Author: IQ TIMES MEDIA
Lee Roberts meets me at the University Club of San Francisco on a Friday morning, hours before his football team will lose to Cal in heartbreaking fashion – a fumble at the goal line, because little about the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s expensive experiment with Bill Belichick has gone according to script. But Roberts, the Chancellor of UNC, doesn’t know this yet. Right now, he’s in California to talk about artificial intelligence, which is both forward thinking and also – I’d hazard a guess – a welcome distraction from a lot else happening at the 235-year-old school.…
A decade after a landmark study proved that feeding peanut products to young babies could prevent development of life-threatening allergies, new research finds the change has made a big difference in the real world.About 60,000 children have avoided developing peanut allergies after guidance first issued in 2015 upended medical practice by recommending introducing the allergen to infants starting as early as 4 months.“That’s a remarkable thing, right?” said Dr. David Hill, an allergist and researcher at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, and author of a study published Monday in the medical journal Pediatrics. Hill and colleagues analyzed electronic health records from…
Steven Qiu, the founder of Chinese LiDAR maker RoboSense, says a multi-sensor system is a better and safer approach for self-driving vehicles than the vision-only system touted by Tesla CEO Elon Musk.LiDAR, which stands for Light Detection and Ranging, is a sensor that scans the environment by emitting laser beams and measuring the time it takes to get a return signal. LiDAR can be found in Waymo’s robotaxis and consumer products, like robot vacuums and smartphone cameras.”There’s been a lot of debate over whether a vision-only or multi-sensor approach is better when it comes to self-driving vehicles in the past…
“The most lucrative industry in Hsinchu isn’t chips. It’s kindergartens,” a Taiwanese friend quipped when I mentioned my trip to the chip city, 50 miles south of Taipei.He was half-joking, but it’s not far from the truth.Hsinchu, home to Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company and a dense network of tech firms that form the world’s chip supply chains, is now the rare place in Taiwan where people are still having babies — if they can afford to.While most of Taiwan struggles with one of the world’s lowest birthrates, Hsinchu’s numbers have held just above the national average, fueled by high salaries,…
SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — A planned five-day strike by thousands of registered nurses and other Kaiser Permanente health care workers in California, Hawaii and Oregon ended on Sunday, union leaders and the health care system said.California-based Kaiser Permanente said it welcomed back about 30,000 employees who participated in the strike, which began Tuesday and ended Sunday morning. Its statement said its facilities were “staffed by physicians, experienced managers and trained staff, along with nearly 6,000 contracted nurses, clinicians and others who worked with us during the strike.”Plans call for bargaining to resume this week, with a focus on “economic issues,”…
Even in the fast-moving world of AI, patience is still a virtue, according to Andrej Karpathy.The OpenAI cofounder, and de facto leader of the vibe-coding boom, appeared on the Dwarkesh Podcast last week to talk about how far we are from developing functional AI agents.TL;DR — he’s not that impressed.”They just don’t work. They don’t have enough intelligence, they’re not multimodal enough, they can’t do computer use and all this stuff,” he said. “They don’t have continual learning. You can’t just tell them something and they’ll remember it. They’re cognitively lacking and it’s just not working.””It will take about a…
NEW YORK (AP) — “Being bald is sexy. It’s an attitude. It’s a luxury. It’s a lifestyle.”That’s how Brennan Nevada Johnson, who shaved her head voluntarily 14 years ago, opens the video podcast she launched last November to celebrate the advantages of choosing a bald look.Sensuous, self-assured and glamorous are not the adjectives typically assigned to women with shorn hair. For centuries, many cultures have viewed long hair as a symbol of femininity, health and fertility. But more women are defying that traditional beauty standard and finding empowerment by baring their heads.“Once you do it, it brings all this confidence…
“Hoisted by their own GPTards.” That’s how Meta’s Chief AI Scientist Yann LeCun described the blowback after OpenAI researchers did a victory lap over GPT-5’s supposed math breakthroughs. Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis added, “this is embarrassing.” The Decoder reports that in a since-deleted tweet, OpenAI VP Kevin Weil declared that “GPT-5 found solutions to 10 (!) previously unsolved Erdős problems and made progress on 11 others.” (“Erdős problems” are famous conjectures posed by mathematician Paul Erdős.) However, mathematician Thomas Bloom, who maintains the Erdos Problems website, said Weil’s post was “a dramatic misrepresentation” — while these problems were indeed…
Gamers have been waiting over a decade for the release of Grand Theft Auto 6. It is probably the most highly anticipated game of all time.AI could speed things up.Google Cloud’s Global Director for Games, Jack Buser, said AI has arrived at an important time for the gaming industry, and could help developers release new and better games more quickly. “We’re just very, very fortunate that AI has arrived on the scene at a time when the games industry really needs it more than ever before,” he said recently on the “Strictly Business” podcast.While layoffs and a post-pandemic decline hit…
M.C.I. Foods Inc. has recalled over 90,000 pounds of its ready-to-eat breakfast burritos and wraps because of a potential listeria contamination in the products’ eggs.The Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) announced the recall on Saturday after M.C.I. Foods notified the FSIS of a positive listeria contamination after conducting a routine test from its external suppliers.The recalled burritos and wraps were produced between Sept. 17 and Oct. 14 and were shipped to food service institutions across the country, including schools.“The Los Cabos, El Más Fino and Midamar brand products are included in the USDA’s National School Lunch and Breakfast Programs,”…