Author: IQ TIMES MEDIA

Elon Musk says an AI-driven future will mean government handouts and citizens not needing to save for retirement, so we asked his longtime friend and fellow techno-optimist, Peter Diamandis, to break down the argument behind those claims. Loading audio narration… “Don’t worry about squirreling money away for retirement in 10 or 20 years,” Musk said on a January episode of the “Moonshots with Peter Diamandis” podcast. “If any of the things that we’ve said are true, saving for retirement will be irrelevant.””So I’m not sure I’m going to be passing that advice along,” Diamandis told Business Insider by video call,…

Apple appears to be running out of Mac Minis. Loading audio narration… The $599 base model has sold out on the Apple website in the US. As of Thursday afternoon, any memory configuration of the M4 chip Mac Mini with the standard 256 gigabytes of storage was unavailable when Business Insider checked. Other models weren’t faring much better, with options for more storage quoting wait times of over one month.Of course, custom and higher-capacity configurations often take longer to ship.Apple did not respond to a request for comment.Availability was hit-or-miss with third-party retailers. On Amazon, Business Insider found M4 Pro…

Software engineers are in the midst of a sweeping industry shift — and they’ve picked up a second job along the way: upskilling. Loading audio narration… Some developers are deliberately pivoting into AI-focused roles at the cutting edge of the technology. However, even those who remain in traditional engineering roles say keeping up with the pace of change can feel daunting.”In order to keep up with everything that’s coming out right now, you have to have no job,” Jason Grad, the cofounder and CEO of tech startup Massive.He told Business Insider that he spends roughly 20% of his time learning,…

Everything is bigger in Texas — and that includes the data center demand straining its power grid. Loading audio narration… Texas data center development has become so rampant that the state is on track to become the world’s data center capital by 2030, surpassing Virginia.Just last week, Electric Reliability Council of Texas, the Lone Star State’s grid operator, told state regulators that power demand is on track to quadruple by 2032, driven by an unprecedented surge in large data center projects seeking to connect to the grid.ERCOT isn’t the only grid operator facing outsize power demand amid the data center…

White-collar workers are jostling to climb rankings on AI leaderboards in a new kind of workplace competition known as “tokenmaxxing.” Loading audio narration… The trend is separating AI power users and laggards at large companies, including JPMorgan, Disney, and Meta.At JPMorgan, dashboards categorize employees as “non,” “light,” or “heavy” users, Business Insider reported. A Disney “AI Adoption Dashboard” shows one employee invoking Claude 460,000 times in nine days — likely with the help of automated agents, BI found. At Meta, engineers can earn titles like “Token Legend” for their usage of tokens, a measurement of data used by AI models, The…

Claude Code’s head of product said she knows the frequency of AI releases is stressing people out. Loading audio narration… On an episode of “Lenny’s” podcast published on Thursday, Cat Wu, the head of product for Claude Code and Cowork at Anthropic, said that users are experiencing the fear of missing out on new AI products.”With these agentic tools, not just Claude Code and Cowork, but across the whole ecosystem, people feel this need to like check Twitter every single day to see what the absolute latest thing is,” Wu said. “There’s more we can do to help people feel…

Multiple forces have converged to trigger a wave of job cuts across the tech industry. Some of these changes could be temporary, while others could stick and change the character of tech work forever. Loading audio narration… The latest news feels bad. Meta is cutting another 8,000 jobs. Microsoft offered buyouts to long-term employees. Oracle shed thousands of roles. Block chopped 40% of staff.These cuts are painful and stressful for the people involved. However, it pays to put recent numbers in context, gauge how much AI is to blame, and consider how permanent this situation might be.A recent report from…

A US Army soldier was indicted Thursday on charges he used classified military information to make bets on the prediction market platform Polymarket, winning more than $400,000. Loading audio narration… Gannon Ken Van Dyke, a Special Forces master sergeant who worked out of Fort Bragg in North Carolina, was charged with felonies including wire fraud and violating the Commodity Exchange Act, federal prosecutors in Manhattan announced.Van Dyke, prosecutors said in a statement, “was involved in the planning and execution of Operation Absolute Resolve,” the military operation to capture Venezuela’s Nicolas Maduro, “and had access to sensitive, nonpublic, classified information about…

If you were one of the users complaining that Claude Code has sucked lately, Anthropic just confirmed it wasn’t all in your head. Loading audio narration… The company wrote in a lengthy blog post that after reviewing user complaints about the quality of Claude Code, one of its most popular products, it identified three issues likely contributing to a worse user experience.”We take reports about degradation very seriously. We never intentionally degrade our models,” the Thursday post read. It said the underlying model was not affected; the issues were tweaks made at the product level.As of April 20, Anthropic said, those issues…

Sierra, the customer service agent startup founded by Bret Taylor, announced on Thursday that it has acquired the YC-backed French startup Fragment, which helps businesses integrate AI into workflows.  This is Sierra’s third public acquisition. It previously bought Japan-based enterprise AI solutions company Opera Tech (which it acquired in late March) and voice agent company Receptive AI (which it also announced it acquired in late March). Fragment co-founders Olivier Moindrot and Guillaume Genthial will be joining the Sierra team.  In a blog post, Taylor and his co-founder, Clay Bavor, wrote that Moindrot and Genthial will bring “valuable strength” to Sierra’s…