Author: IQ TIMES MEDIA
Meta founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg is trying to sell investors on his prediction for the future — one where billions of people will have their own personal AI agents in the next five years. (Let’s hope that future also comes with data centers efficient enough to power all those agents — without triggering a fresh wave of climate disasters.) “I think that it’s extremely unlikely if you look out five years from now, for example — whatever period of time you want — that you don’t have billions of people with a personal agent that understands your goals and…
When Microsoft reported killer fourth-quarter earnings for its fiscal 2026 year (which ended June 30), it tucked in an interesting little tidbit about how its investments in the two biggest, and competing, AI labs are doing. For the quarter, it recorded its investment in Anthropic as a $3.2 billion gain, boosting diluted earnings per share by 33 cents. (Microsoft reported diluted earnings per share of $4.81 for the quarter). Microsoft invested $5 billion in Anthropic in November 2025 as part of a circular agreement under which the AI lab also agreed to buy $30 billion worth of Azure services. Microsoft…
In June, Meta entered the enterprise AI market with a new AI agent aimed at businesses, to help with customer service, support, and other daily operations. But the tech giant’s enterprise AI ambitions are much more expansive, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg told investors on Wednesday’s second-quarter earnings call. “We see a large enterprise opportunity to sell to businesses, including APIs, business agents, potentially selling compute directly, and other services that we’re building for large customers,” Zuckerberg said. These additions could potentially position the business to create new revenue streams beyond advertising, which drives the bulk of its business, and subscriptions,…
Many Americans are very concerned about AI. Can Mark Zuckerberg change their minds?That is what the Meta CEO is trying to do, via a persuasion campaign: Last week, the company launched an ad, scored by a David Bowie song, telling viewers to ignore “some people” who don’t like AI.Zuckerberg followed up a Wall Street Journal op-ed on Tuesday, promising that “superintelligence will be the most profound technological advance we will see in our lifetimes,” and that this will be a good thing. Then he got on the phone with reporters at the Journal, the Financial Times, and The New York…
Microsoft kept its capex forecast unchanged on Wednesday, becoming one of the first data center giants to hold the line on the industry’s runaway AI spending spree.The stock surged about 8% on the news. Earlier this year, the company said it planned to spend $190 billion on capital expenditures this calendar year.On Wednesday’s earnings call, Microsoft kept this spending forecast steady. Due to an accounting change, this capex guidance is now $175 billion. However, in reality, Microsoft is keeping its AI capex plan the same for this year.The decision to keep a lid on capex is unusual. Most cloud giants…
Meta’s stock slumped in after-hours trading on Wednesday, shortly after the tech giant reported earnings per share below Wall Street estimates, while revenue slightly beat expectations.Shares tumbled further, trading down 9.5% as Meta’s analyst call discussing the results concluded. Meta is one of the “hyperscalers” spending huge sums on its AI projects, from data centers to its own large language models, and investors are impatient to see what those efforts have yielded.The answer, according to Meta, is that the billions invested are making its popular apps — Instagram, WhatsApp, Facebook, and Threads — more engaging and boosting its advertising engine.The…
AI hasn’t just changed how startups build; it’s broken how they sell, secure their data and customers, and scale it more rapidly than ever before. At TechCrunch Disrupt 2026, the AI Stage is back to dig into the single hottest topic in the community for the past few years, presented by Google for Startups. This time around, we’re exploring the business models AI is rewriting, the wealth of unsolved security gaps, and the entirely new job categories AI has created from scratch. From October 13–15 in San Francisco at Moscone Center, join leaders from across the AI industry as they…
Lilian Weng, co-founder of Thinking Machines, announced this week that she would step down from her role, citing health issues. “I don’t feel I’m able to continue at the pace a startup requires,” she wrote in an internal Slack message, which she also shared on X. “After thinking about it for several months, I ultimately have to admit that the amount of consistent stress and workload have pushed me beyond what my health can sustain physically.” On Wednesday, OpenAI told TechCrunch that Weng would be rejoining the company, where she previously served as the VP of AI Safety Research. According…
Hugging Face on Monday published a technical timeline that walks readers through how an autonomous AI agent, built on OpenAI models and running inside one of OpenAI’s own cybersecurity evaluations, broke into its systems over more than four days earlier this month. It’s the first security incident about which OpenAI CEO Sam Altman “felt very viscerally,” he has said. Little wonder given it feels, at least, like something has truly been unleashed here. In fact, Hugging Face’s team prefaced its report by offering that “everyone should be prepared as defenders,” before diving into the nitty-gritty of what went down for…
For a year now, the AI safety testing firm Andon Labs has tasked frontier models with various real-world tasks to determine how well they do as agents running for long periods with no human supervision. On Wednesday, Andon published a new installment in how things are going in its Vending-Bench research, where the lab has frontier models run a simulated vending machine business for a simulated year. The mission is simple: make more money than the other models. It benchmarks the results in areas like final cash balance, prices paid to suppliers, and refunds paid. Across these tests, it has…