Author: IQ TIMES MEDIA
For decades, IT services firms made billions of dollars by allowing companies to outsource tech tasks like customizing, integrating, and maintaining enterprise software. Vishal Sikka, former CEO of Infosys, one of the largest such firms in India, is now betting that AI can do much of that work instead. His new startup, Hang Ten Systems, has raised a $32 million seed round led by Mayfield, it said Wednesday, with a strategic investment from Aramco Ventures and participation from angel investors. The startup, whose board includes Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang, said it helps enterprises continuously build, modify, and operate software using…
Meta is walking back its stance on forcing engineers to join a task force focused on AI training, according to an internal memo obtained by Business Insider and four people familiar with the matter.Last month, Meta reassigned 7,000 employees to units such as an Applied AI task force to help train Meta’s coming AI models.On Wednesday, Meta sent a memo about this task force, saying the company will now “defer to each individual’s choice.” The company sent the email to employees who had been “drafted,” as some described its Applied AI task force.”As I emphasized before, personal agency will remain…
Shares of Cerebras Systems dropped almost 20% on Wednesday, even after the company delivered better-than-expected first-quarter earnings on Tuesday. That’s because in its first earnings report since going public, the AI chipmaker forecast a narrower gross margin in its core business, guiding for a full-year margin of 38% to 41%, compared with the 47% reported in the first quarter. The stock hit a new low on Wednesday, almost hitting the company’s IPO price. Cerebras CEO Andrew Feldman told CNBC that investors had misunderstood the company’s margin guidance, noting that Cerebras will need to rent back some equipment from one of…
Whether AI is already replacing jobs is the subject of fierce debate. Tech layoffs hit their highest single month total in years in May, and AI was the most-cited reason, according to outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas. Software engineering, in theory, is the professional field most vulnerable to automation, given the rapid adoption of AI-powered coding tools. However, researchers at venture firm SignalFire say the hiring data tells a different story. “The rationale given for lots of layoffs is consistently AI, and specifically they’ll say AI with respect to code; they’ll say one engineer could do the job of however many…
Top AI researchers Jonas Adler and Alexander Pritzel are leaving Google for Anthropic, according to Bloomberg. Per the report, Adler and Pritzel played key roles in the development of Google’s Gemini model. TechCrunch reached out to Google for comment. These departures are part of a concerning trend for Google. Last week, legendary AI researcher Noam Shazeer announced that he was leaving Google for OpenAI. Shazeer had been at Google since 2000, save for the three years he spent building his controversial chatbot startup, Character.AI (which Google effectively acqui-hired for $2.7 billion, in part to bring Shazeer back to work on…
The AI boom has fueled dozens of new startups and minted a new class of billionaires. It has also produced a serious shortage of memory chips — a critical component for compute-hungry AI models — which some predict could persist through 2027. This era of RAMageddon isn’t just a corporate problem. As demand spikes and squeezes supply, prices are rising and trickling down to consumers. Apple CEO Tim Cook warned just a week ago that price increases for its products are unavoidable. But amid this Mad Max-esque fight for memory chips, some companies are coming out ahead. Micron, the largest…
Humanoid robot maker Agility Robotics said Wednesday that it plans to go public in a deal valuing the company at about $2.5 billion.The deal would make Agility, which builds a robot called Digit, the first humanoid-focused company to go public in the US.The startup, which spun out of Oregon State University in 2015, plans to merge with Churchill Capital Corp XI, a special-purpose acquisition company (SPAC) led by former Citigroup executive Michael Klein. It is expected to trade under the ticker AGLT.”The timing is right, both for our company and for the market,” Jonathan Hurst, Agility’s cofounder and chief robot…
Mark Zuckerberg has spotted a trend — once again, after others got there first. When videos exploded on TikTok, the Meta chief built Reels. When users began fleeing Twitter, he launched Threads. When dating apps flourished, he introduced Facebook Dating. And now, as online betting booms, the 42-year-old is entering the business — a few years late.Internally, the project is called “Arena,” and it is set to become an app competing with platforms such as Polymarket and Kalshi — platforms where users can bet in real time on who will win the next election, whether the Federal Reserve will cut…
The era of tokenmaxxing is over. After the AI industry encouraged companies to max out their AI budgets earlier this year, and some companies even built employee leaderboards to encourage internal AI usage — they are now realizing just how easy it is to spend huge sums of money on AI and get little in return. We now appear to be entering the era of token rationing. Recent news has been rife with stories about AI cutbacks and now 404 Media reports that consulting firm Accenture has been attempting to stop its employees from depleting its token reserves by using…
GitHub just had its “best month ever” thanks to a growing demand for AI coding.The Microsoft-owned developer platform saw a significant jump in customer usage in June after changing how it charges for Copilot, its AI coding tool, Chief Technology Officer Vladimir Fedorov told employees during a meeting on Wednesday.”June was by far our best month ever,” Fedorov said, declining to “talk about the numbers” because the company’s financial quarter is coming to a close.The surge is a bright spot for GitHub as it competes with fast-growing rivals such as Cursor, OpenAI’s Codex, and Anthropic’s Claude Code, all of which…