Hey {{first_name|Conscious Church Fam}} 👋
This week OpenAI revealed its first hardware, a talking speaker designed by Jony Ive, right as Apple's lawsuit against them heats right up. Elon and Sam are also back at each other's throats, and a Chinese open-source lab just undercut the frontier price war.
Here's what we're covering:
📢 OpenAI's First Gadget Is a Speaker With a Personality
🥊 Musk and Altman Are At It Again
🚀 An Open-Source Model Just Undercut the Frontier
Let's dive in 👇
✍️ Josh's Musings
I’m going to be honest. I’ve left it late this week. It’s midnight, and I’ve just got back from watching the world cup final with Judah. (it’s 00:30am as I’m writing this musing)
I was chatting to a guy at the game who is a roofer by trade, and he started mentioning how AI has massively helped him get more work because his proposals and quotes are way more professional sounding. I mentioned that I barely write long form text any more, and I just speak it.
The context it affords me in the same time it would take me to type it, is remarkable.
If I’m typing, chances are my notes are weaker and sloppier, than if I’m chatting through my microphone.
The roofer hadn’t used speech to text, so I gave him a few scenarios so he can test it out this week.
He was asking me if i’m worried about AI taking my job (graphic design etc).
‘No’.
I said.
You can’t fake ‘taste’.
So here is my challenge to you (as I fall asleep at my keyboard).
Reverse engineer your current role with AI.
What are the current things it can do (and perhaps do better) than you/human.
What could it never do like you do?
Stay conscious
Josh
Image: Bloomberg | The Conscious Church
OpenAI's much hyped hardware debut, the one designed with Apple's old iPhone chief Jony Ive, is finally coming into focus. According to a new Bloomberg report it isn't a phone or a wearable, it's a speaker. Screen free, battery powered, and built to feel less like a gadget and more like a companion you carry from room to room.
The Details:
A rechargeable battery lets you carry it between rooms, with onboard cameras and sensors reading its surroundings.
It runs on GPT-Live (OpenAI's upgraded voice mode) and can answer questions, send replies, queue music, and control smart home gear.
Mechanical movement is built in to make the device feel "alive," and it can study your data, like emails, to personalise itself over time.
The launch is now tangled up with Apple's lawsuit accusing OpenAI of poaching hardware secrets, with a possible 2027 release date on the line.
Conscious Take:
We keep saying we want less screen time, then we build a speaker engineered to feel alive so we never want to switch it off. That is probably always listening and built to be just as ‘on’ and companion-like rather than a tool.
Image: X | The Conscious Church
Just when you thought the Musk vs Altman feud had cooled off after their court battle wrapped up back in May, Apple's new lawsuit against OpenAI poured petrol on it. The two took to X over the weekend and it got personal fast.
The Details:
Musk accused Altman of taking "scamming to a whole new level," saying he "might literally love scamming more than any human alive."
Altman fired back, calling out Musk's SpaceX space data centre pitch as him "selling public market investors on short-term space datacenters."
Musk doubled down, saying "we start flying them next year" and joking Altman could come see them "if your parole officer approves."
Altman closed it out claiming the best proof GPT-5.6 Sol is the top model is that "Elon is obsessed with me again."
Conscious Take:
Two of the most powerful men in the world, worth a combined quarter of a trillion dollars, and they're bickering like kids in a school yard. It's somewhat funny until you remember these are the people steering where AI goes next.
Image: Moonshot AI | The Conscious Church
Chinese lab Moonshot AI just released Kimi K3, an open-weights model that pulls within a few benchmark points of Claude Fable 5 and GPT-5.6 Sol, and beats both on some tasks, at a fraction of the price. If this is 2026's DeepSeek moment, it landed fast.
The Details:
K3 has a 1M token context window and beats Fable and Sol on benchmarks for web research, spreadsheet work, frontend design, and long coding tasks.
It scores 57 on AA's Intelligence Index, just behind Fable (60) and Sol (59), a double-digit jump from the previous Kimi K2.6.
In one demo, K3 worked solo for 48 hours to design and verify a tiny chip running a mini version of itself, hitting 8,700 tokens a second in simulation.
Pricing matches Claude 5 Sonnet at $3/$15 per million tokens, and Moonshot says the full weights will be published by 27th July.
Conscious Take:
Six months ago, closing the gap on frontier intelligence took billions of dollars and a lab full of the best researchers in the world. Now Moonshot are showing that it is possible to achieve incredible outputs at a fraction of the cost.
Kimi is a brilliant model, I tried out their earlier model back in January to build out a powerpoint based on my talk notes/script and it did a very very good job (and it was editable).
For those of you coding, this could make sense.
📬 One quick ask...
If this email has been helpful, would you forward it to one person this week who might be interested? Thanks :)
"Whatever you do, work at it with all your heart, as working for the Lord, not for human masters." — Colossians 3:23
Build with the tools. But build for the right reasons.
That's all for now
Stay conscious,
Josh
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