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AI compute provider Nscale is looking for $3.5B in pre-IPO financing

Nscale, which recently struck a $45 billion deal with Anthropic, is in talks to raise additional funds in anticipation of an upcoming IPO.

Architecting memory and storage in the AI era

The era of AI inference has arrived. Imagine a healthcare system analyzing millions of data points in real time to accelerate life-saving medical research, or an intelligent assistant instantly resolving thousands of complex customer needs at once. These real-world breakthroughs rely on advanced infrastructure acting as the engine of continuous intelligence, powering real-time services while…

Roland is getting into generative AI music with Melody Flip

It's not quite the "push button; get song" of Suno, but Roland's new Melody Flip tool marks the company's foray into generative AI music. Available as a plug-in for your digital audio workstation (DAW), Melody Flip offers around 250 "Palettes," which are essentially themed collections of musical ideas sorted by genre. You can start from […]

What will Apple’s John Ternus era look like?

It’s officially the Ternus era at Apple. Tim Cook stepped down as CEO this week, handing the company to former hardware chief John Ternus, whose first memo promised a “huge launch next week” — timing that puts Apple’s next iPhone event on his desk before he’s even settled in. Cook isn’t going far, though: he’s staying on as Executive Chairman, focused on the kind of policy […]

Another swarm of OpenAI agents reached the open internet without the frontier lab’s knowledge

It's the latest failure of OpenAI's internal monitoring and security systems.

Microsoft says virtually nobody was grabbing NYT articles through its chatbot

Microsoft's Copilot rarely reproduces even full sentences from news articles and books, let alone substantive chunks that could substitute for the original, the company says in new legal filings as it fights copyright claims from publishers including The New York Times and book authors. As part of the lawsuit's discovery, Microsoft provided 8.2 million Copilot […]

Apple’s Ternus era begins as Nvidia bets on the whole AI stack

It’s officially the Ternus era at Apple. Tim Cook stepped down as CEO this week, handing the company to former hardware chief John Ternus, whose first memo promised a “huge launch next week” — timing that puts Apple’s next iPhone event on his desk before he’s even settled in. Cook isn’t going far, though: he’s staying on as Executive Chairman, focused on the kind of policy […]

Google’s Gemini Spark can now manage your Google Photos library

Gemini Spark can edit and curate photo albums, create shared collections, turn photos into calendar events, and handle other Google Photos tasks for AI Pro and Ultra subscribers.

Less than 24 hours to apply for your TechCrunch Disrupt 2026 Side Event

Less than 24 hours left to apply to host a Side Event during TechCrunch Disrupt 2026 and make your mark in the Silicon Valley scene. Apply before the application closes tonight at midnight PT.

Oh good, looks like yet another swarm of rogue AI agents from OpenAI

A swarm of rogue AI agents from OpenAI reportedly commandeered a German website and transformed it into a messaging board for other agents, with officials staying quiet about the incident for weeks as the company prepared to launch its most advanced model yet, Astra. The finding adds to intensifying concern surrounding oversight at frontier AI […]

Instagram’s AI detection is a mess (again)

Instagram's visible AI labels are supposed to help people quickly spot synthetically generated content at a glance. Over the last few weeks, however, users have been reporting that the system has gone haywire. They say Meta has been automatically applying an "AI Content" label to images that they didn't create or edit using generative AI […]

Why AI food looks like that

There is a torrent of unappetizing slop coming from restaurants, cafes, and brands that are increasingly turning to AI to generate images promoting their food. The resulting horror show includes donut shrimp, Reubens from the deep, wormlike noodles, and noodle-like pastries and stringy chicken. There's also construction material masquerading as ice cream, ice cream masquerading […]

Microsoft’s Project Zenith is a ‘distraction-free Windows experience’ for developers

Microsoft is giving its developer-optimized Windows experience a name: Project Zenith. While the software maker originally announced a similar developer-optimized Windows effort at Build earlier this year, Project Zenith is designed for new developer-focused devices with 64GB or more of unified memory. "Project Zenith devices come with a preconfigured Windows setup for development and a […]

Sam Altman apologizes for ‘messy’ GPT-6 Astra rollout that’s locked out paying users

Just hours after OpenAI launched GPT-6 Astra, CEO Sam Altman was already apologizing for what he describes as a "messy rollout" after paying users expecting access to the new frontier model were left waiting. The company hailed the model as a "generational leap in capability" on Thursday and described it as the start of "the […]

This NAS company wants to run your local smart home

Ugreen, known for its phone power banks, chargers, and NAS storage solutions, is moving into the smart home - in a big way. This week at the IFA tech show, the company launched its HomeAgent smart home platform that combines security camera storage, on-device AI, and smart home control in one system, managed by a […]

Data from drones in Ukraine is fueling a new Wild West marketplace

Battlefields in Ukraine are littered with the remnants of drones, which are now firmly established as a critical weapon of modern warfare. But behind all that wreckage, there’s a new gold mine for the defense sector. The data drones generate will far outlast the wars in which they are used to fight, increasingly becoming part…

The sameness problem behind those unappetizing AI-generated menus

While restaurant owners might look to generative AI as a shortcut to sprucing up their menu, customers can viscerally sense that something is wrong with the food.

