Author: IQ TIMES MEDIA

On the Monday, February 2, 2026, episode of The Excerpt podcast: A landmark trial asks whether social media giants like Meta knowingly designed addictive platforms, and if they can be held legally responsible. Clay Calvert, nonresident senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, joins USA TODAY’s The Excerpt to break down the case.Hit play on the player below to hear the podcast and follow along with the transcript beneath it. This transcript was automatically generated, and then edited for clarity in its current form. There may be some differences between the audio and the text.Podcasts: True crime, in-depth interviews and more USA TODAY…

There are dozens and dozens of guides on how to ask for a promotion. What about a demotion?Igor Tsvetkov spent over a year as a senior staff software engineer at Meta, coming from a background at Google and Cruise. Then he posted on LinkedIn, describing how difficult he found it to try to blend into Meta’s culture — and why he decided to ask for a downward shift in title.”I did not fit in perfectly,” Tsvetkov wrote in the December post, describing the need for intimate systems knowledge and credibility among leaders at his rank. “It is very hard to achieve…

The era of the tiny team is upon us.Just ask LinkedIn cofounder Reid Hoffman, who made the point in a recent LinkedIn post and in an episode of the “Possible” podcast that aired on Wednesday.”15 people with AI can compete with 150 without it,” Hoffman wrote on LinkedIn. “AI fundamentally changes what small teams can accomplish.””Small teams have clearer shared context, something large organizations can’t replicate. AI amplifies this because you can build systems that capture and surface patterns across that shared context,” he added.Hoffman said that instead of trying to find existing AI products to solve a specific issue,…

Digital meeting notetakers like Read AI, Fireflies.ai, Fathom, and Granola help record and transcribe online meetings. But for in-person or more versatile options, many people prefer physical recording devices These physical notetakers transcribe audio and give users summaries and action items of meetings using AI. Some of these devices are wearable—pins or pendants with dedicated mics for recording—while others are credit-card sized with dedicated mobile apps to transcribe and extract insights using AI. A few even offer live translation. Below is a non-exhaustive list of physical AI notetakers and transcription tools. Plaud Note/Plaud Note Pro This credit card-sized notetaker has…

French tech giant Capgemini is divesting a US subsidiary that held a contract with US Immigration and Customs Enforcement.In a press release on Sunday, Capgemini said that “legal constraints” stopped it from controlling this subsidiary’s operations.Capgemini has come under pressure from French lawmakers and its trade union over a contract its subsidiary signed with ICE. Capgemini Government Solutions has been under contract since December to provide software that can detect and locate foreign nationals, public records showed.Last week, Capgemini’s CEO Aiman Ezzat wrote on LinkedIn that the company was recently made aware of “the nature and scope of this work.”…

Two detainees were infected with measles at a Texas immigration facility where 5-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos and his father had been held, a Department of Homeland Security official said Sunday.The two patients at Dilley Immigration Processing Center were quarantined, alongside anyone else who may have made contact, DHS spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin said in a statement. “All movement” within the facility was halted, she said.The detainees in question, who were not identified, were in good hands, she said. “This is the best healthcare than many aliens have received in their entire lives,” McLaughlin said.Dilley Immigration Processing Center is where 5-year-old Liam…

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has ceased “all movement” at a detention center for families in Texas after two measles cases were confirmed at the facility, the Department of Homeland Security said.Two people detained at the South Texas Family Residential Center have “active measles infections,” Department of Homeland Security spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin told USA TODAY on Sunday, Feb. 1. The South Texas Family Residential Center is an ICE detention center in Dilley, a small town over 70 miles southwest of San Antonio.The Texas Department of State Health Services confirmed the measles cases on Saturday, Jan. 31, and ICE quarantined the…

How many of the companies with recent layoffs are truly adapting their workforces to the efficiencies and challenges of artificial intelligence? And how many of them were just using AI as an excuse to cover other problems? That’s the question posed by a New York Times article on the trend of “AI-washing,” where companies will cite AI as the reason for layoffs that might actually be caused by other factors, like over-hiring during the pandemic. AI was the stated reason for more than 50,000 layoffs in 2025, with Amazon and Pinterest among the tech companies who blamed the technology for…

Indonesia has followed Malaysia and the Philippines in lifting a ban on xAI’s chatbot Grok. The Southeast Asian countries banned Grok after it was used to create a flood of nonconsensual, sexualized imagery on X (now a subsidiary of xAI), including images of real women and minors. In late December and January, Grok was used to create at least 1.8 million sexualized images of women, according to separate analyses by The New York Times and the Center for Countering Digital Hate. In a statement, Indonesia’s Ministry of Communication and Digital Affairs said that it was lifting the ban after X…

As the global race to build AI infrastructure accelerates, India has offered foreign cloud providers zero taxes through 2047 on services sold outside the country if they run those workloads from Indian data centers — a bid to attract the next wave of AI computing investment, even as power shortages and water stress threaten expansion in the South Asian nation. On Sunday, India’s finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman announced (PDF) the proposal in the country’s annual budget, offering a tax holiday — effectively zero taxes — on revenues from cloud services sold outside India if those services are run from data…