Saturday, 14 February 2026

Top Stories

- Airbnb plans to bake in AI features for search, discovery and support (TechCrunch AI) 2026-02-14 Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky said the company wants to increase its use of large language models for customer discovery, support and engineering. - Airbnb says a third of its customer support is now handled by AI in the US and Canada (TechCrunch AI) 2026-02-13 Airbnb was poised to introduce an app that doesn't just search for you, but one that "knows you." CEO Brian Chesky said, "It will help guests plan their entire trip, help hosts better run their busine - Why top talent is walking away from OpenAI and xAI (TechCrunch AI) 2026-02-13 AI companies have been hemorrhaging talent the past few weeks. Half of xAI’s founding team has left the company — some on their own, others through “restructuring” — while Ope - OpenAI removes access to sycophancy-prone GPT-4o model (TechCrunch AI) 2026-02-13 The model is known for its overly sycophantic nature and its role in several lawsuits involving users' unhealthy relationships with the chatbot. - AI burnout, billion-dollar bets, and Silicon Valley’s Epstein problem (TechCrunch AI) 2026-02-13 AI companies have been hemorrhaging talent the past few weeks. Half of xAI’s founding team has left the company — some on their own, others through “restructuring” — while Ope - Anthropic’s Super Bowl ads mocking AI with ads helped push Claude’s app into the top 10 (TechCrunch AI) 2026-02-13 The numbers suggest that Anthropic's Super Bowl commercials, combined with Anthropic's recent release of its new Opus 4.6 model, worked to drive attention to Claude's app and its key differentiator fr - Elon Musk suggests spate of xAI exits have been push, not pull (TechCrunch AI) 2026-02-13 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 - Cohere’s $240M year sets stage for IPO (TechCrunch AI) 2026-02-13 Cohere surpassed $240 million in annual recurring revenue in 2025, highlighting strong enterprise AI demand as the Canadian startup positions itself for a potential IPO amid intensifying competition f - Meta plans to add facial recognition to its smart glasses, report claims (TechCrunch AI) 2026-02-13 The feature, internally known as “Name Tag,” would allow smart glasses wearers to identify people and get information about them via Meta's AI assistant. - Amid disappointing earnings, Pinterest claims it sees more searches than ChatGPT (TechCrunch AI) 2026-02-12 Pinterest's stock tumbles after an earnings miss, with higher-than-expected usage its only bright spot. - IBM will hire your entry-level talent in the age of AI (TechCrunch AI) 2026-02-12 IBM plans to triple its entry-level hiring in the U.S. in 2026, but these jobs will have different tasks than in previous years. - Musk needed a new vision for SpaceX and xAI. He landed on Moonbase Alpha. (TechCrunch AI) 2026-02-12 "I really want to see a mass driver on the moon that is shooting AI satellites into deep space." - Didero lands $30M to put manufacturing procurement on ‘agentic’ autopilot (TechCrunch AI) 2026-02-12 Didero functions as an agentic AI layer that sits on top of a company’s existing ERP, acting as a coordinator that reads incoming communications and automatically executes the necessary updates and ta - Anthropic raises another $30B in Series G, with a new value of $380B (TechCrunch AI) 2026-02-12 The infusion of funding for the AI startup takes place as it is vying for customers and cultural attention with its competitor, OpenAI. - Spotify says its best developers haven’t written a line of code since December, thanks to AI (TechCrunch AI) 2026-02-12 Spotify credits Claude Code and its internal AI system Honk with speeding up development. - A new version of OpenAI’s Codex is powered by a new dedicated chip (TechCrunch AI) 2026-02-12 OpenAI calls the new coding tool the "first milestone" in its relationship with the chipmaker. - 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 - Browse Business (Reuters AI) - Browse Sustainability (Reuters AI) - Sponsored Content (Reuters AI) - Chinese AI models festoon Spring Festival a year after DeepSeek shock (Reuters AI) - Momentum AI New York, opens new tab (Reuters AI) - AI forecasting model targets healthcare resource efficiency (AI News) - Agentic AI drives finance ROI in accounts payable automation (AI News) - How e& is using HR to bring AI into enterprise operations (AI News) - Alibaba enters physical AI race with open-source robot model RynnBrain (AI News) - AI deployment in financial services hits an inflection point as Singapore leads the shift to production (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) - View All Latest (AI News) - Google identifies state-sponsored hackers using AI in attacks (AI News) - 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) - Exclusive: Why are Chinese AI models dominating open-source as Western labs step back? (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) - AI Expo 2026 Day 2: Moving experimental pilots to AI production (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) - What Murder Mystery 2 reveals about emergent behaviour in online games (AI News) - Brave Search API revamp makes web search useful for AI apps (AI News) - AWS CEO describes AI undermining software fears as ‘overblown’ (AI News) - Private 5G networks: Solving the space and power problem (AI News)