Carl Franzen

Executive Editor

Carl Franzen is executive editor of VentureBeat with more than 16 years of experience in tech journalism. He's led newsrooms and launched award-winning digital publications at The Atlantic, The Verge, Popular Science, Xerox, Lyft and multiple startups. He is based in NYC. Photo by Michael O'Donnell Photography.

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Intercom's new post-trained Fin Apex 1.0 beats GPT-5.4 and Claude Sonnet 4.6 at customer service resolutions

Intercom plans to expand Fin beyond customer service into sales and marketing—positioning it as a direct competitor to Salesforce's Agentforce vision, which aims to provide AI agents across the customer lifecycle

Carl Franzen

March 26, 2026

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Google's new TurboQuant algorithm speeds up AI memory 8x, cutting costs by 50% or more

Within 24 hours of the release, community members began porting the algorithm to popular local AI libraries like MLX for Apple Silicon and llama.cpp.

Carl Franzen

March 25, 2026

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OpenAI is shutting down Sora, its powerful AI video model, app and API

The company released updates to Sora on a regular cadence all the way through this week, making the news of the shutdown even more abrupt.

Carl Franzen

March 24, 2026

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Cloudflare’s new Dynamic Workers ditch containers to run AI agent code 100x faster

Cloudflare says dynamically loaded Workers are priced at $0.002 per unique Worker loaded per day, in addition to standard CPU and invocation charges

Carl Franzen

March 24, 2026

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What is DeerFlow 2.0 and what should enterprises know about this new, powerful local AI agent orchestrator?

The primary condition for use is the technical readiness of an organization’s hardware and sandbox environment.

Carl Franzen

March 24, 2026

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Scale AI launches Voice Showdown, the first real-world benchmark for voice AI — and the results are humbling for some top models

The results, drawn from thousands of spontaneous voice conversations across more than 60 languages, reveal capability gaps that other benchmarks have consistently missed.

Carl Franzen

March 20, 2026

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Anthropic just shipped an OpenClaw killer called Claude Code Channels, letting you message it over Telegram and Discord

The consensus among early adopters is that Anthropic has successfully internalized the most desirable features of the open-source movement—multi-channel support and long-term memory

Carl Franzen

March 20, 2026

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Cursor’s new coding model Composer 2 is here: It beats Claude Opus 4.6 but still trails GPT-5.4

It has to prove that its integrated platform, team controls and now its own in-house models add enough value to justify sitting between developers and the model makers.

Carl Franzen

March 19, 2026

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Xiaomi stuns with new MiMo-V2-Pro LLM nearing GPT-5.2, Opus 4.6 performance at a fraction of the cost

MiMo-V2-Pro utilizes a 7:1 hybrid ratio (increased from 5:1 in the Flash version) to manage its massive 1M-token context window.

Carl Franzen

March 18, 2026

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New MiniMax M2.7 proprietary AI model is 'self-evolving' and can perform 30-50% of reinforcement learning research workflow

That makes M2.7 one of the most affordable frontier AI models to run in the world — only xAI's Grok 4.1 Fast is cheaper.

Carl Franzen

March 18, 2026

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Open source Mamba 3 arrives to surpass Transformer architecture with nearly 4% improved language modeling, reduced latency

This release is good for developers building long-context applications, real-time reasoning agents, or those seeking to reduce GPU costs in high-volume production environments.

Carl Franzen

March 17, 2026

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z.ai debuts faster, cheaper GLM-5 Turbo model for agents and 'claws' — but it's not open-source

Z.ai says GLM-5-Turbo is currently closed-source, but it also says the model’s capabilities and findings will be folded into its next open-source model release

Carl Franzen

March 16, 2026