AI News
Recent AI news and official updates
Follow recent AI announcements and reporting with concise PopAIExplorer summaries and direct original-source links.
Meta’s new AI chips will begin production in September
TechCrunch AI published: The company is taking a modular approach to designing these chips, anticipating that their needs will change as AI evolves rapidly by the time the chips are in production.
Tiny robot boats build floating structures
MIT News AI published: MIT researchers developed FloatForm, a swarm of small aquatic robots that snap together like ants forming a raft, assembling into reconfigurable structures on the water.
Anthropic’s new Claude feature is quietly selling you on AI
TechCrunch AI published: Claude’s new Reflect dashboard doesn’t just visualize how you use AI. It also subtly reinforces how much of your daily work now depends on Anthropic’s chatbot.
Anthropic, OpenAI, and SpaceX are bigger than the last 25 years of tech exits
TechCrunch AI published: Three big AI IPOs are set to generate more value than all the U.S. VC-backed exits since 2000.
Popular open source AI developer tool Ollama raises $65M, grows to nearly 9M users
TechCrunch AI published: Benchmark-backed Ollama has amassed 176,000 stars, and nearly 17,000 forks on GitHub by helping developers easily run AI on their PCs.
Character.AI enters the microdrama arena with its own productions, but there’s a twist
TechCrunch AI published: In an interesting twist that takes advantage of the company's core product, users can chat with these shows' characters, ask them questions, and even roleplay different storylines.
Nandan Nilekani leaves GP role at Fundamentum as it launches $200M third fund
TechCrunch AI published: Nilekani remains Fundamentum's anchor investor as the firm expands its leadership team and targets AI and fintech startups in India.
Google’s deepfake detector system used to debunk McConnell hoax pic
TechCrunch AI published: Earlier this week, a picture seemed to show Kentucky Senator Mitch McConnell covered in tubes in a hospital bed in a state of extreme distress. It turned out to be an AI-generated fake.
SpaceXAI releases Grok 4.5, which Elon describes as an ‘Opus-class model’
TechCrunch AI published: Elon Musk's tech company released the newest version of Grok on Wednesday, promising a cheaper, more efficient alternative to other powerful AI models.
This startup thinks robotics is about to have its ChatGPT moment
TechCrunch AI published: General Intuition is betting millions of hours of video game data can train the foundation models for physical AI, making it easier to build smarter robots with minimal real-world data.
Google Photos adds a new AI ‘Video Remix’ tool
TechCrunch AI published: The feature can do things like apply cinematic relighting to brighten up a dark clip, swap out a plain background for something fun, or add artistic styles to videos.
Why this CEO thinks video games make better training data than the internet
TechCrunch AI published: When it comes to achieving artificial general intelligence (AGI), large language models just don’t have what it takes. Models like ChatGPT and Claude are great at text, but they’re less skilled at understanding how things actually move through space and time — an essential skill for producing intelligence that generalizes. That gap, it turns out, might be filled by gaming data. That’s the bet behind General Intuition, a […]
Meta wants its AI glasses to seem less creepy. Its AI strategy says otherwise.
TechCrunch AI published: Meta is adding a new safeguard to stop people from secretly recording others with its AI glasses. But the update comes as the company continues to expand how much personal data its AI products collect and use.
OpenAI releases new voice models for more natural live conversations
TechCrunch AI published: OpenAI says its new voice mode can speak and listen at the same time, a key ability for live translation.
EmTech AI 2026: The Rise of the AI Platform
MIT Technology Review published: EmTech AI 2026: The Rise of the AI Platform
Prime Intellect raises $130M Series A to help enterprises build their own AI agents
TechCrunch AI published: Founded in 2024, Prime Intellect’s goal is to give organizations capabilities to train their own agentic systems without relying on frontier AI labs.
These AI startups are growing revenue at faster and faster rates
TechCrunch AI published: There are a lot of fast-growing AI startups, but some are growing even faster, they say.
Your gaming data could be the secret to AGI, according to this Bezos-backed startup
TechCrunch AI published: When it comes to achieving artificial general intelligence (AGI), large language models just don’t have what it takes. Models like ChatGPT and Claude are great at text, but they’re less skilled at understanding how things actually move through space and time — an essential skill for producing intelligence that generalizes. That gap, it turns out, might be filled by gaming data. That’s the bet behind General Intuition, a […]
Former OpenAI exec Kevin Weil is now on the board of Stoke Space
TechCrunch AI published: Kevin Weil's new role at Stoke Space suggests reusable rockets are the next hot thing in Silicon Valley.
Hot French startup ZML releases free product to speed inference across lots of AI chips
TechCrunch AI published: ZML, a hot French AI startup endorsed by Turing Award winner Yann LeCun, has now released ZML/LLMD, software that could make running AI less costly.