Author: IQ TIMES MEDIA

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 billio, making it the largest IPO in history. At this price, the deal also looks set to make…

I spent over eight hours on TikTok last weekend.Why? I’ve been busy playing dozens of TikTok’s new mini games — popping pimples, running an oil company, and giving very hairy women makeovers.If I open TikTok now, within a few flicks of the thumb through the main feed, I’m getting ads for “TikTok Minis,” one of the platform’s recent additions that includes both micro dramas and mini games. Micro dramas, bite-sized soap operas (sometimes made using AI), have become a popular format on TikTok.One selling point of the games: They can be played without ever leaving the TikTok app.I got hooked.What…

The noise around a Tesla-SpaceX mega-merger is growing louder.In an interview with CNBC that aired Friday, SpaceX president Gwynne Shotwell said the two Elon Musk-led companies are working toward the same goals — and didn’t rule out a merger in the future.”That might make Elon’s life a little easier, actually,” said Shotwell, who has been SpaceX president since 2008.”There’s no question that there’s synergies between Tesla and SpaceX in our futures, definitely, there’s a convergence of a kind of what we’re all trying to accomplish in the future,” she said.However, Shotwell added that right now she was focused on “keeping…

What if you could see a leaderboard of the coworkers who stress you out the most? A tech worker has cobbled together a project that examines just that, leaning on heart-rate data from his Whoop health-tracking wearable.Pankaj Tanwar, a Bengaluru, India-based tech worker, wrote in posts on LinkedIn and X that he connected his Whoop wristband to his work calendar, pulled per-minute heart-rate data, and matched spikes to meetings and attendees. In the posts, he said he now has “a leaderboard, and I think about it daily.””We were all joking in a meeting about how draining some of them are,”…

I had lunch with the CEO of an AI infrastructure company recently. I can’t tell you their name, but they said something that really caught my attention: There will be a crop of new AI models later this year that will be a lot better and more efficient.This will likely make AI tokens more abundant and radically cheaper. (Tokens are the basic units models use to process information, and the standard way AI use is measured and priced).Hand-wringing about tokenmaxxing could die down. Or, users could go on another bender and burn even more tokens with abandon.Either way, the price…

The race for AI talent may be fierce, but Mark Zuckerberg says breakthroughs in the artificial intelligence world don’t require armies of researchers.Speaking on an episode of the “No Priors” podcast released Wednesday, the Meta boss argued that a small team of elite researchers can drive meaningful advances in AI, even as Silicon Valley firms shell out hefty sums to hire specialists.”In order to make progress in AI, you don’t need like many, many hundreds of AI researchers or thousands or anything like that,” Zuckerberg said. “I think you can really make progress with a very strong group of a…

NAIROBI, Kenya (AP) — Hundreds of mourners gathered on Friday in Kenya’s central town of Gilgil for a memorial service to honor the lives of 16 students who died in a fire at a girls school last month that police said was caused by arson. Authorities have arrested nine suspects.The remains of the girls, who were students at Utumishi Girls Academy, were placed in white coffins adorned with flowers and topped with their portraits. The coffins were lined up in front of their families, schoolmates, community members and local leaders, who called for justice.The nine accused girls, who were students…

India’s AI model output has been slow compared to the U.S., Europe, and China. Only a few startups are releasing models, and most of them are large language models or voice models. To encourage more development, the government launched the India AI Mission, a roughly $1.2 billion initiative that — among other things — gives selected startups access to subsidized GPU compute in exchange for releasing their models publicly. One of the 12 startups selected for the program, Avataar AI, has launched a new video model called Varya that is built to understand local context — such as identifying different…

The world’s richest man is rocketing toward a new milestone.Elon Musk is getting closer to becoming the world’s first trillionaire as his aerospace company, SpaceX, goes public at an astronomical price. At the initial public offering price of $135 per share, his SpaceX stock is worth $688 billion, bringing his total net worth to $971 billion, according to Bloomberg.Before SpaceX’s IPO was priced on Thursday, Bloomberg pegged Musk’s net worth at $696 billion. His private stake in SpaceX accounted for the majority of that; Bloomberg calculated it was worth $426 billion based on a $1.03 trillion valuation. Shares in Musk’s other companies —…

MANILA, Philippines (AP) — Philippine officials said Friday that years of disaster-preparedness drills helped prevent a larger casualty toll when one of the strongest earthquakes in 50 years struck the south and left 55 people dead with 31 others missing.The 7.8 magnitude offshore quake, which struck Monday off Sarangani province, injured about 1,120 people and displaced more than 45,000 people, about half them still in emergency shelters, after the quake damaged more than 12,600 houses across farming towns and cities.Many were still too traumatized to return home because of strong aftershocks, officials said.Days after the earthquake hit, more videos of…