Author: IQ TIMES MEDIA

Two years ago, Josephine Timperman arrived at college with a plan. She declared a major in business analytics, figuring she’d learn niche skills that would stand out on a resume and help land a good job after college.But the rise of artificial intelligence has scrambled those calculations. The basic skills she was learning in things like statistical analysis and coding can now easily be automated. “Everyone has a fear that entry-level jobs will be taken by AI,” said the 20-year-old at Miami University in Ohio.A few weeks ago, Timperman switched her major to marketing. Her new strategy is to use…

Someone’s offering an unusual deal for a 13-acre property in Mill Valley, just north of South Francisco. Homeowner and investment banker Storm Duncan has created a LinkedIn page for the home, which he said he’d “like to exchange […] for Anthropic equity.” The San Francisco Standard reports that Duncan described this as a “diversification play,” as he’s “under-concentrated in AI investments relative to the importance of AI in the future, and over-concentrated in real estate,” while a young Anthropic employee might be “in the exact opposite scenario.” Duncan is asking potential buyers to email him to discuss deal specifics, but…

Kavitta Ghai wants her startup’s engineers to spend more tokens. Loading audio narration… The 29-year-old cofounder of Nectir started setting minimum quotas for Claude Code use. First it was at least $100 in tokens a week, then $200. Now, the expectation is that her engineers each spend a couple thousand in AI tokens a month.The strategy has been successful, Ghai said. Some of Nectir’s senior engineers were previously skeptical of AI coding tools; now, they call it their “army of coders,” she said.But she doesn’t think Nectir is “tokenmaxxing,” the buzzword du jour for techies racing to spend as much…

In early 2023, when Elon Musk began attacking OpenAI in public, Sam Altman sent him a text. Loading audio narration… He was upset.”i am tremendously thankful for everything you’ve done to help—i dont think openai would have happened without you—and it really fucking hurts when you publicly attack openai,” Altman said.The complicated and messy history between Musk and Altman is set to spill into a courtroom this week, where nine ordinary Californians will have the chance to render a verdict.The jury will be tasked with digging into Musk’s grievances against Altman. Did Altman, as Musk alleges, deceive the Tesla CEO…

Not so long ago, Brené Brown’s ideas about vulnerability as a leadership virtue were not only uncontroversial, they were embraced in corporate America. No longer.Today, CEOs are conducting sweeping layoffs, dressing them up as productivity gains. They’re ratcheting up the pressure on their remaining teams, cracking down on dissent, tracking their workers’ every keystroke, and pouring billions into the all-consuming infrastructure of AI projects while scaling back their investment in employees. This is the new reality, they say. If you don’t like it, get out.”If you are an asshole leader,” Brown told me, “you have never had more cover than…

Even as a perma-online millennial, I can relate to the struggle OpenAI CEO Sam Altman faced on Saturday, when he tried and failed to use a Gen Alpha internet slang term correctly. Loading audio narration… “we still get looksmaxxed on frontend a little but we IQmog hard now,” 41-year-old Altman posted on X.Tyler Cosgrove of TBPN — which just got acquired by OpenAI this month — took it upon himself to correct Altman with this explainer on X.sam just so you know for next time this is technically incorrect usage of the “-maxx” suffixto “looksmaxx” is to improve oneself, it’s…

In a recent experiment, Anthropic created a classified marketplace where AI agents represented both buyers and sellers, striking real deals for real goods and real money. The company admitted this test — which it called Project Deal — was only “a pilot experiment with a self-selected participant pool” of 69 Anthropic employees who were given a budget of $100 (paid out via gift cards) to buy stuff from their coworkers. Nonetheless, Anthropic said it was “struck by how well Project Deal worked,” with 186 deals made, totaling more than $4,000 in value. The company said it actually ran four separate…

Maine Governor Janet Mills has vetoed a bill that would have temporarily brought permits for new data centers to a halt. If it had become law, L.D. 307 would have imposed the country’s first statewide moratorium on new data centers — lasting, in this case, until November 1, 2027. The bill also called for the creation of a 13-person council to study and make recommendations on data center construction. With public opposition to data centers rising, other states including New York have considered similar moratoriums. In a letter to the state legislature, Mills — a Democrat currently running for the…

Things are getting serious. Loading audio narration… For consulting firms, partnering with AI startups has become a key survival tactic as the technology upends everything about their industry. And for AI startups, consulting firms have become an important channel for distributing their products to companies.The love affair between the two was apparent in a flurry of recent dalliances.Google announced Wednesday it was launching a $750 million fund to help consulting firms like McKinsey, Accenture, and Deloitte roll out agentic AI to their clients.McKinsey and Google have also created a new working group to help companies go from identifying AI opportunities…

In a letter to the residents of Tumbler Ridge, Canada, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said he is “deeply sorry” that his company failed to alert law enforcement about the suspect in a recent mass shooting. After police identified 18-year-old Jesse Van Rootselaar as a suspected shooter who allegedly killed eight people, the Wall Street Journal reported that OpenAI had flagged and banned Van Rootselaar’s ChatGPT account in June 2025 for describing scenarios involving gun violence. The company’s staff debated alerting police but ultimately decided against it, eventually reaching out to Canadian authorities after the shooting. OpenAI has since said that…