Author: IQ TIMES MEDIA
The race to get in on the humanoid robot boom is heating up.In a research note released earlier this month, analysts at Morgan Stanley broke down a list of the 25 companies best positioned to dominate the market for humanoid robots, which the investment bank estimates will be worth more than $5 trillion by 2050.The list focuses on companies with expertise in AI and computing chips, cameras and perception, and sensors and movement technology, the analysts said.They added that the list is intended to help investors look beyond humanoid robot manufacturers and focus on the foundational component suppliers who stand…
It was Friday afternoon, and I’d just hit send on my weekly report to Amazon’s Retail vice presidents, detailing what the Global Merchandising team I’d created had accomplished that week.I was 38, and the role — which oversaw standards, best practices, and technology for Amazon’s 200+ site merchandisers — was the biggest of my life by far, one I’d been thrust into just three months after my arrival in Seattle and at Amazon.I was thrilled (and a bit terrified) by the size of the opportunity, and threw myself into it. Two years in, my team had 18 sizable projects underway.…
MANILA, Dec 8 (Reuters) – The Philippines has temporarily banned imports of pigs and pork products from Spain and Taiwan following outbreaks of African swine fever in both locations, Manila’s agriculture ministry has announced.The import freeze, announced separately on Sunday for Spain and Monday for Taiwan, covers live pigs and pork-derived products, including semen used for artificial insemination.”We have to be vigilant in preventing further ASF infections to protect jobs and investments,” Agriculture Minister Francisco Tiu Laurel said in a statement on Monday.The ban on pork from Spain, the European Union’s biggest producer, follows a November 28 report by the…
MINNA, Nigeria (AP) — A total of 100 of the schoolchildren abducted from a Nigerian Catholic school last month have been released, the Christian Association of Nigeria said Monday, adding that more than 100 students remain in captivity.At least 303 schoolchildren were seized at the Niger state school together with 12 of their teachers when gunmen attacked the St. Mary’s Catholic School in Papiri community on Nov. 21. Fifty escaped in the hours that followed.Daniel Atori, a spokesman for the association in Niger state, told The Associated Press that the church learned the children were released during the weekend and…
Young people entering the job market are facing the toughest conditions in years — but artificial intelligence isn’t the reason.A new analysis from a London-based economics consultancy suggests something much more old-fashioned is going on: Companies simply aren’t hiring.Since 2023, unemployment among new entrants to the US labor force has jumped more than 2.5 percentage points — a sharp contrast with older workers, whose jobless rates have remained flat, according to the analysis from Dario Perkins, a managing director at Global Data.TS Lombard.”For the AI maximalists, this is ‘proof’ that companies are deploying the technology rather than hiring graduates. And…
ORLANDO, Fla. (AP) — Changes that Disney made to a popular program that lets qualifying disabled people skip long lines at its California and Florida theme parks are too restrictive, disabled fans contend in a federal lawsuit and shareholder proposal that seek to expand eligibility.The battle over who can skip long lines on popular rides because of their disabilities marks the latest struggle by Disney to accommodate disabled visitors while cracking down on past abuses. But some Disney fans say the company has gone too far and has no right to determine who is disabled.“This isn’t right. This isn’t what…
AI companies are prioritizing flash over substance, says Surge AI’s CEO.”I’m worried that instead of building AI that will actually advance us as a species, curing cancer, solving poverty, understanding universal, all these big grand questions, we are optimizing for AI slop instead,” Edwin Chen said in an episode of “Lenny’s” podcast published on Sunday.”We’re basically teaching our models to chase dopamine instead of truth,” he added.Chen founded AI training startup Surge in 2020 after working at Twitter, Google, and Meta. Surge runs the gig platform Data Annotation, which says it pays one million freelancers to train AI models. Surge…
By Byron Kaye and Cordelia HsuSYDNEY, Dec 8 (Reuters) – Sydney teenager Ayris Tolson believes the start of her first summer holiday under Australia’s youth social media ban will be relatively easy as she spends time with family, but as the weeks drift by, she fears being alone and isolated.From December 10, Australia will impose a world-first social media ban on under-16s, blocking them from TikTok, Alphabet’s YouTube and Meta’s Instagram.More than one million under-16s will lose their accounts and nine days later break for the long December-to-January holidays when most of Australia shuts down until February.”You’re basically isolated for…
There’s a debate rippling through Silicon Valley: How far can scaling laws take the technology?Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis, whose company just released Gemini 3 to widespread acclaim, has made it clear where he stands on the issue.”The scaling of the current systems, we must push that to the maximum, because at the minimum, it will be a key component of the final AGI system,” he said at the Axios’ AI+ Summit in San Francisco last week. “It could be the entirety of the AGI system.”AGI, or artificial general intelligence, is a still theoretical version of AI that reasons as…
Anduril cofounder Palmer Luckey defended the use of AI technology to make life-and-death decisions in war on Sunday.A group of defense tech startups that includes Anduril, along with traditional defense companies, is developing autonomous AI weapons and tools for use in conflicts around the world, worrying some who say the technology is not ready for such high-stakes environments.”When it comes to life and death decision-making, I think that it is too morally fraught an area, it is too critical of an area, to not apply the best technology available to you, regardless of what it is,” Luckey told journalist Shannon…