Latest AI News
Sam Altman would like remind you that humans use a lot of energy, too
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman addressed concerns about AI’s environmental impact this week whilespeaking at an event hosted by The Indian Express. For one thing, Altman — who wasin India for a major AI summit— said concerns about AI’s water usage are “totally fake,” though he acknowledged it was a real issue when “we used to do evaporative cooling in data centers.” “Now that we don’t do that, you see these things on the internet where, ‘Don’t use ChatGPT, it’s 17 gallons of water for each query’ or whatever,” Altman said. “This is completely untrue, totally insane, no connection to reality.” He added that it’s “fair” to be concerned about “the energy consumption — not per query, but in total, because the world is now using so much AI.” In his view, this means the world needs to “move towards nuclear or wind and solar very quickly.” There’s no legal requirement for tech companies to disclose how much energy and water they use, so scientists have beentrying to study it independently. Data centers have also been connected torising electricity prices. Citing a previous conversation with Bill Gates, the interviewer asked whether it’s accurate to say a single ChatGPT query currently uses the equivalent of 1.5 iPhone battery charges, to which Altman replied, “There’s no way it’s anything close to that much.” Altman also complained that many discussions about ChatGPT’s energy usage are “unfair,” especially when they focus on “how much energy it takes to train an AI model, relative to how much it costs a human to do one inference query.” “But it also takes a lot of energy to train a human,” Altman said. “It takes like 20 years of life and all of the food you eat during that time before you get smart. And not only that, it took the very widespread evolution of the 100 billion people that have ever lived and learned not to get eaten by predators and learned how to figure out science and whatever, to produce you.” So in his view, the fair comparison is, “If you ask ChatGPT a question, how much energy does it take once its model is trained to answer that question versus a human? And probably, AI has already caught up on an energy efficiency basis, measured that way.” You can watch the full interview below. The conversation about water and energy usage begins at around 26:35.
View
7 days until ticket prices rise for TechCrunch Disrupt 2026
Super Early Bird pricing forTechCrunch Disrupt 2026ends February 27 at 11:59 p.m. PT. That gives you one week to secure the biggest savings of the year — up to $680 off individual passes and up to 30% off community passes.Register now to lock in at the lowest rate. From October 13-15 at Moscone West in San Francisco, Disrupt will bring together 10,000 founders, investors, and operators for three days engineered for results. Explore300+ exhibiting startups. ExperienceStartup Battlefield 200, where one standout company wins a $100,000 equity-free prize. Meet the leaders who can change your company’s trajectory. Disrupt has a long track record of bringing together the most influential voices in tech. Previous speakers have included WordPress co-founderMatt Mullenweg,Phia co-foundersPhoebe Gates and Sophia Kianni, and renowned investorElad Gil, alongside leaders from Google Cloud, Netflix, Waymo, and more — all sharing actionable insights for building and scaling what’s next. Stay tuned to theevent siteto see when the 2026 agenda drops. Seven days remain to secure the lowest rate of the year. Whether you’re scaling a company or sourcing your next investment, there’s a pass built for you.Lock in your savings before February 27 at 11:59 p.m. PT.
View
OpenAI debated calling police about suspected Canadian shooter’s chats
An 18-year-old who allegedly killed eight people in a mass shooting in Tumbler Ridge, Canada, reportedly used OpenAI’s ChatGPT in ways that alarmed the company’s staff. Jesse Van Rootselaar’s chats describing gun violence were flagged by tools that monitor the company’s LLM for misuse and banned in June 2025. Staff at the company debated whether or not to reach out to Canadian law enforcement over the behavior but ultimately did not, accordingto the Wall Street Journal. An OpenAI spokesperson said Van Rootselaar’s activity did not meet the criteria for reporting to law enforcement; the company reached out to Canadian authorities after the incident. “Our thoughts are with everyone affected by the Tumbler Ridge tragedy,” an OpenAI spokesperson said in a statement. “We proactively reached out to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police with information on the individual and their use of ChatGPT, and we’ll continue to support their investigation.” ChatGPT transcripts weren’t the only concerning part of Van Rootselaar’s digital footprint. She apparently created a game on Roblox, the world simulation platform frequented by children, which simulated a mass shooting at a mall. She also posted about guns on Reddit. Van Rootselaar’s instability was also known to local police, who had been called to her family’s home after she started a fire while under the influence of unspecified drugs. LLM chatbots built by OpenAI and its competitors have been accused of triggering mental breakdowns in users who lose grip on reality while conversing with digital models.Multiplelawsuitshavebeen filed that cite chat transcripts that encourage people to commit suicide or offer assistance in doing so. If you are in a crisis or having thoughts of suicide, call or text 988 to reach the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline. This post has been updated with comment from OpenAI.
