Author: IQ TIMES MEDIA

Anthropic recently took its two newest AI models offline due to an export control order from the Trump administration, prompting broad debates about AI policy and digital sovereignty. On the latest episode of TechCrunch’s Equity podcast, Sean O’Kane, Rebecca Bellan, and I discussed what actually prompted the administration’s moves against Anthropic, and what this might mean for the broader AI ecosystem. As Sean put it, “Anthropic has not had the best relationship with the Trump administration in a way that stands apart from the other leading AI labs,” so perhaps other Anthropic’s rivals don’t need to worry about a similar…

Siri’s AI overhaul may have been the headline announcement at Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference earlier this month, but Apple’s broader AI strategy is taking shape through a series of smaller features embedded across its software. Rather than asking consumers to adopt the new AI-powered version of Siri to get all the benefits that AI brings, the company is weaving AI into the apps and services people already use, with a focus on solving real-world problems. The result is that your iPhone will be able to split restaurant bills among friends, secure your passwords after data breaches, automate tasks, and organize…

One night after work in Dublin, Maahir Sharma watched an AI agent that he built call hotels in the United States and negotiate room rates on his behalf.The project wasn’t part of his job. It was one of many AI experiments he pursues outside work to stay current in an industry being reshaped by AI.Sharma, a software engineer at a Big Tech company, says AI has dramatically increased his productivity, helping him complete some tasks in days that once took months. But he also spends about 20 hours a week outside of work experimenting with AI tools like Cursor, a…

Rivian’s future may ride on a five-seat SUV with animatronic-looking headlights.The R2 — Rivian’s new midsize SUV that launched to customers on June 9 — hits the sweet spot on paper: It (eventually) starts at $44,990, delivers around 300 miles of range across trims, and competes in America’s best-selling new-vehicle segment: midsize SUVs.That makes it super important for Rivian.If it works, Rivian could join Tesla in the tiny club of modern American automaker startups that have reached sustained profitability. If it doesn’t, it risks joining the gigantic graveyard of we-tried-and-burned-through-lots-of-cash EV startups (we’re looking at you, Fisker, Canoo, Lordstown, Nikola,…

When Greg Estes retired last year after nearly 16 years at Nvidia to spend more time with his family, walking away from work proved trickier than expected.”It’s really hard to go from a job like that, doing amazing things, and you just stop, and you’re unemployed, looking at avocados at Safeway,” said Estes, who worked closely with CEO Jensen Huang as vice president of corporate marketing and developer programs.Now, he’s writing his next chapter at EverGreen — a community of former Nvidia employees that advises and invests in AI startups, which formally launched in March.Estes previously led Nvidia’s Inception startup…

Tokenmaxxing became the buzzy AI word du jour this spring; as summer begins the trend is already running on empty. Amazon pulled its AI leaderboard after some employees made useless AI work to game the rankings. Palantir CEO Alex Karp likened tokenmaxxing to a porn addiction, and Duolingo walked back a decision to weigh AI use in employee performance reviews. Meta and AT&T have reportedly started curbing AI use as costs skyrocket.The pressure to use AI for the sake of using AI has created AI sprawl: Workers employ new agents or vibecode solutions with myriad AI tools that prove difficult…

Asked about the privacy implications of chatbots like ChatGPT and Claude, Signal President Meredith Whittaker answered, “These are not your friends. These are not conscious beings. These are not sentient interlocutors.” Whittaker made those comments in a broader interview with Bloomberg about policy, privacy, and Signal. She acknowledged that she uses AI tools “to format a document here and there,” but insisted, “I don’t ask them questions. I’m very serious about my thinking and writing, and I don’t want the process of working through an idea […] to be foreclosed or eclipsed by the response of a system that’s averaging…

Anyone who’s Googled themselves recently knows that it doesn’t quite hit the way it used to. Sure, there’s everything going on with Google search itself, but there’s also an inescapable feeling that web search isn’t the canonical source of information that it used to be, with just as many people learning about you and me from chatbots. Thomas Dimson and Joey Flynn had a similar feeling, leading them to create In the Weights. The “weights” in question are the numerical parameters that shape an AI model’s training and output, so the website purports to measure how well “a model is able…

John Jumper, who shared a recent Nobel Prize in chemistry, announced Friday that he’s making the leap to Anthropic after “nearly 9 years” at Google DeepMind. In a post on X, Jumper wrote that DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis “took a real chance letting me lead the AlphaFold team just six months after finishing my PhD, and the entire GDM team taught me so much about how to do great science.” Jumper (pictured above right, with Hassabis) added, “GDM is a special place, and I’ll still be excited to hear about what amazing things they discover next.” Bloomberg reports that Jumper…

A cofounder of the video game giant Ubisoft, the publisher behind “Assassin’s Creed” and “Just Dance,” has died at 69.A Ubisoft Entertainment spokesperson told Bloomberg in a statement that Claude Guillemot died in a plane accident.”Ubisoft was deeply saddened to learn of the death of Claude Guillemot, cofounder of the group and chairman of Guillemot Corp., in an accident,” the statement said. “Our thoughts are with his family and loved ones during this difficult time. No further statements will be made at this time.”French media reported that a Cessna plane carrying Guillemot and another passenger crashed in a field on…