The creator economy’s ad revenue problem and India’s AI ambitions

8:21 AM IST · February 21, 2026

Loading the player… The creator economy is evolving fast, and ad revenue alone isn’t cutting it anymore.YouTubers are launching product lines, acquiring startups, and building actual business empires. In fact, MrBeast’s companybought fintech startup Step, and his chocolate business is outearning his media arm. This isn’t just one creator’s strategy. For many, it’s the new playbook. On this episode of TechCrunch’sEquitypodcast, hosts Kirsten Korosec, Anthony Ha, and Rebecca Bellan unpack how creators are diversifying beyond ads, whether their model can scale beyond the top 1%, everything happing atIndia’s AI Impact Summit, and more of the week’s headlines.

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Adaption aims big with AutoScientist, an AI tool that helps models train themselves

For years, AI researchers have anticipated the moment when AI systems will be able to improve themselves better than humans could. With investors pouring money into a new generation of research-driven AI labs, there are more resources than ever available to pursue the goal. Now, one of those neolabs has taken a major step towards making it real. On Wednesday,Adaptionintroduced a new product calledAutoScientistthat helps models learn specific capabilities quickly by using an automated approach to conventional fine-tuning. The techniques are applicable to a wide range of fields, but the Adaptation team is particularly focused on the potential for speeding up and easing the process of training and fine-tuning a frontier-level AI model. According to co-founder and CEO Sara Hooker, who previously worked as VP of AI research at Cohere, AutoScientist represents a new way to approach the AI training process. “What’s super exciting about it is that it co-optimizes both the data and the model, and learns the best way to basically learn any capability,” Hooker told TechCrunch. “It suggests we can finally allow for successful frontier AI trainings outside of these labs” AutoScientist builds on the company’s existing data offering,Adaptive Data, which aims to make it easier to build high-quality datasets over time. AutoScientist, meanwhile, is designed to turn those continuously improving datasets into continuously improving AI models. “Our view at Adaption is that the whole stack should be completely adaptable, and should basically optimize on the fly to whatever task you have,” Hooker says. Of course, that approach will only be as good as the results. In its launch materials, Adaption boasts that AutoScientist has more than doubled win-rates across different models — impressive numbers, but difficult to put into context. Since the system is built to adapt models to specific tasks, conventional benchmarks like SWE-Bench or ARC-AGI aren’t applicable. Still, Adaption is confident that users will see the difference once they try AutoScientist out — so confident that the lab is making the tool free to use for the first 30 days after its release. “The same way that code generation unlocked a lot of tasks, this is going to unlock a lot of innovation at the frontier of different fields,” Hooker says.

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Zoho Commits ₹70 Crore to ONDC to Empower MSMEs with Accessible Sovereign Tech

With this investment, Zoho seeks to support MSMEs in their digital transformation and contribute to India's economic growth.

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Proximal Cloud, NxtGen Partner to Enable Sovereign AI Deployments in India

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AIM Launches ‘Best Firm for GCC Talent’ Certification

The new certification programme focuses on culture, learning, and retention across India’s various Global Capability Centres.

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