Startups don’t need to go viral to win customers
At TechCrunch Disrupt last week, two founders and a VC discussed how to not just gain an early following but keep one.
OpenAI says it will no longer train its AI models on the live internet, citing “significant risks”
OpenAI will cut frontier models off from the internet weeks after one of its engineers said that solution wouldn’t work.
Xbox’s first chief operating officer is out after just a few months
Xbox’s first chief operating officer (COO) is leaving after the new role was created just a few months ago. Helen Chiang is leaving Microsoft today, according to an internal Xbox memo seen by The Verge. Chiang has been at Microsoft for 21 years, serving as the head of Minecraft before being promoted to Xbox chief … Read more
OpenAI now trains its frontier AI models with no internet access
OpenAI is now training its most advanced AI models without internet access following a string of rogue hacking incidents. In a blog post on Friday, OpenAI says it built an offline testing environment where AI models can interact with indexed and cached web content “without risk of affecting external systems.” OpenAI paused training its frontier … Read more
Abandoned Popcorn Time apps had to be disabled to prevent a zombie army
Remember Popcorn Time, the app that served as an easy-to-use front end for streaming torrents of movies and TV shows? Development of the MPAA’s least-favorite app of the 2010s has been abandoned for years, but the “Netflix of Piracy” software is still installed on millions of devices that are just waiting to join a bot … Read more
Jack Dorsey’s Block made an AI model that talks to you like an awkward new friend
Jack Dorsey’s Block announced an AI model called Dessa that’s trained “from scratch on nothing but human conversation,” and to show off the model, Block shared chats it has had with humans that can occasionally be a little awkward and uncanny. Take this one, for example, shared by Dessa lead Ragavan Thurairatnam. The conversation between … Read more
Soundcore’s latest noise-crushing headphones are on sale for a new low price
The Space 2 comes in multiple colors, including an attractive seafoam green. | Photo: Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge My colleague John Higgins considered Soundcore’s Space One some of the best budget noise-canceling headphones you could buy when they launched in 2023 — and their successor has only improved upon their winning formula, albeit … Read more
Hottest toy for Christmas? Nvidia CEO plays with adorable Microduck robots, 20,000 sell
The robots, stomping their little feet and making tiny R2-D2 noises, sat, fell down dead for a “nap,” and summersaulted on voice command.
VCs, Superhuman Mail founder share red flags about product-market fit
Top investors from Iconiq and Sapphire Ventures, along with Rahul Vohra, the founder of Superhuman Mail, share the do’s and don’ts for building hit products.
TechCrunch Founder Summit 2026 roundtables: Go deeper on the challenges founders are solving right now
TechCrunch Founder Summit 2026 is coming to SoWa Power Station in Boston on November 4, bringing founders, investors, and operators together for a full day of candid conversations, practical sessions, live pitching, networking, and smaller roundtables built for deeper discussion.