People are using AI to make their smart TVs dumb again

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1:02To book a personalized enterprise demo, visit scribe.how slash tcdaily. That's s-c-r-i-b-e dot how slash tcdaily. This episode is brought to you by Framer. You know what's absolutely terrifying? A bad website. Or worse, one that doesn't work. Avoid that nightmare and use Framer. Framer is the AI website builder that helps creators, teams, and businesses ship production-ready sites faster than ever while getting every detail right. Prompt, inspect, edit, and publish in one place at a whole new pace. You get a visual canvas, responsive layouts, a built-in CMS, and agents to help bring your vision to life.

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2:23I'm Imran Sheik and your Daily Crunch featuring three big tech headlines starts right now. Well, Elon Musk's out here claiming he'll give one of his SpaceX shares to every kid in America in 2027, which would result in a gift worth more than$10 billion based on the current $146 share price of his combination spaceflight and AI company. Now, that's roughly 1 % of his trillion dollar net worth. It's not clear how Musk plans to do this, though he said in a separate post that he wants to give the shares directly to the public and that this will be the first of many shares he'll donate. Now, President Donald Trump, who Musk spent around$300 million to help elect, has set up bank accounts for children through the Treasury called Trump Accounts that can accept stock donations from wealthy donors.

3:13Musk did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Musk's posts came just a few hours after Anthropic promised to put 5 % of its shares into a new public benefit fund, which it intends to use to make large donations to traditional non-profits or direct distributions to specific populations after its upcoming IPO. On Sunday afternoon, Musk replied directly to Anthropic's post on X about its new fund, suggesting the company should give directly to the public instead. This is what I will be doing, he wrote in another reply four hours later. Then overnight, he announced his plans to donate SpaceX stock.

3:50Now, there are currently more than 70 million children under the age of 18 in the United States, according to the Federal Interagency Forum on Child and Family Statistics. Musk owns around 849 million Class A common shares of SpaceX and more than 5.5 billion Class B super voting shares. He stands to earn many more. On Thursday, NVIDIA launched new open-weight models designed for always-on agents and edge computing. The Nemotron 3.5 Super VL is a large 120 billion parameter model geared for agents used by the enterprise. While it uses fewer parameters than the Nemotron 3 Ultra model, NVIDIA says it can deliver similar accuracy and instruction following and tool use tasks.

4:35At the other end of the spectrum, the company also launched two lightweight Bolt models. These are intended to run locally on the new AI PCs, running the NVIDIA RTX Spark chip, of course, and workstations running the DGX Spark. Such PCs, aimed at consumers, programmers, and enterprise knowledge workers, are being released right now into the market through partners like Microsoft and Dell. NVIDIA claims that the Super VL completes tasks faster than competing models from Anthropic and OpenAI, Opus 5, GPT 6.1, Sol, Luna, Astra, when post-trained on specific agentic tasks. These tasks include document intelligence, financial accounting, scientific experimentation, medical insurance claims, and security attack resilience.

5:20Now, of course, while such claims are standard whenever a major tech company announces a new model, NVIDIA has backed it up with a list of heavy-hitter companies that it says are using SuperVL. These include Skydance, EY, Ramp, CrowdStrike, Perplexity, and Salesforce. SuperVL is available now. The latest use case for AI? Well, dumbing down your smart TV to get rid of the bloat, of course. You see, a number of developers and vibe coders have recently been sharing solutions for vibe coding your TV to get rid of sponsored ads, speed up the app launcher, redesign the home screen, disable tracking features, and a whole bunch more.

5:59One such solution called Dumb TV describes its mission on its GitHub page thusly. Your TV should do what you paid for. Your apps, your HDMI inputs, and nothing else. No ads from the TV itself, no watch tracking, no update you did not ask for. Another one, Clean Your TV, promises to strip the bloatware from any Android TV or Google TV over Wi-Fi to replace the launcher with one that resembles Apple TV. Now, while hacking consumer electronics devices to gain more control over their systems is hardly a new idea, the latest advances in AI technology have made such efforts much more accessible to, well, anyone.

6:38With smart TVs in particular, the hacks come at a time when people have grown frustrated with being forced to watch ads and put up with their devices surveilling their viewing habits. Modern smart TVs ship with a technology called Automatic Content Recognition, ACR, which identifies what's playing on the screen using screenshots, audio clips, or other forms of digital fingerprinting. Now, if these dumb TV hacks become more popular among everyday consumers, they have the potential to disrupt the smart TV ad industry, which profits from selling viewing data to advertisers or using it to display personalized ads on their own interfaces.

7:14As the creator of Clean Your TV, Gothen T, puts it, the idea to clean up the smart TV interface started one afternoon when he got tired of seeing the ads on his parents' TV set. The solution doesn't require gaining root access to the TV, nor does it make it impossible to return to the factory default state. If desired, and don't fret, for those of you wary of using AI to fully hack your TVs, there are existing solutions for customizing Android-based smart TVs, such as home screen replacement apps, ATV Launcher, Projectivity Launcher, and F Launcher. And folks, that's your Daily Crunch. Today's stories were reported by Sean O 'Kane, Julie Bortz, Sarah Perez, and more awesome TechCrunch journalists.

7:55We'll see you here tomorrow. Same tech time, same crunch channel. And until then, find us at TechCrunch.com.

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