Author: IQ TIMES MEDIA

The signs that AI could lead to mass job displacement are already piling up: entry-level job postings in the U.S. have sunk 35% since 2023, mass layoffs have swept across Big Tech, and even AI leaders themselves are warning about what’s coming.  Backstage at the Axios AI Summit in Washington on Wednesday, Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA) said a venture capitalist recently told him he’s writing software investments down to zero in large part due to the strides of Anthropic’s Claude, and a major law firm told him it’s not hiring first-year associates because AI can now handle much of the…

French AI company Mistral released a new open-source text-to-speech model on Thursday that can be used by voice AI assistants or in enterprise use cases like customer support. The model, which lets enterprises build voice agents for sales and customer engagement, puts Mistral in direct competition with the likes of ElevenLabs, Deepgram, and OpenAI. The new model, called Voxtral TTS, supports nine languages, including English, French, German, Spanish, Dutch, Portuguese, Italian, Hindi, and Arabic. “Our customers have been asking for a speech model. So we built a small-sized speech model that can fit on a smartwatch, a smartphone, a laptop,…

Enclave, a startup focused on finding the most dangerous security flaws buried deep within code written by AI, is launching from stealth with $6 million in seed funding at a $33 million valuation, led by 8VC.The round includes a roster of prominent tech investors and executives, including Stripe cofounder Patrick Collison, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, Box CEO Aaron Levie, and Yelp CEO Jeremy Stoppelman.8VC’s bet on Enclave is shaped in part by its investment in AI coding startup Cognition, the company behind the coding agent Devin, which gave it a front-row seat to how quickly AI-generated software is spreading.”As a…

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang’s direct reports don’t have to worry about one-on-one meetings with the big boss.Huang spoke to podcaster Lex Fridman in an episode published Monday about the way he leads one of the largest chipmakers at the forefront of technological innovation. He said he runs his business differently from the way other trillion-dollar companies do.Huang said he oversees more than 60 people in his direct staff, but he doesn’t conduct one-on-one meetings with each of them. He said he prefers to tackle issues as a group.”I don’t have one-on-ones with them because it’s impossible,” Huang said. “We present…

Amazon is testing a new program that lets shoppers get Prime shipping benefits on other websites, without ever logging into an Amazon account.The initiative, described as a “Confidential Product” in seller invitations seen by Business Insider, is being piloted with a small group of merchants who use Amazon’s multi-channel fulfillment services. The MCF lets third-party sellers use Amazon’s fulfillment network to pick, pack, and deliver orders from external websites, like their own online store or other marketplaces.The pitch: Direct-to-consumer brands can offer Prime shipping on their own sites without requiring a Prime login, while retaining control over the checkout process.…

Harvey is raising money like it’s training ChatGPT, not selling software to lawyers. The legal AI startup has pulled in nearly $1 billion in just over a year, leaving some asking a simple question: What does it actually need all that cash for? Loading audio narration… Since last February, Harvey has disclosed four funding rounds totaling about $960 million, an almost OpenAI-like pace for a company that doesn’t build its own frontier models. The startup just closed a $200 million round that values it at $11 billion, only months after its valuation tipped $8 billion.Harvey has its reasons to stockpile…

Nebius is one of the more unusual players in the AI boom: a “startup” that didn’t exactly start from scratch.The company emerged in 2024 from the breakup of Russian search giant Yandex. A complex transaction left the new Nebius with hundreds of employees and roughly $2.5 billion in capital, giving it a scale and war chest most new entrants can only dream of.With decades of experience building massive data centers for a huge online search business, the Nebius team brought deep know-how to the AI infrastructure race. The company builds AI data centers from the ground up.I met Nebius CEO…

AMSTERDAM (AP) — From the stage of Amsterdam’s historic concert hall, violinist Hyunjin Cho and cellist Efstratia Chaloulakou look out over row after row of young faces illuminated by the glow of laptop screens.The plush red seats of the Concertgebouw’s main auditorium are occupied by students cramming for upcoming exams and finishing dissertations as classical music fills the hall.The students aren’t being rude by ignoring the musicians. At this event, they’re meant to be studying — and the music is intended to assist rather than distract them.The study sessions were first organized during the COVID-19 pandemic by Entree, the youth…

SANTA ANA PUEBLO, N.M. (AP) — An empty lot between a fire station and a soccer field just outside Albuquerque soon will be the home of a federal medical center first promised to Native American patients more than 30 years ago.Earlier this month, Santa Ana Pueblo Gov. Myron Armijo took officials from the U.S. Indian Health Service and the Department of Health and Human Services on a tour of the location where patients are to receive everything from dialysis and diabetes care to optometry services.”This will definitely change the game for healthcare in our area,” Armijo said.Set to break ground…

Okay, so the U.S. and China are locked in an all-out race to build the most powerful AI on the planet. Beijing is throwing billions at homegrown models, tightening its grip on the tech sector, and watching nervously as its best AI talent gravitates to U.S. companies. Yet Manus — one of China’s most buzzed-about AI startups — quietly relocated to Singapore and sold itself to Meta for $2 billion. Did anyone think there would not be a reckoning over this tie-up? As industry watchers know, Manus burst onto the scene in the spring of last year with a demo…