Author: IQ TIMES MEDIA

Amazon reached a $2.5 billion settlement with the US Federal Trade Commission on Thursday, resolving a case over its Prime subscription sign-up and cancellation practices that Business Insider exposed in an exclusive investigation.The settlement is the largest civil penalty in a case involving an FTC rule violation, the regulator said.BI’s 2022 report, based on internal Amazon documents, showed that the company had known since at least 2017 that its website design misled customers into joining Prime, the membership program that offers perks such as free delivery and video streaming.Despite years of complaints, Amazon took little meaningful action, and in some…

OpenAI is launching a new feature inside of ChatGPT called Pulse, which generates personalized reports for users while they sleep. Pulse offers users five to 10 briefs that can get them up to speed on their day and is aimed at encouraging users to check ChatGPT first thing in the morning — much like they would check social media or a news app. Pulse is part of a broader shift in OpenAI’s consumer products, which are lately being designed to work for users asynchronously instead of responding to questions. Features like ChatGPT Agent or Codex aim to make ChatGPT feel…

While sexually transmitted disease rates for U.S. adults fell last year, syphilis in newborns continued to rise, according to new data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.In the provisional data from 2024, released Wednesday, the total number of cases of chlamydia, gonorrhea and syphilis declined 9% from 2023, down a third consecutive year.Gonorrhea cases declined for the third year in a row, while chlamydia and primary and secondary syphilis cases declined for the second year in a row.Congenital syphilis, however, where moms pass the infection to their babies, increased for the 12th year in a row, with nearly…

GOMA, Congo (AP) — As a deadly new Ebola outbreak kills dozens in southern Congo, health authorities and organizations are sounding the alarm, warning they lack the funds and resources to mount an effective response to the crisis.The World Health Organization said Wednesday that 57 cases and 35 deaths have been reported since the outbreak was announced by Congolese authorities on Sept. 4. The fatality rate is over 61%.It is the first Ebola outbreak in 18 years in Kasai province, a remote part of Congo characterized by its poor road networks. It is located more than 1,000 kilometers (620 miles)…

FARMINGDALE, N.Y. (AP) — U.S. captain Keegan Bradley made sure a most anticipated Ryder Cup would get off to a most explosive start Friday at Bethpage Black. Bryson DeChambeau with all his power and energy will be leading off in foursomes for the Americans.Europe counters with the equally fiery Jon Rahm, who has never lost a foursomes match.DeChambeau will have Justin Thomas, perhaps the most outwardly passionate American, as his partner in the opening match. Rahm is with Tyrrell Hatton again. They also were sent off first two years ago at Marco Simone and delivered the first point for Europe.Here’s…

TALLAHASSEE, Fla. (AP) — A charter school network backed by a billionaire hedge fund manager announced Thursday that it is expanding in Miami, after they successfully lobbied Florida’s GOP-controlled Legislature to pass a new state law easing restrictions on the privately run schools and freeing up more state subsidies for the operators. Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis, who has overseen a major expansion in state funding for school choice, presided over Thursday’s announcement in Miami alongside Success Academy Charter Schools CEO Eva Moskowitz and Citadel investment firm founder Ken Griffin, a GOP megadonor who has pledged $50 million toward the charter…

For years, recruiters used machine learning to find potential hires by searching for keywords in résumés and LinkedIn profiles. Although this method helps to narrow the candidate pool, recruiters still have to manually review each profile to determine the best fit for the job. David Paffenholz (pictured left) and Ishan Gupta, then just 22 and 19, respectively, realized that LLMs could find talent faster and more efficiently. They built Juicebox, an AI-powered search engine that uses natural language to analyze professional profiles, personal websites, and other publicly available information to identify the most qualified candidates. After attending startup accelerator Y…

Food supply chains are notoriously messy. Orders arrive through different channels, staff spend hours manually entering them into clunky enterprise software systems, and compliance often depends on spreadsheets. For decades, software vendors have tried, with mixed success, to modernize the workflows behind the global movement of perishable goods. Now, a Y Combinator startup called Burnt thinks AI agents — software that can automatically handle tasks typically done by humans — can succeed where traditional enterprise software hasn’t in the trillion-dollar U.S. food market. The company, which automates back-office supply chain tasks with AI, has raised $3.8 million in seed funding…

OpenAI released a new benchmark on Thursday that tests how its AI models perform compared to human professionals across a wide range of industries and jobs. The test, GDPval, is an early attempt at understanding how close OpenAI’s systems are to outperforming humans at economically valuable work — a key part of the company’s founding mission to develop artificial general intelligence, or AGI. OpenAI says its found that its GPT-5 model and Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4.1 “are already approaching the quality of work produced by industry experts.” That’s not to say that OpenAI’s models are going to start replacing humans…

Elon Musk’s xAI has reached an agreement with the U.S. government’s purchasing arm to sell its AI chatbot Grok to the federal government for under a dollar, pitting it against OpenAI and Anthropic.  Under the agreement between xAI and the General Services Administration (GSA), federal agencies will be charged 42 cents to use xAI’s chatbot Grok for a year and a half. OpenAI and Anthropic are offering their enterprise and government versions of ChatGPT and Claude, respectively, for $1 for a year.   The steep discount for federal agencies includes access to xAI engineers to help integrate the technology. The…