Nvidia published some interesting new research on Friday suggesting it’s the harness, more than the underlying model, that is far more important when asking an AI to do long-horizon tasks. A harness is the software wrapper around an AI model – the tools, memory management, and rules that turn a raw model into something that can act on its own.
The TL;DR: Simply by using a custom…
Starcloud, a startup developing satellites that can perform AI inference in orbit, told TechCrunch that it has added a $250 million extension to its March $170 million Series A funding round. The extension values the company at $2.3 billion.
The additional capital will allow…
A third of web pages published since ChatGPT’s launch show signs of AI authorship, study finds
August 21, 2026
Over one-third of web pages published after the release of ChatGPT show signs of being written by AI, according to a new study from Pew Research released on Thursday. The report corroborates other studies that detail how much of the web’s newer web pages are now either…
Inertia Enterprises finds a way to make its fusion fuel fast
August 21, 2026
Fusion startup Inertia Enterprises said it has found a way to cut the time it takes to make its fuel pellets from several days to just minutes.
By slashing fuel filling time, Inertia says it has knocked down one of the 10 barriers it must overcome to deliver the first phase of its commercial power plant ambitions. The startup gave TechCrunch an exclusive first look at the process.
The advance was…
Binance, the world’s largest crypto exchange with more than 300 million registered users, on Thursday launched a platform that lets AI agents analyze markets and execute trades on users’ behalf, bringing autonomous AI directly into the business of managing real…
Nuclear power startups have been pitching themselves as the antidote to what ails AI data centers: power that’s always available. Bill Gates-founded TerraPower is one of the latest to throw its hat into that ring, with Bloomberg reporting that the startup plans to…
A biotech startup called Vivodyne says the AI drug-discovery industry has a data problem, and that it has built a machine to fix it.
HIVE, modular robotic labs built by the company, can grow 20 kinds of human tissue, then autonomously dose and monitor them, generating the kind of causal biological data that today’s AI models are missing – data that today mostly comes from animal…
Relativity Networks raises $22 million to bring a faster kind of fiber to data centers
August 20, 2026
Data center developers are expected to spend as much as $4 trillion by the end of the decade – and they’re already heavily constrained by both political and power-grid considerations in where they can build. But while most treat the speed of fiber as a given, one…
Companies are still grappling with exactly how software development should work in the AI area, but one early answer is the so-called software factory. Essentially an agent loop that’s built around the traditional stages of software development, the software factory…
After numerous lawsuits over AI chatbots’ lack of safety measures, leading to teens’ suicides and other mental health concerns, OpenAI on Monday announced the launch of ChatGPT for Teens. The new product promises to include additional safety measures, as well as address the educational crisis of ChatGPT-assisted cheating in schools.
On the educational side, ChatGPT for Teens introduces…
