Author: IQ TIMES MEDIA

The fight to tame spreadsheets with AI isn’t over yet. A new company called Meridian has emerged from stealth with a more comprehensive IDE-based approach to agentic financial modeling — and plenty of funding to build it. On Wednesday, the company announced $17 million in seed funding at a $100 million post-money valuation. “Our goal is to make financial modeling and spreadsheets way more predictable and auditable,” CEO and co-founder John Ling told TechCrunch. “How can you take a process that traditionally might have taken several hours and condense it down into like 10 minutes?” The round was led by…

Gov. Gretchen Whitmer has signed a new law to ban smartphones from public school classrooms starting this fall, making good on a pledge to keep the devices out of instructional time. “We know that phones impede a student’s ability to learn,” Whitmer told a crowd of reporters, students and educators on Tuesday ahead of a bill signing at Waverly High School.“They are by far the most disruptive distraction in our classrooms … designed to keep you scrolling, and teachers struggling to keep the class engaged while competing against social media.” Under the new law, students will still be able to…

BANGKOK (AP) — For many Thais, a meal doesn’t feel complete without an iced coffee or tea so sugary it could pass for dessert. The government, concerned about the health consequences, wants them to dial it back.Starting Wednesday, nine major coffee chains across the country have pledged to cut the default sugar content in some of their drinks by half in a government initiative aimed at tackling excessive sugar consumption.According to the Health Department, Thais consume an average of 21 teaspoons of sugar per day, more than three times the World Health Organization’s recommended limit of six teaspoons. Health officials…

VANCOUVER, British Columbia (AP) — The suspect in a Canada school shooting was an 18-year-old who had a history of police visits to her home to check on her mental health, authorities said Wednesday, a day after the attack that killed eight people in a remote part of British Columbia.Police said Jesse Van Rootselaar was found dead from an apparent self-inflicted wound following the assault on a school in the small mountain community of Tumbler Ridge.Royal Canadian Mounted Police Deputy Commissioner Dwayne McDonald said Van Rootselaar first killed her mother and stepbrother at the family home before attacking the nearby…

Elon Musk has long framed SpaceX’s mission in sweeping terms: to send humans to Mars and make humans interplanetary.Along the way, the moon has played an inconsistent supporting role.SpaceX is under contract with NASA, for example, to send people to the moon, and that funding plays a key role in some of SpaceX’s major projects. However, Musk’s main messaging for years has been to build cities on Mars, not the moon.On Sunday, that messaging seemed to take a hard 180.”For those unaware, SpaceX has already shifted focus to building a self-growing city on the Moon, as we can potentially achieve…

HAT YAI, Thailand (AP) — A hostage situation and a shooting were reported Wednesday inside a school in southern Thailand, authorities said. The situation was resolved after a few hours, with the gunman apprehended, police said.The police’s Central Investigation Bureau said that an armed man held some students and teachers hostage, and at least one student was injured. They reported that the incident was under control about two hours later, though they didn’t immediately release further details. Thai media reported several people being injured, though that wasn’t officially confirmed.The gunman appeared to be angry as he went into Patongprathankiriwat School…

On Tuesday night, Elon Musk gathered the employees of xAI for an all-hands meeting. Evidently, he wanted to talk about the future of his AI company, and specifically, how it relates to the moon. According to The New York Times, which reports that it heard the meeting, Musk told employees that xAI needs a lunar manufacturing facility, a factory on the moon that will build AI satellites and fling them into space via a giant catapult. “You have to go to the moon,” he said, per the Times. The move, he explained, will help xAI harness more computing power than…

Prediction markets are hot — and about to get even hotter, says Robinhood’s CEO.On Tuesday’s earnings call, Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev called prediction markets the fastest-growing business in the fintech company’s history.”We’re just at the beginning of a prediction market supercycle that could drive trillions in annual volume over time,” he said. “This year is going to be a big year. Olympics are going on right now, World Cup coming in the summer.”Supercycles refer to sustained, long-term periods of expansion spurred by high demand for a product. Companies like Kalshi, Polymarket, and, recently, Robinhood let users bet on the outcomes…

DAKAR, Senegal (AP) — Thousands of students left Senegal’s top public university Tuesday after authorities closed campus housing following a student’s death during protests over unpaid financial aid.Abdoulaye Ba, a second-year medical student, died during protests at Cheikh Anta Diop University in the capital Dakar, authorities said. Burned cars and broken barricades still littered the university grounds on Tuesday following clashes a day before between the police and students. A video posted on social media Monday night shows flames and smoke coming from a four-story student housing building as students try to flee, some jumping from windows.Ba died in a…

Ryan Beiermeister, who served as OpenAI’s vice president of product policy, was fired in January after a male colleague accused her of sex discrimination, the Wall Street Journal has reported. “The allegation that I discriminated against anyone is absolutely false,” Beiermeister told the Journal. TechCrunch reached out to OpenAI for comment and also contacted an email that appears to be associated with Beiermeister; neither had responded at the time of publication. Per the Journal’s report, Beiermeister’s termination came after she expressed criticism of a planned ChatGPT feature dubbed “adult mode.” The new mode would introduce erotica into the chatbot user…