Author: IQ TIMES MEDIA

Software giant Atlassian announced new AI tools and agents on Wednesday with a focus on turning data into visual assets and applications. This includes the rollout of the visual tool Remix in open beta. Remix allows enterprises to turn the data and information stored in Atlassian’s content collaboration software Confluence into assets including charts and graphics. Remix will recommend which visual format makes the most sense for the data or information at hand and create these visual assets without requiring the users to open another application or software. The company also announced three new third-party agents that run within Confluence…

The brand-safety battles that once pitted CMOs against Big Tech are over. Now, there’s a new war brewing over “AI safety.” Loading audio narration… More and more dollars are flowing into AI-powered platforms that promise to automatically create ads and choose where they’re placed.The rapid shift is causing headaches for some CMOs.”CMOs want to see the numbers” to help them understand precisely how these AI platforms are driving metrics like revenue, new customer acquisition, and brand equity, Tim Lathrop, a VP at the media agency Mediassociates, told me.Cross-industry efforts are taking shape to demand more transparency from tech giants like…

Marketers have to sift through mountains of data as they try to make their ads perform better. A new startup, Pomo, is using AI to help.Pomo shared exclusively with CMO Insider that it had raised $4.5 million in seed funding led by Kindred Ventures, with participation from Databricks Ventures, Seven Stars, SV Angel, Timeless Partners, and 645 Ventures.It also got angel investments from Scott Belsky, who led product at Adobe; Mehdi Ghissassi, the past product head of DeepMind and Google Brain; and Massimo Mascaro, formerly of Google AI.Pomo — whose name is a riff on post-modern advertising — is a…

MADISON, Wis. (AP) — Fired Universities of Wisconsin President Jay Rothman told The Associated Press on Wednesday in his first interview since the ouster that he was “blindsided” by the move but has no hard feelings and is unlikely to sue.Rothman was fired on Tuesday night in a unanimous vote by the board of regents following a roughly 30-minute closed-door discussion. Regents have not given a reason for firing Rothman, who was in the job for just under four years.“Absolutely I was blindsided,” Rothman told the AP. He said he has still not been given a reason for his firing.“I…

Engineers, take note. Instagram’s former VP has some advice. Loading audio narration… James Everingham spent over eight years at Meta, along with stints at Yahoo and Netscape, according to his LinkedIn profile. On “The Peterman Pod,” he shared five tips for young engineers looking to forge connections and climb the ladder in software engineering.First, it’s all about being curious, especially about others’ work. He recommended that young people “ask a lot of questions,” calling it a “great way to build relationships within a company.”Then there’s the mentorship question. When Everingham was starting his career, he wanted “good mentors around,” he…

This as-told-to essay is based on conversations with Bill Atienza, 29, who is a startup founder in California, and one of his former clients, Phil Hargrove, 80. Atienza founded an AI-powered on-demand technology support platform that operated until 2023. He continued working with clients to improve technology and become more familiar with AI. Hargrove shared more about his relationship with Atienza. These interviews have been edited for length and clarity. Loading audio narration… In the past, it took months or years to create software, but now it takes me, or another person my age, less than an hour to create…

Update (April 7, 10:30 PM PT): The company has updated the app store listing and removed references to the Android app. But it also added that the iOS keyboard is coming soon. Google on Monday quietly released an offline-first dictation app called “Google AI Edge Eloquent” on iOS to take on the likes of Wispr Flow, SuperWhisper, Willow, and others. The app is free to download, and once its Gemma-based automatic speech recognition (ASR) models are downloaded, you can start dictating on your phone. In the app, you can see the live transcription, and when you hit pause, the app…

Contractors filed five lawsuits against Mercor, the AI training firm valued at $10 billion, in the past week, accusing the company of violating data privacy and consumer protection laws. Loading audio narration… The suits, filed in federal courts in California and Texas, allege Mercor’s negligence could have resulted in the disclosure of Social Security numbers, addresses, and other information, including recordings of interviews, to bad actors.The lawsuits seek unspecified monetary damages.Mercor said last week that it was impacted by a breach of the open-source project LiteLLM, which was created by Berrie AI, without describing the stolen data.Techcrunch reported that sample…

Arcee, a tiny 26-person U.S. startup that built a massive, 400B-parameter open source LLM on a $20 million shoestring budget, has released its new reasoning model. Arcee calls the model Trinity Large Thinking — and it’s the most capable open-weight model “ever released by a non-Chinese company,” claims CEO Mark McQuade to TechCrunch. As that comment implies, Arcee has a goal that I can’t help but root for: It wants to give U.S. and Western companies a model that gives them no reason to use a Chinese-based one. While Chinese models are extremely capable, they are perceived as risky, putting…

A U.S. judge on Tuesday ruled that a customs officer improperly canceled the visa of a Russian-born scientist and Harvard University researcher charged with smuggling frog embryos in the U.S. The opinion said Customs and Border Protection officers have limited authority to cancel visas and can’t do so for suspected smuggling of biological samples. The cancellation of Kseniia Petrova ‘s visa was arbitrary and capricious, U.S. District Court Judge Christina Reiss said in her written ruling. “The undisputed facts reveal that Ms. Petrova’s visa was impermissibly canceled because of the frog embryo samples and for no other reason,” Reiss wrote.…