Thursday, 12 February 2026

Top Stories

- xAI lays out interplanetary ambitions in public all-hands (TechCrunch AI) 2026-02-11 On Wednesday, xAI took the rare step of publishing its full 45-minute all-hands presentation to the X platform, making it widely available. - AI inference startup Modal Labs in talks to raise at $2.5B valuation, sources say (TechCrunch AI) 2026-02-11 General Catalyst is in talks to lead the round for the four-year-old startup, according to our sources. - OpenAI disbands mission alignment team (TechCrunch AI) 2026-02-11 The team's leader has been given a new role as OpenAI's chief futurist, while the other team members have been reassigned throughout the company. - Apple’s Siri revamp reportedly delayed… again (TechCrunch AI) 2026-02-11 While the new Siri was expected to launch with the upcoming iOS 26.4 update in March, now, the changes are expected to roll out more slowly over time, reportedly postponing some features until the May - Uber Eats launches AI assistant to help with grocery cart creation (TechCrunch AI) 2026-02-11 Uber Eats launched a new AI feature, “Cart Assistant,” that can automatically add items to your cart based on text or image prompts. - Glean’s fight to own the AI layer inside every company (TechCrunch AI) 2026-02-11 Enterprise AI is shifting fast from chatbots that answer questions to systems that actually do the work across an organization. But who will own the AI layer that powers all of it?  Glean, which - Who will own your company’s AI layer? Glean’s CEO explains (TechCrunch AI) 2026-02-11 Enterprise AI is shifting fast from chatbots that answer questions to systems that actually do the work across an organization. But who will own the AI layer that powers all of it?  Glean, which - Elon Musk suggests spate of xAI exits have been push, not pull (TechCrunch AI) 2026-02-11 At least nine engineers, including two co-founders, have announced their exits from xAI in the past week, fueling online speculation and raising questions about stability at Musk’s AI company amid mou - Why the economics of orbital AI are so brutal (TechCrunch AI) 2026-02-11 A 1 GW orbital data center would cost roughly $42.4 billion — almost three times its ground-bound equivalent. - Threads’ new ‘Dear Algo’ AI feature lets you personalize your feed (TechCrunch AI) 2026-02-11 The platform's new feature lets users tell Threads what they temporarily want to see more or less of in their feed. - How AI changes the math for startups, according to a Microsoft VP (TechCrunch AI) 2026-02-11 Amanda Silver is a corporate vice president at Microsoft’s CoreAI division, where she works on tools for deploying apps and agentic systems within enterprises. - Former Founders Fund VC Sam Blond launches AI sales startup to upend Salesforce (TechCrunch AI) 2026-02-11 The startup, Monaco, has come out of stealth as an AI-native all-in-one CRM plus more system backed by names like the Collison brothers and Garry Tan. - Build a pipeline and close deals with an exhibit table at TechCrunch Disrupt 2026 (TechCrunch AI) 2026-02-11 Get an unmatched ROI by exhibiting your startup in front of 10,000 tech leaders and investors at TechCrunch Disrupt 2026, October 13-15 in San Francisco. Book your table now before it's gone. - Meridian raises $17 million to remake the agentic spreadsheet (TechCrunch AI) 2026-02-11 A new company called Meridian.AI has emerged from stealth with an IDE-based approach to agentic financial modeling. - With co-founders leaving and an IPO looming, Elon Musk turns talk to the moon (TechCrunch AI) 2026-02-11 According to The New York Times, which reports that it heard the meeting, Musk told employees that xAI needs a lunar manufacturing facility, a factory on the moon that will build AI satellites and fli - OpenAI policy exec who opposed chatbot’s ‘adult mode’ reportedly fired on discrimination claim (TechCrunch AI) 2026-02-11 The executive has denied the allegation that she engaged in discrimination. - Okay, now exactly half of xAI’s founding team has left the company (TechCrunch AI) 2026-02-11 Whatever the cause of the departures, the cumulative impact is alarming. There is a lot of work left to do at xAI, and an IPO will bring more scrutiny than the lab has ever faced before. - Amazon may launch a marketplace where media sites can sell their content to AI companies (TechCrunch AI) 2026-02-10 A new report claims the e-commerce giant