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Spranic builds spatial memory for physical AI
Physical AI needs context about its surroundings to adapt beyond a fixed set of instructions. Munich-based Spranic is building a spatial memory layer that records physical spaces and how they change....
Character.ai will shut down if no buyer emerges, capping a fall from $2.7 billion Google deal to bankruptcy
Character.ai has filed for bankruptcy and is looking for a buyer. If none steps up, the platform shuts down. Founded by ex-Google researchers, the company once had over 20 million users but is now...
On theCUBE Pod: AI doubters get loud, and IBM seeks competitive advantage
Americans have big concerns about artificial intelligence, but that hasn’t stopped OpenAI Inc., Nvidia Corp., IBM Corp. and others from charging ahead. Last week saw shares of Nvidia, CoreWeave Inc.,...
Western mathematicians fear AI makes them dumber while China builds an entire alliance for it
While 25 Fields Medal winners in the West warn against AI-generated proofs and parts of the community call for a boycott, China is going on the offensive. Fields Medal winner Shing-Tung Yau has...
SpaceXSI bundles X Premium, Grok, and Cursor into one subscription
The new X Subscription combines X's paid features with AI tools like Grok and Cursor, offering plans ranging from $8 to $200 per month.
Amex introduces a framework to prevent AI agents from making unauthorized purchases
American Express is introducing a new framework designed to ensure AI agents only make purchases their users have authorized, potentially preventing costly mistakes and disputes as AI-powered...
Just 5 years in, interactive chatbot platform Character.AI files for bankruptcy
The startup will sell some of its assets to Disney for $20 million.
The Download: open model trade-offs and geothermal power’s promise
This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. Open models have real benefits. Do they outweigh the risks?...
Anthropic says it cut Claude reasoning token theft by up to 99% in fight against industrial-scale distillation
Anthropic says it has cut the extraction of Claude's internal reasoning tokens by 90 to 99 percent. The company links the large-scale distillation attacks to Chinese companies Zhipu and Moonshot, and...
Fifth Wall’s Brendan Wallace On Why The Best Proptech Bets May Not Look Like Proptech
In a recent interview with Crunchbase News, Brendan Wallace, founder, CEO and chief investment officer of Fifth Wall, discussed the AI shift, why proptech funding totals may overlook some of the...
Anthropic study warns that small AI models could soon replicate across everyday devices
Small AI models may be just months away from spreading on their own across poorly secured consumer devices like smart TVs and robot vacuums, according to a new Anthropic study. In tests, one model...
Open models have real benefits. Do they outweigh the risks?
MIT Technology Review Explains: Let our writers untangle the complex, messy world of science and technology to help you understand what’s coming next. You can read more from the series here. Late...
The Biggest Pro-AI Super PAC Network Has Poured Millions Into Nevada Shell Companies
Backed by Silicon Valley titans, Leading the Future has raised huge sums to promote pro-AI candidates on both side of the aisle.
AI labs are buying data from dead startups to train their models
When Keelan Miskell began winding down his crypto startup this year, he didn’t think its data was worth much: the users were anonymous, the company just a few years old. But he’s since turned the...
Intel, Broadcom CEOs flag AI industry challenges at financial event
Intel Corp. Chief Executive Lip-Bu Tan and Hock Tan, his counterpart at Broadcom Inc., have flagged capital access as a potential challenge for the artificial intelligence sector. The executives...
Meta releases Muse Wonder AI models built to run personal and professional agents
Meta Platforms Inc. today released Muse Wonder and Muse Wonder Full, two artificial intelligence models it says are its most capable yet at running agents that handle personal and professional tasks....
Dell and Intel weigh the costs of enterprise AI scalability
Enterprise AI scalability is running into a hard budget wall for some customers. As agentic workloads multiply, cloud token bills are consuming allocations faster than planned, prompting companies to...
AI governance shifts to runtime as always-on agents spread
As enterprises move from debating artificial intelligence adoption to deploying it, AI governance has become the harder question. Autonomous agents now run around the clock across a sprawl of...
Deepgram targets voice AI on air-gapped laptops
Voice AI is quickly becoming core infrastructure as people swap screens and clicks for conversations with their devices. That shift puts new pressure on the compute, storage and partnerships behind...
Meta's new frontier model Muse Wonder Full breaks into the AI top tier
Meta's new Muse Wonder models rank in the top three on six out of ten benchmarks, with the biggest gains in agentic tasks. But the cost per task has nearly tripled. The article Meta's new frontier...
Dell’s AI partner ecosystem adapts to Silicon Valley’s build-it-yourself buyers
Silicon Valley’s AI partner ecosystem is changing as enterprises push artificial intelligence projects out of pilots and into production. In the region where much of the AI stack is invented,...
Sakana AI's self-improving model gets better at solving and judging, but can't catch its own blind spots
Sakana AI's MASS method lets one language model improve itself by solving tasks, judging results, and refining workflows, reaching a win rate of nearly 70 percent against the base model after two...
Meta releases its first frontier model, Muse Wonder
Where Muse Spark aimed to be a lightweight model that could perform at low latency, the Wonder models are larger and said to be more capable, with higher benchmark scores and better results on...
WindBorne wins a hefty US Air Force contract for its balloon data
A Silicon Valley startup that uses weather balloons and AI to predict the weather won a U.S. military contract worth almost $50 million.
Muse Wonder Puts Meta Back at the AI Frontier
Meta’s biggest model rivals the world’s best—and includes new features to keep agents from going off the rails.
