Author: IQ TIMES MEDIA

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,…

Google is shaking up its AI leadership, with some of the company’s top experts in the field moving roles or leaving. Shares of the tech giant fell as much as 5% on the news.Demis Hassabis is shedding his CEO title at DeepMind to take on a broader AI research role at Alphabet, Google’s parent company. Koray Kavukcuoglu, previously DeepMind’s chief technology officer, will head the unit, reporting to Google CEO Sundar Pichai.Hassabis, one of the pioneers of modern AI, will become chief scientist of Alphabet and chair of Google DeepMind. He’s been tipped by some to be the next CEO,…

The biggest expense for most restaurants isn’t food costs, rent or mortgage costs, or overheads like utilities or insurance. For most restaurants in America, regardless of size, the biggest expense is labor.The better a restaurant can manage labor costs, the more profit the operation stands to generate. And yet restaurant operators frequently bemoan the tech sprawl of separate digital platforms for hiring, scheduling, payroll, inventory, and more.”Many struggle with running three or maybe four separate systems across what we think of as the employee life cycle,” says David Peirce, senior vice president and GM of emerging markets at Fourth. “You…

E-commerce software maker Shopify seems to be benefiting handily from people using AI to search. On the company’s second-quarter earnings call, Shopify President Harley Finkelstein said AI has become a “complement to search, rather than a substitute for it,” and had particularly benefited the long tail of e-commerce, including the smaller merchants that make up the majority of its customer base. Indeed, the company credited its earnings beat and soaring revenue to AI search, at least partly. This is quite different from how AI is impacting online publishing, where AI summaries have led to a measurable drop in click-through rates,…

Hark, a startup that raised $700 million in Series A funding in May, today launched its agent Hark Handoff, which can use a browser efficiently to complete tasks. The company claims that Handoff can easily navigate websites that have no official APIs, including Target, Walmart, OpenTable, and LinkedIn. It said that the Handoff agent looks at website structure and visual data to understand if it needs to click buttons or type information. The premise is similar to tons of browser-based agents released before. Issue a command, and it will complete tasks for you, including ordering food or coffee, booking travel…

AI is reshaping Uber — gradually, and as it keeps a handle on AI spending.The ride-hailing company kept a lid on its token spending during the second quarter by “by setting better defaults for different use cases,” using lower-cost models for some tasks, and “letting employees more clearly understand and manage their spend,” CFO Balaji Krishnamurthy said in prepared remarks after the company reported quarterly earnings on Wednesday.”As a result, cost per token has declined over the past several months, even as adoption has continued to increase, allowing us to keep overall AI spend broadly stable,” Krishnamurthy said.Earlier this year,…

At our past TechCrunch Disrupt events, AI has taken center stage, both throughout our programming and in a stage of its own. This year, the technology, implications, and players are so rapidly developing and widespread that we’re expanding the single AI stage into two! The AI Stage will continue as you’d expect, with a rundown of sessions and speakers available for review right here. But the Real World AI Stage is brand-new for TechCrunch Disrupt 2026. On this stage, we’ll be focusing on that intersection between the digital and physical, and all the ways we’ll continue to see a blending…

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Ryan Stewart, a 28-year-old brand marketing manager at Tinder, based in Los Angeles. His identity has been confirmed by Business Insider. This piece has been edited for length and clarity.I started as a design intern at Tinder in the UK in 2021, and from there, I sort of weaseled my way up. Now I’ve been with the company for almost five years, and I work out of the Los Angeles office.I applied during COVID, when it was hard to get any job. So I was sending out a lot of applications.I…

Hope Denton is a 35-year-old mom of three kids, ages 6, 13, and 15, in Indiana. She’s also juggling a remote content writing job, her photography company, freelance writing, contract projects, and volunteer work.She told Business Insider that she balances all her tasks by brain-dumping into ChatGPT every night. “Instead of falling asleep, I’m mentally bouncing between work deadlines, appointments, practices, dinner, laundry, emails, and all the little things I am afraid I will forget by morning,” she said.ChatGPT then helps her find the most efficient ways to tackle everything, while also noting what can be put off for now.Denton…

Anthropic is building a team to design its own custom chips for AI usage. Business Insider was first to report on the news, but Anthropic has since confirmed with TechCrunch. The Claude maker said it is planning to co-design hardware and models to help its technology run faster and more efficiently. Last month, The Information reported that Anthropic was scouting Samsung as a potential partner for building such chips. Anthropic’s decision to design its own chips comes as demand for Claude rises while AI companies snatch up as many AI infrastructure deals as they can.  For its part, Anthropic has…