Author: IQ TIMES MEDIA

Ask a teen what they want to be when they grow up, and there’s a fair chance being an influencer is on their list. Digital media and the people who star in it have been cultural mainstays for teens’ entire lives, so creating social media, video or podcast content seems a natural, albeit nontraditional, career path. And now they can earn a college degree in that very field.Arizona State University recently launched a new bachelor’s degree in content creation, offered through its Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication. The curriculum overlaps with that of ASU’s mass communication and…

Across the AI industry, users are becoming more conscious of just how expensive their deployments can be —and feeling a new urgency to cut costs. But while open source models offer significantly lower per-token costs, it can be difficult to find the right model for a given job. On Thursday, Writer, which offers AI tools and agents for marketers, launched a new flagship model called Palmyra X6, aimed at solving that problem for its users. Built as a post-training variation on Z.ai’s open source model GLM-5.2, Writer says the new system should provide deployment-ready capabilities at a much lower price.…

There’s a funny kind of game that the latest of late-stage startups must play when raising money. They often have to sell more shares than they want or risk offending some of their existing VCs. This scenario recently played out with AI big-data company Databricks and its latest $5 billion raise announced Thursday, co-founder and CEO Ali Ghodsi (pictured above) told TechCrunch. “We wanted to raise $1 billion, but then The Information printed this article saying that Databricks is doing a big fundraise. They did that in the middle of our conference. We were heads down with our conference, and…

If you’ve ever found yourself wishing that ChatGPT was a little bit quicker on the uptake, OpenAI seems to be answering your prayers. The AI lab has rolled out a new mode called Ultrafast, which it says is designed to seriously accelerate the pace at which its latest and most powerful model, GPT-5.6 Sol, accomplishes its work. The company says that Ultrafast can work at 14x the speed of standard processing, delivering up to 750 output tokens — such tokens represent the distinct pieces of text generated by an LLM when it interacts with a human — per second. “Until…

IBM on Thursday announced its partnership with OpenAI to bring the AI company’s models and tools to more enterprise customers, opening another avenue for OpenAI to connect with some of the world’s largest companies through IBM’s global consulting business as competition for corporate AI spending intensifies. The deal, terms of which were not disclosed, comes less than a year after IBM announced a similar alliance with Anthropic. OpenAI and IBM will jointly market AI offerings and develop industry-specific solutions for sectors including financial services, government, telecommunications, and retail, IBM said. Under the agreement, IBM will establish a dedicated OpenAI practice…

What happens when you pit AI agents against each other? According to Anthropic’s testing, things get messy fast. On Thursday, Anthropic’s Frontier Red Team published new research examining how groups of AI agents behave when they encounter each other in the wild. The findings provide a glimpse into potential risks that could develop as companies and governments move to implement agents working autonomously across shared codebases, markets, and computer systems. In one experiment, Anthropic gave three Claude agents access to the same software project, each with its own incompatible instructions for what to do with it. The agents weren’t told…

Being a content creator in the age of AI means navigating a minefield of reputational risks.Using or simply talking about AI in the wrong way can spark internet backlash, never mind doing a promotional post for an AI company.Artificial intelligence is highly polarizing, and the backlash against the tech has been ramping up recently. Many factors have contributed to the negative vibes, from unpopular data centers to fears about job displacement and AI-induced price hikes on tech products like video game consoles.In the particular case of video platforms, AI slop has flooded social feeds with low-quality videos and misinformation, irking…

Netflix cofounder Reed Hastings says CEOs could soon face critical decisions if generative AI continues to rapidly improve.”You could either cut your workforce in half and stay in the same business lines, or you can use all these new resources to expand against your competitors,” Hastings said during an interview for Semafor’s “The CEO Signal” podcast.Hastings, who sits on Anthropic’s board of directors, said that in five years, frontier models will be 32 times better than today. If that pace continues, which is not guaranteed but is something many in the industry expect, “then in 10 years, that’s a thousand…

OpenAI’s executive shake-up continues.The company announced Thursday that it is replacing its chief revenue officer, Denise Dresser, after only eight months in the role. Dali Rajic, formerly the chief operating officer of Wiz, is taking over the role with the monumental task of preparing OpenAI for its initial public offering, expected next year.Dresser’s departure joins a wave of change inside OpenAI’s upper ranks. On Tuesday, former chief operating officer Brad Lightcap said he’d be leaving the company — Dresser had been given parts of Lightcap’s former remit as recently as April. In July, OpenAI lost Johannes Heidecke, its head of…

Garry Tan was employee No. 10 at Palantir. He regrets that it wasn’t single digits.On “The A16z Show,” the Y Combinator CEO said that he was offered a place on the company’s founding team — but he turned it down to stay at Microsoft.Tan was in Stanford University’s Phi Kappa Psi fraternity. His frat brothers included Joe Lonsdale and Stephen Cohen, two Palantir cofounders. Both were interning at Peter Thiel’s hedge fund, Tan said.He described one of Thiel’s strategies: “When you start a thing, you write down on a piece of paper all the smartest people who you need to go…