Author: IQ TIMES MEDIA

AI coding agent startup Niteshift has raised a $7 million seed round led by Greylock’s Jerry Chen. That’s a modest sum by AI standards, but the startup, founded by two former early Datadog engineers, has attracted some big-name angels like Reid Hoffman, Datadog’s Olivier Pomel and Alexis Lê-Quôc, Ankur Goyal of Braintrust, and Misha Laskin of Reflection AI.  Founded by Sajid Mehmood and Conor Branagan, who helped grow Datadog from its early days to a multi-billion valuation, the company has entered the crowded AI coding space with a compelling idea: Why would any company trust its most sensitive assets —…

SpaceX is coming to market on Friday, and investors can barely contain their excitement. The $75 billion stock offering is reportedly deeply over-subscribed, with some institutional investors ponying up for $10 billion blocks of Elon Musk’s empire. There are lots of reasons to be skeptical of the investment — big IPOs tend to sink, the company is losing money, and Musk’s erratic online behavior would be terrifying coming from any other tech CEO — but it doesn’t seem to be slowing anyone down. Tech investors have learned to never bet against Elon, whatever the business logic indicates. But a dispassionate…

America’s biggest retailer is on a mission to become America’s fastest.One key piece of Walmart’s mission is automating its supply chain. The retailer has spent the past several years plowing cash into building new facilities equipped with an army of robots, coordinated by AI.That money is paying off in terms of raw speed.What makes these distribution centers especially powerful is that they use store-level data to direct robots to arrange pallets, making it easier for workers to restock aisles, Walmart US CEO David Guggina told the Oppenheimer Consumer Growth and E-commerce conference on Tuesday.Store workers used to spend hours unloading…

Sen. Elizabeth Warren said the Securities and Exchange Commission should delay SpaceX’s IPO to ensure the Elon Musk-led company won’t put investors at risk.”The massive size of the SpaceX IPO alone, under normal circumstances, would justify careful SEC review and attention to investor needs,” Warren wrote to SEC Chairman Paul Atkins in a letter that her office published on Wednesday.”But these are not normal circumstances: a number of additional factors exacerbate concerns and require action by the SEC to meet its investor protection and market integrity mandates by delaying the IPO,” the Senator wrote.SpaceX is set to debut on the…

Warner Music Music (WMG) announced on Wednesday that it’s acquiring AI attribution startup Sureel AI. Sureel’s patented technology creates “AI DNA” for songs and breaks them down into component parts to trace how AI models use those elements. Through the acquisition, WMG aims to better track when its artists’ and songwriters’ work is used in AI-generated content or for training AI models. “Bringing Sureel into WMG strengthens our capability for protection, control and monetization and ensures that the creative community remains in control of its intellectual property, name, image, likeness, and voice,” said WMG chief executive Robert Kyncl in a press…

Companies are giving their AI consumption the GLP treatment.Pushing an AI-over-everything mentality isn’t cheap. And now that the bills are due, some executives are telling workers to rein in their usage.Mind you, this is the same group that was building literal AI leaderboards. But “tokenmaxxing” isn’t as fun when AI giants start raising prices and switch to usage-based pricing.BI’s Stephen Council, Polly Thompson, and Charles Rollet spoke to workers and executives about the whiplash they’re experiencing as AI goes from an all-you-can-eat buffet to à la carte on a budget.The pivot has the potential to predetermine winners and losers internally,…

DETROIT (AP) — Federal prosecutors unsealed an indictment Wednesday against eight pro-Palestinian activists who are accused of conspiring to run a criminal intimidation campaign against University of Michigan officials while trying to force the school to cut financial ties to Israel.The indictment also describes vandalism against some companies that operate in Michigan and against the Jewish Federation of Metropolitan Detroit.“In America, we rule by law not by fear. These alleged threats and attempts to terrorize government officials, businesses, and the Jewish Federation are anti-American. We will counter intimidation with justice,” said U.S. Attorney Jerome Gorgon Jr.The document highlights several incidents…

AI vendors promote their enterprise products as if they’re turnkey solutions, but the chances are low that AI agents will hit the ground running right away. Unless you put in the effort to train a model on the specifics of your business, it’s unlikely to understand how your company, for example, defines revenue or knows who is allowed to see which file. That’s part of the reason why we’re seeing AI companies deploying engineers to help integrate their AI products into customers’ systems. New York-based startup Jedify is attacking this very gap. The company says its platform connects to enterprises’…

AI startup Decart on Wednesday unveiled Oasis 3, its latest interactive world model that can generate photorealistic driving environments in real time, TechCrunch has exclusively learned. The model is currently available via API.  The startup is initially targeting autonomous vehicle companies that need to simulate rare driving scenarios at scale, and plans to expand into robotics and other physical AI applications. But the bigger bet is on developers: By offering API access from day one, Decart is trying to build a developer ecosystem around world models much like how OpenAI did with language models. “It’s going to be the first…

Companies have been offered what looks like a golden ticket: Pour money into AI, and your firm will bubble over with productivity. Costs will go down; workers will produce more. It sounds almost too good to be true.Right now, it kind of is.On the one hand, there are people like software engineer Iren Azra Zou. She says that Anthropic’s Claude Code has helped her complete software engineering tasks in a day that used to take as long as a week. “It saves an insane amount of time,” said Zou, who works at the trucking logistics startup Double Nickel. Software engineer…