Latest AI News
Mark Zuckerberg tells staff that AI agents haven’t progressed as quickly as he’d hoped
Replacing people with AI doesn’t seem to be that easy to do, if Meta can be seen as an example. Reutersreportsthat at an internal town hall Thursday, CEO Mark Zuckerberg told staff that the pace of AI agent development had not “accelerated in the way” executives had previously expected them to. Earlier this year, Metalaid off some 8,000 employees— approximately 10% of its corporate workforce — and reassigned another 7,000 to various AI groups, including one called Agent Transformation,Bloomberg reported. During this week’s meeting, Zuckerberg apparently commented on these job cuts — noting that they were not as “clean” as they should have been. The cuts were made because top officials at the company “were worried that we weren’t going to move fast enough to adapt” to the changing landscape of the tech industry, Zuckerberg reportedly added. The corporate leader also apparently said that the perceived upside of the new AI-focused company structure hadn’t “come to fruition yet,” although he said that he believed the company would begin to see improvements from its AI investments during the next three to six months. Several other investigative reports have depictedMeta’s months-old AI unit as a soul-crushing gulag,according to some of the engineers assigned to it. Meta has invested heavily in AI and is expected to spend as much as $145 billion on AI infrastructure this year,Reuters reports. TechCrunch reached out to Meta for comment.
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Jersey Mike’s IPO illustrates how bad the AI hype has become
I can’t tell the exact tipping point from realistic excitement over a new technology, to hype, toaww-come-on— but I’m pretty sure when a sandwich shop with Danny DeVito as its public face talks about AI in its IPO documents, we must be getting close. So it is with Jersey Mike’s. Because of investor thirst for all things AI these days, I understand why tech companies feel the need to sprinkle AI dust all over their pitches. This is as true for non-AI startupsraising venture capitalas it is forBending Spoons’ public debut, a company in the business of buying aging, “not-AI” tech companies to rehabilitate. Just for kicks, I took a look at Jersey Mike’s IPO documents to see how far this compulsion may go. Surely a sandwich shop would have no need to mention AI in itsS-1. But lo and behold! The term artificial intelligence and its acronym “AI” were mentioned 22 times. In this case, the company can’t claim to be selling AI software. It sells submarine sandwiches. AI products are what investors are really hungering for (terrible pun intended). Still, it found a way to mention AI in its investor-risk warnings. That may be even more funny. It doesn’t explain what it’s using AI for that could be dangerous to investors, beyond a hand-wave of a phrase, “We are beginning to use AI Technologies in our business.” In all fairness, as a company that operates franchisees, it does rely on software (mentioned 52 times) and data (112 mentions), as all businesses do. Its AI risk warning was boilerplate copy, perhaps even necessary, as such disasters have already happened to other food businesses, likethe half-baked AI inventory toolthat Starbucks rolled out, which couldn’t count and was recently scrapped. Still, I’m going to go out on a limb here and predict that the risk of an AI disaster for a company that produces real-life sandwiches, not AI slop, is about the same as, say, a franchise shop getting hit by lightning. That actuallyhappened, by the way,to a shop in Texas in 2021. Yet weather was only mentioned five times in the S-1. And lightning? Not once.
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OpenAI proposed donating 5% of its equity to a US sovereign wealth fund
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has proposed giving 5% of the company’s equity to a U.S. sovereign wealth fund,the Financial Times reported on Thursday, citing two people familiar with the matter. Under the proposal, other AI companies would donate similar stakes, although significant questions remain about the specifics. According to the FT’s reporting, the donation would be meant to “secure good relations with the administration and … address political blowback.” Similar discussions werereported by CNBC in Juneand were subsequently confirmed by President Trump, who said he had discussed “concepts where pieces could be given to the American public, where the American public essentially becomes a partner with the companies.” At the time, no specific size for the proposed equity stake was given. The talks remain preliminary and, per the FT, it’s likely that any formal action would require congressional approval, which would significantly complicate the matter. The idea of a public AI fund has also been publicly discussed by Altman, and OpenAI has grown increasingly specific in its proposals for how such a fund could be structured. Most recently, a policy paper titled “Industrial Policy for the Intelligence Age,” released by OpenAI in April, proposed a public wealth fund that could invest directly in AI labs and companies deploying their technology. “Returns from the Fund could be distributed directly to citizens, allowing more people to participate directly in the upside of AI-driven growth, regardless of their starting wealth or access to capital,” the document reads. A more aggressive version of the policy wasproposed by Sen. Bernie Sanders(I-VT) in June, calling for a one-time 50% tax on AI company stock, with the collected shares being deposited into a public wealth fund. The bill, called the American AI Sovereign Wealth Fund Act, would apply to all “systemically important” AI companies, including those dealing with data centers, infrastructure, or robotics. Under the proposal, companies like Google and SpaceX that include AI as only part of their business would be allowed to spin off non-AI portions of the company to avoid taxation. The bill has yet to advance to committee.
