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…
Browser maker Opera has introduced a new web standard that lets users run AI models directly in its browser, without relying on the cloud.
The new standard, WebAI, is designed to work with a variety of AI models. Opera name drops Google’s Gemma – an open-weight…
General Compute raises $100 million Series A, countering the neocloud disaster narrative
October 28, 2026
CoreWeave, a publicly traded neocloud that rents out computing power for AI, has seen its stock price fall to a 12-month low, and Elon Musk is flexing $40 billion in debt for buying computing capacity and predicting that “200+ neoclouds are going to see guppy-level…
As the AI boom strains computing capacity, Nvidia has backed Indian startup Simplismart in a $14 million funding round, betting on software that helps companies run AI models more efficiently and, in some cases, with fewer GPUs.
Nvidia participated in the all-primary Series B round alongside Accel, Shastra VC, and Micromax, with Dallas Venture Capital leading the investment. The deal values the…
