Nathan Owens (@VirtuallyNathan) header
Nathan Owens (@VirtuallyNathan) profile picture

Principal Eng, Starlink Network & xAI Training @ SpaceXAI. Software, systems, data, networking. Bike rides, hikes, nutrition/longevity, tech, etc.

Redmond, WA
Joined May 2010
Photo by Nathan Owens (@VirtuallyNathan)Photo by Nathan Owens (@VirtuallyNathan)Photo by Nathan Owens (@VirtuallyNathan)Photo by Nathan Owens (@VirtuallyNathan)Photo by Nathan Owens (@VirtuallyNathan)Photo by Nathan Owens (@VirtuallyNathan)Photo by Nathan Owens (@VirtuallyNathan)Photo by Nathan Owens (@VirtuallyNathan)Photo by Nathan Owens (@VirtuallyNathan)Photo by Nathan Owens (@VirtuallyNathan)
Nathan Owens retweeted
More than a dozen flight tests and years of development, with countless hours worked by SpaceX engineers and technicians, all come down to this: the first orbital Starship launch carrying advanced Starlink satellites bound for space. Watch “Go For Orbit” and experience the moments behind flying the most ambitious Starship mission yet
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For some reason I went to go look at my high school yearbook — almost like I knew I’d end up @Starlink
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Nathan Owens retweeted
Full fleet. Full speed. Full connection. ✈️ We're bringing Starlink to our entire mainline fleet, and will be one of the world's largest Starlink-connected airlines. With more than 1,000 aircraft planned for installation beginning in 2027, we're taking connectivity to new heights. 📶 Learn more: bit.ly/aa-starlink
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Nathan Owens retweeted
Grok 4.7 works extremely well with our Build harness X.ai/Build
Excited to bring 4.7 to you all! Numerics aside, it's incredibly capable in Grok Build/Cursor. We spent a lot of hours on the harness, iterating with some of the greatest engineers in the world. Also, the fast mode has INSANE tps. Happy Grok Building :) Lmk what you think!
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Welcome to the SpaceXAI team! Cursor will help us move faster on the path to the world's most useful AI, starting with software engineering and expanding into knowledge work.
Cursor is now part of @SpaceX. Today, we have officially closed our acquisition. We will join the @spacexai team to help make Grok the world's most useful AI and improve Grok Build, Grok Bot, Grok API, Cursor, and more. SpaceX has built some of the most inspiring and impressive technology in the world, and we’re grateful for the opportunity to become part of such a special company. Onwards.
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SpaceXAI's Grok 4.6 scores 61 on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index, joining the frontier in line with GPT-5.6 Sol, with standout agentic performance at lower cost Grok 4.6 gains 5 points over Grok 4.5 on the Intelligence Index just over one month after its release, or +23 points compared to Grok 4.3. This brings SpaceXAI back to the intelligence frontier alongside OpenAI, behind only Anthropic. Key takeaways: ➤ Grok 4.6 joins the frontier of the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index: It scores 61, in line with GPT-5.6 Sol (max), behind Claude Opus 5 (max, 63) and Claude Fable 5 (max with fallback, 62), and just ahead of Kimi K3 ➤ Strong agentic performance: Grok 4.6 achieves a GDPval-AA v2 Elo of 1753, behind only Claude Opus 5 and with overlapping confidence intervals with Claude Fable 5 and Qwen3.8 Max. It scores 50.7% on 𝜏³-Banking, among the top two scores alongside Qwen3.8 Max (51.3%), and 88.4% on Terminal-Bench v2.1, in line with the leading models ➤ Frontier-level intelligence at lower cost: Headline pricing is unchanged from Grok 4.5 at $2/$6 per 1M input/output tokens, 60%+ below Claude Opus 5 ($5/$25) and GPT-5.6 Sol ($5/$30). It cost $0.84 per task, the same as Kimi K3 with slightly higher intelligence, placing it on the Intelligence vs. Cost per Task Pareto frontier ➤ Grok 4.6 sits at Fable 5-tier on AA-Briefcase, our private benchmark of long-horizon agentic knowledge work tasks, with an Elo of 1577 - behind the Claude Opus 5 family. It is notably turn-efficient, completing tasks in ~53 turns and ~0.5B input tokens on average vs. ~103 turns and ~2.0B input tokens for Claude Opus 5 (max) Other model details: ➤ Context window of 500k tokens (unchanged from Grok 4.5) ➤ Pricing of $2/$6 per 1M tokens of input/output; cache hits discounted to $0.5 per 1M tokens, an increase over Grok 4.5’s $0.3 per 1M tokens for cache hits Congratulations to @spacexai and @elonmusk on the release!
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Introducing Grok 4.6. It delivers frontier intelligence and is a significant improvement over Grok 4.5 at the same price.
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Nathan Owens retweeted
The foundations for an exciting future are being built in Texas. Next up: Terafab → spacex.com/updates#terafab
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Nathan Owens retweeted
This has my full support. Jensen is right.
For my first post, I’m sharing a letter @NVIDIA signed on why open models matter. AI will transform every industry, power every company, and be built by every country. Open models strengthen safety and cybersecurity, accelerate innovation and diffusion, and enable sovereignty. The world needs both frontier closed models and frontier open models. images.nvidia.com/pdf/Open-W…
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We've open-sourced Grok Build and have reset usage limits for all users. Open sourcing Grok Build allows anyone to support making a reliable and robust harness. Check out our code, including the Git repo for the Grok Build CLI. x.ai/open-source
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After coming across RaptorQ from one of @doodlestein's crazy projects, I was inspired to build a TCP performance enhancing proxy (PEP) using it, consider it a proof-of-concept. I also contributed a bunch of perf improvements the RaptorQ Rust package. github.com/virtuallynathan/r… (I built this a few months ago but failed to open source it)
Whoa — fountain codes are really interesting!
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Nathan Owens retweeted
The path to launch is filled with obstacles and success is only possible through the tireless efforts of many working together towards a common goal. “Critical Path” continues the ongoing Starship series, following SpaceX engineers through the final days before launch of the first Starship V3 and the challenges that come with development of the world’s most powerful and fully reusable rocket.
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Nathan Owens retweeted
Grok 4.5 has insane value 4th best model on Artificial Analysis Index
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Nathan Owens retweeted
We've partnered with SpaceXAI to train Grok 4.5. It’s our most powerful model yet and the first we've built for more than software engineering.
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Announcing Grok 4.5, our first model trained specifically for coding and agents. It was trained with Cursor and offers frontier intelligence at leading speeds and cost efficiency. x.ai/news/grok-4-5
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