xAI’s CFO is the latest executive to leave the Elon Musk’s AI firm

Mike Liberatore, xAI’s chief financial officer, has left the company, according to reporting from The Wall Street Journal. This marks the latest in a string of high-profile executive departures.  The former Airbnb executive joined the company in April and left around the end of July, per WSJ. While at xAI, he helped orchestrate the company’s … Read more

CoreWeave acquires agent-training startup OpenPipe

CoreWeave, which provides cloud servers to large companies training AI models, has struck an agreement to acquire OpenPipe, a 2-year-old Y Combinator-backed startup that helps enterprises develop customized AI agents with reinforcement learning, the companies announced on Wednesday. “Reinforcement learning is emerging as a pivotal force to strengthen model performance on agentic and reasoning tasks,” … Read more

Google’s NotebookLM now lets you customize the tone of its AI podcasts

Google’s AI note-taking and research assistant NotebookLM now lets users customize the tone of their Audio Overviews, which are podcasts with AI virtual hosts that summarize and discuss documents shared with NotebookLM, such as course readings or legal briefs. When generating an Audio Overview, users can now choose whether they want their AI podcasts to … Read more

Why the US government is taking a stake in Intel

The Trump administration wants the United States to be the dominant force when it comes to artificial intelligence, and one way the administration hopes to achieve primacy is by bringing semiconductor manufacturing back to the U.S. To help with that transition, President Donald Trump has introduced potential chip tariffs and policies in recent months meant … Read more

Karen Hao on the making of a $90B AI empire

Karen Hao, the bestselling author of “Empire of AI,” has watched OpenAI go from a nonprofit “laughingstock” into a $90 billion powerhouse chasing artificial general intelligence at breakneck speeds. Hao, who first profiled the company back in 2020, says early visions of building AI “for humanity’s benefit” were quickly overtaken by a familiar Silicon Valley … Read more

These 20- and 22-year-olds raised $5M from YC, General Catalyst to study online behavior using vision AI

Amogh Chaturvedi is running on little sleep but plenty of conviction at 6 a.m. He’s groggy, apologetic for rescheduling, and still reeling from a recent scare involving a family member and an electric scooter. Within minutes, though, the 20-year-old Stanford dropout snaps into focus, walking me through how he and his co-founders sold one startup … Read more

Warp brings new diff-tracking tools to the AI coding arms race

The AI coding tool Warp has a plan for making coding agents more comprehensible — and it looks an awful lot like pair programming. Today, the company is releasing Warp Code, a new set of features designed to give users more oversight over command-line-based coding agents, with more extensive difference tracking and a clearer view … Read more

Disrupt 2025 finalizes Builders Stage agenda with top scaling voices

Startups don’t build themselves, and the Builders Stage at TechCrunch Disrupt 2025 — taking place October 27–29 at San Francisco’s Moscone West — is where founders, operators, and investors get real about what it actually takes. This stage is all tactics, the nitty-gritty of turning an idea into a business that works. We’ve already announced … Read more