Author: IQ TIMES MEDIA
The founders and teams fueling the AI boom look a lot different — and are generally younger — than the software-era startups of yesteryear.AI founders are five years younger by median age, more technical than business-minded, and generally don’t have a previous history of working together, according to a new report by early-stage venture capital firm Leonis Capital, which examined the 100 fastest-growing AI startups using internal AI research tools and public data.The unicorn club of the 2010s included Airbnb, Box, and LinkedIn, and these companies were more frequently led by product managers and MBAs.Now, AI founders are likelier to…
Eugenia Kuyda saw the future of consumer AI before most. She founded Replika, the first major AI companion startup, in 2017 — years before ChatGPT launched. Today, it has 35 million users. Now Kuyda is back with a new startup called Wabi, which she describes as YouTube for apps — a social platform where anyone can use prompts to instantly create mini apps and share them with friends. Wabi, which launched in beta last month, is a harbinger of another consumer AI shift: one where personalized software becomes the norm. Wabi has raised $20 million in pre-seed funding from a stellar list of angels, including AngelList co-founder Naval Ravikant, Y…
Google announced on Wednesday that it’s making it easier to access AI Mode on mobile. Users will now be able to access AI Mode, which allows users to ask complex questions and follow-ups to dig deeper on a topic directly within Search, via a new dedicated shortcut button under the search bar when opening a “New Tab” page in Chrome. The new shortcut for AI Mode in Chrome is launching in the U.S. starting Wednesday and will soon be coming to 160 new countries and other languages, including Hindi, Indonesian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, and more. By making it easier to…
On Wednesday, researchers at Microsoft released a new simulation environment designed to test AI agents, along with new research showing that current agentic models may be vulnerable to manipulation. Conducted in collaboration with Arizona State University, the research raises new questions about how well AI agents will perform when working unsupervised — and how quickly AI companies can make good on promises of an agentic future. The simulation environment, dubbed the “Magentic Marketplace” by Microsoft, is built as a synthetic platform for experimenting on AI agent behavior. A typical experiment might involve a customer-agent trying to order dinner according to…
By Sybille de La HamaidePARIS (Reuters) -A surge in deadly bird flu cases in Europe has prompted more countries to confine millions of poultry indoors to shield them from infected wild birds, with Ireland the latest to take action on Wednesday.Highly pathogenic avian influenza, commonly called bird flu, has been concerning for the poultry industry and governments since it led to the death of hundreds of millions of birds in recent years and spread to dairy cows in the U.S., disrupting supply, fueling food prices and posing a risk of human transmission.Ireland on Wednesday imposed a nationwide housing order for…
By Sybille de La HamaidePARIS (Reuters) -A surge in deadly bird flu cases in Europe has prompted more countries to confine millions of poultry indoors to shield them from infected wild birds, with Ireland the latest to take action on Wednesday.Highly pathogenic avian influenza, commonly called bird flu, has been concerning for the poultry industry and governments since it led to the death of hundreds of millions of birds in recent years and spread to dairy cows in the U.S., disrupting supply, fueling food prices and posing a risk of human transmission.Ireland on Wednesday imposed a nationwide housing order for…
NEW YORK (AP) — A top executive at a startup company that eased the process for college students applying for financial aid was sentenced Wednesday to over five years in prison for cheating JPMorgan Chase in a $175 million acquisition of the company four years ago.The Manhattan federal court sentencing of Olivier Amar came a month after Charlie Javice, the founder of the startup known as Frank, was sentenced to seven years in prison.In sentencing Amar to five years and eight months in prison, Judge Alvin K. Hellerstein said Amar was “intimately involved in the fraud,” including the creation of…
NEWPORT NEWS, Va. (AP) — A jury in Virginia began deliberating Wednesday in a $40 million lawsuit filed against a former school administrator accused of ignoring repeated warnings that a 6-year-old had a gun hours before a teacher was shot.Closing arguments were held earlier Wednesday following a weeklong trial in the lawsuit filed by former teacher Abby Zwerner against Ebony Parker, a former assistant principal at Richneck Elementary School in Newport News. Zwerner was shot in January 2023 as she sat at a reading table in her first-grade classroom. Zwerner spent nearly two weeks in the hospital, required six surgeries…
A German court on Wednesday ordered a life jail sentence to a palliative care nurse for the murder of 10 patients and attempted murder of 27 others with lethal injections.The court in the western city of Aachen found the 44-year-old man guilty of the offenses committed between December 2023 and May 2024 in a hospital in Wuerselen, near Aachen.The court also determined that the offenses carried a “particular severity of guilt” which should bar him from early release after 15 years, normally an option in such cases.The man, who has not been publicly named, was accused by prosecutors of playing…
A German court on Wednesday ordered a life jail sentence to a palliative care nurse for the murder of 10 patients and attempted murder of 27 others with lethal injections.The court in the western city of Aachen found the 44-year-old man guilty of the offenses committed between December 2023 and May 2024 in a hospital in Wuerselen, near Aachen.The court also determined that the offenses carried a “particular severity of guilt” which should bar him from early release after 15 years, normally an option in such cases.The man, who has not been publicly named, was accused by prosecutors of playing…