Author: IQ TIMES MEDIA

New Levels.fyi analyses show how equity grants at frontier tech companies have turned into life-changing sums.A SpaceX Software Engineer II offer from August 2022 included a $155,000 salary and a $365,000 equity grant that vested over five years. At SpaceX’s IPO valuation, that grant is estimated to be worth more than $4 million, assuming it was held.At Anthropic, engineers who joined in 2023 may now be sitting on equity worth tens of millions of dollars after the AI company’s valuation surge. OpenAI shows a similar pattern, with some 2022 and 2023 equity grants to engineers now valued at over $50…

Apple has a habit of showing up late to the tech party and still being the best-dressed. It might do it again with the new Siri in iOS 27 this fall.Right now, Siri is bad — and that’s not a harsh take. Ali has ChatGPT pinned to his iPhone’s home screen. I have Gemini in a prime spot for quick access to a genuinely useful AI assistant.These are the habits Apple is up against. But I’m using Gemini less after a few days of test-driving the first iOS 27 beta and years of dunking on Siri. It turns out Siri’s…

The founder of the AI chatbot startup Replika says fears about AI eliminating jobs are “justified” — and could eventually trigger widespread backlash and protests.Eugenia Kuyda, who is also the CEO and founder of AI-powered mini-app platform Wabi, said during a recent live episode of the Platformer podcast that she believes “crazy protests around jobs and AI are going to start happening.””We’ll live in this very optimistic city where it’s all about like future, future, future, but as soon as you get out of here, like it’s pretty scary,” Kuyda told Platformer founder Casey Newton. “People are really struggling to…

Your next iPhone is going to be more expensive than the last one you bought.Same thing for your next Xbox.And it could well be true for your next PC, or TV — or just about anything else with electronics inside it.Blame AI.That’s the messaging we’re getting from the C-suites across the country: A steady drumbeat of company leaders saying that the AI boom means that chips and other components they need for their products are getting snapped up by AI companies. That means their costs are going up, and they’re going to pass those rising costs along to consumers.Apple CEO Tim…

NEW DELHI (AP) — Supporters of India’s viral Cockroach Janta Party banged steel plates with spoons in a protest Saturday to demand the resignation of the education minister over allegations of examination irregularities and repeated paper leaks.The protest near Parliament in New Delhi by hundreds of students and young supporters of the nascent movement added to the pressure on Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government while also seeking wider support among Indians.Authorities deployed heavy security and police used cameras and drones to monitor the protest.Some carried placards and others banged plates, their noise cutting through the crowd protesting and demanding the…

Last Friday, citing unspecified national security concerns, the White House ordered Anthropic to restrict the export of its powerful AI models Fable and Mythos to anyone outside of the United States, as well as foreign nationals inside the country. Shortly after, the AI giant hastily pulled the plug on both models, which have now been unavailable to anyone for a week.  The episode is the first real test of whether the U.S. government can use export controls to contain frontier AI the way it has tried, with very uneven results, to contain encryption and spyware before it. And dramatic as…

That AI slop can’t hurt you, according to Figma’s top executive.Figma CEO and cofounder Dylan Field said creative people — like the graphic designers who use his company’s tools — should find the AI era “a great time to be creative.”AI models, he said, are trained on the “distribution of data” and typically create designs that people recognize as “average.”Humans, on the other hand, can make something that hasn’t been seen before, Field told The New York Times’ “Hard Fork” podcast.”If you’re in distribution, and you’re not actually pushing the bounds, I think that you’re in a worse shape than…

John Jumper, a chemist and computer scientist who once won a Nobel Prize alongside Demis Hassabis, announced Friday he is leaving Google DeepMind to join Anthropic.He’s the latest Silicon Valley name to jump ship for the AI startup darling. Jumper worked at Google for nearly a decade.”The entire GDM team taught me so much about how to do great science,” he wrote in an X post on Friday. “GDM is a special place, and I’ll still be excited to hear about what amazing things they discover next.” Jumper is best known for spearheading Google’s AlphaFold team, an AI system that…

Two tech titans are now competing on another battlefield: Employee snacks.Earlier this month, Meta CTO Andrew “Boz” Bosworth said the company would be taking steps to improve employee morale after successive waves of layoffs and AI strategy pivots. One of those steps, he said in a memo, would be improving the snacks and drinks in its office kitchens.Elon Musk’s social media is going toe-to-toe on that front.To entice engineers to work for X, Nikitia Bier, the top product executive at the social media platform, offered to up its snack game.”Neglected Meta employees: X is hiring web and data engineers &…

Just as last week was ending, the US government forced Anthropic to pull its two newest models, Fable 5 and Mythos 5, citing national security concerns after Amazon researchers allegedly found a way to bypass Fable 5’s guardrails.  Cybersecurity researchers have since signed an open letter calling the move dangerous, and Anthropic itself noted the same jailbreaks exist in other models. So is this a genuine security concern, or just the latest chapter in a messy relationship between Anthropic and the Trump administration?  On this episode of TechCrunch’s Equity podcast, hosts Anthony Ha, Sean O’Kane, and Rebecca Bellan unpack what the ban means for developers building on Anthropic’s platform and for anyone…