Author: IQ TIMES MEDIA

Dystopian or useful? Amazon’s Ring doorbells will now be able to identify your visitors through a new AI-powered facial-recognition feature, the company said on Tuesday. The controversial feature, dubbed “Familiar Faces,” was announced earlier this September and is now rolling out to Ring device owners in the United States. Amazon says the feature lets you identify the people who regularly come to your door by creating a catalog of up to 50 faces. These could include family members, friends and neighbors, delivery drivers, household staff, and others. After you label someone in the Ring app, the device will recognize them…

WINSTON-SALEM, N.C. (AP) — A stabbing at a central North Carolina high school Tuesday left one student dead and another injured, authorities said. Forsyth County Sheriff Bobby Kimbrough said officers at North Forsyth High School in Winston-Salem sought assistance shortly after 11 a.m. “We responded to an altercation between two students,” Kimbrough said at a news conference, adding that “there was a loss of life.” In an email to families and staff, Winston-Salem/Forsyth County Schools superintendent Don Phipps said one student died and another was injured. Kimbrough did not take questions at the news conference, citing the ongoing investigation. No…

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman says his most famous product has helped him manage life as an actual parent.”I cannot imagine having gone through, figuring out how to raise a newborn without ChatGPT,” Altman told Jimmy Fallon during an interview on NBC’s flagship late-night talk show. “Clearly, people did it for a long time — no problem.”Altman said he feels “kind of bad” asking a technology that boasts such wide-knowledge questions like, “Why does my kid stop dropping pizza on the floor and laughing?”Another example, Altman said, was a couple of months ago when he was at a party talking to…

As AI moves beyond chatbots and towards systems that can take actions, the Linux Foundation is launching a new group dedicated to keeping AI agents from splintering into a mess of incompatible, locked-down products.  The group, dubbed the Agentic AI Foundation (AAIF), will act as a neutral home for open-source projects related to AI agents. Anchoring the AAIF at launch are donations from Anthropic, Block, and OpenAI.  Anthropic is donating its MCP (Model Context Protocol), a standard way to connect models and agents to tools and data; Block is contributing Goose, its open-source agent framework; and OpenAI is bringing AGENTS.md…

Ever heard of a chipmaker called “SANDKYAN?”No? That’s because it doesn’t exist — it was the fake company name involved in what US authorities are saying was a “sophisticated” AI chip-smuggling operation.On Monday, prosecutors announced they have arrested several parties in connection with an operation that involved smuggling Nvidia’s most advanced AI chips to China and Hong Kong in violation of US export control laws.Among those are Fanyue “Tom” Gong, a 43-year-old tech-company owner in New York, and Benlin Yuan, a 58-year-old Canadian executive. They were arrested on December 3 and November 28, respectively, after investigators linked them to the…

Amazon has long had to deal with the reality that owners of its Echo smart speakers weren’t using its voice-controlled assistant, Alexa, to buy things, as it had hoped. The tech giant hasn’t given up on that dream yet: Its AI assistant, Alexa+, is getting new shopping-enabled features in the U.S. and Canada from today, including a shopping hub, tools to add items to recent orders, and personalized recommendations. The company has already been working on features that make Alexa+ more of a shopping assistant with abilities like automated deal tracking and automatic purchases. The former feature lets you set…

Google will launch its first AI glasses in 2026, according to a company blog post. At Google’s I/O event in May, the company announced partnerships with Gentle Monster and Warby Parker to create consumer wearables based on Android XR, the operating system that powers Samsung’s Galaxy XR headset. But you can’t wear a bulky headset while out in the real world, which makes smart glasses appealing as a less obtrusive smart wearable. “For AI and XR to be truly helpful, the hardware needs to fit seamlessly into your life and match your personal style,” Google writes. “We want to give…

Even as Big Tech and American tech elites criticize how the European Union is implementing rules to regulate tech and AI on the continent, the bloc isn’t letting competition concerns slide. The European Commission has launched an investigation into whether Google may have breached EU’s competition laws by using content from websites without compensating owners to generate answers for its AI summaries that appear above search results. The EC also will look at how AI summaries use videos from YouTube to generate answers. The investigation will examine if Google is harming competition in the AI market by granting itself access…

Microsoft plans to invest $17.5 billion in India over the next four years, expanding its AI and cloud footprint in the South Asian nation, whose vast online and smartphone user base is turning it into a critical battleground for global tech companies. Announced on Tuesday, the investment — Microsoft’s largest in Asia — will fund new data centers, AI infrastructure, and skilling programs from 2026 to 2029, building on the $3 billion the company committed in India in January. Microsoft’s move comes as major U.S. tech companies ramp up spending on data centers and AI compute worldwide, with India emerging…

India has proposed a mandatory royalty system for AI companies that train their models on copyrighted content — a move that could reshape how OpenAI and Google operate in what has already become one of their most important and fastest-growing markets globally. On Tuesday, India’s Department for Promotion of Industry and Internal Trade released a proposed framework that would give AI companies access to all copyrighted works for training in exchange for paying royalties to a new collecting body composed of rights-holding organizations, with payments then distributed to creators. The proposal argues that this “mandatory blanket license” would lower compliance costs for…