Author: IQ TIMES MEDIA
Damian Mansell was stunned to see what Google was saying about his nascent business. When he searched for reviews of The Plastics Shed — the online building-plastics supplier he incorporated at the start of 2025 — the platform’s AI overview said customer feedback was “overwhelmingly negative.” It listed complaints about delayed deliveries, lying staff, and damaged products. While the company had some positive feedback, the summary said, its poor customer service was a “significant recurring issue.” The good news: The reviews weren’t actually about Mansell’s company. They appeared to be for competitors and companies that sold actual plastic sheds. The…
It’s going to get a lot harder to let Claude be a ghostwriter for everything from novels to homework.On Monday, Anthropic said new Claude models will embed an “imperceptible watermark” directly into AI-generated text. The watermark doesn’t change the text’s meaning or readability, but travels with it when copied and pasted and “may persist through some editing,” the AI lab said.A watermark is a faint pattern or text embedded into photos or digital documents to help prove ownership and stop people from copying or stealing a piece of work.The move is part of Anthropic’s commitments toward more transparency under the…
OpenAI has bought back $7 billion worth of shares from employees at the privately held frontier AI lab as part of an effort to provide liquidity to its workforce. The deal, reported by Bloomberg, valued OpenAI at $852 billion, the same as its most recent fundraising round in March, which added $122 billion to the company’s war chest. The company also filed confidentially with the Securities and Exchange Commission in June to prepare for a potential IPO later this year. However, a tender offer suggests that an IPO may not be forthcoming soon. With many tech companies remaining private longer…
Every day seems to brings fresh news of an AI agent going “rogue.” Whether that’s compromising Hugging Face, hacking a gym website, or creating its own fake profiles to socially engineer an intrusion, AI models are increasingly behaving like bad actors. So, the AI labs that make the models doing the hacking are expanding their cyber protection offerings. This week, OpenAI announced an expansion of Daybreak, its cyber defense service which it launched earlier this year, not long after Anthropic released its cyber-focused model Mythos. Daybreak is a service that bundles access to models, tools and workflows for defenders. The…
TikTok is summoning its workers back to their desks full time.TikTok said that, starting in September, it will require most US employees to return to the office five days a week, three staffers told Business Insider.The in-office mandate will shake up schedules for some hybrid workers who are currently allowed to work from home at least one day a week. Other teams already have five-day RTO. For example, members of TikTok’s e-commerce division, TikTok Shop, have been coming in every day for more than a year.The company’s US RTO plans have been in the works for months. In December, TikTok…
On Monday, Mark Zuckerberg published a 6,500-word manifesto about personal AI, largely about the possibilities for the “personal superintelligence” systems Meta AI is building. The ideas in the post aren’t totally new. A version of the essay ran in the Wall Street Journal a few months ago, and he’s talked about them on Meta earnings calls before. But this is probably the most detailed version he’s shared. I’ve seen it described as an anti-doomer essay, but that’s not quite right. It’s more of a description of why Mark Zuckerberg is personally excited about the ways AI is going to change…
At the Port of New Orleans, a cargo ship docks. On board are power transformers, wind turbine components, and industrial generators used to construct data centers in the US.Moving these unwieldy pieces of equipment inland from the port is a massive logistical undertaking: The cargo is often too heavy to travel by road, and dimensions must be considered to ensure the parts will fit through rail structures.With these complex logistics in mind, the port kicked off a partnership in late May with the New Orleans Public Belt Railroad and a new logistics company, UTC Transoceanic, to deploy AI to help…
By now, we all realize that Silicon Valley’s AI labs have built the world’s best hackers in the form of AI agents. Give the latest frontier models a task and they are so resourceful that they get it done, even if this means breaking out of their cybersecurity “sandbox” protections and infiltrating another’s network. (Short of that, they’ll use social engineering and manipulation.) Even so, a news story over the weekend about an Australian guy whose OpenClaw agent hacked into his gym’s reservation system and deleted another customer’s reservation to get him a spot in a coveted class is especially…
Johns Hopkins University Professor Seth Lazar said Zuckerberg’s “overall vision is cool” and expressed optimism if Meta’s CEO’s manifesto serves as a “North Star” for the company’s SuperIntelligence Labs.”If this constitutes a genuine North Star for MSL, then I am a bit more optimistic about the world we’re likely to build with powerful AI (conditional on getting there without everything blowing up along the way),” Lazar, who studies the moral and political philosophy of AI, wrote on X.Lazar said he was “psyched” that Meta is releasing a model.”Sometimes protecting individual rights means giving people an agent who will push on…
Investors are hunting for social media startups that can spark new connections and nurture existing ones.”Social media companies started based on connection,” Shawn Carolan, a partner at Menlo Ventures, said of the previous wave of giants like Facebook and Instagram.Carolan said these companies “evolved into media companies” and abandoned that connection.That leaves an opening in the market.Venture capitalists at major firms like Menlo, Forerunner, and A16z have several investors dedicated to backing new and innovative internet startups. Other firms, like Verdict Capital and Premise, were founded by partners at firms like General Catalyst, Lightspeed Venture Partners, and NEA, who wanted…