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Elon Musk and his companies are thinking big in Texas — and that may be an understatement. SpaceX and Tesla have committed sixteen point eight billion dollars to build a semiconductor factory in Grimes County called TeraFab. Musk claims the facility will eventually span fifty times the size of the Pentagon, which would make it one of the largest structures ever built. Whether that ambition meets reality remains to be seen, but the investment signals a serious push toward chip independence.
Shifting to artificial intelligence, Meta appears to be walking back its retreat from open-weights models. The company just launched Muse Glimmer, a thirty billion-parameter language model distilled from its larger proprietary Muse Spark system. It's the first open-weights release from Meta in more than a year, and it arrives at a moment when American tech firms are under real pressure to demonstrate they can compete without locking everything behind a paywall.
And in a story that will frustrate developers and free software advocates, Illinois has passed a law requiring age verification at the operating system level — language broad enough to put Linux distributions in scope. Critics say the bill is technically confused and sets a troubling precedent for regulating open source software.
Keep surfing. Tech Beat out.
