Robots still aren’t that good at picking things up, despite billions of dollars of investment and endless videos fed into deep learning models.
That may be about to change, thanks to a manipulation architecture built by Eka Robotics, which encompasses a force-sensitive gripper and a new kind of deep-learning model. Founded by MIT professor Pulkit Agrawal and former Google DeepMind…
Meeting notetaking tool Otter.ai announced on Tuesday that it has raised $320 million from General Catalyst’s Customer Value Fund (CVF), which provides capital to startups without diluting equity and gets returns on the results of marketing spend.
Otter.ai said that it…
Over the last few weeks, personal assistants like Instinct, Fo, and Muse have enabled users to call businesses for customer support and appointment booking. Following this trend, Yelp is adding the ability for its app users to get a voice agent to call a restaurant to check…
People are using AI to make their smart TVs dumb again
October 20, 2026
The latest use case for AI? Dumbing down your smart TV to get rid of the bloat. A number of developers and vibe coders have recently been sharing solutions for “vibe-coding” your TV to get rid of sponsored ads, speed up the app launcher, redesign the home screen, disable tracking features, and more.
One such solution, called “dumbtv,” describes its mission on its GitHub…
Nvidia on Thursday launched new open-weight models designed for always-on agents and edge computing.
The Nemotron 3.5 Super VL is a large, 120-billion-parameter model geared for agents used by the enterprise. While it uses fewer parameters than the Nemotron 3 Ultra model…
Laplace Intelligence red-teams robots and self-driving cars before they hit the real world
October 20, 2026
If there’s one lesson the OpenAI-Hugging Face incident taught us, it’s that AI agents can be unpredictable.
“Imagine if something like that happened in the physical world,” Howie Sun, CEO and co-founder of Laplace Intelligence, told TechCrunch.
Replit is no longer working with Anthropic, CEO says
October 18, 2026
Replit, the AI coding platform that has become a favorite of startup founders and developers, is no longer working with Anthropic, the company’s CEO and co-founder Amjad Masad said Thursday while onstage at TechCrunch Disrupt.
Masad said the decision was made for a number of different reasons, including cost. Replit announced a partnership with OpenAI in August, but there was never any…
Elorian, the Palo Alto AI startup that raised a $55 million seed round at a $300 million valuation before it launched a product, released its first model on Friday, TechCrunch has exclusively learned.
The model, Glimpse, is launching as a research preview with API access and…
Replit makes OpenAI its default over Anthropic, CEO says
October 18, 2026
Replit, the AI coding platform that has become a favorite of startup founders and developers, is no longer working with Anthropic, the company’s CEO and co-founder Amjad Masad said Thursday while onstage at TechCrunch Disrupt.
Masad said the decision was made for a…
Mark Wahlberg on using AI in film ‘the right way’ and being open to an AI clone carrying on his legacy
October 17, 2026
Even as Hollywood remains divided over the use of AI in filmmaking, actor and director Mark Wahlberg believes the technology has a place in the industry as long as it’s used the right way.
Wahlberg, who’s also an entrepreneur and angel investor, took the stage at TechCrunch Disrupt to share his perspective on AI’s role in filmmaking, and how he’s open to having an AI…
