• 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…