Author: IQ TIMES MEDIA

What do gremlins, raccoons, and pigeons have in common? They’re all explicitly referenced in the instructions for Codex. Loading audio narration… OpenAI’s instructions for its coding agent have a personality guide. It tells Codex to have a “vivid inner life” and a “good ear.” It also tells the agent to get out of fairytale land, as one X user pointed out.”Never talk about goblins, gremlins, raccoons, trolls, ogres, pigeons, or other animals or creatures unless it is absolutely and unambiguously relevant to the user’s query,” the source code reads.The sentence appears four times in the code.In the prior days, some…

Google Photos on Wednesday announced a new AI-powered feature that will soon turn photos of your clothes into a digital closet where you can create new outfit ideas, and even virtually try on your creations. Yes, the idea takes obvious inspiration from Cher’s iconic virtual wardrobe featured in the movie “Clueless,” where she could scroll through her various ensembles while deciding what to wear. Google says the new feature will leverage AI technology to automatically create a copy of your wardrobe that’s based on the pieces of clothing appearing in your Google Photos library. From the app, you’ll be able…

Google announced on Wednesday a new wave of AI-powered features coming to Google TV, alongside a dedicated short-form video feed that brings YouTube Shorts directly to the home screen. At the center of this update are more Gemini capabilities. Within the Gemini tab, a “Create” button lets users experiment with generative AI tools Nano Banana and Veo. These are rolling out first on Gemini-enabled TCL TVs in the U.S., with broader device support expected later. Nano Banana, Google’s image-generation and editing model, lets users transform photos using simple voice prompts. Users can swap outfits, change backgrounds, or generate entirely new…

No pressure, but five companies carrying the market report earnings over the next 48 hours. Loading audio narration… Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, and Microsoft all report today after the bell. Apple closes things out on Thursday. In total, more than $15 trillion in market capitalization is telling investors how they’re doing.Their massive size isn’t the only important thing. Since almost all these companies are vying for AI supremacy, their success (or failure) is a report card on the technology reshaping everything.BI’s Joe Ciolli, author of the great First Trade newsletter, breaks down what to look out for with each company. We’ve…

In a Pacific conflict, the nearest U.S. drone factory is thousands of miles away. Ships and planes carrying parts to the front lines would be vulnerable to attack. Defense startup Firestorm Labs thinks the answer is a drone factory that fits inside a shipping container. The company announced on Wednesday that it has raised $82 million in Series B funding led by Washington Harbour Partners with participation from NEA, Ondas, In-Q-Tel, Lockheed Martin, Booz Allen Ventures, Geodesic, Motley Fool Ventures, and others, bringing its total funding to $153 million. Firestorm didn’t start out as a factory company. It began as…

Shapes, an app where humans and AI characters chat together in shared group conversations, is emerging from stealth with $8 million in seed funding. Think Discord, but with AI characters alongside humans.  Founded in 2022, Shapes has more than 400,000 monthly active users. The app’s founders, Anushk Mittal and Noorie Dhingra, believe that Shapes can address issues around “AI Psychosis,” which refers to cases where prolonged interactions with AI chatbots or AI companions can cause individuals to develop delusions or paranoia.  Instead of isolating people with one-on-one interactions with AI, Shapes allows people to connect with AI within their everyday…

At a US military base in central California, four-seater all-terrain vehicles roam hillside trails. This is a training exercise, but not for the people in the vehicles: This is an effort to train AI models to enter conflict zones.  The autonomous military ATVs are operated by Scout AI, a startup founded in 2024 by Coby Adcock and Collin Otis, that calls itself a “frontier lab for defense.” The company said on Wednesday that it has raised a $100 million Series A round, led by Align Ventures and Draper Associates, following its $15 million seed round in January 2025. Scout invited…

University of Washington computer science professor Dan Grossman said it’s time to evolve the push to “Learn to Code.” Loading audio narration… “I think that part of what we were teaching a few years ago, when we had people learn to code, was a lot of focus on getting all the tiny details right,” Grossman, who is also vice director of the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science and Engineering, told Business Insider. “Where did you put a semicolon versus a comma? What exactly is the word for something? Things like that.”Grossman said AI coding tools have changed the…

Loading audio narration… In early December, Anthropic’s CEO, Dario Amodei, suggested that some rivals were overextending themselves in AI compute.”There are some players who are YOLOing,” Amodei said, hinting that rival OpenAI had signed too many AI compute deals and might struggle to afford them.But as demand surges and systems strain, the balance is shifting. OpenAI’s aggressive push to lock in capacity is starting to look more pragmatic, while Anthropic faces outages and growing pains of its own, a reminder that in the AI race, having enough compute may matter just as much as building better models.”Anthropic, in particular, is…

Snap CEO Evan Spiegel says AI is moving so fast, it’s already reshaping how his company operates. Loading audio narration… In an interview on the “Cheeky Pint” podcast, Spiegel said more than two-thirds of new code at Snap is now written by AI. He pointed to rapid advances in tools like Anthropic’s Claude.”Claude is transforming software development, full stop, at Snap in every part of our organization,” he said. “That’s happened really quickly. I think the rate at which these models are getting better is just extraordinary.”That shift is starting to change how companies allocate resources, Spiegel said. As building…