Good morning. It’s Thursday, November 20. Today we are covering:
Grok 4.1 Fast and Agent Tools API
Trump Takes Aim at State AI Laws in Draft Executive Order
Introducing SAM 3D: Powerful 3D Reconstruction for Physical World Images
The Pentagon Can’t Trust GPS Anymore. Is Quantum Physics the Answer?
Windows on Arm is now ready for gaming thanks to some big changes
Let’s dive in
Grok 4.1 Fast and Agent Tools API
x.ai
xAI introduces Grok 4.1 Fast, a 2M-token context, tool-centric model tuned via RL for real-world tasks like customer support and finance, alongside the Agent Tools API, which lets agents call web search, X search, code execution, file retrieval, and MCP tools directly on xAI’s infrastructure.
Grok 4.1 Fast delivers state-of-the-art tool calling and agentic search, topping benchmarks such as τ²-bench Telecom, Berkeley Function Calling v4, and internal X Browse tests, with stronger long-context, multi-turn accuracy and roughly half the hallucination rate of Grok 4 Fast, while remaining cost-efficient versus GPT-5, Claude 4.5 Sonnet, and Gemini 3 Pro.
Developers get two API variants (grok-4-1-fast-reasoning and grok-4-1-fast-non-reasoning), free access on OpenRouter and to the Agent Tools API until Dec 3, and transparent pricing thereafter ($0.20 / 1M input tokens, $0.50 / 1M output tokens, and tool calls from $5 / 1,000), enabling production-grade autonomous agents without managing keys, rate limits, or sandboxes.
𝕏: Grok 4.1 Fast just released with our new Agent Tools API that has direct access to 𝕏 data, web browsing and code execution - Elon Musk (@elonmusk)
Trump Takes Aim at State AI Laws in Draft Executive Order
By Maxwell Zeff via WIRED
President Donald Trump is weighing an executive order, “Eliminating State Law Obstruction of National AI Policy,” that would create an AI Litigation Task Force under attorney general Pam Bondi to sue states over AI rules seen as violating the First Amendment or interstate commerce, particularly laws that compel model disclosures or alter “truthful outputs.”
The draft order targets recent AI safety laws in California and Colorado, aligns with lobbying from Big Tech–backed groups like Chamber of Progress against a “patchwork” of state rules, and comes amid broader pressure campaigns, including a Silicon Valley–funded super PAC going after New York lawmaker Alex Bores and House Republicans pushing a moratorium on state AI regulations.
It would invoke the Commerce Clause, threaten to withhold federal broadband funds via the $42 billion BEAD program, ask the FTC to block state efforts to “manipulate” AI outputs, and direct White House advisors such as David Sacks to draft a light-touch national AI framework – a move civil liberties advocates like the ACLU’s Cody Venzke
𝕏: BREAKING: Trump considering executive order that bans states from restricting AI, threatening to halt federal funding in any state that attempts to impose regulations while additionally creating AI Litigation Task Force overseen by AG Pam Bondi. - Dominic Michael Tripi (@DMichaelTripi)
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Introducing SAM 3D: Powerful 3D Reconstruction for Physical World Images
Meta
Meta launches SAM 3D, introducing SAM 3D Objects for object/scene reconstruction and SAM 3D Body for full-body pose and shape estimation from single images, along with open resources (model checkpoints, code, datasets, and the Segment Anything Playground) and real-world deployment in Facebook Marketplace’s “View in Room” feature.
SAM 3D Objects uses a large-scale human-in-the-loop data engine and the new SA-3DAO benchmark to deliver state-of-the-art, physically grounded single-image 3D reconstruction, generating millions of meshes, achieving strong human preference win rates, near real-time textured 3D outputs, and supporting dense scene editing, while still being limited in resolution and multi-object layout reasoning.
SAM 3D Body leverages billions of images, targeted mining of rare poses, and a promptable transformer architecture built on the Meta Momentum Human Rig (MHR) format to deliver more accurate and robust full-body 3D meshes, open-sourcing MHR under a permissive license and targeting applications in gaming, film, robotics, AR/VR, and sports medicine, despite current gaps in multi-person interaction and fine-grained hand pose estimation.
𝕏: 3Dfy anything from a single image! Very thrilled to announce SAM 3D. From an input image, select any object you want, 3Dfy it! - Georgia Gkioxari (@georgiagkioxari)
The Pentagon Can’t Trust GPS Anymore. Is Quantum Physics the Answer?
By Mike Cherney via Wall Street Journal
Pentagon-backed researchers are testing a quantum-based navigation device in Griffith, Australia, flying it on a small plane as a potential upgrade for how U.S. drones, aircraft, and ships find their way on future battlefields.
The instrument uses lasers and ultra-cold atoms that behave like tiny compass needles, continuously measuring Earth’s magnetic field to determine location without relying on satellites such as GPS.
By matching real-time magnetic readings to a detailed magnetic-field map, this technology aims to provide a resilient backup when GPS signals are jammed, spoofed, or otherwise untrustworthy.
Windows on Arm is now ready for gaming thanks to some big changes
By Tom Warren via The Verge
Windows on Arm gaming gets a major boost through Qualcomm’s new Snapdragon Control Panel, which auto-detects installed games, optimizes settings, and delivers updated Adreno GPU drivers, with fixes and improvements rolled out to more than 100 titles since launch.
Microsoft’s Prism emulator now supports x86 AVX, while new Snapdragon X2 Elite chips add AVX2 emulation (coming to existing Snapdragon X devices), and the Xbox app on Windows on Arm finally lets players download and install ARM64-compatible games and PC Game Pass titles instead of relying only on cloud streaming.
Qualcomm and Epic Games have worked to get Fortnite running on Windows on Arm with full kernel-level anti-cheat, and Qualcomm is partnering with multiple anti-cheat providers to unlock more multiplayer games, making the platform far more viable for gaming even as performance and compatibility remain a work in progress.
𝕏: Windows on Arm is now ready for gaming thanks to some big changes by Microsoft and Qualcomm. There’s even a new Snapdragon Control Panel and anti-cheat compatibility for Fortnite on Windows on Arm. - Tom Warren (@tomwarren)
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