Author: IQ TIMES MEDIA
No pressure, but five companies carrying the market report earnings over the next 48 hours. Loading audio narration… Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, and Microsoft all report today after the bell. Apple closes things out on Thursday. In total, more than $15 trillion in market capitalization is telling investors how they’re doing.Their massive size isn’t the only important thing. Since almost all these companies are vying for AI supremacy, their success (or failure) is a report card on the technology reshaping everything.BI’s Joe Ciolli, author of the great First Trade newsletter, breaks down what to look out for with each company. We’ve…
In a Pacific conflict, the nearest U.S. drone factory is thousands of miles away. Ships and planes carrying parts to the front lines would be vulnerable to attack. Defense startup Firestorm Labs thinks the answer is a drone factory that fits inside a shipping container. The company announced on Wednesday that it has raised $82 million in Series B funding led by Washington Harbour Partners with participation from NEA, Ondas, In-Q-Tel, Lockheed Martin, Booz Allen Ventures, Geodesic, Motley Fool Ventures, and others, bringing its total funding to $153 million. Firestorm didn’t start out as a factory company. It began as…
Shapes, an app where humans and AI characters chat together in shared group conversations, is emerging from stealth with $8 million in seed funding. Think Discord, but with AI characters alongside humans. Founded in 2022, Shapes has more than 400,000 monthly active users. The app’s founders, Anushk Mittal and Noorie Dhingra, believe that Shapes can address issues around “AI Psychosis,” which refers to cases where prolonged interactions with AI chatbots or AI companions can cause individuals to develop delusions or paranoia. Instead of isolating people with one-on-one interactions with AI, Shapes allows people to connect with AI within their everyday…
At a US military base in central California, four-seater all-terrain vehicles roam hillside trails. This is a training exercise, but not for the people in the vehicles: This is an effort to train AI models to enter conflict zones. The autonomous military ATVs are operated by Scout AI, a startup founded in 2024 by Coby Adcock and Collin Otis, that calls itself a “frontier lab for defense.” The company said on Wednesday that it has raised a $100 million Series A round, led by Align Ventures and Draper Associates, following its $15 million seed round in January 2025. Scout invited…
University of Washington computer science professor Dan Grossman said it’s time to evolve the push to “Learn to Code.” Loading audio narration… “I think that part of what we were teaching a few years ago, when we had people learn to code, was a lot of focus on getting all the tiny details right,” Grossman, who is also vice director of the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science and Engineering, told Business Insider. “Where did you put a semicolon versus a comma? What exactly is the word for something? Things like that.”Grossman said AI coding tools have changed the…
Loading audio narration… In early December, Anthropic’s CEO, Dario Amodei, suggested that some rivals were overextending themselves in AI compute.”There are some players who are YOLOing,” Amodei said, hinting that rival OpenAI had signed too many AI compute deals and might struggle to afford them.But as demand surges and systems strain, the balance is shifting. OpenAI’s aggressive push to lock in capacity is starting to look more pragmatic, while Anthropic faces outages and growing pains of its own, a reminder that in the AI race, having enough compute may matter just as much as building better models.”Anthropic, in particular, is…
Snap CEO Evan Spiegel says AI is moving so fast, it’s already reshaping how his company operates. Loading audio narration… In an interview on the “Cheeky Pint” podcast, Spiegel said more than two-thirds of new code at Snap is now written by AI. He pointed to rapid advances in tools like Anthropic’s Claude.”Claude is transforming software development, full stop, at Snap in every part of our organization,” he said. “That’s happened really quickly. I think the rate at which these models are getting better is just extraordinary.”That shift is starting to change how companies allocate resources, Spiegel said. As building…
HANOVER, Mass. (AP) — Less than two years after her 6-year-old son was killed at Sandy Hook Elementary School in 2012, Nicole Hockley was in an Ohio church basement teaching the first class of a program she hoped would help prevent future school shootings. The program, born in the grief of one of the nation’s worst mass shootings, teaches students how to identify warning signs among their peers and urges them to report any red flags to an anonymous tip system or a trusted adult to head off any violence. Since that first class in a Columbus church, the program,…
This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Charles Yang, the founder and CEO of Vibe, a US-based AI workspace startup. The conversation has been edited for length and clarity. Loading audio narration… I started my first company with my friend after finishing my third year at Zhejiang University.I still remember the morning in January 2006. We went to the bank, and my father gave me about $5,000. My friends and I used that sum to start our own gaming company.As a computer science major, there were conventional pathways laid out: You can go to big companies like Microsoft,…
Among the most interesting parts of Elon Musk’s testimony Tuesday in his lawsuit against OpenAI wasn’t the charity he claims was stolen from him (we all knew that was coming). It was about an old friend. Musk testified that one of his core motivations for co-founding OpenAI was a falling out with Google’s Larry Page over AI safety — specifically, a conversation in which Musk raised the prospect of AI wiping out humanity and Page shrugged it off as “fine,” so long as AI itself survived. Page called Musk a “speciest” for being “pro human.” Musk called the attitude “insane.”…