Clearing chat history helps AI agents find better solutions
Microsoft researchers found that autonomous AI agents get trapped in what they call "idea basins" because of their growing chat context, local solution regions they can't escape. Their...
Phasis develops platform for agentic orientation using World APIs and reality layers
When the founders at Phasis Inc. sought to develop a platform for orienting AI agents, they turned to graphs as a way to obtain a measurement of culture. The company wanted to better understand...
Honeyjar offers AI tools to improve PR and comms at every company
Journalists, entrepreneurs, and even some public relations professionals will tell you that the PR process is broken. But could AI actually make things better?
Microsoft president says UK is best placed to drive AI regulation
Microsoft president Brad Smith calls for urgent AI regulation, saying milk and washing machines have more oversight than AI companies.
This AI startup says it can generate permit-ready blueprints in minutes
Blueprints AI, a bootstrapped startup based in Santa Monica, developed software that produces code-compliant construction blueprints from a photo, PDF, or sketch.
Microsoft plans to scale its own Maia AI chips to gigawatt levels by 2027
Microsoft will make its in-house Azure Maia chips the main AI inference system across its products starting in 2027, deploying them at multi-gigawatt scale. The upcoming Maia 300 should deliver 40...
White House reverses course and restores UK AI Safety Institute's access to frontier models
The White House has reversed course and restored the UK's AI Security Institute's early access to AI models from Anthropic, Google DeepMind, and OpenAI. In September, the Trump administration had...
Mistlabs takes its Ambi AI system out of beta on Apple devices with $26M in funding
Ambient intelligence startup Mistlabs Ltd. today brought its Ambi artificial intelligence system out of beta test on Apple Inc. devices, backed by $26 million in new funding. Ambi is designed to act...
Anthropic's Andrej Karpathy says "the external world has seen the preview" of what AI can actually do
Andrej Karpathy, co-founder of OpenAI and now at Anthropic, sees a widening knowledge gap in AI. About 75 percent of the world's population has barely touched LLMs. Roughly 5,000 people, meanwhile,...
Former Plaud exec raises $26M for AI app that listens to you in the background
One of the core promises of AI is that the more it knows about a person, the better it will be able to assist them with tasks and make appropriate suggestions, which, if you'll believe the tech...
E-commerce AI startup Loops raises $3.5M to create smoother online shopping experiences
Agentic e-commerce startup Loops Smart AI wants to help online retailers create more seamless buying journeys and streamline the shopping experience after raising $3.5 million in seed funding today....
The ecologist revealing the invisible networks that revive rainforests
In a research station in central Panama, you can walk through a century of forest time, watching scrubby plots of adolescent trees give way to cathedral-like canopies of mature growth. Forest...
BotMan AI uses knowledge graphs for legacy modernization
Legacy modernization requires understanding how an application’s code, data and business rules fit together before rebuilding it. BotMan AI uses an AI-powered migration pipeline that maps an...
Nvidia reportedly in early talks to buy, acquihire or invest more in Reflection AI
Nvidia Corp. is in early talks to acquire open-weight model developer Reflection AI Inc. or invest more in the startup, according to the Financial Times. People familiar with the matter told the...
Why AI agents might not be right for you
There’s no question that 2026 is the year of the artificial intelligence agent. AI agents are remarkably ubiquitous, as people use them to write code, communicate with customers, identify and resolve...
Can the AI industry persuade data center opponents by getting rid of NDAs?
On Equity, we debate the impact of data center moratoriums and whether the AI industry has a communication problem.
Flahy uses knowledge graphs to support AI-powered healthcare
AI is helping companies interpret biological data for drug discovery and more personalized care. Healthcare technology company Flahy Inc. is applying that approach to clinical decision support,...
Agentic workloads break assumptions about software testing. Here’s how to cope
Most traditional enterprise systems were built around three assumptions: Jobs finish quickly, retrying one is free and the same input always produces the same output. Agentic workloads break all...
I Made Terrible Games With Google’s AI Playground
A long day’s haul in the video game slop mines.
What to expect during the AI Data Pipeline Forum: Join theCUBE Oct. 13
The artificial intelligence infrastructure race is no longer just about building faster chips. AI infrastructure bottlenecks are shifting attention to a bigger challenge: keeping those chips supplied...
Microsoft’s Satya Nadella says AI models need an ‘emergency brake’
In a Saturday morning post, Microsoft's CEO wrote that it’s time “to step back and assess the trust architecture” of AI.
AI reshapes professional services around trust and business outcomes
Professional services firms are rethinking how they deliver client value as artificial intelligence takes on more routine work, shifting attention toward human judgment, trusted outcomes and new...
Apple discloses deal to hire team and license tech from personalized podcast startup Huxe
Is Apple hoping to get into the AI-generated podcast business?
The AI control gap: Who gets to say ‘It’s safe’?
We see a control gap between what artificial intelligence can do and what the evidence supports trusting it to do. A great demo doesn’t prove that a system will stay within the limits of an intended...
3 days to TechCrunch Disrupt 2026: Meet the startups before they hit mainstream
TechCrunch Disrupt 2026 takes place October 13-15 in San Francisco. Over 300 startups will show what they’ve built to 10,000 tech leaders. Plus, 250+ speakers are ready to share insights across 200+...
Hot Right Now
Spranic builds spatial memory for physical AI
Character.ai will shut down if no buyer emerges, capping a fall from $2.7 billion Google deal to bankruptcy
On theCUBE Pod: AI doubters get loud, and IBM seeks competitive advantage
Western mathematicians fear AI makes them dumber while China builds an entire alliance for it
SpaceXSI bundles X Premium, Grok, and Cursor into one subscription