is looking to create a pipeline of licensable content between media publishers and AI companies. - An ice dance duo skated to AI music at the Olympics (TechCrunch AI) 2026-02-10 Czech ice dancers Katerina Mrazkova and Daniel Mrazek are learning the hard way that LLMs sometimes spit out straight-up plagiarism. - This Sequoia-backed lab thinks the brain is ‘the floor, not the ceiling’ for AI (TechCrunch AI) 2026-02-10 AI lab Flapping Airplanes just landed $180 million in seed funding from the likes of Google Ventures, Sequoia, and Index to do something most labs have quietly given up on: making models lea - Browse Business (Reuters AI) - Browse Sustainability (Reuters AI) - Sponsored Content (Reuters AI) - Exclusive: ByteDance developing AI chip, in manufacturing talks with Samsung (Reuters AI) - Momentum AI New York, opens new tab (Reuters AI) - Barclays bets on AI to cut costs and boost returns (AI News) - How insurance leaders use agentic AI to cut operational costs (AI News) - Red Hat unifies AI and tactical edge deployment for UK MOD (AI News) - Chinese hyperscalers and industry-specific agentic AI (AI News) - Agentic AI in healthcare: How Life Sciences marketing could achieve $450B in value by 2028 (AI News) - FedEx tests how far AI can go in tracking and returns management (AI News) - How SAP is modernising HMRC’s tax infrastructure with AI (AI News) - AI use surges at Travelers as call centre roles reduce (AI News) - PepsiCo is using AI to rethink how factories are designed and updated (AI News) - Meeting the new ETSI standard for AI security (AI News) - View All Latest (AI News) - Exclusive: Why are Chinese AI models dominating open-source as Western labs step back? (AI News) - AI Expo 2026 Day 2: Moving experimental pilots to AI production (AI News) - OpenAI’s enterprise push: The hidden story behind AI’s sales race (AI News) - AI Expo 2026 Day 1: Governance and data readiness enable the agentic enterprise (AI News) - From blogosphere to the AI & Big Data Expo: Rackspace and operational AI (AI News) - How Cisco builds smart systems for the AI era (AI News) - Ronnie Sheth, CEO, SENEN Group: Why now is the time for enterprise AI to ‘get practical’ (AI News) - Gartner Data & Analytics Summit 2026 (AI News) - Drive Real Results: Build a Business-Focused Data & Analytics Strategy (AI News) - How to Calculate Business Value and Cost for Generative AI Use Cases (AI News) - Thailand becomes one of the first in Asia to get the Sora app (AI News) - Malaysia launches Ryt Bank, its first AI-powered bank (AI News) - Google’s Veo 3 AI video creation tools are now widely available (AI News) - Computer Vision (AI News) - US and Japan announce sweeping AI and tech collaboration (AI News) - UK and Canada sign AI compute agreement (AI News) - Quantum AI represents a ‘transformative advancement’ (AI News) - Machine Learning (AI News) - How AI is changing the way we travel (AI News) - Spot AI introduces the world’s first universal AI agent builder for security cameras (AI News) - Tony Blair Institute AI copyright report sparks backlash (AI News) - Cold snap highlight’s airlines’ proactive use of AI (AI News) - Retailers examine options for on-AI retail (AI News) - IBM Research unveils breakthrough analog AI chip for efficient deep learning (AI News) - Damian Bogunowicz, Neural Magic: On revolutionising deep learning with CPUs (AI News) - OpenAI’s GPT-3 is a convincing philosopher (AI News) - On-Demand Webinar: AI Combined with Automation is the Perfect Marriage for Scalable, Intelligent Operations (AI News) - On-Demand Webinar: DataOps Can Build the Foundation For Your Generative AI Ambitions (AI News) - On-Demand Webinar: From Complexity to Clarity: AI + Agility Layer for Intelligent Insurance (AI News) - On-Demand Webinar: Turning a Hacker’s Toolkit Against Them (AI News) - On-Demand Webinar: CMS Buyer’s Briefing: A Live Look at What’s Next in AI-Driven Platforms (AI News) - On-Demand Webinar – From pretexting to payloads and everything in between: The latest phishing threat trends in 2023 (AI News) - Data Centers Expo North America 2026 (AI News) - Android 17 beta intros continuous Canary updates for developers (AI News) - Marketers struggle to predict AI’s methods for B2B purchase choice (AI News) - Smart city deployments shift to prioritising ROI (AI News) - Reddit and AI search are reshaping how brands get found (AI News)

Evening Update (17:59-18:02 GMT)