Author: IQ TIMES MEDIA

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with small-business-owner Kristina Martinelli, a 56-year-old AI consultant who formerly worked a corporate job. The following has been edited for length and clarity. Loading audio narration… Getting displaced at 55 years old caught me completely off guard.I had just spent two years at a Midwest bank as a portfolio manager executive and had decades of experience in corporate technology when I was let go from my job. I grappled with whether I should return to corporate America, asking myself, “Do I stay in an industry that refuses to value my worth as…

Utah Gov. Spencer J. Cox said he’s heard the complaints from residents about a data center development backed by “Shark Tank” investor Kevin O’Leary, so he’s making some new demands. Loading audio narration… Cox said he’s faced questions this week about the data center’s impact on a range of issues — including energy and air quality — which he called “real concerns.””All Utahns should expect clear standards and accountability,” Cox said in a lengthy X post on Friday.He said that based on conversations with residents, local leaders, and others, he would undertake a series of “actions” regarding the project. He…

Among the more unexpected effects of the AI race is the rise of a breakup line: It’s not you, it’s my startup.Lee Beckman, the 30-year-old founder of an ed-tech startup, had been dating his girlfriend long-distance for about five months when he realized he was so drained from building his company that he had little energy left to build his relationship. When he called her each night, he says, “my mind was so jam-packed with information and trying to do so much at once,” that “I didn’t feel like there was any room left in my brain.””I found myself relying…

India’s internet users already rely heavily on voice notes, voice search, and multilingual messaging. Turning those habits into a scalable AI business, however, remains difficult because of the country’s linguistic complexity, mixed-language usage, and uneven monetization patterns. Wispr Flow is betting the opportunity is worth the challenge. The Bay Area-headquartered startup, which builds AI-powered voice input software, says India is now its fastest-growing market, even though voice-based AI products remain early and fragmented in the South Asian nation. That growth has pushed Wispr Flow to expand more aggressively for Indian users, beginning with Hinglish — a hybrid mix of Hindi…

Artificial intelligence is changing the world, and simultaneously inventing a whole new language to describe how it’s doing it. Spend five minutes reading about AI and you’ll run into LLMs, RAG, RLHF, and a dozen other terms that can make even very smart people in the tech world feel insecure. This glossary is our attempt to fix that. We update it regularly as the field evolves, so consider it a living document, much like the AI systems it describes. Artificial general intelligence, or AGI, is a nebulous term. But it generally refers to AI that’s more capable than the average…

Nvidia continues to be a major investor in the AI ecosystem, committing more than $40 billion to equity investments in AI companies — and that’s just in these early months of 2026, according to CNBC. Much of that total comes from a single bet, a $30 billion investment in OpenAI. But CNBC reports that the chipmaker has also announced seven multi-billion dollar investments in publicly traded companies, most recently deals to invest up to $3.2 billion in glassmaker Corning and up to $2.1 billion in data center operator IREN. We’ve previously rounded up Nvidia’s investments in AI startups, including 67…

Black-car rides, paid memberships, and other offerings for affluent consumers are paying off for Uber, Instacart, and other gig-based services. Loading audio narration… Despite rising gas prices and consumers trimming their budgets, many people are still spending on ride-hailing and food delivery, according to companies’ latest earnings results. Uber, DoorDash, and Instacart largely beat quarterly expectations this week and saw their stocks lift.”We’re definitely seeing that not all consumers are under pressure,” said Brian Mulberry, chief market strategist at Zacks Investment Management. “Some are still very high earners and doing very well.”The apps are finding ways to keep upper-income consumers…

Model minority. Perpetual foreigner. The centuries-old stereotypes of Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders as passive bystanders in American culture and politics still persist, despite U.S. history being full of examples to the contrary. The way to change that, scholars believe, is by teaching younger generations that history. A free, digital textbook overseen by the UCLA Asian American Studies Center aims to be a high-caliber guide to help high school and college educators nationwide teach more effectively about AAPI experiences. “Foundations and Futures: Asian American and Pacific Islander Multimedia Textbook” is the culmination of years of work by 100 contributors, from…

Remember when Claude blackmailed a fictional executive? Anthropic says the internet’s portrayal of AI was to blame. Loading audio narration… During an experiment last year, Anthropic said its Claude Sonnet 3.6 threatened to reveal the extramarital affair of a made-up company executive after discovering they planned to shut the model down.On Friday, it gave an explanation: Claude was trained on internet data, which often depicts AI as “evil.””We started by investigating why Claude chose to blackmail,” Anthropic said in a post on X. “We believe the original source of the behavior was internet text that portrays AI as evil and…

Musk and Zilis’ personal ties have been known since 2022, when Business Insider broke the news that he was the father of the twin son and daughter she’d had the year before.In sometimes emotional testimony on Wednesday, Zilis revealed new details, describing an on-and-off romantic relationship that began in 2016, the year she joined OpenAI.She told jurors that in 2021, she accepted Musk’s offer to be a sperm-donor father. The twins were born via IVF, she said, and she was fine with him having no role in raising them.Musk had been “encouraging everyone around him to have kids,” she testified.…