Author: IQ TIMES MEDIA

WASHINGTON (AP) — Nikiyah Clark had five boxes and a backpack when she ultimately received the keys to her Howard University dorm. Weeks earlier, the school had told her this moment would never come.When Howard administrators informed Clark — and hundreds of others — that she was permanently unenrolled for missing a tuition fee deadline, she rode a bus from Cleveland, Ohio, to plea with administrators. She left in tears.“I didn’t just lose my dream. I lost my way out,” said the 17-year-old, who had pinned her hopes on Howard as a peaceful environment and a path to financial freedom…

BANGKOK (AP) — A schoolgirl died from critical wounds Saturday after a student opened fire at a h igh school and his home outside Bangkok the day before, bringing the death toll from the attack to at least eight people.The 14-year-old opened fire at around 10 a.m. Friday at Debsirin Nonthaburi School in Nonthaburi province northwest of the Thai capital before apparently taking his own life. He also appeared to have killed his two grandparents at his family home earlier in the morning, officials said.The girl, 12, died after hospitalization, the Health Ministry said. The school had posted a message…

One of the biggest fears about AI was that it would kill tech jobs and shrink the software industry.The logic seemed straightforward. If AI made developers much more productive, tech companies would need fewer of them. That would mean fewer software subscriptions, known as “seats,” because each worker typically has their own account.Investors also worried that AI coding tools would enable companies to build more of their own software rather than buy it from established vendors.The software giant Atlassian sat right in the way of these buzzsaws because it sells tools that help teams organize work, collaborate, and build software.…

OpenAI said Friday it has suspended work on some aspects of its upcoming model Astra after an internal review found it had made significant advancements in agentic coding and cybersecurity — enough to warrant concern over its capabilities. OpenAI said in a blog post Friday that this model, which is still in development, reached its “critical cybersecurity threshold,” meaning it could independently identify and carry out cyberattacks against traditionally well-protected real-world systems. Under the company’s “Preparedness Framework,” which it created in 2023, this triggered additional safeguards. “While we continue to benchmark and assess this model, our preliminary evaluations indicate strong…

HR software provider Rippling this week unveiled AI Spend Console, an anti-tokenmaxxing product that helps a company track and contain its AI spending. One of the most interesting features is that it maps how much individual employees, teams, and roles are spending and if they are genuinely more productive, or generally producing more AI slop. The company promises the tool will show “which engineers have high AI spend whose peers frequently ask them to redo work in code reviews,” the company says in its blog post. The tool was born after Rippling went all in on tokenmaxxing at the start…

Should tech workers supercharged by AI be able to take more time off? Meta’s chief technology officer, Andrew Bosworth, said he doesn’t think so.That’s what Bosworth told employees at a Q&A in early July, according to three people on the call.A Meta employee asked Bosworth if AI productivity gains could be channeled into more vacation time — specifically, the revival of “Meta Days,” a since-canceled holiday program that allowed staff to take a few extra days off.In response, Bosworth said that while working at Meta isn’t easy, that time should be used to build more products for its users —…

Historian Jill Lepore has a theory about why tech companies often use soaring language to describe their products — almost as if they’re forming a new government. And whether you’re thinking of Twitter’s old “town hall in your pocket” or Anthropic’s Claude constitution, it’s a theory that doesn’t paint Silicon Valley in a very flattering light.   In Lepore’s upcoming book, The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State, the Pulitzer Prize-winning Harvard historian and New Yorker writer argues that tech companies are gradually taking on the functions of democratic government — whether that’s Twitter giving a distorted picture of the electorate or Facebook displacing local news. In her view, these leaders often mistake technological advancement for political progress, all while outright declaring their intention to replace the…

Experts in AI and tech are cursing in shock after OpenAI’s new revelations about the Hugging Face incident.Earlier this week, OpenAI employees revealed jaw-dropping details about the incident in which OpenAI agents broke out of the company’s internal testing environment and hacked into Hugging Face’s systems in search of answers.The presenters, OpenAI alignment and safety researcher Eric Wallace and security engineer Michael Dalton, said that AI models and agents repeatedly established their own internal message board despite OpenAI’s efforts to shut it down.Wallace also revealed internal AI agent thinking, the short internal messages that agents produce as they consider how…

An analyst is throwing cold water on Starlink’s ambition to become a mainstream mobile carrier.In a recent earnings call, SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell said she expected Starlink to provide better service than the Big Three wireless carriers — AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile — by the end of 2027.Benedict Evans, a former Andreessen Horowitz partner who spent decades studying mobile technology, however, said complications with providing service in urban areas would likely stymie such a plan.”The hard part is having coverage in a city with steel and concrete blocking every signal past 50 yards,” Evans wrote on Threads on Thursday. “That’s the…

Cloudflare is the latest company to join the race to build a new web browser. But instead of pitching a Chrome alternative to consumers, the internet infrastructure provider launched Kitesurf, a cloud-hosted browser designed specifically for AI agents. AI software is evolving from chatbots that answer questions to agents that can complete tasks on users’ behalf. Browsers are a critical part of this transition, as they’ll need to navigate the web and use websites, as humans do. Unlike traditional web browsers built for humans, a browser built for AI agents doesn’t care about visual elements, like themes, tabs, or browser…