A recent change sees YouTube further cracking down on AI slop by clarifying its policies around how content on its platform can be monetized. To discourage creators from using AI and other tools to make low-quality content, YouTube’s policy now explains that there are three types of videos under the broader category of “inauthentic content” that cannot be monetized.
YouTube…
Months after analysts warned that AI-driven demand for memory chips would ripple through consumer electronics, India is providing the strongest evidence yet that the disruption has arrived, with rising handset prices reshaping the smartphone market.
The memory chips in…
Patreon, the membership platform for creators, is cracking down on AI scraping its content for training purposes. On Thursday, the company shared that it’s working with internet infrastructure provider Cloudflare to directly block access to AI bots designed to train…
General Compute, an AI inference cloud startup, has landed a $400 million loan from Upper90, a tech investment firm. It might be the first deal to put up inference-specific chips as collateral – chips built to run already trained AI models quickly and efficiently, rather than the more expensive chips used to build the models in the first place.
The financing is the latest signal that markets…
How a former DeepMind researcher raised at a $300M pre-seed valuation before launching a product
July 17, 2026
Andrew Dai left Google DeepMind knowing visual AI was the frontier he wanted to stake his claim in. He pulled off a whirlwind fundraise that resulted in a more aggressive valuation-to-capital ratio than Thinking Machines, which raised one of the largest rounds in U.S.
While the rest of the AI industry races to label its work as “AGI” or “superintelligence,” Alexandre LeBrun, the CEO of Yann LeCun’s world model startup, AMI Labs, avoids the terms altogether. Lebrun said in an interview with TechCrunch that the…
Applied Computing, a London-based startup that’s building a foundation AI model for the oil, gas, and petrochemical industry, has raised a $20 million Series A led by engineering giant KBR, with Databricks Ventures participating.
Founded in 2023, the startup targets oil, gas, refining, and petrochemical systems, where a single facility can have thousands of sensors measuring everything from…
Voice AI startups’ biggest unlock has been handling calls for enterprises in areas like sales, marketing, and customer support. Large organizations are offloading calls to voice model developers like ElevenLabs and Deepgram; infrastructure companies like Vapi, Retell…
Vint Cerf says his favorite place is where he’s never been before.
One of the architects of the protocols behind the open internet, Cerf left Google after 20 years last week, but he’s not done thinking about the digital future. Starting today, he’s advising…
Indian AI coding startup Emergent has raised $130 million in a Series C funding round at a $1.5 billion post-money valuation, a five-fold jump in six months.
The funding round was led by private equity firm Creaegis. New investors MNI Ventures-Claypond, Sentinel Global, and existing backers Khosla Ventures, SoftBank’s Vision Fund 2, Lightspeed, and Y Combinator also participated. The deal…
