Founded by two sisters, Hot Girl Hotline uses AI to give young women personalized dating and relationship advice, with an emphasis on safety and avoiding emotional dependency.
TikTok describes its new Shopping Assistant as a conversational AI agent designed to help users discover and purchase products.
Instinct is launching group chats that let friends use its AI agent together for tasks like planning trips, organizing carpools, and coordinating events. The company says personal accounts remain separate, with permission required before personal agents share information or take action.
The tool can free up over 12GB of storage.
Reflection is aiming Beam and future models at enterprises and sovereign nations. The pitch is to build “AI factories,” a product that would let institutions build their own customized, local AI system by training Reflection’s AI models on their own proprietary data.
The 2026-10-06 YZ Index Smoke quick test covered 15 models, with GPT-6 Luna and GPT-6 Sol tying for first place at 80.99. As a daily 10-question test, Smoke is suited to short-term signals and does not represent Full weekly leaderboard conclusions.
In 2026, the question for enterprise AI is no longer whether predictive models can outperform statistical forecasts—that argument is settled. The big question now is how to enable predictive systems to act on their own conclusions without drifting from business intent. The frontier has moved from prediction to autonomous decision making, and the gap between…
HackerRank’s AI interviewer has already conducted more than 500,000 interviews, with Snowflake, Snorkel, and Capgemini among its early testers.
Meet the final five Startup Battlefield judges who'll decide who wins the pitch competition at TechCrunch Disrupt 2026. Get your pass now to save up to $100, and get a second at 50% off.
Independent researchers discovered an agent swarm that seems to be running on Tencent's infrastructure and targeting Alibaba's map service, Amap.
Learn how founders are choosing between building on open or closed AI at TechCrunch Disrupt 2026. Register now to save up to $100 and get a second pass at 50% off.
OpenAI said the new visual ads will show up after your image generation results appear in the U.S. only for now.
For all the data that AI systems continually amass and analyze, enterprise AI agents often suffer from a curious shortcoming: a lack of knowledge. More than data, knowledge is the understanding of what the data means in the context of individual organizations. AI agents need this understanding to reason about situations, make decisions, and ultimately…
Norway wants time to write permanent rules for glasses that can record bystanders.
The full TechCrunch Disrupt Stage lineup revealed, featuring Max Hodak, Mark Wahlberg, Benchmark partners, and more. Register now to save up to $100 on your pass and get a second at 50% off.
Safeworld is building digital humans to make sure robots don't hurt the real ones.
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. People really hate AI, so why can’t they get enough? —Will Douglas Heaven Over the summer I talked to the CEO of Springboards, a startup building an LLM designed to come…
In Politico's Decoded launch interview, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said society should accept some bad things for AI's benefits and people's agency, while publicly separating his regulatory philosophy from Amodei's. The remarks come amid a wave of real incidents involving OpenAI AI agents.
Anthropic's IPO prospectus dedicates 80 of 261 pages to risk disclosure, warning that models may resist shutdown, conceal or manipulate information, and engage in extortion-like behavior. The company is seeking a $2 trillion valuation.
Over the summer I talked to the CEO of Springboards, a startup building an LLM that’s designed to come up with a wider variety of responses than its mainstream rivals do. At the start of the call, he said something that’s been stuck in my head since: “We often say that we’re a self-loathing AI…
