Author: IQ TIMES MEDIA

It’s not often that Ron DeSantis, Josh Hawley, Bernie Sanders, and Elizbaeth Warren find common ground. But as more voters grow critical of AI data centers — the sprawling, humming, energy-guzzling campuses that power everything from pharmaceutical research to your AI girlfriend — they and many other politicians are squaring off with Big Tech and calling to regulate the burgeoning behemoths.In New York, lawmakers have proposed a three-year moratorium on developing new centers. “Massive data centers are gunning for New York, and right now we are completely unprepared,” state Senator Liz Krueger said when announcing the bill earlier this month.…

FLAGSTAFF, Ariz. (AP) — Interested in starting a business, learning about artificial intelligence or exploring a new hobby? There’s a class for that.Millions of U.S. adults enroll in credit and non-credit college courses to earn professional certificates, learn new skills or to pursue academic degrees. Some older students are seeking career advancement, higher pay and job security, while others want to explore their personal interests or try new things.“They might have kids, they might be working full-time, they might be older non-traditional students,” said Eric Deschamps, the director of continuing education at Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff, Arizona. But returning…

HARARE, Zimbabwe (AP) — Young women, mothers holding babies and some men lined up in a dusty field on the outskirts of Zimbabwe’s capital, Harare. They came for injections of a new HIV prevention drug launched in the country on Thursday, one that only needs to be administered twice a year.Zimbabwe, where HIV has led to tens of thousands of deaths over the past two decades, is one of the first countries to roll out lenacapavir, a long-acting drug that authorities hope will slow new infections.With clinical studies demonstrating near-total protection, the drug has been described by some health officials…

NEW YORK (AP) — Nurses at a big New York hospital system approved a new contract Saturday, voting to end a major nursing strike after more than a month.More than 4,000 nurses in the privately run NewYork-Presbyterian system went on strike Jan. 12. They are now due to start returning to work in the coming week. The union, called the New York State Nurses Association, said 93% of its members at NewYork-Presbyterian voted to ratify the three-year contract.Two other big private hospital systems, Montefiore and Mount Sinai, ended their nurses’ walkout earlier this month by inking contract agreements with the…

SpaceX CEO Elon Musk and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman famously don’t agree on much.The latest point of contention: data centers in space. Musk has made it a priority. Altman thinks it’s a fantasy, at least for now.”I honestly think the idea with the current landscape of putting data centers in space is ridiculous,” Altman said during a live interview with local media in New Delhi on Friday, causing audience members to laugh.Altman said that orbital data centers could “make sense someday,” but factors like launch costs and the difficulty of repairing a computer chip in space remain overwhelming obstacles.”We are…

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman addressed concerns about AI’s environmental impact this week while speaking at an event hosted by The Indian Express. For one thing, Altman — who was in India for a major AI summit — said concerns about AI’s water usage are “totally fake,” though he acknowledged it was a real issue when “we used to do evaporative cooling in data centers.” “Now that we don’t do that, you see these things on the internet where, ‘Don’t use ChatGPT, it’s 17 gallons of water for each query’ or whatever,” Altman said. “This is completely untrue, totally insane, no…

Like a modern-day Paul Revere, Ben Dziobek’s voice rang across the night as he ran toward a crowd waiting outside New Brunswick City Hall on Wednesday.The news? Members of the city council struck down potential plans to build a data center.”They canceled it! They canceled it!” Dziobek shouts in footage shared by New Jersey’s Climate Revolution Action Network. Loud cheers followed, and then a chant: “The people, united, will never be defeated!”The New Brunswick City Council had just decided to remove data centers from the list of permitted uses in a plan to redevelop several parcels of land. While no…

Microsoft announced a major gaming shakeup on Friday, with Microsoft Gaming CEO Phil Spencer departing the company, along with Xbox President Sarah Bond. Spencer will be replaced by former Instacart and Meta executive Asha Sharma. With Sharma’s most recent role as the president of Microsoft’s CoreAI product, these moves suggest that Microsoft might be doubling down on bringing AI into video games. The company had already been experimenting with ways to combine AI and gaming, for example developing an AI gaming companion and releasing a buggy, AI-generated level from “Quake II.”  Indeed, in an internal memo published by The Verge,…

The generative AI boom minted a startup a minute. But as the dust starts to settle, two once-hot business models are looking more like cautionary tales: LLM wrappers and AI aggregators.  Darren Mowry, who leads Google’s global startup organization across Cloud, DeepMind, and Alphabet, says startups with these hooks have their “check engine light” on. LLM wrappers are essentially startups that wrap existing large language models, like Claude, GPT, or Gemini, with a product or UX layer to solve a specific problem. An example would be a startup that uses AI to helps students study. “If you’re really just counting…

An 18-year-old who allegedly killed eight people in a mass shooting in Tumbler Ridge, Canada, reportedly used OpenAI’s ChatGPT in ways that alarmed the company’s staff. Jesse Van Rootselaar’s chats describing gun violence were flagged by tools that monitor the company’s LLM for misuse and banned in June 2025. Staff at the company debated whether or not to reach out to Canadian law enforcement over the behavior but ultimately did not, according to the Wall Street Journal. An OpenAI spokesperson said Van Rootselaar’s activity did not meet the criteria for reporting to law enforcement; the company reached out to Canadian…