. “It will be across not just emergency settings but urgent care environments, and will give us very compelling evidence by the end of the study period around the ability for these systems to be deployed at greater scale in the future.”
Microsoft’s study in Science coincides with a manifesto of sorts around what it will take to build medical superintelligence, defined as “the capacity to surpass the strongest contemporary human-led health systems in medical reasoning and coordination across the full arc of care.” Microsoft hopes to move beyond benchmarking individual tasks — like answering medical exam questions and generating diagnoses — into integrating with clinicians and healthcare systems for better outcomes.
“This is the kind of technology that everybody in the world wants, and that’s why we’re committed to doing everything we can to accelerate its introduction to the world,” Suleyman said, adding that this focus could be a differentiator for Microsoft compared to the other frontier labs.
Microsoft already sells dictation and radiology tools to clinicians and sees DxO as an expansion to those efforts.
“We have to have the absolute number one state-of-the-art medical clinical decision support products over the next few years,” Suleyman said.
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Image: The Lego Group
Image: The Lego Group