TeeJay Tech Bro

  With all the talk about how AI might one day kill us all, it’s easy to forget that AI has already been life-threatening to some, not through bioweapons, but psychologically. For example, Character.AI settled several wrongful death lawsuits earlier this year brought by families of underage users who died by suicide after interactions with its bots. Multiple families have also sued OpenAI over ChatGPT’s alleged role in their loved ones’ suicides and delusions. Making AI safer across languages and cultures is the mission of Circuit Breaker Labs, one of TechCrunch’s 2026 Startup Battlefield 200 finalists. (Circuit Breaker will be pitching at TechCrunch Disrupt , which takes place this year at Moscone West in San Francisco from October 13-15.) Founders Shirali and Arul Nigam, who are siblings, were motivated by Sewell Setzer, the 14-year-old who developed an emotional attachment to a Character.AI chatbot and confessed thoughts to it of harming himself before dying by suicide. The c...

  Facing new competition in the audiobook market from Spotify, Audible is turning to AI and other technology to enhance the listening experience. On Thursday, the Amazon-owned company introduced three new features that will allow listeners to explore a book’s characters, engage in interactive stories, and view additional imagery and bonus information about landmarks or places mentioned in the book. If you’re thinking the last would be great for highlighting the different courts’ locations in Sarah J. Maas’ faerie realm of Prythian, I must disappoint you. The feature will first arrive in just one title for now, “The Cultural Tutor: A Modern Guide to History, Art and Philosophy in 49 Short Chapters” by Sheehan Quirke, which focuses on making culture more accessible by teaching about poetry, art, architecture, geography, and more in short lessons. The other new features, a character guide and interactive stories, are also starting off fairly small. With Audible’s October 1 release of...

  OpenAI is again experimenting with how its conversational AI assistant, ChatGPT, can help users as they shop online. On Thursday, the company announced the global launch of two new shopping features, including a way to virtually try on clothing and accessories and a new favoriting function that can help users save products they like for later reference. The updates arrive at a time when AI assistants are exploring consumer use cases around shopping. OpenAI already had to pivot from one of its earlier ideas in this space, an instant checkout feature that ended up not performing well. More recently, agentic AI startup Instinct began pushing product recommendations to users, but some felt that the proactive recommendations were an overreach, more akin to ads than helpful suggestions. OpenAI said its new shopping features leverage the newly launched ChatGPT Images 2.5 model , which the company claims produces more natural lighting and richer textures, follows editing instructions m...

  Exhibit bookings for TechCrunch Disrupt 2026 close in less than 24 hours. From October 13-15, 10,000+ founders, investors, operators, and tech leaders will arrive at San Francisco’s Moscone West looking for companies, products, ideas, and people worth knowing. The question is: Will they find your startup? You have until 11:59 p.m. PT tonight, October 2 — or until the remaining tables sell out — to secure your place in the Expo Hall, the heart of Disrupt. Find out more and book your spot before your competitor takes your table. Don’t just attend — give startup leaders something to discover Disrupt brings thousands of people together, but an exhibit table gives your startup a home base for three days. A place to demo what you’ve built. Start conversations with investors, clients, and potential partners. And turn a quick introduction in the Expo Hall into something that continues after Disrupt. Use your exhibit presence to: Show, rather than tell. Put your product directly in ...

  After Mozilla’s read-it-later app Pocket shut down in August, a number of alternatives popped up to take its place. But one newcomer, Laytr , is taking things further than offering a way to save things to read. The app lets you save anything on the web for later consumption, whether that’s an article, recipe, screenshot, video, PDF, bookmark, or tab. The app also automatically sorts those different file types and lets you organize them into collections it calls “cases.” It can also remind you about a saved item on a date you choose, which could help you remember local events or places you want to visit on certain days, for instance. (Or perhaps as a way to force you to get through your reading list!) What’s interesting about how the app works is that everything you save becomes a private archive that’s only accessible on your own device. That means you don’t have to create an account to use Laytr, and the developer can’t see anything you’ve saved either. Still, you can access y...