AI & Tech

This week, Liquid AI released two new retrieval models. They are LFM2.5-ColBERT-350M and LFM2.5-Embedding-350M. Both hold 350M parameters. Both are the first bidirectional members of the LFM family. They build on LFM2.5-350M-Base, released in March. The pair targets fast multilingual and cross-lingual search across 11 languages. Their footprint is small enough to run almost anywhere….

With each new season comes another YC Demo Day. On Tuesday, the Spring 2026 cohort was unveiled, filled with defense tech, robotics, AI infrastructure and developer tools, and of course, AI agents. TechCrunch spoke to eight investors to determine which ones were the hottest companies in this batch — both the ones they were watching…

def extract_function_source(full_text, function_name): text = full_text.replace(“\r\n”, “\n”) fence = re.search(r”“`(?:python)?\n(.*?)“`”, text, flags=re.S | re.I) if fence: text = fence.group(1) pattern = rf”^def\s+{re.escape(function_name)}\s*\(” match = re.search(pattern, text, flags=re.M) if not match: return “” chunk = text[match.start():] lines = chunk.splitlines() collected = [] for i, line in enumerate(lines): if i > 0: if line.startswith(“def “) or line.startswith(“class…

As India cut off access to messaging app Telegram for a week over concerns about exam-related fraud, users turned to virtual private networks (VPNs) and alternative messaging apps in unusually large numbers. App intelligence firm Appfigures told TechCrunch that Tuesday, the day India announced the Telegram restriction, marked the biggest day for VPN app downloads…