Author: IQ TIMES MEDIA
Two national church-state advocacy groups are warning the Duval County School Board to end its practice of opening board meetings with prayer. The groups received separate citizen complaints, which prompted them to send letters to board members.Both groups — the Freedom From Religion Foundation, which sent the board its letter on Friday, and Americans United for Separation of Church and State, which sent a similar letter in November — say that to start school-sponsored events like board meetings with prayer is a violation of the First Amendment’s Establishment Clause. That’s the doctrine preventing the government from “establishing” a religion and…
AI scientist, entrepreneur, and investor, Rana el Kaliouby, is worried that AI could become another ‘boys’ club’ in the tech industry. At the SXSW conference in Austin on Sunday, el Kaliouby shared her view that a lack of diversity in the field could lead to economic disadvantages for women in tech, with further ramifications. “I think AI today is a boys’ club. I think diversity is not a very popular conversation topic these days, but I think it’s so important because AI is creating incredible economic opportunity,” el Kaliouby said on stage, when asked if the perception of AI being…
Microsoft is continuing a major leadership shakeup by creating a new combined team for its commercial and consumer Copilot products, under a new executive. The company is also moving Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman to its superintelligence team, focused on building frontier AI models.The reorganization underscores how high the stakes have become to dominate AI in Big Tech. Microsoft is trying to solve two problems at once: turning its sprawling lineup of Copilot products into a coherent platform for both businesses and consumers, while also reducing its reliance on OpenAI by building its own frontier models.The structural changes also reflect…
World, co-founded by Sam Altman, is dedicated to creating what it calls “proof of human” tech — ID verification tools for an internet increasingly overrun by AI-generated content of dubious quality. The connection isn’t lost that Altman’s other company, OpenAI, has been widely blamed for creating a whole lot of that slop (though one could argue he saw the problem coming when he founded World). This week, Tools for Humanity (TFH), the startup behind World, released the beta of a new verification tool — this one designed to support the build-out of agentic commerce, the fast-growing practice of using AI…
Companies are rapidly embracing AI coding tools, and the payoff is showing up in how quickly software gets shipped. Loading audio narration… That’s the central finding of a sweeping new benchmark study from engineering intelligence platform Jellyfish, which analyzed data from more than 700 companies, 200,000 engineers, and 20 million pull requests.Adoption is already mainstream. Across companies in the dataset, median AI tool adoption stands at 63%, and 64% of companies are now generating a majority of their code with AI assistance. Weekly usage rates have steadily climbed over the past year, with a growing share of engineers using AI…
Gamma, a platform that lets you use AI to create presentations and websites, is launching a new image-generation product for making marketing assets as it seeks to better compete with the likes of Canva and Adobe. The company says its new product, called Gamma Imagine, will let users employ text prompts to create brand-specific assets like interactive charts and visualizations, marketing collateral, social graphics, and infographics. Gamma currently provides more than 100 templates, which you can use alongside its AI tools to build the kind of assets that you need. To power its data-driven asset generation features, the company is…
Electricity is a key raw material for artificial intelligence, but new processing techniques outstrip the ability of data center operators to manage their relationship with the power grid, forcing them to throttle down by as much as 30%. “There is so much power squandered in these AI factories,” Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said during a keynote speech at the company’s annual GTC customer conference. “Every unused watt is revenue lost,” the company proclaimed during the annual presentation. Today, startup Niv-AI has emerged from stealth with $12 million in seed funding to solve this problem by precisely measuring GPU power use…
Uber’s former CEO says there’s a clear leader in the robotaxi race. Loading audio narration… Speaking on an episode of the “All-In” podcast published on Monday, Travis Kalanick said Waymo had pulled ahead of Tesla as the two companies roll out autonomous vehicles across the US.”Waymo obviously is ahead; the existence proof is there. Their issue is manufacturing and scale and urgency and fierceness,” said Kalanick, adding that the Google-backed startup’s desire to win and ability to expand its service quickly would be key to its success.The former Uber boss said Tesla had the technical “fundamentals” needed to execute its…
Scientists are making rapid progress toward a long-awaited goal that could help to reshape cancer care: mRNA cancer vaccines with the potential to significantly boost the immune system’s ability to fight and eliminate tumors.Since the early 2000s, there have been over 120 promising clinical trials testing the use of mRNA vaccines to treat multiple cancer types, such as melanoma, brain, breast, lung and prostate cancer.At the same time, misinformation about so-called turbo cancer began spreading widely on social media, with mainstream media outlets first reporting on it in late 2022. Turbo cancer refers to the false claim that COVID-19 mRNA…
March 17 (Reuters) – Pfizer said on Tuesday its experimental combination reduced the risk of disease progression or death by 40% in patients with breast cancer.Here are some details:* Pfizer’s atirmociclib in combination with fulvestrant, ahormone therapy, was being tested in a mid-stage study inpatients whose cancer had spread and had received priortreatment. * The experimental drug combo was being compared tofulvestrant or everolimus plus exemestane, a widely usedtargeted therapy regimen for postmenopausal women with thecommon type of breast cancer * Pfizer said the study enrolled patients whose cancerreturned soon after treatment with widely used CDK4/6 drugs, agroup that is…