Author: IQ TIMES MEDIA

I am a screentime maximalist. I make no apologies and feel no guilt about how much time I spend staring at my phone. I’m a grown adult who pays taxes and makes my own choices about how I spend my precious free time on this blue marble. And what I want is to spend as many of those moments as possible consuming short-form vertical video on my phone.My need to consume more and more inane content reminds me of the famous photo of the Florida Everglades python whose stomach exploded while trying to eat an alligator. I identify with the…

OpenAI is limiting the release of its newest AI models to a “small group of trusted partners” at the behest of the U.S. government, the company said Friday. The next generation GPT-5.6 lineup includes Sol, its flagship model; Terra, a more balanced model for everyday use; and Luna, a faster, lower-cost option. Although Sol is the company’s most powerful model, the Trump administration has restricted the release of all three. OpenAI said the preview is limited to partners “whose participation has been shared with the government.” The administration’s request comes as the U.S. government puts new pressure on AI companies…

OpenAI is making yet another big, visible bet on India. It has appointed former Uber India and South Asia president Prabhjeet Singh as its first managing director for the country to scale its presence in what it has called its second-largest market after the U.S. Singh, who announced his resignation from Uber on Friday, will join OpenAI in September and report to Kiran Mani, the company’s managing director for Asia Pacific, the company told TechCrunch. He will be responsible for OpenAI’s performance in India across consumer growth, enterprise adoption, partnerships, regulatory engagement, and operations, the company said. The hire marks…

OpenAI is limiting preview access to its latest GPT models at the request of the US government.The company said it previewed the capabilities of its new series of GPT-5.6 models, which includes Sol, Terra, and Luna, to the US government ahead of Friday’s launch.”At their request, we are starting with a limited preview for a small group of trusted partners whose participation has been shared with the government, before releasing more broadly,” the company said.OpenAI said they were complying as part of its earlier agreement with the Defense Department, which allows the Pentagon to use its AI models.Introducing a limited…

Tim Cook isn’t the only CEO shocked by the soaring cost of memory. Elon Musk said he’s never seen anything like it.The Tesla CEO posted a quote on X from the Apple CEO, who earlier this month had said the memory shortage is “a hundred-year flood” and that he’d “never seen anything like it in any area in over 40 years.”Musk said he agreed with Cook. He wrote on Thursday that it’s the “biggest price jump in anything I’ve ever seen.”The soaring demand for chips, which are widely used in consumer electronics, and the resulting costs, have eaten into company…

Amazon raised prices for a key AI cloud service, the latest sign of strong demand for this new technology.Amazon Web Services recently announced price increases for EC2 Capacity Blocks for ML. This lets companies reserve GPUs in advance, so they can avoid workloads getting interrupted — a bit like booking a hotel room for a future trip and paying to ensure it’s there when you arrive.This AWS service is popular among serious AI developers with big-budget projects, such as training huge new models, or fine-tuning foundation models.The changes mean hourly rates for renting this type of AI compute capacity will…

At a GNC warehouse in Whitestown, Indiana, workers see and hear four drones overhead every day as they complete tasks that few humans want to do: count and track full boxes of products across more than 2,000 pallets in the warehouse’s aisles.The drones’ regular flights allow GNC, a nutritional manufacturing company, to obtain a full view of its 250,000-square-foot reserve inventory once a month rather than once a quarter, said Bill Monk, GNC’s vice president of distribution. More frequent monitoring helps the company achieve its goal of reducing backorders, which occur when its inventory system records items as in stock…

Nvidia has dominated the AI chip market for years, but the era of total dependence might be ending.   OpenAI just shared its plans to spice things up with Jalapeño, its custom inference chip built with Broadcom, joining Google, Apple, and SpaceX in a growing list of companies building their way out of single-supplier risk. The goal is less of a clean break and more of a hedge. Custom silicon means more control, hardware tuned to specific needs, and the kind of performance gains Apple unlocked when it ditched Intel.  On this episode of TechCrunch’s Equity podcast, hosts Kirsten Korosec, Anthony Ha, and Sean O’Kane dig into what the custom…

The U.S. government is set to take an awful lot of control over which AI models get released. Two weeks after the U.S. government pulled Anthropic’s Fable and Mythos models, OpenAI’s new model seems to be headed for the same limbo. The Information broke the news Thursday that GPT 5.6 would be released only into limited preview, with the government approving the release “customer by customer” until a general release can be approved. If that preview only lasts a “couple of weeks,” as Altman reportedly projected, that might not be a particularly big problem. But Mythos has already been in…

Gov. Gavin Newsom says a controversial California initiative to impose a one-time tax on billionaires is aimed at the wrong place.”The fight to make the wealthiest Americans pay more in taxes is not one we should be fighting state by state,” Newsom wrote in a Substack post. “You may not be able to pick up and move to Texas or Florida to shelter your income from taxation, but I promise you that billionaires can, and do. “Instead, Newsom called for the passage of a nationwide billionaire tax, which he described as “a true minimum tax on billionaires — a modern…