Author: IQ TIMES MEDIA

BOSSIER CITY, La. (AP) — A Louisiana school board and the federal government have agreed to end more than 60 years of oversight meant to end segregation.The agreement was announced Thursday on the first day of classes for Bossier Parish Schools near Shreveport.“Dismissal of the case allows us the freedom to make our own decisions that are in the best interest of all students, staff and our community, while keeping in mind the history of the past 61 years,” Bossier Schools Superintendent Jason Rowland said in a statement.Louisiana Attorney General Liz Murrill announced the settlement. Last month she announced she…

OpenAI is removing limits on text-based chats for all users on ChatGPT, which recently crossed the 1 billion weekly user mark, the company announced today. The new GPT-5.6 Luna model will power this experience and will be the default model for Free and Go users, replacing GPT-5.5. Both users will also get a new “Think” button that lets them select higher reasoning power for complex questions. OpenAI said that there will still be separate limits for files, images, voice, and image generation. Image Credits:OpenAI The update brings changes for Plus and Pro users as well. They’ll gain access to an…

Developers detest drudgery. The entire field of programming is proof of how hard people will work to automate away the boring tasks involved in building things. And, as vibe coding has proved, they’ve even managed to find ways to not do most of the work of putting products together. So I wasn’t very surprised to hear that Naïve, which offers infrastructure that lets AI agents take on the bulk of the work involved in running a business, had signed up over 30,000 developer customers within months of its launch. Taking vibe coding a step further, the startup claims its infra…

This generation of twentysomethings is so disillusioned with swipe-based dating apps that they’ll try literally anything else — even an AI matchmaker. After dropping out of UC Berkeley, Ditto co-founders Allen Wang and Eric Liu set out to build something that would help their peers connect without having to spend hours each week navigating the messiness of apps like Tinder and Hinge. “As Gen Z ourselves, we were firsthand witnessing the behavioral shift in terms of how people are connecting with each other,” Wang told TechCrunch. “We see that people are getting super tired of all the endless swiping and…

OpenAI’s motion to dismiss Apple’s trade secrets lawsuit, along with newly filed exhibits, reveals the company’s legal defense strategy. Rather than focusing on whether former Apple employees working at OpenAI had accessed certain information, the AI company argues that Apple’s own security practices and offboarding procedures weaken its claim that the information qualifies as legally protected “trade secrets.” Apple’s complaint, filed in July, accuses OpenAI of orchestrating a scheme to obtain confidential hardware information from former Apple engineers. This week, Apple asked the court to expedite discovery, saying its internal investigation indicates some additional former employees may have participated in,…

Silicon Valley has found its joke of the summer and, like the enormous white sweater at the center of it, it just keeps growing.An image of Chamath Palihapitiya, the founder of venture fund Social Capital, wearing a chunky white turtleneck, has taken over tech circles on X.The picture, which appears to be a screenshot taken from a January 2023 episode of the “All-In” podcast, got a new lease of life when X users added a glass of wine to Palihapitiya’s hand.Users then fed the original picture into AI image generators, repeatedly expanding and transforming the sweater to increasingly absurd proportions.The…

There are pitch decks, then there are Jeff Dean pitch decks.Google’s departing chief scientist shared slides for his new AI startup, Discovery Loop, on X on Wednesday — and they include a list of achievements any founder would be envious of.One slide lists products the founding team helped build or worked on, including Google Search (the largest search engine), Ads (a highly lucrative business), and Gmail (the most widely used email service).Other products include Gemini, Google’s family of frontier AI models, and TPUs, the tech giant’s custom-built chips.Our general approach is to automate the experimental loop. We think this approach…

Suno, the service that allows users to create AI-generated songs, today announced new tools to mark tracks made on its platform, limit downloads, and update community guidelines to prevent copycat songs. The changes come as Suno faces numerous lawsuits from labels and artist bodies. In a blog post, co-founder and CEO Mikey Shulman shared core principles and said that the platform wants to promote original creation while enabling more people to make music with its AI tools. One of the key points of contention involved users uploading AI-generated songs on other streaming platforms and gaming the system to earn revenue.…

Ford has been very secretive about its all-important new slate of EVs. That’s starting to change.The Detroit automaker confirmed to Business Insider that its next EV, a midsize truck, will be called the Fathom. The company also said it will have a starting price of $28,350 — or $29,945 after destination charges.Both the name and pricing are a big departure from Ford’s recent EV efforts. The company’s first generation of mass-market EVs — including the Mustang Mach-E and the F-150 Lightning — were named after iconic, nostalgic Ford vehicles. They also had sticker prices ranging from roughly $38,000 to around…

AI lab Mirendil has signed a multiyear partnership with Google Cloud to source compute capacity for its self-improving AI research, TechCrunch has exclusively learned.  The deal mirrors two trends shaping the AI industry: Cloud giants are courting startups with huge infrastructure commitments, and AI companies are snatching up as many compute deals as they can to secure access as they scale.  The deal is worth upward of $100 million, Mirendil’s co-founder and CEO, Behnam Neyshabur, told TechCrunch. That’s roughly half of what Mirendil raised in seed funding at a $1 billion valuation in late June. The deal gives the startup…