Author: IQ TIMES MEDIA

Remember the executive who sparked the tokenmaxxing panic earlier this year after saying Uber had already blown through its 2026 budget for Anthropic’s Claude Code? He’s back with a more interesting lesson about AI.Uber CTO Praveen Neppalli Naga says the company has started sending its best AI engineers into departments like finance, legal, marketing, customer support, HR, and procurement to study how people actually work before building AI tools with them.He called these two-week teams “Agentic Pods.” Engineers spend the first few days shadowing employees, learning every step of a workflow, then quickly build and test software to improve it.The…

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said Silicon Valley luminaries taught him how to be ok with standing out when making investments.”The thing I really learned from Peter Thiel and Paul Graham, both in two different ways, which is that the very best companies, the very best investment opportunities are almost never the ones that look really popular,” Altman said during a recent episode of the “Invest Like The Best” podcast.Altman said following the crowd can help to a point, but it’s only when you pick companies that may look unpopular in the moment that you open yourself up to a potentially…

The Slate truck doesn’t have a typical key.Unlike today’s cars — which pack proximity sensors inside a little plastic box that runs tech that allows drivers to start the engine via a push-start button — the Slate has a simple solution.Drivers put a square key into a square slot. The instrument display flicks on. A single bell chimes.That’s it. There is no theatrical lighting sequence, symphony-like entrance music, or enormous touchscreen springing to life.Even the windows are simpler. They’re controlled by manual hand cranks. In my test, it took six or seven spins before the glass disappeared into the door…

Caleb Ashton’s journey into the resale business was, like many who start out in that industry, humble.Ashton began flipping items — textbooks, action figures, golf clubs, sneakers, and more — while living with his wife in a one-bedroom apartment in 2019. He was eager to create an extra source of income while his wife attended law school.In true millennial fashion, he learned how to buy and resell items from YouTube videos.”I started with a budget of 500 bucks that I had cobbled together from birthday and Christmas money. That was my startup seed money,” Ashton, 31, told Business Insider.”I initially…

DoorDash’s delivery robots need a hand.Some workers in areas where DoorDash is using its Dot delivery robot are receiving offers through the DoorDash app to load them up. While the vehicles can navigate miles to delivery destinations, it’s the few feet between a restaurant’s pickup counter and the curb outside where delivery workers intervene.Devena Bybee, a DoorDash gig worker in Mesa, Arizona, said that she received one such offer in early July. The company is using the robots to make deliveries in the Phoenix area.Bybee drove about two miles to a restaurant, picked up an order, and placed it in…

Beth Barnes, one of the AI industry’s most influential watchdogs, has a lot to worry about.The ex-OpenAI researcher has shown that AI’s capabilities are escalating by the month. Now, she fears that the industry doesn’t have the staff in place to keep up with the technology in its next chapter.The biggest barrier to that research is talent, said Barnes, who left OpenAI to start the nonprofit METR in 2022. METR, which stands for Model Evaluation and Threat Research, plays a crucial role in the AI industry by working closely with OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and Meta to provide independent answers about…

James Hardaway has a reputation among his friends and family for being a reviews guy. Before making a big purchase, he’ll check Wirecutter and Consumer Reports, do a drive-by of Reddit, and see what’s being said on YouTube. He’s an avid film fan, and he eagerly combs through Rotten Tomatoes scores and media writeups ahead of new releases to make sure he’s in tune with the cultural moment. He feels that if he’s not doing his homework, he may not be making the best use of his money.Still, Hardaway, a 38-year-old manufacturing manager in Texas, isn’t sure if all the…

Despite a lawsuit from xAI, a Minnesota ban on apps that allow users to “nudify” images can move forward, according to NBC News. U.S. District Judge Donovan Frank’s ruling focused as much on the timing of xAI’s lawsuit as on the substance of the law itself. Frank wrote that xAI filed its request for a temporary restraining order “on July 29, 2026, nearly three months after the law was signed, and only three days before the law is set to take effect” on August 1. “Such a delay in bringing the action and the motion suggests that harm is not…

Hank Green, a novelist, comedian, and YouTuber with 3.2 million subscribers, recently apologized to his audience for his growing reliance on AI chatbots. The controversy started when, in the middle of a video posted on the educational channel Complexly, Green incongruously used the phrase “I appreciate the pushback,” leading viewers to speculate that he’d written the script with a chatbot — and, in the process, accidentally included its response to one of his prompts. In a since-deleted post on X, Green acknowledged that he’d produced the video “under a ton of pressure” and used ChatGPT “for research on this script.”…

Sam Altman’s concept of “cool” seems to differ from the majority.In his X profile, he says, for instance, that “AI is cool i guess,” a statement with which many would likely disagree. He also fails to capitalize “i,” which some think is cool, but not all.And when the OpenAI CEO shared what he called a “cool use case” for ChatGPT on X this week, the reception was not cool. It was cold.”connect your family calendars and explain your kids’ interests,” he wrote, in lowercase, adding that it was not his own idea but one he heard. “every morning for the…