Author: IQ TIMES MEDIA

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Anna Noelle Rinke, the 30-year-old Austin-based founder of Homebody Studios. Her previous employment and identity have been verified by Business Insider. The following has been edited for length and clarity. Loading audio narration… I have an engineering background, and I worked in tech for the first portion of my career. I started an AI software company that was part of IBM’s intrapreneur program. It made me realize I love entrepreneurship, but I wanted to learn a lot more. And then I was most recently a chief of staff to a major…

OpenAI announced on Thursday something that power users have been asking for forever: a $100/month plan. Until now, plans were priced at: free (which now includes ads), an $8/month Go plan (that also includes ads), a $20/month Plus plan (ad free), and then all the way up to a $200 Pro plan (also ad free). OpenAI’s pricing plan page currently does not list a $200/month plan at all. However, that highest tier is still available, OpenAI confirmed to TechCrunch. The model maker says Plus (which remains at $20/month) and the new $100 Pro tier are geared to support daily usage…

A low-profile Texas company that provides temporary housing for immigrant detainees and oil riggers could get a boost from the data center boom. Loading audio narration… Target Hospitality’s stock is up about 60% since March 31. The company announced on April 1 that it had signed a $550 million deal with a top hyperscaler to house thousands of construction workers building a data center campus in Texas.The deal is a “landmark” for Target Hospitality, Stifel analyst Stephen Gengaro said Monday in a note to investors.Target Hospitality has become one of the many non-technology companies hoping to cash in on the…

Florida’s attorney general, James Uthmeier, announced Thursday that his office planned to investigate OpenAI over the alleged role of ChatGPT in a deadly shooting last year. In April 2025, a gunman opened fire on Florida State University’s campus, killing two and injuring five. Last week, attorneys for one of the victims of the shooting claimed that ChatGPT had been used to plan the attack. The family of the victim has said that they plan to sue OpenAI over the incident. “AI should advance mankind, not destroy it,” Uthmeier said in a statement posted to X. “We’re demanding answers on OpenAI’s…

Six months ago, Mercor was flying high after raising a massive $350 million Series C that valued the AI data training startup at $10 billion. But after admitting on March 31 that it was the target of a data breach, the company has been facing a world of trouble. Since then, a hacker group has claimed to have obtained 4TB of stolen data from Mercor’s systems, including candidate profiles, personally identifiable information, employer data, source code, and API keys. Mercor has not commented on the authenticity of the data, reiterating only that it is investigating and “will continue to communicate…

Meta’s AI app has seen a sizable jump in installs following Wednesday’s launch of the company’s newest AI model, Muse Spark — its first model release under Alexandr Wang, the head of Meta’s Superintelligence Labs who was recruited from Scale AI last year to overhaul the social giant’s AI efforts. According to new data from market intelligence provider Appfigures, consumer demand for the Meta AI app has pushed the app up from No. 57 right before the launch of Muse Spark on Wednesday to No. 5 on the U.S App Store on Thursday — a move suggesting a flood of…

Anthropic said this week that it limited the release of its newest model, dubbed Mythos, because it is too capable of finding security exploits in software relied upon by users around the world. Instead of unleashing Mythos on the public, the frontier lab will share it with a group of large companies and organizations that operate critical online infrastructure, from Amazon Web Services to JPMorgan Chase. OpenAI is reportedly considering a similar plan for its next cybersecurity tool. The ostensible idea is to let these big enterprises get ahead of bad actors who could leverage advanced LLMs to penetrate secure…

Google and Intel announced an expanded multiyear partnership on Thursday for Google Cloud to continue utilizing Intel AI infrastructure and to keep developing processors together. Google Cloud will use Intel’s Xeon processors, including Intel’s latest Xeon 6 chips, for AI, cloud, and inference tasks. The company has used Intel’s various Xeon processors for decades. The companies will also expand the co-development of custom infrastructure processing units (IPUs), which help accelerate and manage data center tasks by offloading them from CPUs. This chip development partnership, which started in 2021, will focus on custom ASIC-based IPUs. Intel declined to share any information…

California Attorney General Rob Bonta cleaned laundry rooms to support himself through college and still left Yale Law School with a mountain of debt. Loading audio narration… Bonta says he’d do it all again.”I get a lot of questions from young folks who ask me if law school’s worth it,” Bonta told Business Insider. “I still tell every person to ask me, ‘Yes, it’s worth it.'”A law degree doesn’t come cheap. The Education Data Initiative estimates the average total cost of law school was $217,480 in 2025. That investment looks shakier in the age of artificial intelligence, as software takes…

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy’s total compensation was about $2.1 million last year — a roughly 30% increase from 2024. Loading audio narration… Last year, Jassy earned a base salary of $365,000, and business travel and security expenses totaling $1.7 million largely boosted his pay year over year, according to the company’s annual proxy statement, published Thursday.His total pay has fallen since 2021, the last year he received a stock award from Amazon, and Jassy’s first year as CEO. That year, his annual compensation totaled over $200 million.In 2025, Jassy also had $43 million in stock awards that vested, and $242 million in…