Author: IQ TIMES MEDIA

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…

Sidd Motwani, Ian Anderson, and Shivaditya Sinha spent years building the behavioral intelligence infrastructure behind Spotify’s recommendation engine. Called Vector AI, the system is designed to predict a person’s intent and next actions instead of relying only on their past behavior. It powers about 90% of Spotify’s recommendations to its 800 million users.  Now, the three are bringing a similar system to e-commerce with their new startup, Malachyte. The company on Thursday said it had raised $10 million in seed funding to scale distribution and hire more product and commercial leaders. Malachyte was formed from the belief that most online…

Google announced on Thursday that Google Maps’ “Ask Maps” feature is gaining a slew of new agentic capabilities, including the ability to order food, book hotels, and find event tickets. The tech giant is also bringing Personal Intelligence to Ask Maps, allowing the AI tool to personalize its responses by drawing on information from a user’s Gmail and Google Calendar. The launch of the new features reflects Google’s ambitions to transform Google Maps from a navigation tool into an assistant that’s capable of helping users complete real-world tasks. With the new agentic food ordering capabilities, users can open Ask Maps…

The customer support industry has seen a massive influx of startups like Sierra, Decagon and Parloa trying to infuse AI into automating customer calls, chat and messages so companies can handle more queries at scale. But according to Athens-based Omilia, which has been working on automating voice calls and customer support since 2002, throwing AI at every process can be wasteful. The company’s CEO Dimitris Vassos says that a large proportion of incoming customer support queries involve basic information, such as account balances, and there’s little need to deploy large language models for such tasks. “We will use any available…

If it talks like AI, and it walks like AI, it might just be AI.An application to the startup accelerator Y Combinator includes several written prompts. Founders need to explain how they picked the idea, who their competitors are, and how they’ll make money. Many techies have offloaded their writing skills to AI — and application data suggests it shows in their applications.YC applications have grown by 60% in length over the past three years, according to partner Tyler Bosmeny. “I wonder what could explain that…” he wrote on X.Pete Koomen, another YC partner, wrote on X that he noticed a…

Google chief scientist Jeff Dean, one of the company’s most respected engineers and executives, is leaving the search giant as part of a broader AI leadership shake-up at the search giant.Naturally, employees have had something to say about his shock departure.Googlers peppered the company’s central message board with memes and posts about Dean’s departure, according to several posts seen by Business Insider. Some of them riffed on “Jeff Dean Facts” — a running gag where staff post ridiculous and exaggerated “facts” about Dean’s mythical status.”Google is not losing Jeff Dean. Google is finally open-sourcing him for humanity,” one of the…

Jean-Michel Lemieux missed building things with people.The former chief technology officer at Shopify served on boards and dabbled in VC work, yet said that leadership alone left him too far removed from the work.”I’m in these board meetings, and it feels like I’m a coach of a pro team, but I can’t see them play the game,” Lemieux, 54, said.He said he loves the energy of “hands on keyboard.” So, these days, he’s working at Spellbook, which makes an AI copilot for lawyers. With the title “executive individual contributor,” he’s able to both lead and build.”I love that adrenaline,” he…

Everyone has that one colleague they dread working with.If you haven’t yet, it’s probably only a matter of time, T-Mobile’s former chief business and product officer, Mike Katz, told Business Insider.Katz began his career as a college student selling cellphone services at retailers before working his way up the C-suite. He exited his role in July to pursue new professional interests and will remain in a strategic advisory role through December 2026.”There’s going to be people that you run into that, no matter all your best efforts, they’re just going to be super difficult,” said Katz. Mike Katz has held…

Residents of a rural Texas county say they want more control over the gigantic AI infrastructure projects sprouting in their backyards.Nearly 900 residents of Grimes County, the site of Elon Musk’s planned 100-million-square-foot Terafab semiconductor factory, signed a petition calling for more stringent regulations on large infrastructure projects that receive public incentives.The residents leading the call presented the petition to the County Commissioner Court on Wednesday.”When a company asks Grimes County for tax abatements, grants, reinvestment zones, development agreements, or other public benefits, the County has leverage,” the petition reads. “Public benefits should require public protections.”The petition’s demands include a…

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump’s administration said Thursday it plans to overhaul Head Start, tossing out many of the regulations that are the hallmark of the early education program for the nation’s poorest children.Officials from the Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees the federally funded preschool program, said the proposed changes would encourage more local decision-making. Early childhood policy experts argue the deregulation could undermine Head Start’s position as the gold standard in early education. The Associated Press previously reported on the overhaul proposal, which became public Thursday when it was posted online. The public will have…