Hardware's brutal week: iRobot, Luminar, and Rad Power go bankrupt

Ready to ship AI that works? Start building at mongodb.com/build. Hello, and welcome to Equity TechCrunch's podcast on the business of startups. Today is Friday, December 19, and I am weekend editor Anthony I'm here with senior writers Rebecca Balan and Sean O'Kane. Kirsten is not here this week, but she will be back next week. In the meantime, I did want to talk about the word of the year, at least according to Merriam Webster. Rebecca, what is the word of the year? Slop. We're sloppy. AI slop. And how did you feel about it? Yeah. No. I think it makes sense. AI slop has seeped into everything. I mean, as we were just discussing before we got on the call, I was talking about how obsessed I am with videos of, dogs saving babies. And Sean was like, oh, there's that's there's, like, a a scandal happening. A lot of these videos are actually just AI slop and just made up. Is this true, Sean? To be fair, I hope it's you know, they're they're actually out there saving babies, but I know it's a thing that has taken some people recently. So I I hope that I hope that you were watching some of the real ones. I really hope I was too. We really need a way surely, there's a way for us to know when we're watching something that's AI generated, but I guess that would take away the Oh, there are ways if there are ways to know. They just act against the interest of the companies that's putting it out there. Exactly. Well, there's ways to know, but not necessarily to be certain. Right? There's usually tells, but also we start to get paranoid. I mean, we were talking a few weeks ago about the whole em dash thing of you know, I use a lot of em dashes. It doesn't mean my writing's AI generated. I love em dashes. I'm try I'm actively trying not to use em dashes now. I'm like, what do I use instead? I guess, like, shorter sentences, semicolons. I brought back the semicolon. I don't know. But, anyway, slop is the word of the year. It's defined as low quality digital content produced at scale by AI. And there are some other, you know, winners of the year in terms of word choices, like rage bait and vibe coding. But the thing that I think is interesting about Slop is since this has been since that got announced I don't know if you guys have noticed on Twitter that a lot of people are talking about how, oh, yeah. Sure. This isn't slop. Like, you know, only the only boomers call it slop. Look how amazing this content is. And to me, it's not just about, like, okay. Yeah. Sure. You can get Nano Banana to make some cool looking images, and that's really great. Or Runway makes amazing videos, and that's really cool. But it's it's …