While Silicon Valley is spending billions to make AI agents shop for us, the man who pioneered Apple’s retail stores thinks the industry is overestimating how much of shopping people will hand over to machines — and believes physical stores will continue to thrive. Ron Johnson, 66, has heard predictions about the demise of physical…
On Monday, OpenAI announced a new independent advisory group hosted at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. Called the Advisory Group on Mathematics and Artificial Intelligence, the group is meant to give mathematicians more input into the company’s math-oriented research. “This group will serve as a bridge to the mathematical community and…
Many developers find that an agent idea works inside Claude Code or Codex, then struggles once they rebuild it with their own loop. The Strands Agents team at AWS is targeting that gap with Strands harness, a fully assembled, general-purpose agent harness. It runs locally or deploys to a cloud provider, ships for Python and…
Of all the events in the United Nations General Assembly taking place this week, the most anticipated by far is the upcoming meeting between Donald Trump and Chinese president Xi Jinping. Though the majority of the diplomatic activities are happening in New York, this face-to-face between the two leaders will take place at the White…
With five days left to save up to $200 on your TechCrunch Disrupt 2026 pass, each day we will list a reason why you should join 10,000+ founders, investors, and operators at San Francisco’s Moscone West on October 13-15. Grab your ticket savings before prices go up on September 25, 11:59 p.m. PT. Plus, get…
Kairos Power has picked engineering firm Samsung C&T to help build its 50 megawatt demonstration reactor for Google, which the nuclear startup is aiming to have completed by 2030. As part of the deal, Samsung C&T will make an equity investment in Kairos and provide “in-kind” engineering services, the combination of which is worth up…
Alibaba’s Qwen team has released Qwen-Image-2.1, a unified text-to-image generation and image editing model. Its visual generation component has 7B parameters across 32 single-stream DiT layers. One checkpoint covers text-to-image, multi-reference editing, local edits, and transparent RGBA output. Is it deployable? Yes, for research and evaluation. Day 0 support covers Diffusers, ComfyUI, vLLM-Omni, SGLang, and…
In Could of 2025, Ahad Ali was a profitable accountant, overseeing a crew of 20 folks and dealing with greater than 2,000 returns a 12 months. “We did bookkeeping, accounting, gross sales tax, taxes, every little thing,” Ali says. It was a secure enterprise, and one that may have been simple to remain in. However…
What does one of Silicon Valley’s most successful venture firms think founders are getting wrong? At TechCrunch Disrupt 2026, we’re putting all five Benchmark general partners on one stage to find out. Jack Altman, Peter Fenton, Chetan Puttagunta, Everett Randle and Eric Vishria will come together for this main stage session, “What We Believe Now”…
A few of the requirements Google has set embrace utilizing “premium supplies,” like aluminum, magnesium, or carbon fiber, to make them light-weight. They want not less than 16 GB of RAM, ship greater than 45 tera operations per second (TOPS), a touchscreen (LCD or OLED), a backlit keyboard, a haptic trackpad, Dolby Atmos audio system,…