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Anthropic is discussing a new custom chip with Samsung
Back in April, Reutersreported thatAnthropic was toying with the idea of producing its own AI chips as a means of responding to chip shortages. Now, it would appear that the company is getting serious about this idea. On Thursday,The Information reportedthat Anthropic was in contact with Samsung to explore a collaboration around the pending chip. However, Anthropic hasn’t yet decided what the chip will be used for, how it will fit into the server, or how powerful it will be, according to the report. When reached for comment, Anthropic told TechCrunch that a diversified hardware stack that includes chips from Google, Amazon, and Nvidia will continue to be pivotal to its compute strategy. On the topic of a potential Samsung partnership, the company said it had nothing further to add. A number of AI companies have sought to develop custom chips — both as a way to create unique hardware for specific compute tasks and to gain a certain amount of independence from Nvidia, which continues to be the undisputed leader of the chip industry. Anthropic’s announcement may also be a response to one made last week by its key competitor, OpenAI, which hasteamed up with Broadcomto announce its own custom built inference processor, dubbed “Jalapeño.” OpenAI says that the chip is more efficient, demonstrating better performance-per-watt, than other competitor chips.AmazonandGoogleboth offer custom-built TPUs as part of their cloud offering. Samsung is already embedded in the AI industry, and acts as a major partner of Nvidia,producing chipsthat the company needs to train or run its AI models. In turn, Samsung uses Nvidia’s software to manufacture its chips. The duo areworking on an AI chip factoryin South Korea. Samsung has alsodiscussed partneringwith Google on its chip-making efforts.
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Meta quietly launches vibe-coded gaming app Pocket
Meta is getting into gaming with the launch of a new app calledPocket, which allows people to generate small, interactive apps and games using AI prompts. The software, a result of Meta’sacquisitionof the team at thevibe-coded gaming platform Gizmoearlier this year, describes itself as “a creative platform for making and sharing gizmos,” which is what the interactive experiences are called. It also offers a scrollable feed where you can play with gizmos others have made. Based on theapp’s screenshots in Google Play,there are many similarities to Gizmo’s original app,which is still listed. Like Pocket, Gizmo also offers a way to use written AI prompts to build small, interactive experiences, and it includes a discovery feed. Alessandro Paluzzi,a reverse engineer and regular spotter of new apps and features, first noticed the app’s launch this morning and published a Play Storescreenshotof the app on X. According to data from app intelligence providerAppfigures, however, Pocket was first launched on June 29, 2026 on the App Store and Google Play. (Because of its newness, the firm can’t tell if it’s yet to see any downloads.) #Metais working on a new app called Pocket 👀ℹ️ A new creative platform to make and share gizmos.pic.twitter.com/zFjMU5jj1U Other outlets, includingBusiness InsiderandInvesting.com, have also reported on Paluzzi’s discovery. Meta has not yet responded to a request for comment. Pocket is another example of Meta’s push to make AI creation tools more mainstream, extending its earlier efforts, which included AI-generated images created viaits Meta AI app, and AI videos created withits app called Vibes.It has also added AI features across its social platforms and into itsvideo-editing app for creators, Edits. Given that Meta has not officially announced Pocket’s debut, it’s likely that Pocket is still in its initial experimentation phase. Its counterpart Gizmo, however, had generated 635K lifetime installs across both iOS and Google Play, according to Appfigures, which noted it had a 98% positive sentiment.
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Yep, we’re using OpenClaw to date now
Ben Guez has “a bunch of potential international wives in [his] DMs,” thanks to an automated script he set up using OpenClaw, Claude code, and Instagram trial reels. “I think it’s crazy, like the potential is insane right now,”Guez, a content creator and startup founder, told TechCrunch. “I’m not sure if everyone’s gonna think it’s good, but I mean, it’s working.” How is Guez is wooing so many women? First, he uses the open source AI agentOpenClawto track World Cup match results. After each game, OpenClaw triggers Claude to create and post a nearly identical Instagram “trial reel” with the same template. In the video, Guez stares out a train car window looking dejected, with the caption: “I can’t believe {COUNTRY} lost… If any {COUNTRY} girls need emotional support… my DMs are open.” Guez has made the same post, save for the country name, more than a dozen times. But you can’t tell when you look at his profile, since trial reels don’t show up on a creator’s public page. Since he launched this automation, Guez has gotten over one million views and 200 DMs in a few days. That volume is even more impressive considering that Guez says in his profile that he will only answer DMs sent viaCanary, his AI language learning app, which means that these women have to download his app. You have to hand it to him: Guez is really taking “work smarter, not harder” to another level. But once these women realize he doesn’t actually care about Tunisian soccer, wouldn’t they feel played? “They’re not feeling angry, they’re more impressed, like, ‘Oh, you’re thinking outside of the box, you’re a genuis,’” Guez said. “I think as long as you’re open [about] what you’re doing, I think it’s fine.” TechCrunch was not able to independently verify the actual reactions of these women, so we’ll just have to take Guez’s word for it. But we can tell you that Guez isn’t the only guy getting creative with theviral AI assistant. While Guez’s methods are a bit more outrageous, other people see OpenClaw as a way to streamline the process of setting up dates. Jeff Weisbein, founder of a tech PR firm, uses