Author: IQ TIMES MEDIA

Tokenmaxxing was the hottest trend in Silicon Valley earlier this year, with CEOs encouraging employees to push AI usage as far as it would go. Then the bill came due. Uber reportedly blew through its annual AI budget in a few months, some companies cut Claude licenses for parts of their org, and Meta killed its internal leaderboard.  This tension between hype and ROI is exactly where NEA partner Tiffany Luck lives these days. She got her start convincing companies that e-commerce was the future, and now she’s all in on AI, especially when it comes to the possibilities for “magic moments” in the consumer business.  On this episode of…

At the G7 Summit on Wednesday, world leaders like French President Emmanuel Macron and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi voiced concerns that the U.S. could cut off their countries’ access to top American AI models at any time. Macron warned G7 leaders and top AI executives — including Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, and President Donald Trump  — over lunch that if the U.S. “from one day to the next can turn off the switch,” it could not only harm the economies of European customers but also damage the AI firms themselves.  The comments come a few days…

EarnOS, a startup that pays people to interact with brands online to ensure they are seen by humans and not AI bots, has raised $18.5 million in funding.On Wednesday, the New York-based company launched its app, Ero, where customers can verify they are human and earn rewards for engaging with a brand’s content. Users can scroll through the Ero app feed and participate in challenges, such as physical activities tracked through their fitness app, share their data, and click on brand content.Brands only pay when someone engages with them, and the app helps them to ensure humans, and not AI…

Anthropic is joining Frontier, the carbon removal collective, contributing to a new $915 million tranche of funding and marking its arrival as the first AI startup to join the group.  The new funding nearly doubles pledges to Frontier, bringing the total to $1.8 billion. So far, Frontier has contracted nearly $700 million across more than 50 projects to remove 1.8 million tons of carbon. Companies that have pledged money to Frontier typically use the company’s carbon removal credits to reduce their publicly listed carbon footprints. The new funding will help bolster Frontier’s position in the carbon removal industry, but more…

For years, social media giants controlled what users saw in their feeds. While people could follow accounts, like posts or hide content they didn’t enjoy, recommendation algorithms controlled what was shown to them. Now, social platforms are handing over some of their power by allowing users to personalize their algorithms with the help of AI. Beyond traditional “Not Interested” buttons, apps like Threads, Instagram, and TikTok have begun introducing tools that let people train their own algorithms and influence what appears in their feeds. The shift reflects an evolution in how recommendation systems work. Social media feeds are moving away…

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei said he’s at “peace” with where the Anthropic-OpenAI rivalry stands even as a cold war brews between two of the world’s largest AI companies.But he did throw some shade Sam Altman’s way.”At the end of the day, why argue with someone when you don’t have the same vision and you don’t trust them?” Amodei said in an apparent jab at the OpenAI CEO during a lengthy Bloomberg interview for “The Circuit with Emily Chang” published on Wednesday.”The way to resolve it is you go off and do your thing, they go off and do their thing,”…

Odyssey, a world model AI startup founded by self-driving vehicle pioneers CEO Oliver Cameron and CTO Jeff Hawke, has raised a $310 million Series B round at a $1.45B valuation led by Natural Capital, with Amazon, AMD Ventures, GV, and others participating. World models are the next big thing in AI beyond text- and chat-based large language models. They gather data from the physical world and simulate it with accurate physics. In Odyssey’s case, it has mimicked how Google Earth gathered data; the startup sent people out with cameras strapped to their backs. (Google drives camera-equipped cars around.) That approach makes sense given the backgrounds…

Despite the fact that AI increasingly dominates our economy (it’s hot IPO summer and we’re all just along for the ride), most Americans are not particularly optimistic about the technology’s long term impact on the country, a new study from Pew Research reveals. In fact, although a whole lot of Americans increasingly use AI in their daily lives, most of them have neutral to negative views about it, the research reveals. Only 16 percent of Americans think that AI’s impact on society during the next 20 years will be positive, Pew says, while around 40 percent say that it will…

Today’s marketers are under more pressure than ever to prove that their work has real revenue impact — that marketing is not a cost center but a growth engine for the business. But when campaigns are optimized for clicks, impressions, or surface-level engagement alone, budget flows toward the metrics that look good in a deck rather than the ones that move the pipeline, a problem LinkedIn has coined as “Bullspend.””Think about numbers that look incredible on a dashboard, you can show the arrows going up, but when the next question comes about — how did they move the business forward?…

After years of incremental updates, Google is betting that its Gemini AI can reinvent its smart speaker. On Wednesday, the company introduced its first audio device built specifically for Gemini with the $99.99 Google Home Speaker. The new Google Home device is the first stand-alone smart speaker from the tech giant since the Nest Audio in September 2020. That older device arrived at a time when smart speakers were thought of largely as handy controllers for your smart home and music-playing systems. They lacked the smarts of today’s AI chatbots, as commands often had to be phrased correctly to get…