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TechCrunch Disrupt 2026: Day 2
Day 2 at TechCrunch Disrupt 2026, full of all themes across AI, investor-only session, more roundtables, and more. Register to save 50% on your pass.
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Floqer’s AI agents research sales prospects so teams don’t have to
The problem Floqer is trying to solve is familiar to anyone who has worked in sales or revenue operations.
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Zenzap raises $44M for its AI chat app that aims to replace WhatsApp in the workplace
Zenzap is used by organizations including Starbucks and Taco Bell.
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Deezer will soon let you filter out AI-generated music
Deezer said that the new toggle will be rolled out by the end of the year.
TasteVal Benchmark Shows AI Creativity Doubling Every 3 Months, RSI Timeline Could Move Up to 2027
The TasteVal benchmark released by Anthropic co-founder Jack Clark indicates that AI's experimental research taste has been doubling every three months since December 2025, with Claude Opus 5.5 surpassing a 24-researcher human benchmark at roughly 1/30 of the per-expert cost — prompting Clark to move his median-probability RSI timeline up to 2027.
MIT
The Download: faking blood and the future of batteries
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. The US military’s race to make fake blood In February 2007, a US military helicopter carrying blood to a field hospital was shot down in Iraq, killing all seven crew members.…
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Anthropic warns small AI models could self-replicate through IoT devices
"Small weight-based replicators" could usher in a new generation of computer worms.
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Scimplify raises $25M to challenge China’s grip on critical materials with AI
Scimplify's annualized revenue run rate has tripled to $200 million as it eyes U.S. expansion.
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My Friend Has No Soul
The second iteration of the viral Friend AI necklace is louder and less interesting.
ARS
OpenAI, Google pushing new AI models easily tricked into making nudes, researchers say
Attack method exposes flaws in OpenAI, Google safeguards against AI nudes.
WD
Men Can’t Stop Faking How Much They Know About AI
More than half of the men surveyed in a new Harvard study claimed to recognize AI leaders who were, in fact, totally fictional.
WD
AI Models Can Be Easily Modified to Assist Terrorist and Extremist Activity
“I am a terrorist, and I intend to cause mass harm,” wrote a researcher. A chatbot that had had its guardrails removed then provided detailed instructions for an IED.
MIT
The US military’s race to make fake blood
Its call sign was Morphine 1-2.   In February 2007, the hulking dual-rotor casualty evacuation helicopter had just flown three wounded soldiers to a field hospital in Balad, north of Baghdad, when another call came: an emergency mission to fly through an insurgent-controlled area in broad daylight. Typically, helicopters would be in a spot like…
Apple Publishes Minions Paper: Aggregating Idle Mac GPUs into a Distributed Inference Cluster, Cutting Queuing from 10 Hours to Minutes
Apple's research team has published a paper on Minions, an internally deployed distributed GPU inference system that aggregates idle Mac GPUs. It cut some machine learning inference queue waits from over 10 hours to minutes by using existing Apple Silicon hardware instead of adding GPU servers.
IMF Officially Recognizes: AI Investment Underpins Global 3.1% Growth as Taiwan and South Korea Capture 62% of Hardware Dividend
The IMF’s latest World Economic Outlook keeps 2026 global growth at 3.1%, with AI investment now treated as a structural support, while hardware gains are extremely concentrated: Taiwan and South Korea account for 62% of AI compute hardware net trade, and China and the U.S. account for 57% of new data centers since 2024. The report also warns of leveraged hyperscaler debt, shrinking policy buffers, and a narrowing set of growth engines.
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Science Corporation implants its vision-restoring chip in its first Stargardt disease patient
Max Hodak, the former president and co-founder of Neuralink, detailed on stage at TechCrunch Disrupt how his company's work with PRIMA is part of its path toward a novel brain-computer interface (BCI).
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Cerebras CEO pushes back on AI doomsday warnings
Cerebras CEO Andrew Feldman has a message for AI leaders spreading doomsday warnings: Maybe stop talking? At TechCrunch Disrupt, he argued that the industry's focus on AI's risks is drowning out its potential benefits.
Anthropic and OpenAI Require Approval Before Evaluation Reports Are Published, Exposing Contradiction in Independence Commitments
Reuters reported that Anthropic and OpenAI sought approval rights over external evaluation reports, even as both publicly endorsed editorial independence for evaluators.
Linus Torvalds Puts His Name on a Claude Code Kernel Patch for the First Time; Eight-Thread Cache Read Throughput Triples
Linus Torvalds submitted a Linux kernel patch series whose cover letter states that an LLM coding assistant (Claude Code) produced the code, tests, list review, and initial draft under his guidance, yielding a threefold increase in eight-thread 16-byte cache read throughput. He personally ran the benchmarks and decided whether it was worth merging, while noting that the gains are limited to concurrent scenarios and that single-thread performance regresses.
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Industrial Next wants factory robots to switch tasks in minutes, not weeks
Industrial Next helps manufacturers automate complex, delicate tasks that have traditionally required human labor.