On 2026-10-15, the YZ Index Smoke quick test covered 13 models, with Gemini 2.5 Pro ranking first for the day at 95.91. The Smoke test is a daily 10-question quick check suited to short-term signals and is not equivalent to Full weekly ranking conclusions.
Get a 50% discount on the last two days of TechCrunch Disrupt 2026, October 14-15, in San Francisco. Register now and join the rest of the startup ecosystem. Today, it's all about physical and software AI.
OpenAI engineer faces 5 years and $250K fine as FBI lobs foreign spy charges.
AI design tools make proteins that break bonds that are stable for hundreds of years.
Most companies use AI agents to ship products faster or speed up workflows. Apate.ai sends them undercover to get scammed.
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.
The problem Floqer is trying to solve is familiar to anyone who has worked in sales or revenue operations.
Zenzap is used by organizations including Starbucks and Taco Bell.
Deezer said that the new toggle will be rolled out by the end of the year.
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.
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.…
"Small weight-based replicators" could usher in a new generation of computer worms.
Scimplify's annualized revenue run rate has tripled to $200 million as it eyes U.S. expansion.
The second iteration of the viral Friend AI necklace is louder and less interesting.
Attack method exposes flaws in OpenAI, Google safeguards against AI nudes.
More than half of the men surveyed in a new Harvard study claimed to recognize AI leaders who were, in fact, totally fictional.
“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.
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'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.
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.
