Author: IQ TIMES MEDIA
There’s an old saw in management: What you measure matters. And, typically, you get more of whatever you’re measuring. Software engineers have debated productivity metrics for decades, starting with lines of code. But as the new generation of AI coding agents delivers more code than ever, what their managers ought to be measuring is less clear. Enormous token budgets — essentially, the amount of AI processing power a developer is authorized to consume — have become a badge of honor among Silicon Valley developers, but that’s a very weird way to think about productivity. Measuring an input to the process…
Under the cherry blossoms lining NYC’s City Hall Park, a new metal-and-glass structure stands. Loading audio narration… It’s called the City Hall Deliverista Hub — a first-of-its-kind rest stop for the roughly 80,000 delivery workers who zip through the city, transporting lunches, Amazon packages, and other online orders. Worker advocates hope it’s the first of many.It’s a few blocks from Business Insider’s newsroom, so I went to see it the day after a much-ballyhooed April 7 ribbon-cutting, hoping to interview delivery drivers about their first impressions.It was locked. I went back on April 15. Still locked. I returned on April…
At least one person in Trump world believes Anthropic was correct to reject a deal with the Pentagon. Loading audio narration… “I think Anthropic had it right,” former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon said during the Semafor World Economy Summit in Washington, D.C., on Thursday.Bannon said allowing the Pentagon to operate Anthropic’s frontier model — Claude — with little guardrails is “too dangerous.”Bannon, who’s criticized the development of superintelligent AI, said there needs to be greater transparency about how weapons manufacturers will use AI.”The central thing is what is happening in the weapons lab with AI,” Bannon said. “We…
Conferences are fun for journalists because the private chatter flows. Business Insider’s The Long Play in San Francisco was no exception. Loading audio narration… Biohacker Bryan Johnson urged founders to bang, not build. Carina Hong dished on the AI talent wars. Joanna Strober reflected on her late, great friend Susan Wojcicki. Jason Blum described the horror of making AI movie shorts with Meta. That’s what we reported from the stage. Here’s what else I heard:A tech CEO recalled being interviewed last year by a big newspaper about a possible AI bubble. She gave a nuanced answer and didn’t make it…
Elon Musk thinks he has a solution to AI-driven job losses: the government pays for everyone to live well. Loading audio narration… “Universal HIGH INCOME via checks issued by the Federal government is the best way to deal with unemployment caused by AI,” the Tesla and SpaceX CEO said in a late Thursday post on X.”AI/robotics will produce goods & services far in excess of the increase in the money supply, so there will not be inflation,” he added.Universal HIGH INCOME via checks issued by the Federal government is the best way to deal with unemployment caused by AI. AI/robotics…
After three decades at Apple, one exec’s last day included checking items off his corporate bucket list. Loading audio narration… Stan Ng oversaw marketing for iconic products such as the Apple Watch, AirPods, and Apple’s home and health offerings. He said Thursday was his last day at the tech giant, and it looks like he spent it exactly as he wanted.Ng described his final shift as an Apple employee in a LinkedIn post.”After 31 years at Apple, today was my last day,” he wrote. “I think I got in everything I wanted to do on my last day before retiring.”He…
Anthropic announced on Friday that it’s launching Claude Design, a new experimental product that lets users create visuals like prototypes, slides, one-pagers, and more using Claude. The company says Claude Design is intended to help people like founders and product managers without a design background share their ideas more easily. With Claude Design, users describe what they want, and Claude will create an initial version. From there, users can refine the visuals with direct edits or requests. For example, you could ask Claude to “prototype a serene mobile meditation app. It should have calming typography, subtle nature-inspired colors, and a…
One year after it launched a universal school voucher program, Tennessee will nearly double the program with 15,000 additional vouchers, directing about $260 million in public funds to private schools. The Tennessee Senate voted 18-14 on Thursday to fund 35,000 vouchers for the 2026-27 academic year. The Senate bill conformed to its companion in the House, adopted earlier this week, which included 5,000 fewer vouchers than Gov. Bill Lee’s ask of 40,000. The bill passed by a similarly slim margin of 52-43 in the House. The legislation now heads to the governor’s desk for his signature. In an hour-long discussion…
I have seen the future of AI, and we are all managing agents. Loading audio narration… We are telling them where to go. What to look at. We are answering their follow-up questions. We are correcting them when they make a mistake.These were some of the talking points at last week’s AI Engineer conference in London, which brought together people from across the industry, including Google, Anthropic, and OpenAI.The talks were varied, highly technical, and curated for the people steeped deepest in AI right now.What was striking was how many of the presentations and discussions weren’t so much about the…
Colleagues at a company are often compared to a family unit, but this can be a faulty metaphor, Hastings wrote. While families are often seen as a lifetime commitment, Hastings approached Netflix as a sports team, where the coach can swap and trade players periodically to make sure that they’re all the best fit for their positions.That’s why one of the most controversial parts of Netflix’s pitch deck, under Hastings, read: “Like every company, we try to hire well / unlike many companies, we practice: adequate performance gets a generous severance package.” As in: If an employee is simply adequate,…