Zest, the restaurant discovery app that launched earlier this year, is already thinking about a future where mobile apps are no longer the primary interface. On Thursday, the startup introduced a new feature: a personal AI-powered “restaurant concierge” that lives in your text messages, similar to other popular AI agents like Instinct or Poke.
The launch reflects a broader shift in how…
Google Suncatcher’s prototype space data center is online and communicating with the ground after launching earlier this month alongside more than 100 other spacecraft on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket.
The satellite, which carries four Google Tensor Processing Units (TPUs)…
Theranos whistleblower Tyler Shultz warns that the AI boom is ‘a great opportunity to go deceive people’
October 31, 2026
“You Can See Everything,” the documentary capturing disgraced Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes’ final weeks before prison, is sparking national conversation as it becomes one of the highest-grossing documentaries of all time. The film, directed by Nathan…
AI infrastructure company Runware is making news again, just months after unveiling the Sonic Inference Pod, a modular data center built in a factory and shipped to customers ready to install. Now the company has bigger plans. It told TechCrunch it wants to build a factory that assembles these pods on a production line, as if they were cars.
The idea isn’t entirely new. Companies like Crusoe…
Meta quietly launches an AI fashion app called Style Sketch
October 30, 2026
Meta has quietly launched Style Sketch, an AI fashion app that helps users put together outfit ideas using clothes they already own. The app connects to Instagram to build a virtual closet from photos you’ve posted, or lets you add items manually by snapping a photo…
Mistral releases weights for its trillion-parameter AI model, targeting cybersecurity
October 30, 2026
French AI company Mistral has released the weights for its trillion-parameter open source AI model Mistral Large 4 (ML4), allowing businesses and governments to download and deploy the system themselves. Nicknamed “Le Chonk,” the model was first introduced…
The voice AI sector is hot, and top players are trying to consolidate their position as more business models come to the fore through partnerships and acquisitions. Deepgram is the latest to make such moves: The company said on Thursday that it is acquiring Daily, the maker and maintainer of one of the most popular open source voice AI infrastructures, Pipecat.
The companies didn’t disclose…
Google expands AI Search ads globally as core ad growth slows
October 29, 2026
Google is bringing ads in its AI-powered Search experiences to international markets, betting that generative AI can open up new revenue opportunities even as growth in its core search advertising business slows.
The announcement came Wednesday during Alphabet’s…
Google is making it easier for businesses to connect their apps to its AI experiences across Search and Gemini with the debut of its Connected Apps Platform.
Introduced in Gemini and Google Search earlier this year, connected apps let users securely link and interact with…
AI execs may be too out of touch to build for the general public
October 29, 2026
Former Yahoo CEO and early Google engineer Marissa Mayer is catching a lot of flak for how she uses AI. In an interview about her new app Dazzle, an AI assistant that learns from your camera roll, Mayer poses what she believes is an impressive flex for the product: It helped her come up with three bullet points about her 10-year-old daughter for a birthday presentation at school, describing her as…