View
Google VP warns that two types of AI startups may not survive
Loading the player… The generative AI boom minted a startup a minute. But as the dust starts to settle, two once-hot business models are looking more like cautionary tales: LLM wrappers and AI aggregators. Darren Mowry, who leads Google’s global startup organization across Cloud, DeepMind, and Alphabet, says startups with these hooks have their “check engine light” on. LLM wrappers are essentially startups that wrap existing large language models, like Claude, GPT, or Gemini, with a product or UX layer to solve a specific problem. An example would be a startup thatuses AI to helps students study. “If you’re really just counting on the back end model to do all the work and you’re almost white-labeling that model, the industry doesn’t have a lot of patience for that anymore,” Mowry said on thisweek’s episode of Equity. Wrapping “very thin intellectual property wrapped around Gemini or GPT-5” signals you’re not differentiating yourself, Mowry says. “You’ve got to have deep, wide moats that are either horizontally differentiated or something really specific to a vertical market” for a startup to “progress and grow,” he said. Examples of the deep moat LLM wrapper type include Cursor, a GPT-powered coding assistant, or Harvey AI, a legal AI assistant. In other words, startups can no longer expect to slap a UI on top of a GPT and get traction on their product, like they could, perhaps, in mid-2024 when OpenAIlaunched its ChatGPT store. The challenge now is to build sustainable product value. AI aggregators are a subset of wrappers — they’re startups that aggregate multiple LLMs into one interface or API layer to route queries across models and give users access to multiple models. These companies typically provide an orchestration layer that includes monitoring, governance, or eval tooling. Think: AI search startup Perplexity or developer platform OpenRouter, which provides access to multiple AI models via a single API. While many of these platforms have gained ground, Mowry’s words are clear to incoming startups: “Stay out of the aggregator business.” Generally speaking, aggregators aren’t seeing much growth or progression these days because, he says, users want “some intellectual property built in” to ensure they’re routed to the right model at the right time based on their needs — not because of behind-the-scenes compute or access constraints. Mowry has been in the cloud game for decades, cutting his teeth at AWS and Microsoft before setting up shop at Google Cloud, and he’s seen how this plays out. He said the situation today mirrors the early days of cloud computing in the late 2000s/early 2010s as Amazon’s cloud business started taking off. At that time, a crop of startups sprang up to resell AWS infrastructure, marketing themselves as easier entry points that provided tooling, billing consolidation, and support. But when Amazon built its own enterprise tools and customers learned to manage cloud services directly, most of those startups were squeezed out. The only survivors were the ones who added real services, like security, migration, or DevOps consulting. AI aggregators today face similar margin pressure as model providers expand into enterprise features themselves, potentially sidelining middlemen. For his part, Mowry is bullish on vibe coding and developer platforms, which had a record-breaking year in 2025 with startups like Replit, Lovable, and Cursor (all Google Cloud customers, per Mowry) attracting major investment and customer traction. Mowry also expects strong growth in direct-to-consumer tech, in companies that put some of these powerful AI tools into the hands of customers. He pointed to the opportunity for film and TV students to use Google’s AI video generator Veo to bring stories to life. Beyond AI, Mowry also thinks biotech and climate tech are having a moment — both in terms of venture investment going into the two industries and the “incredible amounts of data” startups can access to create real value “in ways we would never have been able to before.”
View
Microsoft’s new gaming CEO vows not to flood the ecosystem with ‘endless AI slop’
Microsoft announced a major gaming shakeup on Friday, with Microsoft Gaming CEO Phil Spencer departing the company, along with Xbox President Sarah Bond. Spencer will be replaced by former Instacart and Meta executive Asha Sharma. With Sharma’s most recent role as the president of Microsoft’s CoreAI product, these moves suggest that Microsoft might be doubling down on bringing AI into video games. The company had already been experimenting with ways to combine AI and gaming, for exampledeveloping an AI gaming companionandreleasing a buggy, AI-generated level from “Quake II.” Indeed, in an internal memopublished by The Verge, Sharma wrote that Microsoft “will invent new business models and new ways to play” and said that “monetization and AI” will both “evolve and influence this future.” At the same time, she said that the company “will not chase short-term efficiency or flood our ecosystem with soulless AI slop.” “Games are and always will be art, crafted by humans, and created with the most innovative technology provided by us,” Sharma added. That’s just one of three “commitments” Sharma made in her memo. The others involve building “great games beloved by players” and prioritizing Xbox.
View
NeuroDx Unveils MANAS-1, India’s Native AI Brain Model at India AI Summit
In parallel, the company is working on a larger 20 billion parameter foundation model focused on EEG signal analysis.
View
Queues, Quadrupeds & Quoted Pledges: IndiaAI Ends with Big Money and Bigger Intent
After five frenetic days of ambition and uproar, the IndiaAI Impact Summit closed amid spectacle, scrutiny and sovereign dreams.
View
The creator economy’s ad revenue problem and India’s AI ambitions
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.
