You’ve seen the stages, the celebs, the coverage…but what is Disrupt actually like to attend?

Venture Fund Baukunst’s co-founder Kate McAndrew explored the show floor and discovered a wealth of companies to meet with, a tour of the globe’s innovators, and most of all, a reminder that the community made there goes far beyond what can be discovered via a screen.

The internet is having an off week, to say the least.

Security researchers at OpenAI and Google-owned Wiz used AI to uncover critical flaws in PHP, the open source language behind roughly 70% of websites, including those built on WordPress, WooCommerce, and Magento. The holes date back more than a decade, and now that a fix is out, companies are scrambling to patch their systems as attackers try to exploit the them.

On this episode of TechCrunch’s Equity podcast, Kirsten Korosec, Sean O’Kane, and Anthony Ha dig into why AI-powered bug hunting could make this the first of many internet-wide scares, what Elon Musk’s careful choreography says about where a Tesla-SpaceX merger is headed, and more of the week’s headlines.

Chapters:
0:00 – Intro: PHP security crisis, Tesla and SpaceX, and Otter.ai’s $320M raise
0:55 – TechCrunch Disrupt recap and the Elizabeth Holmes documentary
2:50 – Critical PHP vulnerabilities threaten millions of websites
8:01 – AI’s role in discovering and exploiting cybersecurity flaws
13:09 – The future of AI-powered cybersecurity
17:07 – Are Tesla and SpaceX finally merging?
19:10 – Elon Musk’s influence over both companies’ boards
22:50 – Why a Tesla-SpaceX merger could make financial sense
25:27 – Musk’s plan to give American children SpaceX shares
27:08 – Character.AI’s bankruptcy and Disney’s involvement
30:21 – OpenAI acquires biotech startup Orchestra Bio
33:00 – Otter.ai raises $320 million from General Catalyst
35:30 – Outro

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It seems like every big AI player is building a personal agent. Meta has Muse, OpenAI launched Dots, and a startup called Instinct recently raised $1 billion at a $10 billion valuation. But Eugenia Kuyda thinks the next generation of AI assistants needs to do more than book your restaurant reservations and find you hidden money in your Gmail.

Kuyda, who founded AI companion app Replika, has just launched Wabi, a personal AI agent that organizes your life into separate conversations, brings other people into the mix, and builds custom apps around what you’re trying to do. The idea is to make AI less of a solo productivity tool and more of a way to spend time with the people who matter to you.

On this episode of TechCrunch’s Equity podcast, Rebecca Bellan talks with Kuyda about why she thinks AI agents should bring people together instead of keeping them glued to a single chatbot, how Wabi plans to compete in a crowded and expensive market, and what it takes to get people comfortable giving an AI access to their email.

Subscribe to Equity on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts. You can also follow Equity on X and Threads, at @EquityPod.

Chapters:

00:00 Intro

1:11 Meet Wabi

5:33 From “YouTube for apps” to a proactive personal agent

7:12 Why AI should bring people together, not just save time

10:17 Multi-thread chats vs. everything in one conversation

13:33 Shared permissions: who sees what inside a chat

14:57 Phones, hardware, and the “MS-DOS era” of AI interfaces

17:39 Funding, compute costs, and the free-for-now business model

24:10 Handing over your Gmail: how Wabi earns trust

28:02 Outro