Author: IQ TIMES MEDIA
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…
I have a rule about the internet that serves me well whenever I see something I don’t quite understand: Assume everything you’re seeing is for — or by — 12-year-olds.Wondering what “Baby Gronk rizzed up Livvy Dunne” means? It’s for 12-year-olds. Unclear about Skibidi Toilet or Italian brainrot? That’s because it’s for children. See a photo of The Grinch smiling and saying, “That feeling when knee surgery is tomorrow?” That’s for 7th graders, not you. Confused by the rise of looksmaxxers like Clavicular and the new mogging and maxxing lingo? I promise: If you’re reading this, you’re at least two…
When Tony Fadell entered New York City’s 28th Street Subway Station, he did not expect to come face-to-face with an advertisement for a product he designed over 20 years ago. But there it was: a five-by-four-foot poster promoting the iPod Shuffle, luring passersby with the promise of “Zero screen time.” “The first thing was, I thought, ‘Wait a second, did somebody not change the ad?’” Fadell, known as the father of the iPod, told TechCrunch. “For somebody like me who knows that thing intimately, it’s like seeing your kid’s picture.” As Fadell stood in the train station, he was surrounded…
Two weeks ago, OpenAI said it would relaunch the robotics program it shuttered in 2021 — the latest signal that the biggest AI labs are racing to teach machines to operate in the physical world. But building capable robots requires something the AI industry doesn’t yet have, which is the training data to match that used for language models. That gap is creating a new kind of infrastructure business. Unlike LLMs that were trained on a vast sea of publicly available text, robots need data that captures physical interaction, and that kind of data barely exists. YouTube videos and footage…
As enterprises struggle to turn AI pilot programs into functional parts of their business, reliability has taken center stage. A new startup is hoping to solve that problem by drawing on the tools of mathematical formalization, combining one of computer science’s most reliable systems with one of its most chaotic. On Wednesday, Pramaana Labs announced $27 million in seed funding led by Khosla Ventures, with participation from Accel, BoldCap, Nexus Venture Partners, Premji Invest, and Unbound. Pramaana will focus on highly sensitive verticals like law, drug discovery, and tax preparation — where errors can be costly and reliability is at…
SpaceX’s soaring stock price isn’t just making shareholders richer. It’s making acquisitions cheaper.Elon Musk’s company hasn’t wasted time since its record-breaking public debut. Some highlights from its first three days of trading:-A nearly 50% rise in share price from its $135 IPO price.-A $2.66 trillion valuation, pushing it ahead of Amazon to make it the fifth-most valuable company in the world.-An agreement to buy vibe-coding startup Cursor for $60 billion.SpaceX had 30 days after its IPO to decide whether to buy Cursor under the terms of an agreement struck in April. It only took a few days to pull the…
America has never had as many billionaires as it does now — and the number is only growing.The SpaceX IPO resulted in one of the greatest wealth increases in history, turning Elon Musk’s estimated net worth of over $800 billion before the company went public into the world’s first-ever trillion-dollar-plus fortune.While the scale of Musk’s fortune is unprecedented by all measures, it also raises the question of how historic figures, largely considered America’s richest, such as the Gilded Age industrialists, compare with the richest people today.That is to say: Who are the richest Americans of all time?In many historical calculations…
Convey, a startup founded last year that builds AI “teammates,” has raised $38 million in Series A funding led by Andreessen Horowitz, with participation from Khosla Ventures and Pear VC.AI agents have become one of the hottest corners of enterprise software, with startups and tech giants racing to build tools that can take actions on a worker’s behalf. This week, Salesforce agreed to buy Fin, an AI-driven customer service agent platform, for $3.6 billion.Convey is trying to shed the agent label.”Agents feel a bit overloaded at this point in time,” cofounder and CEO Rohan Chopra told Business Insider. “We emphasize…
Paradromics, a competitor of Elon Musk’s Neuralink, recently completed its first brain implant in a human patient, marking a major milestone in the startup’s decadelong effort to use brain-computer interfaces (BCI) to restore lost human functions.The startup announced Wednesday that its Connexus brain-chip was implanted in a Michigan woman who has difficulty speaking due to a motor neuron disease. The woman’s identity has not yet been disclosed to protect patient privacy.The procedure was part of an FDA-approved clinical study conducted at University of Michigan Health. The operation, which took place in early June, lasted about four hours, a representative for…
As global investors race to fund the infrastructure underpinning the artificial-intelligence boom, Canada Pension Plan Investment Board’s CPP Investments has committed up to ₹70 billion (about $741 million) to Indian data center operator CtrlS, betting on India’s growing role in the global buildout of cloud and AI infrastructure. Under the partnership announced on Wednesday, CPP Investments will invest ₹40 billion (around $423 million) to acquire an 8.2% stake in CtrlS and commit up to ₹30 billion (about $317 million) to a joint venture to develop hyperscale data center campuses across India. CPP Investments will own 48% of the joint venture,…