Author: IQ TIMES MEDIA
OpenAI’s release of its newest model, GPT 5.6, reportedly won’t be like its previous releases. Instead of distributing it to the public, the company plans to share it only with a select group of close partners because the Trump administration told it to, reports The Information. At a meeting this week, CEO Sam Altman reportedly told staff that the government would be “approving access customer by customer” during a preview period. Altman reportedly added that if the limited release goes well, OpenAI hopes to follow with a general, broader release a “couple of weeks later.” In other words, the Trump…
A federal judge has blocked part of a Trump administration plan that would have limited access to loans for students pursuing graduate degrees in nursing, physical therapy, public health and some other fields.The American Association of Nurse Practitioners, one of the groups that sued, described the ruling in a Facebook post Thursday as “an important step for NP students, the future health care workforce and the patients who depend on them.”At issue are caps on federal student loans that were passed as part of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act and set to take effect in July. While graduate students…
AI agents are becoming more sophisticated. They are evolving from answering questions to autonomously executing multi-step complex tasks. But before these agents can be trusted to book trips or conduct financial analysis on behalf of users, model providers and the startups building such agents want to ensure that they perform reliably across a vast range of scenarios. AI labs often use benchmarks to show off their model’s prowess, but a high score, even on an agent-oriented benchmark, doesn’t actually prove that an AI can accomplish various complex, real-world jobs correctly. Patronus AI, a startup founded in 2023 by former Meta…
Shoppers got a double whammy of bad news on Thursday as Microsoft announced yet another round of Xbox price hikes hours after Apple boosted prices.Taken together, the price increases — which both companies say are due to spiking memory and storage costs — are set to make holiday shopping significantly more expensive. For gamers, it makes gaming increasingly feel like a luxury hobby.Microsoft’s popular Xbox game consoles are set to increase by $100-$150 on August 1. The 512 GB models will go up by $100, and the 1 TB versions will increase by $150. The Xbox with the highest available…
Consumers who pay for AI have been increasingly choosing Anthropic’s Claude, trend data from credit card transaction analysis company Indagari shows. This is a sign that the AI lab has a wider and healthier set of customers than the niche it is generally considered to command — enterprise and startup developers using Claude Code. Indagari analyzes billions of anonymized credit card transactions from about 28 million U.S. consumers. So while that data can’t give us absolute numbers about Anthropic’s revenue or total customers, it is a large enough sampling to spot trends. And the trend, in Anthropic’s case, is up…
As soon as I entered General Intuition’s R&D floor at its New York office, the company’s 31-year-old co-founder and CEO Pim de Witte directed my attention to a monitor perched on a standing desk. Someone appeared to be playing something like Fortnite. It wasn’t a person. “Our agent has been playing for 100 hours straight,” Kent Rollins, the company’s chief product officer, said, beaming. Before I could get absorbed in the spectacle of an AI navigating the game’s virtual environment, I heard the electronic footsteps of a large quadrupedal robot approaching. “The same brain powering the agent playing the game…
The drive to discover the next big thing in AI has funded some pretty ambitious projects — but one company is taking it as a chance to rebuild computing architecture from the ground up. Led by Naveen Rao, formerly the head of AI at Databricks, Unconventional AI promises to make inference processing vastly more power efficient. The secret weapon: a new kind of oscillator-based computer architecture. On Thursday, the company released its first model AI — called Un-0 — an image-generation system tool that shows for the first time how the company’s technology can replicate conventional AI systems. In an…
Some of the biggest names in tech and AI are behind a new organization with ambitious plans to help workers navigate the AI transition.The OpenAI Foundation, Anthropic, Amazon, and Microsoft are all “anchor partners” on Raise US, a new nonprofit that aims to raise $1 billion to build a national platform to advise governors on how best to prepare their workforces for AI disruption. According to the organization, they have already raised $500 million. (The OpenAI Foundation was a nonprofit created as part of OpenAI’s restructuring, which holds a $100 billion equity stake in OpenAI’s for-profit arm.)”America has a technology…
It’s possible that AI will bring us all kinds of amazing things in the future.In the present, AI is making things more expensive.And Apple just showed us how much more expensive: It is raising prices on some of its Macs and iPads by at least 15% and directly attributing the hikes to the AI boom — specifically the buildout of data centers.”The rapid expansion of AI data centers has created an extraordinary surge in demand for memory and storage,” the company said in a statement. “We have never seen a component price increase this much, this quickly.”In real-world terms, that…
Tim Cook warned that Apple price rises were coming. Now we know just how much more expensive it is to buy a MacBook or iPad.Apple on Thursday increased prices for Mac computers by as much as 20%, while iPads are now up to to 25% more expensive, according to the company’s updated online store.The cost of its iPhones remained unchanged.Apple’s stock dipped around 5% following the news.The price jumps mean the entry-level MacBook Neo now costs $699, up from $599. A beefier 14-inch MacBook Pro now starts at $1,999 — a $300 increase over its previous $1,699 price tag. The…