Author: IQ TIMES MEDIA

I always assumed software engineers were naturally curious people who couldn’t wait to try the latest technology. Lately, I’m realizing that’s not always true. I recently asked a developer friend whether she’d tried Claude Code or Codex, even for a few minutes over a weekend.”Nope,” she said proudly. This is a highly educated, experienced software engineer who works on big long-term projects. Some techies, it turns out, are just as resistant to change as everyone else.It’s not just her. This is happening inside one of the most important software projects on earth.Linux is the operating system that powers much of…

In response to Leading the Future, two former congressmen — Republican Chris Stewart of Utah and Democrat Brad Carson of Oklahoma — have formed a competing political network, Public First, to back candidates who support AI regulation.Public First Action, the umbrella organization for a trio of super PACs, is not required to disclose its donors. In June, the group said it had raised $80 million thus far. Anthropic has donated $40 million to the group.Carson previously told Business Insider that he felt good about Public First’s odds, even if the group was likely to be outspent by Leading The Future.…

Lindsey Hall, a writer based in Texas, suspected the man she was seeing was using AI. Uncertain about where things were going, she asked him outright what made him want to be with her.”You’re fun, smart, pretty,” she summed up his response. “The way it was written was so cold and so formal and so ChatGPT. I just remember being so turned off by that.”One night, about five months into dating, she happened upon a conversation he’d had with ChatGPT in which he expressed serious doubts about their relationship. “I’m just not proud of her,” she said he’d written. He…

Three years ago, Satya Nadella catapulted Microsoft to the front of the AI race and became “like a superhero,” one recent former Microsoft executive said.In February 2023, after betting early on OpenAI, the CEO unveiled Microsoft’s AI-powered Bing search engine before a packed audience outside Seattle, and declared a war on Google’s search dominance. “A race starts today,” he said. Waves of adulation followed. When Nadella helped navigate OpenAI’s board crisis later that year, Bill Gurley called it an “amazing shift in corporate reputation.” CNN Business chose Nadella as the CEO of the Year.Inside Microsoft and across the tech industry,…

Monday.com, the Tel Aviv-based work management software company known for its colorful, customizable project-tracking boards, this week became the latest tech company to cite AI as a factor in job cuts. On Wednesday, the company said in an SEC filing that it will lay off about 20% of its workforce, or just over 600 employees, as part of a “restructuring plan” tied to its “ongoing transformation of its product, marketing, and go-to-market strategy” in support of “a leaner, more focused operating model” as it continues investing in its “AI-driven growth strategy.” Co-founder Eran Zinman told employees in a LinkedIn memo…

Even in the AI age, some conversations are best had in person.Last week, after Hugging Face suffered an unusual security breach involving an AI agent running on OpenAI models, the company’s CEO, Clem Delangue, boarded a flight to San Francisco to meet with the maker of ChatGPT.A week later, in the “spirit of transparency,” Delangue shared on X what he asked of OpenAI. He said he asked the leading AI startup to release all the “traces” of the rogue agent for the public and research community to study. And then he asked for $100 million worth of “compute” to help Hugging…

“Everybody’s on their phone at my program!” joked Charlie Bailey, a librarian in South Philadelphia. He’s just asked his audience to pull out their phones so that he can walk them through the steps of disabling Apple Intelligence and Gemini. Bailey stands at the front of a library classroom that’s outfitted for children – the focal point is the vibrant rug he’s standing on, which reminds us that M is for “moon” and Z is for “zebra.” But the 20-odd adults in the room aren’t here to learn about the alphabet. They’re at a workshop called Avoiding AI, which, in…

A power line went down outside of Washington, DC, this week. Normally, the grid would only need a few seconds to recover from such an event. But this one took more than 10 minutes because more than 3 gigawatts of data centers stopped drawing power nearly simultaneously. The event caused voltage across the PJM grid to spike from Northern Virginia to Chicago, according to data collected by Ting Labs, a startup that runs an IoT sensor network out of people’s electrical sockets. The event didn’t cause a blackout, but it did cause lights across the region to flicker. The incident…

The AI industry has spent the past few years obsessing over one question: Who has the smartest model?That still matters. But a new north star is emerging: how much useful intelligence can be delivered for each dollar spent.A lot of models are now good enough for many business tasks. Once that happens, buyers start caring less about the absolute best model and more about the cost of getting reliable work done with AI.Eugene Kim’s recent scoop on Amazon’s rebuild of Alexa+ is a good example. Internal documents show the company routing more requests to its own less-powerful AI, while avoiding…

Chris Caldwell is more focused on tablets these days than AI tokens.The chief information officer of Chili’s parent company, Brinker International, has spent his 2½ years in the role figuring out how to overhaul WiFi systems at restaurants and replace thousands of handheld devices that waitstaff use to take customers’ orders, he told Business Insider.Many restaurants are adding AI to their operations. At Starbucks and Burger King, for instance, AI agents are listening to drive-thru orders and fetching recipes for baristas.Chili’s, meanwhile, has largely stayed away from such uses. Instead, it’s turned around its same-store sales in part by focusing…