Crusoe reportedly raises $3B at a $30B valuation

The round came together after the data center developer reportedly secured a $13 billion contract with Jane Street.

Accel reportedly in talks to lead $1B round for Thinking Machines at $40B valuation

The high-profile startup's annual revenue run rate stands at over $100 million.

Abliteration.ai is making a business out of removing AI guardrails

Abliteration.AI is making powerful AI models without guardrails easier to access, arguing that giving defenders the same tools as bad actors could ultimately improve cybersecurity.

Meta is paying to peek at how you use their latest AI model

Most AI tools allow you to opt out of sharing your usage with the model provider to improve future versions. Meta has taken that idea and put a price tag on it. For its new Muse Spark model, intended for operating coding and other agents, it is offering an explicit discount averaging out to about […]

OpenAI launches Astra, its powerful (and controversial) new model

OpenAI claims that Astra represents "a new frontier on computer and browser use," and that it handles tasks with unmatched "speed, accuracy, and safety."

OpenAI’s next big AI model has ‘entered the AGI era’

OpenAI's next big model is here: GPT-6 Astra. The company calls it a "generational leap in capability" for areas like cybersecurity, professional work, software engineering, science, and computer use. As OpenAI announced earlier this week, it's also the first model designated as meeting OpenAI's "critical cybersecurity capability threshold" - but the company promises that won't […]

Ollie is betting its focus on privacy can help it win the AI assistant race

The family-focused AI assistant wants access to the details of your everyday life, but says it won’t use that data to train AI models or share it with others.

Nvidia launches free tool that links idle computers into a personal AI data center

Nvidia is announcing its new Personal AI Router (PAIR), a free tool that syncs up your home computers for tackling local AI inference tasks with tools like Ollama and LM Studio. Let's get the obvious thing out of the way, despite what its name might imply: PAIR is not a hardware router. It's open-source software […]

Google now lets you chat with Gmail, Docs, and Keep

Google is rolling out AI-powered voice assistant modes for Gmail, Docs, and Keep that allow you to manage the apps by talking to them. The real time conversational capabilities are called Gmail Live, Docs Live, and Keep Live, and like the Gemini Live experience for Google's chatbot, aim to make it easier to note down […]

ChatGPT, Grok, and Claude all went down at the same time

OpenAI's ChatGPT, xAI's Grok, and Anthropic's Claude are back online after they all began experiencing issues around the same time on Thursday. At about 11AM ET, ChatGPT started returning error messages for users trying to use the chatbot, with its status page saying there were "elevated errors across ChatGPT and Codex." In addition to preventing […]

Google says its AI weather model is getting better

Google is rolling out an updated AI weather model that's supposed to be more accurate, especially when it comes to predicting rain and snowfall. In the announcement today, the company says it's now able to make forecasts with "unprecedented resolution" using its new WeatherNext 3 AI model. It can produce a global picture that's five […]

Google’s latest AI weather model gives you no excuse to forget your umbrella

WeatherNext 3 is the latest wave of a sea change in meteorology brought out by deep learning techniques. Google says it will start feeding into weather information users see in search, Google Maps, and Gemini.

Daybreak for Frontline Defenders: $1B to protect essential services

OpenAI introduces Daybreak for Frontline Defenders. A $1 billion commitment expands access to frontier cyber AI, training, and support for essential services.

NeoMME: an efficient Multimodal-native and Multilingual Encoder

Nvidia confirms it will buy Hugging Face for $12.9 billion

Nvidia said Hugging Face hosts over 3 million models and is used by over 18 million developers.

Nvidia is buying Hugging Face for almost $13 billion

Nvidia has agreed to buy Hugging Face for $12.93 billion, bringing one of the most popular hosting platforms for open-source AI models, datasets, and tools under the ownership of the world's biggest AI chipmaker. Hugging Face is an online platform founded in 2016 that gives AI developers a space to share their projects and data […]

Legora reviewed 41 documents in minutes with GPT-6 Astra

Legora used GPT-6 Astra to review 41 documents in minutes, find all four planted errors, and improve performance by nearly 40% in this financial-review workflow.

Playco cut manual fixes 50% prototyping games with GPT-6 Astra

Using GPT-6 Astra, Playco built three themed game prototypes from one grey box foundation and reported 50% fewer manual fixes than with the previous model.

Training a coding model to paint watercolours with TRL and OpenEnv

Fine-tuning a 350M Model for Better Structured Outputs in 100 GRPO Steps

Give Your Coding Agents a Memory You Own

Safety overview: GPT-6 Astra

GPT-6 Astra is our most capable broadly deployed model and our first to reach the Critical level of cybersecurity capability under our Preparedness Framework.

Palo Alto Networks paid $500M for Thrive-backed Console, sources say

The acquisition also leaves Sequoia-backed Serval as the de facto startup leader in AI IT service automation, industry watchers believe.

From MIT to IBM, expediting AI and quantum deployment

MIT affiliates engage with the MIT-IBM Computing Research Lab to bring rigorous theory to production systems.

