The complete field record · 2024—2026
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issues
110 weekly reports on the systems moving from experiment to infrastructure.
Every issue covers four developments, preserves its research trail, and calculates reading time at 150 words per minute for dense technical prose.
Field reports
Newest first · Filter by time- 60Frontier Mechanics Week 60: Claude operates a computer, DeepSeek sparsifies attention, California writes a frontier rule, and Honda stores the lunar dayAgent reliability became a product claim, sparse attention attacked long-context cost, SB 53 turned model scale into reporting duties, and regenerative fuel cells turned the lunar night into a storage problem.
- 59Frontier Mechanics Week 59: Zeno secures americium, Galactic Energy fills a launch round, Nvidia backs its largest customer, and capital closes the loopA nuclear startup locked in an unusual isotope, Chinese private launch absorbed fresh capital, the largest chip supplier proposed a vast OpenAI investment, and demand became harder to separate from financing.
- 58Frontier Mechanics Week 58: Nothing funds AI-native devices, Icarus targets orbital labor, IonQ links quantum to space, and retail investors buy the startup wrapperCapital chased a new consumer-computing layer, a robot company proposed replacing spacewalks, quantum networking acquired an orbital frame, and private-market exposure moved toward public accounts.
- 57Frontier Mechanics Week 57: K2-Think compresses reasoning, IonQ prices electronic control, Rendezvous tiles orbit, and inference gets an energy billA small reasoning system challenged parameter-count reflexes, IonQ put electronic control on its public roadmap, self-assembling tiles escaped the fairing, and operators measured intelligence in joules as well as tokens.
- 56Frontier Mechanics Week 56: Nvidia rents its own chips, Quantinuum prices error correction, the SEC audits AI claims, and return cargo finds demandA circular infrastructure lease exposed GPU finance, a quantum company raised $600 million, regulators treated AI marketing as disclosure, and orbital logistics shifted attention from launch to landing.
- 55Frontier Mechanics Week 55: Jetson gets a Thor, Starship completes the checklist, Taco Bell meets the adversarial customer, and spectrum consolidatesNvidia shipped a robot computer, SpaceX recovered from three failed tests, a drive-through voice agent was stress-tested by real people, and AT&T bought EchoStar's frequencies.
- 54Frontier Mechanics Week 54: FieldAI generalizes the body, Meta rents taste, space solar enters the grid model, and Tensor leaves SamsungA robot-software company raised $405 million, Meta licensed Midjourney's aesthetic machinery, researchers priced orbital solar inside Europe's grid, and Google's phone chip moved to TSMC.
- 53Frontier Mechanics Week 53: robots get a world model, Vulcan earns the mission, humanoids race, and export control takes a cutNvidia put a reasoning layer over physical AI, ULA flew Vulcan for national security, Beijing turned humanoid failure into sport, and Washington attached a royalty to restricted chips.
- 52Frontier Mechanics Week 52: open-weight reasoning, chip-smuggling arrests, an astronaut medic, and Rocket Lab’s payload stackOpenAI released models people could run, US prosecutors traced accelerators, NASA tested a medical assistant for Mars, and Rocket Lab bought deeper into defense sensors.
- 51Frontier Mechanics Week 51: NISAR unfolds, Groq reaches $6B, OpenAI adds $8.3B, and Joby goes hybridA US–Indian radar mission launched, inference silicon repriced, OpenAI’s round grew, and an eVTOL company joined a defense contractor on autonomous flight.
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