OpenClaw to help him figure out where to take dates across different neighborhoods in South Florida. “I’m meeting women who are in various parts of South Florida, so I don’t know all of the restaurants or things to do,” Weisbein told TechCrunch. “I have my bot just kind of do all the research and make a document with links to why it’s a choice for whatever type of date it is.” When I fill him in on Guez’s OpenClaw scheme, he bursts out laughing. “I guess I’m not leveraging OpenClaw to the fullest,” he said. “But definitely in the realm of using OpenClaw to facilitate a task that I would manually have to do otherwise.” Like Guez, Weisbein doesn’t hide the fact that he’s using AI tools to help plan dates (it backfired, though, when one woman told him, “I hate AI agents”). In a way, asking OpenClaw where to go for happy hour in Fort Lauderdale isn’t that different from Googling the coolest neighborhood bars, but Weisbein says he would draw the line at using AI to mediate his actual conversations with women. “I have seen people create bots and ways to swipe using OpenClaw, and I wouldn’t do that. They say it’s a numbers game, but if that’s what it takes… that seems like a pretty terrible way to do it,” he said. “I feel like you shouldn’t delegate your communication when you’re in a relationship with someone to AI.” People seem hesitant to let AI meddle once there’s an actual connection, but a tech worker named Cailey said that once she’s decided to end a flirtation, she doesn’t mind using Claude to break things off. “I started using Claude and created an automation that crafts ‘I no longer wish to see you’ messages based on a few key terms I would enter about the date. It’d then automatically send them for me at random times so that I wouldn’t feel the anxiety of when to send,” she told TechCrunch. “It worked really well, until I mentioned it to someone I was on a date with, who I then had to send an automated message to, and he asked if he was talking to Claude or Cailey.” What’s worse: getting ghosted, or getting broken up with by an AI? Wish you could have a team of experts at your beck and call?NanoClaw is the first personal AI assistant to support agent swarms.We've got you covered – no matter the need.pic.twitter.com/X5vcf4Cmve OpenClaw rocked the tech world with its potential when it went viral this spring, but security advocates have continuouslywarned usersabout the dangers of giving an AI assistant unilateral control over all of your accounts. For Lazer Cohen, the co-founder of the security-focused OpenClaw alternativeNanoClaw, there are steep privacy implications of outsourcing personal relationships to AI, even if his company advertises date planning as a potential use case on X. “Whenever you’re giving an agent access to personal information and accounts, you need human-in-the-loop approval,” Cohen told TechCrunch. “We’ve all heard the stories of OpenClaw creating dating profiles for people without their knowledge or consent, or OpenClaw dating coaches spilling to other groups that they’re being used as a dating coach too.” NanoClaw has found its way into Cohen’s love life, though he uses it in a way that’s a bit more wholesome than mass-producing reels that ask heartbroken soccer fans to slide into his DMs. “My wife and I personally use our NanoClaw assistant, Rosie, to manage the schedules of our five children,” he said. “But ‘claws’ are widely used to help couples get to the child-rearing phase.”
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Microsoft launches its own AI deployment company with $2.5 billion commitment
On Thursday, Microsoft announced a new operating business called Microsoft Frontier company, focused on delivering successful enterprise AI deployments with Microsoft’s existing AI tools. The project will be backed by a $2.5 billion investment from Microsoft, as well as 6,000 industry and engineering experts. In a statement announcing the venture, Microsoft’s Commercial Business CEO Judson Althoff resisted the Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE) label that is often applied to these ventures. “This goes beyond what has been labeled as Forward-Deployed Engineering,” Althoff wrote, “and will be the largest, most capable, outcome-driven engineering organization in the industry.” Nonetheless, the venture bears a striking similarity to a number of FDE-based AI ventures announced in recent months. Justtwo days earlier, Amazon Web Services announced an internal commitment of $1 billlion for its own AI deployment venture, explicitly embracing the FDE model.Both OpenAI and Anthropichave launched joint ventures along similar lines, although those efforts also involve outside capital from private equity firms. Microsoft’s existing client base will give the new effort a significant head start, as the company has already deployed engineers to much of the Fortune 500. The announcement cites an early partnership with the London Stock Exchange Group, as well as Unilever, Land O’Lakes, and Accenture.
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How to Escape OpenAI, Anthropic, and Their Expensive APIs
Enterprises are grappling with the ever increasing token costs. So, how to put an end to this?
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Skyroot Sets Date for Vikram-1 Orbital Test Flight from Sriharikota
Skyroot Aerospace’s Mission Aagaman will test India’s first privately developed orbital rocket and gather flight data for future launches.
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How Vibe Coding Became a Hiring Opportunity for This Observability GCC
New Relic CEO Ashan Willy says AI-generated code is increasing demand for observability and creating new opportunities for India’s GCCs.
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India's AI Funding Boom in H1 2026 Left Most Startups Starving
India’s AI-native startups drew nearly $1 billion in H1 2026, but on the back of two mega deals from Neysa and Sarvam AI.
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Microsoft Invests $2.5 Bn to Launch Frontier Company to Help Businesses Deploy AI
Microsoft also named Rodrigo Kede Lima as President of the Frontier Company.
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