Author: IQ TIMES MEDIA

Google’s bet on an AI startup to streamline employee benefits quickly turned into a privacy firestorm on Wednesday. The company told staff they’d have to hand over personal data to healthcare startup Nayya to use their health benefits — a move that Nayya’s CEO says is rare among its partners.Google’s initial data sharing requirements came from the Big Tech giant, not from the startup, Nayya’s CEO Sina Chehrazi shared with Business Insider. Nearly every other business Nayya works with allows its employees to opt in to sharing different pieces of their personal data as they see fit, he said.”We haven’t…

The AI startup founder Eugenia Kuyda is building something new.Kuyda is known for founding Replika, a Y Combinator-backed startup that lets users create AI-powered companions. She quietly stepped down as CEO at the start of the year and announced her new startup, Wabi, on Thursday.Wabi will enable users to create their own mini-apps without any coding.”It’s a platform to discover, remix, and share, create mini apps for daily life,” Kuyda said. “We’ll tell a little bit more when we launch publicly. Right now, it’s a very close private beta.”Wabi is a 10-person team, Kuyda said, and plans to launch its…

Reflection AI, a startup founded just last year by two former Google DeepMind researchers, has raised $2 billion at an $8 billion valuation, a whopping 15x leap from its $545 million valuation just seven months ago. The company, which originally focused on autonomous coding agents, is now positioning itself as both an open source alternative to closed frontier labs like OpenAI and Anthropic, and a Western equivalent to Chinese AI firms like DeepSeek. The startup was launched in March 2024 by Misha Laskin, who led reward modeling for DeepMind’s Gemini project, and Ioannis Antonoglou, who co-created AlphaGo, the AI system…

LOS ANGELES (AP) — The Philadelphia Phillies and Los Angeles Dodgers didn’t blink as the pressure built, inning after scoreless inning. Both teams pushed a single run across, forcing extra innings. Then came one of postseason baseball’s craziest endings.Orion Kerkering made a wild throw past home instead of tossing to first after mishandling Andy Pages’ bases-loaded comebacker with two outs in the 11th inning, and the Dodgers escaped with a 2-1 win Thursday for a 3-1 NL Division Series victory.“That was a nail-biter,” beer-soaked Dodgers catcher Will Smith said in the postgame celebration. “They cracked. We didn’t.”Kerkering hung his head…

Does David Ellison, who just bought Paramount, want to buy Warner Bros. Discovery next?Most everyone in the media business thinks so. And multiple outlets have reported that Ellison, backed by his father, Oracle founder Larry Ellison, plans to bid for WBD, whose assets include HBO, the Warner Bros. movie and TV studio, and cable channels including CNN.Onstage at a Bloomberg event on Thursday, David Ellison refused to answer questions about his plans. That’s not a surprise — a company won’t formally announce a bid until it formally announces a bid.In the meantime, there are plenty of questions surrounding the offer…

ATLANTA (AP) — The superintendent of Georgia’s third-largest school district has been indicted on federal charges alleging he ran a kickback scheme and stole money from his previous employer, a smaller school district in suburban Chicago.A federal grand jury in Chicago on Wednesday indicted Devon Horton, currently superintendent of the 93,000-student DeKalb County school district, on 17 counts including wire fraud, embezzlement and tax evasion. The indictment alleges the 48-year-old Horton issued more than $280,000 in contracts to three friends and received more than $80,000 in kickbacks from 2020 through 2023 while he was superintendent of the Evanston-Skokie school district.…

BOSTON (AP) — Mike Greenwell, an outfielder who played 12 seasons with the Boston Red Sox and finished second in the 1988 American League MVP voting, died Thursday, his wife said. He was 62.The Boston Globe reported in mid-August that Greenwell had medullary thyroid cancer. Tracy Greenwell told WINK, a radio station in Lee County, Florida, that her husband died in Boston.“With a heavy heart, I lost my best friend today,” Tracy Greenwell wrote on social media. “It was Mike’s time to be an angel. At 10:30 a.m. in Boston’s General Hospital. We are forever grateful for the life he…

Six months after Lip-Bu Tan began his quest to turn around struggling Intel, the semiconductor giant has announced a major hardware upgrade. On Thursday, Intel unveiled a new processor, codenamed Panther Lake. This marks the next generation of the company’s Intel Core Ultra processor family and is the first chip built using Intel’s 18A semiconductor process. The processors are expected to begin shipping later this year and are being produced at Intel’s Chandler, Arizona, Fab 52 facility, which came online in 2025. “We are entering an exciting new era of computing, made possible by great leaps forward in semiconductor technology…

By Deena Beasley(Reuters) -Retail pharmacies and prescription drug savings site GoodRx are talking with the Trump administration about joining its TrumpRx website, they told Reuters, suggesting an expansion beyond the early description of it as a link to pharmaceutical companies’ direct discounts.Drugmakers, including Pfizer and Amgen, are offering to sell some brand-name medications directly to consumers at the negotiated prices they get from insurers rather than much higher list prices.Some say they will work with TrumpRx, spurred in part by President Donald Trump’s threats of steep tariffs on drugmakers that don’t cut prices and increase U.S. manufacturing. The site is…

Of all the ugly moments so far — bad play, blowout losses, home fans fleeing early for the exits — the most telling moment of Bill Belichick’s first season at North Carolina came during an open week.It took the form of a pair of terse statements from Belichick and athletic director Bubba Cunningham posted on social media late Wednesday, reaffirming the marriage between the six-time Super Bowl winner from the NFL’s New England Patriots and the school desperately seeking to elevate its football program beyond decades of also-ran status.“I’m fully committed to UNC Football and the program we’re building here,”…