Welcome to M5BMachine 5-Minute Briefing

Payroll service provider Remote recently surpassed $300 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR) and became cash-flow positive, thanks to a 50% increase in revenue per employee resulting from AI adoption.

Meta is rolling out paid subscription plans for Instagram, Facebook, and WhatsApp worldwide, while also testing new AI, creator, and business-focused offerings under its broader “Meta One” subscription brand.

As Cognition reaches $492 in annualized revenue run rate, it more than doubled its valuation in eight months, it says.

As synthetic content rises and the open web degrades, clean, verified, domain specific data becomes the defining advantage in AI. The next decade belongs to those who curate better, not scrape more.

SOND, a startup led by Bose’s former head of sleep products, emerged from stealth with $7M in funding for its AI-powered sleep earbuds.

There are only 3 days left to save up to $410 on your ticket to TechCrunch Disrupt 2026. Early Bird pricing ends May 29 at 11:59 p.m. PT, and once the deadline passes, ticket prices increase. If you plan to attend one of the most influential gatherings in tech this year, now is the time to lock in y...

China's AI boom is producing world-class talent, and Beijing is increasingly reluctant to let them go elsewhere.

YouTube will now automatically label videos that use significant photorealistic AI, instead of relying solely on creators to disclose AI-generated content themselves. It's also making AI labels more prominent.

"CEOs are uniquely prone to AI psychosis," Box CEO Aaron Levie opines. Maybe that explains the almost religious belief in AI productivity gains.

In this tutorial, we use zeroentropy/zerank-2-reranker, a 4B Qwen3-based cross-encoder reranker, to improve retrieval quality. We start by setting up the runtime, loading the reranker, and understanding how it scores query-document pairs. Then, we move from simple pairwise scoring to a practical two...

Save up to $410 on your TechCrunch Disrupt 2026 pass before prices increase on May 29 at 11:59 p.m. PT. Register here to join the tech epicenter in San Francisco.

Artificial intelligence has not so far produced a clean story of mass unemployment. Aggregate employment in developed countries remains broadly stable, and recent assessments have found limited evidence that AI has shifted the headline numbers. But a troubling change may be hiding beneath the surfac...

In this tutorial, we explore the TuringEnterprises/Open-MM-RL dataset as a practical foundation for multimodal reasoning and reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards. We load the dataset, inspect its schema, analyze domains, formats, question lengths, answer types, and image distributions, and...

In this tutorial, we build an advanced federated learning experiment with NVIDIA FLARE. We compare FedAvg and FedProx on a non-IID CIFAR-10 setup, where client data is split using a Dirichlet distribution to simulate realistic label imbalance across federated sites. We use the NVFlare Job API to def...

The deadline to apply or nominate for Startup Battlefield 200 is May 27. This is your shot at VC access, global visibility, TechCrunch coverage, and $100,000. Apply now.

Dimitris Bertsimas and Megan Mitchell discuss the motivation behind Universal Learning, and what sets the new MIT Open Learning educational initiative apart.

As MCP crosses 97 million monthly SDK downloads and AI agents move into production workflows, authentication has become the most critical infrastructure decision teams face. This guide ranks the eight leading platforms — WorkOS, Stytch, Auth0 by Okta, Composio, Nango, Arcade, TrueFoundry, and Cloudf...

We're in the transition period -- all of us.

IBM and Scuderia Ferrari HP take TechCrunch inside how they are redefining the fan experience.

Elon Muks's xAI has gone all in on natural gas, while SpaceX is obsessed with orbital data centers. What happened to the "solar-electric economy" he promised?

People used AI on a spectrogram image of cockpit recordings to reconstruct them, forcing the NTSB to temporarily block access to its docket system.

You can now disco ball-ify your entire Pixel homescreen, says Google.

Some AI startups are stretching traditional revenue metrics when talking about progress publicly. And their investors are fully aware.

AI agents start every session from zero — no memory of meetings, notes, or decisions. GBrain, the open-source memory layer Y Combinator's Garry Tan built to power his own OpenClaw and Hermes deployments, fixes that with a markdown-first knowledge graph that wires itself through regex inference, not ...