Author: IQ TIMES MEDIA

Microsoft President Brad Smith has a message for tech leaders after college graduates booed AI during this year’s commencement speeches: listen.In a blog post published Wednesday, Smith said recent pushback — including from students about to enter the job market — against AI’s role in society should serve as “a powerful wake-up call for the tech sector.””To those in the tech sector who seemingly want to pursue a future where computers replace jobs, and AI becomes more capable than people, the next generation has offered a compelling response: ‘Not so fast,'” Smith wrote.For years, executives have cast AI as transformative…

Rising memory prices are making AI infrastructure more expensive — and Nvidia’s biggest customers could be in for serious sticker shock.Last month, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Microsoft CFO Amy Hood cited rising memory costs for chips and data centers as a key factor in their increased AI spending. The surge has helped fuel a boom in memory stocks.Research firm Bernstein said in a note to investors this week that the impact could become more pronounced with Nvidia’s next-generation AI systems. For Nvidia, these rising costs could be a substantial growth driver.The firm estimates Nvidia’s coming Vera Rubin NVL72 system…

Vivek Natarajan is one of the Google DeepMind researchers trying to prove that advanced AI can do more than improve search, ads, and recommendations.His work sits at the center of one of Google’s most ambitious bets: that AI can become a collaborator for doctors and scientists, helping diagnose disease, propose experiments, and speed up the search for new treatments.For Natarajan, that mission stems from seeing his father suffer. His dad spent 35 years at a widely read Indian newspaper. Then Parkinson’s disease began to change him. While Natarajan was completing a master’s degree in the US, his father started showing…

Wall Street spent the past year debating when the AI spending spree will finally slow, but Big Tech may not be done yet.Hyperscalers are likely to spend a lot more on AI than the market expects — even after a series of massive upward revisions, according to analysts at Goldman Sachs in a Wednesday note.”Consensus 2027 hyperscaler capex estimates are too conservative,” they wrote.Goldman’s analysts estimate that hyperscaler capital spending could reach roughly $1.1 trillion in 2027, compared with the roughly $920 billion expected by Wall Street.In a bullish scenario, spending could climb to $1.4 trillion.Goldman’s key assumption is that…

Satya Nadella has a message for Microsoft’s AI-pilled employees: Not every problem needs the most powerful AI model.At a live taping of The New York Times’ “Hard Fork” podcast, Microsoft’s CEO was asked how much tokenmaxxing is happening inside the company.”A lot,” Nadella said, before cohost Casey Newton could finish the question.”I’m a tokenmaxxer too, it’s addictive,” Nadella said. “But you have to step back when the novelty wears off to say, ‘What is it that I’m trying to create?'”Silicon Valley executives have spent the past year pushing workers to use AI as much as possible, sometimes through internal leaderboards…

Opendoor, the San Francisco-based online home-buying platform, is shutting down its India operations less than two years after expanding its presence in the country. The decision has become a flashpoint in the debate over whether AI is starting to alter the economics of offshore work. In announcing the decision on Wednesday, CEO Kaz Nejatian cited a push to bring operational work back to the U.S., where Opendoor’s customers are, and a shift toward smaller AI-native teams. The company did not respond to requests for comment on how many employees were affected or how much of the decision was driven by…

If founders and other business leaders weren’t already envious of Dario Amodei, who sits atop one of the world’s fastest-growing AI companies — currently valued by private market investors at roughly the trillion-dollar mark little more than five years after it was founded — they’re going to be seriously envious now. In a new sit-down with Bloomberg’s Emily Chang, he reveals he has just one direct report; that’s his chief of staff. Everyone else on Anthropic’s executive team reports to his sister, co-founder and President Daniela Amodei, who handles day-to-day operations. Anyone who has managed a large team knows that…

Texas is shifting from courting data centers toward regulating them.Gov. Greg Abbott has proposed new rules for data centers as concerns about their energy and water consumption and their impact on utility prices spur complaints in communities across the US.”The rapid scale of data center development requires oversight to ensure everyday Texans are not burdened with the costs of infrastructure driven by data center expansion,” Abbott, a Republican, wrote in a letter to state regulators on Wednesday.Abbott said he would work with the state legislature to pass a number of measures, including requiring data centers to pay for their own electric…

Dario Amodei says he’s not trying to be a “prophet of doom” about AI and jobs, but the Anthropic CEO is warning that mass displacement may not be a temporary growing pain of the technology — it may be part of what makes AI work.In a new policy essay, Amodei wrote that there is a “decent possibility” that, despite efforts to soften the blow, AI could cause “significant enduring job loss” — and that this “may be an intrinsic property of the technology and the way it broadly replicates human cognition.”The argument reframes one of the AI industry’s most uncomfortable…

A former engineer at Elon Musk’s xAI has filed suit against the company and its parent SpaceX claiming he was fired for raising concerns about AI safety. Devin Kim, who left xAI in September 2025, filed the suit in a California state court on Tuesday. The complaint comes days before SpaceX is set to join the public markets in what’s shaping up to be the largest IPO in history. According to the lawsuit, which TechCrunch has viewed, Kim became a prominent voice for AI safety while working on Grok, xAI’s AI chatbot. He allegedly complained repeatedly about xAI’s failure to…