A new AI assistant is entering the increasingly crowded personal-agent market with a familiar promise but a different emphasis: Hark wants to become the software that can actually operate your digital life while keeping privacy at the center of the experience. Hark, the latest startup from serial entrepreneur Brett Adcock, has launched Hark Pro to the public after spending months developing the product. The service is available for free, with paid plans designed for users who need higher usage limits. Rather than positioning Hark as another chatbot, the company describes it as a new interface for interacting with computers. Its...

Content moderation has long relied on AI classifiers trained to identify harmful or policy-violating material. But as online platforms face an ever-growing volume of posts, messages and user-generated content, a new category of AI models could offer a faster and more flexible way to make moderation decisions. Musubi, an AI startup focused on decision models, is betting on that opportunity with PolicyLM-1.7B, a lightweight open-weight model designed specifically for real-time content moderation. The company says the model can take a platform’s content policy written in ordinary language and apply it to incoming content in less than 50 milliseconds. The key...

A new AI assistant is entering one of Silicon Valley’s fastest-growing markets with a proposition that could become increasingly important as personal AI agents gain access to users’ most sensitive information: keep the data on the device. Underdog, developed by startup Conway Research, launched in invite-only beta this week under the leadership of self-taught programmer Sigil Wen. The assistant is designed to run entirely on users’ own computers rather than sending their personal data to cloud-based AI systems. That approach puts Underdog in direct competition with a growing group of personal AI assistants, including Instinct and Meta’s Muse, which can...

OpenAI is expanding its GPT-6 lineup with two new models, GPT-6 Sol and GPT-6 Luna, bringing some of the capabilities introduced with its flagship GPT-6 Astra to lower-cost and more accessible systems. The new models arrive just weeks after OpenAI introduced GPT-6 Astra, which the company positioned as its most capable AI model yet. Rather than competing directly with Astra at the top end of the market, Sol and Luna are designed to make advanced AI capabilities more practical for everyday and high-volume workloads. OpenAI describes GPT-6 Sol as a model aimed at more demanding professional tasks, particularly coding and...

Following recent calls from prominent tech leaders to slow the pace of frontier model development, the debate over whether the artificial intelligence sector is truly prepared to decelerate has intensified. Discussed extensively on TechCrunch’s Equity podcast, industry analysts and venture capitalists are questioning whether public safety proposals can coexist with the economic realities of the AI boom. The skepticism surrounding a potential slowdown centers on several key industry factors: Commercial Pressures vs. Voluntary Safety: Despite executive endorsements for “pacing” frontier development and embedding independent safety evaluators, major AI startups face massive pressure from investors. With multi-billion-dollar capital expenditures and impending...