Author: IQ TIMES MEDIA

Micro dramas are booming — and one startup is betting AI can help make them more interactive.StoReel is a Beijing-based startup that distributes AI-made micro dramas in its mobile app. It’s also a platform that lets creators make series using AI characters and voices. StoReel makes most of its revenue in the US, but is present in a handful of markets.The company shared exclusively with Business Insider that it had raised $34 million in funding — $9 million in seed capital led by Play Ventures, and $25 million in user acquisition financing from PVX Partners. In user acquisition financing, investors do not…

Andrew Ashur, the founder and CEO of window cleaning robot startup Lucid Bots, likes to joke that his company is the antithesis of the robotics industry right now. While many companies are trying to build humanoids or tout demos of their robots dancing and doing flips, Lucid Bots’ drones are out in the field making traditionally unsexy and dangerous work, like cleaning windows, safer and more efficient. “The sad truth is most are still selling a lot of hype and headlines, and we sell performance on the job site that shows up in our customers, profits, and losses,” Ashur told…

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Rohan Gore, a 38-year-old AI engineer at Reach3 Insights, a market research firm based in Vancouver. His identity and employment have been verified by Business Insider. The following has been edited for length and clarity. Loading audio narration… I graduated with a computer science degree back in 2010, and I’ve worked in the industry since.I started as a typical software engineer working on some of the interesting and complex problems in marketing research. Now, I’m an AI engineer.I have mixed feelings about the impact of AI on the software engineering industry.I…

A new AI benchmark asks a deceptively simple question: Can machines tell when something is, well, BS?Peter Gostev, AI capability lead at model-evaluation firm Arena, recently created “BullshitBench,” a suite of deliberately nonsensical questions designed to test whether large language models will push back, or confidently plow ahead without spotting the BS. Since launching in late February, the project has quickly gained traction, racking up more than 1,200 stars on GitHub.The premise is straightforward. Models are presented with prompts that sound technical but collapse under scrutiny. This is what caught my eye at first, because the questions are hilarious and…

Decathlon, the world’s largest sporting goods retailer, said on Tuesday that it’s seeing “significant” productivity gains at seven of its European warehouses, where it has been using robots from Exotec to sort and pack items for brick-and-mortar stores. Loading audio narration… Exotec’s CEO and cofounder, Romain Moulin, said the benefits run across the board, from reduced warehouse footprint to increased items shipped out of the facilities.At its Portugal warehouse, Decathlon said the site doubled the number of orders it can prepare from 57,000 to 114,000.The human work is also changing, as employees are walking less throughout the warehouse or being…

Some Meta employees received a message on Tuesday night directing them to work remotely on Wednesday, two sources who received the email told Business Insider.Employees in Meta’s wearables and ads divisions got the notes, said the two sources. The short HR email said leadership would share more information.Meta’s wearables unit, which includes AI glasses and its augmented reality business, is one of the company’s “several key investment areas” for 2026, per its latest earnings report.A spokesperson for Meta declined to comment.The note comes as the company gears up for layoffs. Business Insider reported earlier this month that some managers were…

Meta’s C-suite is set to score a big increase in their compensation — if the $1.5 trillion tech company can massively boost its stock price, according to forms Meta just filed with the SEC.The forms detail a two-part incentive system for six executives, including CTO Andrew Bosworth, CFO Susan Li, chief operating officer Javier Olivan, and chief product officer Chris Cox. The execs are set to receive an increased number of restricted stock units that vest over time, and tens of thousands of stock options that give them the right to purchase shares at lofty future targets, with a deadline…

Kleiner Perkins, the prominent U.S. venture firm, announced on Tuesday that it raised $3.5 billion in fresh capital across two funds, a significant increase from the firm’s $2 billion fundraise less than two years ago. The firm, founded back in 1972, says it raised $1 billion for its 22nd early-stage venture fund, and $2.5 billion for a separate vehicle designed to fund late-stage growth businesses. The much larger capital haul is not a surprise. Over the last few years, Kleiner Perkins has managed to secure early stakes in a number of fast-growing AI startups, including Together AI, Harvey, and OpenEvidence.…

Earlier this month, Fidji Simo laid out a sharper strategy for OpenAI: the startup’s everything era is over. Now, it’s about focus. Loading audio narration… “We cannot miss this moment because we are distracted by side quests,” Simo said at an all-hands meeting, according to Business Insider’s must-read profile of OpenAI’s new CEO of applications.One of the first “side quests” to go is the Sora AI video-generation app. The product was a breakout hit when it launched last year. So why shut it down?The answer comes down to a growing constraint across the AI industry: compute. AI token use on…

The assignment involves no laptop, no chatbot and no technology of any kind. In fact, there’s no pen or paper, either.Instead, students in Chris Schaffer’s biomedical engineering class at Cornell University are required to speak directly to an instructor in what he calls an “oral defense.”It’s a testing method as old as Socrates and making a comeback in the AI age. A growing number of college professors say they are turning to oral exams, and combining a variety of old-fashioned and cutting-edge techniques, to help address a crisis in higher education.“You won’t be able to AI your way through an…