Good morning. It's Wednesday, July 22nd, 2026 — and tomorrow is the day.

Story one: SpaceX is set to launch Starship Flight 13 tomorrow, July 23rd at 5:45 PM Central. This is the re-attempt after Flight 13 was scrubbed at T-zero on July 16th with four of thirty-three Raptor 3 engines failing to ignite on Booster 20. This time, at least two engines have been replaced. The FAA closed its Flight 12 investigation on July 13th with four corrective actions, clearing the way. If it flies, this mission carries the first V3 Starlink satellites — the next generation with deployable solar arrays — and will attempt a booster landing return to the launch tower. Also on tap tomorrow: a Falcon 9 launching from Vandenberg, making it a potential double-header day for SpaceX. Flight 13 has been rescheduled at least three times now. Tomorrow, weather permitting, they finally light the candle.

Story two: Google released three new Gemini models on Tuesday — and notably, the long-delayed Gemini 3.5 Pro is still MIA. The new models are Gemini 3.6 Flash, which Google calls its workhorse — improved coding, multimodal, and knowledge-work performance while using up to seventeen percent fewer tokens than 3.5 Flash. There's also 3.5 Flash-Lite for cost-sensitive agent workloads, and 3.5 Flash Cyber — a security-specialized model for finding and fixing vulnerabilities, available only to governments and trusted partners in a limited pilot. And Google finally teased Gemini 4, though gave no timeline. Sundar Pichai admitted on Hard Fork last week that Google is "a bit behind" on agentic coding. These Flash releases feel like holding the line while the Pro tier sorts itself out.

Story three: Anthropomorphic AI acquisition fever. Reports confirmed this week that Anthropic held acquisition talks with Physical Intelligence — the $11 billion robotics startup whose pi-zero-point-five model is one of the most widely used robot brains in research today. Physical Intelligence's CEO denied an active deal, but The Information confirmed spring talks took place. Meanwhile, Fei-Fei Li's World Labs announced its acquisition of SceniX, a robotics simulation startup founded by Yunzhu Li, specifically built to close the real-to-sim gap for robot learning. Li posted that joining forces means "we close that gap faster." Two separate moves, same signal: the smartest AI labs are vertically integrating into physical intelligence. Language models got us here. The next battlefield is robots that can actually understand the world.

And finally, from China's State Administration of Taxation: revenue in the embodied intelligence sector grew twenty-two percent year-over-year from January through May 2026, and industrial purchases of embodied intelligence robots more than tripled in the same period. The hardware is shipping. Whether the software can keep up is the question of the year.

That's all for today. Tomorrow — watch the sky.