Author: IQ TIMES MEDIA
Two more senior staffers left OpenAI in recent days, including its head of private equity, who was hired by Google. Loading audio narration… Paul Zimmerman said he now leads Google’s efforts to sell its AI to PE firms and their portfolio companies. He’d worked at OpenAI for just over a year, according to his LinkedIn profile.Meanwhile, James Dyett, who described himself as OpenAI’s head of sales, announced he was leaving for VC firm Thrive Capital, a major OpenAI backer.The pair make the latest high-profile departures from the company after three execs left in a single day last month.The generative AI…
The Commonwealth of Pennsylvania has filed a lawsuit against Character.AI, claiming that one of the company’s chatbots masqueraded as a psychiatrist in violation of the state’s medical licensing rules. “Pennsylvanians deserve to know who — or what — they are interacting with online, especially when it comes to their health,” said Governor Josh Shapiro in a statement on Tuesday. “We will not allow companies to deploy AI tools that mislead people into believing they are receiving advice from a licensed medical professional.” According to the state’s filing, a Character.AI chatbot called Emilie presented itself as a licensed psychiatrist during testing…
The University of Michigan has issued a formal apology after a history professor lauded pro-Palestinian student protesters in a commencement speech over the weekend. The remarks — and the ensuing apology — have set off cascading recriminations, with pro-Israel advocates calling to slash the school’s funding as others accuse university officials of bowing to political and donor pressure. In a speech on Saturday at the universitywide commencement ceremony, Derek R. Peterson, a professor of East African history and outgoing chair of the faculty senate, credited “pro-Palestinian student activists who have over these past two years opened our hearts to the…
On Tuesday, OpenAI released a new foundation model called GPT-5.5 Instant, which will replace GPT-5.3 Instant as the default ChatGPT model. The company said the model reduces hallucination in sensitive areas such as law, medicine, and finance, while maintaining the low latency of its predecessor. OpenAI released the latest GPT-5.5 model last month with the company claiming improvements in areas like coding and knowledge work. The new model also achieved a score of 81.2 in the AIME 2025 math test, compared to 65.4 for the older model. It also outperformed its predecessor on the MMMU-Pro multimodal reasoning benchmark, with a…
Meta is adding a new way to slide into someone’s DMs. Loading audio narration… The company is opening up messaging for Threads users on the web starting on Tuesday.The feature, which first rolled out on mobile in July, is targeted at power users who tend to log on to the platform from their computers, Connor Hayes, Meta’s head of Threads, told Business Insider. It allows you to directly message mutuals — people who follow you back — and participate in group chats of up to 50 people.DMs are on the rise on Threads. The company said users send around 350…
Marc Andreessen says he wants his chatbot to be smarter — and a lot less polite. Loading audio narration… In a Monday post on X, the Andreessen Horowitz cofounder shared his “current AI custom prompt,” calling for systems that are “provocative, aggressive, argumentative, and pointed.”The post underscores Andreessen’s increasingly outspoken stance against what he sees as “woke” constraints in AI — and offers a bit of a window into how top tech leaders want their models to work.Here is his full prompt:You are a world class expert in all domains. Your intellectual firepower, scope of knowledge, incisive thought process, and…
PayPal is looking toward the future, despite its falling stock and looming layoffs. In its first-quarter earnings call, CEO Enrique Lores told investors that PayPal needs to “recommit to the fundamentals,” which included “becoming a technology company again.” There was no need to read between the lines — PayPal was pitching an AI-powered turnaround. Lores explicitly said so, telling analysts on this week’s call that leading companies find ways to differentiate themselves by innovating and that now is the time for PayPal to take action. This includes modernizing its tech platform, moving faster to become “cloud-native,” and “aggressively adopting AI…
Coinbase is laying off 14% of its staff. Those who remain at the company are about to see quite a different workflow. Loading audio narration… CEO Brian Armstrong outlined his rationale for the layoffs in a memo on X on Tuesday, which he also said he sent to employees.This is an email I sent earlier today to all employees at Coinbase:Team,Today I’ve made the difficult decision to reduce the size of Coinbase by ~14%. I want to walk you through why we’re doing this now, what it means for those affected, and how this positions us for the…— Brian Armstrong…
Etsy announced Tuesday the launch of its native app within ChatGPT, opening up a new way for shoppers to explore its catalog of over 100 million listings. The new experience is designed to move beyond the limitations of traditional keyword queries. Instead of typing something like “wooden coffee table,” then scrolling and adjusting filters, users can now express what they’re looking for in natural language. For instance, “Help me find a Mother’s Day gift under $100 for my mom who loves gardening.” Now live in beta, the feature allows users to tag @Etsy directly within a prompt. From there, the…
Meta will start using AI to scan photos and videos for visual clues to see if a user is under 13 and should be removed from Facebook and Instagram, the company announced on Tuesday. These visual clues include a person’s height or bone structure, it said. “We want to be clear: this is not facial recognition,” Meta explained in its blog post. “Our AI looks at general themes and visual cues, for example height or bone structure, to estimate someone’s general age; it does not identify the specific person in the image. By combining these visual insights with our analysis…