Author: IQ TIMES MEDIA
TV tech is booming, which means you don’t have to spend a ton of money for serious performance. If you can invest around $1,200-$1,500, you can get a very good 65-inch TV, from brightness monsters like the Hisense U7SG to the fabulously colorful TCL QM7L. But if that’s too steep, you can still get a pretty good TV for far less cash thanks to budget-friendly options like the new Hisense U6SF Pro.The U6SF Pro doesn’t offer the next-gen colors, searing brightness, or striking contrast of pricier mid-tier models, but its QLED panel and Mini LED backlight deliver impressive poise across…
On X, not all engagement is equal.Elon Musk’s social media company on Thursday released the source code that determines how posts are recommended to users, the latest development in Musk’s quest to champion transparency on the platform.”The goal is straightforward — we want people to be able to answer for themselves whether a platform is limiting their reach, whether the system is fair, and why they see particular content,” the company said in an X post.Musk said on X that the decision to make X open source was to “improve fairness” and seek feedback for improvement.Here’s a breakdown of what…
Reddit, the internet destination for the discussion of probably anything you can think of, has been launched into the ranks of America’s most prominent companies.Reddit will join the S&P 500 on August 18. While the site offers a version of the internet that’s a throwback to its primordial beginnings, it’s recent rise is also partly rooted in the AI explosion that’s propelled markets since 2022. The sprawl of freewheeling message boards has helped Reddit grow a portfolio of data-licensing deals with other tech companies looking to use the site’s content to train artificial intelligence models.Reddit is also a nearly limitless…
It’s a tough environment for a founder trying to build the next-generation Facebook.With more apps than ever and the mainstay social media giants dominating people’s screen time, the competition is fierce. Investors, meanwhile, are pining after flashy AI deals.There was a peak in venture capital investment in social startups in 2021 — when apps like BeReal and Clubhouse were getting people excited for new challengers taking on Instagram and TikTok — according to PitchBook data, and the number of deals has declined each year since.That 2021 peak saw 239 deals totaling $2.2 billion, per PitchBook’s data of US transactions. In…
Tech analyst Ben Thompson says requiring AI companies to be transparent about the content their models produce is missing the mark.Thompson tore into the European Union AI Act, which Anthropic cited as the reason it will add watermarks to content in Claude-generated files and text.In his widely read “Stratechery” newsletter, Thompson said such AI transparency requirements are both overburdensome and unlikely to be strong enough.”I am sympathetic to the impetus behind watermarking: wouldn’t it be better to know what is fake and what isn’t?” he wrote. “What, though, is ‘fake’? If an LLM states a true fact, and a human…
Jeff Bezos has entered his sports ownership era.On Friday, Liverpool Football Club, one of the English Premier League’s so-called “Big Six” clubs, announced that Fenway Sports Group sold a minority equity stake in the franchise to 1892 Holdings, which includes K5 Sports, a fund where the Amazon founder is the lead investor.This is the first time Bezos has been publicly identified as owning a stake in a major sports team, placing him in rare company among his fellow billionaires and business titans.The 1892 group is managed by Amit Bhatia, the son-in-law of steel magnate Lakshmi Mittal. Bloomberg estimates Mittal’s net…
LONDON (AP) — A British sociologist who resigned last week from the University of Cambridge following accusations of plagiarism was found dead Friday, British media reported. Jason Arday, who was 37 when he became Cambridge’s youngest Black professor in 2023, resigned after he came under intense media pressure, with weeks of allegations about plagiarism in his academic work and questions surrounding claims about his athletic and fundraising accomplishments.The Times and Telegraph newspapers, as well as Sky News, reported that Arday, 41, was found “unresponsive” inside a home in Battersea, south London, on Friday afternoon.The Metropolitan Police said only that a…
Google announced on Friday that it will now allow users to remove a visible watermark from its AI generations, including images, videos, and songs. The company specified that this won’t affect the invisible SynthID watermark and C2PA standard-related metadata. Josh Woodward, the company’s VP for Gemini, said in a post on X that this toggle will be available for Nano Banana, Omni, and Lyria models. He specified that the setting to turn the visible watermark off will be available in Gemini and Google’s video editor, Flow, with support for Search coming soon. The change reflects an evolving approach to labeling…
Meta released Glimmer this week, an open-weight AI model anyone can download and run on their own hardware — a contrast to Muse Spark, the company’s more powerful model that stays locked behind its own APIs. The release landed alongside a letter from Mark Zuckerberg arguing AI should be “for everyone” rather than controlled by a handful of labs, but as Equity’s hosts point out, the vision comes with some asterisks. On this episode of TechCrunch’s Equity podcast, Kirsten Korosec, Anthony Ha, and Rebecca Bellan take a look at Glimmer, Zuckerberg’s 6,500-word manifesto, and more of the week’s headlines, from the true cost of the AI industry’s energy needs to a $250M acquisition gone very wrong. Listen to the full episode to…
The race for faster AI inference is on, and markets gave Cerebras and its purpose-built chips a warm welcome in its IPO debut in May. But French startup Kog is betting that there’s a lot more power to be squeezed out of conventional GPUs. The startup hit the front page of Hacker News in May with a tech preview aimed at proving that “extremely fast single-request decoding is possible on the standard datacenter GPUs enterprises already own” — such as the AMD MI300X and Nvidia H200 GPUs it used for its demo. Some were disappointed to hear this didn’t extend…