Author: IQ TIMES MEDIA

ChatGPT, OpenAI’s text-generating AI chatbot, has taken the world by storm since its launch in November 2022. What started as a tool to supercharge productivity through writing essays and code with short text prompts has evolved into a behemoth with 300 million weekly active users. 2024 was a big year for OpenAI, from its partnership with Apple for its generative AI offering, Apple Intelligence, the release of GPT-4o with voice capabilities, and the highly-anticipated launch of its text-to-video model Sora. OpenAI also faced its share of internal drama, including the notable exits of high-level execs like co-founder and longtime chief…

As generative AI becomes faster, cheaper, and more convincing, the ethical stakes are no longer theoretical. What happens when the tools to deceive become widely accessible? And how do we build systems that are powerful — but safe enough to trust? At TechCrunch Sessions: AI, taking place June 5 at UC Berkeley’s Zellerbach Hall, Artemis Seaford, Head of AI Safety at ElevenLabs, and Ion Stoica, co-founder of Databricks and professor at UC Berkeley, will take the main stage to unpack the ethical challenges of today’s AI. Their conversation will cut to the heart of one of the most urgent questions…

In the startup world, access to cutting-edge tools isn’t the biggest obstacle — it’s knowing how to wield them with precision. At TechCrunch Sessions: AI, taking place on June 5 at UC Berkeley’s Zellerbach Hall, we’re digging into the frameworks and decisions that determine whether an AI startup can scale — or stall. We’re excited to welcome one of the most tactical voices in that conversation: Iliana Quinonez, Director of North America Startups Customer Engineering at Google Cloud. Impactful conversations are better shared — get up to $300 off your pass and 50% off a guest ticket. Register now to…

Time’s almost up — save big before prices jump in 3 days!  You’ve got until May 25 at 11:59 p.m. PT to save up to $900 on individual tickets to TechCrunch Disrupt 2025. Or double your impact — grab one Early Bird pass and get another for your +1 at 90% off. These deals will be vanishing fast — lock them in now. Step into the future of tech on October 27-29 at Moscone West in San Francisco. Join a global gathering of 10,000+ tech leaders, investors, and innovators for in-depth sessions, expert insights, unmatched networking, and to witness the…

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. (AP) — For students around the world, an acceptance letter to Harvard University has represented the pinnacle of achievement, offering a spot among the elite at a campus that produces Nobel Prize winners, captains of industry and global leaders.That allure is now in jeopardy. In its intensifying fight with the White House, Harvard was dealt its heaviest blow yet on Thursday, when the government blocked the Ivy League school from enrolling foreign students. The move threatens to undermine Harvard’s stature, revenue and appeal among top scholars globally.Even more than the government’s $2.6 billion in research cuts, the administration’s…

BRUSSELS (AP) — Belgium’s Royal Palace said Friday that Princess Elisabeth, who is first in line to the throne, is waiting to find out whether she can return to Harvard for her second year after U.S. President Donald Trump announced a ban on foreign students at the university.The Trump administration on Thursday revoked Harvard University’s ability to enroll international students in its escalating battle with the Ivy League school, saying thousands of students must transfer to other schools or leave the country.“We are looking into the situation, to see what kind of impact this decision might have on the princess,…

Google made literally 100 announcements at I/O this week, a clear sign that the tech giant intends to dominate every aspect of AI, from its overhaul of Search to its latest AI models and wearables tech.The event was packed and, at times, felt electrifying. Google showed impressive stats about how its AI has taken off. It had plenty of far-out goals, too, like building a universal AI assistant and extended reality glasses that give directions in real time.I/O also showcased Google’s vulnerabilities. Some releases clearly overlapped, while arch-rival OpenAI upstaged Google on Wednesday with a big announcement of its own.With…

CEOs are now so immersed in AI, they’re sending their avatars to address quarterly earnings calls instead of themselves, at least partially. After the Klarna CEO’s AI avatar appeared on an investor call earlier this week, Zoom CEO Eric Yuan followed suit, also using his avatar for initial comments. Yuan deployed his custom avatar via Zoom Clips, the company’s asynchronous video creation tool. “I am proud to be among the first CEOs to use an avatar in an earnings call,” he — or rather his avatar — said. “It is just one example of how Zoom is pushing the boundaries…

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei believes today’s AI models hallucinate, or make things up and present them as if they’re true, at a lower rate than humans do, he said during a press briefing at Anthropic’s first developer event, Code with Claude, in San Francisco on Thursday. Amodei said all this in the midst of a larger point he was making: that AI hallucinations are not a limitation on Anthropic’s path to AGI — AI systems with human-level intelligence or better. “It really depends how you measure it, but I suspect that AI models probably hallucinate less than humans, but they…

Anthropic’s new flagship AI model, Claude Opus 4, is a strong programmer and writer, the company claims. When talking to itself, it’s also a prolific emoji user. That’s according to a technical report Anthropic released on Thursday, a part of which investigates how Opus 4 behaves in “open-ended self-interaction” — i.e. essentially having a chat with itself. In one test that tasked a pair of Opus 4 models with talking to each other over 200, 30-turn interactions, the models used thousands of emojis. Opus 4 sure does like emojisImage Credits:Anthropic Which emojis? Well, per the report, Opus 4 used the…