Author: IQ TIMES MEDIA

Forget the environment or job opportunities. AI’s latest casualty might be the health of the people building it.Thinking Machines Lab cofounder Lilian Weng said she’s stepping down from her role because of stress and illness. Weng, who also spent time at OpenAI, didn’t disclose a specific diagnosis but said she’s been ill more often in the past seven months than at any other point in her life.”I don’t feel I’m able to continue at the pace a startup requires,” Weng wrote in a note to colleagues.She’s not alone, as evidenced by the internet’s response to her exit. The pressures of…

MADISON, Wis. (AP) — A Wisconsin appeals court on Wednesday overturned a ruling that had restored abolished collective bargaining rights, in a setback for unions and public workers in the state. Unions are expected to appeal, sending the case to the Wisconsin Supreme Court, which is controlled by liberal justices.The enactment of a 2011 anti-union state law, championed by Republicans, sparked weeks of protests and made Wisconsin the center of a national battle over union rights.That law, known as Act 10, effectively ended most public employees′ ability to bargain for wage increases and other issues, and forced them to pay…

Growing up on Japan’s northernmost island allowed Hikaru Kuribayashi to immerse himself in nature, where origami patterns are everywhere.”Imagine a tiny ladybug,” Kuribayashi, 18, told Business Insider. “That ladybug actually uses origami patterns to fold and expand its wings.”Leaves. Flower petals. Insect wings. He’d often notice the intricate patterns while traversing the Hokkaido prefecture’s sprawling forests and mountains. Kuribayashi, however, believed origami’s influence on nature could reach beyond artistic inspiration. Hikaru Kuribayashi traveled from Japan to Arizona to compete in this year’s competition.  Chris Ayers/Chris Ayers Photography/License by Society for Science “Origami and linkages have been used in many, many…

Tolan, an AI companion that looks like a cartoon alien, is popular with a surprising demographic: mothers.”The little aliens have been a hit with, like, moms 35 to 45-ish years old,” Tolan founder Quinten Farmer said on a recent episode of the “Access” podcast.”A lot of the folks we serve are moms that work and have, you know, kid logistics to think about, family logistics to think about,” he said. “They kind of like just unload all of that.”Farmer told Business Insider in an email that more than 75% of Tolan’s users are women ages 26 to 40, many of…

A lot of the AI narrative has focused on the companies it might destroy. Software firms, the argument goes, are being squeezed as customers bypass apps and go straight to powerful AI from OpenAI, Anthropic, or Google.But a different story is emerging. Ironically, one of the biggest winners from China’s flood of cheap, open models could be the very software industry that many feared would become obsolete.Chinese companies, including Moonshot, DeepSeek, and Z.ai, are releasing models that are close to the performance of the best American systems but at a fraction of the price. Many are “open weight,” meaning software…

Artificial intelligence has gotten much better at drafting legal documents. Now one legal-tech giant wants to make sure the facts behind them are right.Legora has acquired the litigation startup Wexler, whose software helps lawyers reconstruct cases from thousands of documents. Lawyers can then trace something a witness or another attorney says back to the source and spot where it conflicts with the evidence. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.The acquisition is a bid to make Legora more useful to trial lawyers. Much of its software has focused on helping lawyers research, review, and draft documents. Wexler brings it closer…

I think social media is the worst thing that’s happened in the last forty years,” Steve Krug tells me.A quarter century ago, Krug wrote “Don’t Make Me Think,” one of the founding books of internet usability. It’s the reason sites have big bolded text and read vertically, not zagging around the screen. It’s why links look like links and buttons look like buttons. He gave instructions like “instructions must die.” In other words: websites and apps should just work, intuitively, effortlessly. The book is still taught in several university courses and regularly cited on X by Silicon Valley apostles like…

Vibe coding is just one small part of the engineering puzzle, says DoorDash’s CEO.”Only certain parts of a software engineer’s day are writing code, and it’s great that we have models today to write the code for us,” Tony Xu said on an episode of the “Uncapped” podcast released Tuesday. “That helps maybe the whatever 25%, 30%, 50% of our time that’s actually shipping code.”Xu cofounded the food and grocery delivery giant in 2013. DoorDash went public in 2020, one of the year’s biggest tech IPOs.The CEO said engineers spend another big chunk of time in product reviews, design meetings,…

Mark Zuckerberg is making his biggest public push yet to shape the AI debate.Within a week, the Meta CEO published an open letter, penned a Wall Street Journal op-ed, and sat down with The New York Times for a rare interview.Across all three appearances, Zuckerberg laid out a consistent message: AI should be open, widely distributed, and built to empower individuals — not replace them.Here are the three biggest takeaways from his media blitz.AI shouldn’t be centralizedZuckerberg repeatedly said that concentrating advanced AI in the hands of a few companies would be both economically and politically dangerous.In Zuckerberg’s open letter,…

Data security company Cyera, which recently raised $600 million at a $12 billion valuation, announced Tuesday that it signed a letter of intent to acquire Oasis Security for approximately $1 billion in a deal expected to be paid mostly in cash, with the remainder in Cyera shares. Oasis focuses on non-human identities, primarily AI agents. As the number of AI agents proliferates, companies must deploy cybersecurity software that monitors these agents’ behavior and grants them permission to access other software. Founded in 2022, Oasis has raised about $195 million from Accel, Craft Ventures, Cyberstarts and other investors. The deal highlights…