Author: IQ TIMES MEDIA

The Army Special Forces soldier indicted on charges that he used military secrets to win over $400,000 in Polymarket trades was blocked from opening an account on rival prediction market platform, Kalshi. Loading audio narration… Elisabeth Diana, head of communications for Kalshi, told Business Insider that Gannon Van Dyke did not make it past the verification and know-your-customer process but declined to provide more details. Reuters, citing an unnamed source, had earlier reported that Van Dyke tried but failed to gain access to Kalshi.Van Dyke, a 38-year-old master sergeant assigned to Fort Bragg in North Carolina, was charged with wire…

YouTube’s biggest star, MrBeast, is looking for a leader to help his company create “AI-native” productions. Loading audio narration… A job posting says that Beast Industries wants to build a new production capability in which AI is “not a tool but the foundation.”It calls for someone who can help define “what AI-native entertainment looks like, develop original formats, and build systems that enable content to be conceived, produced, and scaled with AI at the core.”MrBeast, whose real name is Jimmy Donaldson, wouldn’t be the first creator to delve into AI. Fellow superstar creator Steven Bartlett has been making fully AI-animated…

Weiyao Wang spent eight years at Meta — his first job out of college — helping build multimodal perception systems and contributing to open-world segmentation projects, including SAM3D. His final day at Meta was last week, and he has since joined Thinking Machines Lab (TML). His move to TML comes as the AI startup expands on multiple fronts. It just signed a multibillion-dollar cloud deal with Google, giving it access to Nvidia’s latest GB300 chips and making it one of the first startups to run on the hardware. The agreement, announced this past Tuesday at Google Cloud Next, follows an…

ComfyUI, a startup that helps creators control image, video, and audio outputs from diffusion models with a node-based workflow, has raised a $30 million funding round at a $500 million valuation. The round was led by Craft Ventures, with participation from other investors including Pace Capital, Chemistry, and TruArrow. ComfyUI was started as an open-source project in 2023, shortly after the introduction of diffusion models. At that time, models like Midjourney and OpenAI’s DALL-E were barely functional, frequently making major mistakes, such as adding extra fingers to hands. To address these limitations, the project founders developed a modular framework that…

Quick-thinking middle school students in Mississippi kept their school bus from crashing after their driver passed out while on a four-lane highway. The bus had just left Hancock Middle School in Hancock County on Wednesday with about 40 children on board when Leah Taylor, 46, had an asthma attack. She reached for her medication but blacked out before she could get it. In a matter of seconds, the students sprang into action.Sixth grader Jackson Casnave, 12, who was sitting directly behind the driver, noticed the bus beginning to swerve. Casnave jumped up to steer and told others to call for…

Google plans to invest up to $40 billion in Anthropic and support the AI firm’s growing computing needs, Bloomberg reports. The Alphabet subsidiary is committing to invest $10 billion now, at a $350 billion valuation for Anthropic, with another $30 billion to follow if Anthropic hits certain performance targets, according to Anthropic.  The promise of investment comes after Anthropic released its latest model, Mythos, to a limited group of partners this month. Anthropic says that Mythos is the company’s most powerful model to date and has significant cybersecurity applications. Due to potential misuse, Anthropic has restricted broader access while it…

A new era is on the way for Apple as Tim Cook plans to step down from his CEO role in September, handing the reins to hardware chief John Ternus.   Ternus may be inheriting one of the most durable businesses in tech, but he’s also stepping into a very different ecosystem than the one Cook spent decades shaping. The App Store’s 30% cut is under pressure, the behind-the-scenes power Apple once held over developers is being challenged, and vibe-coded apps are changing what it means to build on Apple’s platform.  On this episode of TechCrunch’s Equity podcast, hosts Kirsten Korosec, Anthony Ha, and Sean O’Kane dig into what this…

Did you hear about the time Don Rickles tried to chat up Lena Dunham in the middle of the night? Loading audio narration… No? Let me explain. First, we need to talk about Reese Witherspoon.See, I’m a simple woman. I have only two interests: tech news and celebrity gossip. So I was naturally intrigued by a recent online fuss over Reese Witherspoon’s admonition for women to learn to use AI. It sparked so much backlash that she had to issue a follow-up explanation.I’ve also been intrigued by Lena Dunham’s new book. (They’re related — sort of. Keep reading!)I think Reese…

Overpriced Mac minis are flooding eBay amid shortages of the sold-out machines, which have become a favored tool for running on-device AI models like OpenClaw. This week, reports indicated that the $599 M4 Mac mini base model with 16GB RAM and 256GB of storage is sold out on Apple’s retail website, with no options for delivery or in-store pickup. The shortages have since extended to other configurations of the base model, regardless of the amount of memory selected. This is the first time the base model has been sold out, some outlets noted. Meanwhile, models with higher storage (512GB and…

Welcome to “28 days of hell.” Loading audio narration… That’s how one Meta employee characterized the tech giant’s announcement that thousands of jobs will be cut on May 20. Employees flooded internal forums with similar posts, many of which were filled with anxiety, dark humor, and questions as they wait to learn who will be out of a job.”How are you motivating yourself to work for the next 1 month with layoffs confirmed?” one person posted on the anonymous workplace app Blind, in a section just for Meta employees.Someone else replied, “I’m motivating myself to do stuff that I can…