TechCrunch Disrupt 2026 expands AI coverage with new Real World AI Stage
TechCrunch launches a dedicated track for physical-world AI applications at its October conference, featuring robotics, de-extinction, and edge computing leaders.
#edge-ai
Liquid AI's LFM2.5-2.6B brings on-device agents to edge hardware
A 2.6B-parameter model trained for tool use and multi-step reasoning, matching performance of models 4x larger while running at 220 tokens/sec on consumer hardware.
Nvidia's Jetson GPUs Head to the Moon as Private Lunar Exploration Accelerates
Nvidia Jetson chips will power rovers and satellites on the lunar surface, marking a major shift in space robotics toward edge AI processing.
Liquid AI releases 230M-parameter model optimized for edge devices
Liquid AI's LFM-2.5 230M targets phones, Raspberry Pi, and robotics with sub-gigabyte footprints and millisecond latency.
NASA and Loft Orbital Deploy First Vision-Language Model in Orbit, Automating Satellite Data Analysis
A spacecraft successfully used Google DeepMind's Gemma 3 VLM to autonomously identify features from natural language queries, reducing reliance on ground-based analysts.
Google DeepMind's Gemma 4 12B Brings Encoder-Free Multimodal AI to Consumer Laptops
Google DeepMind releases Gemma 4 12B, a 12-billion-parameter model with unified vision and audio processing that runs on 16GB consumer hardware.
Kiwibit's AI Bird Feeder Brings Backyard Birdwatching Into the Age of Species Recognition
A solar-powered smart feeder with onboard AI identifies over 10,000 bird species and sends real-time notifications, though visit-counting accuracy needs refinement.
Reachy Mini Now Runs Speech Conversations Entirely Local, No Cloud Required
Hugging Face enables fully on-device speech-to-speech for Reachy Mini robots using open-source models and cascaded AI pipelines.