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…
Anthropic is building the same kind of cross-product ecosystem that helped make tech companies like Amazon and Uber enormously sticky, and its S-1 suggests the strategy is working. More than half of customers spending at least $100,000 annually now use both the Claude…
SpaceX locks in $40B GPU financing deal with Apollo
October 27, 2026
SpaceX has reached a binding commitment for roughly $40 billion in financing for AI chips and related data center equipment, the company disclosed in a regulatory filing Monday. In a statement, SpaceX called the deal the “largest committed GPU financing”.
Under…
Will AI expose the rickety infrastructure of the internet?
October 27, 2026
A startling announcement went out earlier this week: Due to recently discovered vulnerabilities in the open source programming language PHP, website owners had to immediately patch their sites – or if they couldn’t update right away, they should take the sites down to be safe.
On this week’s episode of TechCrunch’s Equity podcast, Kirsten Korosec, Sean O’Kane, and I…
