Author: IQ TIMES MEDIA

Tech giants’ efforts to ramp up AI adoption in India may be about to hit a turning point, as companies end free promotions with hopes to convert the world’s fourth-largest economy into a windfall of paid subscribers. India became the world’s largest market for generative AI app downloads in 2025, according to market intelligence firm Sensor Tower, widening its lead over the U.S. as installs jumped 207% year-over-year. Companies including OpenAI, Google, and Perplexity rolled out extended free premium offers to accelerate user growth in the price sensitive market. Leading AI firms have also backed India in its push to…

MatX, a chip startup founded by two former Google hardware engineers, has raised a $500 million Series B led by Jane Street and Situational Awareness, an investment fund formed by former OpenAI researcher Leopold Aschenbrenner. The company’s goal is to make its processors 10 times better at training LLMs and delivering results than Nvidia’s GPUs.   Other investors in the round include Marvell Technology, NFDG, Spark Capital, and Stripe co-founders Patrick Collison and John Collison, the startup’s founder and CEO Reiner Pope announced Tuesday in a post on LinkedIn. Although the company didn’t release its latest valuation, Etched, MatX’s closest…

It’s a familiar frustration for those trying to find a doctor or therapist: You browse the provider directory on your insurance company’s portal and, at first, it seems like there are plenty of options. But it turns out that some providers are not accepting new patients, and others only work in hospital settings. Still others are out of network or don’t return calls. And some phone numbers and addresses are simply wrong.The situation is so common that there’s a term for it: a ghost network.These inaccurate or misleading physician directories have for years been an obstacle for patients seeking in-network…

For some young children in Columbus, Ohio, reading assessments don’t start in the kindergarten classroom — they happen first in the doctor’s office.With concerns rising about lagging childhood literacy rates across the country, Nationwide Children’s Hospital has begun screening children’s literacy skills starting at age 3 during pediatrician visits. The idea is to catch reading struggles early on and guide parents on how to help their kids. “They are all doing developmental screenings, they’re all talking to parents repeatedly,” said Sara Bode, the hospital’s medical director of school-based health. “So this is an opportunity.”The pediatric hospital chose clinics to provide…

Wayve is revving up its global robotaxi ambitions with fresh funding as it prepares to take on Waymo in London.The UK-based autonomous vehicle software startup announced early Tuesday in the UK that it had raised $1.5 billion from a host of Big Tech giants and major automakers.The funding round, which values the startup at $8.6 billion, includes $1.2 billion from investors including Microsoft, Nvidia, and Uber, as well as Mercedes-Benz, Nissan, and Stellantis.It also includes additional capital from Uber, which is tied to deployments of Wayve-powered robotaxis across the globe. The two companies have a deal to launch self-driving vehicles…

Large language models have a problem: they are large. Multiverse Computing, a Spanish startup, is addressing this issue with compressed models that aim to close the gap between what frontier models can do and what companies can actually afford to deploy.  The secret sauce is CompactifAI, a compression technology inspired by quantum computing that the Basque company has applied to models released by OpenAI. As of today, developers can access a newer version of Multiverse’s HyperNova 60B model for free on Hugging Face. The company also plans to open source more compressed models in 2026 to support a wider range…

Sitting on a park bench and observing woodpeckers could be quite beneficial, as a new study has found that bird-watching may enhance cognitive function as you age.The Canadian study was published Feb. 23 in JNeurosci, the Journal of Neuroscience. Researchers explored bird identification in expert watchers and assessed changes in brain structure, brain activity and identification performance. Researchers studied the brains of 58 adults, comparing the expert bird-watchers (29 people, ages 24–75) to novices of similar ages and educational backgrounds (29 people, ages 22–79).The bird-watchers in the expert group were from the Toronto Ornithological Club and the Ontario Field Ornithologists,…

Consumers probably think of Uber as a ride-hailing and food delivery company. But in the eyes of CEO Dara Khosrowshahi, Uber is really just a giant code base with engineers that are “literally the builders of the company.” In fact, Uber’s engineers have gone so far as to replace Khosrowshahi with a chatbot that they’ll ask questions in preparation of meetings with the top brass. That’s according to an interview Khosrowshahi gave this week on Steven Bartlett’s podcast, The Diary of a CEO. “One of my team members told me that some teams have built a Dara AI, you know,…

John Davidson, whose life inspired the award-winning biopic “I Swear,” involuntarily shouted a racial slur during Michael B. Jordan and Delroy Lindo’s speech at the BAFTA film awards in London on Feb. 22, 2026. The moment went viral, and the ensuing backlash ignited public debate about Tourette syndrome and its most shocking symptom.Davidson has been a familiar figure to British audiences since his teenage years, when he first appeared in a BBC documentary about Tourette syndrome. He has since devoted decades to public education about the condition, earning him a distinguished honor from Queen Elizabeth II in 2019.The reactions to…

At President Donald Trump’s State of the Union address on Tuesday, he hoped to convince Americans that the economy is strong and that they should vote for more of the same by backing Republicans during November’s midterm elections. ___ This is a photo gallery curated by AP photo editors. President Donald Trump delivers the State of the Union address to a joint session of Congress in the House chamber at the U.S. Capitol in Washington, Tuesday, Feb. 24, 2026. (Jessica Koscielniak/Pool Photo via AP) President Donald Trump delivers the State of the Union address to a joint session of Congress…