As consumers crave more connection and less screen time, the smartest brands may stop fighting for more attention and start giving people something worth putting their phones down for.
At TechCrunch Disrupt 2026, the AI Stage is back to dig into the single hottest topic in the community for the past few years, presented by Google for Startups.
Meta’s settlement with 29 states allows it to retain certain data from children under 13 to train and test age-detection models, highlighting a privacy tradeoff built into the deal.
The update turns product recommendations into a more direct revenue stream for creators, and for Amazon, the move puts its massive online marketplace inside one of the most popular video platforms.
Zoph, who co-founded Thinking Machines Lab alongside Mira Murati and also served as the startup’s CTO, led a brief stint at OpenAI and is now at Google.