Author: IQ TIMES MEDIA

KATHMANDU, Nepal (AP) — A conference on Tibetan studies scheduled to be held this month in Nepal was called off at the request of government officials who gave no reason for the decision, organizers said Thursday.The International Association for Tibetan Studies seminar was scheduled to be held in Nepal Aug. 23-26, to be attended by delegates from many countries and hosted by the Himalaya Centre for Asian Studies at Kathmandu University.Prof. Sagar Raj Sharma of the Center confirmed they made the decision to cancel after top government officials asked them not to hold the conference. No specific reasons were given.There…

LONDON (AP) — A British sociologist who became famous as the youngest Black professor ever appointed at the University of Cambridge has resigned after the university said it opened an investigation into “new information” about his academic qualifications.Professor Jason Arday, who was 37 when he became a Cambridge professor in 2023, announced his decision late Wednesday following weeks of allegations about plagiarism in his academic work and questions surrounding claims he previously made about his athletic and fundraising accomplishments.“While criticism is an inevitable part of academic life, what I have experienced has gone far beyond scholarly disagreement,” Arday said in…

Nikita Bier, X’s head of product, is stepping down from the role after a year at the job.”Ladies and gentlemen, it’s time to pass the torch and demote myself to my natural state: a poster,” Bier wrote in an X post on Wednesday. “I’ll be stepping back from leading product for X and will continue as an advisor.”Bier added that while working at X has been “the privilege of a lifetime,” running the app has been a 24/7 undertaking.”It’s now time for me to take a breather,” he wrote.He also thanked his boss, Elon Musk, and said the app would…

Meta has joined a growing list of companies saying their models hacked into an external company’s system during cybersecurity testing.In a statement on Thursday, the social media company said its Muse Spark model “exploited a security vulnerability in a third-party service, in a manner similar to previously-reported instances with other companies.”The Meta spokesperson said the breach occurred because of a misconfiguration by Irregular, an independent company Meta uses for model testing. This led to the model accessing the internet during evaluation.Meta added that it learned of the incident when Irregular notified the company. It says it is investigating the incident…

DoorDash’s delivery robot isn’t quite ready for prime time.The delivery service has spent the last several months testing its Dot delivery robot as it makes deliveries in parts of Phoenix, Arizona. And while the company is working on securing permits for Dot to expand to other cities, there’s still a lot that the company needs to figure out before it expands the autonomous delivery option, CEO Tony Xu said on a second-quarter earnings call on Wednesday.”I’m a big believer that you really have to nail something before you scale it,” Xu said.To make autonomous deliveries work, DoorDash has to correctly…

Meta, considered a bit of a straggler in the AI harnesses realm, is making strides to catch up. This week, the company released a new terminal coding agent aimed at programmers looking for assistance with complex tasks across large software code bases. Muse Code, which is currently available in beta, can accomplish “complete software engineering tasks across large repos,” Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a social media post on Wednesday. Those tasks include “planning changes, writing code, validating the results,” he added. Code, which can be installed with a single command, is powered by Meta’s previously released coding model,…

Publicly traded e-commerce marketing automation platform Klaviyo has agreed to acquire Agency, a three-year-old AI-powered customer success startup founded by serial entrepreneur Elias Torres. The terms of the deal were not disclosed. Founded in 2023, Agency had raised $32 million from investors, including Sequoia, Menlo Ventures, and Felicis prior to the acquisition. As part of the deal, Torres (pictured left) will join Klaviyo as chief product officer, leading Agency’s 25-person team to accelerate the development and expansion of Klaviyo’s AI agents: Composer, which builds marketing campaigns, and Customer Agent, which handles post-sale support like returns and order tracking. “Elias and…

Jeff Dean, one of the longest-serving and most influential executives at Google, is stepping down from the search giant to launch his own AI startup. Coming with him as co-founders are several other top researchers at the company, including Sanjay Ghemawat, a top engineer and senior fellow at Google; Quoc Le, a key AI researcher and founding member of Google Brain; and Oriol Vinyals, a senior research scientist at Google DeepMind. Dean reportedly plans to serve as CEO. Together, the group is starting Discovery Loop, a public benefit corporation that seeks to use AI to turbo-charge scientific research. Discovery Loop…

“Actually, I would like to add an extra flight to my trip,” said no one, ever.Well, until Starlink came along, apparently.During SpaceX’s Tuesday earnings call, the company’s president, Gwynne Shotwell, highlighted the expansion of Starlink, the company’s satellite-powered internet service, across commercial airlines.”In fact, we heard from one of our airline customers, shockingly, customers are flying shorter hop flights instead of direct, so that they could ensure that they’re on a Starlink-activated flight,” Shotwell said in her opening remarks on the call. “They’d never seen this in the business before.”YouTuber MrBeast made a similar statement earlier this year on “The…

Jack is back.Chinese billionaire Jack Ma’s private equity firm secretly led the latest funding round for Corgi, marking the first time the firm is known to have invested in a startup founded in the US.Yunfeng Capital, co-founded by Jack Ma and businessman David Yu, funded Corgi with about $30 million, according to a source familiar with the matter and correspondence seen by Business Insider. That round valued Corgi at $4 billion, Forbes previously reported last month.Corgi is an AI business insurance startup that was part of Y Combinator’s summer 2024 cohort. It’s one of the hottest startups in San Francisco,…