• Even Benchmark thinks AI is eroding the venture pact against backing rivals

    October 16, 2026

    For decades, the unwritten rule of venture capital was that a firm doesn’t back two companies that compete head-on. But speaking at TechCrunch Disrupt earlier this week, the partners of Benchmark readily acknowledged that the AI boom is straining that rule. It’s been on the verge of snapping for some time. The towering AI labs OpenAI and Anthropic share dozens of the same investors at this point. Then, at the end of September, Factory, a startup that builds an AI agent to write software, said it was firing board observer and adviser Chris Degnan for “unethical conduct involving Cognition,” its…

  • China’s Leapmotor says its ‘legacy brand’ association isn’t a liability

    October 16, 2026

    The term ‘legacy brand’ is often used by fast-growing Chinese automakers to characterise marques from other countries, which have been in Australia longer, as slow-moving and behind the times. However, one rising Chinese brand in Australia is boasting of its connection to a ‘legacy’ automaker. Leapmotor is a Chinese automaker that’s a little over a decade old, which European-American automotive giant Stellantis acquired a 20 per cent stake in back in 2023. The two companies formed Leapmotor International, a Stellantis-led (51/49) joint venture that sees the Fiat and Jeep parent distribute the Chinese brand outside of China. Looking for your…

  • ChatGPT Can Now Look At Your Chrome Tabs To Do Tasks For You

    October 16, 2026

    OpenAI has updated its ChatGPT extension for Chrome, giving it the power to look at your tabs so it can come up with more personalized and useful answers to your queries. The company used to have a browser of its own, but it retired the product on August 9. It did, however, roll out upgrades to the Chrome extension that made ChatGPT a more viable alternative to Gemini in the browser. With these latest updates, ChatGPT can now do even more tasks inside Chrome.  If you’re in ChatGPT Chat, you can ask the AI assistant to take a look at your…

  • Top 12 AI Live Translation Tools in 2026: Latency, Languages, Pricing

    October 12, 2026

    AI live translation tools turn speech into translated captions or speech while people are still talking. The market now spans consumer apps, meeting add-ons, event platforms and developer APIs. We checked 12 tools against official product, pricing and documentation pages. It listens, transcribes, translates and outputs captions or synthetic speech in near real time. Most products chain speech recognition, machine translation and text-to-speech. Captions suit webinars. Speech output suits two-way calls. Real-time conversations and developer APIs 1. Palabra.ai: Palabra.ai does two-way speech-to-speech translation with automatic voice cloning and captions. It claims under 1 second latency and offers a WebRTC and…

  • Citroen 2CV revived as budget EV steeped in nostalgia

    October 12, 2026

    The Citroen 2CV concept was clearly developed by fans of the original French runabout. It previews a production model due for release by 2028 with a base price of around €15,000 (A$24,000), which will be built in Europe and meet E-Car regulations. It’ll join the Ami quadricycle, currently priced from €8490 (A$13,600), and the e-C3, priced from €12,990 (A$20,850), at the low end of Citroen’s electric vehicle (EV) lineup in Europe. Instead of a tiny petrol engine, there’s an electric motor and a battery. But unlike past retro revivals like the Mini, Volkswagen Beetle, and Renault Twingo, the 2CV concept…

  • NVIDIA Open-Sources OSMO: One YAML Orchestrates Physical AI Training, Simulation, and Robot Testing

    September 14, 2026

    Robot developers do not have one compute problem. They have 3. A policy is trained on GB200 or H100 clusters, tested in Isaac Sim on RTX GPUs, then validated on a Jetson mounted inside a real robot. Each tier has its own cluster, its own scheduler, and its own glue scripts. NVIDIA OSMO is NVIDIA’s answer to that fragmentation: an open-source, Kubernetes-native workflow orchestrator that lets a team describe the whole pipeline in a single YAML file and run it across every tier without touching infrastructure code. Deployable? Yes. OSMO is Apache-2.0 licensed, ships Helm charts and containers on NGC,…

  • Insight Partners’ Deven Parekh on why the firm is diversifying while everyone else bets the farm on OpenAI and Anthropic

    September 14, 2026

    Deven Parekh has co-run the heavyweight investment firm Insight Partners for 26 years. Unlike many VCs who are loud on X and seem to live on podcasts, Parekh and Insight Partners tend to lay low. In this sit-down with TechCrunch at its StrictlyVC event on Thursday night in New York, Parekh was refreshingly candid about some of the firm’s wins (it has led and co-led numerous rounds in Databricks, for example, and owns stakes in OpenAI and Anthropic); the deals it hasn’t won, including buzzy AI legal-tech company Legora; conflicts of interest in venture investing; and why Insight has stuck…

  • Leapmotor confirms vehicle-to-grid testing in Australia, eyes Amber collaboration

    September 14, 2026

    Leapmotor has confirmed preliminary vehicle-to-grid (V2G) testing has taken place in Australia, as it explores a potential collaboration with energy retailer Amber Electric. The confirmation follows comments from Leapmotor’s global product planning team that Australia had become one of the company’s leading markets for the technology. “Preliminary V2G testing has been undertaken in Australia as part of our ongoing evaluation of the technology and its potential applications,” a Stellantis Australia spokesperson told CarExpert. “We are currently exploring opportunities for broader collaboration and further testing, including with Amber, and look forward to sharing more information in due course.” Looking for your…

  • MG 4 Urban gets $2000 cashback offer, now $29,990 drive-away

    September 14, 2026

    The MG 4 Urban electric hatchback is being offered with $2000 cashback, while customers who order a vehicle at this weekend’s Everything Electric show in Sydney will also receive a $500 charging card. Available until September 30, the offer reduces the MG 4 Urban Essence 43 price to $29,990 drive-away, undercutting the GAC Aion UT’s current promotional price of $31,990 drive-away nationally. It also makes the MG 4 Urban cheaper than the Geely EX2 Inspire, priced from $30,990 before on-road costs, although the entry-level EX2 Complete remains more affordable at $26,490 before on-roads. The MG 4 Urban went on sale…

  • Which Is Better For Charging Your MacBook?

    September 14, 2026

    MagSafe is safer and simpler, but USB-C has a few advantages of its own. Ivan_Shenets/Shutterstock The latest MacBooks are known for featuring Apple’s clever charging solution: MagSafe. It’s one of those features that’s a make-or-break factor for some people. And it’s no wonder — these chargers attach magnetically and disconnect if the cable is pulled sharply, like when tripping over it. But Apple laptops can also be charged via USB-C, which has become an industry standard. While you can’t use both at the same time, they can both be great charging options depending on what you need at…