TechCrunch Top 3

Amazon will stop accepting new customers for Mechanical Turk: These may be the last days of Amazon’s Mechanical Turk. Read More

5 desk gadgets that can make your workday better: The right desk gadgets can help you reduce clutter, stay focused, and add a little extra convenience to your day. Read More

Reddit is using LLMs to solve a problem LLMs largely created: In the AI era, platforms have no choice but to fight fire with fire to cull spam. Read More

A message from General Compute

General Compute is making a $300m bet against GPUs

General Compute raised $15m to build the worlds first ASIC cloud. By removing the GPU bottleneck, it runs frontier LLMs up to 16x faster than standard GPU clouds. ASIC silicon is also far more energy efficient, so it deploys in air-cooled data centers, making growth and expansion dramatically easier.

Learn more here

This Week's Must-Reads

Instagram users: Here’s how to stop Meta’s AI from using your photos: Muse Image allows users to generate AI images using photos from public Instagram accounts. As long as a person's profile is public, another user can tag that account and use their images as part of an AI-generated creation. Read More

Smart glasses maker Even Realities hits $1B valuation with $150M funding led by Meituan, Tencent: Even Realities, an ex-Apple team building camera-free smart glasses, raised $150 million from Meituan and Tencent at a $1 billion valuation. Read More

Meta removes controversial AI feature on Instagram after backlash: "Our intent was to provide a useful creative tool and to give people control over whether their public content could be referenced in this way," the company said in a blog post. "We've heard the feedback that this feature missed the mark, so it's no longer available." Read More

Filing: College app Fizz accuses VC of sharing confidential startup information with rival Sidechat: Fizz has expanded its lawsuit against rival Sidechat, alleging that a Maveron VC shared its confidential information obtained during a fundraising meeting with the competing startup. Read More

Apple sues OpenAI over alleged trade secret theft: Apple alleges the misconduct was directed by OpenAI's senior leadership, including a longtime former employee. Read More

Disrupt 2026: Where deals and ideas ignite

Oct 13–15 at San Francisco's Moscone West, 10,000 founders, investors, and operators gather for high-signal insights, curated connections, and real momentum.

Last but Not Least

Figma acquires team behind a vibe-coding app: The Y Combinator-backed company started a vibe-coding platform and later built an agent-creation product. Read More