Astronauts splash down on a perfect bullseye 🌙

Welcome back to the Technology newsletter 🤖

Four astronauts splashed down in the Pacific on Friday a historic slingshot around the moon, the first humans to make that trip in over 50 years.

We've also got Elon Musk escalating his legal war with OpenAI, the White House making nervous phone calls about AI weapons, and Beijing letting robots race a half-marathon.

Let's get into it 👇

🧑‍⚖ Elon Musk's lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft took a dramatic turn over the weekend. Musk is now seeking $134 billion in damages and wants Sam Altman and Greg Brockman removed from the company entirely. OpenAI called the move a "legal ambush," and the trial is set to start April 27. (Bloomberg)

🔒 Vice President JD Vance and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent got on a call with the CEOs of Anthropic, Google, OpenAI, Microsoft, and xAI to talk about AI security risks. The conversation centered on what happens when AI models get good enough to help attackers. It’s safe to say that security is top of mind, the conversation comes just days after Anthropic revealed its latest model had found thousands of unknown software vulnerabilities on its own. (CNBC)

🤖 Meta released Muse Spark, the first AI model built by its Superintelligence Lab, the team led by Scale AI founder Alexandr Wang, who Meta brought on nine months ago for $14 billion. The model is rolling out across WhatsApp, Instagram, Facebook, and Meta's Ray-Ban AI glasses over the coming weeks, and time will tell if users agree that it’s more efficient than AI model heavyweights.(CNBC)

🆕 Chinese AI startup MiniMax open-sourced its M2.7 model over the weekend, and the benchmarks are turning heads. It scores 56% on SWE-Pro (a tough real-world coding test) and can handle about 30-50% of a reinforcement learning research workflow. What's unusual is that M2.7 ran over 100 rounds of self-improvement during training — basically, the model helped build itself. (MarkTechPost)

📹 Google just made AI video generation free for anyone with a Google account. Through Google Vids, you can now generate up to 10 high-quality video clips per month using the company's Veo 3.1 model (no subscription or credit card required). Paid subscribers get extras like AI-generated music and custom avatars, but the base video tool costs nothing. (Google Blog)

📈 Google Gemini has quietly quadrupled its market share over the past year, jumping from about 6% to 22% of the AI chatbot market. ChatGPT still leads with roughly 64%, but that's down from 86% a year ago. Gemini's growth is largely coming from being baked into Android, Chrome, and Google Search — places where hundreds of millions of people are already hanging out. (TechRadar)

🏃 Beep boop. Beijing is gearing up for the world's first humanoid robot half-marathon on April 19, and over the weekend more than 70 teams brought their robots out for a full-scale overnight test run. The robots will share the actual course with human runners, separated by barriers. Participation is up nearly fivefold from last year, and about 40% of the robot teams are running fully autonomously — no remote control. (CGTN)

🔓 A critical security flaw in Marimo, an open-source Python notebook tool used by developers, was exploited by attackers within 10 hours of being publicly disclosed — before a proof-of-concept exploit was even available. The bug let anyone connect and get full control of a server without logging in. Researchers say the speed of the attack suggests hackers are now monitoring security advisories in near real-time, likely with AI help. (The Hacker News)

Four astronauts splashed down in the Pacific Ocean off San Diego on Friday evening, wrapping up a nearly 10-day trip that took them around the moon and back. It sounds almost routine when you say it like that, but it's anything but.

This was the first time humans have traveled beyond low-Earth orbit since the Apollo 17 crew came home in December 1972. That's a 53-year gap.

The Artemis II mission launched on April 1 aboard NASA's Orion spacecraft, carrying Commander Reid Wiseman, Pilot Victor Glover, and Mission Specialist Christina Koch from NASA, along with Canadian Space Agency astronaut Jeremy Hansen.

At their farthest point, the crew was about 253,000 miles from Earth.

Glover became the first Black astronaut to travel beyond low-Earth orbit, Koch became the first woman to make the trip, and Hansen became the first non-American to fly around the moon.

After splashdown, Mission Control called it "a perfect bullseye."

Glover told reporters that watching the sun disappear behind the moon was the moment that floored the whole crew — something no simulation had prepared them for.

The mission matters beyond the milestones because it was essentially a proving flight for Artemis III, which is supposed to actually land astronauts on the lunar surface. Artemis II tested the Orion spacecraft's life-support systems, heat shield, and navigation on a real deep-space trajectory, and early reports suggest everything worked.

NASA needed this to go well. The program has been years behind schedule and billions over budget, and a failure would have handed critics an easy argument for cutting the whole thing.

For now, though, NASA has a clean win. The hardware works, the crew is safe, and the door to going back to the moon with boots on the ground is open. Artemis III is currently targeting late 2027 for its landing attempt, and will use a SpaceX Starship as the lunar lander.

It's been a long road back, but for the first time in a generation, the moon feels close again.