As AI begins to interact with the physical world, new types of labs are working to build world models that could be used to operate physical robotics or model objects in physical space. Unlike large language models, there isn’t an easy source of data for those models, which has left many labs scrambling to assemble the necessary training sets.
Now, one startup is emerging with an unlikely data…
WhatsApp adds an incognito mode in Meta AI chats
May 14, 2026
Meta on Wednesday said it is adding the ability to start “incognito” conversations with its Meta AI chatbot within WhatsApp. These conversations, the company said, will be processed in a secure environment and can’t be seen by anyone.
Users can start an incognito…
Smartphones can be distracting with their dizzying array of apps and constant stream of notifications. A new app called Poppy aims to organize the chaos by combining your calendar, email, messages, and other sources into a single dashboard.
The idea, per the company’s…
Anthropic announced Tuesday that it is launching a host of new chatbot features designed to provide automated assistance to law firms. The new features expand Claude for Legal – the law-focused plug-in that launched earlier this year – offering users a new set of legal plug-ins and MCP connectors designed for specific areas of law.
The new tools come amid hot competition in the legal AI space.
New types of design tools, such as Perplexity-owned Visual Electric, Figma-owned Weavy, Flora, and Krea, have risen in popularity in the last few years, thanks to AI. These tools bank on the promise that, with AI, a product team with designers can iterate through variations…
Amazon Ring, facing a surge in customer-support calls during last year’s holiday season, evaluated more than 40 AI voice vendors before choosing startup Vapi to handle its inbound phone traffic. Today, Ring routes 100% of its inbound calls through Vapi’s platform.
That…
General Motors has laid off more than 10% of its IT department, or about 600 salaried employees – in a deliberate skills swap: clearing out workers whose expertise no longer fits and making room for some with AI-focused backgrounds. GM confirmed to TechCrunch that it had conducted layoffs; they were first reported by Bloomberg News.
In an emailed statement, the automaker framed the layoffs as a…
Digg is back from the dead. Again.
Just months after launching, the reboot of Kevin Rose’s once-popular link-sharing site shut down in March as the company shifted course. Originally redesigned as a competitor to the massive community forum site Reddit, the new Digg found…
There aren’t enough rockets for space data centers - Cowboy Space raised $275M to build them
May 12, 2026
The apparently insatiable demand for AI compute has data center entrepreneurs looking to the stars. There’s a key problem: There aren’t enough rockets to put data centers in orbit around Earth, and they’re too expensive.
Most of the players are hoping that SpaceX’s…
Artificial intelligence is changing the world, and simultaneously inventing a whole new language to describe how it’s doing it. Spend five minutes reading about AI and you’ll run into LLMs, RAG, RLHF, and a dozen other terms that can make even very smart people in the tech world feel insecure. This glossary is our attempt to fix that. We update it regularly as the field evolves, so consider it…
