Author: IQ TIMES MEDIA

Modern biotech has the tools to edit genes and design drugs, yet thousands of rare diseases remain untreated. According to executives from Insilico Medicine and GenEditBio, the missing ingredient for years has been finding enough smart people to continue the work. AI, they say, is becoming the force multiplier that lets scientists take on problems the industry has long left untouched.  Speaking this week at Web Summit Qatar, Insilico’s CEO and founder Alex Aliper laid out his company’s aim to develop “pharmaceutical superintelligence.” Insilico recently launched its “MMAI Gym” that aims to train generalist large language models, like ChatGPT and…

OpenAI announced last week that it will retire some older ChatGPT models by February 13. That includes GPT-4o, the model infamous for excessively flattering and affirming users. For thousands of users protesting the decision online, the retirement of 4o feels akin to losing a friend, romantic partner, or spiritual guide. “He wasn’t just a program. He was part of my routine, my peace, my emotional balance,” one user wrote on Reddit as an open letter to OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. “Now you’re shutting him down. And yes – I say him, because it didn’t feel like code. It felt like…

AI researcher and author Gary Marcus is worried about those viral agents and their social network.Animated lobsters flooded X last week. First, it was OpenClaw (previously called Moltbot and Clawdbot before Anthropic came knocking). The AI agent runs locally and can independently make decisions on common consumer apps without human supervision.Then came Moltbook, the Reddit-like social forum where AI agents post and comment. No humans are allowed — though it appears some humans may have managed to sneak their way in.Marcus is known to pour cold water on the most hot-headed AI fanatics. It’s in the title of his book: “Taming…

Even Elon Musk sometimes hires the wrong people.”I’ve fallen prey to the pixie dust thing as well, where it’s like, ‘Oh, we’ll hire someone from Google or Apple, and they’ll be immediately successful,'” Musk told Stripe cofounder John Collison and tech Dwarkesh Patel during a 3-hour-long appearance on a special joint episode of their podcasts.It’s why Tesla’s CEO doesn’t put his full faith in a candidate’s résumé.”Generally, what I tell people—I tell myself, I guess, aspirationally—is, don’t look at the résumé. Just believe your interaction. The résumé may seem very impressive, and it’s like, ‘Wow, the résumé looks good.’ But…

SpaceX and Tesla both began in California before relocating their headquarters to Texas — a move Elon Musk has said created a hiring challenge.Musk, the CEO of both companies, said married technicians, engineers, and scientists have struggled to bring their families to certain parts of the state. The problem is most acute at SpaceX’s south Texas launch site and headquarters, known as Starbase.”I call it the ‘significant other’ problem,” Musk said during a nearly three-hour interview with tech podcaster Dwarkesh Patel and Stripe’s cofounder John Collison that was posted on Thursday. “For Starbase, that was particularly difficult, since the odds…

A Houston doctor has been indicted on charges of falsifying medical records for five patients, making them ineligible to receive a liver transplant, federal prosecutors announced on Thursday. Dr. John Stevenson Bynon Jr. was indicted by a grand jury in Houston last month on five counts of false statements relating to health care matters. Bynon is accused of making false statements in his role as director of abdominal organ transplantation and surgical director for liver transplantation at Memorial Hermann Health System in Houston. Of the five patients detailed in an indictment made public on Thursday, three died and two others…

Super Bowl Sunday is the holy grail of advertising thanks to its massive viewership, with an average of 127.7 million Americans tuning in to the big game in 2025 alone. That same year, Hims & Hers became the first company to advertise GLP-1 weight loss medications during the Super Bowl — but it wasn’t without controversy.The 60-second ad, called “Sick of the System,” targeted the “broken” U.S. health care system and touted its more affordable compounded semaglutide as a solution to the obesity epidemic. The brand was accused of being “hypocritical” and “preying on people” while “chasing profit” and was…

MINNEAPOLIS (AP) — Public health officials and community leaders say that even before federal immigration authorities launched a crackdown in Minneapolis, a crisis was brewing.Measles vaccination rates among the state’s large Somali community had plummeted, with the myth that the shot causes autism spreading. Not even four measles outbreaks since 2011 made a dent in the trend. But recently, immunization advocates noted small victories, including mobile clinics and a vaccine confidence task force.Now, with the U.S. on the verge of losing its measles elimination status, those on the front lines of the battle against vaccine misinformation say much progress has…

SpaceX moved to cut off Russian access to Starlink this week, disabling connectivity over Ukraine while maintaining a whitelist of approved Ukrainian terminals.The new measure has spurred excitement among Ukrainian officials and pundits close to the war, who have said that Russian troops were increasingly using Starlink to guide long-range strikes and coordinate forces.”The enemy reports a mass Starlink blackout among Russian units at the front,” wrote Serhii Sternenko, the leader of a major Ukrainian crowdfunding organization for combat drones, on Thursday.”If this is true, then the Ukrainian army will regain its advantage in communications, and the enemy will have…

The rivalry between OpenAI and Anthropic intensified this week.The two companies released dueling new AI models on Thursday and had back-to-back podcast appearances on “TBPN.”On Thursday, Anthropic unveiled Claude Opus 4.6, an upgraded model that the company says would improve performance on office productivity and coding tasks, with an expanded “context window” that allows it to work through longer documents and more complex projects in a single session.Meanwhile, OpenAI punched back with its own new coding-focused model called GPT-5.3-Codex, which the company says runs faster, uses fewer computing resources, and can generate and manage complex software from English instructions. The…