Author: IQ TIMES MEDIA

Anyone who works at Meta or knows anyone who works at Meta will tell you the same thing: It is not a happy place, particularly given the seemingly endless layoffs the company has executed over the last few years — cuts that have only accelerated as the company funnels billions into AI. Now, a new report in Wired suggests the company’s Applied AI team is on the verge of revolt. The drama kicked off when someone hijacked a livestreamed, employee-only presentation this week with an expletive-laden meltdown, demanding that attendees tell a senior Meta AI executive that he was “a…

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani used SpaceX’s historic IPO — and founder Elon Musk’s newly minted status as a trillionaire — to push policy.”Reason #1,000,000,000,000 why we should tax the rich,” Mamdani wrote on X in response to Musk becoming the world’s first trillionaire on Friday.Musk reached the financial milestone after SpaceX stock popped upon hitting the market on Friday, trading at $150 per share, above the company’s initial offering of $135.Already the world’s richest man, the windfall put Musk leagues ahead of the next richest person, Google’s Larry Page, who now has a quarter of Musk’s wealth.Mamdani’s response…

Google is suing to dismantle the infrastructure behind an alleged massive AI-powered cybercrime operation. On Friday, the tech giant announced a lawsuit against an alleged Chinese cybercrime network called Outsider Enterprise, which Google says uses AI in its campaigns to send scam text messages impersonating Google and other brands to steal passwords and credit card numbers.  Outsider Enterprise has financially scammed “hundreds of thousands of victims” with losses “estimated in the millions.” The group deployed 9,000 fake websites, one million fraudulent web domains, and 2.5 million texts sent to Android users in a two-week period, according to Google.  The company…

Google is suing to dismantle the infrastructure behind an alleged massive AI-powered cybercrime operation. On Friday, the tech giant announced a lawsuit against an alleged Chinese cybercrime network called Outsider Enterprise, which Google says uses AI in its campaigns to send scam text messages impersonating Google and other brands to steal passwords and credit card numbers.  Outsider Enterprise has financially scammed “hundreds of thousands of victims” with losses “estimated in the millions.” The group deployed 9,000 fake websites, one million fraudulent web domains, and 2.5 million texts sent to Android users in a two-week period, according to Google.  The company…

SpaceX has captured the attention of media, investors, and the public for years now — interest propelled by the company’s reusable rocket launches, the rise of its Starlink satellite network, and of course, for its founder and CEO Elon Musk. But in its 24-year history, nothing quite compares to this initial public offering. Everyone seems to be interested, and perhaps it’s because of the sheer size of this IPO. The company priced its 555.6 million shares at $135 each to raise $75 billion, making it the largest IPO in history. At this price, the deal also looks set to make…

SEATTLE (AP) — Ali Abdulla was over the moon when he learned his youth-soccer nonprofit would receive 20 free tickets to the World Cup round of 16 match next month in Seattle. Many of the kids in his African Youth Sports Academy come from low-income, immigrant families, and with ticket prices hovering around $1,000, it was an incredible opportunity for them.Then the U.S. barred Omar Artan — the first Somali referee set to officiate in the World Cup — from entering the country. Abdulla, himself a former semi-professional soccer player and Somali refugee, wanted to do something in solidarity, and…

Elon Musk, now the world’s first trillionaire, is famous for demanding absolute loyalty. SpaceX’s market debut proves that he also pays it back in dividends, minting a new class of billionaires out of the allies who have stood by him for decades through good times and bad.SpaceX started trading on Friday, instantly turning years of private-market gains into public-market wealth for SpaceX employees, executives, early backers, and venture firms that bought into Musk’s vision long before reusable rockets and satellite internet made the company one of the most valuable businesses in the world.Here are the biggest winners in SpaceX’s IPO,…

French AI lab Mistral AI is in early discussions to raise about €3 billion ($3.5 billion), Bloomberg reported Friday, citing anonymous sources. The funding round would value the company at around €20 billion (about $23.15 billion), nearly double the €11.7 billion valuation it received in a Series C funding round last September. One of Europe’s leading AI startups, Mistral launched in 2023 with the stated ambition to “put frontier AI in the hands of everyone.” The company has taken a more open approach to its AI development compared to its American rivals, offering some foundational large language models with open…

Facebook and Instagram suffered from widespread outages for hours on Friday before the service began to come back online.Outage reports spiked throughout the morning on the third-party website DownDetector.com before the disruption appeared to ease.”We’re aware people are currently having trouble accessing our services,” Meta’s communication director, Andy Stone, said in a 10:11 a.m. ET post on X. “We’re working on it.” Facebook and Instagram users reported outage issues on DownDetector.com on Friday.  DownDetector At the time, Meta’s systems dashboard page also showed “high disruptions” for its Facebook Ads Manager, Messenger API, Messenger platform, and WhatsApp Business Platform.Just before noon…

Anthropic changed course after a developer backlash this week. The bigger story is what the company is still doing, and why.The startup said it will no longer secretly degrade Fable 5 responses when users ask for help on frontier AI model development. Instead, Anthropic said these requests will be routed to a less-good model, Opus 4.8, and developers will be told.This addresses the freakout over Anthropic essentially giving intentionally worse answers and lying about it. “We apologize,” the company said.But Anthropic is still restricting use of its most powerful public model for certain AI development work. The company says this…