Author: IQ TIMES MEDIA
Burnout stalks even the most accomplished operators.On Tuesday, Lilian Weng, a cofounder of Thinking Machines Lab and former OpenAI safety executive, announced her resignation from her role.In a note to colleagues, later shared on X, she wrote that seven months of recurring illness, made worse by the relentless pace of startup life, had left her unable to give the job the full effort she felt it demanded.”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,” Weng wrote. She said…
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman says he doesn’t believe people would want an AI to replace his job.”I think for my job, for example, I think the world wants to know about the person that’s going to be responsible for the decisions of a company, and who they’re going to hold accountable if they make bad ones, and they don’t really want an AI CEO,” Altman said during an episode of “Invest Like The Best” published on Tuesday.Altman’s thinking on the matter may have evolved since last November, when he told the “Conversations with Tyler” podcast that it would be akin…
Apple has a new way to lower the monthly cost of financing its devices: Don’t buy them, lease them.On Tuesday, the company announced a new program, called Apple Upgrade, in partnership with the buy now, pay later platform Klarna.It’s like a car lease, just for new tech: The new program lets customers lease an iPhone for a monthly payment rather than financing the full purchase price.It’s cheaper for shoppers on a monthly basis: a base iPhone 17e through Apple Upgrade costs $17.99 a month, while financing the same phone to own is $24.95 a month. Shoppers can opt for a…
The largest electrical grid in the U.S. has struggled to cope with an onslaught of data centers. Now, after an auction to add more generating capacity fell short, the grid’s operator, PJM Interconnection, has said it will cut off data centers and other large users during power shortages. The decision arrives as the breakneck pace of data center construction has grid operators scrambling to generate power. By 2035, data centers are expected to use 4x more electricity than they do today. PJM won’t start curtailing supply until June 2027, and the cuts will only apply to data centers that are…
The U.S. Department of Education said Tuesday it was investigating allegations that a high school teacher in the Denver school district required students of the same sex to kiss in front of a class and a district in Washington state displayed vials of testosterone in a Pride month exhibit.The department said it will probe whether the Bethel School District, about an hour south of Seattle, and Denver Public Schools violated a federal law that gives parents the right to opt out of school evaluations on topics including sex behavior or attitudes.“Parents must be the decision-makers in matters impacting the most…
The market for AI-generated voice models is massive. Creative use cases require AI voice models to be more expressive, while enterprises looking to automate customer support and sales ops need them to be more steerable. Palo Alto-based Fish Audio wants to cater to all of those use cases with its library of more than 15,000 natural language controls. Since launching last year, the startup today has more than 8 million people using the open-source or hosted versions of its models, and now generates annual recurring revenue of $21 million. To continue building on that traction, the startup on Tuesday said…
On Tuesday, the AI company Recursive Superintelligence announced a $400 million compute deal with Amazon Web Services. The company, which emerged from stealth in May with $650 million in funding, is focused on building open-ended self-improving systems, a potentially compute-intensive approach to AI research. This multi-year deal is meant to provide flexibility as the company looks to scale up those systems. Recursive’s $410 million outlay represents the bulk of the company’s fundraising to date— but on a call with TechCrunch, Socher emphasized that he expected it to be the first of many such deals. Today’s announcement is “likely going to…
In the weeks after killing two students and two teachers at Apalachee High School in Georgia, the jailed teenage gunman had frequent phone conversations about his online notoriety with his mother, who at one point promised to make him a shrine to him.Prosecutors played clips of the recorded conversations between Colt Gray and his mother during the teenager’s sentencing hearing Tuesday. Gray, 16, pleaded guilty Friday to 55 counts, including murder, in the Sept. 4, 2024, shooting at the school about 45 miles (73 kilometers) northeast of Atlanta. The conversations so alarmed officials that Gray’s mother was later barred from…
Two founders who sold their first startup to Cisco for $500 million have raised $34 million in seed funding for their next act.Last year, CEO Nitzan Shapira and CTO Ran Ribenzaft launched their new startup Harmony, which uses AI to field workplace requests. Rather than simply answering employees’ questions, Harmony operates inside Slack and Microsoft Teams to handle tasks like onboarding, software access, and resetting passwords.They aim to help workers avoid digging through internal systems or waiting to talk to tech support or human resources, the company said.Harmony works with more than 100 applications and can use an employee’s role…
A startup that has developed software to track whether AI coding tools are actually making developers more productive has raised $13.5 million.San Francisco-based Weave builds tools that measure the work of human engineers and AI coding tools, then consolidates it into an output score to help business leaders assess the return on every dollar spent on AI.”Sales gets judged on one hard number, revenue, while engineering, the most analytical discipline in the company, gets evaluated on vibes,” Adam Cohen, Weave’s cofounder and CEO, told Business Insider. “We wanted to bring that same quantitative rigor to engineering, so we built that…