Victor Vance

Starship’s twelfth flight test will debut the next generation Starship and Super Heavy vehicles, powered by the next evolution of the Raptor engine and launching from a newly designed pad at Starbase. The launch is targeted as early as Tuesday, May 19 → spacex.com/launches/stars…

Announcing agentic performance benchmarking for Speech to Speech models on Artificial Analysis. We use 𝜏-Voice to measure tool calling and customer interaction voice agent capabilities in realistic customer service scenarios Even the strongest Speech to Speech (S2S) models today resolve only about half of realistic customer service scenarios end-to-end - a meaningful gap relative to frontier text-based agents on the same tasks. Voice channels introduce significant complexity: challenging accents, background noise, and packet loss, all while requiring fast responses, consistency across long multi-turn conversations, and reliable tool use. Performance also varies considerably by audio condition: in clean audio some models perform notably better, but realistic conditions continue to pose a challenge. Conversation duration also varies meaningfully across models, with implications for both customer experience and operational cost. About 𝜏-Voice: Our Agentic Performance benchmark is based on 𝜏-Voice (Ray, Dhandhania, Barres & Narasimhan, 2026), which extends 𝜏²-bench into the voice modality to evaluate S2S models on realistic customer service tasks. It measures multi-turn instruction following, support of a simulated customer through a complete interaction, and tool use against simulated customer service systems. The simulated user combines an LLM-driven decision model with realistic audio synthesis: diverse accents, background noise, and packet loss modelled on real network conditions. This complements our Big Bench Audio benchmark measuring intelligence and Conversational Dynamics (Full Duplex Bench subset) benchmark measuring conversational naturalness. Scores are the average of three independent pass@1 trials. We evaluate under realistic audio conditions using the 𝜏²-bench base task split across three domains: ➤ Airline (50 scenarios): e.g., changing a flight, rebooking under policy constraints ➤ Retail (114 scenarios): e.g., disputing a charge, processing a return ➤ Telecom (114 scenarios): e.g., resolving a billing issue, troubleshooting a service problem Task success is determined by deterministic checks against expected actions and final database state, consistent with the 𝜏²-bench evaluator. Key results: xAI's Grok Voice Think Fast 1.0 is the clear leader at 52.1%, averaging 5.6 minutes per conversation, the second-longest overall. OpenAI's GPT-Realtime-2 (High) (39.8%, 3.0 min) and GPT-Realtime-1.5 (38.8%, 4.8 min) follow, with Gemini 3.1 Flash Live Preview - High close behind at 37.7% (3.8 min). Speech to Speech is a fast evolving modality and we expect movement in rankings as we continue to add new models with these capabilities, and model robustness improves. Congratulations @xAI @elonmusk! See below for further detail ⬇️

We just made history. ✈️🌐 Gulf Air’s first @Starlink flight just took off. Full internet. Complimentary. One-click. Gate to gate. Welcome to the future of flying. #GulfAir #Starlink

Grok Voice Think Fast 1.0 ranks #1 on the Artificial Analysis τ-Voice benchmark for real-world agentic customer service resolution Absolutely outperforming GPT-Realtime-2 (High) and Gemini 3.1 Flash by a huge margin That's a massive 12%+ lead over OpenAI's best model that just released a few days ago Grok is running real-time background reasoning without the latency penalty, which is why it is already handling live Starlink phone operations autonomously at scale

It is impossible to overestimate the historic importance of @elonmusk purchasing this platform. He saved freedom of speech. He saved truth.

@TWarPhilosopher Sparta launched a war against Troy over a woman and Achilles refused to continue fighting because the Spartan king took his woman. These are the two biggest plot points in the Iliad.

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