Author: IQ TIMES MEDIA

I’m a career coach working with directors through C-level leaders in retail, tech, finance, real estate, and other industries. When my clients ask me how they should use AI at work, their real question is, “How do I stay competitive as expectations change and my colleagues leverage new tools?” Loading audio narration… Some people use AI to get through their to-do lists faster, while others use it to enhance their thinking, fine-tune how they communicate, and make their value easier to recognize. The tool may be the same, but the outcomes can be very different.Here are five ways you can…

Fashion keeps getting faster. Loading audio narration… Retailers like Temu and Shein are setting a new pace for traditional stores, and Target says artifical intelligence is helping it meet the moment.Earlier this spring, the bullseye retailer unveiled a new Trend Brain tool that it is rolling out to designers for its portfolio of owned-brands like Wild Fable and Universal Thread.The tool takes a predictive approach, drawing on sources ranging from social media feeds to fashion show catwalk photos to real-time purchasing trends, to help the company anticipate where trends are headed next.After several years of lackluster sales performance, Target is betting…

The tech industry is entering a new phase of AI spending discipline, and the latest data from Jellyfish suggests the winners are not the biggest token burners. Loading audio narration… In a recent study, engineering intelligence company Jellyfish said the top 10% of Claude Code users consumed about 10 times as many AI tokens as the median developer, but produced only about twice the output.AI tokens are small chunks of text that AI models break words and inputs into to process them. They are also a way to price AI usage, usually at a cost per million tokens.Nicholas Arcolano, Jellyfish’s…

Oracle is ditching a contentious plan to construct a natural gas plant to power one of its newest data centers. Loading audio narration… Instead, Oracle said last week that it will partner with fuel-cell maker Bloom Energy to generate on-site electricity.Dubbed Project Jupiter, the site in New Mexico is part of Oracle and OpenAI’s $300 billion cloud computing contract.Project Jupiter’s potential environmental impact has been the subject of intense scrutiny and speculation by the local community for months.In a press release last week, the tech giant said Bloom’s technology would “dramatically reduce water use” and “protect local air quality” at…

ABUJA, Nigeria (AP) — Nigerian troops rescued seven children and two women abducted by gunmen at an orphanage last month in a north-central region, the army said in a statement released Thursday.Authorities in Nigeria’s Kogi state said that gunmen attacked an Islamic orphanage that was operating illegally and abducted 23 pupils in an “isolated area” of Lokoja, capital of Kogi State, on April 26. Fifteen of those abducted were immediately rescued.The troops intercepted and recovered nine of those abducted within a forest area in the state, army spokesman Hassan Abdullahi said in the statement, which was dated Wednesday but released…

Earlier this week, five people who touch every layer of the AI supply chain sat down at the Milken Global Conference in Beverly Hills, where they talked with this editor about everything from chip shortages to orbital data centers to the possibility that the whole architecture that undergirds the tech is wrong. On stage with TechCrunch: Christophe Fouquet, CEO of ASML, the Dutch company that holds a monopoly on the extreme ultraviolet lithography machines without which modern chips would not exist; Francis deSouza, COO of Google Cloud, who is overseeing one of the biggest infrastructure bets in corporate history; Qasar…

At the Milken Global Conference, the talk is about saving the world, but the real action still revolves around raising money. Loading audio narration… Between panels on policy, guided meditations, and celebrity sightings, thousands of suited financiers descend on Beverly Hills every Spring for what remains, at its core, one of the most lucrative networking events in finance.Milken Institute CEO Richard Ditizio’s opening speech highlighted wealth inequality and how a “deficit of hope” among young people has resulted in “bets on the fates of US servicemen shot down in Iran.” The program included panels about niche financial topics and AI,…

Former OpenAI board member Shivon Zilis was asked under oath on Wednesday to clear the air about her complex, once-secret relationship with Elon Musk. Loading audio narration… Zillis, a decadelong executive at Musk’s companies and the mother of four of his children, testified as a witness in the ongoing Musk v Altman trial in federal court in Oakland.She said sometime after she joined OpenAI in 2016, she had a romantic “one-off” with Musk, a cofounder and major investor in the company.They then became friends, she said — and co-parents. Shivon Zilis leaves court on Wednesday.  Benjamin Fanjoy/Getty Images Zilis, an…

Billionaire media mogul Barry Diller doesn’t think OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is untrustworthy, despite recent reporting to the contrary. Onstage at The Wall Street Journal’s “Future of Everything” conference this week, Diller vouched for the AI exec, who has been accused by some former colleagues and board members of being manipulative and deceptive at times. Diller, who is friendly with Altman, was responding to a question about whether or not people should put their faith in Altman to ensure that artificial intelligence benefits humanity. In particular, he was asked about the theoretical form of AI known as artificial general intelligence,…

Snap no longer has a deal with Perplexity, the company revealed on Wednesday as part of its quarterly earnings report. The deal, announced last November, would have seen Perplexity’s AI search engine integrated directly into Snapchat. Perplexity was set to pay Snap $400 million in cash and equity over one year as part of the deal. Snap said that the companies “amicably ended the relationship in Q1″ and that its sales guidance “assumes no contribution from Perplexity.” When Snap announced the deal as part of its third-quarter earnings last year, it said it expected revenue from the partnership to begin…