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Venture firm Trucks VC says it has received pitches from 81 new AV startups so far in 2026, a two-thirds increase over last year and more than during the 2016-2017 dealmaking boom. Partner Puneeth Meruva told TechCrunch that some startups are now deploying within months while raising less than $1 million, aided by open-source foundation models like Nvidia's Alpamayo and Qwen's vision-language-action models.
Liquid AI released LFM3, a new generation of Liquid Foundation Models spanning text, vision, audio, omni, and decision variants built on a shared backbone. The initial release includes six 2B-class models trained from a base model called LFM3-1.7B, using a new hybrid architecture and 22 trillion tokens of pre-training. The base and post-trained weights are open and available now on Hugging Face, Liquid AI's Playground, and its API.
CERN and French AI company Mistral have signed a statement of intent to form a long-term partnership developing foundation models for scientific research. Their first project is a single pretrained Large Physics Model, trained on billions of simulated proton-proton collisions from the Large Hadron Collider, intended to handle multiple analysis tasks such as particle reconstruction, identification and anomaly detection.
Industrial Next, a San Francisco startup presenting at TechCrunch Disrupt 2026, unveiled self-contained robotic stations that use proprietary AI foundation models to combine vision, task context and motion, allowing production lines to be retooled in minutes instead of weeks without manual reprogramming. The company also announced a partnership with BMW Group Technology Office to evaluate its dexterous manipulation technology for manufacturing use.
Physical Intelligence has launched a beta API that lets developers upload data, fine-tune the company's π0 and π0.5 robotic foundation models on managed compute, and access the resulting models through a hosted gateway for inference. The company says the system removes the need for developers to build their own ML infrastructure or data pipelines when adapting general-purpose robot models to new tasks, environments, or hardware. It is testing the API with partner companies across industries to gauge how broadly the models generalize.
Apple has launched the HomePod mini 2, updating its compact smart speaker with a new S10 chip, refreshed color options, and support for the newly upgraded Siri AI assistant. The speaker also introduces Sound Glow, a glowing light display on top that reacts to music in real time, and the device is available for pre-order now alongside the new Apple TV 4K and HomeView display.
An independent test compared pretrained tabular foundation models TabPFN and TabICL, which make predictions without training on new data, against a hyperparameter-tuned XGBoost model. Across 14 datasets from the Grinsztajn benchmark, using the same data splits and timing for all methods, the non-training models outperformed tuned XGBoost on every single dataset, including at scales up to 32,000 rows.
Travel planning app Tripsy released version 3.10, adding a Smart Import tool that converts links, PDFs, screenshots, emails, and social media posts into trip itineraries, plus an on-device AI feature called Smart Insights that extracts details like baggage rules and cancellation policies. The update also brings support for iOS 27's extra-large widget and deeper Siri integration allowing restaurant recommendations to be added directly to the app.
With today's iOS 27 rollout of Siri AI, Apple has replaced its old 'Improve Siri and Dictation' opt-in with a new setting called 'Improve Siri and Apple Intelligence.' Choosing 'Share Audio and Text' now lets Apple use voice and text interactions from Siri, Dictation and Translate to train its Foundation Models, not just refine Siri as before. Even users who previously consented will be prompted again during setup to confirm their choice under this expanded scope.
Alongside its new macOS 27 Golden Gate release, Apple has pushed out macOS Tahoe 26.7 and macOS Sequoia 15.8 as updates for users who haven't moved to the newest OS. Apple describes both as containing important security fixes recommended for all users, though it has not yet published detailed release notes on its security page.
The provided text is a bibliography of academic papers and preprints on computational and AI-based approaches to modeling cells, including foundation models for single-cell biology, perturbation prediction, and optimal transport methods for tracking cellular dynamics. It compiles work from research groups building toward what scientists call a 'virtual cell'—computational systems that simulate how cells respond to genetic or chemical changes. No new announcement, product, or specific finding is presented; it is purely a citation list.
Google published documentation outlining the intended uses and known limitations of Gemini 3.8 Flash, a model aimed at cost-effective, production-scale agent deployment for developers and enterprises. The company flagged persistent issues including hallucinations, occasional slowness or timeouts, and inconsistent knowledge freshness across domains despite a stated March 2026 cutoff.