Author: IQ TIMES MEDIA

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump is moving to block nearly all foreign students from entering the country to attend Harvard University, his latest attempt to choke the Ivy League school from an international pipeline that accounts for a quarter of the student body.In an executive order signed Wednesday, Trump declared that it would jeopardize national security to allow Harvard to continue hosting foreign students on its campus in Cambridge, Massachusetts.“I have determined that the entry of the class of foreign nationals described above is detrimental to the interests of the United States because, in my judgment, Harvard’s conduct has…

It’s becoming a little easier to build sophisticated robotics projects at home. Earlier this week, AI dev platform Hugging Face released an open AI model for robotics called SmolVLA. Trained on “compatibly licensed,” community-shared datasets, SmolVLA outperforms much larger models for robotics in both virtual and real-world environments, Hugging Face claims. “SmolVLA aims to democratize access to vision-language-action [VLA] models and accelerate research toward generalist robotic agents,” writes Hugging Face in a blog post. “SmolVLA is not only a lightweight yet capable model, but also a method for training and evaluating generalist robotics [technologies].” SmolVLA is a part of Hugging…

As hundreds of wildfires burn across Canada, Americans’ health could be impacted.As of Wednesday, 203 wildfires were burning in Canada, according to the Canadian Interagency Forest Fire Centre.The smoke forced health officials in the U.S. to send air quality alerts across parts of the Upper Midwest on Tuesday and caused hazy conditions in New York, according to National Weather Service NY.MORE: Why smoke from wildfires could cause a host of symptoms — even in healthy peopleReadings from AirNow show air quality alerts in the Northeast, Midwest and Great Plains range from “moderate” to “unhealthy.”Inhaling toxic smoke and ash from wildfires…

NEW YORK (AP) — President Donald Trump’s support of Pete Rose was among the factors Major League Baseball Commissioner Rob Manfred weighed when he decided last month that permanent bans by the sport ended with death, which allows the career hits leader to be considered for the Hall of Fame.Manfred announced the new interpretation on May 13, a decision that allows Rose and Shoeless Joe Jackson to be considered for a Hall committee vote in December 2027.“The president was one of a number of voices that was supportive of the idea that this was the right decision,” Manfred said Wednesday…

Smoke from Canadian wildfires is impacting multiple U.S. states, even as far south as Florida.As over 203 active fires rage in Canada as of June 4, according to the Canadian Interagency Forest Fire Center, wind carrying smoke from the fires have engulfed states in the eastern and central U.S.Many states are reporting moderate air quality levels, but conditions are worse in areas closer to the U.S.-Canadian border.Multiple states in the mid-to-upper Midwest have been flagged as unhealthy for sensitive groups and unhealthy for the overall population, regardless of health conditions, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s AirNow tracker. Areas…

Reddit is suing Anthropic for allegedly using the site’s data to train AI models without a proper licensing agreement, according to a complaint filed in a Northern California court on Wednesday. Reddit claims in the complaint that Anthropic’s unauthorized use of the site’s data for commercial purposes was unlawful, and alleges the AI startup violated Reddit’s user agreement. Reddit’s lawsuit makes it the first Big Tech company to legally challenge an AI model provider over its training data practices, joining a litany of publishers that have sued tech companies on similar grounds. The New York Times has sued OpenAI and…

“My wife taught me something,” Klarna CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski told the crowd at London SXSW. He was addressing the headlines about the company looking to hire human workers after previously saying Klarna used artificial intelligence to do work that would equate to 700 workers. “Two things can be true at the same time,” he said. Siemiatkowski said it’s true that the company looked to stop hiring human workers a few years ago and rolled out AI agents that have helped reduce the cost of customer support and increase the company’s revenue per employee. The company had 5,500 workers two years…

When you buy through our links, Business Insider may earn an affiliate commission. Learn moreThe Nintendo Switch 2 features 256GB of storage built in. Though that’s a lot more than the original Switch’s 32GB, it’s still a bit limited, especially if you plan to download a lot of games. Luckily, you can use a memory card to expand the Switch 2’s storage by up to 2TB, ensuring you have plenty of space to work with.The original Switch also supported memory cards, but while that system worked with standard microSD cards, the Switch 2 requires a new type: microSD Express. These…

AMD’s latest acquisition could help reduce Nvidia’s market dominance when it comes to AI hardware. Semiconductor giant AMD on Wednesday announced it acquired AI software optimization startup Brium. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. Brium is a startup that appears to be in stealth mode. The startup builds machine learning applications to enable AI inference, the process a trained AI model uses to draw conclusions from new data, across a variety of different hardware options, according to a blog post on Brium’s bare-bones website. Cutting through that jargon a bit, Brium can help retrofit AI software to work with…

Snap has launched a stand-alone Lens Studio iOS app and web tool, the company announced on Wednesday. The new tools are designed to make it easier for anyone to create AR Lenses through text prompts and simple editing tools. With the Lens Studio app, users will be able to do things like generate their own AI effects, add their Bitmoji, and browse trending templates to create customized Lenses. Up until now, Lens Studio has only been accessible via a desktop application for professional developers. While the desktop application will remain the primary tool for professionals, Snap says that the new…