Author: IQ TIMES MEDIA
Amazon reported better-than-expected second-quarter earnings on Thursday, and investors loved what they saw. Net sales rose 20%, and cloud revenue stood out as a particular bright spot. This combination of positive results was enough to send Amazon’s stock up nearly 10% in after-hours trading. Crucially, Amazon isn’t slowing down on data center spending, despite the conventional wisdom that investors want companies to rein it in. One line item, in particular, illustrates Amazon’s appetite for investing in infrastructure. Amazon spent $173 billion for the fiscal year ended June 30 on property and equipment — a category that covers GPUs, natural gas…
Amazon’s stake in Anthropic is proving to be a massive boon to the world’s largest online retailer.In its latest quarterly earnings report, Amazon reported non-operating pre-tax other income of $53.4 billion, “primarily from our investment in Anthropic.”According to previous financial filings, Amazon has invested $13 billion in Anthropic with the potential for up to $20 billion more.In June, Anthropic announced that it confidentially filed for an initial public offering, taking the first step toward a highly anticipated IPO. In late May, Anthropic said that it had completed a Series H funding round that valued the company at $965 billion.Amazon isn’t…
Tattoos, company logos, and deleted apologies — oh my.A Y Combinator-backed startup founder is in hot water after saying his company would offer job interviews to anyone who got a tattoo of its logo at a party in San Francisco last weekend.Jordan Zietz, the cofounder of the small AI automation startup LemonLime, wrote about the stunt in a since-deleted X post on Tuesday.”7 people left with new ink,” Zietz wrote on X. “That’s how you get a job in 2026.”He wrote a longer post on LinkedIn, also since deleted, that featured a photo of a woman getting a tattoo on…
Patreon slashed its workforce by 20% last week — and wants its remaining staffers to come into the office more.The company informed workers that it is increasing its return-to-office (RTO) requirement from two to three days a week for staff who commute to Patreon’s three offices in New York City, San Francisco, and Porto, Portugal, a company spokesperson confirmed to Business Insider.Staffers at the company, which runs a platform where creators can sell memberships and offer subscriber-only perks to fans, learned of the change a day after a layoff round that affected 93 employees. The updated RTO policy will go into…
OpenAI has laid down the latest marker in the AI pricing war.On Thursday, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman touted the company’s “major price cuts,” which came in the form of cheaper usage of GPT-5.6 Luna and Terra, two of the company’s latest AI models.”We want to offer the best price/intelligence tradeoff at every level,” Altman wrote on X.major price cuts today:*80% drop for GPT-5.6 Luna, now $0.20 per million input tokens and $1.20 per million output*20% drop for GPT-5.6 Terra, to $2/$12*GPT-5.6 Sol gets Fast mode in the API, up to 2.5x the speed for 2x the price, same intelligence pic.twitter.com/erC6u4VoDR—…
During a Thursday hearing, a judge said the Trump administration hasn’t presented enough evidence to justify labeling Anthropic a supply chain risk and banning the federal government from using the company’s technology. Bloomberg and Axios were among the first to report the news. The dispute stems from stalled contract negotiations between Anthropic and the Department of Defense. Anthropic said it didn’t want its AI used for mass surveillance of Americans or for targeting or firing decisions involving lethal weapons, arguing the technology wasn’t ready. The Pentagon countered that a private company shouldn’t dictate how the military uses technologies, and said…
Two years ago, tech founder Avi Schiffmann launched Friend, an AI wearable that you could talk to, and that would send you text messages about your day. The idea, ostensibly, was to use artificial intelligence to combat loneliness. This week, the company announced a new overhaul of the product, introducing a noticeable upgrade: a voice. “Introducing friend 2.0,” Schiffmann tweeted Thursday. Friend now comes with a built-in speaker that can project a unique and consistent personality to its user. A new commercial for the wearable shows a woman wearing a Friend and talking to it about what is presumably her…
With help from its internal AI tools, Google says it has patched more security flaws in its Chrome browser in the last month than in the past two years combined. The tech giant announced on Thursday that it has fixed a whopping 1,072 security bugs in the last two versions of Chrome, both released in June. That is more than the number of bugs patched in the previous 23 versions released over the last two years, which totaled 1,036 fixes. Ever since the advent of LLMs, cybersecurity experts have warned that AI-powered systems would find an increasingly and exponentially enormous…
LinkedIn is taking aim at the “AI slop” — low-quality, artificially generated content — filling its feed. On Thursday, the company announced that it’s adding a new feature to let users click a “seems like AI slop” button when someone’s post appears to have been written with AI. The move reflects a broader shift across online publishing platforms to cut back on AI content, as people have grown frustrated with the computer-written, inauthentic posts filling the web. Last week, for instance, newsletter platform Substack added a tool to help users identify when the content they’re reading on its site was…
Okta on Thursday agreed to acquire AI identity security startup Permiso Security, betting that demand for protecting AI agents and other machine identities will grow as enterprises deploy autonomous software across their operations. The identity management company did not disclose the terms of the transaction. But TechCrunch has learned that the acquisition is valued at just under $200 million and is structured as an almost all-cash deal, according to a source with knowledge of the deal. A spokesperson for Okta did not dispute the $200 million figure when TechCrunch asked CEO Todd McKinnon for comment about the deal, but the…