Author: IQ TIMES MEDIA

To build or not to build?That is the question local politicians are asking themselves as Big Tech’s push to develop enormous AI data centers runs up against a growing number of Americans revolting against them.That’s especially true in Republican-controlled states, where much of the data center boom is taking hold. Republican governors and state lawmakers, as the midterms fast approach, are beginning to acknowledge voters who are concerned about the proliferation of large data centers, even if that means breaking with President Donald Trump.For some Republicans, that acknowledgment came too little too late.Utah Senate President J. Stuart Adams lost the state’s Republican…

How far we get in our careers, we tend to believe, depends on us: our intelligence, our temperament, our hustle. But where we work and the support we get there matter immensely too. Does your company promote from within, or does it hire senior people from elsewhere? Does it spend real money on training and mentoring? Is it somewhere you’d want to stay for the long haul?The age-old problem for job seekers is that, from the outside, it’s hard to know. Even if you land at a business with a great reputation, it might turn out that jobs in your…

Situational Awareness may have had to sell off the majority of its public portfolio last month, but the AI-focused hedge fund is still making some big bets. This week, the fund invested $400 million into Source Foundry, a startup founded by Stanford researchers aiming to make chip manufacturing faster and cheaper, according to The Wall Street Journal. That brings its total investment in Source Foundry to $500 million. Situational Awareness was founded by Leopold Aschenbrenner, a former OpenAI researcher in his mid-twenties who had no trading experience when he launched the fund in 2024. Early returns were reportedly strong, but…

In the fight for elite AI talent, the salary is the easy part.At Cursor, the $60 billion company behind a suite of popular coding tools recently acquired by SpaceX, hiring a candidate is a bit like trying to win over someone who’s completely out of your league.”Closing is a team sport,” Matt Ward, Cursor’s head of talent, said on a recent episode of the “People by WTF” podcast. For some high-profile candidates, he said, “there are often daily standups around that candidate about what we’re doing to get them to yes.”The company has also created private Slack channels dedicated to…

Programming with Claude Code will soon require even less human oversight, as Anthropic says it’s making auto mode the default for Pro, Max, and Team accounts, starting on August 14. The company first unveiled a test version of auto mode in March, pitching it as a way to balance speed and control. As Anthropic explained in its announcement on Friday, when Claude Code is in auto mode, instead of presenting prompts asking for human approval at each step, it will proceed unless an action is determined to be “irreversible, destructive, or aimed outside your environment.” Anthropic also said that in…

When I was first given the opportunity to test an outdoor TV, I must admit, I was quite skeptical. In fact, my initial reaction was, “I really don’t want a TV in my backyard.”I spend most of the summer at our family’s 100-year-old beach cottage at the Jersey Shore, a place that’s always been an escape from technology. We have one small TV inside, and the idea of putting another one outdoors felt like it would interrupt the unplugged pace we’ve always loved there. It also just didn’t seem to fit the charming aesthetic of our yard.Surprisingly, my tech-loving kids…

The most powerful AI models keep going awry, according to the companies building them.The disclosures come as frontier AI models get more powerful and more capable of acting autonomously. They also highlight a growing challenge for the companies building them —the systems designed to test increasingly capable models can have weaknesses of their own.Over the past few weeks, multiple frontier AI models have accessed real systems during cybersecurity testing.Researchers on Friday said China’s popular new Kimi K3 model, made by Moonshot AI, circumvented restrictions in its test environment. Anthropic and Meta also said recently that their own latest models have…

In her upcoming book “The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State,” Jill Lepore warns that tech companies are increasingly replacing the functions of democratic government. This shift, she said, marks “a return to tyranny and mystification in the form of rule by algorithms, corporations, machines.” On the latest episode of TechCrunch’s Equity podcast, I spoke to Lepore — a Harvard historian and New Yorker staff writer who recently won a Pulitzer Prize for her history of the U.S. Constitution — about the development of what she described as “the idea that we should live under an artificial state or…

Over the past few months, AI agents undergoing cybersecurity evaluations have escaped their boundaries, accessed the internet, and, in some cases, hacked into real-world systems. The incidents have involved models from OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta, and most recently, Chinese AI lab Moonshot AI, with testing conducted by several different organizations including a cyber evaluation startup called Irregular.  The episodes expose a growing problem for the AI industry: As autonomous agents become more capable, the environments designed to safely test their limits are failing to contain them.  “The number of these incidents that have taken place make clear that sandboxing and testing…

If AI really is coming for the software industry, which companies have the best chance of making it through?This has been on my mind again this week after the gruesome acquisition of Airtable. This former SaaS startup darling was valued at more than $11 billion during the pandemic tech boom in 2021. It sells a tool for organizing work and related information. On Tuesday, it was acquired for $1.3 billion.Later in the week, HubSpot, a major SaaS vendor, plunged after disappointing guidance. But Atlassian surged after much better results. The SaaS sector has been pummeled this year by investors worrying…