View
India’s Sarvam launches Indus AI chat app as competition heats up
Sarvam, an Indian AI startup focused on building models for local languages and users, on Friday launched its Indus chat app for web and mobile users, entering a fast-growing market dominated by global players including OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google. The launch comes as India has become a key battleground for generative AI adoption. Recently, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman saidChatGPT has more than 100 million weekly active usersin India, while Anthropic saidIndia accounts for 5.8% of total Claude usage, second only to the U.S. Indus serves as a chat interface for its newly announced Sarvam 105B model, the company’s 105-billion-parameter large language model. The app’s launch comes two days after Bengaluru-based Sarvamunveiledits 105B and 30B models at theIndia AI Impact Summitin New Delhi earlier this week. At the summit, the startup also outlined enterprise initiatives and hardware plans and announced partnerships with companiesincluding HMD to bring AI to Nokia feature phonesand Bosch for AI-enabled automotive applications. Currently available in beta oniOS,Android, and theweb, the Indus app allows users to type or speak queries and receive responses in text and audio. Users can sign in using their phone number, Google account, or Apple ID, though the service appears to be limited to India for now. The app currently comes with some limitations. Users cannot delete their chat history without deleting their account, and there is no option to turn off the app’s reasoning feature, which can sometimes slow response times. Sarvam has also warned that access may be restricted as it gradually expands its compute capacity. “We’re gradually rolling out Indus on a limited compute capacity, so you may hit a waitlist at first. We will expand access over time,” Sarvam co-founder Pratyush Kumarwroteon X, adding that the company is seeking feedback from users. Founded in 2023, Sarvam hasraised $41 millionto date from investors, including Lightspeed Venture Partners, Peak XV Partners, and Khosla Ventures as it builds large language models tailored for India. Sarvam is one of a small but growing group of Indian startups attempting to build domestic alternatives to global artificial intelligence platforms as India seeks greater control over its AI infrastructure.
View
InScope nabs $14.5M to solve the pain of financial reporting
Even without a background in accounting, anyone who has ever glanced at a 10-K or 10-Q can tell that preparing financial statements is a complex, tedious process. While legacy platforms like Workiva and Donnelley Financial Solutions aim to streamline financial reporting, longtime accountants Mary Antony (pictured right) and Kelsey Gootnick (pictured center) found themselves exhausted by various manual hurdles within these tools (co-founder and CTO Jared Tibshraeny is pictured left). The duo met seven years ago at Flexport, where Gootnick served as the company’s controller and Antony served as assistant controller. They stayed in touch even after Antony moved to Miro and Gootnick to Hopin and later Thrive Global. No matter where they worked, Antony and Gootnick kept running into the same manual challenges. “The way financial statements come together, it’s just patched together in a lot of spreadsheets, moved into a bunch of Word documents, emailed back and forth between people,” Antony told TechCrunch. So, in 2023, the pair decided to launchInScope, an AI-powered financial reporting platform that helps companies and accounting firms automate many aspects of the financial statement preparation process. The startup just raised $14.5 million in Series A funding led by Norwest, with participation from Storm Ventures and existing backers Better Tomorrow Ventures and Lightspeed Venture Partners. While InScope isn’t fully automating the generation of income statements and balance sheets yet, it automates a vast amount of the manual busy work, from verifying math to formatting. Simply ensuring that dollar signs and commas are uniform and correctly placed can save accountants up to 20% of their time, according to Antony, InScope’s CEO. Over the last 12 months, InScope has grown its customer base by 5x, attracting significant accounting firms such as CohnReznick, currently ranked in thetop 15 nationally. Of course, it may be a while before accountants — a profession Antony describes as risk-averse — feel comfortable letting AI fully automate financial statement preparation. Nonetheless, that remains InScope’s ultimate goal. Norwest partner Sean Jacobsohn told TechCrunch that he invested in InScope after he heard from multiple clients that the startup’s product saves them a lot of time. Jacobsohn is convinced that InScope stands out because few founders possess the specific expertise required to reinvent financial reporting technology. “It’s a very complex space, and you need to be able to have been in the shoes of the buyer before,” he said. Antony agrees that accountants are not typically the type to launch startups. Fortunately, she and Gootnick developed their entrepreneurial instincts through years of operating within the fast-paced cultures of other high-growth startups.
View
Anthropic-funded group backs candidate attacked by rival AI super PAC
Late last year, New York Assembly member Alex Bores became the target of a campaign by a pro-AI super PAC to thwart his congressional bid. The group,Leading the Future, is armed with more than $100 million from backers including Andreessen Horowitz, OpenAI President Greg Brockman, AI search startup Perplexity, and Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale. Bores’ response was simple:bring it on.Now, he’s got the muscle to back that challenge up. Public First Action, a PAC backed by a$20 million donation from Anthropic, is spending $450,000 to boost Bores in the race for New York’s 12th congressional district, reportsBloomberg. Like its rival, the committee is pro-AI, but it’s pitching a different vision, one centered on transparency, safety standards, and public oversight. Meanwhile, the industry-backed PAC,Leading the Future, has already poured $1.1 million into ads attacking Bores, largely because he sponsoredNew York’s RAISE Act,which requires major AI developers to disclose safety protocols and report serious misuse of their systems.
View
Why creators are ditching ad revenue for chocolate bars and fintech acquisitions
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, what happens when influence becomes infrastructure, and whether this model can scale beyond the top 1%. Listen to the full episode to hear about: Subscribe to Equity onYouTube,Apple Podcasts,Overcast,Spotifyand all the casts. You also can follow Equity onXandThreads, at @EquityPod.
View
