Your shot at VC access, global visibility, TechCrunch coverage, and $100,000 in equity-free funding is gone in a week. Startup Battlefield 200 applications close May 27. If you’re building a breakout startup — or know a founder who is — this is the moment to act. Apply today for the opportunity to take the stage at TechCrunch Disrupt 2026, October 13-15, alongside…
Google just released Gemini 3.5 Flash at Google I/O May, 2026. It is the first Gemini 3.5 model. The series combines frontier intelligence with action. Google calls it a major leap for intelligent agents. The Flash tier has historically been faster and cheaper. 3.5 Flash outperforms Gemini 3.1 Pro on challenging benchmarks. The previous premium…
NVIDIA researchers have released Nemotron-Labs-Diffusion, a language model family that unifies three decoding modes in one architecture. The model supports autoregressive (AR) decoding, diffusion-based parallel decoding, and self-speculation decoding. It is available in 3B, 8B, and 14B parameter sizes. The family includes base, instruct, and vision-language variants. Sequential Decoding Limits Throughput Standard autoregressive (AR) language…
One of the most immediately noticeable changes to Flow is the new video-generation model powering the experience: Omni Flash, succeeding Veo. Similar to how Google’s Nano Banana model brought more context about the world into the AI image-creation process, the Omni Flash model overhauls video generation with richer detail throughout clips. Flow users can generate…
Simultaneous interpretation is one of the harder problems in applied AI. You’re asking a model to translate speech before the speaker has finished a sentence. Every extra second of delay breaks the illusion of real-time communication. Alibaba’s Qwen team has been chipping away at this with each release. Their latest model, Qwen3.5-LiveTranslate-Flash, brings that latency…
Shay Shwartz knows a lot about email phishing attacks. As a teenager, he made money as a hacker, but after getting caught at age 16, he realized he could use his cyber talents to prevent attacks rather than launch them. He went on to spend about a decade in top-tier cybersecurity roles, leading major projects…
Three-year-old Mach Industries has acquired solid rocket motor startup Exquadrum in a $50 million cash-and-equity deal, the Huntington Beach-based defense startup tells TechCrunch. Exquadrum — now rebranded as Mach Energetics — has been fully folded into Mach’s operations, giving it direct control over one of the most important, and constrained, components in modern unmanned systems….
Messaging platform giant Discord has switched on end-to-end encrypted voice and video messaging for every user. The end-to-end encryption feature means that Discord users can now communicate privately without anyone else being able to listen in to their calls, not even Discord. This is a major privacy win for the community’s hundreds of millions of…
Google is totally revamping its search expertise, and that doesn’t cease at YouTube. Like the remainder of Google, YouTube’s search bar is getting infused with AI instruments like “Ask YouTube,” a characteristic that’s supposed to offer customers a extra refined search expertise. “With Ask YouTube, you possibly can ask extra complicated search queries, resembling wanting…
At the Google I/O 2026 keynote, the tech giant revealed new agentic capabilities in Search, where users can create, customize, and manage multiple AI agents to stay updated on topics of interest. The announcement is part of Google’s larger push toward agentic AI systems that can take initiative and assist with ongoing tasks instead of…
