For hard-tech startups, manufacturing is an expensive endeavor. Now, Thea Energy has a head start thanks to a grant from the Department of Energy. The fusion energy startup told TechCrunch on Monday that it received a $20 million grant from ARPA-E to help manufacture its modular high-temperature superconducting (HTS) magnets. HTS magnets are expensive but
On Sunday, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella doubled down on the shocking warning he issued earlier this month to companies using AI, and this time he went a step further. Companies that rely entirely on proprietary AI labs for their AI needs ultimately won’t survive, he predicts. That’s what he said on CNN. Fareed Zakaria GPS.
Microsoft on Monday launched its first specialized cybersecurity model along with a new AI cybersecurity platform at a small event in San Francisco, dealing a big blow to the major players in the space, namely Anthropic, Google and OpenAI. The company describes MAI-Cyber-1-Flash as a model created “to find challenging vulnerabilities in complex codebases.” The
Last week, an unreleased model created by OpenAI breached Hugging Face’s systems during internal testing, and a lot of theoretical research suddenly became very practical. The hack was the first verifiable case of an AI lab losing control of its own model, chaining exploits to gain access it should never have had. But while the
AI search is quickly becoming the default option, whether users like it or not. In just one year, Google’s AI-generated search responses, known as AI Overviews, have gone from appearing in 15% of searches to 43%, according to a new report, driving a shift in the way web users consume information online. In a recent
AI doesn’t just run on code: it requires enormous amounts of energy, and that demand is increasingly becoming a critical bottleneck. At TechCrunch Disrupt 2026, the intelligent systems stage will be where energy, infrastructure and technology collide, covering everything from advances in fusion to the grid strain that AI is putting on the entire economy.