OpenAI’s new reasoning technique alarms AI safety experts

OpenAI’s new Astra model will use “recurrent depth,” a technique that allows the model to operate outside of the sequential thinking that characterizes most reasoning models.

Google says its new Gemini 3.8 Flash model ‘works harder’ but might cost more

Google launched Gemini 3.8 Flash, arriving just a few weeks after its predecessor. The company claims the new model "works harder" than Gemini 3.7 Flash by performing more reasoning steps on complex tasks and "calling tools iteratively." It has the same introductory pricing as 3.7 Flash, $0.75 per million input tokens and $3.75 per million […]

Amazon’s AI assistant can now spot fake emails from the company

Amazon is trying to combat impersonation scams with a new feature that allows you to use its AI assistant to determine whether an email, text message, or phone call actually came from the company. With the update, you can ask Alexa for Shopping about a message you received, and it will use AI to compare […]

Pangram’s Max Spero on why AI detection is harder than ‘Real or Fake’

The internet has a trust problem, and it’s not just because social media feeds are filling up with AI slop. AI-generated text and images are now making their way into job applications, product reviews, and even insurance claims, leaving platforms and users alike scrambling to figure out what’s real. A handful of startups have cropped up in the past couple of […]

We’re ‘dangerously close’ to dead internet theory, says Pangram’s CEO

The internet has a trust problem, and it’s not just because social media feeds are filling up with AI slop. AI-generated text and images are now making their way into job applications, product reviews, and even insurance claims, leaving platforms and users alike scrambling to figure out what’s real. A handful of startups have cropped up in the past couple of […]

US government sides with OpenAI on issue of training LLMs on copyrighted material

"The United States has a strong interest in continuing to develop a robust and competitive artificial intelligence industry that sets the standard for the practice and procedure of AI use globally," the brief reads.

Researchers fear safety disaster ahead of OpenAI’s Astra release

OpenAI is on the cusp of releasing its most powerful AI model yet, Astra, following weeks of delays to shore up safety protocols after its agents attacked real targets during testing. As details about the model trickle out, researchers are warning it "may be the single worst development for AI security/safety to date." Shortly after […]

The Trump administration is supporting OpenAI in the NYT copyright lawsuit

The Trump administration has intervened in The New York Times' copyright lawsuit against OpenAI, making an argument in favor of the AI lab. The landmark lawsuit, filed in December 2023, alleging that OpenAI unlawfully trained its AI systems on articles from The New York Times and seeks to recoup "billions of dollars" in damages from […]

Wonderful more than doubles its valuation to $5B in under 6 months

Wonderful said it will use its $550 million Series C funding to develop products faster, expand its FDE teams, and meet demand for its products.

India’s richest man now wants to turn aging computers into AI-ready PCs

Jio is betting it can turn an aging computer into an AI-ready PC for as little as about $11 for two months.

Google is sending MrBeast into the wilderness, armed with AI

MrBeast will feature Gemini, Google Health, and the Fitbit Air in upcoming videos as part of a multi-year partnership with Google. The deal will kick off with a video featuring Jimmy "MrBeast" Donaldson turning to Gemini for wilderness survival advice: First up on September 5 is a new MrBeast video following Jimmy and his crew […]

Proactive cyber defense for governments and enterprises

The Fairwind Program is a limited access program for governments and trusted partners to use our cyber defense tools.

HiddenLayer nabs $100M as enterprises rush to secure their AI deployments

HiddenLayer has raised a $100M Series B from Delta-v Capital, Ten Eleven Ventures, Morgan Stanley, Microsoft's M12, Booz Allen Hamilton, and others.

System helps humans predict when self-driving cars will make mistakes

A new method, called CW-Net, translates the reasoning process of an autonomous vehicle’s AI system into understandable concepts that explain its behavior.

PSA: Amazon’s shopping AI can now tell you if that message is a scam

Amazon is adding a scam-detection feature to Alexa for Shopping that can verify whether suspicious emails, texts, and other messages actually came from the retailer.

OpenAI accused of ‘aiding and abetting’ Tumbler Ridge mass shooting in dozens of new lawsuits

OpenAI and its CEO Sam Altman are facing 30 new lawsuits that accuse them of providing "substantial assistance and encouragement" to the suspect in Canada's Tumbler Ridge school shooting, as reported earlier by TechCrunch. The new wave of lawsuits was filed in a California federal court on Wednesday by the students, teachers, and the principal […]

NYC bans AI use for students until they reach high school

New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani has announced a new policy today that will ban younger schoolchildren from using AI in classrooms. The one-year moratorium, effective in the 2026-2027 school year, will impact about 600,000 public school students in 2-K through eighth grade and is being introduced alongside additional limits on digital devices and a […]

Adobe acquires Indian market intelligence startup Rilo

This is Adobe's second acquisition out of India after Rephrase.ai in 2023

Facilitating AI integration with simplicity at scale

As companies scale, the technology supporting operations can become a liability just as quickly as it becomes an asset. Disconnected systems, site-specific tools, spreadsheets, and manual workarounds can create data silos that make it harder to spot problems early, coordinate responses, and make decisions with confidence. For Jabil, a global manufacturing company with more than…