VATICAN CITY (AP) — The Incredible Hulk fulfilled a childhood dream by meeting with Pope Leo XIV on Wednesday.
Lou Ferrigno, who starred as the Marvel character during its 1977–1982 U.S. television run, met with the American pope and chatted briefly with him at the end of Leo's general audience in St. Peter’s Square.
“I’m here because it’s a lifelong dream for me to meet the pope,” Ferrigno told reporters. Noting that one side of his family hails from the southern Amalfi region, Ferrigno said he grew up hearing about the pope in a Catholic Italian family and served as an altar boy.
“I’m very, very honoured to be here to see Pope Leo, because it’s my whole life, it’s a dream coming true,” he said.
He posed for photographers, mimicking the gesture that made him famous in his on-screen transformation from Bruce Banner into the superhero Hulk — flexing his arm muscles.
Ferrigno, a retired professional bodybuilder, starred as Hulk in the CBS series before going on to other television and film roles. He noted that some had been filmed in Rome, and that he appreciated the pope's message.
"Our world, our country needs someone like him: A great leader about kindness and peace, because there’s so much turmoil happening in this world,” he said.
Associated Press religion coverage receives support through the AP’s collaboration with The Conversation US, with funding from Lilly Endowment Inc. The AP is solely responsible for this content.
American actor Lou Ferrigno, left, attends Pope Leo XIV's weekly general audience at the Vatican, Wednesday, Sept. 30, 2026. (AP Photo/Andrew Medichini)
SAN FRANCISCO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Sep 30, 2026--
CoreWeave Inc. (Nasdaq: CRWV), The Essential Cloud for AI™, today announced CoreWeave Forge, a development layer for teams building and improving models and agents. It runs the entire AI loop – run, observe, curate, improve, evaluate and repeat – in one connected environment, and it’s open across the models, frameworks, and other clouds teams use. MasterClass and Canva are already building on CoreWeave Forge. The news was shared during Fully Connected, CoreWeave’s AI cloud conference, which brings together more than 4,500 customers, partners, developers and AI leaders to share how they are building and running AI in production.
This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20260930545351/en/
Model and agent development has been split across tools from separate vendors, none built to work together. For the researchers and engineers carrying a model or agent through its full lifecycle, that fragmentation has a cost: a production trace does not feed the next training run, a finished experiment does not inform the next evaluation, and every handoff loses a signal or costs more time.
CoreWeave Forge unifies Weights & Biases Models, post-training expertise from OpenPipe, and the open-source marimo notebook project with CoreWeave’s own services, in one connected environment built for continuous improvement. This development layer closes the AI loop and assists customers in improving their models or agents, no matter their expertise, while keeping every team free to build with any model, framework or cloud, so improvement compounds with every version. Training runs, experiment tracking, evaluations and agent traces live where the model or agent actually runs. CoreWeave Registry keeps every checkpoint and agent configuration versioned. Every piece of it stays open to the models, frameworks, and clouds a team already uses.
“As more people build with AI, they’re putting models to work with their own data and workflows. That’s where the gaps between model capability and system performance become clear,” said Chen Goldberg, executive vice president of product and engineering at CoreWeave. “Engineering teams need to understand those gaps, identify the signals that matter, improve the next version and measure whether the change worked under real operating conditions. All of this has to function as a single, connected system. Forge brings all these capabilities on one platform, so what a business learns from running AI becomes part of how engineers improve it.”
What ships with CoreWeave Forge
CoreWeave Forge is available today with new and expanded capabilities across the AI loop:
“Every platform decision in this market has involved weighing how much optionality a team is willing to surrender for a connected toolchain,” said Nick Patience, vice president and practice lead, AI platforms at the Futurum Group. “CoreWeave Forge is built on the premise that teams shouldn’t have to make that calculation. Closing the loop from production back into training in a single environment, while staying open across models, frameworks, and clouds, is a harder engineering problem than either half alone.”
Visit the web page to learn more about signing up for CoreWeave Forge Pro and starting a free 30-day trial.
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About CoreWeave
CoreWeave is The Essential Cloud for AI™. Built for pioneers by pioneers, CoreWeave delivers a fully integrated platform of technology and teams that enables innovators to move at the pace of innovation, building and scaling AI with confidence. Trusted by 9 of the 10 leading foundation model providers, CoreWeave serves as a force multiplier by combining superior infrastructure performance with deep technical expertise to accelerate human discovery. Established in 2017, CoreWeave completed its public listing on Nasdaq (CRWV) in March 2025.
CoreWeave Forge connects Run, Observe, Curate, Improve and Evaluate in one continuous AI loop.
